A fabled wall, marking the territory of the werewolves and adorned with the severed skull of a once great alpha, stands between Natalya and her prey.
When she finds the body of Anesa, her beloved mentor, she is determined to hunt down the vampire r...
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Five years later
The fabled castle was near. Anesa could see where it stood, silhouetted high upon a mountain crag on a winding staircase of crumbling stone. It lay in the heart of the great forests of Valwood, shrouded in mystery and a long lost symbol of man's journey into the peaks.
She was still miles away from it, but all of the surrounding trees stood in the mountain's shadow. She knew that the foreboding citadel was adorned with gargoyles and turrets that seemed to disappear into the rising mist and reappear with the patterns of the weather. A fence, black wrought iron, encircled the castle, rising and falling with the contours of the land and hidden in places by looming pines. She was not near enough to see these details, but she could envision them clearly even though she had never once traversed the great steps into its stony walls. She knew because it was her destiny to know and to pass all she knew to the next vampire huntress.
Anesa thrust her walking stick into the ground and leaned heavily against it. She rested a moment, her breathing slightly ragged in the late summer breeze. With the onset of old age, her strength and stamina had been diminished, but her mind, it seemed, only grew sharper in defiance. The woods were beautiful, and she could not help but notice the way the sun cast brightly colored rays through the gaps in the trees, outlining the green foliage in glowing amber.
She pressed onwards. She did not need to rely on the walking stick as heavily as she had before her brief respite, and gradually her breathing slowed to a normal rate. The sun began to die, and dusk fell. She was making good time.
Anesa felt a gradual warming at her neck. The dark forest was saturated in topaz as the amulet she wore brightened, illuminating the trees with its yellowish light. She slowed again, this time not out of weariness but out of instinct, borne of the deer that knows a wolf pack is trailing her scent. The vampire she had been tracking was near.
Her ears strained in their quest to dissect every call of the bird or drone of an instinct for some more sinister source. Her icy blue eyes shifted to each side, scanning each rock, tree, and bush for movement. She did not feel fear, but her heart beat quicker in anticipation.
Anesa heard him before she saw him. But as the snapping of twigs grew louder and a subtle hissing like a many-headed viper seemed to fill the air, she realized she had walked into an ambush. The vampires were closing in, and by the sounds of it, there were at least four of them.
The elderly woman withdrew the stake that had been strapped to her thigh beneath her clothing, abandoning the walking stick. Five vampires approached at every angle. She could not possibly face them all, but she circled anyway, not wishing to show any of the creatures her back.
Their mental nudges to drop her stake or forfeit the amulet were easily pushed aside, and she used almost no energy in defying their efforts to seduce her mind.
At the signal of whom Anesa presumed to be the leader, a sibilation that was strangled with thirst, the vampires attacked simultaneously. Anesa responded with reflexes honed by years of training and enhanced by the magic of her amulet, wielding her stake like a sword and plunging it into the unfortunate heart of the first fledging that had raised his fangs to her. Fledglings they must have been, for they lacked respect for the huntress and fear of her pendant and weapons.
