The Queen of Wolves
P
RAISE
FOR
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
BESTSELLING
AUTHOR
D
OUGLAS
C
LEGG
AND
T
HE
V
AMPYRICON
“Clegg crafts a fitting finale ornamented with prose that modulates between the sensual and regal and that distinguishes his series as one of the more memorable modern vampire epics.” —
Publisher’s Weekly
“Action and adventure combine with traditional vampire fiction to create a book that will appeal to fans of vampires and historical fantasy.” —
Library Journal
“Well-paced fantasy adventure, and not just for hardcore vampire fans.” —
Kirkus Reviews
“An intense and grisly dark fantasy, set in the 12th century, that rivals Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain sequence in both sheer narrative scope and unbridled, violent eroticism...Clegg’s Vampyricon saga will be a blood-sucking masterpiece of truly epic proportions...” —Paul Goat Allen,
BN.com
“Douglas Clegg has accomplished a rarity in the horror vein...This book will sink its teeth into you!” —
Kansas City Star
“Clegg’s unique interpretation of vampire mythology makes for a page-turning, bone-chilling adventure. Vampire fans and horror aficionados will relish this tale.” —
Romantic Times
THE QUEEN OF WOLVES
Book Three of The Vampyricon
D
OUGLAS
C
LEGG
A
LKEMARA
P
RESS
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
T
ABLE
OF
C
ONTENTS
THE QUEEN OF WOLVES
Chapter 1
________________
T
HE
W
OLF
K
EY
1
A small key made of carved bone, kept secret, hidden away—this was the only object I kept from Natalia Waterhouse within our resting place. I wrapped it into an old, leathered pouch and placed it in some worthless pottery amidst the debris of my tomb that no one should find it—and if they did, they would not know how to use it.
Even the vampyres who had been with me for the past several hundred years did not know what lock existed that fit such a key—made from wolf bone, and missing one piece.
Natalia herself had brought me the one bit of wolf bone that had been missing from the key for centuries.
It was a long, curved tooth, taken from a mahogany box—with a silver clasp in the shape of a wolf’s head—which her mother had delivered to her only in death. A wolf’s tooth with a tiny hole drilled into it that fit perfectly into a groove of the bone key.
The key was now complete in its hiding place.
When she stole it, I knew it was nearly time for me to show her the lock that waited for the key.
2
In this twenty-first century, as the storms of war poured around us from beyond our hidden fortress, I spent long nights showing Natalia Waterhouse the treasures of Alkemara. Beyond our tomblike sanctuary, jets blazed their paths across the sky, and the blasts of bombs could be heard even at a distance of a hundred miles. A city across the desert was under siege, and its districts set afire. At night, the distant billows of smoke enshrouded the stars. You could not exist in the tomb at daylight without dreaming of the red skies of battle, and of ancient nights when the torches set the woods ablaze and the burning arrows showered the sky like a thousand falling stars, when sword and ax cut the flesh of memory.
Within the necropolis beneath the hollow of the mountain, I shared with my mortal guest the years of the lost century of humankind while the dark hours of Earth passed over us. At daybreak, we slept side by side, or in an embrace, in the crystal bier that had once held the Priest of Blood, far below the heavy stone floors of the Temple of Lemesharra.
I showed her much of the evidence and writing of my early life and resurrection as a vampyre, but there was one thing I held back.
The wolf key.
I knew the night would come when I would take that key and lead her to the one secret chamber—hidden from even the others of my tribe—and reveal to her why she, of all her bloodline, had found Alkemara at all.
I did not expect her to steal it, and yet mortals sought knowledge and power at all times and could be tempted to their own destruction with this seeking. Even my tribe of vampyres—the Fallen Ones of Medhya—had stolen secrets and sorcery from our Dark Mother, who—in turn—had stolen from the Great Serpent who brought us immortality.
I was sure I could trust her by our twentieth night together. She had given me no reason to mistrust her, and Natalia had revealed a keen intellect and an apparent lack of the need for power over anyone.
When I awoke in darkness, I felt heaviness within me as some unrestful thought preyed upon my mind.
She’d found it.
As certain as the doom of sunrise, the news awaited me in the form of Vaspiana leaning over me. Vaspi had grown possessive of me since Natalia had come to us—my first thought was that Vaspi herself had done something to our mortal guest.
Vaspiana grasped my shoulders to shake me out of the day’s rest. I smelled dusk in the damp of my tomb. My eyes quickly focused and brought up the ambient light within the darkness. Instinctively, I sniffed the air, for—upon awakening—the threat of mortal hunters hung over us like a sharpened blade at our hearts.
Beside me, in the tomb-bed, the blanket and the pillow untouched as if Natalia had not slept there at all.
“No one’s hurt her?” I glanced about my chamber. I briefly took in the clothes that were missing—her tan slacks, her shirt, her sandals.
“She escaped.” Vaspi pointed to the lid of my chamber—a round stone doorway above us, from which a staircase descended. It was meant to be sealed daily, with a vampyre on guard, above, at all times. She looked back toward me, a sly grin on her face.
“You’ve done nothing to harm her?”
She offered me a look of offense, raising her eyebrows and nearly sneering. “I don’t stoop that low.”
“You’ve checked the city?” I looked about the room—an urn had been upturned, broken, its bits swept beside a stack of unrolled scrolls. When I found the leather pouch and strap that had been hidden in the urn, it was empty of its small occupant: a key.
I imagined her hand clutching the key, moving toward the door over which the winged serpent sculpture stood—a place where none could pass without my consent.
Vaspi eyed the broken bits of pottery. She might have guessed its contents, given that many a vampyre wished to go into that secret chamber with me.
She sniffed the air. “She can’t go far. Someone will catch her, I am certain of it. Mortals are easy to find. Her stink alone will leave a trail like a comet.”
“She’s not an ordinary mortal.” I got up and checked my other belongings to see what had been disturbed.
“If she were, you would have shared her with us,” Vaspi said.
I ignored her comment. These young vampyres with only a century or two to their existences were full of themselves. In the early nineteenth century, Vaspiana had been preparing for her execution in some Baltic backwater for stealing a horse, but I saw potential in her when I gave her the Sacred Kiss of vampyrism.
Nearly two hundred years later, she still had the urges of arrested adolescence; I could barely trust a word from her mouth. Yet Vaspi had saved me from my Extinguishing on more than one occasion. Without a quest of some kind—without a reason to guard the mortal realm—these young ones grew lazy and fought among themselves simply for entertainment.
All this would change. I was the only one to feel it in the air, but each night that I rose, I sensed the slightest weakening of the Veil, and had felt it for several years.
Something sought to come through again, and one of the signs of this was Natalia Waterhouse herself, though she did not know it.
“Of course, she’s so special, she might have fooled even you. She may be out along some road, approaching a settlement,” Vaspi said as she began climbing the steps.
“Natalia Waterhouse is still here,” I said. “She would not leave. If she had, my heart would be staked, and I doubt very much you’d be standing before me, either.”
“I’d have cut her throat first,” the vampyre said, glancing back at me, a gentle snarl on her lips.
“Where’s Daniel?”
Daniel had been our guard, and slept above, at the doorway.
“Hunting, I suspect,” Vaspiana said.
“Don’t lie to me, Vaspi. Where is he?”
I closed my eyes briefly, feeling for Vaspi in the stream that connected all vampyres to one another. If it was a web, I was the spider of my tribe—I plucked at the stream, drawing her close to me that I might read her thoughts.
When I opened my eyes, I said, “If she’s dead, you will answer.”
“If she’s dead,” Vaspi said, “I will be the first to applaud. But I won’t be the only one.”
She reached the floor above, and I rushed after her. I leapt through the round opening of my tomb to see the gathering of the tribe along the arched doorways of the Temple of Lemesharra.
They all watched me with indolent and empty expressions upon their faces. My tribe of vampyres did not appreciate the strange mortal allowed to live among them and not serve them or, at the very least, feed them.
They, in fact, were made to serve her—to bring food from the outside world, to cook and clean, and to treat her as if she were above them in some way.
I snarled at them with fury—though I did not have time to take on their foolishness. To say that all who occupied this fallen necropolis were under my command would be the ultimate in self-deception. They served me from an oath of loyalty, but this could mean nothing when they became a gang of ruffians—they did not like serving mortals, whom they considered mere vessels of blood.
Leading these vampyres was like herding saber-toothed tigers at times. Their instincts were too rooted in the next sip of life force and not in their duties.
I glanced up and down the halls, sniffing the air for the smell of mortality.
Outside, on the steps of the temple, I glanced along the two-story flat-roofed dwellings that had not been occupied since the Priest of Blood ruled the city. I had lived for centuries, and knew the double-dealings of mortal and vampyre. For all I knew, Natalia Waterhouse might already be dead.
Vaspiana had tacitly agreed to Daniel’s taking of Natalia. If I had told them why she was important to me, my own tribe might have torn her limb from limb.
I should have known it would be nearly impossible to allow a mortal to live among us as she did—freely and without obligation or offering—not as our protectors did, who were also mortal. The protectors lived along the boundaries of the city, guarding our resting place from the living. Only a handful of them acted as house servants who slept nights within the ruins of the old city, though they were not allowed into the temples or the tombs. These mortals took care of matters of cleanliness—difficult among a pack of vampyres who did not always notice where they left the vessels’ bodies or care if their sleeping quarters grew filthy. The protectors who entered Alkemara rarely escaped with their lives, nor did they wish it. They were addicted to our tribe, and often begged to be bled so that they might experience the heightened pleasures that our bleeding them provided.