Broken Warrior

A Returning

Eirene

Without the resources of the Knights, the time taken between hunts was longer. Now I had to lay low without many resources while whatever local organization of vampires ripped up the area looking for whomever had killed one of their more powerful members. And then I also had to deal with my own healing and finally my own hunting list and travel arrangements. Money wasn't an issue in that sense but governments all over the world had people looking for supernaturals and tracking travel patterns of everyone they could identify as out of place.

I was laying low in a small cottage in the French Alps several weeks after a job, watching the snow fall on the mountain passes while flipping through my pages of notes on the various vampires around the world and what I knew about them. Several names stood out to me and I came to the conclusion that I would have to return to North America, if I wanted to make any headway.

I had not been to the Americas since freeing Rurik and was pretty certain that he would have returned to the only place he was familiar with in this world, giving him space. I had no delusions that my freeing him would absolve me of the guilt of betraying his trust and allowing them to torture him for so long.

If I was being pragmatic, I also wondered if he was even still alive, knowing that the human organization there was hunting supernaturals with an aggressive, evil zeal that saw innocents murdered as often as monsters.

I would have even considered targeting those humans who called themselves Hunters, if I had wanted to tangle with all out war. But I am one person and my rules were simple now that I worked for myself.

I verified the targets. I watched them and gathered my assurances that they really were evil. And I only killed those who I was certain of as being detrimental to the lives and safety of others. I had a few such targets in North America, including one who would be visiting there from Russia. I had not dared look into Carbry Alesky, he had gone near silent in the way of atrocities in the century and a half since I had last hunted him. And even back then, he hadn't been confirmed at doing anything untoward for a long time, essentially since he arrived in the new world.

He was hiding it well now, it seemed. But he was also bound to be well protected and was an extremely formidable fighter himself. I would be seriously debating trying to execute him from a distance, if I could get a chance. There was no shame in the long reach of a sniper rifle when the target was stronger and faster than I was.

Still, I hesitated.

Some part of me was certain that Rurik was across the Atlantic, though I had not heard of him since he had left me in Ireland. Had he disappeared? Died? I did not know, though I hoped that he hadn't lost complete control. I could not face the world if I had turned that man into the very evil I hunted. Perhaps if I completed these targets, I would seek out him and his judgement for reckoning.

I rested for a few more days before I returned to the world. I had whatever documents I needed in the names and nationality that worked for the moment. It was easy to get things when you could convince people of anything you wanted. It was also easy to avoid the biometric scanners that were set up to detect and track supernaturals by slipping through the secure zones and onto the planes I needed to be on. Whether through my training in getting places not normally accessible or my abilities to make humans look the other way and forget that they even did so.

Walking through the passenger terminal, I stopped at a bookstore and smirked as I ran my fingers over a modernized cover of Dracula. Such far fetched ideas of what we were but clear understandings of the evil we were capable of. Though the constant refusal to understand that by separating the woman and removing her from the equation to fight the evil that plagued her, they surely doomed her all the same.