Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 37136 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37136 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
He did not scent a monster, but that might very well have been due to the overwhelming olfactory profile of the mass of humanity bustling about the place as if they were the only creatures that mattered.
“I don’t scent anything. The wolves don’t seem to have any kind of scent…” Gideon turned to Ray. “I very much hope you have not brought me so far to waste my time. I prefer to remain outside large population centers, for the safety of the occupants.”
“I understand, but that is the same rationale that draws our kind to such places, as well as their predator.”
“Are we certain? Do we have any verified sightings? If I have been brought this far out due to the urban legends of coddled city vampires…”
Something moved in the bushes. Something that was not animal. Something that disturbed reality as much as it disturbed the physical trees themselves. Gideon felt the tugging of the thing’s presence. It still had no smell, but he sensed it regardless, like a warping of gravity.
He stopped threatening Ray and turned toward the disturbance. The wolves had not scented the thing, or if they had, they were not responding.
“Come out, come out,” Gideon called, his voice resonant, elegant, and formal. He sounded like an older echo of Maddox for a moment.
There was a hesitation. He wondered if the creature felt fear, or if it was simply cursing the fact that it had lost the element of surprise. It was not easy to sneak up on Gideon. His senses were more keen than anybody imagined, a blessing and a curse in these crowded modern times.
The monster stepped out from the bushes.
Gideon let out a laugh of dark amusement.
A police officer stood in the middle of the misty forest. A tall woman with blonde hair, and features he recognized not just from memory, but every time he looked into the face of Maddox’s bratty little fledgling. This face was starting to haunt every corner of his world. He saw it in Maddox’s wolf, and he saw it in Carter, and now he saw it where it had originated, in the woman who knit them both together in her womb.
This was a woman he knew. A woman whose children he had killed. He remembered ripping her throat open, seeing the life pour from her. But that wound had healed and been replaced by fur. She stood before him in the garments of her past, a police uniform ripped, torn, and mended again in red thread.
She was not as she had been. She was not as simple a creature, as easy a slab of meat. Her golden hair was longer and thicker. Her skin was pale, as pale as the grave, more like a concrete gray than a healthy human tone. Her eyes, which had once been blue, were now a glazed opaque green. She did not look alive, exactly, and yet she did not look dead in the way he and his kind were. Gideon was looking at a creature who had no right to exist, and yet she did anyway.
He puzzled over how such a thing could have happened. In his very, very long life, practically nobody he killed had come back alive. The few times it had happened was very early on, a long time before history itself began and the written word started to solidify events in which things either did or did not happen.
He had a brief moment of something like panic, though a creature of his nature could never truly be afraid. It was more like confusion, a certain discombobulation of thought. He was seeing something he had never seen before in all his days. Something new.
She opened her mouth as if to speak, and a new revelation was made. She had fangs, but not like a vampire. Her fangs were long and curved and yellowed. They reminded him slightly of the canines of a wolf, but they did not fully fit that category either.
“Who made you?”
The woman’s voice was even and strong. “You made me.”
That was not possible. Gideon had only ever made two fledglings. It was not the sort of thing one did by accident. There had to be transfer of blood. There had to be drinking… had she somehow cut him that evening? She had tried to defend herself…. Perhaps she might have tasted a very small portion of his blood. But that alone could not be enough to create a being like this, and even if it had, she would be vampire.
She was not vampire.
“I am a part of all that has hurt me,” Lora Candy declared. “I am woman, and like too many women, I have been molded by the men who wanted to use me, hurt me, turn me into a vessel of their desire and then discard me and take the issue of my womb for their own. My body. My blood. My flesh. You took it as if I was nothing but a wrapper for your desires. You wanted to end me, but instead you created me.”