Thanks to Celtic Aurora for betaing the chapter and for putting up with me and my constant ranting :D
AN: This is the first part of a series about Amelia the Elder. The choice on her eye color was based on a careful watching of the second movie, in which I saw that her eyes do not turn the vampiric ice blue, but a toxic green.
This story takes place when the second movie was supposed to happen, which is the year 2003 A.D.
PROLOGUE: 1192 A.DShe sits patiently, waiting for the two men to cross the door to the fortress as she has already allowed. Viktor is the first to reach her, having gone through the winding halls already, and greets her with a hug. She points to one of the six empty seats around the throne, which would normally be occupied by her council. Honoring an allegiance that goes back for many generations, he takes a seat to her right as she goes to sit on her throne.
The other man is not offered a seat. He has less presence, even though his appearance is far more intriguing. Red hair is an unusual trait this far south from the Great Islands, but only slightly more peculiar than the name he offers as means of introduction. Corvinus, after all, no longer inspires the same feeling of reverence as it did centuries before, when the head of the house was Astos and not Alexander Corvinus.
Amelia stoically endures the formalities, letting out a tiny, quiet sigh of relief when the matter at hand is finally addressed. She, having inherited the kingdom only a year ago, doesn't yet understand the value of such beaurocratic behavior. She listens patiently as both men, in a new-formed allegiance, retell Markus Corvinus' saving of Lord Viktor from the cold clutches of death. She scoffs and assumes they are being presumptuous when bragging about enhanced strength, and interrupts to inform them of her disbelief, but accepts defeat when Viktor's hitherto weak fist collides with, and shatters, a thick wooden beam.
After a long discussion that revolves around the present situation, and after only a moment's hesitation and a brief reminder of the cause of her father's death, she finally nods her consent, and Markus approaches her, baring pointed fangs.
She regrets the decision once the burning begins. It's like liquid fire rushing through her veins. Her vision sways, and she falls unceremoniously to the floor. For moments, she sees her surroundings in colors she never knew existed. However, her eyelids cover her toxic green irises too quickly, and she continues to writhe on the hard stone floor. She rolls over and curls in on her stomach, which feels as though it's being ripped from her body. The heels of her hands are pressed against her closed eyes, in an attempt to diminish the throbbing in them.
From numb lips, the princess gasps, her chest heaving, and finally manages to glance up at the two men, with eyes that are now hazel, now pure green. She seeks guidance in the one who has stood by her side this whole time, and clenches her teeth to ward off the pain.
"You'll live, princess," Viktor says, and those words bring him huge relief, but the only thing she sees right now are his pale blue eyes instead of the brown ones she knows him to have. Her gaze does not waver from his, even as the edges of her vision turn dark and she finally slips into blessed unconsciousness.
1. OUT OF THE NORM
She didn't want to go underground. Amelia scowled, letting her shoe hang from her toe. She hated to be drained of her blood, to literally feel as she died, and to wake up as if she hadn't gotten a moment's rest. What she hated the most, though, were the long hours she had to spend drinking to restore her body, which would be weak and wrinkled when she got the blood memory. She hated to have to spend that first while awake sorting out the details of the last century, and drowning herself in blood, emptying glass after glass, before Viktor would finally deign to talk to her and explain the memories he had passed on to her.
She sighed. This time, she had had to force herself into the train and resist the urge to go back to her coven. The one she owned, and not Viktor; the only place his words had no authority unless she was there to enforce them, and where his dark hand could not reach. She shuddered at the thought of waking up in a cold crypt, with Viktor's children keeping a tight watch over her until she would again leave for America.
Amelia got up from her seat next to the window as the train stopped, checking her reflection in the mirror for the last time. She smiled, pleased at the way the soft, pale blue strapless dress hugged her body, and adjusted the golden choker on her neck and matching bracelet on her thin wrist. She returned to her chair and picked up the glass of blood before her, taking a gulp of the rich liquid before putting it back down on the small table. She scowled bitterly, remembering that would probably be the last drink she took in two centuries, and picked it back up to take one last gulp before answering the door. It was a Death Dealer, to tell her they'd finally arrived at the station. Amelia smiled and walked out of her wagon, leaving him to close the door. She lifted her head up higher, steeled herself, and elegantly crossed the threshold into the council's wagon.
The preparations for the trip had taken about a month, and, while it was nice to have such effort pay off so nicely, she was by far more glad to have finally arrived. The trip had taken two long days, first to fly from America in a modified private airplane, and then to stop in the outside of Hungary to take the train, as Amelia had wanted. And finally, they could say they were home.
The twelve council members got up after her, and headed into the last wagon, with Amelia at the lead and a Death Dealer at the end of the procession. The pale blue dress trailed behind the Elder as she walked and softly ran a hand along a curtain.
It was then that the first howl was heard. She froze in her steps and cast her eyes upwards, trying to pinpoint the source of the blood-curdling noise. Just as she realized it was coming closer, and the last Death Dealer held up his rifle, something landed hard on the steel top of the train. She counted the next thuds and came to a total of nine. Amelia's breathing quickened, and she glanced back wildly, catching sight of two of the three Death Dealers and thinking just now that bringing only them with her on the train had been foolish. She calmed down, however, after remembering the escort form Ördögház, which had cleared them to come out of the convoy. She took a deep breath and reasoned that, if the attackers were on top of the train, it was only a matter of seconds before their guards opened fire.
They didn't.
Amelia strained her hears to hear anything from that direction only to pick up the ugly sound of tires screeching away.
"Traitors," she hissed through her teeth and let her fangs elongate and her eyes turn green in rage as the first window broke. A fully transformed lycan entered through the hole, howling at the council members, who, never having been trained to fight, cowered as the Death Dealer nearest to them stepped forward. The three first shots killed the threatening beast, but by now the narrow room was swarming with them, and another one swiftly avenged its comrade with a swing of its claws.
The other two Death Dealers reacted in no time and now gunfire rang in her ears as she, too, reached to grab hold of a dark leathery neck and squeezed. She let the carcass fall and looked around again. There was no escape route she could see, and Amelia realized, perhaps too late, that the ambush had been so cleverly planned, there was no way to get the council out of the train. She hadn't been under an attack of this magnitude for a few decades, and wasn't exactly sure she could take on the Lycans, already having had some of her blood drained prior to the Awakening.
She quickly snapped the neck of the Lycan in her hands, and turned around to find another one looming threateningly over her. However, she was too slow to avoid the clawed hand that landed on her cheek, leaving three bleeding scratch marks, which marred her pale complexion. Letting out her breath at the exact moment, she managed to add enough strength to her fist to cave in the chest of her attacker, and proudly stood over the body, pressing the back of her hand to her slightly bleeding face.
Amelia sidestepped a body, refusing to look down and recognize the deceased Vampire, and dodged the snapping jaws of the next Lycan. Her intricate hairdo was coming undone, and strands of raven hair fell on her face. She pulled backwards after taking hold of the beast's nape and clutching hard until a whine escaped the snout before the Lycan broke her hold and stepped back. She ran a hand through her tresses, but stumbled backwards as a claw tore her side open and had her crying out, clutching at the wounds, and leaning against the red velvet curtain in order to stay upright. Her blood seeped through her fingers and stained the soft fabric a darker red.
She breathed heavily, trying to get some air into her desperate lungs, and snapped her hand away from her side with a groan. Pushing herself off the wall, she let her fangs grow even more and lunged forward towards the closest werewolf, however, her vision swayed because of the blood loss, and so she failed to dodge the snapping jaws. The pain on her shoulder reminded her of reality, and she gasped and with no regards for the consequences pushed the monster away, its fangs dragging along her skin and widening the puncture wounds into fifteen-centimeter gashes. She hissed and jerked the Lycan's shoulder until she heard a pop, and the Lycan howled.
She fell to her knees next to the still living wolf and looked around herself. The only remaining Death Dealer stepped up to protect the lightheaded Elder and readied his handgun with shaking hands as he realized they were the only two Vampires left alive on the train. He managed to shoot the Lycan that had bitten her, but soon enough the inevitable happened. Amelia recoiled from the cut-open body when it was dropped before her and shakily stood, fighting off another wave of dizziness. She was lifted off her feet by the neck and tossed to the carpeted floor like a rag doll.
There, among the bloody mess of the battle, she laid, trembling, feeling salty tears sting her cheeks. She took shaky breaths and fisted her hands, her crying intensifying, when a hooded man approached. One of the two remaining Lycans forcefully tilted her head to the side, exposing her throat, and Amelia could only gasp in fear as she felt a slight prick in her neck. She struggled to break free of their hold, but her weak try only had the Lycan press down on her wounded shoulder. She tensed up and clenched her teeth with a groan, but at the same time felt the slight pull in her eyes, which indicated they had turned back to their usual hazel color. She let out a choked sob; her body had given up on her. Her limbs felt heavy and her hands cold. Everything hurt, and under the pressure of the werewolf's paw, she could feel the blood bubbling out of the wound and trickling down her arm and back.
She continued to struggle, but her weak fists could do nothing against a fully transformed Lycan, and her vision narrowed around the edges until she saw no more than black, beckoning to her with the promise of painless rest. She gave in.
Selene looked at the screen, stuffing a bunch of glow-sticks into a bag.
01h 30m 12s, it read. Michael confirmed this, taking a step closer to her.
"There's only about an hour until daylight," he said as Selene reached for some throwing disks. They, too, went carelessly into the bag. "Can we make it back to the mansion before sunrise?"
She looked at him with her brown eyes. "Just."
Michael reached for the bag, "Okay, let's get what we need and go."
"No," she said plainly but firm, pulling the bag out of his reach, "I'm going alone."
She reached inside a steel cabinet for its contents. Michael stared at her, but averted his gaze as she looked up. With an annoyed sigh, she picked up the bag and laid it down on a nearby table, opening another cabinet.
"If I can plead my case," she explained, throwing various things into the bag, "there's a chance you'll be granted sanctuary. Right now you'll be killed on sight," her gaze softened as she once again looked at Michael before opening a glass door, "and I'm not prepared to risk it."
"So what am I supposed to do?" Michael complained quickly, "Sit down and wait for you?" she didn't reply, so he took her silence as an affirmative and continued, "No, Kraven might still have his men with him, you're not going alone."
He looked at her leather-clad back and short hair, annoyed at the fact that she refused to even look at him. She, on the other hand, kept stuffing the bag and silently regretted Michael's involvement in the war of the Underworld; his talking about Kraven as a force to be contended with told her just how deep in he was.
"You're not as strong as you might think," she told him, turning slowly around.
"What?"
"Michael, you're unique," she replied, meeting his gaze, "There's never been a Hybrid before. However ambivalent you may feel about it the truth is," she glared at him as he rolled his eyes dismissively, "your powers could be limitless."
She turned around again to grab a blood package, and handed it to him, pleading with her intense gaze, "You depend on blood." Sensing his reluctance, she added sternly, "You need to feed. Without it, you'll be growing weaker by the second, use the time for that.
He grudgingly took the blood and muttered, "Jesus Christ."
She smiled lightly, but her smirk was replaced with a frown when he started again,
"What if I don't? What if I can't?"
"Normal food could be lethal," she said; it was for her, but not for the Lycans, so she was not sure. She took a different approach then, remembering he was a doctor, "If you don't anticipate your cravings, you will attack humans. And believe me," she continued with a tone of sadness, "you don't want that on your conscience."
He looked crestfallen, and she took a step closer and added, "There really is no going back," she looked down, "I'm sorry."
"Look," he replied putting a hand on her back, "I understand what you did. I'm grateful; you saved my life," she looked back up at him. "I wasn't ready to die. I don't know," he hesitated looking back down at the blood in his other hand, "everything's changed."
She nodded, accepting his answer, and looked apprehensively first at the timer on the screen behind him, then at the still figure lying on the steel table of the next room, and finally, to Michael. He followed her eyes and reassured her with a hand on her elbow,
"Look, go. I'll be here. Just make sure you come back."
She nodded and quickly turned and left for the door. Michael sat down on a cold steel chair for a while, moving the blood package uncertainly from one hand to the other to the table and back to his hand again, until, with a sigh, he let it drop on the table and got up, heading for the other room.
Cold; the safehouse was very cold. It was to be expected, however, as the place had been built for practicality and not comfort. He wasn't freezing, either, as he could not feel the chill, but his human side was uncomfortable. Instinct told him the place was many degrees too cold. Thin concrete walls separated the few rooms from one another, and the space was just enough for the essentials: One bathroom, one room with two bunks, a small closet and, of course, an armory. Other than that, there was only the room with surgical tables, which was where Michael was headed.
He opened the cold steel door wider and stared at the figure in the bloody dress. He repressed the urge to press two fingers to her cold neck; Selene had already explained she would wake whenever she had restored enough blood, and that was the reason there were plastic tubes connected to her back, feeding her body from six blood bags which hung next to her.
They had rescued her from among a huge mess of corpses, pale even for a Vampire, not breathing and, as Michael had ascertained soon after, with no pulse. He sighed again. He didn't believe the woman would just revive and get up after a few hours of rest, but Selene seemed to have faith in it, and so he had carried her from the train station to the safehouse, as Selene had been occupied with defending them from the sudden bullets, which had been fired from far away. Little did they know the attack didn't come from the Lycans, but the humans under the service of Alexander Corvinus.
Michael rubbed his forehead and left, rummaging inside the closet before changing his coat for a warmer one and again catching sight of the blood package Selene had ordered him to drink. Unwilling to make a decision on the subject of his foods, he headed for the door.
He stopped in his tracks as he heard the gasp from the next room. Returning to it, he looked inside just in time to see Amelia roll over and reach around her back to pull at one of the tubes on her back. Michael froze, sure she hadn't heard him, and not knowing how to react. The woman before him was, according to Selene, one of the three Elders, of which he'd helped to kill one just the night before.
Amelia turned and looked at him, unfazed by his presence, and waited for him to move. Michael blinked and dropped awkwardly down to a knee.
"My Lady…"
"Rise," she said with a roll of the eyes, and then took a deep breath and ripped another tube out of her flesh, not having the patience to remove them the normal way, "You reek of Lycan," she commented, giving Michael a sideways glance as she twisted to check the skin on her side.
Michael got up and looked at her in slight worry, grimacing at the violence with which she tugged at the plastic. He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes in confusion. Hadn't Selene given her a blood memory? Did she not know who he was? Wasn't it to be expected that he smell like a Lycan when he was half?
She sighed, "I guess a shower is out of the question here, is it not?" she asked, scrunching up her nose as his scent once again hit her, and deciding to stop breathing so often, "For a war weapon, you're quiet," she told Michael, reaching for an unfinished blood package on the table to drink from the plastic bag.
"War weapon?" he chorused, making a note to actually take a shower when he could. So she did know of him.
"Well yes," she said, "why else do you think Lucian wanted to merge the bloodlines so badly? A hybrid could have been the means to stop the war, or to win it. And he would have benefited from whichever outcome."
She turned around and got up, keeping a hand on the table in case she lost her balance.
"How much longer until dawn?" she asked. Michael returned to the screen to check it, and she called, "And where's Selene?"
"A little over an hour," he replied, and then returned to the room. "She should be back in a while," he said as Amelia again reached for a tube.
"If I may?" he said, gesturing to her back, not wanting to see her rip the rest of the lines like she had the first few. At her nod, he walked closer, and removed the remaining three tubes gently. He looked away as she reached for another blood bag and drank in long gulps, her free hand instinctively reaching up to her wounded shoulder.
"I guess I don't have to tell you, but the Vampire virus demands that you drink blood," she commented between gulps. He looked back at the blood bag on the table in the other room, grimaced slightly and shook his head.
She sighed, foreseeing how hard it would be for him to finally get used to that fact.
"At least go and eat. A dead hybrid is no use," she rolled her eyes at him, but smiled when he looked at her concernedly, "I'm fine," she said, reassuring the doctor in him.
He nodded and left without another word. Amelia sighed when the door to the safehouse closed.
"Finally alone," she said to herself and walked to the closet, choosing out an attire from among the Death Dealer clothing. After she had picked out the clothes, she tossed them onto one of the bunks and set out to look for a first aid kit. She walked slowly, still weak from the attack and needing blood, but ignored the frailty and pressed on, wanting to clean her wounds and see how they had healed.
When she finally found the small case, she removed the golden choker from her pale neck and set it aside, reaching for the alcohol and gauze. She tended to her wounds, mostly concerning herself with the bite, which had not healed like the gashes. Although it looked like she had been clawed on the shoulder, she was constantly reminded that the injury was a bite, for it burned and stung, making the skin around the gashes very tender. This was because of the dueling viruses in her veins; whereas the Vampire virus tried to repair the damage, its Lycan counterpart concerned itself with destroying the blood cells and in turn the tissue around them. Amelia paid this no heed, knowing she had until the full moon to either find a solution or be killed by the Lycan viral infection, and bandaged the wounds tightly. After that, she discarded the tattered dress and put on trademark black Death Dealer clothes. She stood up from the bed and went to turn on the radio in the other room, then looking for the compartment with the blood supplies. Vampires had an agreement with both Hungary and New York's police forces, so they would easily find out about threats either from the Lycans or to their cover.
"We have a fugitive," the voice crackled from the radio in Hungarian, "We have Michael Corvin, send backup to Dragon's bar…"
Amelia didn't stay much longer than that. With a fleeting glance at the screen again, and letting out a quiet string of curses, she grabbed five blood packages, as many as she could hold in her hands, and left the safehouse, heading quickly in the direction of the mangy bar.
Fifteen minutes. That had been the total of the time he'd been out there, and he had managed to attract the attention of the local police. It was nearly unbelievable and yet, with the dawn creeping threateningly closer, Amelia was looking for a car to get to the tavern quicker than the Hybrid could get himself killed.