Blood and Beasts

Chapter 42

The snow was falling heavy now on the streets of Chicago, and Bethany held her jacket tight to her chest, one hand clutching the pistol in the holster at her side. Each passing stranger put her nerves on edge. Since killing William Marshal, she'd ordered a whole new set of precautions, ditching old burner phones, the cars they'd been using, setting fire to the I.D.s they'd been using. Marshal's body had been found only a few days later (enough time to be a couple states away), but Bethany had to assume the Imperial Cult would be on red alert now, hunting for blood.

Andie had gone with Saif and the others as planned, and now they were meeting up with various contacts, anyone that might be brave enough to make a stand against the Imperial Cult. Bethany could think of one or two that would happily die in a blaze of glory, in one last fight to stop evil, but mostly those types were already dead. It wasn't hard to find a place to die fighting against monsters.

In the web of contacts that Logan and her had built over the years were clusters of paranoid and ultra cautious types. They knew of the dangers in the world, and would do what they could to help, but few were the types to put themselves in the line of fire. Bethany couldn't say she blamed them. There were horrors out there that could barely be fathomed.

The thought brought her to Jack, and she had to fight to keep from breaking down. At any given moment, she feared the thought of her beautiful baby boy, suffering in ways that no living person ever had, would send her spiralling into hysterics that she couldn't escape. Three months it had been now, but she had to keep fighting. She wouldn't stop. She would kill every last member of the Imperial Cult if that's what it took to get her boy back. She just wanted to hold him in her arms again, even if only one more time.

"Deep in thought?" a deep but soft voice said behind her. Bethany whipped around, pulling out the pistol in one hand, and the stake in her other, levelling it at the heart of the man behind her. Or vampire rather. He smirked through his thick beard and raised his hands in surrender. "You are quicker than I remember."

Bethany smirked too and tucked the stake back in her jacket, the pistol back into the holster. "Only getting better with age." She opened her arms wide and gave the vampire, Thomason, a hug. He embraced her warmly. "I didn't know if you'd come."

"I told you, for you I will always be there." Thomason Kobango was the vampire faction leader of Chicago, only three generations down from the queen herself. Bethany had met him near a decade ago, before he ruled in the city. At that time it had been a vampire named Krill that was in charge. Bethany and Logan had still been learning the vampire ways then, following up on some killings. What they had discovered was a string of disappearances of young teens and children, all of them being turned into vampires and set loose on the city.

Hunting for leads they had met Thomason, and he changed Bethany's thinking on vampires. Thomason was a vampire and drank human blood to survive, but he didn't kill, and he was appalled by Krill's leadership, his kidnapping of children, turning them into tools of chaos and death. Thomason was a potential candidate to take over the faction after Krill, and with his close relation to the queen, he was the likely choice, but Krill needed to die before that. More than that, if there was suspicion that Thomason had a hand in Krill's death, then he could be potentially be executed for it.

Bethany and Logan took a gamble on Thomason, listening to his advice, managing to track down Krill and slay him. Thomason did take over and rounded up all the children Krill had ordered turned. Bethany feared he would simply slaughter them, but he showed his mercy, taking them in and training them to feed as he did, restrained, no killing. With Thomason taking over, vampire related deaths had dropped significantly in the area over the decade.