The air in the ossuary beneath Prague was colder than the grave, thick with the scent of ancient dust, damp stone, and something else—something metallic and sweet that clung to the back of Lena Petrova’s throat.
It was the smell of spilled life, stale and profane. Her own breath plumed in front of her face, a transient ghost in the beam of her tactical light.
She moved with an economy of motion that bordered on preternatural, her boots making no sound on the floor paved with the femurs and skulls of long-dead monks.
Silence was her first weapon. Patience, her second. The third was the silver-laced garrote coiled in her left hand.
Her comm unit crackled, a tiny spark of sound in the oppressive quiet. “Status, Acolyte?” The voice was Master Voronin’s, a low baritone that was less a question and more a demand for precision.
“Eyes on the nest,” Lena whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “Three, possibly four. Fledglings. They’re feeding.”
She flattened herself against a pillar of bone, peering into the main chamber. The dregs of the city’s forgotten had become a feast.
Four creatures, hunched over a pair of vagrants, their forms jerky and unnatural. They were new, clumsy in their hunger, tearing and slurping with a desperate greed that betrayed their youth.
They were soulless things, animated only by a parasitic thirst.
Vermin.
“Cleanse it,” Voronin commanded. “No witnesses, living or un-living.”
“For the Light,” Lena replied, the words a familiar prayer and a promise. The comm went silent.
Her mind was a sanctuary of cold logic. She mapped the chamber in an instant.
Four targets. Two feeding, distracted
One lurking near the entrance, a twitchy sentinel. The last was deeper in the shadows, a gluttonous shape half-hidden by a crumbling sarcophagus.
The sentinel was first.
Lena uncoiled the garrote.
She didn’t run; she flowed. A predator in her element, she became one with the shadows the dead cast.
The sentinel vampire, a young man who might have been handsome in life, turned his head, his senses finally catching a flicker of something amiss.
His eyes, glowing with a faint, predatory luminescence, widened.
Too late.
The silver wire bit deep into its neck. There was no scream, only a choked, wet gurgle as the blessed metal met unholy flesh.
The creature thrashed, claws scrabbling at her leather-clad arms, but Lena’s grip was absolute. She put her weight into it, using its own momentum to twist its head at an impossible angle.
A sharp crack, and it went limp. She let the body drop, already moving toward the next.
The smell of searing flesh, like ozone and burnt meat, filled the air.
The two feeding creatures looked up, their faces smeared with blood, their expressions a mixture of confusion and animalistic rage. They hissed, baring elongated canines.
They were fast, but they were sloppy. Driven by instinct, not strategy.
Lena was strategy incarnate.
She drew the twin stakes from the holsters on her thighs. They were old yew wood, weighted perfectly, their tips sharpened and inlaid with consecrated silver filigree.
She dodged the first one’s wild lunge, pivoting on her heel as it clawed at the space where she’d been. Her left hand shot out, palm striking its jaw with enough force to snap its head back.
In that moment of disorientation, her right hand drove the stake home, straight through its heart. It was a single, clean motion—a precise application of physics and faith.
The creature shuddered, a look of shock freezing on its face before its body dissolved into a cascade of gray ash and whispering embers.
The third one screamed, a shriek of pure terror, and scrambled back.
It was a girl, no older than twenty in her human life. Fear had replaced hunger in her eyes.
Lena felt nothing.
Pity was a weakness the Order had trained out of her. A monster was a monster, regardless of the face it wore.
She advanced, her steps measured and deliberate.
The creature threw a chunk of stone at her, which she easily deflected with her forearm. It tried to scuttle up a wall of skulls, its desperation pathetic.
“Please,” it rasped, the single word a foul aberration from a thing that had forsaken its humanity.
Lena’s response was the second stake.
She threw it with an underhand flick of her wrist, a technique Voronin had drilled into her for a thousand hours.
The wooden projectile spun through the air and struck the vampire squarely in the chest, pinning it to the wall of bone. It gave one last, agonized cry before crumbling to dust, leaving the stake embedded in a human skull.
One remained.
The fourth, the glutton, was now fully aware.
It rose from behind the sarcophagus, larger than the others, its hiss a low, rumbling threat. This one had fed more, was stronger.
It lunged, not with the blind panic of its brethren, but with a clear, murderous intent.
Lena met its charge.
She didn’t have another stake, so she used her body. She dropped low, letting its momentum carry it over her.
As it passed, she drove the hardened heel of her boot into the back of its knee. The joint shattered with a sickening crunch.
The creature roared in pain and fury, tumbling to the ground.
Before it could recover, Lena was on it, a knee pinning its spine, her hand grabbing a fistful of its lank hair and slamming its face into the stone floor.
She drew the silver knife from her belt.
“You are an abomination,” she said, her voice low and devoid of heat. It was a simple statement of fact. “And the light has no place for you.”
She drew the blade across its throat. It wasn’t a killing blow—not for its kind—but the silver cauterized and crippled.
As it writhed, paralyzed by the holy metal’s burn, she retrieved her thrown stake from the wall, wiped it clean on her trousers, and ended it.
The chamber fell silent once more, the air now thick with the cloying dust of four disintegrated bodies.
Lena stood, her breathing even, her pulse steady.
She surveyed her work.
The two vagrants were beyond saving, their bodies mangled.
A necessary loss. A small price to pay for the city’s safety.
She did not feel triumph, only the quiet satisfaction of a task completed.
This was her purpose.
This was her vow.
***
The Charles Bridge was empty in the hour before dawn. Mist coiled up from the Vltava River, shrouding the statues of saints in a damp, grey veil.
Lena stood in the shadow of one, the cold of the stone seeping through her tactical gear as she waited. A black sedan, sleek and silent as a phantom, pulled up to the curb.
The back door opened and Master Voronin stepped out. He was a man carved from granite and discipline, his face a mask of stern lines, his graying hair cropped short.
He wore a simple, dark suit that did nothing to hide the formidable strength of his frame.
For twenty years, since he’d found her, a traumatized orphan, he had been her mentor, her trainer, and the closest thing to a father she had ever known.
“Report,” he said, his eyes scanning the quiet street.
“The nest is cleansed. Four fledglings, dispatched. Two civilian casualties, beyond recovery.”
“Efficient, as always, Lena.” His praise was sparse but genuine, and it landed with the weight of a medal.
“You move like a whisper. You strike like lightning. The Order is proud of the weapon you have become.”
Lena inclined her head. “I serve the Order.”
Voronin’s gaze settled on her, and for a moment, the hardness in his eyes softened with something that resembled paternal pride.
“You do more than serve. You embody its principles. But this,” he gestured vaguely back toward the old town, “is beneath you now. Swatting flies. Culling the weak and the stupid.”
Lena’s brow furrowed slightly. “They are all monsters, Master. A threat is a threat.”
“Is a rabid dog the same threat as a wolf pack? Is a wolf pack the same as a dragon?” he countered, his voice taking on a new intensity. He stepped closer, his presence commanding.
“You have been honed to a razor’s edge, Lena. It is time you were used not to prune the branches, but to strike at the root.”
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle in the cold air. Lena felt a flicker of anticipation, a deep thrum of purpose.
This was what she had trained for. This was the culmination of her life’s single-minded focus.
“There is a name the Order has whispered for centuries,” Voronin continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush.
“A blight on history. An Original Sin that has spawned countless lesser evils. The one they call Rhysand de Valois.”
The name felt ancient, heavy on the tongue even when spoken by another. Lena knew it from the deepest, most restricted archives.
A creature of myth and terror, an ancient so powerful he was considered by many to be untouchable.
“He has surfaced,” Voronin stated.
“Paris. He grows bold, or perhaps, careless. The Council has deemed him the single greatest active threat to the balance. They believe he is the key. Eradicate him, and a thousand of his bloodlines will wither and die.”
Lena’s heart, usually a metronome of calm control, beat a fraction faster. This was not just a mission; it was a crusade.
To hunt a legend, to face the very source of the filth she had sworn to destroy… it was the ultimate test. It was her destiny.
“They say he cannot be killed,” she said, not out of doubt, but to measure the scope of the task.
“They say many things,” Voronin scoffed.
“They spin tales of tragedy and romance to make their evil palatable. Do not be fooled. He is a predator of the highest order, cunning and ruthless. But he is not a god. He is a monster, and all monsters have a weakness. All monsters can be unmade.”
He looked her directly in the eye, his own gaze as sharp and piercing as a blade.
“This will not be a simple cleansing, Lena. This will be a war fought in the shadows, a battle of will as much as of strength. He will try to manipulate you, to poison your mind with his ancient lies. You must be more than a hunter. You must be an executioner. An answer. A final, definitive end.”
Lena’s resolve solidified, hardening from steel into diamond. Everything she was, everything he had made her, had been for this moment.
The orphan girl who had lost her family to the darkness would now extinguish one of its oldest flames.
She met his gaze without flinching, her own reflecting the first pale light of the coming dawn.
“I will not fail,” she said. It was not a boast. It was a vow, sworn in the heart of a sleeping city, under the watchful eyes of stone saints. “I will find him. And I will erase him from this world.”
Voronin nodded, a rare, thin smile touching his lips. “I know you will.”
He turned and slipped back into the car, which pulled away as silently as it had arrived. Lena remained on the bridge, the yew stake still warm in her hand.
She looked east, where the sun was beginning to bleed over the horizon, painting the sky in hues of orange and rose.
It was a beautiful, holy fire, the ultimate weapon against the creatures she hunted.
Rhysand de Valois.
The name echoed in her mind, not as a source of fear, but as a target.
The ultimate target.
She felt the familiar, cold fire of purpose surge through her veins.
The hunt was on.