Raving Moon, Lords of the Night Book One

Chapter 13: Without a Trace

I'd gone home to change and grab a proper bite to eat. A hard boiled egg and two slices of toast later I dozed off on the couch. I checked my messages, then rested my eyes. I was up again at noon. My mind kept going to the pictures Dr. Noraa showed us before we left. He knew Gates, Carlos, and I were like family and thought we should know what we were dealing with.

Much of the skin on Carl's arm was gone. What remained was purple tinted and riddled with black veins. The flesh beneath was sickly grey, and the exposed bone had yellowed. Seeing it frightened me. A weapon out there capable of ashing on contact and destroying flesh days after was a devastating twist to modern warfare. With a few of those guns, a gang of street punks could overthrow a House. A House could conquer a city. The pillars which held up the vampire kingdom would crumble.

Sure I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep, I showered, dressed, and went down to headquarters. During the day there was only one way in or out of the complex. The entrance was through the back door of a diner across the street from the LYFE building. The door led down a flight of stairs to a basement, a hidden door in the basement connected to another flight of stairs and finally into a twenty foot square room.

I stood at the bottom of the steps, staring at the door twenty feet away. The room smelled of dust and ages past. I waited there and the minutes stretched on. Then it came, a subtle rumbling, the grinding of ancient stone, and finally a voice from antiquity spread through the room.

"Why do you wait, white one" the words were dragged out, each a deep sigh.

"Because I know no man may enter without the guardian's approval."

The guardian was a being far older than the city, his stones ancient when the vampire kingdom was new. His kind were one of the oldest on our plane of existence.

"Then you desire entrance?"

"I do."

"Then answer: What must be broken before it can be used?" The guardian's voice was the slow erosion of mountain rock.

"An egg."

"Yes." The one word echoed through the chamber long after he finished. "The man who built it doesn't want it, the man who bought it doesn't need it, and the man who needs it doesn't know it. What is it?"

"A coffin."

"These things are one and the same, a cycle end to beginning, beginning to end. What are they."

I pondered the connection between the two for a moment, wondering where the old thing in the walls found its endless supply of riddles. The wall groaned, and I just made out the guardian's outline in the walls from the corner of my eye. A shiver ran down my spine and my nerves tingled under the pressure of ancestral fears buried deep in the memories of my DNA. unable to stop myself I turned to catch a glimpse of the guardian, but found nothing but old rock.

"Answer," the room commanded.

The guardian's impatience made the breath catch in my lungs.

"You are life, symbols of birth and death..."

It was a guess, but I felt confident in my response. The guardian's long pause could have meant everything and nothing.

"Enter."

The walls seemed to recede, the gloom peeled back, and the door swung open. It was rare that I visited HQ when it was on lockdown and I'd never gotten its riddles wrong, but I dreaded seeing the penalty for failing the test.

I went straight to evidence storage. My passcode got me through the first door, a retinal scan unlocked the second. An air lock separated the second and third door. I put on a clean suit and punched in the final code. The credentials changed every month and only the praetorian were allowed to know them under punishment of death. The door opened with a hiss and I entered a room housing some of Gorgon City's most dangerous contraband.