The Dirigible Airship Disaster Read online

  Annoyance gnawed at me for losing my control earlier. But Lucius, that damn, mad king. He lived! Flying devils in hell, I would end him soon, but first I would woo her, ply her and bring her closer to me yet.

  The opening between the door jamb and the frame beckoned and whispered to me like a mother’s call across the foggy trenches of France. I pushed the door open with the edge of my talon, happiness soaring through my veins as I stepped across the threshold.

  Inside, the rook—I do believe the same one from the pines outside the front door—fluttered from the windowsill, regarding me with a burning, yellow eye. My happiness turned to ice, and the shaggy bird gave a sharp caw, bouncing from the windowsill to a dingy marble console beneath a cracked mirror.

  The mirror held no reflection.

  The zing of metal strings engaging a projectile sounded throughout the room. At once, my heart was pierced by the sharp end of a stake of indeterminable wood, and my consciousness was no more.

  Chapter 4

  Samuel Quartermaine

  Tiodora Anfani, rogue witch of the Coven of the Alpine Manticore, ran the edge of her black fingernail upon the links in the runed, silver chain that held Lucius Marquis; my enemy, my undeterred assailant who had followed me through the centuries and over at least one ocean. I struck a match against the sole of my boot, igniting my cigar. Thick smoke filled the crooked, one-room shack on the edges of the bayou where crocodiles thrashed, ibises posed like statues and bullfrogs croaked in offensive choruses.

  Tiodora had been in Bonaventure, procuring a helping of usnea from the back of a fallen soldier’s skull for some macabre magick when she heard the altercation between Henderson and I. She’d given me her cloak, rushed me to her hideaway shack in the swamp, and armed me with an enchanted hickory stake. After fetching Lucius, I’d returned to the shack, and with round, tear-filled eyes, she told me everything about her megalomaniacal high priestess’s horrible ambition to enslave humanity. And I believed her. Her sincerity was blatant, and as the son of a witch, I was immune to any of her enchantment if she dared try it on me. Since the incident with Coldiron, Tiodora was my only ally.

  Lucius Marquis’s ghastly, pale nose twitched as I puffed a ring of smoke into his stupid, pinched face. The hickory stake protruded from his hollow chest, a ring of dark blue blood kissing the wood where it met his cold flesh. He would be infuriated at the state of his shirt. I smirked, puffing another ring in his face, and gave him a sharp slap across the cheek.

  The rage inside me only grew. I could never quieten it. It was an insatiable demon that lived within me, eternally hoping I’d offer it sustenance. A groan sounded from Lucius’s throat, and Tiodora’s fingers wrapped around my wrist before I raised my hand again.

  The dark sheen of her hair reminded me of Elyse. The memory of its softness and how my soul became as lost as my fingers as I wound my greedy hands through the thick locks.

  “He should be out for as long as the stake remains,” Tiodora said before tilting her chin. “That is if you don’t rouse him by other means.” She released my wrist.

  I took another drag, and tipped the ash to the dirt floor. “I would never. Does your lack of trust in me mean we aren’t even friends, Tiodora?”

  The corner of her lip lifted in a half-grin and she scoffed, turning toward the rickety door. “I’m risking my neck for you.”

  I grinned and shook my head, tipping the ash once more. It sizzled as it hit a tiny puddle of mud gathering in a dip in the packed dirt. “Not only me, the entire world. Why, Tiodora, my rogue witch, you are a hero. Children shall sing your praises. Men of old shall glorify you through the centuries—”

  “You’re insufferable.” She cut me off and smoothed the hem of her leather vest.

  My grin faded. Someone else had always called me insufferable. The memory of that spark in her green eyes when she said it hit me in the gut like a shot to the heart. I took another drag and exhaled the smoke at Lucius’s feet.

  “I must procure a crocodile’s head.” Tiodora turned, opening the door, and stared back at me through the opening. Stars twinkled behind the curly, wild wisps of her hair, and the melody of the swamp boomed inside the shack.

  “You’re ready to go tonight?” I asked. I’d been hoping for more time alone with Lucius. To have him so close, and so vulnerable had me happier than expected. Perhaps I could pierce the tender skin beneath his claws with the splinters of a dry reed, or shave off his disgusting mane, or sew his eyelids shut. Tiodora’s stare prickled the side of my face, and I quit looking at Lucius like a salivating dog about to tear off a trespasser’s limb.

  She nodded. “The sooner you chop that head off for me, the sooner we can be done with him,” she said, jutting her chin in the direction of our unconscious charge.

  I cleared my throat, and pulled the machete from the scabbard of my boot. As my fingers gripped the cool hilt, I took another glance over at Lucius. Bile and hatred and disappointment that I was compelled to return him to the Scion Hive so soon burned within my stomach, and I slammed the door behind me as the dark, brackish swamp swallowed Tiodora and I into the night.

  Chapter 5

  Talcott Henderson

  A vicious sting, a deep suctioning sound filled my ears and the hollow cavity of my chest as some unseen hand pulled the stake from my heart and consciousness returned to me.

  I was chained at the wrists, topless, watching the hole over my heart slowly fill in with slippery, midnight-blue tissue and taut new skin. It crackled like logs on a fire and all evidence of my recent assault faded, disappearing, before I lifted my gaze.

  My captors had me in the center of a dais that was shiny and round with jagged edges like a new guinea, and I was crouching with aching shoulders and pinched wrists in the very center of a dark amphitheater. Torches burned at the edges before rows of seats jutted up to an earthen ceiling, and the musty, cold and wet smell of an underground cavern filled my nostrils. Panic coursed through me—I was in the heart of the Scion Hive, in their secret, centuries-old meeting place, deep underground and hidden away from any prying, human eyes.

  I began to straighten and pull at my chains, and they jingled like the mocking laugh of a spotted hyena. Something radiantly cold, primordial even, like how the sea must have felt at the beginning of the eon, radiated from the dark edge beyond the torches.

  “Abaddon,” I whispered a weak plea, hissing from my chapped and trembling lips.

  Nothing answered, nothing stirred but the radiant cold. The torches flickered.

  “Talcott Henderson.” A deep voice spoke from the recesses of the amphitheater, although its direction was imperceptible.

  My gaze darted to and fro across the dark edge of the dais. Was it above, below, or behind? I could not discern from whence it came, but its master was unmistakable—the great and terrifying Abaddon, king of the undead, commander of hellfire and ruler of all the vampire hoard. He would have my head.

  The words poured from my lips like shattering glass. “I did not kill him, Your Honor. He is alive, I swear it!”

  “Silence,” Abaddon spoke in a chilling, quiet monotone.

  My mouth slammed shut and I bit my tongue. One cannot kill their maker, and if Samuel was gone along with Lucius, that left me to take the fall for them both. The realization that I was the unwitting sacrifice, the innocent, the wrongly blamed party in this current turn of events had my fear searing itself with a heaping coat of rage. The irony of what was happening filled my hollow soul with a bitter, overwhelming poison. I closed my eyes for a moment, grimacing.

  Ahead of me, two torches flickered, then extinguished, and the smoke which lingered from their wicks was pushed away to the outer edges of the dais, like some unseen force commanded it to avert itself. A powerful swell of frigid artic air washed over me, and he appeared; Abaddon, the great king.

  His eyes of smoke – all white, milky and hoary like a crystal ball, their sight striking a primitive fear into my thrashing spirit—were the first to appear a
mongst the shadows. Although my insides trembled, I was compelled by his awesome sight to remain still. He entered the edge of dais, floating almost like a ghost, his steps a silent killer in the dark bowels of the earth where none could ever hear my screams. Cloaked in a sweeping robe of royal purple, his hair was white as his eyes, and his skin was a yellowish-gray, like even the weak light of the moon hadn’t touched it for centuries. But, what was most unnerving is he had no scent, only that cold, invisible arctic blast that seemed to linger and waft from his cadaverous frame.

  All creatures, alive or not, possessed an olfactory presence. After many decades in which I commanded this supreme faculty, it hardly struck me anymore. The smell of the living and the dead was as unnoticeable as the hair upon my jowls, but the lack of it could not be ignored, and was unfitting as a bone out of joint. Abaddon’s inodorous, glacial being turned my bowels to liquid.

  With my head bent, he came upon me, and I stared at his bare feet, willing myself not to plead with useless tears of blood, and thus mar the body of my undead king. The flesh of his toes was a shade of mauve to match his robe.

  “It is not your maker whom I seek from you.” He placed his hand beneath my chin, and jerked it up with a quick and powerful thrust. I swallowed hard as I felt a bone in my neck crack from his preternatural strength, and my eyes watered from the pain which radiated throughout my skull and down my spine like spilled pitch. His face became blurred, tinged a dark pink through the bloody tears that threatened to pour from my eyes and down my chin.

  “The girl,” he whispered, his cold, unscented breath fanning across my face.

  “I, I don’t—”

  He dropped my chin with a swift flick of his wrist, twisting my jawbone at an unnatural angle. I groaned as another terrible agony assaulted my skull. With a soft sweep of his long robes, he turned, pacing once, and returned to face me.

  I kept my head bent, and the bones in my neck and the aching tendon of my jaw began to crackle and snap back into place as his toes curled below my face like a grasping osprey’s claws.

  “You know nothing,” he spat, sucking in a breath like a mountain gust. “I see straight through you, underling Henderson. Your guile is thin and flippant as a funereal shroud.”

  I clenched my healing jaw, sending a dagger straight into my brain. My hands shook within their chains.

  “Your maker has been trying to return the Nephilim to their thrones, to my throne.”

  “Your Honor, I—” I began to plead with him, to convince him that I was unaware of Lucius’s deceit, but Abaddon placed his cold hand to the back of my head, much like Lucius had only a day before. Abaddon crushed my skull between his fingers with nary an effort; my bones were as weak to him as brittle chalk.

  “You will remain silent.”

  The jelly in my skull pulsated from the pressure of his tightening fingertips.

  “I know you were far too occupied with your own futile ambitions to notice much about your maker. For your lack of observation and your naivety, you must prove your worth to the Scion Hive by ending what Lucius has started.”

  “Yes, your Honor,” I whispered, my vision hazy from the agony in my head. I could scarcely discern what Abaddon meant.

  “You will close the wormhole with the blood of your love.”

  My brow furrowed. “But, Lucius murdered my love nearly a century ago, your Honor.”

  Abaddon scoffed, and his breath was like a door shutting upon a crypt in bleak mid-winter. “Don’t be a willful idiot, Henderson. You will take Elyse Delafayette to the opening of the wormhole at the peak of the Harvest Moon. You will sacrifice her with your own hand and cement my place as your king. That is, if you wish to save your own skin.”

  My blood congealed at his words.

  He laughed without mirth, like the boom of distant thunder. “For what kind of vampire would you be without your breathtaking selfishness?” With a pinch of his fingers, he crushed my temples with a distinct ‘pop,’ and fire flooded my brain.

  I yelped, falling to his feet with my nose against the cold, dais floor, my arms outstretched behind me, caught within the jingling chains. I wished to sob, to scream in agony and frustration. Would I ever be free of another’s machinations? I gasped for air, choking as the pain ricocheted around the inside of my skull, and my arms went numb.

  The cold began to recede as he reached the end of the dais, but a new scent filled my flaring nostrils which dripped with my blue and acrid blood. A muddy, pungent smell, like rot in the grave, and a half-dead condition.

  As the bones in my temples stitched themselves together in a stinging agony, I willed myself to lift my head. From beneath my blood-stained and sticky lashes, who would appear at the edge of the dais between King Abaddon and the line of torches other than The Quartermaine, and my maker, chained at the neck, wearing a severed crocodile’s head. Enchantment swirled about the pair in tiny, flashing orbs, and Lucius walked an arm’s length behind The Quartermaine with a languid, unsure step. He tottered and swayed like branches in a heavy draft. A crossbow, outfitted with a menacing hawthorn stake, bounced at The Quartermaine’s hip.

  Legions of sulphuric demons, hellfire and dead baby’s breath, was he looking to make a trade of hostages? The thought of what The Quartermaine would do to me at the end of the hawthorn stake caused a ghastly shiver to caress my spine like the touch of a corpse.

  “I believe I have something of yours,” The Quartermaine spoke.

  Abaddon stood still as a cobra before it strikes, and gave a snap of his spindly, white fingers. A pack of white wolves rushed from behind me, growling low, forming a protective circle around the vampire king.

  “He is mine.” Abaddon nodded once, regarding Lucius with his unnerving, milk-white eyes.

  The Quartermaine appeared to shudder, and for a moment, his upper lip curled in repulsion.

  Abaddon gave as short, curt laugh, and Lucius stumbled, teetering in his enchanted daze. “You think to form an alliance with me? For what? To save that simpering waif?”

  The Quartermaine gripped my maker’s chain tight and gave it a swift jerk, pulling Lucius to his knees before Abaddon’s lupine circle. The wolves snarled.

  “That is quite an impressive feat of magick, half-ling.” Abaddon sniffed.

  “Why, thank you.” The Quartermaine gave a deep bow, his nose almost brushing the floor. “There are other ways you can close the portal.”

  “Hm,” Abaddon said, nodding once again. “I will not sacrifice my own. Despite his insubordination, Lucius is still quite useful to me. And it must be a love sacrifice. No one’s loved him since, hm. Well,” Abaddon said, a chuckle in his throat as he stroked his chin. “You ought to know, Sir Quartermaine. What was her name, Therese? Ah yes, Therese Hortense Bellinger.” Abaddon smirked, like the twisting of a dead man’s jaw bone as it rots.

  The Quartermaine’s face grew grave and hard as river stone. The flesh around his eyes tightened.

  “Hm, yes. Mademoiselle Bellinger, the woman whom you both once professed to love. Well, the sting of the guillotine and the unbridled passions of Le Terruer took care of all that. I wonder what she would say about being the catalyst for your rivalry with my Lucius, her memory driving both your wild passions through the centuries.” Abaddon reached down and stroked the back of a wolf, it’s fur bristling as it regarded The Quartermaine’s reaction.

  He merely straightened his suitcoat before clearing his throat. “I suspected as much that you would be unwilling to do away with my oldest friend Marquis. Shame. And him?” The Quartermaine gestured in my direction with a tilt of his head.

  Red filled my sight as my eyes changed to crimson fury. My claws extended, and I longed to tear the flesh from his bones.

  Abaddon laughed, and his breath seemed to fill the dais with a polar wind. The Quartermaine shivered and took a step back.

  “The underling Henderson? Why, do you have any inkling of how utterly, bone-chillingly boring existence gets after enduring it for several millennia? No
, no.” Abaddon tilted his chin, closed his eyes and shook his head with a smirk. He fixed his eyes to The Quartermaine’s face, which now twisted in fear. “The sight of the underling Henderson reluctantly closing the portal with the blood of his insufferable waif-love is the most entertainment I’ll have had since the Civil War.” Abaddon clapped his hands and grinned. His teeth were black, and every single one was a pointed fang, row upon row of vicious, flesh-tearing daggers.

  I could almost hear The Quartermaine’s sluggish, half-dead heart cease. The sight and smell of his disappointment was an exquisite draught in my lungs. Short-lived, however, for now my darling was in terrible danger.

  Abaddon turned quick on his heal within the circle of wolves, lifting a long, lithe, spindly finger to the ceiling. “Now, back to that magick you’ve brought. Only a member of the Coven of the Alpine Manticore can enchant beyond my senses.” He turned, fixating those horrible eyes upon The Quartermaine. “Tell me, did my estranged sister Callista send you?”

  No sooner had his enquiry left his thin lips then the chains upon my wrists fell and I was free. A black licorice scent enveloped me, and a disembodied, clipped, female voice called from the vast and dark ceiling of the cavern.

  “I did not,” she said.

  The wolves began to snarl, but Abaddon was unmoved, and I swore from my unchained spot on the dais floor that he rolled his hoary eyes.

  Warm, tropical breath like candy fanned the edge of my ear, and the female voice whispered, “Bring me the girl.”

  My fingertips began to tingle, sizzle with fear, excitement, the ghost of adrenaline. I remained still to keep from drawing Abaddon’s hideous gaze.

  Abaddon gave a shake of his head. “My security team has become rather complacent it seems.” Abaddon looked from Lucius to Samuel, his lips pursing, before returning his attention to the wolf pack. “I shall have all of your heads,” he hissed at the wolves, who whimpered at first, before lunging at The Quartermaine.