The Shroud of A'Ranka (Brimstone Network Trilogy) Read online

  Bogey jumped down off the rock. “You didn’t eat a mountain goat … did you?”

  Emily rolled her eyes just as Bram and Stitch jumped down from an outcropping of rock to join them.

  “Through the woods,” she said, pointing a clawed finger. “Smells like a village or town. What we’re looking for headed there.”

  They all moved through the woods, Emily leading them to the easiest forest paths. It wasn’t long before they came to a road and, in the distance at the road’s end, what seemed to be a quaint town.

  “Are you sure it went there?” Bram asked breathlessly, coming to stand beside her, his face dappled with musky-smelling sweat from his exertion.

  Emily nodded. “Afraid so.”

  She took off down the road, galloping on all fours toward the tiny settlement. It was as if the ancient-smelling funk was calling to her, taunting her to come closer so that it could show her how powerful it was.

  She stopped before an ornate fountain, a founding father sitting astride a powerful steed as he prepared to go into battle. The fountain’s water had been turned off for the coming of winter, and a foul-smelling sludge had built up in the bottom of the now waterless basin.

  But there was something else that she could smell in the night air, something beside the sludge and the taunting evil.

  It was death.

  Bram and the others came into the tiny square.

  She was about to tell them what else her animal senses had picked up when the door to what appeared to be a tavern across from them was thrown open, and a figure emerged.

  Actually it was many figures, one after another coming out onto the street. There was something odd about the way that they moved, and she was about to caution Bram when he spoke.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked the first of the figures to leave the tavern.

  The man shambled closer, his face suddenly cast in the light shining down from the half-moon in the sky above.

  The man was unusually pale, his eyes glinting an animal red.

  And then he opened his mouth and Emily knew for certain that something very bad had happened to the people of this tiny village.

  Something that had changed them all forever.

  4.

  SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.

  Bram watched the people spill out of the tavern into the village center. Something in the way they moved made his instincts jump to attention.

  And then the first of them attacked.

  The deathly paleness, the glint of red in his eyes, and the teeth, the incredibly long incisors, told him everything he needed to know.

  “Bram, watch out,” Emily cried in her guttural wolf voice. “I think they’re—”

  The attacker moved with incredible swiftness, springing at Bram with fangs bared.

  Bram willed his body intangible and the threat passed through him as if he were made of smoke. He spun around to watch as his opponent touched down upon the ground in a crouch with a feral snarl.

  Vampire.

  But how?

  Vampires had been banished to another dimension by one of the earliest Brimstone Network teams over a millennia ago. In fact, in a show of mercy, the Network had found an uninhabited dimension of darkness in which the vampires could thrive, and had even helped them develop a blood substitute to sustain themselves. If Bram remembered his father’s lessons correctly, the vampire had been totally eliminated from this world for a thousand years.

  Until now.

  The blood-drinker sprang at him again, only to be snatched from the air and driven to the ground by an angry-looking Mr. Stitch.

  “Vampires?” the patchwork man said incredulously. “That’s all the world bloody well needs to be dealing with now,” he grumbled.

  Stitch held the monster to the ground by the throat as it thrashed and snapped at him with razor-sharp teeth. He managed to fish a dagger from the inside pocket of his coat, which caused the vampire in his grasp to struggle all the more.

  “Knew I had one,” he said casually, and plunged the blade down into the vampire’s chest, piercing its heart with the sharp metal, causing its body to explode into ash. Stitch waved his hand in front of his face. “At least they still die the same,” he said in between coughs.

  “Heads up!” Bram heard Bogey screech, and turned to see that other vampires were now cautiously coming toward them.

  “Seems like the whole village was turned,” Bram said.

  More blood-drinkers slunk from other buildings to join those from the tavern. It was a very bad sign. If Bram understood his vampire biology correctly, only a very specific member of the vampire race could pass on its curse with a bite—a member with royal lineage.

  Bram had to wonder who exactly had been inside that stone box, and how he had ended up here. But that was a puzzle for another time. For now, these vampires couldn’t be allowed to leave the village.

  “Dez?” Bram called out.

  “I’m here,” the boy answered. “A little freaked out, but I’m here.”

  “I need you to put one of your mental barriers around the village. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Around the whole thing?” Dez asked. “That’s gonna give me one powerful headache, but I think I can manage.”

  “Good,” Bram said. “We have to contain them quickly.”

  Stitch came to stand beside Bram, brushing the ashen remains of the dispatched vampire from his coat. “They seem to be relatively young,” he said. He pointed to the group. “The newer ticks always stay together, hunting in packs.”

  “Ticks?” Bram questioned.

  Stitch shrugged. “Network slang for vampire.”

  The blood-drinkers were closer now, and Bram could see that it wouldn’t be long until they swarmed.

  “Bogey, keep an eye on Dez and his dad,” Bram ordered. “If any of the … ticks gets too close, rift a passage to someplace real inhospitable. All right?”

  “Got it,” the Mauthe Dhoog said, stepping closer to the psychokinetic boy and his father. “I’ve already got a couple’a nice places in mind.”

  Stitch reached into his pocket and removed another dagger, handing it to Bram. “Here.”

  “How many of these do you have?” Bram asked, taking the knife.

  “You never know when you’re gonna lose one.”

  He tried to give another to Emily, but the werewolf refused. “I’ve got these,” she said, flexing her claws.

  “Any suggestions on the best way to take them down?” Bram questioned.

  Stitch shrugged. “Just get to the heart and destroy it; death pretty much follows from there.”

  And the vampires swarmed en masse, mouths open hungrily.

  Ready to drink the life from their veins.

  Vladek screamed.

  The vampire lord dropped heavily to his armored knees, his entire body wracked with the pain of sudden death. He could feel the extermination of the newborn vampires as if it were happening to him.

  And through his mind’s eye he could see those who were responsible.

  He held his hand out to his human slaves, and they rushed to his side. “Help me to my feet,” he commanded.

  Through the agony of his children’s death, Vladek gazed upon the faces of those who killed them with such savagery. He saw them all, but one face in particular demanded his full attention.

  A boy who performed the function of a man.

  And as Vladek studied his features, he saw something all too familiar. This boy … this leader bore a striking resemblance to the commander of the forces who took him captive so very long ago; the same sharp bone structure of the face, a similar burning intensity of the eyes.

  Is it possible? the vampire wondered. Can it be that the Order of Brimstone still exists and that this boy is a descendant of the one who kept me from accomplishing my most holy mission?

  Vladek closed his eyes, committing the boy’s face and all those who followed his command to memory. He would reserve special deaths for them once his
plans had been set in motion.

  “Remove me from this place,” the vampire lord croaked, allowing the humans to assist him toward the back entrance of the tavern.

  Staying close to the shadows, Vladek and his slaves moved through the darkness of the village, eventually reaching the edge of the forest that surrounded the tiny hamlet.

  The vampire turned his gaze toward the sky, sensing the near approach of dawn. He shrugged off the attentions of his servants and stood alone on trembling legs. “We can go no farther. The accursed sun will soon be in the sky, and I must rest now. You will watch over me,” he commanded, his hypnotic gaze digging into the eyes of his servants, bending them to his will. “And allow no one to disturb my healing peace.”

  Then Vladek’s body became like oily smoke, drifting down amongst the leaves, and into the womb of the earth, where he would sleep until the burning sun relinquished to the darkness of night.

  Sleep, heal, and remember.

  The thought that these had once been people, people the Brimstone Network had sworn to protect, filled Bram with a kind of anger that he had never known.

  He had pursued the vampire into the small market store, ghosting his body in such a way that he was able to float and propel himself through the air to chase the fleeing vampire down.

  The sun was rising, and the remaining vampire’s movements became sluggish as they grew weaker with the coming of dawn.

  The vampire that he chased, a teenage boy no older than fourteen, attempted to open a door that would allow him to escape to the darkness of a cellar beneath the store.

  Bram took him before he could get the door open, and the vampire exploded in a cloud of ash as the dagger found its target. Standing in the gentle flurry of ash, Bram felt his anger seethe, arousing his Specter nature, urging him to embrace the rage, but he managed—just barely—to control it. He left the store, striding out into the first light of dawn to find the others waiting for him by the fountain. “Did we get them all?” he asked, his voice clipped and stern.

  Stitch nodded, looking toward Emily, who had returned to her human guise.

  “I searched all the buildings,” she said. “I’m pretty sure we got them all.”

  “And the source of this evil?” Bram asked, suddenly creeped out by the eerie silence that now filled the lifeless village.

  Emily shook her head. “Lost with all the other scents, it’s just one big bloodsucker stink.”

  Bram glanced over to Dez. The boy was slumped in his chair. His father knelt beside him, wiping sweat from the boy’s brow.

  “Think I can drop the barrier now?” Dez asked.

  “Go ahead,” Bram said. “Good job.” Then he walked away, looking around at the buildings and the streets that until the night before had been filled with life but now were as dead as its citizens.

  “Want me to rift us home, Bram?” Bogey asked, carefully coming up behind him.

  Bram turned, staring at the gray-skinned creature. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ve got make sure this doesn’t happen again to some other defenseless town.”

  He paused, thinking about what his father had taught him. First, they had to know their enemy.

  Bram returned to the group. “We know that whatever was imprisoned in that stone box in the cave was put there by the Brimstone Network,” he began.

  They all nodded.

  “And knowing how meticulous my father was about such things, we can only hope that the previous leaders of the organization weren’t any less strict in their record keeping.”

  Stitch smiled.

  “Bogey, I’m going to need you to open a rift,” Bram told the Mauthe Dhoog.

  The little creature went to work right away, hands weaving a spell that would open a passage from here to there.

  “You got it,” he said. “Where to?”

  “Ravenschild, Massachusetts,” Bram said. “We need to pay a visit to the abandoned headquarters of the Brimstone Network.”

  5.

  “DEEP BENEATH THE COLD, DANK, EARTH, SLEEPING with the earthworms, moles, and other burrowing creatures, the vampire lord Vladek dreamed of days long past.

  Curled in a fetal position, the warrior recalled the waning days of the vampire empire.

  They had been poised for greatness, their voracious numbers yearning to spread across the earth, reducing humankind to little more than a source of food.

  But there were some amongst humanity who would not stand for that. Some who had mastered the ways of magick, and who saw themselves as protectors of their kind.

  Vladek snarled as he remembered.

  Times had become desperate as the vampires’ numbers started to dwindle. They were reduced to hiding in the shadows, only the lesser members of their kind venturing out to find food and bring it back to the royal family as they continued to hide in the ruins of castles that had once belonged to the kings of empires long forgotten.

  Was that fate to befall the mighty vampire race?

  Vladek had wanted to confront their attackers, the accursed Brimstone Network, to face them warrior to warrior, but the king—his father—would have none of it. King Yorga believed it better to hide and to survive than to fight and be obliterated forever.

  The vampire prince did not agree, but he held his tongue. For as long as his father ruled, he would follow his wishes.

  Beneath the ground, Vladek twitched with the memory of the old sorcerer, and his proposition of glory. The sleeping vampire saw the scene replay inside his mind as if it were happening again, his father’s hungry vampire subjects dragging the struggling old man beneath the castle rubble to the royal crypt that had become their nest.

  They had found him wandering as the sun set in the sky. But before he could be fed upon, the ancient magick user proclaimed that his name was Gideon, and that he had brought with him a plan that would allow them to snatch victory away from humanity and allow the vampire race to rule the planet.

  King Yorga and Queen Valara had laughed at the strange old man and his even stranger ideas, but there was something about the one called Gideon, something in his words, that stirred Vladek. His father was not happy to have had his meal snatched away, but Vladek insisted that they listen to the old one, and as he spoke, they saw potential in his words.

  The biggest question to the vampires was why? Why would this ancient wielder of magick want the blood-kind to dominate the earth? The answer came in the shape of immortality. Gideon saw that the perfect way to live forever was as one of them—as a vampire.

  And only the ruling members of the blood-kind had the ability to pass the thirst to others. Gideon would help them defeat humanity, and in exchange they would turn him, allowing him to live forever.

  It sounded like a bargain that they could live with.

  But in order for this to occur, Vladek and Gideon needed to embark upon a mission of utmost importance and danger. They needed to cross the world, evading their pursuers, destroying anyone that stood in their way.

  Vladek remembered the gift that Gideon had given him before embarking on their mission. He said that this would make him the ultimate warrior, the ultimate symbol of their most holy mission.

  Still deep in his regenerative slumber, the cross-shaped scar upon Vladek’s chest began to burn as it had those many, many years past when Gideon had given him the gift of invulnerability.

  The vampire prince was certain that nothing would stop them, confident that they would achieve their goals.

  But they had underestimated the tenacity of their enemies. The Brimstone Order tracked them with their powerful magicks, smelling them out like the hound in pursuit of the crafty fox.

  Many of the Brimstone order died in their pursuit of them, Gideon taking just as many lives as he, but still they kept after them.

  Vladek and the sorcerer had come so close, but not close enough for victory.

  At the cusp of their journey, the vampire and the magick user had met their defeat at the hands of the Brimstone Order.
/>   Gideon had been the first to fall, struck down by a blast of pure magickal force wielded by the leader of the Order, a mysterious and serious figure called Stone.

  Vladek had made it a point to remember this man, swearing that he and all who served him would suffer the most horrible of fates when the opportunity presented itself.

  In the midst of their defeat, Vladek had tried to save the dying sorcerer, beginning the process of following through on their agreement—to make him one of the blood-kind—but had only taken his first sip of the ancient magick user’s blood when the followers of Stone were upon him.

  The vampire lord twitched and moaned beneath the ground as he remembered how valiantly he had fought. Many a follower of the Brimstone Order had died that day, but eventually he fell before their might.

  They realized the danger of Gideon’s gift of invulnerability to him, how it had made him nearly impossible to kill, but they eventually came up with a way to hold him. The Brimstone Order imprisoned him in a cube of stone, powerful sigils of magick and objects of faith preventing his escape.

  Unable to move, unable to feed, Vladek was in Hell, and the only thing that he had to sustain himself was the memory of the holy mission that he had failed to carry out.

  A mission that he would complete if the opportunity ever arose.

  Vladek’s eyes suddenly snapped open.

  He could sense the setting of the sun on the surface above and began his ascent through the dirt.

  The vampire lord had made a promise to himself while imprisoned in the stone case lo those many millennia ago.

  A promise that he intended to keep.

  The Ravenschild castle was as quiet as a tomb. Bram and the others emerged from Bogey’s rift into the foyer of the fifteenth-century Scottish castle that had once been the Brimstone Network’s base.

  But that was before the attack. Before the agents had all been murdered.

  “So why are we here again?” Bogey asked as he closed the doorway behind him. The passage closed with an odd sucking sound, like the last bit of bathwater spinning down a drain.

  “My father was kind of a freak when it came to documentation,” Bram said, squinting through the darkness. “I can’t imagine that the Brimstone organization wasn’t the same.”