01 - Underworld

  Billowing steam filled her private bathroom as the invigorating spray pelted her flesh, at long last washing away the sweaty, muddy, bloody residue of her ill-fated excursion to the city. Dirty water collected at the bottom of the pure white marble stall, circling the drain before disappearing into the mansion’s plumbing. Selene wondered how long it would take the bloody stream to reach the dank city sewers where she had battled those two lycans.

  There’s something down there, she knew in her heart. Maybe an enormous pack of somethings.

  Sadly, the scorching shower could not wash away the malignant fears troubling her mind. Was Lucian alive? Kraven had accidentally referred to Lucian in the present tense before, but did that prove Kraven knew about Lucian’s possible return? And what about Michael? Was Erika telling the truth, had Michael truly been conscripted by the enemy?

  Please, no! she thought passionately. The soothing water rinsed the soap and shampoo from her dark hair and porcelain skin, but Selene knew that she could not hide in the shower forever. There were too many vital questions to be answered, and time was running short. The Awakening is almost here, she recalled. Amelia and her entourage will be arriving after sunset tomorrow. On what, thanks to an unlucky coincidence, just happened to be the first night of the full moon.

  Selene shuddered at the thought of what that moon might bring, to Michael as well as to the entire vampire nation. A desperate ploy came to mind, one that she ordinarily would have rejected as too extreme but which now struck her as the only option remaining to her. I have to risk it, she decided. There’s no other choice.

  Reluctantly, she turned off the shower and let the last of the hot water trickle down her body. Stepping out of the stall into the luxury-sized bathchamber, she toweled herself quickly, then pulled on a dark blue cotton bathrobe.

  Steam clouded the queen-sized vanity mirror above the sink. Her mind made up, she strode decisively up to the sink and reached out to touch the foggy mirror. Her fingertip gently traced a string of letters across the glass:

  VIKTOR.

  She paused for a moment or two, humbled by the exalted name she had invoked. Then she wiped her hand across the mirror, erasing the message.

  “Please forgive me,” she whispered, bowing her head in reverence. Although the mirror held only her own reflection, that was not at all whom she was addressing. She lifted her head, entreating the mirror with anguished eyes.

  “But I desperately need your guidance…”

  * * *

  The taxi rushed down the lonely forest road, carrying Michael back toward the manor. Night shrouded the skeletal oaks and beeches lining the road as he peered out the window of the cab, praying that he was remembering the directions right.

  Ashen and trembling, he slumped in the back seat, clutching a handful of fresh bills that he had extracted from an ATM back in the city. A map of the towns and villages north of Budapest was spread out on his lap. As far as he could tell, he was successfully retracing the route he had taken from the mansion back to the city earlier that night. Szentendre, he reminded himself repeatedly, as though the name might slip out of his bruised and battered brain. Selene’s mansion was just outside Szentendre…

  The taxi hit a pothole, and the bump caused Michael’s throbbing head and bones to protest forcefully. He hugged himself tightly, hoping he wouldn’t be sick in the cab. The howling in his ears roared like an upset menagerie, and every glimpse of moonlight caused his teeth and gums to ache something fierce. The moon was almost full, he noticed, waxing brightly above the shadowy forest outside.

  Am I doing the right thing? he worried. He remembered the savage Rottweilers baying at his heels and wondered if he was crazy to come within fifty miles of that creepy mansion again. Then he recalled Selene’s lovely face looking down at him, wiping his febrile brow with a damp rag, and realized he had nowhere else to go. I just hope Selene, whoever she is, is really on my side.

  The cab’s interior smelled of tobacco, beer, and goulash, which didn’t do Michael’s queasy stomach any favors. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d eaten, back before his life went insane, yet he still felt more nauseated than hungry. He struggled to keep his eyes open, afraid of the visions waiting in the darkness, but it was no good. A violent tremor shook his body, and his eyes rolled up inside his head, so that only the blood-streaked whites were visible.

  CRACK! A spinelike whip, seemingly forged of solid silver vertebrae, snapped out of the void. The gleaming whip lashed his head and shoulders, burning and stinging at the same time. The lash opened his flesh, causing hot blood to stream down his back, over countless overlapping layers of old scar tissue, before the scalding silver cauterized the freshly opened wound. Then the whip cracked again, and he felt its agonizing bite once more…

  “No!” Michael exclaimed. His eyes rolled back to normal as he escaped the vivid hallucination. He reached instinctively for his back, to make sure the scars were strictly imaginary. That felt so real, he thought, gasping, as if the flesh were being flayed from my body!

  “Are you all right, sir?” The cab driver, a chunky Armenian immigrant, glanced back over the seat. He looked as if he were having profound second thoughts about accepting the ailing young American as a fare. “You were having some kind of—how you say?—seizure?”

  “I’m fine,” Michael lied. He nodded to assure the worried driver that he was okay, even though he felt anything but. What the hell is wrong with me? he fretted anxiously. I can’t take this much longer!

  Perhaps Selene could explain what was happening to him. If not, he wasn’t sure what else he could do. He forcibly yanked his mind back into the present, away from silver whips and bloody torture, and tried to concentrate on the road ahead of him. An intersection approached, and Michael groggily consulted the map on his lap. “Turn here,” he instructed, gesturing toward the right.

  Selene has to be able to help me.

  She has to!

  Chapter Sixteen

  The guard looked up as Selene entered the security booth, clad in a fresh set of slick black leathers. Watching over the crypt and its hibernating inhabitants was a tedious job, so no doubt he welcomed the unexpected company. Careful, Selene warned herself. Don’t give away your intentions.

  “Kahn wants to see you,” she said tersely.

  That got a reaction. Selene knew that the guard, Duncan, had aspirations of rising in the ranks of the Death Dealers. He jumped up from his seat behind the security monitors, eager to report to the dojo upstairs. He halted at the exit, though, and glanced back uneasily at his post.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

  He nodded gratefully and rushed out of the booth. Selene waited until his retreating footsteps completely disappeared before pressing an electronic button to open the entrance to the crypt itself. I have to hurry, she thought. Duncan would soon discover that he had been tricked.

  She descended the timeworn granite steps to the sunken stone floor below. The temperature seemed to drop a couple of degrees with each step, so that her blood felt even colder than usual by the time she reached the bottom of the crypt.

  Am I actually going through with this? she thought uncertainly, daunted by the sheer enormity of what she was contemplating. Until tonight, I never would have dreamed of disturbing an Elder’s sleep.

  The crypt was hushed and dimly lit. Selene’s eyes penetrated the umbrageous twilight to focus on the three bronze hatches resting at the center of the bottom floors interlaced Celtic circles. Only two of the tombs were occupied, she knew. Amelia’s sarcophagus was empty awaiting the female Elder’s arrival tomorrow night, when Marcus would emerge from his sepulchral resting place to take his turn as sovereign of all the covens of the world. At least, that was the plan.

  Selene had other ideas. Ignoring the other two hatches, she went straight to the polished bronze circle marked by a stylized letter V. She knelt beside the tomb, hesitating only an instant before inserting her fingers into the cold metal
groove surrounding the V. Untouched for almost a century, the ancient hatch resisted her at first. Exerting her strength, however, she succeeded in rotating the circular bronze disk, which activated the dormant locking mechanism. The intricate designs adorning the hatch began to turn mechanically as Selene heard the muted rumble of hidden machinery awakening from slumber. The bronze hatch split apart into four triangular segments, exposing the sarcophagus beneath.

  The ponderous sound of stone sliding across stone violated the funereal stillness of the crypt. Selene rose to her feet and, holding her breath, stepped back from the tomb. She was committed now. There was no turning back.

  Accompanied by the automated reverberation of a concealed motor, a large vertical slab rose from the floor like a coffin-sized elevator. The slab thrust upward until it was several centimeters taller than Selene, then pivoted on its axis. Moving steadily, it snapped into place horizontal to the floor.

  A supine figure was laid out upon the slab. Selene stepped toward the bier, suppressing a gasp at the shocking sight before her.

  After nearly one hundred years of unbroken slumber, Viktor bore little resemblance to the regal monarch she remembered. The skeletal figure on the slab looked more like a mummy than a vampire: dry, withered, and seemingly lifeless, like a collection of fragile bones shrink-wrapped in papery brown skin. His closed eyes lurked at the bottom of sunken black sockets, while his desiccated lips had peeled away from his gums, exposing yellowed fangs locked in a death’s-head grin. Once-powerful limbs were now spindly sticks wrapped in jerkylike strips of meat, and his plunging abdomen had collapsed below the exposed ribcage. Black satin trousers spared her the sight of his shriveled manhood.

  Oh, my sire, she lamented, what has your long repose done to you? Even though she had expected to find Viktor in just this condition, the ghastly reality still came as a jolt. She had to remind herself that Viktor had submitted to his interment willingly, as part of a hallowed tradition that stretched back through the ages. The everlasting cycle of the Chain served two vital functions: first, as an ingenious power-sharing arrangement among the three Elders, avoiding conflict among them by ensuring that only one of them was in command in any given century; and second, to provide each Elder with a much-needed respite from the demands of eternity.

  “Immortality can be wearing,” Viktor had once explained to her, shortly before entering his tomb a century ago, “watching the never-ending tides of history ebb and flow, striving to keep up with the dizzying changes in science and civilization. Even the most resilient Elder feels the need to retire from the fray from time to time, to spend a century or two in silent repose, before rising to confront the future with renewed wisdom and clarity.”

  That had been nearly one hundred years ago. Selene shook her head, trying to reconcile the majestic immortal in her memory with the cadaverous figure upon the slab, which was disturbingly silent and immobile, its bony chest neither rising nor falling as the fleeting moments passed. If she hadn’t known better, Selene would have sworn that the apparent corpse on the slab was well and truly dead, beyond all hope of resurrection. Indeed, by the blinkered standards of modern medicine, Viktor was dead.

  But appearances could be deceiving. Gleaming copper implants mottled Viktor’s emaciated throat, the female components on an elaborate intravenous feeding system. More connections, she knew, were hidden beneath the comatose vampire’s back, designed to sustain Viktor during his centuries-long period of hibernation.

  The apparatus had kept him alive for ninety-nine years and exactly 364 days. Left undisturbed, it would preserve him for another century as well.

  Selene couldn’t wait that long.

  Quickly, she thought, knowing that Duncan could return at any minute. She tore her gaze away from Viktor’s seemingly lifeless carcass to inspect the meticulously crafted framework surrounding him. A series of shallow silver bowls were built into the raised edge of the sarcophagus, leading to a delicate metal spigot. Both the bowls and the spigot were carefully etched with precise calibrations, and a telescoping metal arm connected the apparatus, which was collectively known as the catalyst drip, to the bier itself.

  Trepidation warring with resolve, Selene watched apprehensively as the metal spigot motored along the inside of the casket, positioning itself above Viktor’s mummified face.

  Here comes the tricky part, she thought. To her knowledge, an awakening had never been attempted by one such as she. The Elders alone held the power to organize their thoughts and memories into a single, cohesive vision, forming a detailed record of their reign. Selene could only hope that Viktor would hear—and comprehend—her desperate plea.

  She unzipped her sleeve and raised her arm to her face. Her lips parted, exposing her fangs, and she took a deep breath. Please let this work! she entreated. The outcome of the war may depend on it.

  Without further delay, she bit into her wrist, feeling her own deadly fangs slice through her ageless white skin. The sharp sting of the incision made her wince, and the briny taste of her own blood exploded upon her tongue, yet she resisted the urge to drink deeply of her crimson essence, just as she took care to cut only deeply enough to sever the veins, sparing the vital arteries buried further beneath her flesh. She needed only a tiny stream of blood for this solemn rite, not a spurting red geyser.

  Allowing herself only a sip of her cool vampiric plasma, Selene reluctantly pulled her wrist away from her blood-smeared mouth. There’s nothing like the real thing, she admitted with a stab of regret, even when stolen from my own veins. She had subsisted on sorry substitutes for far too long.

  But her frustrated craving was not what mattered now. She held her wrist out over the leading bowl of the catalyst drip and squeezed the wound to hasten the flow. Dark venous blood spilled from her opened wrist into the shining bowl, beginning its slow and winding progression from bowl to bowl. An arcane chemical catalyst, absorbed via an osmotic filter at the base of each bowl, mixed with Selene’s shed blood to undergo a sublime alchemical transformation even as the thin red serum descended toward Viktor’s desiccated maw.

  Selene peered ruefully at the crimson stream. She was all too aware that she lacked the mental strength and discipline to precisely regulate the flow of memories being carried by her blood. All she could do was watch the dark red fluid make its way toward the open spigot and pray that her entreaty had not been garbled too badly.

  Leaving Viktor and the equipment alone for a moment, she hurried across the bottommost floor to the rear of the crypt, where a sealed plexiglass chamber lurked just beyond the subdued halogen lighting over the Elders’ tombs. A pair of rectangular marble pillars framed the entrance to the sealed compartment, whose sterile, futuristic design contrasted sharply with the somber medieval majesty of the ancient crypt.

  This was the recovery chamber, employed only once every hundred years. The transparent plexiglass walls were a new addition to the facility, part of a never-ending program to update and improve the chamber in accordance with the steady progress of technological innovation. The Elders demanded and deserved the best that modern science could provide, even if their memories extended profoundly back through history.

  Selene rushed into the recovery unit and flicked on the lights. A wheeled metal gurney occupied the center of the room, surrounded by antiseptic chrome counters and sophisticated diagnostic monitors. A complicated array of plastic tubing dangled from the ceiling like a bizarre biomedical chandelier.

  Ducking her head beneath the overhead tubing, Selene went straight for a refrigerated metal cabinet, whose locked door proved no match for her preternatural strength and determination. Dozens of plastic IV bags filled with preserved human plasma and hemoglobin rested inside the cabinet, and Selene helped herself freely to the supplies, piling them high atop a burnished steel counter next to the gurney. Is this enough? she fretted, wishing she didn’t have to figure all this out on her own. Too bad Michael isn’t here, she thought wryly. He was a doctor, after all, although Selene seriously do
ubted that he had ever taken part in a procedure like the one she was now attempting.

  While Selene hastily prepared the recovery chamber, the first few drops of her catalyzed blood completed their circuitous journey through the sequence of bowls. A swollen scarlet bead dangled beneath the lip of the burnished copper spigot, the globule bulging in size until gravity finally wrested it from its precarious perch.

  The bright red droplet plummeted through space to land with a splat upon Viktor’s cracked and arid lips. From there, it trickled over the brink into the yawning chasm between the mummy’s lips, falling like rain upon the sere and barren landscape at the back of his throat.

  More bloody raindrops plunged from above, watering the inanimate tissues with miraculous results. Parched membranes greedily soaked up the magic elixir. Inert cells and corpuscles rose from the dead, pulsing back to life at a geometric rate. Dried veins and capillaries resumed their ancient duties, carrying Selene’s heartfelt libation deep into the petrified recesses of Viktor’s undead heart and mind, along with a flood of jumbled memories and images.

  Selene, bathed in candlelight, her lovely face wan and bloodless, stands before a window, staring at her reflection. A pristine white nightgown is draped upon her shapely form. Her eyes wide, she tugs down the collar of her gown, inspecting the fresh bite wound on her slender throat: two livid red spots directly above her jugular. Her lower lip quivers tremulously as her slender fingers gingerly explore the wound. Her fear-stricken eyes are those of a traumatized innocent, quite unlike the hardened Death Dealer she would someday become.

  A shadowy figure, only dimly reflected in the glass, strolls up behind her, placing a reassuring hand upon her shoulder. Viktor’s hand, as yet untouched by time…

  The images came faster, burning past his mind’s eye with blazing intensity. The memories were disordered, chaotic, and out of sequence, as though being fed to him by a clumsy amateur.