Fall of Two E-Book

Dixon Reuel

• Herausgeber: Thunderloft Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Vampire angst in a zombie apocalypse! The Blood Brute Series grapples with grief, survival, and the painful journey towards a found family.

The vampire Rise—now bitten by a zombie brute—mourns the loss of his coven’s paradisiacal home, while fearing for his and Cypriot’s safety, as the violent and power-hungry Warwolves imprison them in a foreign land.

Terrified of the beast he might become, Rise endures the soul-crushing transformation into a blood brute: a zombie-bitten vampire. His vampire-powers leave him. He must master new powers to save Cypriot, who is controlled by the most perverse Warwolf.
Rise’s imprisonment is a never-ending nightmare.  But, every prison has its flaw.

Days wear on. Rise survives his brutish transformation—much to the Warwolves’ shock and suspicion. Caught between playing the perfect Warwolf war trophy or instead disrupting their oncoming crusade against humanity, Rise wonders if it is in humanity itself that he can trust.
When he discovers the Warwolf yards, filled with people ready to be fed to a devastatingly enormous herd of zombies, Rise must decide: how much can he trust those around him to orchestrate his and Cypriot’s escape? Can he, as a blood brute, even trust himself?

Author’s Note: Be prepared! These supernatural dark fantasies for adults might begin with a slow-burn gay romance, but the series has a soul-crushing love triangle among fated mates! It has morally gray characters, post-apocalyptic and ominous vibes. If you like brooding Dark Fantasy Horror with gay MM romance and occult elements, you can expect that, and a lot more, during this eerie zombie apocalypse adventure!
This is Book 2 in a 6-book series and ends in a cliffhanger.

Leseprobe

First published by Thunderloft Press 2021

www.ThunderloftPress.com

Copyright © 2021 by Dixon Reuel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the

publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or

distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters

and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s

imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or

dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Dixon Reuel asserts the moral right to be identified as the

author of this work.

Dixon Reuel has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet

Websites referred to in this publication and does not

guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will

remain, accurate or appropriate.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-8380233-5-5

This book is dedicated to 2021.

Things got better.

.

“... and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though at first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out in the end to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.”

-Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Contents

PART 1 - SPRING

Chapter 1Unfinished Business

Chapter 2The Warden Eye

Chapter 3Unquiet Graves

Chapter 4Seen and Unseen

Chapter 5The Desolate

Chapter 6Kisslock

Chapter 7Springtime Rumors

PART 2 - SUMMER

Chapter 8The Cat & The Owls

Chapter 9The Scent of the Ill

Chapter 10An Ebony Scythe

Chapter 11Glum Shadows

Chapter 12True Mischief

Chapter 13Lonely Deaths

Chapter 14Two Succors

PART 3 - AUTUMN

Chapter 15Outside Matters

Chapter 16Rooms Without Purpose

Chapter 17Graveyard Screamer

Chapter 18Old Language

Chapter 19The Wandering Sire

Chapter 20In Stripes And Daylight

Chapter 21The Green Dream

PART 1 - SPRING

“He could endure anything, so long as he could also have peace, to sit in silence afterwards and repair. That was where true joy lay. Not in the rush of first love or catch of pleasure. But to pause. To still. To remember.”

-The Blood Brute, The Chronicle of Owl Court (Addendum).

Chapter 1

Unfinished Business

Rise returned to a world of silence and grey. Shadows and hints of other places, perhaps dreamscapes or one-walked halls, plagued his gaze when he opened his eyes. He lay shackled in manacles upon a dilapidated wooden floor, wearing nondescript, navy clothes. A protection spell hummed faintly along a far-flung boundary of many acres. Dust thick on the air. The ceiling arched into an elegant point of dull wood. The world lay silent.

Rise strove to listen, to hear anything, the hunger for human blood noticeably absent from his veins. Gone also was the brute bite to his neck. Had the blasts at Owl Court damaged his hearing? Had that zombie bite awoken him a changed creature, like Ogrim? Rise gingerly sat up. His eyes betrayed him again, making him think he was in a great hall before a sandstone dais. Rise shook his head, bothered, until he took proper stock of his surroundings: he sat upon a ragged army blanket on the highest floor of a stone tower. Grey sky hung beyond the tower’s window opposite him, the day not even casting a glum shadow. The roots of this tower, its walls, they held no salt. Flashes came of Owl Court’s red bricks. Not a plant in sight, Rise noted of his narrow, circular prison. Cypriot’s greenery, the sheer lack of it, for Rise to see only lifeless grey clawed at his heart. Rattled by such despair, his eyes begged to take him to new places. His bones felt like they housed ghosts.

“Cypriot!” he called into the dim room. “Cypriot?” Rise strained his ears. When nothing came in return, nothing at all, Rise sent his hearing abroad. Nothing. Whatever talent Rise once possessed in hearing others from afar, it was utterly gone. All of his physical wounds were healed, sure, and his soul felt oddly solid: an upright thing, as if he stood in a river, never allowed to cross or continue downstream. He realized now the great, profound emptiness that Ogrim hid until his bitter end.

Rise made it to his feet, staggered towards the window until his shackles strained. Used to nothing holding him back, Rise pulled at his bonds, then harder, harder, until he struggled against the metal like a drowning creature. As he gasped in frustration, he wanted to hear again with that effortless skill: earthworms beneath the soil, the soft shuffle of a nesting bird, anything. Not this deafness. Not this grey solitude.

The tower door opened with an unexpected clang. Rise leapt with fright.

“Where’s Cypriot?” he shouted at the petite, waifish woman who entered, dressed in simple black trousers and shirt, crisp and orderly against the dourness of the cell. Her long, straight hair—equally black—spun into a plain braid against her shoulders. She blinked in surprise at Rise.

“He’s awake.” She relayed this news to someone just outside the door. A large leather-bound book was tucked under her arm. Her sensible black boots clicked on the floor.

Rise startled at the book and for a moment thought that she held his coven’s chronicle. But no, this woman—this human woman, he discerned—only carried an empty notebook, large as it was. She pulled a chest-high table from the far wall. Rise hadn’t even noticed his room’s furniture. A chair also sat opposite, just beneath the sole window. He felt no hunger towards her, not even an inkling to sip her blood.

“Ah, so he is indeed awake. Awakened to our great plan,” Catabar chuckled as she, in swathes of deep red velvet contrasting against her pale skin, entered and slammed the tower door. She crossed the room in a cloud of confidence and rich perfume and sat opposite him.

The slam barely registered in his ears. “Where is Cypriot?” Rise lunged until his taught chains nearly yanked him to the ground. He stumbled, pulled his chains again, drawing upon his deep well of strength ... only to find that empty, too. Straining against his bonds, Rise eventually crumpled to the floor in a heap of quaking limbs and sheer embarrassment. When Ogrim first awakened after being bitten by a zombie brute, were his senses also this dulled? Rise hadn’t asked. Ogrim had acted like everything was fine, until it wasn’t.

“I am Dr. Tseng.” The woman calmly laid her notebook on the high table and pressed the binding open until the spine cracked.

“Rise already knows who I am.” Catabar smirked. “Look at his big, bright eyes. As if seeing the world for the first time.” She nodded to Tseng and, as the doctor noted something at the top of the page, Catabar leaned forward. Still smirking, the room was so gloomy that her vampire stripes slept unseen beneath her skin.

“Yes,” Rise managed to say through gritted teeth as he shuffled into a sitting position, trying not to show how much Catabar’s words annoyed him. Ogrim had been just like that when he’d awoken from his brute bite stupor: all bright eyed. What a lie that’d been. Something danced at the corner of his gaze, but when Rise turned his head, the shadow danced away. Isn’t it all so hopeless? A voice inside him asked. Rise froze at the shadows and voices. He listened, watched for them, but they did not return.

It took a lot, surprisingly a lot, for Rise to drag his senses back to the conversation. He sat up straighter, folding his legs beneath him as he pushed away the weird echoes inside his body. “Yes,” he repeated, concentrating. “And what you did to Owl-”

“Rise?” Dr. Tseng interrupted him in a clear, calm voice. A pen in her small hand to record each and every word. “Can you tell me about your origins, please? About your family, where you were born, the country you grew up in? How were you turned? Into a vampire, I mean. We already know how you came to be ... what you are now.” Tseng glanced to Catabar in hesitation and no small amount of fear.

He glowered at such questions as his heart hammered at their sheer audacity. Rise lifted his chin. “If you think I’ll answer anything … Where’s Cypriot? Salter, Iskar, Annette?”

When neither answered, Rise felt the floor grow cold beneath him. Was Cypriot already dead? His heart thudded deep against his ribs. Rise had always been so confident that he could tell if his love drew breath, but now he could barely sense night from day. Rise swallowed a lump in his throat. The loss of Cypriot would be too great. “Tell me, please-” his voice cracked. He felt like a ship askew after a storm, its damaged hull now a delicacy for the ocean to froth through and drown.

“Rise, where were you born?” Tseng repeated, an edge coming into her voice. She looked at him with a mixture of sternness but also fear. “What’s the first thing you remember?”

Rise stared at the distance between Tseng’s pen nib and her page. He thought the voice in his head might come again, but it remained silent. No shadows either.

“Fuck off,” he managed.

“But you know who sired you?” Tseng said as she glanced to Catabar again, another flash of hesitation across her features.

“Sired?” Rise had never heard it put that way. I suppose ‘sired’ is right. “I can’t remember,” he finally admitted, speaking words that had hurt his heart ever since the day, hundreds of years ago, when he’d first opened his eyes as a vampire. Rise glared at Catabar. “Do you know of your life before this veil? Because I don’t. No one in my coven ever did, either. It’s a mystery.” Coven gone, he a loose thread in the world just waiting to be plucked away. Rise sat in sheer misery upon the stone flagged floor.

“No, I do not remember, Bright Eyes,” Catabar admitted with that smugness, no trace of regret or sorrow over her lack of memory. “Save what others tell me. It seems that vampires cannot remember their earlier lives before turning. I thought a blood brute might be different.”

“A what?” he asked.

“A ‘blood brute’ is what the Warwolves call a vampire bitten by a zombie brute,” Tseng explained and gestured to Rise.

He swallowed hard again, shaken at the loss of his powers and this sudden questioning, of these people to poke and prod him. Rise tested his hunger once more but still found no bloodlust for Tseng. What had that brute bite done to him? Even a bitten Ogrim had drank from Cypriot, as did the rest of the coven, at their weekly feed. Did Ogrim also experience this lack of hunger and yet chose to hide it? Well, Rise surmised as he realized the one arrow left in his quiver, if Tseng is human … Rise drew upon his tone, speaking words of the Old Language to command Tseng to his bidding. In that cell, he commanded her to untie his binds. To set him free.

The Old Language faded. Tseng turned, unsure, towards Catabar again.

“Nice try,” Catabar simpered and waved a heavily ringed hand at Tseng to note all of this. “But no other blood brute we’ve encountered has ever retained their vampiric powers, especially not a tone of command, if that was ever theirs to begin with, dear Bright Eyes.”

A world of loss and embarrassment, that was what he’d awoken to. Rise tugged and tested his chains again. He felt a shimmer of his old strength, as if it remained deep within, but blocked somehow. He wanted none of this stupid interrogation, only time to figure things out. “Tell me of Cypriot!” he demanded.

Tseng concentrated on her notes. Her throat bobbed awkwardly, uneasily as she read back over her words. “How do you feel, Rise? In pain? Suicidal or-?”

“Suicidal?” Rise snapped.

Death might be nice, chimed a voice between his ears. He faltered at that suggestion, then glared at Catabar. “What’s this all about? Where are the rest of my coven?”

“Are you hearing voices, suicidal thoughts, Rise?” Tseng pressed. “Ideations of death? Of ending it all?”

As she named such things, slits appeared in his bones. Voices eked out, forming a wall of hopelessness against his old vampire self. Rise closed his eyes as shrieks of death rattled through him. He feared that these idiots had gotten hold of his coven’s chronicle and read how Ogrim had killed himself. Maybe Salter had spoken with Ogrim before his death. Maybe Salter had written far more in their chronicle than Rise had ever realized. Rise shook his head as his bones chattered dark things to him. He struggled to form words, to answer.

“Any vampire bitten by a brute has always killed themselves.” Catabar’s voice thickened. Her smugness faded; momentary wrinkles pinched the corners of her eyes. “We do not turn into a zombie brute, as a human might. No, a vampire turns into something else: a blood brute, who does not live long, Bright Eyes. Hours, a few days at most, before they take their lives. All of them.” She levelled her gaze, burgundy stripes flashing briefly across her face. “We will not let that happen to you.”

Against pounding voices, Rise longed for the comfort of his coven, the walls of home. He cared none for this bizarre questioning. “Where is Cypriot? No more of this charade until you tell me if he lives.”

“Rise? What was your bedroom like at Owl Court?” Tseng pressed; her half-page of notes written in such neat handwriting that Salter would’ve been pleased. Dr. Tseng reminded Rise of Cypriot. Not the Asian heritage clear on her face, no, Rise sensed something different about this notetaker. Sorely wishing that he could read what she’d written, Rise pulled at his chains again until his wrists winced.

“A bedroom can tell a lot about a person,” Tseng continued in a simple, even voice, occasionally jotting down a few words. “That’s why I ask. We’d like to get some idea about your character, about your-”

“We’ve developed some ideas about the Vampire Rise of Owl Court,” Catabar interrupted. She studied him from her chair, chin lifted as she looked down her nose. “But, since you’re our only blood brute now, we’d like an idea of how you view yourself. You might be useful to our plans. The Warwolves have a lot to do, now that humanity has fallen, to install ourselves at the top of the world’s food chain.”

“My bedroom never mattered to me,” Rise grumbled as he sorted through her words. Where once despair and terror at his new predicament whipped at him, he filled with a black anger, one that deepened in time to his pulse, deep into rage. He appeared ever so calm, though. How dare they come and pry and question, promenade their worldly takeover, with nary a nod in response to indicate that Cypriot might be alive!

Tseng flipped to the inside cover of her notebook and read from a piece of paper tucked neatly against the binding. “You had a human living with you at Owl Court, this Cypriot? How did that work with letting in other survivors? Weren’t you afraid that carriers of the zombie plague might enter your home and endanger him?”

Rise was about to snap something choice indeed at her question, but then stopped. Realization washed over him, quenching his anger. He’d never thought about that; Iskar or Annette could’ve carried the plague, or Maxine, Elaine, even Marnie. The ground swayed beneath Rise until he lowered his head and squeezed shut his eyes, black rage ebbing as fast as it had swept upon him. He could’ve easily infected Cypriot through sheer ignorance. No wonder Cypriot hadn’t wanted the hikers inside Owl Court’s walls. Salter probably had the same worry, too. Why, then, did he only ever hear ‘No, Rise’ and ‘I don’t want, Rise’ from the two of them, and never the very clear ‘They might bring infection, Rise’?

“N-no,” he was forced to admit. “I-I didn’t think about plague carriers …”

Catabar and Tseng talked over his head. More questions that he left unanswered. More chatter about his foolishness and ignorance. Hints at their great plans, some sort of road, some sort of construction. He didn’t want to hear. Rise spoke across their words. “I never wanted to conquer anyone, unlike you lot. Only to keep my family together. That’s all.”

“Yes,” Catabar spoke in a loud tone, as if she wanted her words to carry to every nook in the tower. “During the outbreak of the zombie plague, you stayed in your smallholding, hiding until the apocalypse came to your gates. No wonder your own bedroom doesn’t matter. You spent enough time in another’s.”

“Where is he?” Rise demanded, trembling, alarmed at the wash and swell of emotions through his body. One moment he felt in the blackest of rages, then anger seeped away, as if his body couldn’t grasp it for long, leaving only emptiness and despair, until the next flux of anger and dreadful mutterings pounded through his temples.

“You’re no longer in the same country.” Catabar spoke right past his questions again as she gathered the long folds of her crimson velvet gown. She stood, posture straight as if carved from marble. “Owl Court, Holly Hill, Dunsinann, they’re faraway places now. It was no easy task to bring you here, to Basilica X, but we Warwolves managed. You are that important to us, Bright Eyes.”

“Dif-different country?” Rise scarcely believed her, staring closely at the face that’d once haunted him from beyond Owl Court’s walls. He strained his hearing, then every sense he possessed, until it hit him full force: that lone brute bite had truly robbed him of everything.

“We won’t allow those disgusting creatures to bite any more of our vampire kin, nor allow any more blood brutes.” Catabar pushed back her chair until it rested beneath the window. She stepped towards Rise yet stayed beyond the reach of his chains. “For you, the blood brute that we do possess, you’ll make a very nice test subject, indeed. I’d advise you to sleep, Bright Eyes, even though you’ve been unconscious for so long. This conversation was only a bare introduction to life at Basilica X. Tomorrow we will question you more.”

“What about Maxine?” Black swastika tattoos flashed in his memory. Rise gripped the cold metal of his bonds. He couldn’t believe this ‘interview’ was over. “What about Elaine? Marnie? Weren’t they part of your Warwolf tribe, too? What about them?”

Amusement grew on Catabar’s face. Tseng’s eyes widened as her pen whipped across the pages to keep up. “Maxine? Ah yes, she was interesting. Elaine, too. Marnie must’ve been her mother, so mourned, yes?” She shrugged and indicated that Tseng should gather her notes. “Us Warwolves merely gather people, tools, for our cause …” Catabar’s eyes glistened with glee, her next words giddy: “The secret is to let people become whomever they truly wish to be, Rise, whatever’s deep inside. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. That’s when they can be best used. We just … let Maxine become who she really was. If we tried that in a world before the outbreak, when humans reigned, Maxine would quickly be removed from our oversight, either to prison or beaten-up for crossing social norms. We let her do as she liked without such threats. Releasing her that winter would’ve had two outcomes: one, she’d simply perish. Two, she would find her way to you. We were fine with either.”

The second option sounds pleasing. The bone-voices chattered in Rise’s mind. He started at their words, as if someone had snuck up and whispered in his ears. Heart hammering, he blinked more shadows out of his gaze.

“Until tomorrow,” Catabar said from far away.

Catabar and Tseng’s footsteps died quickly from his hearing when they left. Rise had no idea what that short ‘interview’ was about. He’d given them no answers. Turning his gaze to the grey sky beyond the barred window, he didn’t know how much time had passed since the destruction of Owl court, how long he’d been unconscious. He listened to himself, to the world, but that silence reigned once again.

“Not quite rising on the third day,” Rise murmured sadly as he remembered the armchair in Owl Court’s kitchen, sitting on the floor by Ogrim’s knee. As the sky darkened and the cell grew cold, uncatchable shadows returned to his gaze. Rise steeled himself against the oncoming night, as his army blanket offered little respite. Cypriot’s glowing smile, upon realizing that Ogrim awoke healed and in good health, stood as the only light in Rise’s mind. Had Cypriot been hurt or changed in some way when brute-Ogrim drank from him at that final feed?

With too many worries, Rise just closed his eyes.

A few hours later, candlelight appeared as the tower door opened, surprising Rise all over again as he lay huddled on the floor. This time a young boy, a human with dark skin aged eight or nine, entered carrying a wide tray. He seemed torn between dropping the tray and fleeing and yet wanting to ogle the prisoner. Tseng accompanied him, holding an impossibly elegant candle above their heads, watching Rise keenly.

“Just set it on the ground, Rook,” she said and a mop of curly black hair flopped into the boy’s face as he obliged.

“What the hell is this?” Rise asked as the tray was set before him.

“Dinner,” Tseng answered, another bob in her throat as she held open the tower door, drawing Rook away by the elbow. She nudged the tray towards Rise with her foot. The leather of her neat little boots gleamed in the candlelight. “Can you reach?”

Rise looked at the tray, puzzled. A deep metal dish was covered with an ornate lid. A porcelain vase of flowers sat in one corner of the tray, two engraved salt and pepper shakers sat in the other. Lined with a lace doily of the whitest thread, despite such elegance, the tray didn’t have any cutlery. Food. His stomach awoke in ravenous hunger. He was about to say something smart back to Dr. Tseng and the boy, but the meal distracted him.

Tseng stared, terrified, as she ushered Rook back outside.

“Is Cypriot alive?” Rise asked, grasping this moment before they left, voice thick and crackling. He couldn’t tell if he saw recognition of that name in their eyes.

Tseng paused in the tower’s door, hesitating to close it.

Rise straightened at this, ignored the tray, knelt up. He opened his hands, showing his palms. “He’d look like a young man, about your age. Asian, too. His mother was from Singapore,” Rise babbled. “Cypriot’s a great cook. Adores plants, animals …” Rise trailed away when Tseng gave no response.

Then the door clicked shut, locked, and they were gone. Again, Rise listened to people leave the tower for as long as his dummy ears could track their footfall. With a disappointed sigh, Rise slumped onto the floor and lifted the lid on dinner.

“What the hell?” The bowl held clumpy, clotted blood, warmed but pale, as if streaked through with milk. Even though his stomach gurgled in hunger, he grimaced at the thought of such muck.

Wouldn’t it be better to end it all? Voices pulsed from his heart. Rise startled. He listened for more, but nothing came.

Annoyed by hunger and this whole stupid situation, Rise snatched up the salt cellar. It was bad enough to be unable to hear, now his thoughts called for death. He leaned back against the tower’s rough wall and tipped a few grains onto his palm. Waiting for the voices to say more, Rise licked the salt and it pickled across his tongue. Surely the Warwolves mocked him with such a meal? He was once a vampire—maybe he still sort of was? Where was the live person he might feed from?

Clouds shifted and filled his prison with a wash of shadow, then the white glow of moonlight. His chains were too short to let him cross the room and see out of the window.

Rise set the salt aside and lifted the delicate flower vase into his hands. A golden wolf’s head and scythe emblazoned the fine swell of porcelain. Had he seen such an emblem on any of the Warwolves at Owl Court? Rise couldn’t remember. Here, though, was something else wholly unsuited to such a fancy, lace-laden tray: the vase’s flowers had faded into dried crumpled petals. They crackled against his palm.

“Hellebores!” Rise leapt to his feet, nearly upending the tray. Cypriot’s flowers.

The Warwolves might’ve found them in Cypriot’s pocket that day, in the grass thicket, he sternly reminded himself, when Owl Court was lost, when Rise slipped under. He sniffed the blooms but couldn’t detect any scent from the desiccated petals. Rise held the hellebores to the moonlight. Warm tears coursed down his cheeks. He had to believe that Cypriot was alive, that this was—somehow—a signal. Maybe not from him, but even hinting mockery from the Warwolves that his love still breathed.

Rise ate his disgusting meal, relishing every mouthful and urging every drop into his body to reinvigorate his strength. After licking the bowl clean, Rise split the little bunch of flowers in two and set half into the vase, so no one would be suspicious of their absence. He patted his unfamiliar clothes until he found a chest pocket in his heavy woolen shirt and hid the remaining half there. As Rise considered the tray, he reached for the cellar again and created a little ring of salt hidden beneath its base, a clear signal to anyone who had known his affinity for roots and boundaries back at Owl Court.

“Unfinished business, indeed,” he muttered to the curved stone walls, as night swept on.

Chapter 2

The Warden Eye 

The next day, no one came, not even to take away his tray. If this lot were so worried about his suicide, he could easily do a lot of harm to himself with the heavy dish, the solid curve of its lid, the shards of a broken vase.

As the sun put itself to bed, Rise watched the deep grey sky until the first star appeared. Wherever he was in the world, the sun never seemed to shine. He guessed it was spring, in a different country other than England, but his true location eluded him. Left alone for so many hours, Tseng and Catabar’s questions from yesterday rattled around Rise’s head. Questions about family, his life before becoming a vampire, his bedroom at Owl Court—that space had never mattered to Rise, not when he was forever-welcome in Cypriot’s jungle bedroom. Even if put to hot irons, Rise couldn’t tell anyone where he was born, what his mother was like, his father, nothing. One day, he’d just awoken, blood hungry. He’d fumbled along as a new vampire, figuring out everything by himself. If Rise hadn’t happened upon Ogrim and Salter ...

“Then there wouldn’t be much left of the Vampire Rise,” he murmured to the stillness of his tower, feeling like a fairy-tale princess, locked away. Catabar’s comment, that other vampires had photos and video of their human lives before turning, Rise had none of that. “Just a roadside ditch, alone, and I.”

There wasn’t much left of the Vampire Rise as it was, he realized. He cast his hearing abroad as he used to, to eavesdrop on the world as another night drew in. But nothing. Either the dynamite blast deep beneath Owl Court had permanently damaged his hearing, or transforming into this accursed blood brute had severed all Rise’s connections with the natural world.

“Probably both,” he said to his upturned palms in his lap, as if he could hold the stripes of moonlight that streamed in the window, slow-passing across the floorboards as the hours ticked. He listened for the voices that had eked out of his bones, but they were silent. Watching the curve of his cell, Rise didn’t particularly feel like killing himself. To think that other brutes once sat in this very spot and were now no more … The riddles of life churned about in Rise’s head: Ogrim’s burst of strength at Maxine’s death. Ogrim had lasted a while—a little while—after turning. What kept Rise in this life when all others succumbed to ending it? Moonlight striped across his face. He closed his eyes in comfort. Cypriot, the answer came, echoing in his ears.

He leapt in shock when the tower door opened. Catabar returned with Tseng. From the notebook under Tseng’s arm and how a smirking Catabar dragged the chair from beneath the window, Rise groaned. More questions. He was about to announce that he wasn’t going to tell them anything, but a glance to the day-old tray and those crumpled petals stayed his tongue.

“Good evening.” He played along with their idiotic charade, even though he wished to roar a command at Tseng and have her do his bidding. With his grip slipped from the mysticism of the world, the sting of that loss snapped like a rubber band across his knuckles. He possessed little grip on anything now.

Tseng’s dark eyebrows lifted in cautious surprise at such warmth. “G-good evening …” She glanced at Catabar, as if she shouldn’t have spoken at all.

Catabar rolled her eyes at them both as she flounced into her chair.

“Salter,” Rise began, pleading. “And Cypriot, Iskar, Annette. Where are they?”

“Bright Eyes.” Catabar picked non-existent fluff from the heavy skirt that spilled over her knees and pooled on the floor, her face fixed in a blank, pleasant smile. “Who are you now, after becoming a blood brute? What do the whispers of the night tell you?”

Rise knew just one goal: confirmation that Cypriot and the rest of his coven were alive. He needed to play along, but without divulging what little he knew.

“Who are you?” she repeated as Tseng hurriedly took notes.

In truth, Rise didn’t have an answer. Shadows darkened his gaze. He glimpsed himself sitting on the crumpled blanket, just as he sat right now, as if seeing himself from Tseng’s perspective. He glanced to her, meeting her nervous stare.

“Who am I?” his voice croaked from lack of use as he told them the truth. “I honestly have no idea. What does a zombie bite do to a vampire? Again, no clue. Do you know?” Speaking such words aloud shuddered the voices into life and they clanged over his bones.

Bash the metal lid against your throat. Jam that pen into your windpipe. Wind the blanket round and round your neck until you cannot breathe.

He tried to hide all of this. His glimpsed appearance as a downtrodden, wasteful thing upon an old blanket shocked Rise. He didn’t know what this new sight meant, nor the chittering words that swarmed his ears.

Catabar’s face twitched but her pleasant smile didn’t fade. Crimson lines matching the rich fabric of her clothes flashed in ornate patterns across her features, like a warning from a creature of the deep.

A stab of longing swept through him when he saw her stripes, to see a vampire so knowledgeable, so levelled-up. He clung to the one philosophy that’d always worked: do nothing. Play the longest game possible, until others forget there was even a game to begin with. Rise’s chains clinked as he rested his shoulders back against the curving bricks. He cleared his throat and settled into the game.

“I am Rise, once of Owl Court. My memories of that place are like a heavenly, green dream. Now I am Rise of … I have no idea where this is?”

Catabar’s hand raised to stop Tseng from answering. “You are at Basilica X. That is enough.” Her eyes narrowed. “Strange that you claim to not know where you are. Every vampire carries with them an innate compass to the earth, to the heavens. We are never truly lost upon the world.”

Rise forced himself to appear casual, as if leaning against his prison wall in the middle of the night was no trouble to him. “Every vampire, yes, I know. But now I am a … blood brute, as you say.”

Catabar’s eyes remained narrowed. “So you are.”

“And you, Warwolves, shadowed my coven before we even settled in Owl Court. How you lot escaped France at the height of the Great War to come and bother us for the next 100-or-so years in the genteel English countryside, I’ll never know.” Rise managed to smile. Even a blood brute could detect her deep anger, that her lines wished to flash across her skin again. She sat upon the very edge of the chair; tense as an instrument before a symphony.

Tseng’s pen scratched across the notebook. Rise glanced to his dinner tray. “In fact,” he straightened his back. “I have a few questions myself.”

“Oh?” Amusement now on Catabar’s face. “I hardly think you’re in a position to question, Bright Eyes.”

Let them name as they like, I might still get answers. Rise deepened his smile at the nickname. He watched Tseng and Catabar carefully when he next spoke, craving to see their minute reactions to his words, wondering if he’d see himself from their perspective again. So much to keep in check and balance. “That clown, Maxine, she had two swastikas tattooed on her shoulders-”

Catabar tutted. “Oh yes, that one. You fell for that plan far too easily, Bright Eyes. Maxine was a Warwolf Trojan horse, as it were. One of many who we poisoned and released for you to find over that long winter. Trust her, the American, to be the only one of that cohort to survive and evade every brute and bandit in those woods. But, you did find her, eventually, and took her in. I’m sure she was great fun.”

“Poisoned?” Rise said in shock. Maxine had been quite the character, that was true. But deliberately poisoned? Tseng’s question from yesterday returned: how he’d allowed outsiders in without thinking how they might contaminate Cypriot with the brute disease. Rise’s stomach burned at such huge lapses in his own judgment. Salter and Ogrim had drunk from Maxine that night—was that what drove Ogrim’s immediate suicide, that he tasted Maxine’s poison within him? And yet, Salter seemed fine thereafter. Almost three months had passed between Salter savaging Maxine and the destruction of Owl Court. Salter was hale and hearty during that time.

Rise didn’t want to think anymore. He only knew one thing: if he ever breathed free air again, if he ever got the chance at coven life again, he vowed to do so much better.

Tseng’s writing caught up. Her pen paused, expectantly. Catabar opened her mouth to go on when the tower door clattered open with great aplomb.

“Oh! I am here!”

A vampire with smooth, tanned skin entered, tossing a red-lined cloak over his shoulder and flicking back layers of long, ever so pale hair. He carried an impressive scythe, its handle inlaid with mother of pearl and red gemstones. When he crossed the cell to Catabar, he knelt dramatically and held out his black-gloved hand. Bright green eyes sparkled at Rise, though, full of curiosity. Rise got the impression that, for this newcomer, the whole world was a mere backdrop of empty paintings with him the sole star.

“Ah General, welcome home.” Catabar touched his knuckles in a refined gesture and bade him to stand. Her smile was warm enough.

“I am General Otrano, Overseer of the Great Construction, Leader of the Great Expansion.” Rise was bowed to. “And I am here now.”

It was like a movie star had walked right up to Rise in the street and slapped him, such was his overwhelming company. Otrano stood, a glittering beam of light in the dour cell, comically broad and muscular, like a superhero—cloak and all.

“How did your sortie go? Do you have news? Of abroad?” Catabar asked the exuberant figure, stressing her last question.

Otrano only stared at Rise, grinning: a cat deciding what was food or foe. Then he clicked his tongue and looked about the tower, disgusted. Otrano set his scythe by the window and lifted the empty tray from the floor. “Can’t he stay somewhere a bit more … comfortable? No,” he added when Catabar gave him a dark glance. “No news from abroad. Not yet.”

“Rise is kept here because this is the highest point in Basilica X. Where a blood brute will be at its weakest,” Catabar explained with a sigh, as if pained by this visitor.

“Us vampires, too,” Otrano pointed out with a swish of his hair as he crossed the room.

“Yes,” Catabar’s words barely seeped from her gritted teeth. “Thank you, General.”

“Oh hallo, hen,” he greeted Tseng, whose face turned bright red since his entrance. “Almost didn’t see you there.”

To Rise’s surprise, Tseng stared into her notebook as if it were terribly interesting. Red suffused her temples, deepening across her cheeks. Her throat bobbed in an awkward swallow. Rise nearly forgot his own predicament as she struggled to hide clear attraction towards Otrano.

Tseng jumped when Otrano plopped the tray across her notebook. “Be a good hen and take that to the kitchens, would you? I don’t know where Rook is.” Otrano even winked at her.

“Rook is helping Scorper, as he should.” Catabar nodded that Tseng could leave and held up her hand for silence until she departed. Tseng scuttled away with a fearful glance to Rise, a second glance went to the broad sweep of Otrano’s back as she backed out of the cell and closed the door.

“As Rook should, yes of course, what with Scorper’s condition and everything. She should be the center of attention.” Otrano gushed as the tower door clicked shut. They gave Tseng a few moments to go downstairs, then Otrano sighed loudly as if bored by all of this cloak-and-daggers. He read from the notebook, licking fingers that were ringed in gold, deep jasper, and pearl adornments that matched his scythe. “What have you found out about him so far, my queen?”

“That I am an oddity,” Rise joked sourly.

“Indeed,” Otrano laughed as if this was a fine retort. “It’s been decided to keep you, Rise of Owl Court, to see what zombie brute blood does to our race. All others of our kind who were bitten, they’ve always … succumbed to … well ...”

Catabar chimed in. “Bright Eyes is my great experiment—we won’t let him die, will we? Perhaps even the progenitor of a new race? A sufficing fate for one who hid.” She leaned forwards in her seat, hands clasped at this juicy talk, as if she whispered great ideas indeed into his ear.

“It happened to your coven, too, didn’t it, Rise? That someone was bitten by a brute and then killed themselves?” Otrano asked as if of the weather, half-listening to Catabar, nose buried in Tseng’s notes.

Rise glowered at him, at Catabar, at the casual mention of his coven-mate. Ogrim was just letters on a page to them. Rather than suicidal, he instead grew quite murderous at just how casually such words were spoken. Progenitor of a new race? As he took in Otrano’s disgustingly dashing features, another shadow crossed Rise’s eyes. He blinked it away, fearing something truly long-term was amiss with his sight. The shadows returned, clouding his gaze, clustering until Rise couldn’t see his prison anymore. His eyes opened onto the tight spiral of his tower’s stairs as someone descended, carefully, in the night-dark. He turned his head to look at Catabar and Otrano, but instead saw the door at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s small, ink-stained hand pushed it open. The corridor beyond stood vaguely medieval, but brightly lit and warm-wooded, as if that of a grand old house. He couldn’t hear anything from this new scene, but looking down showed him the tray he’d eaten from, the halved bunch of hellebores flowers, the salt cellar.