Blood Solstice (The Tale of Lunarmorte 3)

“How long have I been down here?” Kirios whispered.

The Prophet remained silent for so long Kirios was unsure he was going to get an answer. His heart thudded dully behind its bone encasement.

“Sixty years, my friend. Sixty years.”

A noise of distress escaped his mouth before he could control his response and he felt the Prophet sigh sadly. “I am sorry.”

Kirios shook his head, blinking back tears of defeat. It wasn’t his fault, he told the Prophet silently.

“It isn’t your fault,” the Prophet replied quietly. “Not your fault.”

Kirios squeezed his eyes shut in agony. “If not my own, then whose?”

“No one’s. We are all at the mercy of the will of the gods.”

When perhaps a few days passed, the Prophet turned to him, his eyes bright from sleep deprivation. “I must tell you the reason why I had myself put into this prison with you.”

Kirios grunted. So the mad man had deliberately had himself thrown in prison with him. Why? his eyes asked.

“I’ve had visions of you, Kirios. I am here to save you.”

“Why?” Kirios frowned. What was so special about him?

Tears glistened in the young seer’s eyes. “Oh, Kirios. This awful war… it’s going to haunt our world for centuries.”

The hopelessness of it threatened unsuccessfully to end a life that couldn’t be ended. “Centuries?” he gasped out.

“For centuries. At the end of the 2nd Millennia Anno Domini, Gaia will set in motion events that will lead to the end of this war.”

2nd Millennia Anno Domini… Dear Gaia!

“A child will be born into the end of the 20th Century… a child with blood of both Covens running in her veins – a half-lykan, half-magik who will bring this war to a conclusion.”

Kirios shook his head in amazement. “What has any of this to do with me?”

His eyes blazed suddenly, his face taut with emotion. “I see you in that future. You are an important element of that future.” With that the Prophet seized a hold of Kirios’ head and pressed Kirios’ open mouth to his neck, forcing the vampyre to drink from his blood. Sixty years of starvation… force was not really necessary. Kirios groaned with exultation and sank his teeth through the soft flesh of the Prophet’s neck, drinking and drinking until the blood flowed into every cell of his being, blood unlike any other he had tasted. He jerked back, careful, even when so hungry, to take only what he needed. He underestimated his sudden speed and smacked his head off the wall. He barely felt it. Kirios gasped, reaching up to feel his skull… no mark, no blood. Nothing. He laughed and the Prophet smiled wearily, shuffling back up into a sitting position.

Kirios stared at his hands, looking for some sign in his skin to explain this entirely new feeling in his body. He felt stronger than he ever had before.

“What have you done?” he whispered.

The Prophet shook his head. “The gods… they made me special. My blood… it has changed you. You will be faster, stronger, and you will be able to mask other supernaturals’ trace.”

“Why?”

“I do not know. I am only doing what I’ve been led to do in my visions.”

Kirios nodded. “I understand. But what am I to do with this?”

The Prophet shrugged. “Whatever comes naturally to you, my son.”

The seer struggled to his feet, Kirios rushing to help him, a frown marring his handsome face. “I have taken too much.”

“No, no. You did fine. Most vampyres do not have your restraint.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you out of here.”

At that he began yelling at the top of his voice, screaming for help. When they heard shuffling of feet drawing closer, the Prophet turned away from the entrance so their captors would not see the neck wound, only the blood on his hands. Kirios lay on the ground, his mouth wiped clean of the blood, pretending to be as weak as ever. It was a masquerade that would end once the Midnights looked close enough to see the fullness in his body, the healthy sheen of his skin and hair.

“What is all this yelling?!”

“I’ve been hurt,” the Prophet grumbled.

“Let me have… dear goddess, man, what the Hades have you done?”

“I slipped. I’m bleeding badly.”

“Can’t you fix that yourself?” The magik sighed in irritation.

“You haven’t fed me for days. I don’t have the energy.”

“Fine.” The first magik turned to the other. “Take the spell down.”

There was only a moments silence and then a rush of sound like waves crashing on shore.

“Go, Kirios!” the Prophet yelled.

He was gone before they even knew what had happened, running like the wind itself, brushing by blurred magiks and out of their citadel. Yes, he was a different creature from the one that had been thrown into the prison. He was an altogether new breed.

Paris, 1385

“I have something to tell you.”

Kirios turned slowly and narrowed his eyes on the beautiful woman in his bed. Her long elegant lines were enticing as all Hades and any other time he would have been perusing them languidly. But her tone was not something to be dismissed. The faerie in his bed had been keeping secrets from him.

“Are you going to spoil the party, love?” he asked lazily, deceptively disguising how tense he had grown. The party he referred to was the one going on as they spoke. The young Charles VI of France had just been wed to his even younger bride, Isabeau of Bavaria, and France was holding its first ever court ball to celebrate. The faerie in his bed was a Daylight spy he had met a few years ago when tracking a rogue vampyre. She had been gathering evidence that the vampyre was a dog working for the Midnights and the two of them had collided on the hunt. Collided and then fallen straight into bed with one another. Theirs was a casual relationship, but one of mutual respect and trust. Or so he had thought. She had told Kirios the Coven had reason to believe the Midnights would use the celebration of the king’s marriage as an opportune time to attack the Daylights, who had set up one of their largest branches of the Coven in Paris. Kirios had been in Scotland at the time, hunting a particularly nasty lykan with his gang of hunters, when she had appeared asking for help. He had gladly acquiesced. They had just heard word that Richard II of England was sending a small army invasion force against the Scots and Kirios really hadn’t wanted to get stuck in the middle of his idiocy. It seemed he was forever dodging the battles involving the English and the French. Now after twenty-eight years the English were trying to pull the Scottish back into another damn war.

Dear Gaia, one war was enough for Kirios.

His people had assured him they could find the lykan without him and off he’d gone. It was, after all, a break from the tedium of hunting rogue Daylights. He much preferred the chance to cut down Midnights, whether magik or faerie, loving the complete shock on their face when they realized he was impervious to their magik; another beautiful gift from the Prophet’s blood.

“We did not just meet by chance,” she said softly, drawing the bed coverings over herself nervously.

Kirios shook his head. “I’m not sure I understand, Saffron.”

Saffron sighed. “I was captured within the stronghold of the Midnight Coven when I was spying. I was careless. Or maybe I wasn’t. He was a Cassandrian after all. He knew I was there. He told me to call him the Prophet. That he had seen me in his visions. That I would play a part in bringing the war to an end… 700 years in the future.” She shook her head in amazement. All the time she had been speaking Kirios’ heart had been racing. He stumbled over to the bed and plunked down beside her, his eyes wide with excitement. All these years and nothing. He had almost gone crazy with frustration because nothing had pointed him in the right direction. Finally, here was something.

“Only the strongest of us live that long now, Kirios. He says I am strong too.” She smiled a little shyly.

Kirios chuckled and stroked her cheek affectionately. “I’m not surprised. You’re just a baby and already you’re one of the greatest spies the Coven has.”

She blushed. “You really think so?”

He tut-tutted. “No more compliments for you until you tell me what else he said.”

“He told me about you. Nothing more… just where to find you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this when we first met?”

“I was afraid. I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

“And now…”

She laughed. “Kirios, I brought you all the way to France with false information in order to speak with you about this.”

He snorted. So that was why things had been so quiet around here; why they couldn’t find any signs of an imminent attack from the Midnights.

“Why did you not speak with me in Scotland?”

Saffron bit her lip and ducked her head, her long silver blonde hair falling in front of her stunning face. “I wanted to be on home ground for such a declaration.”

Kirios struggled not to laugh at her logic. “Of course. How silly of me.”

She shrugged off his teasing and looked up at him with wide pleading eyes. “Why did he tell me to find you, Kirios?”

He sighed heavily. “Because he once visited me too.”

With that he told her all he could, about the Prophet, about his visions, of what he thought Kirios’ help would do. And now Saffron too,

“So.” She frowned in thought. “What does that mean for us?”

“I think it means that you and I are stuck with one another for a very long time.”

St. Petersburg, Russia, 1725

Kirios waited impatiently for Petrovsky, burrowing into his fur coat. He wasn’t cold. He was never cold. But the city was charged with apprehension. Peter, the Emperor of Russia, had died the night before, and with no heir apparent a sense of foreboding hung above St. Petersburg like an omen of what was to come.