«Good evening, Natalya.» The voice was hypnotic, almost mesmerizing.
«Well, if it isn't my good friend Arturo.» Natalya faced the vampire with a false smile. «How nice to see you again. It's been a long time.» She gestured with her gun toward the writhing vampire. «Your little sissy partner is making so much noise. Would you mind finishing him off so we can talk without the background music? If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a whiney vampire.» Deliberately she continued to goad Henrik, knowing the angrier the vampire, the more mistakes they made in battle.
«You haven't changed much.»
«I've gotten meaner.» She shrugged and grinned at the newcomer. «I'm losing my tolerance for your kind.»
Arturo glanced at the bleeding vampire clawing at the ground. «I see that. He is rather loud, isn't he?» He walked over and yanked the knife from his partner's heart and tossed it aside, nudging the vampire with his toe contemptuously. «Get up, Henrik.»
Henrik managed to stagger into a standing position. He shrieked and hissed, spittle and blood running down his face. «I'm going to kill you,» he snapped, glaring at Natalya.
«Do shut up,» Natalya said. «You're becoming so repetitive.»
«You will not escape this time,» Arturo said. «You cannot best Henrik, me and the wolves. Do you hear them? They are on their way to assist us.»
«You take all the fun out of fighting because you never fight fair,» Natalya complained. «You have no honor.»
Arturo smiled at her with his perfect white teeth. «What is honor after all, Natalya? It is worth nothing.»
Vikirnoff Von Shrieder knew the moment he entered the heavy woods that something evil waited there. The warning came in the silence of the forest, the way the earth shuddered and the trees cringed. Not a single living creature moved. It mattered little. He was a hunter and he expected danger to find him. It was his accepted way of life and had been for centuries.
He took a step and stopped abruptly as the grass shivered beneath his feet. He looked down, half expecting to see the stalks shrivel. Was the forest shrinking from direct contact with him? Had it sensed the darkness shadowing him with every step, with each breath he took? Nature could very well be naming him monster-vampire, a Carpathian male who had deliberately chosen to give up his soul for the momentary rush of power and emotion a kill while feeding brought.
It was a choice, wasn't it? Had he made a decision and was no longer aware of whether he was good or evil? Was there even such a thing? The thought should have distressed him, but it didn't. He felt nothing at all even as he contemplated the idea that he was no longer fully a Carpathian male; that the predator in him had consumed all but some small spark left in his soul.
He dropped to his knees, his hands digging through layers of leaves and twigs covering the forest floor and plunging deep into the rich, dark soil beneath. He lifted his face to the night sky. «Susu,» he whispered aloud. «I am home.» His native language rolled off his
tongue naturally, his accent thicker than usual as if somehow by just being in the Carpathian Mountains he could go back in time.
After so many centuries of exile in service to his people, he had finally returned to his birthplace. He knelt in utter silence waiting for something. Anything. Some flicker of emotion, or remembrance. He expected the soil to bring peace, to bring him serenity, to bring him something, but there was the same barren void he woke to every rising.
Nothing. He felt absolutely nothing. He bowed his head and sank back on his heels, looking around him. What he wanted or even needed, he didn't know, but there was no flood of emotion. No elation. No disappointment. Not even despair. The forest looked bleak and gray with twisted, malevolent shadows waiting for him. The endless cycle of his life remained. Kill or be killed.
Hunger was ever present now, a soft seductive whisper in his mind. The call to power, to salvation, and false though he knew it to be, it had gained strength with every rising. He had fought battles, far too many to count, destroying old friends, men he respected and admired, watching the fall of his people and all for what? «Tell me the reason,» he whispered to the night. «Let me understand the complete waste of my life.»
Had he fed this night? He tried to recall the occasion of his wakening, but it seemed too much trouble. Surely he hadn't taken a life while feeding. Was this how it happened then? Was there no real choice, but a slow indifference pervading one's mind until one kill ran into another? Until one feeding became mixed with a kill and his indifference became the weapon of his own destruction?
He looked toward the south where he knew the prince of his people resided. The wind began to pick up speed and strength, rushing through the forest in a southerly direction. «Honor is a damnable trait and one that may not last eternity.» Vikirnoff murmured the words with a small sigh as he rose to his full height and drew back his long hair, securing it at the nape of his neck with a leather tie. Did he still have his honor? After centuries of battling to keep his word, had the crouching beast at last consumed him?
The leaves on the trees closest to him began to tremble and the branches swayed with alarm. He was a Carpathian male, born into an ancient race now on the brink of extinction. They had few women, so all-important to the males and the preservation of life. Two halves of the same whole, darkness ruled the males while light dwelt within the females. Without women to anchor them, the males were falling into the greedy jaws of their own demons.
Vikirnoff coexisted with humans, living among them, trying to maintain honor and discipline in a world where he no longer saw in color or felt even the slightest of emotions. After two hundred years, his feelings had faded and over the long endless centuries the dark predator in him had grown strong and powerful. Only faded memories of laughter and love sustained him, and then only through his link with Nicolae, his brother. Now, that too was gone, with Nicolae an ocean away.
Vikirnoff had lived too long and become far too dangerous. His fighting skills were superb, honed and sharpened in the too numerous encounters with those of his kind who had chosen to give up their souls for the momentary illusion of power, or more likely, more tragically, for a brief moment of feeling. He felt as if he were single-handedly destroying his own race. So many deaths. So many lost friends. «For what?» He asked aloud. «Moeri?» He whispered again in his own language.
He deliberately used his own ancient tongue to recall his duty, his promises to his prince. He had volunteered to be sent out into the world. It was his choice. Always his choice. Free will. But he was no longer free. He was so close to being the very thing he hunted, he almost couldn't separate the two.
The ground rolled gently beneath his feet and the night sky rumbled a menacing warning. Somewhere ahead of him was his quarry-a blue-eyed woman who he had pursued across an ocean. Between the woman and Vikirnoff was a vampire-or perhaps more than one.
Vikirnoff pulled the photograph of his quarry from its place close to his heart. He saw only in shades of gray, yet he had known she had eyes as blue as the sea and Nicolae told him her hair appeared midnight black. Blue like the nearly forgotten ice lakes of his homeland. The various shades of blue in the skies overhead. He had thought-hoped-that perhaps knowing instinctively that small detail meant he was pursuing his lifemate. The other half of his soul, light to his darkness, the one woman who could restore the lost colors and most of all, his ability to feel something. Anything at all. That hope, too, had faded over time, leaving the world a bleak, ugly place.