Chapter One
Kilian raised his semi-automatic weapon as shadows gathered in the corners of the empty office complex. In the glow of red emergency lights, each cubicle wall created a sharp edge of darkness where the witch might be hiding. Kilian tried listening for sounds of life—breathing, a heartbeat, a rustle of fabric as the witch reached for spell materials. Silence. The magic that clung to the air muffled even the sounds of the highway outside the long row of east-facing windows.
As a Judas vamp, Kilian carried a curse that included magical limitations, but he could still whisper a powerful countercurse into the too-still air. Most varieties of undead were little more than animals — the attack dogs of the supernatural world. Born of the last remaining drops of the sleeping Eris’s power, Eris vamps were chaos embodied. They had no ability to think beyond the moment. Most armies tried to employ supernatural soldiers, and not always by paying them enlistment bonuses, but few risked having Eris vamps near. At most, they would drop those monsters behind enemy lines and hope that panic and death followed. And Nkisi zombies were worse—they were mere puppets dancing on a witch’s string.
But Kilian was the far rarer Judas vamp. People joked that no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, but the sentiment was even truer of Judas vamps. The nature of a Judas vamp was tangled in betrayal, so his willingness to serve in the Army granted him an element of surprise in the field, especially against enemies like the witch he hunted. Her spells had taken down weres, but he had survived. So far. Kilian crouched low and fingered his silver talisman as he muttered his undoings into the empty air.
At the end of the corridor, the emergency flood light flickered, giving the illusion of lightning. The dull red letters of theEXITsign tempted Kilian with escape. For one moment the sign became the stained glass at the cathedral where his sire's body rested, and Kilian wanted to cringe from the pain of standing even on the perimeter of such a holy place. Even though his existence was a sacrilege, he endured to watch his sire walk between the pews to his resting place.
That was the first hint this was a nightmare or hallucination, a cursed tangle of memory and fear, which explained how Kilian knew the mission’s end. He had never been cursed with foresight. But he still felt compelled to follow the script that he knew so well.
He glanced at his wrist computer to check the position of the rest of his team. Two dots blinked crimson. Dead. Kilian already knew that. He'd seen their bodies. Guilt wracked his soul. Those were his team. He was supposed to have their backs.
Kim had been disemboweled, her intestines spilled over the floor. Dario had been impaled on a pole that had been fixed to the bottom of the elevator shaft. Kilian had heard his weak cries fall silent before the light on the computer had switched from green to red. And Kilian had been helpless to stop death in either case. There was one more green, and Kilian was moving toward it as quickly as he could without exposing himself to the witch.
Barrett was a Fenris werewolf with incredible power and heightened emotional responses. He was not particularly smart, but despite being born of a line cursed by Loki’s son, he had a kindness in him that did not match the ferocity with which he went into battle. Kilian had to reach him before the witch did. Barrett's ferocity would be as useless as Dario’s stealth against a witch prepared for him. The weres in the team had not been prepared for this witch.
But Kilian knew how to bring death, and he would save the last of his team. He refused to be the only survivor, left behind with a broken soul.
Kilian inched forward into the junction between aisles. A curse hit him like a heat wave, and he spoke the words of unraveling, the Latin falling from his mouth faster. His own magic blunted the witch’s work, but the spell slowed Kilian's movements. Muscles pushed against air that had grown thick as mud. A shadow coalesced into a solid shape, and he pulled the trigger, but he couldn't move the muzzle of the gun fast enough to track the witch’s retreat.
Then she was there, her white hair blowing in a wind that didn’t exist. Her beauty had an ethereal quality that might’ve been a quirk of genetics or the result of the spell she’d used to steal youth from the children she hunted. She whispered a word, and in her hand, a sharpened pole shimmered into reality. Kilian spoke his words of undoing faster and louder, but she harpooned the pole at him. It went through his guts and pinned him to the wall like a bug in a museum’s etymology display.
“Are you the best they could send?” she asked with a derisive laugh. “And here I thought they would take me seriously after I killed the last team. They will learn, and you will carry my message.”
Kilian knew how her last message had been delivered. The team had been resurrected as meat puppets with forbidden runes etched in their skin before she transported them to the base. Their comrades had become soulless monsters who killed with the single-minded rage of a zombie. Bullets didn’t stop them because they were already dead. Coppersfield lost his arm without pausing his rampage. The horror continued until the Army witches cut the magical strings that animated the team.
Kilian was not going to allow her to use his body that way. Her magical bindings loosened as he continued his undoing spell. Reality flickered, and his sire stood behind the witch. Silas’ thick, curled beard and olive skin shone despite their dark tones and the shadowed building. That wasn’t right. In life, his sire had an uncanny ability to fade into darkness. Besides, Silas was sleeping under an altar. He looked tired, and in his hand he held the wooden disc that had been buried with him when he’d decided he no longer had the strength to remain awake.
“It has been two thousand years,” Silas said in a rough voice that echoed the last conversation they’d had before Silas had retreated from the world. “I thought a new child, one with so much passion for life, would remind me of what it was like to be alive, but it’s too much. The world changes too fast.” His features twisted in dismay.
Reality flickered, and suddenly Kilian was kneeling at his sire's feet. “I don't know how to be a vampire. I need you, sire.”
“I don't know how to live in this world of yours. I barely learned how to use a phone that I speak into and suddenly the phone has numbers and then the phone has pictures, and now apparently people do not use the phone to talk at all. Now I am supposed to learn a language as confusing as Latin. More confusing. I understand Latin far more than I do the significance of sending pictures of pieces of fruit.”
“I can explain,” Kilian promised. If Silas could speak a dozen languages and command magics that fought dead flesh, then he could learn to text an eggplant emoji. Damn it, that was no reason to retreat to a sleep that sounded more like a coma.
“It’s too much,” Silas said. “It will be easier to sleep and awaken to a world that is so new that I can begin again.” Silas rested his palm against Kilian's cheek. “Child, you know your strength. You can learn the rest without me.”
Kilian grabbed Silas’s wrist. “No, I can't. I agreed to accept the curse of your line so that I would have you, not so that you could leave me.”
“I've given you three years.” Silas’s voice rumbled in warning. He had never hid the fact that he sired Kilian only for the fee the Army had promised him—money he could use for his sleep. The Army gained a valuable supernatural soldier, Silas earned money, and Kilian... life had given him few choices.
“In a lifetime of two thousand years, that is a blink,” Kilian argued.
Silas leaned closer and cupped Kilian's face in his hands, but his hands dripped with blood. That did not match the memory of that day, but then Kilian realized that the blood was his own from having been impaled by the witch’s pole. Discrete memories tangled the way they would in a dream, but the hard reality of the bloody pole was no dream. “It is a blink,” Silas agreed, his tone apologetic. “But it is all I have to give. I will sleep, and when I wake, I hope to see you.”
Silas’s form turned insubstantial and then blew away like smoke, leaving Kilian to stare into the face of the murderous witch.
She smiled and her teeth were sharp like a were-creature’s. She lifted a hand, no doubt to cast some spell, but Kilian finally ripped his will free of her magical bindings and fired a full clip. She screamed and stumbled backwards, clutching her chest as the blood flowed down her yellow shirt. Her breathing made a horrible sucking noise as the movement of her lungs pulled air through the bullet wounds with a slurp that left Kilian nauseated.
He grabbed the pole, slick with his own blood, and he ripped it out of the wall behind him. He didn’t dare remove it from his body or he would lose what blood he had left. A vampire's body was a delicately balanced thing. With enough blood, it could survive anything. Vampires had walked out of Hiroshima with their skin falling off in sheets.
But if they lost one drop more than they could afford, the curse that fueled their personal magic disintegrated and their bodies would turn to dust.
So Kilian left the pole where it was as he stood. He stumbled forward, blood dripping from his wound, and raised his weapon. “Under the authority of the United States of America and the Army’s paranormal unit, I charge you with misuse of magic.” The words were duty, and he enunciated each carefully, even when his instincts urged him to tear her flesh and drink her blood. He carried the vampire curse, but he would not become a slave to it.
The witch laughed, but the sound turned into a gurgle before she spat blood onto the tile floor. The crimson drops smeared when she fell onto her hands and knees, her fingers sliding through the blood spray.
