03 - Evolution (21 page)

Right,
Selene thought. She didn’t believe a word of it.

He gestured at the throwing star in her hand. “Careful
with that, dear. It makes a terrible bang. Open the blades and they’re
active.”

“Good to know.” Selene pocketed a few of the explosive
shuriken,
then selected a gleaming steel
crossbow from the armory. She loaded a silver-tipped bolt into the
crossbow and peered down the length of the stock.
Time to get down to business,
she decided. “Viktor put you here
for a reason, but I doubt it was because you had moral qualms.” She
swung the crossbow in his direction. “What do you know?”

Tanis chose to ignore the implied threat. Getting up
from his chair, he strolled over to a rough-hewn wooden table where he
began to pour himself a glass of blood-red wine. “Very little about
anything, I’m afraid.”

Not the response I wanted,
Selene thought. Taking aim, she squeezed the trigger. The silver bolt
took flight, whizzing over the historian’s shoulder and into the
wineglass in his hand. Tinted glass exploded and wine splashed over the
walls. Tanis jumped backward, a shocked expression on his face. His
blasé pose shattered just as readily as the wineglass. “Son of a bitch!”

Joining her by the weapons rack, Michael smirked at
Selene’s inimitable people skills. She was glad that he was starting to
understand how her world worked.
Just so long as he
never expects me to play the good cop.

“He wanted this,” Michael said, drawing Sonja’s pendant
from his pocket. He tossed the pendant at Tanis, who caught it in one
hand. “Why?”

The historian’s face paled.

The stable was dark and quiet. Having been put away for the night, the weary
workhorses dozed in their stalls… until a noise upon the roof roused the
horses from their equine dreams. They whinnied in alarm and circled
frantically inside their stalls. They reared up in fright and kicked at
the gates with their hooves. Their eyes rolled wildly as they worked
themselves into a lather.

Noisy claws tore apart the timbers overhead, allowing
the cold night air into the barn. Then a fearsome winged figured crashed
through the roof before alighting on the hay-covered dirt floor below.
The hybrid’s abrupt entrance made the trapped horses even more panicky.
They hurled themselves against the walls of the stable in their crazed
attempts to get away from the invader.

Marcus listened to the horses’ racing hearts. He licked
his fangs.

Tanis was ready to talk.

A smart decision,
Selene
thought. She leaned against a tile wall, feeling infinitely more at ease
now that she had thoroughly rearmed herself from the historian’s weapons
rack. New automatic pistols, Walther P99s, replaced her Berettas and now
rested against her hips.

Michael stood in the shadows nearby. Fully dressed once
more, he kept a close eye on Tanis, who was seated at a long wooden
table. Leather-bound tomes, obviously many centuries old, were stacked
atop the table, with more books crowding the shelves behind him. The
historian eyed his captors nervously, no longer trying to hide his fear
behind a sardonic manner.

“Some history is based on truth,” he said. “Other on
deception. Viktor was not the first of our kind as you were led to
believe. He was once human, and the ruler of these lands.”

Tanis flipped through yellowed parchment pages as he
spoke. A beaded crystal lamp provided him with enough light to read by.

“Marcus. He is the one. The source.” Tanis looked up
from the pages. “The first true vampire.”

Attracted by the panicky cries of the horses,
the farmer came running into the stable. Clutching a shotgun, he flicked
on the barn’s interior lights. A gasp tore itself from his lungs as he
got his first look at the slaughterhouse his stable had become.

Dead horses lay in heaps upon the ground, their throats
savagely torn out. Excess blood soaked the hay covering the floor. The
barn reeked of blood and mutilated horseflesh.

The shocked farmer made an inarticulate, gagging noise.
He threw a hand over his mouth to keep from throwing up. The loaded
shotgun trembled in his grip.

Marcus emerged from the shadows. No longer a wizened
relic, he looked just as he had in his prime. A reddish beard framed his
youthful, aristocratic face. His wings were tucked neatly into his back.
He casually wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand.

This latest feast had done much to restore him.

“Mother of God!” The nameless farmer stared at Marcus in
horror. Shaking visibly, he swung his shotgun toward the intruder.

But the Elder’s reflexes were infinitely faster. Before
the farmer could pull the trigger, Marcus lunged forward and knocked the
mortal aside with a vicious slap. The shotgun went off, blasting another
hole in the ceiling, as the hapless farmer sailed headfirst into a wall.
His neck snapped loudly.

Marcus eyed the corpse with interest. Having glutted
himself on the horses’ blood, his appetite was sated now, but maybe this
unfortunate wretch could still be of use. Marcus glanced down at his
silken trousers and gilded belt. The ancient garments did nothing to
conceal the wings folded against his back. Moreover, it struck him as
rather unseemly to be striding about half-naked. Perhaps a bit more
clothing was in order?

Kneeling beside the farmer, he fingered the dead man’s
weathered overcoat.

Marcus? The first true vampire?

Selene’s eyes widened at the revelation. She had always
believed Viktor to be the oldest and most powerful of the Elders. Her
mind instantly flashed back to the night before, when Viktor had taunted
Singe in the crypt below Ordoghaz:

“The three sons of Corvinus,”
Viktor had mocked the lycan scientist, heaping ridicule on what Selene
had believed to be an old wives’ tale about the secret origin of the
immortals. “One
bitten by bat, one by wolf,
and one to walk the lonely road of mortality.”

“So the legend is true,” she declared. Viktor had
implied that the story was nothing but a preposterous fairy tale, but
Viktor had lied about many things. She searched Tanis’ face, but found
no hint of deception. Michael listened just as raptly to the historian’s
words. According to Singe, she recalled, Michael was a direct descendant
of the mortal son mentioned in the myth. She regarded him thoughtfully.
Although new to their world, Michael was nonetheless a physical link to
the very birth of her kind.

Perhaps he was always destined to be part of this?

“Near the end of his ruthless life,” Tanis continued,
“when his next breath meant more to Viktor than silver or gold, Marcus
came with an offer, a reprieve from sickness and death. Immortality.”

Selene could readily imagine the scene. In her mind’s
eye, she saw Viktor, perhaps less than sixty years old, lying upon his
deathbed, succumbing to some incurable mortal ailment. Viktor’s face
would have been drawn and ashen, his life guttering out like the beeswax
candles lighting his gloomy bedchamber. Marcus would have been there,
looking as young as ever, while he sat beside the dying warlord,
whispering promises of eternal life….

All of this centuries before Viktor
made me the same promise,
she realized, stunned by Tanis’
revelations. Up until a few nights ago, she would have regarded such an
account as nothing short of heresy.
How can I have
spent six hundred years fighting in Viktor’s name without ever hearing
this story before?

“In return for immortality for both he and his army,”
Tanis continued, “Viktor was to use his military might to aid Marcus.”

“To do what?” Selene asked.

“To defeat the very first werewolves, a dangerous and
highly infectious breed created by Marcus’ own flesh and blood. His
twin brother, William.”

Marcus tugged the brown leather overcoat over
his shoulders. With his wings tucked away, it was a decent fit. A gash
torn in the back of the coat would allow him to unfurl his wings if need
be. He silently thanked the dead farmer at his feet.

He dabbed a stray drop of blood from his beard. This
stopover at the stable had been worth the while, but now he had more
important matters to attend to.

Soon, William,
he promised
his cursed brother.
We will be reunited at last.

Leaving a scene of utter carnage behind him, he strode
out into the night.

Tanis wrested another dusty tome from his
bookshelves. He slapped it down onto the table in front of Selene and
Michael. After blowing a thick layer of dust from the moldering volume,
he opened the book to a specific page. A woodcut illustration showed a
pack of wolflike creatures running wild through a medieval village. The
shaggy monsters looked even less human than any werewolf Selene had ever
encountered.
Artistic license?
she wondered.

Apparently not.

“These weren’t the lycans we know,” Tanis explained.
Having been informed of Michael’s hybrid nature, he directed his next
remarks to the young American. “Disgusting as your contemporary brethren
may be, they are at least evolved to a degree. These were raging
monsters, never able to take human form again. It is only the later
generations that learned to channel their rage enough to mimic humanity
at times.”

He flipped the pages until he came to another
illustration. This one depicted a single werewolf taking on an entire
contingent of medieval Death Dealers. The beast looked larger and more
powerful than the other early lycans. Judging from the artist’s
rendering, the lycan’s fur was lighter in color as well, perhaps even as
white as snow.

An albino werewolf?
Selene
speculated. She had never heard of such a thing.

“William’s appetite for destruction and rampage was
insatiable. He had to be stopped, before he infected the entire
continent. And so, once Viktor’s army was turned, creating legions of
vampires under his sole control, he tracked down and destroyed the
animals created by William. And, finally, after a long and bloody
campaign, captured William himself.”

Tanis slammed the book shut. He plucked another tome
from the shelves. “Then they locked him away, Viktor’s prisoner for all
time.”

Thus were born the Death Dealers,
Selene realized,
and we’ve been hunting the lycans
ever since.
“Why let William live?”

“The same reason Viktor never conspired against Marcus.
Fear.” Tanis opened the book, scanned a few pages, then snatched up a
third volume from the stacks. “He was warned that should Marcus be
slain, all those in his bloodline—including Viktor—would follow him to
the grave.”

Selene thought she understood. “So, in Viktor’s mind,
William’s death could very well mean the end of all lycans… his slaves.”
She wondered why Viktor had continued to keep William alive even after
the lycans had risen up in revolt.
Perhaps as a
concession to Marcus, to keep peace within the coven?

“Yes,” Tanis stated. “A clever deception, but one Viktor
was hardly willing to put to the test. And so Marcus was protected at
all costs. By keeping both brothers alive, Viktor ensured—so he
believed—the livelihood of the bloodlines. Both species.”

Tanis leafed through the book, looking for a relevant
passage.

A faded etching caught Selene’s attention. She jammed
her pistol into the pages like a bookmark, bringing a halt to Tanis’
hasty page-turning. He backed off and let her take custody of the hefty
tome. She slid the book around so that she and Michael could get a
better look at another medieval woodcut.

The black-and-white etching depicted a time of war and
plague. Mounted soldiers, clad in the armor of the Middle Ages, rode
past a mass grave that held a jumble of lovingly detailed skeletons.
Scythe in hand, the Angel of Death hovered over the morbid scene, but
Selene was more interested in the unique crest that adorned the shields
of the armored soldiers. The crest incorporated an ornate letter
C
that reminded Selene of the stylized
letters emblazoned on the Elders’ tombs.

C
for… Corvinus?

Michael saw what she was looking at. “Vampires?”

Tanis shook his head. “Mortals… men loyal to Alexander Corvinus.”

“Alexander?” Selene recognized the name, of course.
According to Singe, Alexander Corvinus had been the original immortal, a
fifth-century Hungarian warlord who had somehow survived a devastating
plague that had killed everyone else in his domain. In Alexander, the
virulent disease had mutated in an unprecedented fashion, granting him
eternal life. Years later, so the story went, he had fathered his
infamous three sons.

And so our long war began…

“Indeed,” Tanis confirmed. “The father of us all.” He
reached for the book. “If I may?”

Selene nodded, and the historian took back the volume.
He quickly flipped the pages to another illustration. Unlike the
previous woodcuts, this was more of a technical blueprint, like one of
Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches.

At the center of the diagram was a drawing of Sonja’s
pendant. Sketched around the pendant was what looked like a locking
mechanism embedded within a reinforced stone door. Tanis borrowed the
real pendant from Michael, then gently laid it down atop the fragile
parchment. He clicked the hidden switch and watched in fascination as
the delicate bronze blades slid out into the open once more. “The Lost
Pendant,” he said in a hushed tone, “still functioning after nearly six
centuries.”

Selene grew impatient. She had already seen this trick
before. What did any of this have to do with her own fragmentary
memories? She tapped the sketch of the lock. “What’s this?”