Page 1 of Vampire Savage

PROLOGUE

Lan

Winter, 1652

Near the border between the

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Tsardom of Russia

This is a damn trap and all of us know it. We’re foot soldiers, though, and we’ve all seen what happens if someone questions General Jurgis Demencius. At least out here, in the bitter cold and endless rain, we have a better chance of surviving than questioning the general. We’re supposed to be fighting back against raiders and bandits plaguing the principalities as a show of allyship, but there’s been no sign of bandits for weeks.

The general has us searching for something, something he’s grown more and more obsessed with. Something that keeps him up at night, poring over strange drawings with symbols that compel most men to make the sign of the cross and pray to their gods.

I’m all too familiar with the world of magic to know that what the general is searching for could exist. The man my mother, Josephíne, claims as her father, the one I will never see as my grandfather, is a monster. He is a strzyga, someone who was once a man but now cannot die and must drain the life of others to survive.

Oleksandr, though I know that is not his true name because he is already musing about new names. About moving across the sea and taking my mother with him. She will have no choice because of him. It is because of him that her husband, my father, left. Every bruise my father put on her flesh is this vampire’s fault. Every tear she shed, every drop of blood. Doubly so, because he did nothing to stop it. And when my father left my mother, what did her so-called father do?

Demanded she return to his side and obey him as a ward once again.

Soon my commission with the military will be up and I will have enough money to take my mother away from him and his ways.

That’s if I make it through tonight. There are a dozen of us, muskets over our shoulders, as we creep closer to the large wooden izba house in the middle of the woods.

“This is where Baba Yaga lives,” Sergi, my friend on my left, whispers as he moves beside me, his boots crunching in the snow. His hands are gripping the musket tight, and ice clings to the bristles of his black mustache. He’s looking at the house, the two stories of windows dimly lit from within. “Evil is inside, Landon. You know this. We should turn back now.”

I pause, resting my shoulder against a tree where we crouch and look back the way we came. Somewhere in the dark, General Demencius waits for us in his tent, warmed with braziers and wine while our fingers turn black from frostbite. I adjust the brittle musket strap on my chest and meet Sergi’s dark eyes. He is my opposite. Bulky and dark like a bear where I am leaner and fairer like the snow mountain cats, ibises.

“Baba Yaga might be in there,” I agree, inclining my head towards the house. We’re fanned out around it. According to the general, what he seeks is in the house and we’re tasked with retrieving it. But as Sergi says, there is evil inside. Experience with vampires tells me that we are not alone in these woods either. “But if we do not go in, we will die and be branded traitors. Your wife and daughter will not be paid your commission. If you die here, at least they’ll be paid, ya?”

He spits on the ground and mutters a curse I silently agree with. “Then we run, Lan. We know these woods better than anyone else.”

How to explain to him, a man who does not know of the creatures that exist in this world, that we would be hunted by creatures of nightmares?

“Better to fight here,” I tell him, clasping him on the shoulder and squeezing. I put every ounce of charm and light my mother claims are within my soul into my smile and my eyes. She has said I’ve always had a gift to bolster others, something that my commanding officers have agreed with. A kindness that inspires bravery. “We fight as brothers, and I’ll buy you a bottle of wine back home.”

Sergi’s brow softens and his eyes fill with renewed courage; a hint of a smile even graces his lips.

His smile is all I can think about as I lay pinned under a chest of drawers, pain coursing through me, my mind screaming with agony, and blood half-blinding me. Sergi’s vacant eyes watch me from across the room, his face gouged and bleeding. I don’t know if anyone is alive. I can’t draw enough breath to whimper, let alone try to move.

We killed the small gathering of magicians in the izba, despite the demons they summoned. Now General Demencius walks through the slaughter, his heavy footsteps vibrating the floorboards and squelching as he disregards the bodies of the men who died for him.

Someone pleads for aid—Jan, I think, through the haze.

“Kill him,” the general barks without turning towards his soldier. His command is followed without hesitation. “Kill all who survived.”

My eyelids grow heavy, the darkness creeping in, as I watch the general who sacrificed me and my friends so easily stop near an altar before the hearth. A vicious grin splits his face, and I know that whatever he wanted, whatever he’d been obsessing over, he’d found it.

In the shadows, somehow my dying gaze finds the small keg of gunpowder. I hadn’t drawn my pistol and I don’t know where I found the strength to do so now. Perhaps it is rage or grief. But I do, and General Demencius’s shouts for me to be stopped are like the holiest hymn to my ears.

This bastard will die with his precious relic and the rest of us.

I fire, and let the darkness take me, a grin on my face.

Chapter One

WREN

Someone is watching me.

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