“Well, Joshua was the Alpha,” she answered, then thought about it for a moment as he stared at her, waiting for the next part of her answer. “But, he was ready to kill me. So, if he didn’t care about me, it falls back on me to be responsible for my life.”

  “Not your mom?” Michael asked.

  Her eyes scrunched together. “My mom? She’s been dead a while so there’s no way it could be her responsibility. Really, when I left home the responsibility became mine.”

  “So, why help anyone?” Michael asked. “What about the young man that was on the table, dead?” Jacqueline’s face clouded up, and her anger was just under the surface as he said, “If you had known about him fifteen minutes before they killed him, what would you have done?”

  “Kicked their asses and ripped their fucking heads off their shoulders. I would have ripped one arm off and used it to beat the shit out of the next guy, and then I would have…” her voice trailed off. Realization dawned on her face. “I didn’t know him.”

  “No, no you didn’t.” Michael agreed. “But you were ready to throw Paul Mullins off the airship and listen to him scream in the night as he fell to his death.”

  “All because of one guy I never knew,” she whispered and looked over at him. “I still see his face, Michael. I still imagine the torture he must have felt, lying there with no one coming to save him. Who was he? Does he have family that’s wondering if he’s okay, not knowing if he’s alive or dead? No closure for them because we have no way to tell them?” A tear escaped her eye and slid down her face before she reached up and wiped it away. “How many more people are there like him out there?”

  “I suspect dozens, perhaps more,” Michael guessed. “And it isn’t just who’s out there now. There could be hundreds or thousands in the future that might suffer if I do nothing. The tree of Justice must be refreshed from time to time using the blood of those who practice injustice, and the souls of those willing to fight for it.”

  She looked at him, a little awe in her eyes.

  Michael smiled. “It’s a bastardization of a Thomas Jefferson quote, way before your time,” he explained.

  “How do we find them?”

  “Those that are being sucked dry?” he asked, and she nodded. “We find the wealthy and follow the clues. Then to get rid of it, we locate others who are willing to fight for Justice and Honor. Those willing to make sure we stop the selfish who use excuses to attack those different than them for personal benefit.”

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “Kill them?” Michael answered. When her eyes narrowed, he chuckled. “Not all of them. But, I’ve found killing to be a really good deterrent. Unfortunately, my love suggests I not use that as my first response.”

  “What’s your first response now?” Jacqueline asked.

  “I say ‘Please,’” Michael answered.

  “That isn’t going to work!” she barked. “No fucking way!”

  “Why do you think killing them is now my second response?” he asked, a smirk on his face.

  “You really are a Dark Messiah, aren’t you?” she whispered.

  “I can be the darkest, Jacqueline,” he said his voice growing cold. “Never mistake compassion for inability to proactively remove a threat. Take out the dishonorable, and problems in the future are significantly fewer.”

  She sat there thinking about everything he had just told her, and her mind was arguing with itself.

  He stood up and looked down at her, not unkindly, and then started towards the bookshelves. “The young man on the table’s name was Daniel.” Michael didn’t interrupt as she stood up and walked out, heading towards her own room. Now, Injustice had a name to go along with the face for her.

  And the name was a man who had died in a nowhere warehouse in old Denver.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jacqueline stared at the ceiling as she lay in bed thinking back on her life. The selfishness, the pride, the ego, and pain, and the humiliation. She thought about using the knife to stab the pack Alpha her father had in his hands.

  Her father.

  “God, Father, why did you die for me?” she whispered into the darkness. “I’m not worth your life.” Tears fell, soaking the covers. With the home sealed, most of the furnishings had lasted through the decades and centuries.

  Except for the food. There was no way they were trusting that.

  She wiped her red eyes and sniffed. Her confusion, her pride, her reluctance were battling inside her mind. She didn’t want to be her father’s daughter, helping others and not having time for his family. Even when she had been young, he had been pulled away for meetings where others wanted him to intercede, provide guidance and judgment, and others took him away from her.

  So, she ran away with her friends, and he had followed her. Only to die at the end, protecting her, to give her another chance.

  She had promised, on his cairn, to make him proud. She didn’t feel like that was accomplished, not yet. “Why is this so hard?” she asked the room, but it offered no answer.

  “Daniel,” she spoke aloud, thinking of the face, the emaciated body as he had lain there. “I didn’t have your back when they took you, handcuffed you and locked you away. I never knew you, now… I never will. I’m not a vampire, I have no idea what your life was like, what you had to do just to survive.” She wiped away more tears. “I would have come for you if I had only known. What happened to you is bullshit, on so many levels I can’t even begin to comprehend.”

  More tears.

  Her head was in her hands, her shoulders heaving as the tears flowed down her face. “Be with me Daniel, I beg you, be my totem, my reason for doing this. I can’t go back to being the selfish one, the indecisive one… but I’m scared Daniel, I’m so, so scared.”

  Michael retired to his own room, the one he hadn’t visited in so long. He opened the dark brown stained box with the linen cover that rested there and smiled.

  His collection of watches sat arrayed like a row of cars in a garage, each waiting to be matched with the suit of the evening.

  Which watch, he wondered, would be appropriate to go with an apocalypse?

  He could feel the turmoil emanating from Jacqueline’s room but left her feelings and thoughts private. He shouldn’t get back into the habit of reading everyone around him. Well, perhaps not his friends. Which, in this city, meant only Jacqueline.

  Existential ethical crisis averted for now.

  He closed the watch box lid and slid the coat off and walked to his closet. He had clothes, all from a hundred plus years ago. He wondered what they would do above if he went out in this fashion? Was it normal on the street?

  He hung up the coat and sighed. He needed to figure out this problem with his ability to Myst. Which meant he needed to delve deep into the memories of his… what… death? He had been dodging this problem for too long. It wasn’t like him to do that, but then the pain he tried to block wasn’t fun, either.

  He pulled off the holsters and set them on a shelf, and laid the sword he had pulled from his armory beside them. He stripped and walked into his bathroom to test the water. It took about half a minute of choking sounds coming from his pipes, and then some incredibly disgusting brown water spat out before it cleared up enough that he had hoped he would get a chance to wash up.

  He tested the water with his hand and frowned, hot water was a no go.

  The soft pitter-patter of her feet going down the steps were the only noises she could hear. The occasional light in the halls or the stairways impressed her as the technology, even with it not working at a hundred percent, was still so far in advance of what she was familiar with. It made her want to search the rest of the house.

  But she felt a presence. Maybe it was just a construct of her brain, but she chose to decide it wasn’t and it encouraged her to start her changes early.

  Right then.

  Jacqueline found the light switch on the wall and flipped it. The large room lit up, and she started walking towards the area that was for stretching and practice. She stepped onto the bamboo floor and stopped, thinking about what she was doing and then stepped back off.

  She got down on her knees and closed her eyes. This was the place Michael, the Patriarch of Vampires, the ArchAngel, the Dark Messiah himself used for untold years and she would change her attitude. Respect would be given to him, to her father, to those who had died before she grew the hell up and stopped sulking about poor, selfish her.

  Jacqueline stood up and stepped back on the bamboo floor and felt right, centered. She stilled her face, erasing any emotion, and put her feet shoulder width apart and knelt. Michael had been teaching her, and she had been learning. But, it wasn’t with all of her focus, because it had lacked all of her heart.

  She listened to the beating inside her chest, to her breathing. Her balance, when off, she corrected and noted why she thought she had been off. She took in the sounds of the building, the heartbeat of the concrete, as subtle as it was, and in time, she believed she could recognize Michael’s heartbeat.

  Standing, she went through the first kata, as he had called them. She paid attention to power, to efficiency in movement, to the joy of teaching muscles the right way to accomplish an act. Not so she could produce the most pain or destruction.

  But rather, so she would be prepared to protect the next Daniel.

  Michael reached back in his memories. To the time before the age of silence, to the time of pain.

  Unfathomable pain.

  He felt it. He felt the fire in his nerves as he soaked under the cold water, his hands pressed against the ceramic tile wall of his walk-in shower.

  His head hanging, his face a mask of agony.

  The destruction coming from behind him, devouring even the insubstantial form of his Myst. His mental scream of terror, of loss and…

  Dishonor.

  Failing to honor his promise. That wouldn’t, couldn’t, he remembered thinking, be allowed.

  He would NOT fail her in this.

  Then the darkness. Darkness in his heart, his mind, until at some point, consciousness returned. Over time, he had figured out he was in the Etheric, Bethany Anne’s realm. Not his.

  Not his.

  The Myst was his realm, his to own, to be, the area he had owned for hundreds of years. Until the time Myst and pain were intertwined in his psyche. The association of Myst with failure. The form he had been in when he had failed to return to Bethany Anne.

  Until now.

  Michael’s eyes turned red, his teeth started elongating, and then the water stopped hitting his head and dropping to the floor below.

  Because there was no body there anymore.

  When it happened, she felt it, knew it. Michael wasn’t there anymore. She didn’t allow it to affect her next punch nor the pivot and kick that followed. It was just information, awareness... BLOCK PUNCH KICK! Jacqueline performed the roundhouse kick and dropped to the proper block before continuing with the kata.

  She never noticed her own perspiration, she never felt Michael leave the house through his little straw-sized hole.

  Nor did she feel him come back a few minutes later until he reappeared in his room, just another bit of awareness and information as she continued her practice, ignoring the pain in her muscles.

  Michael cut off the water in his shower and walked back into his closet.

  “Fucking clothes,” he said. While annoyance colored his voice, his eyes were serene.

  He could switch to Myst again.

  Morning, according to Michael’s internal clock, had arrived. He got up and dressed in clean clothes, added his weapons, his black jacket and slid on one of his watches. He was able to get about two-thirds of his watches to wind up and work again. The one he grabbed both worked and went with his outfit.

  He stepped out of his room and locked it. Some things should be sacrosanct, and while Jacqueline was welcome here, there would only be one other female allowed in his room.

  Jacqueline wasn’t in her room, so he went downstairs and found her in the practice area. She was sitting in a lotus position, facing towards the chamber. This was not something that he had taught her.

  “Good morning,” she said, without opening her eyes, nor moving her hands from where she had them near her knees.

  Michael raised an eyebrow and looked behind him, before turning back to her. “I’m sorry, who am I speaking with this morning?”

  She did not open her eyes, and her voice was calm, reflective, assured. This did not seem like the woman that had attacked the two punks the previous night. That woman had been boisterous, angry, headstrong and rambunctious... undecided on how to proceed.

  The one in front of him seemed calm, reflective and in touch with her inner self. Whether that continued when put into the flame, he would soon find out. “We need to go.”

  She unfolded and stood up with smooth grace and stepped off the bamboo. He raised an eyebrow when it looked like she bowed her head for a split second before turning, eyes alight, and jogged towards the steps. Michael’s head swiveled on his neck as he watched her hit the steps and disappear.

  “Thirteen hundred years later,” he whispered to himself, “and they are just as confusing as the first time you met one.” Two minutes later, she returned with her sword in its scabbard and a smile on her face.

  “Clothes?” she asked, excited.

  Michael grinned. “Yes, clothes.”

  “Great!” she turned towards the door and started walking. “Out the way we came in?” she asked.

  Michael’s body disappeared, and he flew over to her. This time, she also disappeared, and he turned them around, heading towards his special exit that no one but himself, as far as he knew, could get in.

  HOLY SHIT! Jacqueline mentally screamed. WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?

  Well, your calmness seems to have evaporated, Michael’s voice rang in Jacqueline’s head.

  That’s not all that’s evaporated! she said. But Michael could feel her working to calm her response. Where are we and how did this happen?

  One of my skills, he replied when he felt her flinch as they went into the pipe. Anyone in the Myst with him could see around, they just couldn’t control anything. Moments later, they were up in the city outside. Michael swooped over to the park they had walked through in the dark and then they rematerialized when he got close to the ground.

  Jacqueline stood, her feet apart and her arms outstretched like she was working to keep her balance. Looking around, she checked her clothes. “You might have warned me,” she said. Not in an angry tone, but very matter of fact.

  “Yes,” he agreed and started walking past her. “I could have.”

  Enforcer HQ

  Billy “The Bomb” Wattson stood a hair’s breadth under six and a half feet tall. His ebony skin matched his black enforcer’s uniform.

  He was a vampire hunter, or if you knew the right term, he was a Nacht hunter.

  There were no special emblems on his uniform except a badge he could put on or take off depending on his job for the day. When it was time to go in for a takedown, well he would take it off. No need to have a bright shiny target bouncing around.

  He nodded to the riot team as he passed through the operations room and kept going to the back to slide out into his group’s area.

  Here, they didn’t talk about crime or criminals, here they talked about taking down vampires and Weres that had run amok.

  Or, refused to work with them.

  Billy needed Weres to help locate the damned vampires. Then the vampires were either killed or moved into medical research. Basically, their blood helped pump money into the coffers of the Enforcers and those who helped fund them in the beginning. He was here at the beginning, and he owned a very small cut of the overall income.

  And even a small cut was enough to make his life very good indeed.

  Billy grabbed his pistol and a stun gun, then he grabbed the arc rod he’d made special. It was two arc rods put together with an extra foot of metal rod in the middle. Normally, arc rods were sufficient to cover anyone who knew what they were. Vampires almost always assumed they could dodge the rods or survive the shock. It wasn’t until he and his partner, Vince, had run into a small nest of the bastards that Billy had decided to use two arcs.

  Then, they met a vampire that knew how to use a quarterstaff, and that was the night he’d lost Vince. Even with two arc rods, and his training, he couldn’t get inside the quarterstaff’s reach. The vampire had blocked an overhead slash by Billy, twisted, and stabbed out with his staff and hit Vince in his face shield, cracking through the visor and into his skull.

  Billy had seen the fatal blow, saw his friend and partner collapse, and he lost it. He attacked the vampire with a ferocity born of anger and retribution. He had been hit twice before he got a good shock to the vampire, which had retreated to a back room and out a window into an alley. Billy wasn’t small enough to fit through the window to follow him, and he would be gone before Billy made it out of the house.

  Which meant that Billy had to go back and face his fallen partner, and apologize for failing him.

  Now, Billy had his own upgraded staff and had practiced for months after he made it. He had taken out six vampires with it so far. One he had killed from shocking him too much. Billy didn’t care, the vampire shouldn’t have mouthed off to him.

  Like he cared what a creature like that said. They might speak like a human, look like a human, but they drank blood, and that made them inhuman.

  And inhuman deserved no compassion from Billy.

  He slammed his locker shut and smiled at his four teammates. “Tonight’s going to be good guys, we got us another lead.”

  “HELL YEAH!” they cheered.

  Another night, another Nacht to capture and hook up to the machines.

  Michael and Jacqueline came out of the grocery store, two packages each between them. “This stuff costs as much as the clothes!” she commented as the two of them walked down the street.