Shadows of Vessareon

Sunlight glinted off the frame of the airship as I rode the glider in. I banked up at the last minute, watching the curling Ceide River, drab brown cutting through drab greens and tans far below. When the side access ladder of the airship came into reach, I latched on with one hand, a hand that flashed into a great paw with canine claws and beastly strength. A beast sent to hunt a monster.

While the others landed, Mard above, Breg and Phen below, I fought with the retraction lever on the glider. It folded the wings, barely, enough for me to climb up to the roof and worm out of the many straps and latches tying me to the winged contraption. I left it atop the port frame, cinched with a D-ring. We weren’t supposed to need the gliders after the mission, but I liked to be prepared. Breg and Phen tossed theirs over the side. He always did as she did, though he was the older sibling.

Mard grinned at me and flung him over the side as well.

“Life didn’t bless us with wings, and neither did the curse, so clearly we shan’t be wanting them. Still, they got us here in one piece. And a quiet ride.”

Mard was the tallest of us, the oldest, too. They said he was over two-hundred years, but he resembled a man of forty.

“Breg,” I snapped, “front access port like we discussed. If we don’t get this boat turned south, the sun won’t be on our favorite side, and we don’t want that, now do we? Keep it quiet, though.”

Breg trotted away along the central strut of the frame. The rest of us moved after him but slower. The great gas bladder swelled and shifted beneath us, a balloon that would keep the craft from plummeting if the generators failed. Lurobide lifting rings worked wondrously, so long as you kept the voltage steady.

“Mard, you and Phen to the starboard ventral access hatch. That goes straight down to the hold. Clear it out and get set up. I’ll be there as soon as I clear the target’s quarters.”

I turned toward the rear of the vessel, confident in my companions. This was what we did. If you’re hunting a monster, always send bigger monsters. That’s what we were. Four werewolves to take on one vampire and his kry slave.

The airship had a deck on the rear, a Promenade, as it was marked in pretty, swirling letters. I focused on my nostrils, let the beast breath a little. The cursed blood gave me physical strength, but only where I concentrated. Breg claimed all his great strength was between his legs. Except for Mard slapping him in the back of the head--and except for me, he did seem to have a way with the ladies.

My nose told me the deck was clear. The air was brisk, that high up, and few people would be out, touring the decks. There was little to see but clouds and too-bright sun and that damned dirty river the poets were always going on about. I focused on my arms, let the beast ripple through them, and slung down over the rear overhang and onto the deck. Had the vampire been standing there, he might have heard me. No one else would have. Of course, had the vampire been standing there, my job would have been done.

No security blocked the rear entrance to the passenger quarters. The transit companies seemed to think no one doing ill could get past their guards and gates at the harbor. It was better for me that they persisted in their defective thinking. Fewer guards meant fewer bodies, and that meant fewer questions.

I slipped down a short stairway into the corridor beyond and followed the map I had memorized to room C-16. With a flicker of attention over my forearm and hand, the beast emerged. Between one breath and the next, I grew dense fur over that limb, and my fingers elongated, grew stiff, canine claws, the same hand I used to grab the ladder earlier. This time I twisted a door latch until it snapped inside, then shouldered my way into the tiny cabin beyond.

The kry stood against the rear of the cabin, a room hardly more than a bedroom with a window looking out over the morning world. He had turned transparent, but I saw him anyway. He wasn’t equipped to fool my kind. Not by a long shot.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

He squealed when I grabbed him by the neck, but not the wail for which his people were named.

“Where is your master?” I snarled.

“I have no master,” he grated against the pressure on his throat. “I—travel alone.”

A quick trio of sniffs revealed his lie. I crushed his throat and dropped the twitching husk to the floor. The nicest thing about the kry—they tend to evaporate once dead.

The second kry hid in a tall cabinet at the foot of the bunks. I ripped the door open and jerked him out by his throat.

“We’re moving south,” the slender man hissed. “We made a deal with the dark one to get out of Vessareon. You can tell your masters we are dead, and it’ll be close to the truth. They’ll never see us again.”

Dark one? The kry sounded frightened of more than just me. I threw him against the hull.

“Made a deal with who?”

“She’ll be here soon. She said no disturbances. She’s not like your kind or mine. And she’ll kill you, and probably me too.”

I slashed his throat and watched the flying blood disappear into vapor before the kry settled to the floor.

Bodyguards. The deal part made no sense, but we were always ready for the vampire’s bodyguards.

It occurred to me that the irony of the situation was that the vampire had been marked for death—real death, by his own kind. The humans liked to tell their stories about their hunters, but the truth was that the only thing a vampire feared was another vampire. And me.

I pulled the door closed against the frame as I left. It would never latch properly, but as long as it drew no questions in the next few minutes, it wouldn’t matter.

At the shaft leading to the hold, I glanced out a porthole at the end of a side passage and realized we were still heading west. What the hell was Breg waiting for?

I passed a pair of vacationers on my way to the bridge. They averted their eyes the way humans almost always do, as if they sense something predatory in my walk, in my sneer, something they instinctively bowed to. And they were right. Even my vampire employers feared me.

A commotion caught my attention down the last passage before the stairs to the bridge. I turned that way, and a moment later found a crowd of crew and passengers gathered around something in a closet. I pushed my way to the fore, where I found Breg lying atop the ruin of the closet door as if he had been hurled into it. His throat and jaw had been bitten away, and his stark, wide eyes stared at the ceiling.

I focused my cursed blood on my nostrils, searching for anything, the scent of a vampire, the scent of another wolf, but there was only Breg, his blood, and the myriad and rather porcine odors of the humans gathered. As I left the crowd and turned back towards the central passage, I caught sight of a girl, still in her teens but only barely, lurking at the corner of a turn in the hallway. I lost sight of her as I trotted away, but the vision etched itself across my eyes. She’d been pale, too pale, with completely black eyes and a smirk, as if she knew everything about me, and a good deal more besides. She wasn’t a vampire. I’d have known that immediately.

I found Breg’s sister at the base of the ladder to the hold. Her scent came to me, strong, with more blood. I followed the scent to the ceiling, where in the darkness above the lights, my longtime friend was jammed between a girder and a support joist in the frame of the ship. Like Breg, her throat had been completely bitten away. Eaten?

With a hiss, I dropped back to the floor. A crewman moving towards the stern gasped when I landed almost in front of him, and I backhanded him hard enough that his bones crunched when he slammed into a wall. I was gone before he dropped.

The air smelled wrong the moment I crossed into the hold. There was the luggage, the cargo, and crates of earth, but the vampire was awake. He smelled like death and cat urine and something else unspeakable. He was not my concern. Mard stood in the center of the hold, smelling of blood. Not his blood. Breg’s and Phen’s blood. It painted his face.

“Hello, Irys,” Mard said with a throaty laugh.

I caught sight of the young woman from the corridor where Breg had died. The vampire crouched beside her, his clothes stained with the dirt he slept in. He was deferential to the girl.

“Did you know, Irys,” Mard went on, “I’m over four hundred years old?”

“Is that all?” I spat. “It wasn’t long enough if you were stupid enough to cross me.”

Another deep, sultry laugh.

“You know how I got to be so old? I always bow to the stronger beast. There’s something to be said for courage, and I’ve got plenty when I need it, but when courage is nothing more than stupidity like it is now, then it’s of no use. For instance, if I stay on your side, I’ll die.”

“I’m caring less and less,” I hissed.

“Now, now,” Mard said. “You’ve always been good to us. I’ll give you the same choice I gave the others, and I’ll even give you time to think it over. Just, here’s the thing. You’ve got to change sides, or you don’t get to live.”

The difference between Mard and me, when it came down to it, was that he wasn’t as sneaky as he thought he was. I slipped the hand-crossbow from my hip and popped the lever that unfolded the arms, already cocked with a silver-tipped bolt. I could feel the silver on me, all the time. Some wolves can. It’s like heat you can’t see. A warning that it’ll burn if you get too close. I’d been around silver with the others, from time to time. None of them noticed.

Which was why, as Mard turned to the girl and her pet vampire, he made no reaction to my aiming the bolt at his back, why he didn’t twitch until he heard the thump of the string as the arms slammed forward, too late, far far too late, and the silver-tipped missile caught him just left of his spine, just above the hip. Silver into the kidneys won’t do anyone any good, but for we wolves, it’s about the worst.

Mard crumpled and I was on him in a second.

“If you were gonna bow to the bigger beast, you should have stayed on my side.”

Then I ripped out his throat.

So much for four hundred years.

When I looked up, the vampire had fled. The girl remained, but her black eyes had darkened, if possible. Her mouth turned black, grew wide and large, full of fangs larger than my fingers. Her hair flowed backward in gently flowing curls as if swept by a current of water. Shadows deepened around her as if called to her.

This was the bodyguard the kry had feared.

I snapped a second bolt into the crossbow, aimed at her chest, and fired the weapon. The bolt passed through her. I knew after it seemed to disappear into her chest because I heard the thump as it lodged in the wooden sides of a crate behind her.

“You should have taken the deal,” the vampire screeched. “You should have taken the deal. Now you’re dead. Dead doggie.”

The shadow girl caught the vampire by the back of the neck with one of her tiny hands, now tipped with claws like acacia thorns. Something crunched in his neck, and in a blink she was on him, those wide jaws opening, wider than mine in wolf form, and ripping out the vampire’s throat. She dropped the corpse and looked at me through her brows. Was she grinning?

The shadow girl was on me faster than anything I’d ever seen. That first touch was icy as if a glacier had come to life to grab me by the neck. I kicked at her, and when that didn’t dislodge me, I clawed at her hand. Like the crossbow bolt, my claws were ineffectual, but she hissed as if in pain or outrage. Then I realized that while my claws did nothing, it was the Hexik ring on my finger, a plain band of bronze-colored stone that I kept because it somehow re-sized with my changes in shape, that caused her pain.

I slashed at her face.

With a howl, she flung me against the far wall. I clipped boxes of cargo as I flew through the air, but was able to use the collision to spin and land on my feet against the wall before falling. By then I was in wolf-form. I landed on my forelegs, then rose again, taller, stronger, powerful.

The girl was still faster, and now that she knew my ring caused her pain, she avoided it, slashing me with her icy claws, flinging me across the room again and again, wearing me down. At one point she ripped her talons across my chest, then slammed me through a wall and into the engine room. The noise of the engine filled the chamber, and the heat was oppressive as I climbed to my feet. By then I was losing blood too fast even for a werewolf. I staggered and didn’t see the shadow until she had vaulted into the compartment and punched me so hard I flew back against the engine. Pipes of steam and vomitous green slime burst behind me, and I coughed in the noxious fumes.

No, not noxious. Radiative.

The engine was powered by an Unarium reactor.

The wolf-beast that creates werewolves is made by mixing unprocessed Unarium with human blood. The beast bites a wolf or a human, and the radiative infection spreads. I had been bitten by such a beast, and in part, that made me stronger than other wolves.

I staggered from the realization of what she had done. The shadow had killed me, as surely as if she had ripped my body apart. As if making the same realization, she drew back, leaving me cornered, but awaiting my oncoming agony.

She did not wait long.

I screamed even before the pain hit as if I had been flushed down a well into searing fire that froze and sizzled at the same time.

The processed Unarium, stripped of its impurities and fed into a reactor, doesn’t kill werewolves exactly.

It turns us into vampires.

In a frenzy of pain, I tore up a nearby ladder, crawling monkey-like rather than using the steps, and burst out the hatch onto a side deck. Passengers cried out and flinched from my ferocity, though they must have seen it as insanity and rage rather than pain, and one woman in a fancy dress fainted. I leaped past them, searching for a ladder up, and failing that, for a nearby structural support that would give me access to the top of the vessel, to my glider.

The shadow girl kept up with me, but resumed her human shape, except for those midnight eyes, and she watched me as I climbed. I lost sight of her, but then found her waiting for me at the top of the beam, balanced birdlike and predatory.

She reached for me and I panicked. The cold rose in my chest, a reflection of her icy fingers coming down, like some metaphorical painting, darkness reaching for darkness and I but the canvas. I flung myself backward, out into the air. The sunlight burned me already, stung like acid on the skin beneath my fur, on my eyes. I squinted against the pain and watched the shadow girl as I fell. I was sure she smiled.

I don’t remember most of the fall. I don’t remember landing, and I don’t know how I survived that first day or those that followed. When I first started to wake, in glimmers of night and fog, I was back in Vessareon. I’d know the smell anywhere.

I found I’d made a nest in a sewer drain opening where the Ceide washed out of the city. There were corpses littering the ground, at least a dozen, all with damage to their necks. Naked but for the blood of my victims, I crept out into the night and found fresh clothing and a bath. I walked the streets, night by night, and kept my feeding to the minimum I could bear. I learned to take from my victims without killing them and then found that if I fed more than once, from different sources, I could take less still from each. I hid. I learned to beguile my victims with shadow, so that they no longer knew of my deed, or even my presence, and found a skoti den beneath an industrial office complex where the addicts were easy prey.

That was when I started noticing the shadow girl. I caught her in glimpses, in reflections, but she was tricky and gone before I could find her. I had taken on a key, and when she disappeared, I knew the shadow had decided my time was up. I fled.

I flee still, hunting a shadow that hunts me.