Breed: Slayer

  BREED: SLAYER

  Sandra Seymour

  HOWSON BOOKS

  UK, 2017

  © 2011-2017 Sandra Seymour

  All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people, unless the store where you bought it allows you to lend your file to another user. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit SandraSeymour.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  HOWSON BOOKS

  For bulk ordering and rights permissions requests, please visit SandraSeymour.com.

  Previously Published 2011 as Moroaica

  For Mum, Pete, Mary, Dawn, Derek, & Alan

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Breed

  My Father, the Vampire

  Zero tolerance

  Double Duty

  Consequences

  Are You Sure?

  The Vampires are Coming

  Truebloods

  The Coven

  Mad Scientists

  Pushing Back

  Paladins

  My mother, the witch

  It’s not that simple

  Don’t lose your head

  Tag, You’re It

  Princess Lilleth

  They’re All Insane

  Traitor

  I Will Be With You

  Retreat

  Get your Breed: Swag

  Breed: Books Coming Soon

  Spread the Word

  Acknowledgements

  The Breed

  WAITING IS THE WORST part. It’s when I have time to concentrate on what’s to come, and on how much I would rather be anywhere else. Even as one part of me vows this is the last time they make me do this - I will find a way to get away from these people - another part conjures up a thousand different ways to kill.

  This senseless slaughter goes against every belief my mother instilled in me, and yet physically, I crave it. My body responds to the blood and violence in a way that shames me. I don’t want to be here, to feed that craving. I do not want to become the hate-filled killing machine I was born and trained to be. It’s not that I’m a coward, more a moral objector.

  “Think you’d be used to this by now, Max,” Dillon says, a touch of amusement in his smooth deep voice. “Why so edgy?”

  “I’ll never get used to this.”

  Dillon’s casual stance, leaning against the wall of the boiler house, does nothing to settle my nerves. One foot rests on the wall beside his knee, his hands in the pockets of his dark-grey trousers. A breeze blows the loose material, which slaps against the concrete block behind him. His tight-fitting sweater, a shade or two lighter, ripples around the contours of his lithe, muscular frame. One side of his mouth curls up farther than the other.

  Despite my distaste for violence, I’m fighting the urge to wipe the easy smile off his face. I imagine punching him right on the fulcrum, forcing his perfect Roman nose into his infuriating head and smashing a few teeth. He would break my arm before I got within two feet.

  I shake the image from my mind, and take a deep breath. Letting the air out in a slow sigh, I kick at the loose gravel on the flat rooftop. It comes lose from the cracked and weathered felt, and skitters away, hitting the frame of the raised skylight with a tinkling sound. I know the noise could give our position away, could serve as a warning, but up here, before it all begins, I don’t care. It’s not as if those few moments’ notice will make any difference. Still, Dillon’s warning glare is enough to stop me repeating the exercise.

  “I hate it.”

  Dillon’s smile widens, perfect ice-white teeth showing against his flawless creamy skin. The contrast with the straight black hair that rests on his shoulders is striking, even in the gloom of the mid-October afternoon.

  “You’ll learn to love it.”

  I have no intention of learning to love it, and open my mouth to argue the point. He raises a finger in the air, cocking his head to one side. My instincts and training kick in, and the words die in my mouth.

  “Heads up, party time.”

  He pushes off from the wall and runs across the roof to the skylight, jumping feet first through the glass without slowing. I follow, dropping lightly beside him on the floor of the warehouse, a sense of smug satisfaction when my landing doesn’t even disturb the broken glass. It’s a girl thing. For a moment, I remain in my landing position, one foot beneath me, the other out to the side, my fingertips resting on the floor to either side of my knee, and take in the situation.

  THE WAREHOUSE HAS been derelict for some time. Its windows were boarded with chipboard sheets, but some of them have rotted and crumbled, filling the space with a musty smell. Wooden planks criss-cross the resulting gaps where someone has made hasty repairs. A few rays of watery light penetrate the gloom, dust motes swirling in them.

  The shell is stripped bare, except for the wooden frame of a mezzanine floor, which takes up the back third of the building. A decrepit staircase leads up to a narrow landing and a small room with a single, tiny window. In this long-abandoned office, the squatters have made their nest.

  They are spewing out from it now, some taking the stairs, others leaping the railing in their rush to attack. They are yelling and howling. It’s just noise and bravado.

  The fighting has already begun. Three huddles of scruffy combatants surround Sam, Jax, and Vinnie - the muscles of our team. Nell blocks the main entrance to cut off their escape. She bares her fangs and hisses at one, and kicks him back into the brawl.

  Mine and Dillon’s appearance in their midst has turned their already disorganized attacks into chaotic shambles. They are panicking; desperate to survive. For a moment, I pity them, reduced to such squalid conditions. Then I smell the copper and salt tang of blood. Human blood.

  Beneath the mezzanine frame, in the darkest shadows, lie the withered and shrivelled corpses of the humans they’ve been feeding on. Even from this distance, I see the multiple puncture wounds on each. They must have suffered agony in their last moments. One of the bodies is still fresh, its feet twitching where the poison has not yet reached.

  The raw hunger in the monsters’ minds is overpowering. Even as they fight, the warm blood, oozing out onto the floor, distracts them.

  Hot tears fill my eyes. My stomach flips, then tightens into a knot, and the adrenaline rush starts. It flows through me as my already sharp senses become even clearer, and time seems to slow to a crawl. The muscles around my eyes and jaw swell. My fangs drop, grinding against my teeth. My shoulders tense and hunch. As the chemical moves through my body, it triggers the metamorphosis in each muscle and nerve. My talons extend from their sheaths beneath my fingernails, and dig into the concrete floor as if it were soft mud.

  The other slayers are all over them in a sprawling mêlée, grabbing arms and legs as the vampires scatter. They rip the leeches limb from limb in a display of bloodlust that matches their prey’s.

  Unlike the others, I concentrate on one at a time. I remain crouched, picking out my first victim; a female, who has the poor judgement to land before me, screeching
like a banshee. Her face is drawn and grey, bloodshot eyes sunk into the skull with black circles beneath them. Her hair is lank and greasy, lips cracked with dehydration, despite the fresh blood dripping from them. She issues another piercing scream and runs at me, her eyes full of hate and despair.

  Her attack falters when her eyes meet mine, and fear overcomes her, even before she lashes out at me. She swings wildly and misses my face. I feel the anguish I cause the petrified creature, and turn that empathy inside out, using the connection to influence her emotions. Walking with a measured pace through the mayhem, I glare into the red wild eyes. Unable to tear her gaze from mine, she retreats, falling back, and scrambling away on all fours, still unable to break eye contact. I allow my revulsion at the pallid, sunken features and blood-soaked fangs to show in the feral snarl on my face. By the time I’m close enough to slice the skin from her bones, she’s whimpering and curling into a ball, cradling her legs.

  I move in, make the kill quick and clean, slashing deep into her neck with my extended claws, and pulling the head from her body with no more difficulty than popping the cork from a wine bottle. The steaming blood that spurts into the air cools and congeals before it hits the ground. I punch my fist through the rib cage and tear out her heart in a smooth motion. Throwing it aside, I stand over the slumped corpse.

  Turning only my head, I pick another target, and move on. This time I choose the male Nell herded back into the throng. He is trying to escape out of a side door, tearing the planks of wood from it. I somersault over the heads of the brawlers, landing behind him. He turns, howls, hisses, and charges at me. I sidestep his attack and swipe at him, leaving deep gouges in his chest.

  Dillon says I am meticulous and thorough, once I get the urge. I have the urge now. He says it makes me dangerous and deadly - as if he isn’t - but I appreciate why it makes him uneasy. He thinks I’m cold and unfeeling. He doesn’t understand: I feel the rage just like he does, but my sickening sense of self-revulsion overwhelmes it. The tight hold I keep on myself is the only thing stopping me from puking. Slayers don’t puke in front of anyone, least of all vampires.

  I finish off my second victim, and turn to seek another, but the vampires are defeated. It’s over. There are no survivors, and no escapees. They were no match for us, even if they outnumbered us five to one. It took six of us less than four minutes to despatch over thirty vampires.

  This was an inexperienced bunch, afraid and desperate. Most of them were still raw; the colour drained from their skins, but their hides not toughened, putting them somewhere between three and six months after turning. Even their leader - if you could call him that - was a half-starved, scrawny specimen, less than a year gone.

  They must have just been scraping enough blood to survive on before we turned up and wiped them out. We shouldn’t even have bothered with a pack this size, confined as they were to this area of town. There’s nothing out here but abandoned warehouses and derelict factories.

  It makes me uneasy. Not just because these were no more a threat to the local human population than the common gangs or drug dealers they fed on, inept and weak. Something just feels wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  DILLON GRABS MY arm and leads me off to one side. The others kick through the pack, searching for possums. They sever the heads and rip the hearts out of the dismembered torsos, taking no chances. It’s the first rule of slaying - heads off, hearts out.

  The second rule is that both must be burned, and the ashes mixed with water. It’s the only way to ensure there will be no resurrection should some misguided lunatic bring the dismembered pieces back together. Although, unlike the Romanians who discovered the way to keep a vanquished vampire down, we’re not expected to drink the concoction, fortunately. We just do the dismembering, and leave everything else to the clean-up crew.

  “If we keep this up, we’re going to wipe them out altogether.” I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does.

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s never been our remit. We’re just supposed to keep the peace. Stop the humans being overrun. This is wrong.”

  I don’t want him to think I’m some kind of vampire sympathiser, but we’ve done what we came to do. It’s time to move on to somewhere they are a real problem still.

  Dillon’s face is unreadable, his wide mouth set in a straight line, eyes dull and guarded. The muscles in his square jaw pop out briefly. “Change of policy,” he says in a cold, clipped tone.

  “But if we wipe them out here we’ll bring down an international shit storm. The Italian and Romanian covens won’t stand for it.”

  He shrugs, his face still devoid of expression. “They’re old school. They won’t risk outright war with the humans.”

  “They might not,” if we carry on and things come to a head, they will, but I’m not going to argue the point. Dillon has more experience than me. I get the feeling from the set of his jaw that he’s dealt with them before, “but the Russians and the Chinese sure as hell will. They’re anything but old school. The human Chinese government would probably back them, after what they’ve done for the population problem there. I doubt there are enough slayers in the world to take them on.”

  Dillon is still stony faced, but I sense he shares my opinion to some degree.

  “Anyway, if we kill them all, what happens to us?”

  “We would never be able to wipe them all out. It’s all about balance.”

  I suppose he’s right. He’s been doing this a lot longer than me. I shrug and walk toward the door of the warehouse, heading back to the residential district. I kick an ashen, withered limb away as I walk through the thick puddles of congealing blood. They look like spilled diesel. The thick liquid squelches beneath my foot, and the sickly aroma of treacle fills my nostrils, followed by the undertone of rotten fish and bone meal.

  I gag and my head starts to spin. My eyes roll, and the air feels thick and heavy, clinging to my skin. I feel evil seeping into my pores. I have to force myself to walk from the warehouse, wanting to run as far and as fast as I can.

  THE COOL AUTUMN breeze on my face is not enough to calm my burning skin. Once I’m out of sight of the others, I give in to the urge, and flee from the carnage.

  Dillon follows me, keeping pace silently from a distance. My pulse returns to normal and the fever subsides. I stop running, and sit on a low wall, my head in my hands. He joins me.

  “Practice your skills,” he says, as we head back into the still-populated business district, alive with the hum of commerce, “they are what will keep you alive.”

  As if I don’t know that. We halt opposite a bus stop where a middle-aged man and a blonde business woman in a navy-blue suit stand, waiting for a bus.

  “Read a human,” he nods at them.

  “I can do that in my sleep,” my lip curls as I throw a scowl his way, which he ignores.

  “I know, but it’s a good warmup exercise.”

  I sigh and pull my extra senses in, the way he taught me, until my vision is no more than human. It’s like looking at the world through a veil of white gauze, or frosted glass. My hearing is reduced to close range, sounds muted, as if I’d dunked my head in a bucket of water. How do they cope with such limited senses? I project my focus outward, scanning the area, until I find myself slipping into a daze.

  Before long, I can see more than just their forms. I see their souls. They surround them in swirling clouds, the colours deeper and more vibrant nearer the skin, fading to translucent mist around a foot from their bodies. Their edges are blurred. They remind me of a young child’s drawing, straying beyond the lines, or a watercolour over pencil, bleeding onto the page. A dull rumbling begins in my ears.

  The man’s aura is a deep, muddy brown, with flashes of bright orange. He resents being passed over for promotion. His mind swirls with the image of a younger man, whose intellectual prowess he feels is no match for his own. His thoughts are not articulated, though, rumbling beneath the surface. All I’m getting from h
im is waves of negative emotion.

  I focus on the tall blonde instead, drawn to the pulsating waves of colour drifting from soft green to dusty crimson, as her thoughts flit from one to another. She’s worrying about what to cook for her dinner date, and which of the two low-cut dresses hanging in her wardrobe he has already seen her in.

  ‘Was it the black, or the red? What did I wear for Sarah’s party last weekend? Was it the black? Surely it must have been. Why would I have worn the red for that? Oh, that’s right, I remember now, I spilled...’

  Her thoughts trail off as she glances from me to Dillon and back. As she takes in Dillon’s powerful, slim physique and arresting angular features, the swirling mist of pent up sexual frustration that surrounds her deepens to a plum colour. Her pupils dilate, her pulse quickens, and her mouth opens.

  “She thinks you’re hot, and I must look like my mother because I’m nothing like you, but I have your skin.” I laugh, giving Dillon her next thought verbatim. If only she knew.

  Their bus arrives, and the two board it, taking their petty concerns with them. I dismiss the brief stab of resentment at their easy lives. and try not to wonder why we bother protecting them. Still, the thought nags at the back of my mind.

  “Now me,” Dillon says, “what am I thinking about?”

  I turn my attention to Dillon. I look for the shimmer in the air around him: nothing. He still just looks like Dillon. He’s solid and real, with his soul tucked up inside the skin, where it belongs. I can’t do it. The veins in my temple and above my left eye throb. I’ve never been able to read another slayer.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see. Your brain must work different.”

  “Relax, close your eyes.”

  I do and his voice is soft and melodic, relaxing.

  “Open your mind.”

  My head fills with music, a familiar concerto. I imagine sitting at my cello, playing.

  “You play well.”