PROEM
She was roused from sleep by the sudden, shocking depth of her dreams.
She hadn't been sleeping well for some time. Her thoughts in slumber had been increasingly disturbed of late, growing worse for the strange, intemperate distortions she still felt being worked on the fibers of her very being. Product of a decision she could not bring herself to regret, though she wished terribly that she could.
He was aware that she had risen, but he didn't so much as reach out for her this time, knowing well that she would have recoiled as she always did after the dreams. He had learned to leave her to herself for a bit before moving to comfort her or pull her back down onto the bed with him.
She looked briefly at him, his face caught in the glow of early morning coming in through the curtains in the window that weren't pulled completely shut. Such a beautiful face, and she was becoming more appreciative of his constant presence where once she hadn't found the company of any male creature who wasn't a comrade in arms to be bearable for too long.
Well, there had been an exception before him, as there usually was in such deductions, but Michael had been a comrade in arms to her as well, and far more faithful, it had been revealed, than the other. So little time had passed and she knew already that she would have chosen him to this day over any other. That had been made clear to the both of them when she slew Viktor, the only other male presence who, in her two-hundred years of wretchedly misspent immortal life, she had ever shown anything but a casual indifference to.
That wasn't counting Kraven, who had pushed her to open hostility countless times, even before she learned of his betrayal.
What she felt for Michael, however, as she watched him there, not sleeping anymore now that she had awoken - he was attuned emphatically to her and felt it strongly when she herself felt unrest - but not fully awake as she was, with his eyes still shut, was far from what she had felt for Viktor, the man who had been called her Dark Father. Her admiration for Viktor's ferocity in battle and his cunning in the arena of politics could not be compared to her love for Michael, and she did indeed feel love for him.
She didn't know now if she could continue to call what she had felt for Viktor love, simply because the idea that she had once loved him caused her nothing but a heated, unparalleled rancor. How things change.
She was going. She'd known upon waking that she wouldn't remain here in the bed, and Michael knew this, too. He accepted wordlessly that she would return to him when her mind was settled.
She kissed him quickly, a bold thing for her. She had gone so long bereft of sentiment, driven to live only for the archaic ritual of the hunt that she had come to accept as her only purpose in this deathless coil. But she'd wanted to kiss him on the lips before going, as she inevitably did on these early mornings, to the library of this house, where she sat in silence for hours at a time with the ancient books that were so numerous there she could have lived another hundred years and never read every word within them all, and so she did, loving the contact between them, for it was as new and intimate a feeling still as their nightly lovemaking, which was always resplendent with all the passion and tenderness of newlyweds.
He kissed her back softly and whispered something to her, some sweet little words that equated invariably to the message of "I love you." She repeated them to him in all sincereness, comfortably earnest with him to stunning extents, and rose from the bed.
She'd thrown her black silk slip over the back of the chair at the desk beside the bed, and she retrieved this garment now and pulled it down over her head, matching it with a pair of shorts made of industrial satin. The cloth was cool and smooth against her skin, salutary after the jarring awakening had left her heated.
She left her feet bare and padded across the room to the door. The stone walls were kind with noise, absorbing all sounds the way modern plaster could not, so when the door creaked on antiquated hinges upon opening she knew it would not upset Michael, who was undoubtedly already settling back into sleep.
Navigating the halls outside with a grudging familiarity, she passed room after room, not bothering to turn her head to look inside, for she knew not a single one was occupied but for the one she shared with Michael at the very end of the last passage in the highest story.
Andreas Tanis was gone from this place. They'd found his body upon returning, haggard and drained of all life by who else but Markus, who had come here maybe a mere hour after they left the lair of the Historian the first time to pursue Corvinus. In a show of reverence she did not know herself capable of, Selene had dutifully burned the remains in an oven of coals and cast the ashes to the north-blowing winds.
It was, perhaps, a gesture of requital for what Viktor had inflicted upon Tanis for the irrevocable crime of speaking the truth so long ago, though what truth this was she was unsure of still. There were so many missing pieces to the whole of the events.
It was doubtful to her that Tanis had perpetrated his violation for anything outside of his own immoderate self-interests, but still she'd felt a need to provide some sort of indemnity for yet another of her ignominious maker's atrocities shrouded in lies.
It had been she who Viktor had chosen to bring Tanis here in iron chains, and she had done so without questioning, never heeding then the Historian's warnings to her about the true nature of the Elder's secrets, most especially not his hinting at Viktor's hand in the death of her family. She'd been so willing to believe only untruths in her callous youth, caring only for Viktor's approval of her every action.
Like a good daughter. And what had become of Viktor's other children? Were they not both gone now, by his order, no less? Damn him that he had left such a legacy to tax those who followed him. She had committed horrors in his name.
And to think that Michael had been so quick to forgive that. He was a marvel to her. It seemed he might be her own redemption, for he never saw in her the killer of hundreds that she was, an instigator of genocide.
But she didn't want to think of that now. She had chosen to be better than he who gave her eternal life, the great speaker of deceptions, and that was enough for now. The guilt had haunted her enough in her dreams. The very fact that she no longer knew what she was was retribution enough.
The Corvinus Strain had yet to finish changing her, yet it had been weeks since she'd taken the blood of its progenitor into herself. She could feel it seething within her on a cellular level even as she descended the twisting staircase that would take her down to the ground level of the monastery.
The blood of Corvinus within her, given willingly in a moment of desperation, and the seed of a son of Corvinus in her womb, an accidental and unexpected flowering of life inside her.
She could not deny to herself that she feared what this child might be.
She was still fearful of herself, as well. The struggle with Markus had shown her only the scant beginnings of her new power, something she couldn't presume to know the limits of. That she could walk in daylight had been a disquieting miracle.
She had expected on that first morning to be destroyed in the light, and her sins with her, a ready hecatomb. Instead she had found herself transformed into something beyond even Michael's incredible scope of preternatural strength. She wasn't sure if she did indeed have limits anymore.
She became afraid often that she would become like him, like the despot Elder who had been the first of her kind, for she did share his direct bloodline now. How horrifying it would be, to undergo such a metamorphosis, into a true monster of the night as he had been. Her heart grew heavy for Michael when she thought of this, Michael who was cursed with a bestial form that he only ever assumed with a pang in his soul.
Michael. His firstborn child would be born to outlaws, parents who were pariahs even among their unnatural kind. God, and this little one that was ever growing in the folds of her protective vampiric flesh would be the first of its kind, a hybrid birth.
Already she dreaded for her child's life and she had only just discovered that she was pregnant days ago. Already she was fiercely vigilant of the threat that she knew would come.
Let them come, whoever they might be. Let either family come, whatever vampires remained in the New World coven or however many lycan vagrants would see that she couldn't live to bear. If it came to a clash once again then she would strike down any who would do this child harm with devastating force, and Michael would do no less. He was elated to be a father.
And would she make a mother of herself when the time came? It didn't seem possible, but lo, she had an example to follow. Or rather to oppose. She had only to be everything Viktor had been to her, though she would never drive this child to violence, to vengeance, to lead a life of ceaseless retribution. She would never lie to this child.
There had always been love in Viktor's actions. She couldn't refute that, but in the end it hadn't been enough to outweigh all else.
There would never be anything else but love for this child. She would make sure of that.
She found the library on the bottom floor in the hallway adjacent to the main foyer, behind a pair of august French doors wherein the glass panes were intercut with an elegant gridwork of leafy filigree.
The handle gave with a click when she pulled down on it and she pushed the doors open with both hands and entered the vast room within, closing them gently behind her.
This dwarfed the library in Ordoghaz, which had been burned to cinders in Markus's rampage in the Old World coven house. The shelves of fine polished dark beechwood stood as tall as the cathedral ceilings, covering every wall, corner to corner, right to the very edge of the doors.
Tanis had kept his records flawlessly intact here, no less than a complete paper database, dating back through the last millennia, of vampire historical documents. It was all marked by date and a dozen other categorizing features and ranked and organized down to the last letter in a system only he understood. Selene had taken days on end just trying to decipher how he had catalogued his life's work.
He'd taken some time before his demise to begin translating some of the texts into modern English and scribing them into leatherbound books. The vast majority of them were written in the old tongue, which was still spoken by many in this country but bothersome for any vampire who had acclimated in the last century to speaking and reading the now practically universal language of the Western world. Tanis himself was, naturally, well-versed in many archaic tongues, but even he must have known that he would not live forever, and that his legacy of records had to be passed into the hands of some younger immortal to guard for whatever remained of eternity. It would do no good to let these words disappear with a dying script.
Only one wall in the library housed any number of books. The rest of it was still in scroll form, stored in deftly carved hollows in the shelves and written in faded ink on yellowed parchment that would crumble under the touch. And the translator was less than dust now. So perhaps some history would be lost to the blood hunter clan. As if any of them remaining knew anything of their true history to begin with.
Selene had laid aside, a few days before, a certain tome that had caught her interest while perusing the shelves.
It was one of the newly translated pieces. She could still smell the fresh ink on smooth synthetic paper when she picked it up gingerly from the splintered desk where she'd left it. Paper cut by machines and fixed with factory-brewed adhesives that would last forever into a spine and binding made to look purposely worn by time, though they were as fresh and new as the pages themselves; it was a mystery to her why Tanis hadn't chosen something as simple as a spiral notebook to do this in, or even a computer file. But as a student of history, he'd always had a flair for dramatic ostentation, and the story within this volume really did call for more of an impressive housing.
It was copied with a ballpoint pen with infinite wells of black ink. He could have written an entire book with just one of those invincible metal pens when before he'd had to keep huge stores of bottled India ink on hand and constantly replace his fragile goosefeather quills. At least he was slightly practical about his obsessions.
She sat in one of the comfy cushioned chairs dispersed in odd places all around the room, choosing one in a quiet corner and opening the book in her lap.
This was a story she had heard twice before, once from one who'd actually left memories in these very pages. She knew the names of the characters buried in these words - some of them she'd known in living, some of them she had loved - and as she read she saw them in the space behind her eyes, feeling for herself what they must have felt as this saga unfolded around them.
Viktor's progeny, Solan and Sonja, the twins, one verboten lover to Lucian, who would become the greatest werewolf lord history would never remember, and his sister a celebrated warrior in vampire lore; all were dead or lost to the times, and one by his father's ruling. She hadn't even known Viktor had a son until Lucian told her so himself.
This was a love story. Tanis had written it in his own separated, abstract style, fitting of a Historian, but she could not be blinded to what was really there. There was war, yes, and tragedy in abundance, but in the end there was love to compel every motion. She imagined she heard the words spoken aloud between the impassioned youths who were at the center of it all.
Ah, Viktor, how you buried this tale, your most personal shame and your deepest grief. Here was the root of the war, and it could all be laid at your feet. If you were ever anything more than a monster it could be discerned here in these words.
Selene forgot herself and time as she turned the pages. She settled back in the chair and read on.