Chapter Eight
…A clean slate…
Words whispered around him in the miasma of new opportunity, not quite formed but somehow still intelligible. William floated in the new not-quite-darkness that was the nothing just before something, and waited to be reborn.
…Family…
Things he’d always wanted teased and tempted and reminded him, and his brand new heart formed in his brand new chest. It beat once, twice.
…New chance, new dawn…
New brain cells formed, new synapses, and information filled the memory of his new mind.
…No longer alone…
Love is the same in any realm, Will. It’s time to trust your fate.
They were different, unexpected, and they were the last words Time said to him before he forgot who and what he was and opened his eyes upon the new world Time created for him. William Balthazar Solan was no more. He did not exist here, in this place, in this realm.
Here, he was Will Slate.
A clean slate.
He blinked and sat up straighter. The thought had floated strangely through his head. He was just tired. They’d been up too many hours. He looked up at the sentinel who stood across the safe house room, leaning against the bookshelves with his arms crossed over his chest.
The sentinel’s name was Fort, which was short for Fortescu. He was nearly as tall as Will, but twice as thick. His eyes and skin were dark, his countenance sometimes darker. Sentinels were a tough breed, created that way for a specified purpose. They were made to protect wardens. And that wasn’t an easy job.
Wardens were a hardy breed themselves, peace keepers and bounty hunters for the paranormal, working for the “factions,” the other-worldly, non-human realms in the multiverse. When one of their own went rogue or became dangerous, a leader in a faction – be it werewolf, warlock, fae, or whatever – would contact and pay the wardens to deal with the situation.
Sometimes they were asked to bring someone in. Sometimes they were asked to kill them outright. Every single time though, it was dangerous. And sometimes it got deadly. That was where sentinels came in.
Sentinels possessed the unique ability to hear their wardens’ calls for help. They also possessed the ability to deal with nearly any damage dealt to them by paranormal creatures, and most importantly, they could heal most paranormal wounds. What they couldn’t deal with was human-made damage or wounds, ironically. Which was why most of them tended to lean toward a larger physique: what nature hadn’t given them, they would give themselves. Fort, for instance, was a master martial artist.
One famous sentinel, Ashrim, was reputed to be so adept at meditative ritual, he could escape a bullet. This kind of reaction time was impossible, even with transporting, but numerous tales of Ash doing exactly that abounded. When asked, he claimed he was simply taking advantage of blind sides and speed. But Will had his doubts. He was pretty sure that in the same way Fort took advantage of physical enhancement, Ash was taking advantage of the magical and had become a magic user himself.
Will wearily sighed and addressed his sentinel. “Tell us again.”
Fort smiled a wide smile, shook his head, and pulled out a chair at the table. “You boys need more sleep.”
“We’re coming off a tough job,” said Liam, Will’s cousin. “Cut us some slack.”
Liam sported short dark blond hair that was a touch longer on top and buzz-cut on the sides. He had a model’s chin, but was half a foot shorter than Will. Not that he was short – Will was just tall. Liam was stocky and hard, and fast as a whip in a fight. His eyes were a lot like Will’s, shades of green that changed depending on what he wore or what mood he was in. Right now, they were cloudy; that’s how Will would describe them. Liam had been three beers in when their sentinel had popped into existence in their living room, and his fourth beer was safely entombed in his right hand.
Now he pulled a chair out at the same table beside Will and spun it around, sitting down on it backward. He always did that when he was riding the border between buzzed and bombed. He was a warden too, and Fort served as sentinel for the both of them. Across the paranormal factions, it was often joked that Fort had the hardest sentinel job of all, watching over those two. They were rather infamous for getting into trouble. “But we did it.” Liam nodded at his cousin and smiled a proud, lopsided grin.
Will returned the gesture, then looked up at Fort again. “You want us to find a woman.”
Fort laughed heartily, his massive barrel chest filling with the sound as if he had his own echo chamber. “You also need coffee. And yes,” he replied. “But not just any woman.”
“Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out,” said Liam, rubbing his eyes.
Fort sighed heavily and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees to lace his thick hands together between them. “Her name is Helena Dawn.”
A new dawn.
Will’s brow furrowed.
Liam said, “You called her the Promised One.”
Promised One. Will’s mind flashed, as if it had been dark and someone had struck flint and steel within its vast black expanse. But the flash was gone as quickly as it had come.
Fort nodded. “At least one of you was listening. Like I said, her name is Helena, but in sentinel circles, she’s been referred to as the Promised One for countless generations. To be honest, we didn’t really think she was real. She’s sort of a legend.”
Will silently processed. He was forming an image in his mind; he couldn’t stop it. He wondered whether it was at all accurate, and why he was forming it in the first place.
Fort looked down at his hands as he talked. “We’d always been told she would be beautiful.” He shrugged. “That was a given. She’s supposed to be the ‘gift’,” he said, making the quotation mark sign with his fingers, “that makes everything square between the Storyteller and Cain. So of course she would be beautiful.” He shook his head and his gaze drifted. “But I never expected….” He laughed, unable to come up with the right words. “Well, I never expected her.”
The Storyteller was what the people of the realms called the creator, the maker, the one who had architected everything and everyone in the multiverse. None of them had any idea whether the Storyteller was male or female, or what he or she looked like. They only knew that before there were stories, books, and legends written down or shared – there was nothing. Before words, there was no way to share ideas. There were barely ideas to share.
Hence, all of creation was credited with the one who made those words. The original one. The first story teller: the Storyteller.
Will thought back to the stories he’d been told over the span of his life. One of the most striking was of course the tale of Cain and Abel, the vampire brothers. The Storyteller created all of the factions and species in the realms, from human to werewolf to gargoyle to fae and on and on. Long ago, before the factions and division of the realms, the Storyteller created the first two vampires. They were created as a pair to keep one another company until the Storyteller finished creating the rest.
Long standing legend held Abel as the “good” brother, the kind and decent brother, determined to champion a species of vampires who lived in symbiotic peace with another of the Storyteller’s creations, humans. Cain… was the other one.
Cain didn’t want peace with the humans. He simply thought of them as humans now thought of cattle and chickens. They were fodder and little more. When Abel would not see his side, Cain murdered his brother, taking his head and writing the history of vampires then and there. Due to Cain’s betrayal, the centuries and millennia to come would paint vampire lore red, taint it with darkness, and forever frame the vampire as one of the Storyteller’s most dangerous designs.
For this fateful atrocity, Cain had been imprisoned by the Storyteller in a solitary and empty realm, alone. In the dark.
He’d been there for millennia. The time that had lapsed between the moment of his imprisonment and now was frankly immeasurable. The problem was, he’d been strong going in. Now? After all this time? Well, what did anyone need in order to get better at something? Practice. And what do you need for practice? Time and nothing else to do with it.
Time, in essence, was very much on Cain’s side. Rumor had it that since his incarceration, he’d learned to astral project, in a manner of speaking. In doing so, he was now able to enter the minds of certain individuals in realms outside his. Every now and then, someone would come along who claimed that Cain had been in their heads. They could be any manner of species, from Nightmares to Akyri to human, but they all had one thing in common. Up to that point, these people would always be the ones others considered reasonable. They were level-headed, fair, non-judgmental, kind. And then boom! They were whack-jobs shooting up department stores or running people over in the streets.
Authorities wrote these people off. But if it was all real and Cain was more than just a story, then who knew what other tricks the First Vampire had up his sleeves by now?
“So, you’ve seen her?” asked Liam. He leaned forward a little, draping his arms over the top of the chair back.
Fort’s eyes grew wide and he nodded. “Oh yeah. You could say that.”
Will closed his eyes. He was getting a headache for some reason. “If she’s real, then Cain is too,” he said softly, mulling over the realization.
“Oh believe me boys, Cain is real. And he’s ready to get the hell out of his prison.”
And that settled that. The story of the First Vampires was real. All those poor fuckers who’d claimed he was in their head were telling the truth after all.
Liam shook his head. “Fort, what is the deal with her? I mean, why would the Storyteller give someone to Cain?”
“No shit,” said Will. His voice had an edge to it that it normally didn’t have. “A living, breathing person. Who the hell gives a person to another as a gift?”
“And to someone who killed his brother, no less,” finished Liam. “What’s the point?”
“According to the legend, the Storyteller later felt that by design, he set Cain up to fail. He created Cain first. When Abel was made next, Cain in his imperfection was jealous and felt threatened. Then Abel had all these ideals –”
“Ideals that would further limit the vampires and hence further threatened Cain,” said Will.
“Exactly.” Fort nodded. “The Storyteller hadn’t considered this at first. To rectify the mistake, Abel was resurrected at once.” Fort shrugged. “The Second Vampire is out there right now somewhere under cover, making his own life. But Cain had already committed the act and needed punishment. He was imprisoned, and he’s been there ever since. In short, the Storyteller wanted him to learn a lesson, see if it might smooth out the rough spots in his character.
But the Teller didn’t feel eternity in isolation was fair, especially given Abel wasn’t even dead any longer. So it was laid down that one day in the far future, a Promised One would arrive. That would be Helena Bonaventure Dawn. If she willingly chose to join Cain, the First Vampire would be forgiven for his crime and released back into the world, because surely that meant Cain had redeemed himself.”
“So… she’s like a living, breathing litmus test for evil?” asked Liam.
Fort made a bewildered sound. “I know. It’s messed up. What’s worse is that if he gets his hands on her, whether she willingly chooses him or not, he’ll be set free. Given Cain’s continued reputation, it’s clear he hasn’t changed his mind about humanity or how vampires should behave, and he’s grown ten-fold in power. So, this would be bad.”
“He hasn’t learned anything if he’s breaking into people’s minds,” added Will.
“No, he hasn’t,” agreed Fort. “Except that he wants a whole hell of a lot of revenge for the last several thousand years. But what’s done is done; the Storyteller set the wheels of this event in motion long ago. It’s fated to happen and Helena has come into being. So now we just have to stop all hell from breaking loose. Literally.”
It’s fated to happen.
Fated…
Will frowned at the words that floated through his mind. It was happening a lot, phrases and words echoing in the chambers of his brain as if he’d heard them before, just recently – and they were important.
But Fort continued. “So a few select sentinels have been chosen to protect Helena from Cain. Keep her safe – keep him locked up. That’s why I’m here. And that’s what you two are going to help me do.”