Cherishing Destiny (A Dangerous Destiny) (17 page)

He went back to the barn where he and the others had spent
a couple of days and found that it had been burned to the ground by someone
bent on its complete destruction.  He chuckled when he found that the stash of
food in the cellar was still intact.  Whoever had been there hadn’t found it. 
He was missing Aurora and Sara, and he decided to spend the night in the walnut
grove at home. 

He tied the horse to one of the posts on the shed and
stretched, breathing in deeply the scent of the trees.  Everything smelled damp
from the rain that came every day, but at least it wasn’t raining at the
moment.  He noticed a mild odor under the smell of the damp leaves and he went perfectly
still, listening.  It was a Vampire.  There was no mistaking the potent odor a
Vampire gave off to another of its kind.  He moved silently through the garden
and around the corner of the destroyed house, to the half collapsed garage.  He
saw a shadow near the Rover.  As he moved closer, careful to stay out of sight,
he heard a voice call out.

“I can smell you, of course,” a low gravelly voice came
from the interior of the garage wreckage. 

“I can smell you too.  This is my home.  Explain yourself,”
Alex demanded, falling easily back into the formal rhythm of an elder Vampire
of the council speaking to an underling. 

“I apologize, m’lord.  I smelled that this was a Vampire
home as soon as I arrived, but the scents were all old, sir.  It seemed as if nobody
had been here for the last two or three weeks.  I was just looking for a place
to rest a bit.” A Vampire that must have been older when he was turned came out
of the garage.  He was smallish for a Vampire and looked to be at least 60 in
human years.  Alex could tell from his scent that he was several hundred years
Alex’s junior, no more than three or four hundred years old.  “I’m Reginald,
sir. I meant no offence, being here. I’m heading to Syracuse in the morning,
but I can start out tonight if I’m trespassing, sir.”

“Syracuse? That’s at least five days from here on
horseback,” Alex calculated.

“I haven’t got a horse, so I guess it’ll take me a bit
longer,” Reginald said entirely without humor. 

“What’s in Syracuse?” Alex asked. 

“I am trying to find the elders,” Reginald said.  “I heard
there is a council elder in Syracuse and that a village has been formed.”

“What do you mean a village has formed and which Vampire
elder is in Syracuse?” Ryan was growing agitated by his own ignorance of
events. 

“Sir, I’m afraid I am not an important man, and I wouldn’t
know which elder has decided to set up in Syracuse, but I have heard that
several villages have been established already for the protection of Vampires
and humans from the Hunters that have taken over the highways.”  His low, rough
voice rumbled on as he nervously shifted from foot to foot.  He was well aware
that Alex was an old Vampire, and he bravely asked, “begging your pardon, sir
if it’s none of my business, but it seems to me, you must be an elder even if
you don’t sit on the council.  I don’t know if I ever met a Vampire that feels
as old as you.” He tried to make that last comment sound respectful, but he was
a little in awe of Alex. 

“As it happens, Reginald, I am an elder and a council
member, and I think you and I need to have a seat and talk before we leave for
Syracuse in the morning. I expect a full report.”  Alex’s authority was unquestionable. 

Reginald and Alex sat by the shed in the walnut grove with
their backs against the posts.  “I want your whole story from the beginning,”
Alex informed the Vampire that looked like a well preserved old man.  Even old
men made good looking Vampires.

“Well, sir, It started in NYC for me.  I never knew what
hit me, but suddenly I was being swept along in the ocean.  I just had to grab
a hold of a chunk of something floating and hang on.  I got dragged under a
lot, but being a Vampire, I didn’t need to breathe, so I just waited to come up
again and grabbed the next thing that floated by.” Reginald shook his head and
continued.  “There were bodies everywhere, and sir, some of them were
Vampires.  I saw they were crushed or otherwise severely injured.  I thought
they would start healing, but they didn’t.  They were dead, and I mean final
dead.” Reginald paused, and it was all Alex could do to keep from shouting
questions at him, but he didn’t want to reveal the extent of his ignorance.

Reginald picked back up with, “Someone later told me that
the ocean water was a Tsunami. Anyway, I never got crushed, myself, and I eventually
got tossed on land somewhere in Massachusetts, I think.  There were lots of
people that made it out, but a lot more that didn’t.  I don’t know how the
human ones survived, but some of them did.  We all stayed together in a camp of
sorts, but people started getting sick.  I don’t know what kind of sickness it
was exactly, but the humans started dying of disease.  Bad water, I heard
someone say, but I’m no doctor.  I moved inland with another two Vampires that
came out of the water.  We were still pretty excited about day-walking. We knew
we could because we were in the water for days with no way to hide from the sun
and we never burned up.  So, we were pretty thrilled, and we were travelling in
the day and sleeping at night.  On the third day, three guys on horses rode up,
and one guy tried to shoot me.  It was really weird, but the bullet kind of
fizzled or something; it fired, but nothing like it was supposed to.  It hit me
so slow that it didn’t break the skin, but it sure hurt a lot, like getting hit
with a rock from a slingshot.  On top of that, the bullet was silver, and I got
the idea we were in big trouble because I always thought that Vampires who
talked about silver to humans had their tongues removed and when they grew
back, removed again.”

That last part amused Alex despite his grim mood because he
and the council had started a rumor of that particular punishment about two
hundred years ago when humans and Vampires were starting to cohabit. 

“So me and the other Vamps jumped into action against the
guys.” He looked embarrassed. “It should’ve been a slaughter, but a big guy
appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my buddies by the back of their necks as
they were going after the ones on the horses.  He had claws, and he was strong. 
He was tearing out their spines, and they didn’t seem strong enough to get
away.  The other three guys jumped me and started stabbing me with silver
knives.  Damn, that hurt. Took way too long to heal too. Anyway, I saw the big guy
drop the other two, dead on the ground, and I threw the human guys off of me
and ran like the wind.”  Reginald looked as if he thought Alex was going to berate
him.  “I know I should’ve been able to take on a
Were
, but I was feeling
weak ever since I got out of the water and after what he did to those other
Vampires, I didn’t know if I could take him.  I’m sorry, sir.” 

Alex thought about his own encounter with the
Were
-tiger,
and he knew Reginald would be dead if he had tried to face him. “What do you
know about that
Were
?” Alex asked, ignoring Reginald’s apology and embarrassment.  
Reginald seemed relieved to continue.

“The
Were
never changed, and I only saw claws, but
he kind of smelled like a cat after he shifted those claws out. Before they
shift, I can never tell that they’re
Weres
at all,” Reginald said
shaking his head.

Alex remembered the day he had discovered Ryan was a
Were
.
He saw Ryan shift his eyes in the dark, revealing the telltale glow.  That had
been two years ago in the garden, and he had been standing not far from where
he was this very moment.  Before Ryan made the mistake of shifting his eyes in view
of Alex, Alex never actually noticed Ryan at all, much less suspected him of
being a
Were
. 

Reginald told him about running until he was clear of the
Hunters and the
Were
. “I didn’t find out until later that these guys
were everywhere, and they were being armed, organized and trained by mercenaries. 
Before that, they were redneck nobodies showing up at those anti-Vampire
meetings and throwing eggs at Vamp houses. Now they call themselves the Hunters
and
Were
cat mercs are helping them.”

Alex knew that some of those humans had been a little more serious
about terrorism than just going to meetings, but they had never been well
organized.  Mercenaries explained the
Were
cats, but that didn’t explain
how they ended up helping the haters, now the Hunters, or who was paying them
to do it. “When did you find all this out?” Alex asked.

“I stayed hidden for a while after that, but one day I
could hear someone following me.  I got really nervous about it being another
Were
,
and I tried to wait real quiet behind a tree to jump him.  It was a
Were
alright.  He wasn’t fooled by my hiding place, and he grabbed me and threw me
down showing me some crazy big teeth.  But then he stops and shifts back and
says he didn’t realize I was a Vampire, and he let me go.  Of course, he didn’t
actually apologize, not that I ever thought I would hear anything even that
close to an apology from a
Were
.”  Reginald noticed that Alex appeared
to be getting impatient with his side notes, and he got back on track.  “So, I
didn’t know what to think, and the
Were
started asking me about who I’d
seen and what kind of weapons they had and so on.  I told him about the guys,
and even though it made me a little nervous, I told him about the
Were
and that I was hiding behind the tree because I thought it might be him
coming.  He just got upset and asked me if I thought he looked like a cat? 
Apparently he was Wolf clan, and they are touchy about these things.”

Alex thought about Ryan and his connections.  Ryan’s
special
forces
, he thought. “What did the wolf tell you?” Ryan prodded.

“He told me that Vampires and the humans who don’t support
the Hunters are setting up the villages for protection in numbers.  The Hunters
are taking over the highways, and that
Were
cat mercs are involved
somehow.  He told me to stay low and try to make it to Syracuse.  He said there
was a Vampire elder there running things.” Reginald looked at Alex as if he was
waiting for a verdict.

Alex pronounced his decision. “Tomorrow we head to
Syracuse.  You will ride with me until we can find another horse.”

Reginald looked relieved to have someone else in charge. 

“What do you know about the power or radios, or anything
about this weather?” Alex was going through his list of questions in his mind.

“Not a thing,” Reginald replied. “I’m no scientist.”  

Twenty
-two

On the second night after leaving the walnut grove, Alex
and Reginald, came across three Hunters camped out with no signs of a
Were,
but Alex knew that they might not be able to tell if the
Were
was in
full human form. 

Two of the men were sleeping, and one was on watch.  He sat
with a crossbow next to him and a silver knife in his hand.  He was using his
free hand to poke at their fire with a stick.  Stupidly, ruining his already pitiful
night vision, Alex thought.  He was surprised at how easily he was slipping back
into the silent hunter mode that he had walked away from over 200 years ago. 

He slipped into the camp behind the watcher and closed his fist
around the man’s throat, his clawed fingers sinking into the soft flesh and
squeezing the esophagus and trachea fully closed.  The man’s eyes were bulging
from his head, but he was unable to make a sound and his life blood was flowing
out of his throat around Alex’s buried fingers.  Alex didn’t wait to find out
if the man would shift into a
Were
cat and he tore out the flesh and
sinew he was gripping, ending the man quickly, without waking the others.

He moved to the closest sleeper and again, trying to be
silent, he grabbed the hair and skull of the man and twisted sharply to snap
his neck.  The man squeaked just before the crack of his spine sounded and the
second sleeper came awake in a shot.  He jumped up, wielding a silver dagger,
holding it out in front of him as he backed toward the trio of horses that were
tethered on the other side of the campfire.  Alex closed the distance and was
in front of him in a flash.  The man was quick and lunged out with the dagger. 
Alex had to sidestep and lean back to miss the point, and before he recovered
to end the confrontation, Reginald was behind the man.  The gray haired Vampire
grabbed the man’s knife arm, snapping the bone audibly.  The knife dropped to
the ground, and the man screamed in pain.  Reginald cut the scream off
abruptly, tearing into the flesh of his neck with his Vampire teeth.  Alex
watched the smaller Vampire tearing and feeding on the Hunter as if he was
starved.

Alex belatedly realized that Reginald probably had been
starving.  He did not mention feeding at any point during the last week or more
that he had spent travelling on foot.  But, he never complained or suggested
feeding to Alex at any time during the last couple of days, and Alex realized
that Reginald was probably still operating under the restrictions of hunting
humans that the council had placed on all Vampires.  Alex’s mere presence had
probably discouraged Reginald from trying to feed.

When Reginald next looked at Alex, Alex could see the guilt
and a little fear in his eyes.  He put a hand on the Vampire’s shoulder and
said, “I’m not rescinding any laws just yet, but I think that we need to
consider that we are at war here and unusual circumstances exist.”