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  The Vampire’s Hourglass

  Copyright © 2014 by Shayne Leighton

  ISBN: 978-1-61333-757-8

  Cover art by Shayne Leighton

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC

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  The Of Light and Darkness Series by Shayne Leighton

  Of Light and Darkness – The Vampire’s Daughter

  The Vampire’s Reflection

  Also in the Of Light and Darkness Series

  The Anatomy of Vampires: Volume One

  By Alistair Vlain

  The Vampire’s Hourglass

  Of Light and Darkness – Book Three

  By

  Shayne Leighton

  “We mustn’t speak of nightmares here, girly. Evil feeds on ’em, don’t ya know it.”

  ~ Mr. Třínožka

  The Vampire’s Reflection, Chapter Four

  ~DEDICATION~

  Dedicated to my readers.

  Thank you so much for believing in the magic of this story.

  And to my family.

  Thank you for continuing to believe in my kind of magic.

  You are the true inspiration for this story.

  Prologue

  Francis

  I sat in silence, the memory of Valek’s harsh cries still stabbing at my eardrums. Lion’s cries. I had not anticipated what his induction ceremony would entail. My ceremony had been vastly different, for the Elders needed nothing from me.

  For Valek’s induction, I was the messenger, sent to usher Valek through the Abelim city gates.

  The Parliament never skimped on luxury; the carriage that had brought us into the underbellies of Prague was lush, the inside covered in fine indigo-colored satin. There were more than enough cushions to throw around, each embellished with a scrawling P in the center, done in silver thread. The fabrics were imported, no doubt, from far areas of the globe even I, in all my worldliness, had never visited. The curtains did nothing to shield any sort of light from the windows, hung in layers of pellucid tulle, and even the ornate lines of the handles, which matched Prague’s baroque façade, were sterling. But, of course, I would notice these superfluous details. Valek could have given a damn and half.

  The coach was propelled by six demon beasts like the ones Valek and Sarah had created only weeks ago—horses injected with the same dark curse rampant in our own bodies.

  On the way to the underground city of heathens, the conversation between us was one sided, and misery draped his near-perfect features. I attempted to distract him from the thoughts of the feeble and seemingly defenseless Charlotte he’d left back in the forest clearing with the stranger—with Nikolai, and the other misfit monsters.

  As we traveled on through the dim streets, the cartwheels clattering over the cobblestones, I watched Valek’s eyes, lost and distant somewhere between here and Hell. I attempted to ignore the images replaying in his mind like a broken record. It was enough to see the bloodied, dying girl once. These visions were only starting to make me salivate, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful, so I attempted to focus on my own thoughts.

  Charlotte had made her own decision. She did not want him to stay. Valek needed to remind himself of that. I had hopes he would forget the girl once he was at home with me. At home in the Dark City of Abelim.

  Yet however distant Valek strayed from her, the more obsessed he became. His thoughts were relentless as he fantasized over again about Lusian’s heinous acts and the sort of revenge Valek would seek. She would not suffer in vain, he’d decided.

  During those weeks Valek had spent in the Dark City without her, his cogs had been turning. For the first time since I’d known him, he frightened me.

  The initiation ceremony to induct him into the Parliament was complicated—painful, even to those of us who were spectating. Valek had been merely a ghost of himself the night he arrived with me. The Elders greeted him lavishly with gifts, overflowing bottles of the purest blood, and the best quarters, but he barely took notice.

  Cicero, the previous liege, greeted us in a marble and onyx hall that seemed too impossibly large and tall to fit anywhere under the earth. In fact, everything about the way Abelim was erected seemed impossible. The caverns around the capital palace were immense structures of residences and odd, dangerous-looking little shops carved into the very stalagmites, quartz, and stone.

  The dim lights about the under-Earth megalopolis were nothing other than bewitched enchantments similar to the ones Sarah liked to create—ghostly-white orbs floating about the chilled air. They cast phantasmal reflections on the dark surface of the black river flowing along the pathways snaking under high-vaulted caves. Walking through those dismal passages, one could hear a distant plummeting of water from a fall situated somewhere in the shadowed abyss and the screeching of bats.

  There was no warmth. There was neither humanity nor the sounds of throbbing pulses and delicious rusty- iron smells. The place was a crypt with only the cold scents of wet algae on stone and the musty, cursed creatures forced to an eternity in darkness.

  We followed the envoy called Milo, robed in dark suede and shimmering silver, as he led Valek and me into the capital. Every member of Parliament behaved as lavishly as they dressed, and they indulged in all of the opulent things I loved so well. Fine clothing. Fine furnishings. Pure, hot blood. Elaborate ceremonies and celebrations. I belonged with them. Valek did not. It was disheartening, but I knew he only belonged in one place, however woebegone it was then.

  He seemed barely present during his first night in the Dark City. The only time Valek’s consciousness found him was when a few of the highest Elders splayed and strapped him over a marble slab in the center of some other large room, this one with stone floors separated and uneven. Small rivers and pools of glistening water circulated around where we stepped, lapping over the smooth boulder faces. I cringed at the notion of my boots getting wet.

  Curious markings were etched deep into the walls, too, all conjoined b
ut somehow forming individual symbols until they met at the far wall and disappeared behind a grand four-story effigy of Lilith. Lodged within her stony heart was an ancient hourglass cradled by more sterling fixtures that swirled around the ballooned glass and stone carvings. It seemed less an hourglass and more of a work of art, for within the elaborate silver designs covering its mechanical gears, precious stones were embedded, glimmering in the dim light.

  Of course, time had encased the structure with dust and cobwebs, but, even so, I considered it hauntingly lovely. Red grains of sand from behind the glass plummeted to a mountainous pile in the bottom half with each passing moment. I understood the sand symbolically represented blood and the passing of life. Lilith’s marble eyes stared coldly over Valek writhing on the pedestal, surrounded by some whirling blue streams of magic I’d never seen before. Dark sorcery, for sure.

  Ophelia, Cicero’s sister, moved forward up the crude steps and tore Valek’s shirt from his body. With a wicked glint in her eye, she watched as a few of the others continued with the part of the induction that was a surprise, even to me. I would never have agreed to fetch him if I’d known, for his pain from that night is so branded into my memory.

  Cold! I gasped. The mental wave of ice struck me from behind. I should not have tuned so intently into his mind. Valek’s thoughts revealed to me he hadn’t felt as cold in decades. The sensation knocked the wind from even my own chest and I shook my head, attempting to calm myself so I might continue to study what they were doing to him.

  Valek’s eyes darted about the room, looking at each unfamiliar face peering down at him. He was looking for me. Looking for me to save him like I’d done so many times before. I could hear the desperation in his mind. But, this time, I was barred. This had to happen. It was something he needed to endure if he wanted to avenge Charlotte in the way he imagined. And, if he wanted to win the war against the Regime once and for all, he needed to obtain the sort of power the Parliament planned to give him.

  Cicero smiled and said, “It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Parliament coven, dear friend,” then injected something deep into Valek’s left forearm.

  He wailed with the pain, his back arching as his head smashed against the impossible strength of the granite slab beneath him. The stone crunched with the ferocity of the impact from the back of his skull. I gritted my teeth. His pain swelled through my mind. It was all I could do not to collapse with it. As his eyes swelled with blood, I ,too, felt the violent sting begin at the bridge of my nose, traveling up to my throbbing temples. My heart hammered in time with his temporary life springing forth in my chest.

  Burning!

  Horrible burning sweltered from his arm, quickly to the center of his body and through the rest of his limbs. And I was connected to every terrible moment of it. I could hear every thought over his garbling cries, feel every ounce of terror, grinding my jaw as I looked on.

  “This is for your betterment, Valek,” I heard Cicero say from somewhere in the space around him, his voice solid and satisfied. “And ours, too. You’ll be linked with us forever. An Elder with the same powers we all possess. And with something more. Great responsibility.” His slanted gaze cast up to Lilith then, his grin spreading as he eyed the hourglass.

  It had been one of the worst experiences Valek had ever endured, and, in turn, myself also. And I could not help but think it was somehow entirely my fault.

  But there we were. It had been several evenings since Valek had been made liege of the Parliament, and, for the first time, my superior. It was not quite so lonely down there in Abelim with him, however miserable he was. Barred together again, at last, because the fates had commanded it of us. Though I was forced to continue to admire him once again from a distance. I was left with only my mere fantasies about how less lonely this eternal existence could be if he ever reciprocated what I felt for him. And, worst of it all, he heard these reveries play out in my mind because we all possessed the same irritating access to each other’s thoughts. Like a scratched record, it repeated over and over, and he was forced to listen to my pain nightly.

  The torture was both his and mine. My only consolation was I was made deaf to his vexations because, on the night of his initiation, he had changed. The others sank him even deeper into the darkness than I ever could. He became one of them. An Elder. In charge. More powerful than I could have ever dreamed of him becoming. His mind became a secret to me, just as the rest of theirs were, guarded by curious witchcraft—a bewitched pendant they all wore around their throats. Which was a good thing because just seeing the pain painted on his face night after night was enough for me to have to endure.

  Above all else, Valek was my friend. He had made mistakes. A lot of them. But I knew his heart, however dark and dead, was a good one.

  I sat by the fire—the only bit of light and warmth in this thriving slate society, an ancient, unopened vein hidden beneath the most beautiful city in the world. Hidden beneath Prague. The secret the Golden City concealed just below its surface was but a dismal, forgotten crypt. Not even Occult creatures knew where Abelim was or how to access it. It was a place of eternal shadows, just as Vladislov promised when he condemned me here. And dark it was, though there was something about what Vladislov did that did not seem a true punishment. Not entirely. Not quite. Though my surroundings were as depressing as ever, and the place could seriously have done with some redecorating, I had never felt safer from the impending danger we all knew was coming. Being down here meant security. Safety from the light and from the Regime.

  Whatever was left of it.

  In all three-hundred-and-a-half years of being what I was, I had crossed countless humans as they clumsily hobbled in and out of my existence. For the short time I encountered each of them, I learned more about who they were than they probably even knew about themselves. It’s amazing what one might find in the behavior of another when that person knew they were about to die. I was responsible for each of their ends, watching their lives cut short before my eyes and under my lips. It allowed access to the deepest, darkest parts of each of them.

  Pure, unadulterated bloodlust was what I lived for. The very smell of putrid, human fear excited me so. The salty ambrosia washing down my throat and the sounds of pleading. One, after another, after another. Sometimes multiples in one evening. Men. Women. Children. I broke necks like humans broke bread at supper.

  I lacked complete and total moral compassion for them and did not think twice about the nightly hunts. Ah, the wind on my skin. I seduced each of them and drew them in with my unstoppable charm, for I was the perfect predator, fashioned by the Devil himself to drink up mortality. And out of all of these lives I had taken, none of them haunted me thus.

  None. Except one.

  It is not because I have any conscience to speak of or possess the capacity to feel guilt or empathy. I like to think I lost those abilities the evening I lost my own human life. It was so long ago, and I barely remember anything about my human self.

  Admitting I listen to any sort of theoretical angel of reason perched on my shoulder would make me soft. Weak. So weak. I haven’t been weak in centuries. Guilt, sympathy, and empathy are all three very complicated women I’d never dance with.

  The only reason this one particular soul infected me so deeply was because he absolutely refused to break. Even against all odds, and while I was literally exhausting the life from him, there was a strength which lived on in his eyes and in the sound of his pulse that I knew would never fade. Even when his body ultimately went cold.

  I never intended to make the choice for him, though it was almost like he commanded it of me. Demanded he become this way. It was simple fact. He was made to be a Vampire. Destined to be one with the dark gift and the divinely damned.

  Born to die.

  I will never forget the night I killed him. I will never forget the purity of the snowfall, the chill, numb and un-affecting to me, wrapped in its pure blanket, as I lay in the gutters of Prague. A city steeped in
magic and intrigue, coddled with the cold and the darkness where I belonged. I was condemned to it and thrown out of the protective shelter of the Regime Palace walls.

  Like Charlotte, I, too, was once a mortal adored by the magic, though when I chose to give up my mortality for a life among the damned, my lover decided I had betrayed him in some personal way by joining the darkness.

  The light turned its back on me, and I on the light. Without Vladislov, I was lost for nearly a century and a half.

  Until that night.

  I sat in those inky streets that snaked through all the winter white. I waited for one of them—any of those mortals—to stumble upon me and feel mercy. Under the moonless sky, they wouldn’t have figured out what kind of monster I was until they drew nearer. And by that point, it would have been too late for them.

  I eyed the people from my distance as they ambled aimlessly, and possibly drunken, along the cobblestone streets of Old Town. Mediocre bands played on. Their instruments screeching on the wind made me wince, and paired with the clamor of some clumsy conversation happening too close to me, made me curl my claws around my ears. Sewage filtered up from the gutters, and paired with the roasting turkey legs and other greasy kiosk fare, it was enough to make anyone’s stomach turn. I was surrounded.

  Loud. Obnoxious. Fat. Greedy. Selfish. To err is human, and that loathsome picture was exactly what was depicted before me. It was curious why it was their blood I craved. Interesting to me why our kind did not crave to consume the life of beings more divine even than us. But nothing like that existed. There were no archangels to attack in the streets, and even the blood of Christ was actually nothing more than cheap bottles of wine shelved in the cabinets of Catholic churches. To consume the power of something greater so we might become stronger—now that was an idea! What was it about the clumsy human that beckoned us so? What was it about their blood which called for us more than heroin called to an addict? I lay in the gutters for hours, pondering this, during the long winter’s night.