Her Billionaire, Her Wolf(16)

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Then let us put it to the test,” was his reply.

Without warning, her perfect, porcelain features twisted into vulpine lines and her blood red lips peeled back from a mouth that held far too many teeth. There was venom in her gaze as she flew at him like a harpy out of legend.

But the man stood ready. He stood with the confidence of a righteous man, a man of faith.

For thirty years, he had prepared for moments like these. For thirty years, he had swung that blade while hidden deep in the dark, forgotten catacombs of an abbey. Through the tutelage of an old man who had seen far more horrors than any man should ever seen, the boy that he was learned the arts of wielding a blessed sword and that it was nothing less than divine will that guided his hand.

A boy no longer, the man felt the calm that always filled him in this moment, a cool wind that slipped down the corridors of his mind.

And with a might born of faith, the sword flashed argent in the darkness.

A beautiful face that held eyes of clear sapphire came nose to nose with that of the man.

Then, the blazing fury washed out of her, all violence replaced as her lips formed a circle of surprise.

“But no blade can harm me,” she whispered in the darkness.

The man replied, “This one...can.”

He twisted the sword that impaled the vampire at her waist, then watched intently as it went about its sacred task.

Minute cracks ran through the blood drinker’s skin, tracing like wildfire as they flowed like lightning. In an instant, they had covered her over in jagged lines that hissed in tiny, sputtering flames.

She arched back from him, but he was without mercy. Unable to free herself, she did what all monsters did who had known the bite of that blade. She screamed with a sound that went beyond that of men’s hearing, a sound that tipped over the last few panes of glass in the building’s windows.

And as they crashed down to shatter to fragments, the blood drinker folded in upon herself, collapsing inward to finally drift to the floor in a heap of hot ash.

The man expelled a long exhalation of air, the smoke of the vampire’s demise wafting from his nostrils in lazy curls. And with a shrug, he slipped the still warm sword back into the scabbard hidden under his trench coat.

He kicked at a few embers still glowing upon the floor, then, all need for silence at an end, he strode from the room.



What a shame, he thought as he ran his hands over the tree’s bark.

An otherwise healthy oak, from what he could make out in the darkness, yet death had surely come knocking.

The man stood in the shadow of the abandoned brick building from which he had just come, the question of the dead tree heavy upon his mind, when a voice spoke from somewhere behind him.

“Even the mightiest shall fall one day, whether it be by will or chance.”

The man stiffened then relaxed again, his hand drifting back away from the pommel of his sword. The voice was known to him.

“The fairest and the most foul both,” he responded.

There was a rustling as something shifted behind him. Something very large. Or someone.

“Did she die well, the sweet Jacqueline?” asked the voice.

As was his habit, the man shrugged then turned to face the voice in the darkness.

“Why are you helping me? They’re your own kind, yet here you are again showing me where and when.”

There was only the creaking of dead branches to answer him for a time, then, “What do you know of the great flood, little man? The Deluge meant to cover the world over. What was the true reason for its coming?”

The man nodded. He was at ease with scripture. His upbringing had nearly drowned him in it.

“The Flood was to cleanse the Earth of sin.”

“But whose sin? That of men...or, of someone...something else?”

The man smiled as he thought he knew where the voice was leading him.

“You’re talking about the get of the fallen. The beings created when certain angels came among men and women in carnal knowledge.”

Again, there was the sound of something. Like boulders sliding along the ground.

“‘The get of the fallen’...it is well that you understand at last just what it is you profess to eradicate from the world, human.

“You think me but a vampire, like she was. But, they are lesser things, mere shadows of the greatness that once walked the earth. I am the last of these. And when my travails are at an end, I shall bow down before you so that you might strike with your hallowed blade.

“We were named Nephilim, the sons of the Seraph and human women so many millennia ago. Blood drinker and werewolf are as nothing in comparison.”

The man felt his throat go dry. The voice, if its words were true, belonged to one who had seen the world before the pyramids were built. Before man had presumed to master the world.