Vampire Sovereign Read online

  VAMPIRE SOVEREIGN

  The Chronicles of the Immortal Council #3

  by

  D.C. Young

  Other Books in The Chronicles of the Immortal Council

  1. Vampire Abduction

  2. Vampire Exodus

  3. Vampire Sovereign

  4. Vampire Magic

  5. Vampire Vacation

  6. Vampire Reflections

  7. Vampire Enigma

  8. Vampire Spirit

  9. Vampire Regent

  10. Vampire Intuition

  Other Books in J.R. Rain’s Vampire for Hire World

  Burning

  Afterglow

  Radiance

  Dead Ahead

  Dragon Lessons

  Vampires She Wrote

  Wolf Moon

  Fire Warrior

  Fang

  I, Samantha Moon

  Vampire Apocalypse

  Vampire Sovereign

  Published by Rain Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Rain Press

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  (Vampire Sovereign is based on the characters created by J.R. Rain; the use of story situations and supporting characters from the “Vampire for Hire” universe is authorized by J.R Rain.)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreward

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Reading Sample

  Foreward

  by J.R. Rain

  Hi there and welcome!

  J.R. Rain here, and I’m so excited to introduce you to my “Vampire for Hire World”! As you might have guessed, these are written by writers other than me. Fair warning, these stories are non-canon (as in, unofficial) but they’re still a ton of fun. I’m excited to see the Samantha Moon world grow, and I’m equally excited to see all these wonderful writers exploring her world with me.

  So, sit back and enjoy Vampire Sovereign!

  —J.R.

  Vampire Sovereign

  Chapter One

  “Come on, Max. This isn’t what I think it is, is it? I mean that would be im...”

  “What Samantha?” he asked. “Impossible? I thought that word would have been completely eradicated from your vocabulary by now. What, with all the things you have seen in your short vampiric life so far.”

  He looked disappointed in her for a split second, then covered one of her hands with his and shook his head slightly.

  “Everything you were ever told was a fairy tale or didn’t exist outside of the horror films, is real, Sam. They’re all as real as you and I and believe me when I tell you that there are even worse creatures out there too. Creatures that mankind has chosen to ignore and forget over the centuries.”

  —Archibald Maximus, Vampire Abduction

  Samantha Moon was out on a late night flight over Los Angeles.

  She was headed north over the Pacific Coast Highway; away from the lights and the smog in search of the cold, crisper air in the north.

  In recent weeks, Sam had found that the cold air streaming from the water off the coast was as refreshing and calming to her mind as anything else she could find these days.

  Vampire weather, she thought and immediately Allison Lopez and their freaky trip to Seattle, Washington came to her mind.

  Sam smiled.

  There’d been far too much unrest in her life lately. More and more, she had been feeling the pull and tug of the dark entity inside her and the fight to overcome the disturbing urges she’d been feeling of late was becoming increasingly difficult. From a moral standpoint, the whole affair was aggravating Sam. The feelings and thoughts that the dark master inside her vampire body was giving her were unsettling at best.

  She glided nimbly into the currents of cool air and soared higher. The possibility of being seen soaring above the clouds no longer worried her. It was as a friend had once said, “Let those with eyes see. Let those with ears hear.” Anyone standing on the ground below who happened to look up and see her dark bat-like silhouette dashing across the sky would most certainly come up with a plausible explanation for it; because their good sense would never allow their eyes to see the truth or their minds to fathom the unexplainable.

  It had been Archibald Maximus who’d said those words to her. Thinking of him now, Sam knew she would soon have to go see her librarian friend who ruled over the Occult Reading Room at Cal State Fullerton. He would be able to offer some insight into her recent experiences and the sooner she did that the better. But a week after they had dealt with the dead witch creature, Sam had gone to Cal State and for the first time, she couldn’t find the reading room. She’d arrived at the place where the door always had been with its little sign over head and there was nothing there but wall. A picture hung where the door once stood with a plaque over it announcing that the person in the portrait was the benefactor of that wing of the building.

  Dazed and confused, she’d gone back down to the lobby and asked the person behind the desk for directions.

  “Hmmm, I’m new here but I don’t recall any mention of an Occult Reading Room during my orientation,” the young man said. “Let me look it up in the directory.”

  He’d punched the keys on his computer keyboard furiously for a moment making Samantha roll her eyes in descent.

  No one types that quickly, she thought. But the kid was already scrolling through a list that his keyboard jibber-jabber had evidently produced.

  “Ahh,” he said thoughtfully, then turned and went to a sort of document bin that stood in a row of five similar bins on the credenza behind him. “Apparently, this was left for anyone who came asking for such a room. Must be directions to wherever they’ve moved the material to. Probably microfiche or a server.”

  Sam thanked him, took the envelope and left. Outside in the parking lot, she sat behind the steering wheel of her minivan and tore the document open.

  It was a letter from Max.

  He had to attend to some very urgent business and was unsure how long he would be away. He knew she would understand that the reading room would have to remain closed in his absence but promised he would be back as soon as he was able.

  That had been five weeks ago and still he hadn’t returned. Sam was beginning to worry about him.

  The last few times she had visited the campus, the wall and its portrait had still been there staring at her with dead eyes as she’d wondered what had happened to her friend. She was growing increasingly anxious at his absence.

  However, that night she had managed to find a little peace in the sky and as she glided on her huge bat-like wings over the cliffs of Monterrey and took deep breaths of the icy breeze, she was already beginning to feel calmer and more centered.

  Sam remembered the first conversation she’d had with Archibald about the old, sinister spirit… no, call it what it was, a demon… that inhabited her and generated her immortality. The story had been fantastical. It had all the elements of a great TV series… if only there wasn’t already one airing on the CW network… and Sam had ment
ioned as much during their talk.

  Sam had just brought the diamond medallion, the same one she’d recovered off Detective Hanner’s dead body, for Max to take a look at. They’d been discussing her streak of luck at having all four medallions come into her possession when they had sort of gone off on a tangent. Sam remembered him saying:

  “Back to the medallion… as I’d been saying, it needed to find its way into the world.”

  “Yes, I got that. But my question is, why did we have to go through all that?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out by now, Sam?”

  “Figured out what?”

  “All this had to happen, exactly as it did, so that it could find you. On its own.”

  “You do realize that you could have just given it to me, right?” she said. “It could have saved us both a lot of time.”

  “Yes, I guess I could have done that. But what fun would that have been? Furthermore, that’s not quite the way it works, Sam. For starters, there was no real way for me to know it was meant for you. Not until I’d met you anyway and certainly not until it was clear that there was something particularly uncanny about how you managed to keep gathering the medallions.”

  “So, it’s not surprising to you that I have this one, is it?”

  “No, Sam, not in the least. What I would have found surprising is if our Detective Hanner had figured out how to unlock it.”

  “But she couldn’t?”

  “No. Despite her very valiant efforts to do so.”

  “I take it there’s more to it than just wearing it?”

  “A tad bit more.”

  As usual, the over-sized, ancient-looking books that filled the nearby shelves were freaking her out. They looked dark and felt dark… the fact was, they were dark. And evil. Some infinitely worse than others.

  “Why me?” she asked suddenly. “Why is it that I’m finding all these medallions? I mean… I’m just me, I’m no one special. I’m just a mom who took a jog at the wrong time, to the wrong place and got attacked a long time ago.”

  As she spoke, Sam couldn’t help but notice the Librarian’s demeanor softening. He set the medallion down on the desk, near her drumming fingers and took a deep breath. For the first time ever, she saw the young man who wasn’t young express real emotions. And the emotion that Sam saw in his face was heartbreak.

  She looked at the medallion, and then, looked him in the eyes. Sam couldn’t read his mind, but it was easy to sense that there was something big going on there. She sensed it from deep inside her, it was instinctual, almost visceral. In fact, Sam was certain it was coming from her... the demon that lived inside her.

  A cold shiver ran up and down her spine. “The demon inside me...” she began, but Sam was unable to find the words to explain with Archibald looking at her the way he was. There was so much emotion there that it was breaking her heart for reasons she didn’t know.

  “She wasn’t always a demon,” he finished. “She was my mother… once upon a time.”

  The revelation had blown Sam’s mind and even after everything that had happened since that conversation, it was still game changing.

  Chapter Two

  Ancient queen and lass.

  Risen vampire-like from out the wormy mould,

  Deep in the magic mirror of my heart

  Behold their perished beauty, and depart.

  And now, from black aphelions far and cold,

  Swimming in deathly light on charnel skies,

  The enormous ghosts of bygone worlds arise.

  —Necromancy by Clark Ashton Smith

  It was very difficult to be a witch in the twenty-first century, much less to be a necromancer who’d been cast out of her coven of two-and-a-half centuries. But it seemed that after so many years of looking past her short comings, the other witches of the Citadel Coven had finally had all that they would take of Catalina Caruso.

  To Catalina, they were weak and on the road to extinction. She was sure she would outlive them all. They were too soft and too eager to resign themselves to a life of fitting in and eeking out a modest living from a population of regular people who grew more and more skeptical of the existence of magic as each day passed by.

  They had become tea leaf and palm readers, fortune tellers, potion makers and house blessers… weaklings! As far as Catalina was concerned, they were a disgrace to the very magic they were born to wield and had the power to use. In addition to all that, they had turned their backs on her, all because she had dared to bring their attention to the truth.

  Things grew even more complicated when meteorologists began to talk about the same rare and prophetic planetary alignment that Catalina had warned the coven members was coming soon. For thirty days between January and February, seven of the brightest planets in our Solar System would align and appear brightly in the sky for the whole world to see. Not many on Earth knew the significance of the cosmic event and it angered the witch that those around her who should have known better, had decided to watch it with equally as blind eyes as everyone else.

  “Let’s those with eyes see and those with ears hear,” Catalina mumbled to herself as she stood at the crafting table in her new coven’s lycée. It wasn’t a fancy space but it was well equipped the twelve girls had seen diligently to that.

  She’d attached herself to a small group of wiccans in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and managed to organize them into a rather eager and potent group of casters. They were inquisitive and impressionable and excited to learn that something big was going to happen, that things meant something, that they had a purpose and a role to play.

  Oh, the angst! Catalina thought grinning to herself.

  They had brought mortars and pestles and crystals, bowls, books and furniture and filled the place with everything that would make it functional. The postage stamp sized garden in the tiny backyard had been weeded and replenished with all the staple herbs and plants needed to make good spells and the shelves of the little downstairs kitchen had been stocked with jars of various other ingredients and objects. The screened in porch outside the kitchen door was full of the plants from Catalina’s private collection. They hung in baskets, clung to tree stumps, flourished in vessels of enriched water and some even twined their Viney stems up the wooden columns of the structure and looped themselves through the eaves to hang languidly.

  The lycée was beautiful and together the thirteen witches it housed would make it a resounding success; especially when they brought the spirit of the witch queen back.

  Ever since she was a child, she’d been told the stories about Himiko, the witch queen of Wa. Most importantly, she’d been told of a prophecy that revealed Himiko’s return to earth to rule over the true witch covens. When the time was right, a brave caster— a gifted necromancer— would harness the power of a supernatural being and resurrect the witch queen.

  The legend had grown to be just that… a legend… a bedtime story that wiccans told their children and the faith dedicated to the belief in Himiko and her return to power was lost with the passing of time. But Catalina believed that she had seen the signs that heralded the return of the queen. When she had brought the grimoires to Harriet, the grand witch of her coven, the old woman had laughed Catalina to scorn.

  “Fairy tales, Catalina!” Harriet scoffed. “Utter and complete nonsense. There is no mystical witch who is going to be brought back from the dead to raise all the witches on earth back to their power and status and all that hogwash.” Harriet paused for effect as she extended her arms and spun around the center of the coven’s meeting room slowly. “This is all there is Catalina and that’s the fact of it. Put your head down, pay attention to your lessons and turn your studies to something more useful than that rubbish. Then maybe we can finally see some of that potential we all saw in you a few years ago.”

  Catalina had been scorched by the older woman’s words. Her belief in the fifth reign of Himiko was that strong; the research she had done… in her opinion… flawless. She ha
d traced Himiko through almost two thousand years and identified three previous occasions in history where the witch queen had been resurrected. Catalina was sure her calculations were precise as well.

  Himiko has reigned over Yamatai, Japan from around 185 to 248 A.D. The legend had it that when she died, her body— perfectly preserved and appearing just as it had in life— stood up from the funeral dais, walked to the sea and disappeared below the western waves, never to be found.

  In her research, Catalina had made a solid connection between Himiko and three extraordinary and controversial women, who coincidentally had at one time or another faced accusations of witchcraft. First was Eleanor of Aquitaine, the first queen of France. Her sons became Kings in nearby England and her bloodline ruled in almost every house of Europe for centuries after her death. Eleanor was known for her fearlessness and was called the Witch of the West by Saladin’s men when she rode into battle against them astride a war horse in full armor and very heavily pregnant.

  Then the trail had led Catalina to another queen, a very bizarre woman of her time… Elizabeth Tudor, the fiery-haired bastard queen of England. Even before her conception, Elizabeth’s mother, the notorious Ann Boleyn had been labeled a witch and accused of enchanting Henry the Eighth into divorcing his wife Catherine, a princess of Spanish blood, and denouncing the Church of Rome. In 1533, when Ann gave birth to her daughter, the red-haired child captivated the king’s heart in a way which his daughter Mary never had. It was quite contrary to the king’s well known anxiety over producing a male heir and his entire court saw his adoration of Elizabeth as a spell cast on him by Ann.

  Elizabeth was promiscuous and never got married; gaining a reputation for herself as a hater of men and an abomination to womanhood on a whole. Her choice to legitimize the protestant faith and remove England from the folds of the Catholic Church and from under the thumb of Rome and the Pope sent shock-waves through Europe.