CHAPTER ONE

Her long nails, painted blood crimson and laced with ebony, clicked against the dark arm of her chair, an eerie rhythm to join the hissing voices of her whispering brethren amongst the gloom. Monotony’s song at its best. And indeed, monotony was singing to Scarlatina all too loudly.

A pair of seemingly endless centuries had crawled by, seldom finding the Scarlet Fever absent from her black-upholstered seat, time and time again reminding her that her once formidable power was quick on the wane. How often did her quarry fall feverish and ill only to wriggle out of her hold, which was tentative at best, denying her the casualties she so greatly deserved? Too often. Far too often.

Scarlatina dropped her sculpted chin into one pale palm. Oh, what the wretched thing she had become, pathetic and powerless in this world of the twenty-first century. Mankind had once feared her; once dreaded her; once cowered at but the mere mention of her name, but now… How they mocked her with their medicines and their hospitals. Once upon a wonderful time, before the antibiotics and the vaccines, Scarlatina had given rise to her fair share of deadly occurrences, reveling in the glorious loss of life that followed. Now she could barely draw a small number of coughs from a child before they were whisked away to the doctor’s office. How her cousins scorned her, and cast her aside like others that had fallen before her. And hard as she may try to reclaim her lost vivacity, it seemed always to continue slipping through her delicate fingers.

A quiet chuckle roused Scarlatina from her musings, and she swept her crimson gaze about, smoldering ruby eyes coming to rest upon a pair of shadowy figures across the wide expanses of the dark hall, murmuring voices thrown at each other in avid conversation. She hardly cared for their gossip; hardly cared at all beyond the fact that both were stronger than she…

…Particularly, Leu. Beautiful, devious Leu. Cancer of the bone. Indeed, that one was enormously powerful, with a strain of brothers and sisters second only to ailments of the heart, and if only she was possessed of the ability, Scarlatina would have hated all of them until she had been razed to cinders by her own loathing. But when Leu cast he sallow, blue-eyed stare over her, Scarlatina could only meet it with a matching emotionless gaze.

“He is a ruthless one to be sure,” Leu answered his companion, never removing his vacant eyes from the lovely form across the room, speaking now that she would clearly hear his words. “The undisputed master of the epidemic, with more than two hundred million deaths under his belt, swift to kill and almost always fatal.”

Scarlatina lifted her head at the statement, fist tightening nest to her jaw. He was teasing her, she knew, and he had perfected the shrewd art with subtle allusions to her obvious weakness, knowing well that she would read much too far into a normally simple proclamation such as the last. Very few could weigh against those impressive figures. After all, two hundred million was a fantastically large number.

One hand gripped at the armrest of her chair until the imitation sinews stood out on her arm, but the action itself carried no weight of anger behind it, for she could feel no rage, nor hate for her wicked cousin, nor self-pity for her own powerlessness. Still, Leu noticed the motion, folded his arms across his chest with a casual toss of his long blonde hair, and leaned against the wall, the same blank expression upon his sickly pale face as was on hers, his own satisfaction swallowed up by an inner void before he was even aware that he was in fact satisfied.

“Indeed,” Leu went on, talking as much to Scarlatina as he was to the other standing next to him, “he has claimed many millions of lives during the course of his millennia, and certainly has yet to claim many millions more before his time has ended.” An empty grin played at the corners of his thin lips. “He is a ruthless one to be sure,” he reiterated. “Still near the pinnacle of his grace, while others have fallen.”

Scarlatina had heard quite enough of her cousin’s mocking blather. She narrowed her crimson eyes at Leu, and planted her palms against the arms of her seat, slowly unfolding her long legs as though her intent was to leap up and throttle him. But no. She left her chair with a sensual ripple of her body, unhurriedly descending the few steps from the dais to the floor to follow the ebon-carpeted path that stretched the length of the vast, rectangular antechamber, pursued relentlessly by those pale blue eyes. She cast one last unfeeling glare at handsome Leu, and vanished into the shadowy halls beyond the tall archway.

I knew of my cousin’s presence beyond my doorway long before she came to it, a prickling in the atmosphere that rushed through the gloomy, winding corridors to herald her approach, reminiscent of long, painted fingernails and scarlet eyes. Call it intuition among kin. Consequently, I needn’t have looked up when the black curtain fluttered aside in silence a short while later, seemingly of its own accord, and Scarlatina stepped over the threshold.

With my head still bowed over my hands folded in my lap, I peered at her through the tousled ebony of my bangs, the expression upon my face as deadpan as that upon hers.

Indeed, when I now look back on everything, my cousin possessed a cold, unearthly beauty that flaunted a spectacle of physical desire. Her heart-shaped face seemed to be sculpted of porcelain, perfectly smooth and without flaws, bedecked by full, red lips and almond-shaped eyes and thick, black lashes beneath slender, curving brows. Dark, scarlet hair cascaded down her back in waves, the rare curl escaping over her bare shoulders to skip across the pale flesh of her scarcely hidden breasts.

Scarlatina’s teasing wardrobe only served to exaggerate her already vastly feminine features, the crimson material stretched taut over her ample chest to lift and gather, with lengthy slits in the sides of the blood red gown to reveal long, shapely legs and round hips. The remainder of the fabric, as little as there was, clung sensuously to her womanly curves and hourglass figure in all the most enticing places, leaving her arching back exposed to plain sight, displaying generous amounts of the pale skin beneath.

Surely, Scarlatina would have been the perfect woman of any man’s lustful dreams. That is, if she could have only boasted the gift to feel passion beyond the emptiness inside her mind. But for Scarlatina, as for my brethren; as for myself, emotion was unattainable, the most impossible of impossibilities. It was in our world that feeling ceased to be, the sensations utterly consumed by the nothingness that resided within us. Since the beginning of time, that had been our way.

I was no different than my kin, and so the image of the striking Scarlatina at the foot of my divan did nothing to deter my mind from its ever-constant emotionless course. I simply lifted my head to meet my cousin’s vacant eyes, my whispered voice drifting vacuously from the empty cavity of my chest. “Well met, Scarlatina. What brings you to me?”

With slow steps, hips swaying in time with her footfalls, she approached and glided onto the bed next to me, the crimson satin wrinkling beneath the added weight. Her lips brushed ever so lightly over the abundant ornaments, hoops, studs, chains, and cuffs, that decked my ear from top to bottom, and she said softly, “I have a proposition for you to consider, my dear, beautiful Bu.” She reached to play with a silky lock of my long hair, twisting the glossy, black strand around her finger. “What has it been? Fifty and one hundred years since your most recent pleasure trip to the world of mankind? Certainly you must be itching to prompt a little pandemonium.”

“On the contrary, Scarlatina.” Enthusiasm was an emotion.

A quiet laugh escaped her red lips. “Clever, clever Bu,” she purred as she placed one palm beneath my chin, and slid from the divan in such a way that I had quite the ostentatious view of her bosom, which was most effortlessly ignored. She marched across the room, stopping at the massive arch of my chamber window. “I offer an exchange.”

I tilted my head slightly to one side, hearing my collar, which was fashioned from rat bone, chink about my neck. “Pray tell, what manner of exchange?”

Scarlatina all but pounced back onto the bed, crawling toward me like a cat hunting a mouse. “You are a vassal to your art of ruin, Bu, the same as I, and our arts are growing restive. Can you see it behind my eyes just as I can see it behind your pretty, violet orbs?” She was virtually on top of me, her body pressed against my shoulder, her hand on my thigh. “Do you remember Justinian? London? Do you remember the release? It has been far too long. Leave this place, Bu. Go find your pleasure in toying with humanity.”

“And what of Scarlatina? What gain is yours should I accept this suggestion?”

“You know just as well as the rest of our kin that I lack the strength to overcome mankind and their drugs,” my cousin hissed. “Enfeeble them for me, my dear, beautiful Bu, and I will clean up the mess you give rise to. What say you? Shall we remind the humans that they haven’t been rid of us quite yet?”

There was a long moment of silence, during which I considered the impulse that had been growing within me; beckoning me for decades. Indeed, it was becoming dreadfully compelling, and Scarlatina was correct in assuming so. She was cunning also to incite memories of my previous excursions, for they served only to bolster my drive to leave the fortress home that I shared with my dysfunctional family, and revisit the world of man.

Year 1855 claimed my last jaunt across the inhabited continents. Not my proudest achievement, but an accomplishment nevertheless. A century and fifty years had floated by since then, and I had reduced my tempo, leaving my noxious business and erratic outbreaks in the furry claws of flea-infested rodents. Even here, reclined upon the claret satin, staring emptily at the montage of dancing skeletons painted across the ceiling, I remained as dangerous in my dealings as always, if not on a scale less grand and more roundabout.

But staring at the ceiling would not satisfy the infectious urge squirming in my chest.

Slowly, I turned my head, my lips barely an inch from Scarlatina’s. “I assent.”

Picture, if you will, an empty place forbidding and endlessly silent with a sky overcast by the perpetual gray of swirling clouds. To either side, one would almost be able to make out the skeletal shapes of sickly trees with knotted, bare branches as the eternal fog shifts, but as suddenly as the image appears it is gone again, swept away by the churning mist. A dark cobblestone path, barely wide enough for two people to pass by one another, is a shadowy crack upon the brown and gray ground, disappearing ahead into the haze.

Without forewarning, the fog parts, revealing a grand staircase, one hundred steps of dark stone rising up from the pathway. Tattered black banners border the stairway like ominous sentinels, fluttering in a breeze that does not exist as though a ghost had passed them by. A towering silhouette begins to emerge from the mist at the summit of the staircase, gradually becoming the image of soaring ramparts, parapets and turrets, dark flags, lofty columns, colossal vaulted doorways and casements.

The stonework could be that of a Gothic cathedral, or a Middle Eastern palace, or a citadel of the Britons, or a fantastic concoction of all three. Such work would have taken a thousand years and a hundred thousand artisans. But this castle, grand enough to house a city within its walls, its ebony ramparts brushing the very sky, is too immeasurable to have been constructed by mere human hands.

It is the fortress Arroyo, home to the diseases.

It is this place that I left not long after Scarlatina addressed me. Stone corridors passed me by, the utter sameness of the dark bricks occasionally broken by an ebony banner, my paces falling all but silent upon the black carpet that led me to the great arched and engraved doorway where a pair of torches danced with eerie slowness, bidding welcome to Arroyo’s inner halls. The ghostly flames bent to chase my movement, as though they were watching me, as I crossed the circular veranda between them, and I descended the staircase to the cobblestone path far below. With each step like a spider’s, slow and deliberate, Arroyo began to fall behind, vanishing into the timeless mists that contained her.

The Plague was on the move.