Chapter 1
A lot can happen between now and never.
I once read that the phrase it’s now or never was first coined to describe that moment when if one doesn’t act right now, there will never be a second chance to do so. They missed their one opportunity. Usually through their own fault, but sometimes that vindictive bitch named Karma ninja flipped out of a closet to give you a solid monkey fist to the stones.
You know…
Perhaps you had been facing a once in a lifetime opportunity like saying hello to the cute girl at the bar before anyone else; or maybe you stood in silence for twenty seconds too long during your oral presentation in front of the classroom and desperately needed to formulate words that closely resembled something intelligent.
Basically, you needed to do the thing right freaking now.
Carpe Diem.
Like me.
Right now, I was standing in the chilly sewers beneath the fine city of St. Louis in order to check off something on my to-do list. Something that was likely going to get my fancy new coat all smelly and icky in the process. Still, getting my coat smelly and icky was better than getting it bloody and holey—with an e. That’s why I had brought backup. But the night was young. And I never counted my chickens before they hatched.
Especially when hunting vampires.
But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Right now, I was getting ready to do something marginally dangerous, and even with accomplices to watch my back, I wasn’t quite ready to strap on my big boy pants. I was stalling.
I was here—hopefully—to save some lives. The victims didn’t have Batman coming down to save them, or even the fine police persons of St. Louis. None of those upstanding people knew anyone was in danger or would have even believed the intel that had led me down here: a Greek hero gossiping at the bar over a beer. And all those victims had was one scraggly wizard, a disgraced werewolf FBI Agent, and a vanilla mortal to save them.
Now was a brief period of time that was full of choices that would later result in more choices—harder ones—that would lead to penultimate consequences. The now part was pretty cut and dried for me. It was the consequences I was thinking about.
This whole mess had all started because of a favor I thought I owed Achilles.
Yes. The Achilles. The legendary Greek hero with—what some may call—vengeance issues.
And when one smashes up his place of business—allegedly—he could be known to display said vengeance issues by inflicting gratuitous amounts of pain upon the accused.
No thanks.
So, I wanted to make it up to him before the thought even crossed his mind. It wasn’t like I could blame the Angel for fluttering into Achilles’ bar and picking a fight with Death—one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse—and I a few months back. Angels were Holy—without the e—above the law, beyond reproach, blah, blah, blah ad nauseam.
So. Rather than tattling on the pigeon, I had nervously waited months for the chance to gain his gratitude by doing him a solid.
Over drinks at his bar earlier tonight, Achilles had idly mentioned rumors about a vampire kidnapping young girls to bring them down to the sewers, after which they were never heard from again. The most recent disappearance was one of Achilles’ own bartenders, and he feared the worst.
That was how I found myself in the sewer with my girlfriend and my childhood best friend on a perfectly cold November night. To possibly prevent my sad rear end from being dragged across St. Louis behind Achilles’ chariot.
I glanced at my dismal surroundings. Maybe the vampire was just looking to Netflix and chill in his spacious tunnel home. I studied the slick, slimy walls with a look of disgust. No, not a home…a lair. Definitely a lair.
But this was par for the course in my experience. Find bad guy. Exterminate bad guy. Keep young, pretty girls safe.
Or avenge them.
It’s what we wizards did for a living. Well, most of us. Even the ones who made millions of dollars per year on interest income from their daddy’s technology company.
Ahem.
Maybe I was just doing it for the thrill. The challenge. Or maybe even to do the right thing. I grunted. Who knows these things? I asked myself with mild reproach. I shook my head before my inner Freud could psychoanalyze that too much further.
After the now comes the never part of the phrase. You know, the part where you won’t be here anymore. The part where all of your family and loved ones have moved on and left you six feet under, while your soul is astral projected to the afterlife. Heaven. Hell. Atlantis. Nirvana. Or on a nice long boat ride with Charon—the chatty drunk Greek Boatman—who ferried souls to visit Hades in his Underworld funhouse.
Been there, done that. It didn’t stick.
The point is, you’re dead, so the consequences of your actions won’t be your problem anymore. They will be felt by others, or by no one at all, leaving you with the peace of mind that you did all that you could, that it was worth it. That you made your move. Kissed the girl. Muttered something vaguely English in your speech class.
But you know what’s in the middle of now and never?
Life.
Or in my case, annoying questions that interrupted my well thought out inner philosophical monologue.
“Remind me why we are standing in the literal filth of St. Louis in the middle of November, rather than back at Chateau Falco tipping one back before a roaring fire. Or why I’m here instead of curling up with my fiancée looking at wedding magazines and drinking a glass of wine,” Gunnar complained. He lifted his boot with a disgusting squelch, releasing a whole new level of foulness into the brittle air. The dingy environment only seemed to amplify the stunningly royal bearing of my Viking friend. His golden hair was tucked up in a golden man bun, and his beard was impressively thicker than usual, as he had been growing it out for his upcoming wedding. Or so he had told me. I had recently had a nightmare where we were wrestling over a Monopoly argument involving my rapid construction of hotels, and I discovered that he was actually growing the beard out in order to hide a secret guardian inside—a leprechaun-sized werewolf willing and able to defend his master’s honor in the event his master lost the wrestling match.
In my dream, I had lost to the violent little bastard.
So far, Gunnar’s sniffer hadn’t located any vampire scent at all, so I was appointed navigator based upon my eidetic memory of the scant information Achilles had provided.
“Well, if we’re speaking of the latter, you should thank me,” I muttered.
Indie punched me in the arm, scowling. I shook it off with an idle grin, glad that she had accepted my jibe as surface level. After all, I had been reading over every damn wedding magazine ever printed these past few weeks, which seemed to make my mother deliriously happy.
Yes, even a mother who recently died still went bonkers mad at the topic of gowns and weddings. You just had to find a way to talk to her spirit. Which I had. And she had commanded me to use her engagement ring when I asked Indie to share my life.
Which was the other reason I was down here, and the biggest reason I was stalling.
I was distracted. Conflicted. The vampire part of the trip was secondary in my mind.
Which wasn’t good.
But I couldn’t seem to shake it. I was going to ask Indie to marry me!
My stomach made a little flip-flop motion at the thought. I shot her a discreet glance, but she was too busy fidgeting with her gear to notice. She was so goddamned beautiful that I found myself simply staring at her at times. Like now. Her long golden hair normally fell past her shoulders to frame her perfectly shaped curvaceous upper body, but tonight it was tied up in a ponytail and sticking out the back of a Chicago Cubs baseball cap.
The St. Louis Cardinal in me growled territorially at that.
She was about my height, a hair under six-feet tall, with legs for days, and curves that most men would drool over. Her face was narrow with a thin nose and icy blue eyes that sparkled like sun-kissed sapphires. I averted my eyes as she glanced up, seeming to notice my attention.
I pretended to scout our path as I mentally ran over my proposal plan. I had made reservations at Vin de Set, her favorite French restaurant. Two days from now. I had cleverly used the excuse that we were past due for our regular date night where we usually recalibrated our relationship. We typically did this once or twice per month, but it had stretched into month two now without either of us bringing it up.
It might or might not have started as a result of Othello’s visit to town a few months back when Indie had been out of town caring for her injured mother. Injured because of my enemies, we later found out. Either way, several events from that visit had created a bit of friction between us. Not because I had been unfaithful—not by choice, anyway—but because Othello had openly admitted her ongoing infatuation with me. One that she had secretly harbored since our brief romantic relationship in college several years back.
She had admitted this to Indie. In front of me. Without giving me any warning at all.
Which had required some deft maneuvering on my part, let me tell you.
The two were amicable now, but boy oh boy it had been interesting for a time.
My thoughts drifted back to my dinner plans as Gunnar began sniffing down one of the halls, hoping to catch a whiff of fanger, AKA eau de corpse. Vampire. Indie was still fidgeting with her gear.
Before the dinner proposal, I wanted to see how she handled tonight, because, well, this was my life.
Hunting.
At least a big part of my life. And even though she had told me before that she could handle it, I needed to know that she could. There’s a difference, folks. The proposal details were all set. The venue picked. Dinner dishes and wine already ordered. Her favorite dessert, strawberry shortcake, ordered from a local bakery.
Everything was set.
Well, almost everything… Which led me back to my third reason for jumping on tonight’s opportunity.
Indie readjusted the contraption dominating her cranium, tightening one of the straps so that the headlamp mounted on top didn’t jiggle around so much with each movement. Despite me being chock full of power, able to cast a ball of light to float beside us and illuminate the darkness, and Gunnar’s near night vision thanks to his werewolf genes, a girl needed to accessorize to feel complete in this world. Practicality and logic be damned. And no man would ever get in the way of accessorizing.
Ever.
Indie looked grim at the unexplained dangers of tonight’s extermination—seeing as how I hadn’t yet explained it to either of them in depth—but was also conflictingly excited to be included in the boy’s club. Even if she was completely mundane—as without magic as a boiled egg—it really didn’t seem to bother her. Where Gunnar and I were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Dare I say that Gunnar and I were legen—
Wait for it…
Dary.
Indie and I had been binge-watching How I Met Your Mother lately. So, sue me.
I smiled to myself, which only made Gunnar’s eyes tighten, as if it confirmed his sneaking suspicion that I was as mad as a hatter.
“We’re all mad here,” I whispered softly.
“What?” Indie asked, having successfully completed readjusting her straps.
I mumbled nothing in particular, putting my head back in the game. “Alright, gang. We’re hunting an Alucard named Dracula,” I answered distractedly, focusing my ears towards the two tunnels that branched off ahead of us. One of them led to our target. The other led to more smelly things and my third reason for entering the sewers tonight.
“Are you drunk?” Gunnar asked, very seriously. Indie blinked, having not been around me for the past few hours and realizing that it could very possibly be a valid question.
“What? No. I’m not…I had one drink with Achilles, but…”
“You just keep staring off into the distance as if distracted. And you’re not making any sense. It’s…unsettling.” He folded his arms.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Few other things on my mind.”
He waited. And I realized what else was bothering him as I replayed our conversation in my head. “Oh. I see what you’re getting at. I meant to say a Dracula named Alucard.” They stared at me, still not getting it. I rolled my eyes at Gunnar. “A vampire. The name Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards, you uneducated mutt,” I turned to Indie, “and beautiful, intelligent lady.”
Indie rolled her eyes. The silence grew before Gunnar finally let out a soft chuckle. “He seriously named himself Alucard? Does he have any idea how pretentious that is, or is it really his name?” He grinned hungrily. “I think I should ask him,” he added, flexing his muscles. Or maybe he hadn’t flexed. Regardless, his coat stretched along the seams of his arms and shoulders with a slight creaking sound.
“You’re right. We should ask him. Word from Achilles is that he’s kidnapped some girls. One of them was his bartender. I’m here to see if it’s true. You two are here as witnesses. Especially you, Indie. No heroics. I’m serious. If he really is a vampire, stand back. Gunnar and I will handle it.” She nodded her agreement, breath quickening slightly.
I consulted the mental map Achilles had shown me and took a left.
My posse followed me.
Which was good. Posses are supposed to do that sort of thing. It messed up the cool factor when they didn’t.
We continued on for fifteen minutes or so until I began to hear faint whimpers coming from what sounded like only a dozen feet away. Still, with echoes, it could be a mile. Gunnar took a big whiff of the air and nodded at me one time, looking suddenly relieved. Apparently, his sniffer was back on track. Or the vampire’s apparent concealment spell didn’t work this close up.
“Not far now. A few hundred feet at most,” he whispered. “Won’t they be able to sense us?”
I shook my head, mentally checking our map. “No. I masked our scent.” There were two bends before any kind of opening that might be used as living quarters.
I rolled my shoulders and patted my hip reassuringly.
Magic was suave and all, but I hadn’t really mastered my new abilities yet. A few months back during Mardi Gras when my friends had been out of town, Othello and I had had a run in with Heaven. And Hell. And my previous governing institution, the Academy—which ruled and dictated the laws of the wizard nation. They had thought I was working for the demons. Heaven thought so too. I hadn’t been, of course. But everyone and their mother wanted to get their grubby hands on the secret project my father had gifted to me prior to his death. An Armory of the deadliest supernatural weapons in recorded history.
During the struggle, my own people had taken away my magic, permanently, but my father had given me something else along with the Armory. A new, strange power that had historically been placed higher on the food chain than even a wizard’s magic. To be honest, even months later, I was still struggling to wrap my head around it.
So, having not mastered my new abilities as a Maker, I liked to be reassured by the hundred-pound gun at my hip. Not really a hundred pounds, but the SIG Sauer X5 Gunnar had given me a while back was definitely reassuring, and right now it really did feel like a hundred pounds of confidence.
“Alright, gang. It’s now or never.”
I lifted my foot to take a step, and a silver ball of light—which I registered as a stunningly attractive, anatomically correct, naked Barbie doll—struck me in the dome, knocking me on my ass and into a puddle of nastiness. I quickly scrambled to my feet, shivering, ready to obliterate the creature. She hovered where my head had been, staring directly at me. It was a naked Barbie.
And I recognized her.
“She looks familiar…” Gunnar murmured to Indie, who was staring wide-eyed at the silver sprite.
“What is she?” Indie asked bluntly, cocking her head sideways as she assessed the creature. “She’s beautiful.”
“A sprite. A fairy. A very dangerous fairy. Looks can be deceiving,” I warned, shaking the cold sewage off my coat.
The sprite smiled in approval at the warning, flashing needle-like teeth at Indie, who flinched back a step. “He’s back, and he’s coming to murder you and all your friends.” The glowing sprite hissed darkly to me, “It’s time.”
Like I said, a lot can happen between now and never.
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