Sometime later, he felt his body being moved and juggled awkwardly around. He was laid out on something flat and cold and…searing pain was shooting up his arm, and then…everything went black.
The next time Hockey awoke, his head was clear, his fever was gone, and seated around him in a circle on the floor of a pharmacy were five people.
Tyler—a blond-haired, blue-eyed, twenty-six-year-old army medic turned gym teacher—was a friendly, easygoing guy. He was a hard worker and handy to have around in case of medical problems.
Rachael—a curvy, blonde-haired thirty-one-year-old—wasn’t the easiest person to like. She complained incessantly about matters of little concern, and she was useless in most situations. Hockey got the feeling she’d been pampered and spoiled before the world changed, and he often found himself wondering how she’d survived the initial fallout.
Chris—a scrawny seventeen-year-old with long black hair and an excessive amount of facial piercings—was an idiot. He outright didn’t like the kid. Hardheaded and a know-it-all, his manic temper at times reminded Hockey of Xan—except this kid was scrawny, he couldn’t hurt a fly, and he was as dumb as a brick. Xan was neither scrawny nor dumb. Xan was lethally intelligent and remarkably strong, and Hockey desperately hoped his friend had survived that fateful raid and made it home to the clan.
Then there was David, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, thirty-six-year-old businessman whose muscles rivaled Hockey’s own. The guy was almost as quiet as he was and kept mostly to himself. He didn’t involve himself with the arguments of the others, and yet something about him struck Hockey as…not quite right. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but his gut told him not to trust the guy, and his mamă had always said the gut didn’t lie. Considering his mamă had never lied—most times, she had been painfully truthful—he was inclined to believe her. It wasn’t as if he could kill the guy before he did something. But if he ignored his gut, he might not be in time to catch David before he completed his goal.
He knew what his tată would say—no man should be judged before he acts. Then there was what Xan would say—shoot now, drink later.
No question, Xan would have killed David months ago. But Hockey wasn’t Xan, and he’d never killed a man. Animals, yes. Skins, yes. But never another human being.
But now, holed up on the top floor of a ten-story warehouse on the outskirts of Philadelphia, ready to wait out the winter before they started traveling again…
What would cabin fever do to a man like David?
Lastly, there was Mira—a nineteen-year-old college student, petite with fair, freckled skin and dark brown hair, who was a tomboy and a ridiculously talented shot. She had killed several Skins from a good distance with just one hit. She was also strapped head to toe with knives that never failed to hit their target. He’d asked her once, after she’d killed a Skin with a single knife toss with terrifying accuracy, what sort of training she’d had.
“I’m a military brat,” Mira said, laughing, “and an only child. Therefore, I reaped all the benefits of the son who never was.”
Hockey smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled since he’d been separated from the raiding party.
• • •
So when Mira asked if he’d like to double up, Hockey didn’t have to think too long. “Yeah,” he whispered back, holding open his blanket for her. “Let’s double up.”
As she scooted closer to him, he closed the blanket around her. She immediately buried her face into his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist. But even as he reveled in the extra heat, guilt welled up inside him.
He missed Becki.
No matter what, he would find his wife.
He would find his clan.
Until then, he was…surviving.
Chapter Five
Winter
Squinting as he tried to see through the blizzard outside, Marko Siwak pulled his truck off the icy highway and onto the first exit ramp.
He was so screwed.
Pennsylvania was a snow-covered hellhole. It was dark and snowing, and he couldn’t see jack shit. Now, he was out of gas and out of hope.
“So much for good intentions,” he muttered.
He’d left the safety of his Romani clan and their ancient Romani magic to try to right a wrong. Out of jealousy and spite, he’d left his friend Xan’s wife, a young woman named Trinity, all alone in this shit pit of a world. Everyone had thought she’d run off with another man, and Xan had taken to sleeping with other women to try and stave off the pain of losing her.
One of those other women had been Marko’s fiancée, Nadya Popa. Their pending marriage had been an arranged one, one that Nadya had continuously put off for years, and he’d let her. He hadn’t forced her into becoming his wife, as Gypsy law allowed, because he’d loved her fiercely and would have done anything to make her happy, including waiting. Losing her had been devastating.
The pain was still red hot when Marko had run into Trinity while out on a supply raid, and he’d let his emotions get the better of him.
Gripping the steering wheel, he cringed, remembering what he’d said to her. Blinded by jealousy, he’d callously told her that she was no longer wanted by Xan or the clan.
Now, everything he’d done was out in the open.
Feeling triumphant, Marko had tossed Trinity’s gun onto the ground in front of Xan. For several moments, Xan had just stared dumbly at the weapon. Then reaching out, his hand shaking, he picked it up and turned it over. Marko knew what Xan was looking for—the inscription, Trinity, fată mea.
Finding it, Xan’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed repeatedly. Swaying back and forth, he began to tremble.
“Xan?” Becki yelled. “Xan! Are you going to be sick?”
Xan attempted to shake his head but he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from the gun in his hands.
“Frate!” Pesha shouted.
“Xan!” Nico bent down in front of Xan and shook him.
Someone within the nearby crowd shouted, “Where did you get Trinity’s gun?”
Instead of answering, Marko dropped to his knees beside Xan. “You know where, don’t you?” he sneered. “Kicker is, Trinity left roughly twenty minutes before you showed up.”
“You stupid fuck!” Becki cried out.
“Fată,” Marko said, looking up at her, “that’s not even the best part. According to Trinity, Gerik left her. He dumped her in the woods the same day as the attack in the Catskills, and he never came back for her. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Becki gasped, and the surrounding clan members cried out in shock.
But Marko wasn’t done yet. He had to drive that knife just a little deeper. He needed to take from Xan everything the man had taken from him. “Your wife has been alone since the end of summer, Deleanu,” he said. “Summer,” he repeated. “That’s a long fucking time. It would be a damn miracle if she’s survived this long.”
Marko was suddenly yanked to his feet, coming face-to-face with Nico.
“You dirty fuck,” Nico hissed, right before he slammed his fist into Marko’s face.
Dazed and disorientated, Marko staggered for a moment before falling backward into the crowd. Landing hard on his back, he stared up at the disappointed and horrified faces above him, wondering why he didn’t feel any better than he had before.
It was done. He’d gotten his revenge, only he still felt like shit.
In fact, while watching Xan break down, instead of basking in his revenge, he’d felt a million times worse.
So Marko had packed up his shit and planned to head back to where he’d last seen Trinity, hoping like hell she was still alive and holed up somewhere nearby. He’d tell her what he had done, that he’d lied out of spite and jealousy, and then he’d bring her home to Xan, to the clan. And maybe, just maybe, Nadya would want him again as a result.
At least, that had been the plan. A snowstorm the likes of which he’d never seen, and he’d seen a lot,
had thrown him off course. Now he was running on empty in the middle of nowhere in the midst of a blizzard.
The first farmhouse Marko came across, he didn’t bother looking for a driveway. He just threw the truck into four-wheel drive and headed straight across the lawn. Parking his truck and trailer directly in front of the house, he tied a scarf around his face, grabbed his backpack, and left the warmth of the truck.
It was slow going, fighting the biting wind and flurries as he made his way to the house. Luckily he found the front door unlocked and hurried inside. The house wasn’t any warmer than outside, not that it mattered. He wouldn’t be sleeping in it.
A few months back while preparing for the coming winter, he’d altered his trailer, as had most of his clan, and installed a wood-burning stove. It wasn’t an easy job. First, he’d had to rip out the entire kitchen unit and, using bricks and sheet metal, built a fireproof area. Once that had been completed, he’d taken a saw and cut a rectangular hole in the ceiling of the trailer. Using more sheet metal, he finished off the entire project by creating a flame-resistant chimney area.
Before he left camp in Ohio, Marko had taken a shit ton of firewood, and had since been collecting anything he could find. Didn’t matter what it was as long as he could eat it, drink it, or burn it.
Gypsies didn’t sleep cold.
And they certainly didn’t die just because Western civilization had. Fuck that.
Rubbing his gloved hands together, Marko looked around the basic home. It was a little more floral than most and a filthy mess, which meant it had probably been ransacked several times over. His last shred of hope dissolved. He wouldn’t find any gasoline here. If there had been any to begin with, it was definitely long gone by now.
Still, he never knew what he could find. Anything could be useful.
He started walking, kicking broken furniture out of his way, searching out the kitchen. Because it was winter and everything outside and inside was well past frozen, he didn’t have to worry about the smell, not that it smelled good by any means. It was just not nearly as overpowering as the putrefied stench of rot and decay brought about during the warmer months.
Ignoring the refrigerator, Marko headed straight for the cupboards and was greeted with the usual dead insects and rodents. After some digging, he managed to find a few things that hadn’t been pillaged by the vermin or ruined by the freeze. Once he’d secured his finds in his backpack, he made his way through the mess back to the living room, headed for the staircase. He needed clean clothing. Freezing temperatures weren’t conducive to washing anything, not that he knew how to do his own laundry. He’d always had women around for that. Yet another thing that sucked about leaving the clan.
He had his boot on the first stair when he heard the telltale sound of a door squeaking as it opened and a frigid breeze blew past him. Dropping his backpack, he pulled both his guns from his jeans and whirled around. A bundled-up figure, slight in stature and quaking from the cold, stood in the doorway.
“Don’t fucking move,” Marko growled. “And open your goddamn mouth.”
• • •
Carrie was cold, so very cold, and hungry and terrified. She was out of firewood and out of food. She’d been living off melted snow and a box of stale macaroni noodles for the past week since the crazy bitch had killed her brother. She been rationing the noodles until two days ago when she’d had no choice but to eat the last one.
If she didn’t leave her house, she was going to die in it. And soon.
Her entire family, her entire town, was gone. It was the middle of the worst winter she’d ever seen, and she was starving to death.
“How is this my life?” she mumbled, wiping warm tears off her cold cheeks.
Packing a bag full of spare clothing and anything she could find that could be used as a weapon, Carrie pulled on layer upon layer of clothing, bundling herself against the blustery wind. Then, with a heavy heart, she stepped out into the storm and went south, toward her grandparents’ farm. It was her last hope, her last shot at finding food or gas, something, anything at all, because she didn’t want to die, and more importantly, she definitely didn’t want to die in Elderton.
“I will not die in Elderton,” she repeated over and over again as she battled through the bitter wind and driving snow.
It took the entire day and the very last of her energy, but she made it. Pushing open the familiar wooden fence and half-blinded by the sheer volume of snow, she staggered through the yard. Praying the door was unlocked, she gripped the handle and pushed.
She saw the guns first and the man holding them next.
“Don’t fucking move,” he growled. “And open your goddamn mouth.”
Carrie tried. She gave it her all, but her skin was numb, half-frozen, and her limbs were weak, her body exhausted and malnourished. So instead of opening her mouth, her already blurry vision winked out, and she collapsed.
Chapter Six
From his snow-covered treetop perch, Shandor watched the group of Skins below, feasting on the family of deer they’d come across.
The deer he’d scented from miles away.
The deer he needed to soothe his own burning hunger.
He could kill the Skins, he supposed, and take their meal. He’d killed plenty of them before his transformation. He could kill them again.
Couldn’t he?
He’d been over this many, many times in his head, and every time before, the answer had been a resounding yes. But now, looking down at them, knowing what he now knew…
He couldn’t.
After his run-in with Trinity, Shandor had been unable to shake the melancholy that seeing her again had stirred to life. He’d spent several weeks shut inside a run-down barn, missing his family and his friends, missing Xan most of all, and wanting desperately to be human again instead of…
What the hell was he?
Several times back at his clan’s camp in the Catskills, he’d heard his baró, Jericho Popa, use the term vampir in regard to what he’d become. Was that what he was? A vampire?
Even as he’d thought it, he’d laughed. Remembering the modern Gaje obsession with the bloodsucking Don Juan types that had taken hold of pop culture and hadn’t let go, he’d found the very idea ridiculous. At least one thing was for certain—he was pretty sure any Gajes left alive weren’t swooning over vampires anymore.
Eventually he’d dismissed the possibility, feeling ridiculous for thinking it in the first place, but still he couldn’t seem to shake the word. It stuck within, always in the forefront of his mind, taunting him, teasing him, eating away at him.
Shandor tried tirelessly to poke holes in the theory, to disprove any validation he came up with, but the more he tried, the louder Jericho’s voice grew inside his head. Vampir. Vampir.
Louder and louder it grew, screaming at him incessantly until one day, a memory surged forward. A memory of one of the many fireside stories he’d heard, passed down from generation to generation of Gypsies, a history of the clans, of the most powerful Roma…
“Centuries ago a boy was born, the eldest son to the baró of the Drágon clan. He was a powerful Rom, blessed by nature with all the magical elements. Back then, Romani were not welcome in the Gaje world, and they had to travel many miles in hiding. This particular clan had settled peacefully, deep within the Carpathian Mountains, far away from the towns and villages that had condemned them.
“But they were not alone in the mountains. Unknown to the Roma, a Gaje lord with a hunger for power lived among them, watching and waiting until one day, in an attempt to learn the secrets of their magic, he attacked. The baró’s two sons, who’d been away from camp, returned home to find their entire clan slaughtered. It is said that the lord had spared no one his brutality, not even the children.
“Mad with revenge, the eldest son had walked for days, thinking only of the vengeance he would exact on his enemies. His body grew gaunt, his clothes torn, but still he walked. Upon his arrival at the lord’s castle
, the guardsmen had laughed at the solitary Gypsy who’d thought to take on an entire fortress of armed men. They laughed until they’d looked into his eyes and instead of a man, they saw bottomless pits of black despair. The baró’s son, the most powerful of all the Roma, had called upon dark magic to seek his revenge. No man, woman, or child who crossed his path that day was safe from his madness.”
But it wasn’t the “why” that Shandor was concerned with, it was what had happened as a result of it.
“In this life,” the story went on, “nothing is given freely. There are consequences to every action. For cutting short the lives of hundreds of innocent people, the baró’s son was condemned to live out the lives he’d taken, and the lives of their unborn children, and their unborn children, in a never-ending cycle, filled with eternal pain and shrouded in darkness. In return for his bloodlust, he would always hunger for blood, never knowing peace or life without suffering. They say from that day forward he never left the fortress, and that anyone who dared to venture into those mountains was never heard from again. Mullo was the name given to him. It means ‘the first vampire.’”
Suddenly, it had all made sense.
The end of the world. The bloodlust, and an eternal life full of suffering.
The story of Mullo was true.
Mullo had called upon dark magic and reaped the consequences, becoming the first vampire. Once realizing that the legend wasn’t just a legend but an accurate account of history, Shandor had looked down at his talon-tipped fingers, and for the first time understood what had happened to him.
Vampirism was real, just a little different than everyone had always thought. But why would a world full of nonbelievers think magic had anything to do with anything? The Gaje had very little faith left; they believed in only what they could see, touch, and taste. Their world was reduced to equations and definitions; everyone needed substantial proof or they deemed it impossible.
But the impossible had happened, and it had happened because of magic.