Dawn of the Monster

The second night. A savage blizzard swept across Siberia.

The underground Siberian Shadow base lay 65 feet beneath the eternal ice and snow of the Ural Mountains. It had once been an abandoned Soviet military outpost, since converted into a twisted network of laboratories armored with steel 20 inches thick.

He found the old camp first, two miles from the base, under a thin skin of new snow. Rows of concrete bunkers half sunk into the ground. A rusted watchtower. A fence with its wire long gone, its posts leaning like old teeth.

He went down into one of the bunkers without knowing why. It was a room less than 100 square feet, as she had said, with eight rusted iron frames bolted to the walls. Somebody had scratched numbers into the concrete above each one, and he found 46. Beside it, very small, scratched with something sharp and patient, was 47.

He stood there in the dark for a long time. Then he put his palm flat against the cold concrete between the two numbers, the way she had once pressed hers to a stone wall with him on the other side, and he said a word in a language no one had spoken for 600 years.

Around the base stood 20 mortal mercenaries armed with automatic weapons loaded with silver rounds, along with five perversely modified vampires guarding the gate.

BOOM!

An explosion like a meteor crashed down onto the stone floor. The 20-inch-thick cast-steel gate of the base was blown into tens of thousands of fragments that flew across the valley.

Victor's dark shape walked through the thick gun smoke. He had dropped his usual elegant, aristocratic manner. He wore a black hunting cloak caked with melting snow, and both of his hands were covered in razor-sharp Blood Armor, blazing red like running blood. His eyes had gone past their usual dark red to a blazing red, like a volcano erupting with the most savage killing rage.

"Who the—!?" a mortal gunman shouted, raising his machine gun and firing in bursts.

SHHK!

A dark streak flashed past. The gunman's head flew off his neck before he even caught sight of Victor.

The battle at the Siberian base was a one-sided massacre, nothing like a fair fight.

Victor fought like a monster gone mad. He tore through the gunmen's steel armor and crushed the bones and marrow of the modified vampires. Horrible screams, the crack of breaking bones, and the sharp stench of blood exploded through the cold metal corridors.

He swept through the underground levels one after another. Anyone who got in his way — guard or scientist — was torn to shreds by his Blood Armor.

Victor kicked the door of the central laboratory off its hinges.

Inside the huge laboratory, thick with the smell of chemicals, a big man in a white lab coat under a fur coat was frantically stuffing files into an armored briefcase. He had a hateful, cruel face, and one of his eyes was clouded completely white.

Grigori Volkov.

The butcher of the Siberian Shadow project turned around, his clouded eye bulging as he saw the blood-drenched Pureblood vampire walking toward him.

"Victor Blackwood..." Volkov said, shaking, raising an injection gun loaded with toxin. "What... what are you doing here? That project was shut down back in—"

THUD!

Victor didn't let Volkov finish. He lunged at his top speed, clamped one hand around the butcher's throat, hoisted him into the air, and slammed him down onto a glass lab table. The glass shattered and drove deep into Volkov's back, making him scream in pain.

"The original file on Specimen No. 47," Victor said, bringing his monstrous face down close to Volkov's eyes, his voice rough and so pitiless the butcher couldn't breathe. "And the original harmonizing solution. Hand them over, or I'll pull out every one of your bones one joint at a time over the next 300 years."

Volkov looked into Victor's blazing red eyes, without a trace of humanity in them. He knew Purebloods didn't lie. He raised a trembling finger and pointed at the titanium-clad security safe in the corner of the room:

"In there... everything's in there, the initiating plasma and the decoding documents... Don't kill me!"

Victor walked over to the safe. He didn't need the combination. His Blood Armor-clad hand drove deep into the titanium, and with the strength of a 900-year-old arm, he tore the safe door open like a thin sheet of paper.

Inside was a black leather file marked Specimen No. 47 — Vanya, along with three quartz test tubes holding a shimmering metallic silver liquid that swirled in an eerie way.

Victor carefully took the test tubes and the file and tucked them inside the chest of his cloak.

He turned to look at Volkov, dragging himself across the bloody stone floor. Volkov looked up at him and begged: "I gave you what you wanted! Let me live!"

Victor looked at the butcher who had injected poison into Vanya for eight years, who had stolen her ability to feel gentleness when she was nine. His blazing red eyes narrowed coldly.

"She was the best one," Volkov gasped from the floor. "You understand? The best I ever made. You should be thanking me."

Victor looked down at him for a long moment. "Oh, you'll be thanked," he said. "Just not by me."

"Your life," Victor said quietly, "is hers to take with her own hands."

CRACK!

Victor swung his arm and broke both of Volkov's legs, leaving him completely crippled, and then let him scream his lungs out in the middle of the underground base as it went up in billowing flames.

He walked out through the burning corridors without hurrying. Behind him, the fire found the chemical stores, and the underground base began to come apart floor by floor, and the snow outside was lit orange for miles. He did not look back at it. He had seen enough things burn.

The next morning. Back in the laboratory at Blackwood Castle.

The room was so still you could hear the snowflakes tapping lightly against the windowpane. Vanya still lay there on the granite table, her body cold, with no heartbeat and no breath.

Victor stood in front of the lab table. He carefully drew a measure of original Pureblood from his own heart and mixed it with Volkov's shimmering silver solution in the exact ratio written in the Specimen No. 47 file.

The new compound flared with an eerie reddish-violet light and gave off an intoxicating magical scent.

Victor walked over to Vanya. He knelt on one knee beside her, gathered her slender body up in his trembling arms, and rested her head against his chest. He took the custom platinum syringe and drove the needle straight through the left side of Vanya's chest, injecting the transformation mixture directly into her still heart.

Hssss...

The reddish-violet liquid surged into Vanya's circulatory system.

Victor held her tight. He pressed his forehead to hers, closed his eyes, and whispered the most desperate prayers:

"Come back, Vanya... Please... Come back to me..."

One minute went by.

Two minutes went by.

Five minutes... 10 minutes went by.

The laboratory stayed sunk in a deathly silence. Vanya's skin was still as cold as plaster. No heartbeat rose from her chest. No magical light flared. Her circulatory system was completely still, without the slightest reaction.

Victor held her tighter, his arms shaking uncontrollably.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes.

He counted. He had learned that from her. Seconds, then minutes, then the long, slow minutes after that, each one heavier than the last, like stones being laid one at a time on a man's chest.

He counted her breaths that weren't coming. He counted the beats of his own heart, which were far too loud in the silence. He counted until the numbers stopped meaning anything, and then he kept counting anyway, because it was the only anchor he had left.

Vanya's body began to cool even further. The reddish-violet glow in the syringe dissolved completely into her body without working any miracle at all.

The brutal truth hit Victor's mind like a blade of ice.

It had failed.

Volkov's compound couldn't restart her dead heart. He hadn't been able to save her. He had pushed her into this permanent death with his own hands.

Victor slowly laid Vanya's body back down on the stone table. He dropped his head beside her hand, both hands clutching his head, his whole body convulsing violently. The 900-year-old vampire collapsed completely. A dark, anguished, choking sob rose from deep in his chest and echoed through the cold laboratory — the first true sob, the sob of utter despair, that he had ever let out in nine centuries of existence.

He couldn't stand this room any longer.

Victor staggered to his feet. He turned his back and walked slowly toward the stone door of the laboratory. Every step was as heavy as if he were dragging blocks of granite, and his blazing red eyes blurred with cloudy tears clinging to his lashes. He stepped out into the pitch-dark stone hallway, leaned back against the cold stone wall, and buried his face in his violently shaking hands.

His fingers found the guitar pick in his breast pocket. He held it so hard the edge of it cut into his palm, and he didn't notice the blood until it dripped onto the stone at his feet.

And the very moment his despair hit its peak...

SWISH... WHOOSH!

The air tore with an impossibly sharp sound. A dark shape shot out of the laboratory at a speed that ripped the air apart — 10 times faster than a mortal assassin, as fast as the ghost of a primordial vampire!

SLAM!

Before Victor could react or even open his eyes, the whole of his tall, 900-year-old body had been pinned by a savage force, his back nailed to the granite wall.

A small, slender hand carrying a terrifying, crushing strength clamped the back of his neck and forced his head to one side. The skin of that hand had lost its mortal warmth; it gave off an icy chill, silky smooth and full of Pureblood magic.

And right against Victor's throat, where his pulse was pounding... two sharp, milk-white vampire fangs, only just grown in and bursting with primal killing intent, were pressed against his skin, waiting to sink deep into his vein!

An icy breath, heavy with the smell of newly awakened blood and a faint scent of wisteria, brushed against his ear.

A familiar voice rang out — flat, uncanny, carrying a mocking lilt and a deep love it couldn't hide:

"What are you crying for... Victor? What are you lying to me about this time?"

Victor froze. His blazing red eyes flew wide open.

Vanya stood there. Her usually pale gray eyes now blazed with an eerie reddish-violet light, brilliant and razor-sharp, like a vampire queen just awakened from a thousand years of darkness.

A final word from the author:

If you've read all the way to these last lines, I just want to send you endless love and my deepest gratitude. Thank you for giving so much of your time, your patience, and your heart to walk with me through every breath of this story.

Victor and Vanya's love was never an easy journey. Instead of a gentle, romantic love story, theirs was a violent collision between two souls covered in scars: a lonely 900-year-old vampire, living a thousand years of lies and suffocated by his own power, and an assassin who was robbed of even the ability to feel gentleness when she was still a child.

They made it through the doubts, the survival contracts, and the binding thread of the Blood Bond... until, in the end, what saved them was a choice made of free will, rather than magic or fate. The moment the Blood Bond snapped was the moment real love found its voice.

Thank you for agonizing with me and feeling every desperate but beautiful heartbeat of these two characters. Their journey is only just crossing into a new chapter, darker and more intense than before.

See you in BOOK 2 — where an awakened vampire and her aristocrat will write the sentence for those who stole their lives, and for the pasts that have never been revealed.

With all my love.