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  It hurt, it hurt so good. I groaned, wanting to say I thought you were dead, I want you, I need you, I love you…

  But he knew all that already. So instead I muttered, “Good dog,” and lay back, my neck exposed.

  Surrendering to my dominant.

  ~~~~

  FANE

  FANE

  The Strigoi Chronicles

  By

  NYA RAWLYNS

  The Church gave him sanctuary and purpose. It took fanatics to unleash the man.

  As the werewolf pack hunts them across the Romanian wilderness, Dreu and

  his young lover, Fane, meet up with unlikely allies.

  The demon assassin vows fealty but his motives and allegiance are suspect.

  To cement the demon’s loyalty Dreu does the one thing

  for which Fane will never forgive him.

  Caught between competing demands for his heart and soul, Dreu must finally

  confront his own conflicted feelings.

  With the pack closing in, survival will be the least of their problems.

  Chapter One

  When it came to relationships, I sucked. I’d had nine hundred years to hone that suckiness into a fine-toothed weapon of sensory pleasure for me, leaving everything and everyone else defiled or corrupted or dead.

  I’d gone through life, and most of the continent, treating my encounters like midnight raids on 7-11 snack food buffets. Not that I’d ever really been to one of those legendary pit stops for uncontrollable late night cravings. The modern world and a global entertainment perspective had educated me far beyond my simple scrolls and studious ways.

  From the elegance of Cîteaux Abbey in my formative years, I’d traipsed the highways and byways of my native land, and after wearing out my welcome I’d meandered through the Austro-Hungarian splotch of despots and Teutonic pervs, finally ending up ensconced in a cave overlooking the Black Sea.

  Me and my sterling collection of erotica and Cold War era Soviet arms. Good times.

  Until a rat pack of arms smugglers discovered my sorry ass in stasis as I hid from dear old dad. There be pirates in that tale, though for me it was more hearsay than anything, stasis being what it was. What played out next set me on my present course.

  And to misquote a favorite line:

  Weres. Why’d it hafta be weres?

  Very dangerous, Dreu.

  You go first.

  Except … I’d gone first in a direction I’d never once considered. Ass over teacups. In a raging hard-on, can’t-keep-it-in-my-tunic lust-of-my-life fixation on tall, dark and furry.

  Yes, I was in love, smitten; and the objet de désir was none other than young master Stefan. Or Fane, in the diminutive. A Romanian-bred hunka burning love, with puppy dog eyes and assets that, quite simply, exceeded expectations.

  He was also a dominant and a budding alpha.

  To misquote another movie line: he had me at the manacles.

  He also had me by the short hairs.

  After the little dust-up at Dad’s mountain villa in the picturesque foothills of the Southern Carpathians, we’d made best time pressing deeper into dense forests, hoping against hope for some kind of refuge from the elements. Living in a cave made for a monochrome outlook on the weather: the temps were cool, the air damp, with little or no diurnal variation. Training in monastic asceticism implanted appreciation for simplicity and austerity, surprises of any kind were generally unwelcome.

  I tempered those teachings with some variations of my own. I liked surprises, of the carnal variety. Cold and wet, not so much.

  Fane paced cautiously, keeping just within sight. On a good day I could have kept up. This wasn’t a good day. Against all odds, the impalement of that bit of wrought iron through my thigh had resulted in a gangrenous open wound that seeped buckets of ugly whenever I moved. Next time I’d know to duck or dodge incoming ordnance.

  I had no doubt there would be a next time.

  We were on the run with seasoned hunters of the pissed beyond all reason variety trailing us through virgin forests and over dolomitic rocks from hell. Young master Fane’s pack mates had taken great exception to my little display of pique, rendering them comatose while Dad leveled the complex, locked the door and threw away the key to that slipway through inter-dimensional space.

  More of them had survived than I planned on, a lot more. We’d gotten glimpses of them from our height advantage on an outcrop: butt ugly and mean as a snake Elliot, his fairly bright lieutenant Samuel, and a half dozen others whose names I didn’t catch during my pleasant interlude at their Black Sea digs.

  Apparently my EMP pulse had addled their brain waves enough to keep them from shifting so they were hoofing it, like us, over hill and dale. Judging from their bumbling progress, I’d also hazard a guess that their olefactory and other senses were not running at optimum .

  Which brought me back to my current problem. Fane couldn’t shift either. He was locked into the big bad wolf for the immediate future, leaving me with a wet nose and a warm body to curl up against, but no communication skills to speak of.

  Not that we ever spoke much. Polite discourse left a lot to be desired when it came to quelling our unholy urges. His howl of triumph as he ravaged me was all I needed, or so I thought before the world turned upside down, leaving me and mine exposed to a vigilante mob and a parent with more on his mind than the misfortunes of a wayward son.

  To be fair, perhaps I shouldn’t cast stones. Michel du Velours had a wayward nuke, a possible traitor in his midst and several layers of Hel to manage. By all accounts, his plate might be considered full. Full enough to leave me bleeding out on a carpet of pine needles without so much as a by-your-leave.

  I’d spent nearly my whole sorry existence staying out of sight and out of mind when it came to Demon Central. Now, when I needed his most royal’s very special brand of misery and mayhem, he opted to go the absentee father route. Again.

  And I’d bet a small Papal indulgence that he’d probably make a quick stop to service Maman’s now legendary appetites.

  Petty of me, yes … but there it was.

  Demon is as Demon does.

  And the Man in Armani wasn’t wont to forgive and forget either. The nuke was my form of contrition for wiping out half a legion of minions, with a body count that would give the cleaners job security for a century or two. He’d grinned that feral, snaggled-toothed grin, patted me on the back with an all-is-forgiven tempo and then all hell broke loose. During the were invasion, somebody—not me, not any of the weres either—had made off with the backpack and enough explosive power to level a small city.

  Pops was not pleased.

  A whining sound was enough to jar me out of the stream of consciousness that verged on a memory dump, set to annoying rewind, the kind that keeps regret at half full in perpetuity.

  The whimpering came from me. I lay sprawled in a face plant, the right leg collapsing onto a jagged set of rocks and warming what had been numbed flesh with the remaining bits of body fluids I possessed.

  That made me bitter and hungry.

  Fane padded quietly back, his expression unreadable, but his eyes were silvery blue-black in the dimming light. Imagining compassion and understanding in those glorious depths gave me a soupçon of courage but did nothing to elevate my battered body to an upright position.

  If I didn’t feed soon, it wouldn’t matter one way or the other.

  Nosing me onto my side and off the offending granite, my wolf sniffed at the wound and backed away. If it was offensive to me, I couldn’t imagine what his sensitive nostrils were telling him about the state of my health.

  Pressing a paw on my chest, he stared down at me with what I could only interpret as an imploring request to stay still. I was happy enough to oblige. With a chuff and a flick of his magnificent tail, he slalomed down the steep slope, bound for I knew not where.

  It got dark. Then it sprinkled. I was wet and muddy, suffering lightning bolts of sheer unadulterated red-hot ag
ony up and down my leg, I felt like I had to pee—a situation that would have been laughable under other circumstances—and I finally gave thought to praying. To whom or what seemed immaterial. I no longer had my beads-of-distraction, but the chorus of Hail Marys that usually sufficed as my penance for misdeeds sat fulsome on my parched tongue. I convinced myself it could be worse…

  And then it was.

  Icy cold sleet and freezing rain turned my balls into raisins and all I could think about was salvaging my gonads from nature’s onslaught.

  After that I drifted…

  ****

  Father, Father wake up…

  Dreu, call me Dreu, boy.

  Ajută-l, vă rog. Please, please help him.

  Leg… lose…

  No no no no…

  Die, let me…

  “He’s waking,” my wolf growled low in his throat.

  He sounded like I felt, sliced and diced into jagged chunks of raw meat. So much of me hurt I no longer felt the pain as such. It had receded to background noise, the kind your body makes when it dissociates from conscious thought, leavening sensation with layers of protection to isolate insanity and keep it at bay.

  I should have welcomed and embraced the surcease from my agony, but the thought of what might be missing drove me close to the brink of mindless rage and despair. My fingers inched of their own accord, down past skin burning with impossible fever, every follicle alight with fiery brilliance.

  Fane had me in a death grip, arms pinned but still I searched, following the razor edge of a hipline gone skeletal, protruding against rough pads with bony exuberance. Phantom sensation suggested what my mind insisted was false. The telling of it would never do. I needed the finality of touch to make it real.

  Crooning, “Nu, nu, nu,” my lover rocked me gently, with such sweet passion I would have cried if I could.

  Pleading, “Fane, let me go,” I wriggled against his viselike grip, awakening nerve pathways that screeched in terror at the onslaught.

  Movement to my right distracted me momentarily.

  Fane barked, “Bring her,” with the rasp of one used to giving orders.

  “Da, domnul meu.” The voice sounded hollow and obsequious, compliance bought with compulsion and I wondered, briefly, at how young Stefan had learned that skill.

  “Must you to sit now. Will hurt…”

  The wolf’s English faltered under the burden of moving my battered body into an upright position on the hard wood bench. He braced my back against a log wall, the bulge of rounded timber familiar from centuries past, flooding my memory with visions of home and Maman fussing over her toilette in feminine anticipation while I looked on, jealous and so very alone with my thoughts and worship.

  “Stai jos.” Young Stefan pointed to the bench and maneuvered the girl next to me, her body loose-jointed like a straw doll and dressed in coarse peasant cloth, dulled to gray with work and hardship.

  Her head barely came to my shoulder—and I was hardly considered tall, especially in this day and age when everything had somehow super-sized, leaving me to think of myself as modest in height and demeanor.

  Add to that … crippled.

  My meal lolled with uneasy grace against my filthy tunic. Fane angled her head away, exposing the thick neck and a languid artery barely pulsing enough under the layers of fat to attract even an evening mosquito.

  Squinting, I tried to block out the unappetizing mass of flesh, instead focusing on the sweet rich goodness surely contained within such generous proportions. Draining her would take forever and a day, exactly what I needed to heal and come to terms with the new me, the half me who would lose his lover to guilt and pity.

  Balking, I tried turning away but the wolf growled his displeasure, sending a frisson of fear and longing up and down my spine.

  Stuttering, “I-I can’t, I won’t…” I weakly pushed at his massive chest but I might as well have tried to move the mountain with my bare hands for all the good it did.

  “Do you want to die, bătrân?”

  Old man?

  Did I? Want to die?

  Yes, yes I did.

  “Leave me be, boy. I’m no good for anything now, least of all … you.”

  Fane stared at me, hard. With commitment. With obligation. Loyalty. He was a wolf. It was in his nature.

  I was Vampyr, corrupted with alien genetics. The boy-man could hardly fathom the rage building inside my very bones. If left to live, I would destroy all in my path, including the one thing I had ever loved. They would shun me, my kind, for weakness was an abomination. The Vampyr in me understood and willed itself to meet death with honor.

  The Demon pointed with cruel mirth and condemned me to endless servitude. I had forsaken the promise of eternity as unfulfilling and unworthy of my special talents. The reality of that forever had never really occurred to me.

  The last thing I wanted to do was take my wolf with me into a hell of my own making.

  Clamping my jaw tight, I struggled against his embrace, fought off the advance of warm, full lips seeking out the secret places we had shared for too brief a time. Lovers, strangers, misanthropes, an unholy alliance of lust and greedy desire.

  Too weak to resist, succumbing to the last pleasures of his penetrating domination over my fractured soul, I gave in to my alpha.

  Eyes, look your last!

  Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you

  The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

  A dateless bargain to engrossing death.

  Thick and cloying, awash with sad sweetness, fluid filled my mouth with the mercy of his being, nicked off tender flesh on fangs grown long in desperate desire. Trickling, then gushing down my parched throat, his lifeblood punctured my resolve, thrusting it aside like wanton waves crashing onto shore.

  The beast awoke, ravenous.

  Fane spat, “Drink, damn you!” The words reverbed against lips gone numb with longing. “That leg won’t heal unless you drink.”

  The words barely registered, so angry was my need, so intent on satisfying its basest craving, that I nearly missed the import of them.

  “L-l-leg?” The effort to move, to look down, to see for myself only produced a spasm of agony. “I still have my…” the words came out rough and uneven, with disbelief and hope and fear etched between us, then stilled because that kind of faith always carried a price.

  He muttered, “Da,” then stopped abruptly, realization finally dawning, and with a smile he pulled away and spread the tunic for me to see.

  Sometimes, it’s better not to look. This was one of those times.

  I glanced from the wolf to the plump peasant girl with distaste and asked, “Is this the best you could do?”

  Stefan, my lord and master, gave me a feral grin, his eyes darkly devilish.

  “Da, for now. You must to drink.” Winking, he murmured, “Besides, I save the best for last.”

  For nine hundred years I sucked at relationships. It was time to break with that tradition.

  Licking my lips, I asked, “And what exactly would that best be?”

  Cupping his assets, he murmured something in his own language. It needed no translation.

  Dessert.

  Chapter Two

  The old man, a peasant, perhaps a woodsman, pottered about the confined space. The blaze from the fire smoldered with a sultry, languid dance: reddish-orange to yellow to bluish poofs of spent ash winged aloft, up the chimney and away to linger sweet-scented across the looming pines.

  My addled brain filled in the last fanciful bits. I had no idea if there were pines or cement and steel skyscrapers out there. The hovel was windowless and damn near airless, and the blue haze from the combination cookstove and fireplace was enough to clog even my imaginary sinuses.

  He was less ancient than he seemed at first glance. Bent over, he moved awkwardly as if spine and muscle had merely a passing acquaintance. After a bit of internal data retrieval, I offered up a diagnosis of scoliosis, a condition I�
��d seen with distressing frequency amongst my cell mates in my various habitués over the centuries. That and a fair number of other debilitating conditions spoke to society’s distaste for imperfection, leaving it to God’s minions to rectify the injustices of genetics and poor choices in mating habits.

  Looking around for the generously proportioned wench who had provided several helpings of sustenance, I realized what I’d done and winced with a modicum of regret. Trained to all things, except for one or two, in moderation, it was unlike me to gorge so completely on what proved to be an exceptionally tasty repast. Somewhat along the lines of a fast food meal, dripping with fat and luscious calories, it sufficed as a quick pick-me-up in the heal-thyself category.

  Pain does that to a man, it takes his good sense, and even better intentions, and sends them flying. Happy at first not to have lost the damnable limb, by the time dearest Fane had done with plowing my fields in verdant excess, I’d reached the point of no return in the patience lottery. The wolf went flying into the filthy soot-covered wall, and what came out of his mouth lacked those certain endearments I’d normally drum up from his deliciously ripe lips. So much for his efforts at distraction.

  Young master Fane unceremoniously dumped the plump girl onto my lap, smirking at my obvious discomfort, then stalked out of the cabin to leave me to finishing off the dregs of her bounty.

  She lolled over the open wound, still seeping and oozing, the fluid clearer than before but nowhere near a healthy pallor. With the amount of blood I’d consumed it should have been enough to heal me fifty times over. The Vampyr part, at least. My demon half was still a mystery, and the prospect of having to engage in practices even I, the ultimate purveyor of the corrupt and debased, might find unpleasant did little to spark my appetite.