Chapter One

The Siege

Blue Ash, RUSSIA

March 25th, 2112

Eight hours of trekking through snow and over craggy mountain footways had brought the company to the threshold of Davikov Castle. They’d marched down the access road, boldly displaying their intention to enter the Castle and infiltrated with ease.

The actual siege only lasted around two hours, and the City fell quickly due to the surprise nature of the attack. The vampires of Blue Ash weren’t in any sense prepared to take on an opposing army. The Black Winter had barricaded the Oval and fortified themselves as best they could. Still, when all was said and done, once they’d realised there was no longer a Coven body left to defend, their leader, Taras Vasiliev, fled and left his subordinates to surrender.

Alice was present, but while swords were still drawn, she had stuck close to her Aunt Cambria as she’d been instructed. Cambria knew the Castle second-best compared to her mother, so they followed her lead in searching the endless rat-run of corridors. Karou wandered around with an uncharacteristic emotionless glaze over her face until they passed a seemingly inconsequential door down one of the grander looking hallways. She’d pressed her hand up against the wooden slab; she seemed in disarray just for a second.

All Cambria had to say to get her to move away was an odd statement as far as Alice was concerned, for she didn’t know who it pertained to. “He’s not there.”

“I know…” Her mother had whispered solemnly in reply, shook her head, and took a moment to recenter herself.

“We need to find that green-eyed bastard before anyone else does.” Cam’ urged.

“This way.” Karou merely nodded and turned on her heels to march down the stone hallway with fresh conviction. “Roman will be waiting for us in the throne room, I’m sure of it.”

“Uck, arrogant to the last. It’s high time the pompous little blood-sucker gets what he deserves... Ha, no offence, Karou.” Cambria grumbled as they moved swiftly down the corridors, swords out and at the ready.

Karou merely rolled her eyes and debated stepping on the fallen angel’s cloak to trip her. While she couldn’t disagree that Roman had had this coming to him for a long time, for a moment, she had found herself feeling an ounce of guilt for not having ended him sooner. In her youth, she’d had the opportunity to do away with him time and again and had good reason to. She thought back to the hours the two of them had spent alone, becoming friends. Now the memory made her shudder. She clearly recalled his pretence and how all he’d wanted was to procure her as a trinket for his pleasure.

When they eventually arrived at the throne room, Karou motioned for Alice to stay a few steps behind them. “We won’t need your empathy here,” she whispered, her ear pressed to the door to listen for any signs of distress. “So… just stay here until I call for you.” Then, she looked at Cambria with an intention lingering in her eyes that Alice had never witnessed before. Her mother suddenly nodded and began to count. “One, two... Three...”

On the final count, they kicked the double doors inward. Sent them swinging open into the large, ostentatiously decorated throne room so quickly Alice had flinched, imagining they might fly off their hinges violently.

Spurred into combat by the approach of Roman’s guards, Cambria wielded her weapon and swung her terrible double-ended Seraph blade this way and that to hew the limbs off the offensive foes. While Karou forsook all others and moved intentionally right to her target with that look on her face. She was ready to pounce and devour her prey. It scared Alice to feel her mother home to such a murderous emotion, but truly, Karou hated everything the vampire before her stood for, politically and personally.

Everything seemed to behave in slow-motion from then on as Alice cast her eyes toward her mother’s target from the doorway. He didn’t look like any kind of Lord at all. Perhaps once upon a time, he was handsome; she could see that once she stripped away the look of pure madness on his face. But now, he looked precisely like the lunatic everyone believed he was, speaking only to himself while his guards and what Alice assumed were other nobles around him were slaughtered.

“It’s about time things went back to the way they ought to be,” Cambria cried, using someone’s disembodied arm as a mechanism for taking out one of the last guards. “No more of these awful blood-thirsty mutations running around like they own the damned place.”

“Genocide isn’t what we’re here for,” Alice muttered to herself, finally stepping past the doorway and into the fray. A throwing knife lingered in her hand, ready to use if necessary, but she resighted an internal prayer that she wouldn’t have to with each step she took.

Before the Lord’s throne, Karou stilled, panting in anticipation. “Remember me?” She inquired of Lord Black; his eyes appeared glassy and gazed about the room hopelessly like a lost child. Perhaps he didn’t comprehend all that was happening, but then he spoke.

“The bluebird, Charlie found.”

Suddenly Karou’s eyes welled. She looked pained by his words. Alice didn’t understand why, but it seemed they confirmed that he did know her somehow.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Karou dared to ask.

“What did your glass eye see?” The Lord laughed wickedly and thumped his fist off the arm of his throne, drumming the syllables of his words. “I will bleed my cattle house dry, suckling babes and all!” He exclaimed in his madness, at the top of his lungs, so his threat echoed about the stone walls. Suddenly he flung forth his body that had looked withered and frail on his throne and stood upright on the steps to the podium, envigorated and still laughing insanely as his eyes met Karou’s directly. He knew her.

Only Karou knew what his mad rambling had meant; it fanned the flames of her anger and confirmed her reason for being there. Stepping forward too, she met him on the steps and took hold of his jacket lapels. From there, she dragged him to the centre of the room. The fool continued to mutter a steam of seemingly senseless words but didn’t bother to fight against her.

Usually, Alice saw her mother as peaceful - a woman who rarely let her anger or frustration show, but now Karou wore a look that was a mixture of both sheer rage and excitement.

“I am your judge today. You will pay for all the mortal lives you’ve ended and painfully prolonged for your dark purpose.” Her mother hissed and let the man fall to the ground like a sack of bricks.

“Take my all riches; I am still Lord here!”

“She doesn’t want your money, you fool!” Her Aunt Cambria rolled her green serpentine eyes and wiped a smear of blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. All the guards had been taken care of, burned by her blade. Their corpses were piled on one side of the room like broken dolls. Now the only man in the room alive was the target.

“You have no power here. No one dared testify against me!” Roman scoffed.

“If you’re expecting some sort of trial- …” Karou continued, spitefully grabbing him by his oily hair and tugging back his head so that he had no choice but to hear her. She spat venomous words to burn his ears while lingering by his neck, “…-you’re horribly mistaken. I have seen all the horrors you’re hiding. Y- You didn’t give Magnus, or Ada, a trial, did you? No, I don’t think you did…”

“Cleaved the head off the Spaniard. Undressed the redhead of her pretty skin and drown the cripple!” Roman cackled.

The words cut Karou deeply; Alice didn’t need to notice how her breath hitched nor how her eyes welled up with angry tears; she could feel the grief manifest and spread like wildfire through her mother. Dark, vengeful energy swallowed her mother’s usually warm aura.

Her fangs are drawn, Alice thought, in horror. Surely, her mother didn’t intend to drain this man?

In reply, the mad Lord only laughed again!

Alice couldn’t tear her eyes away even as her mother put her boot-clad foot on the man’s back and forced him down onto the stone slabs. With his cheek pressed to the stone, he still cackled wickedly between fits of trying to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was nonsensical babble about his family’s legacy.

Once he was down, he was dead within a matter of seconds. Alice gasped, having bore witness to the last of a blood-line beheaded in one swift motion; thankfully, she felt nothing; even though the man had known he was about to meet his demise, he’d laughed in the face of it. The blue flame of Karou’s Seraph blade never flickered as it spliced the air and Roman Blacks neck. His head rolled away from him, over the floor. Now free of its top, his neck spilt a pool of vermillion blood onto the stone. Alice couldn’t help but feel disturbed by how Karou’s own black eyes were drawn to it thirstily. The vampiress literally wanted to drink her victory.

Cambria distracted Karou from her momentary bloodthirst when she grabbed the Lord’s head and held it up by its hair with a laugh. “And this is how it was done back in my day!” she cheered, trying to get Alice, who was currently a little repulsed, to join in on the festivities.

Karou kicked the woman in the back of the knee, causing her to release the “trophy”. A pang cut through Alice’s chest, and her eyes looked to her mother again. Awash with misplaced remorse, Karou felt overwrought as she looked around the room and took in the extent of the slaughter. “Stop it. We’re done here. He’s to be buried out in the cemeteries with his father, uncle and the others.”

“Bah! I say we feed him to the Lycans instead. I bet they’d love that.” Cambria grinned and held up the head to glare into his back eyes to mock the slain Lord. “You never thought you’d be dog food, did you, little boy Black?”

“I said stop that!” Karou barked through gritted teeth, startling the Morningstar. “Or you’ll meet the same fate as him, and I will feed you to the Lycans.”

Turning away from Cambria, Karou pressed the back of her hand to her lips to gather herself and come down from her heightened emotions. Her fingers were trembling as she calmed down from the rush of the kill, but once she had centred, she turned to her daughter and clasped a hand on Alice’s cloaked shoulder and said, “Remember what I told you when you were little?”

Alice nodded. “Of course. Be ruthless when killing, but bury the dead, because, in the end, we’re all bound for hell.”

“That’s right. Good girl,” Karou praised and brushed her cheek with the back of her fingers. “I think it’s time for you to go to work. We’re going to clean up here and make a few phone calls. See if you can find one of the Officers and have them find you a nice room to do your work in?”

“Yes, mother.” Alice bowed her head in respect and turned away, anxious to escape the bloody throne room that smelled of death. On her exit, she closed the doors and sealed Blue Ash’s fate – it had fallen and now was the possession of Enoch.

And now my work begins, Alice thought, entering into battle mode; she readied herself to become the mental terrorist everyone in Enoch feared so ardently.