Her Billionaire, Her Wolf(61)

She lifted her arm to point down the street and said, “A human met them here. The stink of him is still here and strong. He met up with them, then left with the woman while the vamp went his separate way.”

Opal picked up where Agate left off, saying, “Yeah...and that dude is sick. Bad sick.”

Braze walked to the women and said, “Can you follow them? I must find her.”

Agate nodded and said, “Yes. That man didn’t up and die right afterward even if he stinks of death come knocking. But, we’ve got a bead on them now.”

“Good,” Braze replied and then all of them were rushing to one of the cars and piling in.

If someone had seen them leave, they might have imagined that the two beautiful women were playing at acting like dogs in a car. The windows on each side of the vehicle were down and both hung their heads out as it sped down the road.

As it was, though, they both managed to keep their tongues in their mouths while the car gathered speed.



~~~



Clement picked his way among the gravestones.

In this part of the cemetery, most of them had long since lost their inscriptions to wind and time, unreadable except, maybe, for those hobbyists willing to take charcoal rubbings or something similar.

Some were tipped at unlikely angles and he made certain to not brush against them as he crossed the grounds.

Each time that he had visited this place, it had been in the dead of night, but he had not been in such haste then. He had been able to stay to the larger, graveled alleyways between the cemetery plots until he had arrived at the oldest, yet most extravagant, part of the grounds.

This time, there was no time to spare, so he crossed in as direct a line as he could to where he had first encountered the voice in the darkness.

Brother Jonas, his mentor in hunting the undead, had always told him to be unafraid of searching for the clichéd places...the places of which local folk might tell stories of hauntings or other strange circumstances.

And, as his years of hunting had worn on, Clement came to understand that there was nothing foolish about visiting graveyards while looking for traces of blood drinkers. It was as though all that death gathered in one place drew them like moths to a flame.

And, once he spotted them, he would follow them, an eye always to ferreting out where the creature lay during the day. Sometimes, when chance smiled upon him, to even find a veritable nest of the things.

That was what he had been doing when he first came to the city several months ago.

Something had drawn him here. Perhaps on some level, he had been searching for news of the Abraxis family.

He was not so vain as to refuse to believe that some part of him might have brought him there for that reason. Even if, his entire life, he had avoided all word of Abraxis name and its apparent meteoric rise in world business.

His name was DuChamp and he had grown up in an orphanage in europe. His father had seen to that and had taken great care that all ties with the Abraxis name had been cut as well.

As a young boy it had stung him and driven him to terrible mischief until Brother Janos had at last taken him under his wing. Thanks to that old man, Clement had learned to turn his bitterness over being abandoned by his werewolf father into a fever for the destruction of all things that were not natural upon the earth. Monsters had become his prey and his sword had become their bane.

He was aware that the old man had manipulated him into becoming a weapon against the unnatural. The religious order that ran the orphanage had in its possession for centuries a hallowed sword that no monster could resist. They had been in need of a champion and when he had been given in to their care by the very sort of creature they would see wiped from the face of the earth...well, it was seen as an act of providence.

Clement had always told himself it did not matter. That what he did was right and just, that in dealing out destruction, he became something more than what he might have been.

His actions had defined him. But, always, even if he did his best to keep such thoughts buried, he would remember the boy who had watched his father turn his back on him, only to be coerced into becoming the kind of man who killed without remorse.

And, now, one of these creatures had proved itself false to him. There was some agenda at work and he had been its pawn as it pointed him, one after the other, to vampires and their hiding places.

The hunt had been good these last few weeks. Only it smelled more and more as if he had been exploited in another’s strategy.

Clement had had enough of being guided as if he had no mind of his own.

He had tired of the game being rigged by others. Now it was time to get answers as to just what sort of embroilment he had been led into.

The last of the old tombstones behind him, tilting this way and that like dull teeth about to fall out, he made his way into one of the most unusual parts of a cemetery he had ever seen.