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Dylan Malone’s boyfriend recovered after a week or so, but Malone, whose wounds were even more extensive, had been treated by doctors there at the hospital and then sedated. Hunters were alerted by the Church and came to collect him the next day before he regained consciousness, immediately transferring him to a Benedictine monastery in the countryside of upper state New York, where a few of the monks specialized in treating the victims of vampires.
In some cases, victims of vampire attack could be saved by the vigorous and rapid application of the medicines and ointments developed over the centuries by the monks. The methods they used were equal parts religious and supernatural, but they worked on those not too far gone. All were designed to stop the decline of the victim into full vampirism. But Malone had been unlucky. He didn’t react well to their medicines and potions. They had kept him there for weeks, sedated while they tried their best to heal him. They even tried blood transfusions. But to no avail.
The decision had regretfully been made to put Malone down. It sounded cruel, but it would have been much crueler to allow him to live as he was and become a demonic creature, a half-blood, who would eventually devolve into full vampirism. He would then be forced to kill others and drink human blood in order to remain in some hideous half existence. What happened next was a disaster. I had read the account in the journal of one of the monks charged with his care.
Once we decided that nothing further could be done, and the patient was showing signs of waking up, no matter how much sedation we’d given him, we decided to employ our last recourse. We hooked him up to an IV ofpentobarbital, as was our standard procedure. At first it seemed to be working, and his heartbeat slowed considerably. Then to our horror, he began thrashing on the table, moaning loudly. We didn’t want him to feel any pain, so we administered more pentobarbital. Suddenly his eyes flew open, and he roused, ripping. the IV from his arm. He seized Brother Andrew, the closest of us to him and tore out his throat with one lethal swipe of his claws. He pulled the brother’s body toward him and as we watched in horror, he began drinking his blood. When the rest of us tried to intervene, he fought us off with teeth and claws and killed another of our brothers despite our best efforts to stop him. It was only by throwing a vial of holy water in his face that I am alive to relay this account. It sizzled on his skin, and he howled and writhed and fell on the floor. One of the other brothers and I were able to escape, baring the door behind us, but by the time we came back with weapons and more of our brothers, the half-blood had escaped through a window, high up on the wall.
In the large doses Malone was given, thepentobarbitalshould havequickly rendered him unconscious, and then shut down his heart and brain functions. Death would have quickly followed, but though the dose they gave Malone should have worked, it didn’t, and that was the first indication that he had devolved much more rapidly than the monks knew, so that not much short of a stake to the heart would kill him.Dylan Malone escaped, leaving the drained and mutilated bodies of the attendants scattered across the room.
Later, Hunters began to get reports of sightings of him from time to time back in New York City again. He showed up at one of the theaters where he once worked and was seen in the backstage area. He was sometimes seen on the streets at night, but always managed to blend quickly into the shadows. We strongly suspected he had begun killing again, because a few drained bodies began to show up in the city morgues. Most of the victims were homeless, so we suspected he was trying to blend in with that population. For the past year since, he had evaded recapture, as Hunters lost track of him.
He was finally tracked to Georgia, near the city of Atlanta. That’s when Conway and I began hunting him, as the Southeast was our primary area.
I’d had my own encounter with vampires over ten years earlier, after I had graduated from college and decided to go with some friends on a backpacking trip around Europe. Back then, if anyone had told any of us that vampires were real, we’d have laughed in their face.
Three of us had started that journey, but I was the only one who had come out of it alive. And the fact that I had was solely due to theHunters who had found me still clinging to life among the dead bodies of my friends and had rescued me.
My recovery had been long and difficult, and since the outcome was uncertain for a while, the Hunters who saved me had to keep my rescue a secret. For my part, I had few memories I could call on for a long time, probably an attempt of my brain and my psyche to keep me sane. I had seen too much, experienced too much shock andloss, and for a time I, too, had to stay in a monastery run by Catholic brothers, being nursed back to health. Meanwhile the Hunters protected me from the nest of vampires who wanted to finish what they’d started.
Years passed, andI had decided to stay in Europe afterward and join the organization that had saved me. Because I’d ingested a little of the vampire’s blood, I’d had a long recovery, and afterward, I found that I had been physically altered. That took even more mental adjustment.
Despite the monks’ best efforts, my experience had changed my body into something not altogether human. I had become what the Church called a half-blood. The Benedictine brothers had plied me with their potions, preventing me from changing so much I had to be put down, but I was different from the man I used to be.
I was faster and stronger now. I could hear and see better. I rarely needed sleep, and for a very long time, food absolutely disgusted me. I still ate very little, and mostly craved meat, cooked as rare as I could get it. I’d been told I would age much differently—much more slowly than a normal human. I was a hybrid—a half-blood. Most of the Hunters were, as we had all been attacked by vampires at some point in our lives and been healed enough by the monks to stay human. But just barely.
Over the centuries the Church had been fighting the legions of demons, they had discovered the enhanced speed and strength of hybrids like us and had decided to put it to good use in fighting the very monsters who had made us what we were. Trained by the Church to hunt down and kill vampires, we had members in every country across the world. Indeed, it seemed that almost every religion in the world had their own version of Hunters, used to fight the vampires, ghouls and other demonic creatures who had been around since Lucifer and his followers were cast out of heaven.
I had been really fortunate in getting the legendary Theo Conway as my partner when I finished my training. He was an American like me and had his own stories of an attack long ago, which he rarely discussed. He was a half-blood, like me, as he also had been very nearly killed by the vampires who’d attacked him. I’d learned a lot from him when I’d first been assigned to him as his partner some ten years ago.
We’d both had nearly all the blood in our body exchanged over time, so we were fundamentally changed, with no way of going back to what we used to be. If we hadn’t been as we were, it would have been impossible to fight the vampires and hope for any kind of positive outcome.
Dylan Malone was like us in some ways—butunlikeus, he was now more vampire than human and devolving every day. The treatment the monks had managed to give him had probably helped him a bit so far, but it was only a matter of time until he became a full-blood. He could still pass as human, though as time went on, he would grow more and more monstrous. We had to find him.
Chapter Two
Jace O’Neal
Thank God it was Friday. It was one of the few things that kept me from losing it when John Atkins, sales manager of Everest Enterprises, Inc, leaned over my desk, and blasted his dragon breath right in my face over a design I was supposed to have to a customer the day before.
“Can you give me one reason why Golden Pet Foods advertising department was blowing up my phone first thing this morning about the designs you were supposed to have to them yesterday?Yesterday, O’Neal. If you can’t do your job, just say so, and I’ll assign someone who can, damn it. I knew it was a mistake to trust you with this campaign for Golden—I tried to warn them about you, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“I can do the job, sir,” I said, working hard to keep any hint of emotion out of my voice. “There was a delay in receiving one of the designs for the posters from the art department. I talked to the head of their advertising department personally about this yesterday afternoon and explained the situation. He said he understood; it was no problem and that he would get the message to his ad guys. There must have been a miscommunication.”
“Oh, there was a miscommunication, all right,” Atkins continued to rant. By this time, he had attracted the attention of most of my coworkers in the other tiny cubicles around me. Some of them—the nicer ones—gave me sympathetic glances and pretended not to pay attention. The others made no effort to hide their delight. When I got this plum assignment over some of these more experienced employees, there had been plenty of hard feelings to go around.
I shifted my attention back to John, who was still in the process of chewing my ass out.
“The ‘miscommunication’ occurred when I agreed to let you handle this project in the first place.” Like he had much choice in the matter. Golden had asked for me personally and threatened to pull out when Atkins tried to foist someone else on him. Atkins glared down at me one more time for good measure and pointed a bony finger in my face. “Get your shit together, O’Neal, or you’ll be out on your ass.” He straightened back up and stormed back to his office.
I had worked with Golden Pet Foods, an Atlanta based company, back in New York City on an ad campaign. When their CEO found out I was back home in Atlanta, he’d asked for me personally to handle his new campaign to introduce his product to local distributors.
I hated my job—I never said I wasn’t damn good at it.
I tore my eyes away from John Atkins’ retreating back and sublimated my fantasies of grabbing him in a headlock and wrestling his fat ass to the floor by taking a huge bite of the jelly doughnut I had on my desk. I glanced over at the grinning face of the guy who sat in the cubicle beside me, Chris Bennett.
“Man, he tore you a new one, huh?” he said. “Better watch yourself, Jace. We all know how much he hates you. One of these days when he’s talking to you, his head’s just going to explode.”
“I should be so lucky,” I mumbled around the doughnut in my mouth, and turned my back on him. I didn’t have time for Chris’s shit, and I sure as hell didn’t have the patience.
