Between Bloode and Death

May, Seattle

Thick, white clouds crowded a waxing moon, bright beams of moonlight fighting to pierce the lush canopy of Seattle’s West Duwamish Greenbelt. The largest contiguous forest in Seattle, it had over five hundred acres in West Seattle from the tip of Pigeon Point to Westcrest Park.

Douglas fir, Western Red Cedar, Madrona, Red Alder, and various willow species of trees loomed over trillium and nettles blanketing the forest floor. The greenbelt, often hiked by locals and tourists alike during the day, gave home to ducks and raptors. Hawks and owls were commonplace in this green forest as well.

Not so the majestic eagle-owl staring down at a large black wolf watching six vampires feasting on a few unlucky humans.

Finally. A bit of good fortune.

The hunt for the idiot group of upir currently dining on a group of humans had been ongoing for two weeks too many. Khent had much better things to do, like hunting down a hell-sent necromancer…

He shifted on the tree branch, his eagle-owl form a pleasant diversion from his new reality. Taking constant orders from a goddess he didn’t worship and new kin he’d been forced to accept gave him headaches. Though technically, they’d been bound for a year and a half, it still felt new to him.

Below him, the wolf silently shimmered and shifted into the form of a large man crouched on one knee. The only blond member of Khent’s clan and a royal pain in the ass, Rolf never played by the rules. Not even the ones Khent followed.

“Wait for it, wait for it,” Rolf whispered, on wings of magic, so that only Khent would hear.

After a moment, Rolf stood tall and cleared his throat.

The upir froze. Of the ten vampire tribes, the upir were the most basic. They had speed and strength, yet their biggest claim to fame came from their sheer numbers. More upir existed than any other tribe of vampire.

Khent sighed then drifted to the ground and shifted so that he landed on two feet instead of talons. Looking over their prey, he snorted. “So common.”

Several of them flashed their teeth and rushed him and Rolf. But before the upir could reach them, they ran into something that stopped them in their tracks. Some spell Rolf had cast, perhaps?

Rolf exploded in laughter while the upir swore at him and tore at…

Khent narrowed his eyes. “Is that tape?”

“Ultra strong packing tape, bitches.” Rolf chortled. “Took me a while to wrap around those trees. Suckers.” Rolf shot the finger at the creatures looking more undead than unalive.

And yes, there was a difference.

Vampires, the most powerful of all the magir—the nonhumans who dwelled in this mundane plane—did have heartbeats, were not considered the undead, at least not among the intelligent and educated, and hated each other more than they hated anyone else.

“Get it, Khent? Suckers.” Rolf kept laughing at his own joke. “As in, blood suckers.”

“Rolf, I’d tell you to grow up, but if you haven’t in nearly a thousand years, I don’t think there’s any hope for you.”

“None at all.” Rolf rubbed his hands together, the draugr never as serious as he should be.

Their clan, the Night Bloode, had managed what no one in thousands of years had thanks to a meddling goddess and a shit-ton of magic.

Vampires from six different tribes lived and worked together. In harmony.

Normally, vampires outmatched every magir in terms of power and strength. To keep them in line, the gods had cursed them long ago. For thousands of years, only family bloode-drinkers could coexist in peace.

Which meant these six upir had to be kin. But they weren’t local. Khent knew all those in the Seattle Bloode clan.

While he’d been woolgathering, the half dozen rogue upir gathered around him and Rolf.

He watched their anger build, that instinctive need to destroy outsiders. A glance at Rolf showed that Rolf didn’t feel it. And like Khent, Rolf didn’t seem to like the loss of all that tasty aggression.

Frankly, Khent found the entire venture simultaneously annoying and boring. He studied his fingernails. “Rolf, I don’t want to get dirty. Handle that, would you?”

“Do we want them dead or alive?”

One of the upir snarled. “You’ll be lucky to survive me, draugr. You pathetic piece of—”

Rolf sliced the upir’s head off mid-sentence, and everyone watched the creature’s body topple to the ground while his head rolled away. A youngling, apparently, as the dead upir didn’t burst into flame or crumble into ash right away.

“Kill him!” “Slowly.” “Painfully.” “Death to the Night Bloode!” The rogue group screamed and attacked as one.

Khent took a step back while Rolf dispatched them easily.

And messily.

Khent glared and flicked a few droplets of bloode from his shirt. Bloode—the mixture of magic and blood that filled a vampire made it very different from the typical blood they ingested from prey.

To Khent’s surprise, he felt something else in that bloode beside magic. Something darker. He brought a drop to his mouth. A small lick warned of darkness, of hellfire and rot. The bitterness of evil pervaded, and Khent spat to cleanse himself of the contamination that tasted all too familiar.

A few months ago, he’d been drawn into a battle in the hidden magir bazaar in the city. There, he’d encountered a powerful sorcerer and a necromancer. The pretty little necromancer had escaped, to his great annoyance. He’d been searching for her ever since.

But the sorcerer dealing in death and dark magic had left behind a stain and a scent.

Despite the sorcerer’s demise, that scent remained.

Hmm. Wasn’t that interesting?

“Look, I’m sorry you got dirty,” Rolf apologized, holding the arm of a upir while they watched the last one try to crawl away. Rolf scowled and threw the arm at him. “Stay there. I’m trying to have a conversation.”

“Rolf, we’ve got a problem.”

Rolf huffed as he stomped over bodies to the remaining upir and ripped his head off. “What problem? Though they’re young, they’ll turn to ash soon enough. No cleanup, bro. What could be better than that?”

Khent pinched the bridge of his nose, hating when Rolf or any of the others called him anything other than his name. I’m not your bro. I’m a Son of Osiris.

Rolf smirked at him, waiting for that exact comeback, something Khent had said a thousand times before. No longer a part of his old clan, the Sons of Osiris, Khent had trouble letting go of the past.

Still, he refused to be Rolf’s punchline, so he glared and said instead, “What could be better than no cleanup? How about finding the puppet master behind dead vampires? Because these six have been mastered by a necromancer.”

Rolf blinked. “That’s not possible. We don’t have souls to control.”

“Tell that to whoever killed them then raised them from the dead. And trust me, it wasn’t a reaper.”

As they hurried home, Khent immediately recalled the necromancer he’d briefly fought in the bazaar before she’d escaped. Unfortunately, he’d been too busy fighting a sorcerer creating zombies out of dead lycans to go after her.

In the time since, he’d searched but hadn’t found her. Forced to focus on other missions for everyone else in his blasted clan, he’d had to put off finding his new prey, the delectable human he planned to drain one drop at a time.

Mages and sorcerers, though looking the part, weren’t human and used the magic inside themselves to make spells. Witches, warlocks, and necromancers, on the other hand were human. They used sacrifice and outside magic to power their spells. Necromancers, especially, had been vilified by the magir community for years.

Most of them had been killed or pushed into the one of the hell realms to coexist with their favorite demons.

That a lesser being should consider herself worthy to battle a powerful specimen like Khent plainly baffled him. Yet she hadn’t died in their brief skirmish, so he couldn’t fault her for that. Still, he’d been preoccupied fighting a sorcerer bringing hellbeasts into the world or he’d have ended her then and there.

It irked him that he remembered too clearly what she looked like, how dark her brown eyes had been. How lovely and ethereal she’d appeared…for a lesser being. And not just any lesser being, but the weakest of them all. A human.

They needed to find out who had the power to not only kill his kind, but to control them as well.

And they could start with the dainty little necromancer with night-dark eyes who had smiled while she’d tried to kill him.