Chapter One: On the Run

Garrett watched as his mother furtively glanced around the area surrounding their table. She had chosen the one furthest from the front door and closest to the back door. Ease of escape, it’s what she was looking for. That was the reason they were sitting on hard chairs at a cold open table rather than comfortable in a booth such as the unoccupied one two feet from them.

They needed to be able to move on a moment’s notice.

He peered down at the mottled purples and pinks of the tabletop, hidden for the most part by cheesy paper mats printed with the Chinese Zodiac. He met her face again, even though she wasn’t looking at him. Curly carrot colored hair obscured most of her features in profile. The tip of her pert nose pushed beyond it, freckles marring the lightness of the skin there. She was nearly forty, but her freckles would never fade, they were integral to the heritage that still remained strong in her line.

She sensed his stare, turning to regard him once more. Emerald green eyes glinted and shone, even in the shadow of her reddish mane.

He’d been living with her all his life, unabashed by the thought that he was nearly the age of emancipation and still living with his mother. All that time, and yet he felt now that he didn’t know her at all.

Garrett knew he was a special teen. His mother always told him so, but she had never before specified just why he was – until his father came after them.

Their coven was centralized around the bones of Old Chicago. The Chicago coven was a large group, supportive and strong. They might have defeated Meirakat had they stayed. The combined power of a hundred witches and warlocks were surely more than a match for an Ancient, no matter how powerful he was. Their protection didn’t last. As soon as they found out that Meirakat was after the two of them, the Coven had kicked them to the curb.

Actually, it wasn’t that Meirakat was after them, it was why he was after them.

It was only after they were on the run that Katharina enlightened him as to why he was special. Then she had informed him of the rules and covenants she had broken in order to bring him – him – into the world.

Before, she would only tell him that she had loved a man who had abandoned her when he found out she was pregnant. Garrett resented his father because of that. But then he had found that his father had never known about him in the first place.

Katharina – his mother – was a powerful witch; in line to take control of the Coven. The war between the covens and the broods raged for at least two millennia. A heavy toll had been paid for the continuing bloodshed, both side so evenly matched that both groups were dwindling in strength and numbers. Katharina recognized this, and knew the only way to become more powerful was to find a way to shift power to the covens. Coming up through the ranks, she divined a way in which to make that happen. She planned with care her plot to seduce a vampire, Meirakat, living with him over the course of several months, beguiling the vampire. It was a black widow spider’s ploy only in reverse. If Meirakat had gained his senses at any point, Katharina would have died and Garrett would never have been born. Her ploy was successful and she escaped his clutches carrying the future in her womb. She wanted to create a being which neither side had seen or thought of before.

Him.

Garrett looked down again at his pale hands, bright rust colored freckles splotching across the backs of them. The story explained a lot. It filled in gaps that had nagged at the back of his mind since he was little.

From his first memories, he could recall having long sharp teeth fixed in his head. When he was six, his mother took him to a dentist and had those teeth removed, an intensive surgery – traumatic for a six year old. He covered the gaps left by the removal of his eyeteeth and the space between them and his incisors with a bridge.

Then there was the hunger.

He desired blood every two weeks or thereabouts, which was previously attributed to the ritual drinking of the liquid. Garrett figured he had merely developed a taste for blood. His mother had insisted he pursue that path, providing him with the blood, drinking with him. Such made him believe it was just part of the coven’s culture. It wasn’t a far fetched considering some of the sacrifices and rituals he had been witness to in his short life.

Witches and warlocks were an evolutionary offshoot of the standard human population, and careful breeding had brought their innate talents to their height. That they shared an ancestry didn’t stop humans from hating what they were.

And that was the reason Mother didn’t want to use her powers in public, the reason they were running and not fighting. She knew that she would be mowed down the moment her talents were aired, just like their ancestors in Salem. She had made him promise he wouldn’t use his either…and he was good.

He wasn’t even sure just how to classify himself now. Before he had thought himself a warlock, a human who’d developed talents to tap the supernatural. He’d learned spells and incantations, silent summons and other magical talents that many witches three times his age hadn’t mastered. His higher than normal pain tolerance had a lot to do with that. Spells taxed the user, especially the harder ones which were invoked silently. Many only rose so high, held back by the pain of harder spells. He wasn’t fettered in that manner.

And now he knew the reason why.

He’d heard of and seen dhampirs – creatures barely tolerated by coven societal rules – and only because they were often of the same purpose – killing any and all vampires who happened across their path. They were almost as fast as a vampire and much more deadly.

But dhampirs were human and vampire. Did that definition apply to a witch/vampire hybrid? He preferred his title as warlock, he was much better at that than he was with that undead half of his heritage.

The revelation regarding his full heritage answered many more questions his mother would never answer for him. He could see in the darkest of pitch, he could see the measure of a person by the glow they emanated. He was stronger physically than anyone he’d been friends or enemies with, and his reflexes were cutting edge fast.

He flexed his hands once more, the trapped blood blending his freckles into their redness. Despite those explainations, Katharina’s secrecy angered him.

“I think we’ll be safe,” Katharina sighed, scooting her chair closer to the table.

Garrett grunted, looking elsewhere and showing her the disdain resulting of his anger with her.

“Garrett, what’s the matter?”

He glared at her. “You know what’s wrong.”

Power flickered at the edges of his awareness and he sat on the autonomic reaction to his rage.

“How many times must I say I’m sorry?”

“You could shout it in mantra and still not make up for the deception.” He shifted in his chair, sitting sideways and leaning his elbow onto the slick surface.

“I couldn’t tell you. It would have only been that much more dangerous for you - for both of us.”

“Bullshit.”

His mother straightened, her hand slapping on the table. Electric shocks ran through the surface, making him pull his arm from it as the tingling traveled up to his shoulder. He glared at Katharina again.

“I’m still your mother. You will not speak to me that way.”

Garrett fell silent, avoiding her eyes. He was bigger than she was, stronger than she was, physically, magically, and mentally. It didn’t mean he wasn’t fearful of repercussion. Age and craft often overcame youth and speed. She would not forget this slight; he would pay for this at the most inopportune time.

That didn’t abate his anger in the slightest.

Neither spoke until the server brought their meal. Garrett found he wasn’t hungry and picked at his wafer thin steak with the point of his knife.

“You must eat.” She leaned in. “Daemon knows when we will get another opportunity to enjoy real food.”

He shot daggers across the table at her, but made a show of cutting the steak and spearing it into his mouth. The first bite reminded him he was really hungry and he was more enthusiastic as he moved through the meat and into the side dishes.

Garrett finished eating single-mindedly and then rose, heading for the restrooms in the back. He took his time, even though he only had to piss, trying to put returning to his mother off as long as possible.

Washing his hands and staring into space, Garrett contemplated what might be in their future. Not a lot with an Ancient vampire on their tail. He missed the stability they used to have in his home with the coven. He had friends, a comfortable life, and a mother who – while tough on him – loved him very much. There had been the communion that came from living in a society with related interests and talents. It was gone now, all of it, and this place only felt cold and foreign to him.

They had arrived in Denver this morning, the huge dome overhead dwarfing even the ones around Chicago. There, the domes had been many, clumped together and connected by snake tubes. Here, in contrast, grandeur was paramount. The dome was one huge unit encompassing downtown all the way to the residences at the outskirts. Only one or two subsidiary bubbles existed outside Denver’s dome.

The sheer difference between here and home made him loathe their leaving all that much more.

Sighing, Garrett shut off the water and shook the excess moisture into the rust stained basin.

As he turned to grab a towel, a commotion started within the confines of the restaurant. The warlock started for the door, but jumped back when the door swung violently inward.

Katharina’s eyes were wide and wild as she said, “He’s here – he’s found us! We need a portal…in that wall. Get us out of here!”

Garrett didn’t question her direction, hearing her begin the incantation to block and booby trap the door. He began his own, drawing power to him from thin air and concentrating on creating a walkway through solid brick. Several motions later, a hole appeared, melting the structure until it was large enough for them to walk through together.

“Hurry!” he cried, feeling both the strain of the spell and the approach of a dreadful blackness at his back. It was like a sucking fog, pulling his emotions into the pitch to be lost forever. He fought the maddening feeling as his mother scurried past him and through the escape hatch. Fearing it would collapse, Garret stopped reinforcing the field and dove through his own handiwork.

Rolling over his shoulder, Garrett spun around and began to draw his power from the rift, watching the gap close. A flash of brilliant light and a mad howl of pain echoed through the room and then funneled through the hole he was repairing. A crash followed, and a snarl of rage. Garrett squinted seeing a form moving through the smoke settling in the wake of the supernatural blast.

His heart squeezed as he caught a glimpse of the man who was his father. The vampire looked nothing like his mother, and yet he looked nothing like the vampires he’d seen before. Meirakat was short, no more than about five foot five. His frame was compact and heavily muscled. He wore a full length cape, tattered by the trap his mother had laid upon the door. The vampire threw the garment back from his arms exposing a shirtless jerkin, thick biceps strung tight with anger and vengeance. The creature was unnaturally pale, the skin nearly glowing in the low light of that decimated bathroom.

The hole closed completely before Garrett could get much more of the vampire’s appearance. He wouldn’t forget his father’s face, however. It was square - swarthy and scarred. Puckered flesh that was too glossy ran from his left eye down and across to where his jaw met his ear on the right. It was an exposure scar, the kind that only could have been left by direct sunlight. That was one scarring no vampire could recover from, solar radiation damage was permanent. Meirakat’s dishwater hair was raggedly cut, hanging in uneven lengths around his face. The effect enunciated the bluntness of his feature, an effect that left fear in its wake.

That was an Ancient?

Damn, he’d been romanticizing what kind of standards vampires held themselves to when they got that old. Or else he’d been watching too many old vids. He had expected something a bit more debonair.

He stepped back, feeling the blackness seeping through the wall and rolling across his skin in numbing waves. His mother grabbed his shoulder and hastened his retreat.

“C’mon!”

He wheeled, skipped forward and broke into a run. He would have outstripped his mother were it not for her skill with teleportation. He needn’t have worried about her, she stayed at his side in small puffs of her phasing in and out of the space near him.

Their flight led them to a staging area for the many transports supplying the large city. Dodging between the trailers, Katharina and Garrett tried to elude their pursuit. The warlock dodged sideways as a loud clang sounded off to their left, but close enough that he could feel the waves Meirakat was pushing before him.

“He’s here,” Garrett announced, out of breath from such a prolonged flight.

She pulled her son toward a warehouse, one door ajar enough they could slip through it. His mother slammed it shut; hexing the lock, even though both of them knew it would do little good. She bolted across the cement floor heading for a truck bed being unloaded by a crew of workers.

Their entrance served to stop all motion, lifts and people coming to a halt to stare at mother and son. Neither Garrett nor Katharina bothered to even meet their gazes.

Katharina paused motioning him toward the dark maw, “Get in!”

He did as she said.

“I’ll come back for you.”

Garrett clawed at her arm, frightened to be separated from her and the tie she represented to the normalcy he enjoyed in that previous life. “I can help! You can’t take him alone!”

“Stay here!” she insisted. “Your survival is more important than mine. You’re not strong enough to take him yet. He would tear you apart!”

She hit him with an invisible ball of energy, knocking him back and slamming the heavy doors before he could recover his footing. He charged the barrier, putting all his considerable strength behind it. He laid his shoulders into the gray panel, but the spell she managed to throw across the doors to protect him – both from himself and from his father – repelled his attempt at escape.

The darkened space echoed the impact and his own labored breathing, and beyond that he could hear incantations, snarls, and howls. Lastly he heard his mother’s scream.

“No! Mother!”

He extended his arms, bright in his night vision. He consciously swapped to visual sight to keep from blinding himself, as he conjured the needed spell, muttering the foreign words that drew dark forces to do his bidding.

Vacuum filled the trailer as the power built, the sound drowning any further noise from outside his prison. With a “whoom,” the steel separated from its hinges, flying across the warehouse and decimating three crates before its momentum slowed. The clatter was slow to silence as it fell to the floor.

The sight that greeted him took his breath and froze him in place. The area all around where he’d been hid was in shambles. Stains reached high up the walls, body parts dangling from supports overhead. Detached arms and legs perched precariously high above, threatening to become widow-makers to the unwary. It seemed the dock workers had become collateral damage to the short lived fight.

He reached out with unfamiliar and underused senses to try and seek out the vampire who had instigated their flight. Garrett was scared that Meirakat was still close by. His seeking touched no sign of life. That meant his father was either dead or had retreated.

He searched in earnest for some sign that the vampire had been caught in the blast of his mother’s most powerful incantations, becoming more fearful when he found no evidence of his demise. When he completed a circuit of the warehouse with no sign of either his mother or the vampire, Garrett stepped outside.

The warlock’s stomach sank when he found a trail of blood leading away from the entrance. The trail was a drag, something or someone had been injured or was dead, and another had dragged the body out of the warehouse. Sick fascination kept him following the swath, dread growing in him.

He halted when the trail ended at an unmarked building. The power emanating off of it revealed it to be a coven house. On the wall of the house someone wrote the anarchist symbol in blood. Pinned with splinters of crates across the ragged A– he sucked a reluctant breath trying not to be ill – his mother stared with eyeless sockets across the space at them. Her throat had been torn out, her gauzy dress stained beyond repair. One arm had been freed from her body and lay on the ground. He thought it might have been the instrument of writing for the symbol on the wall. The other extremity dangled by little more than a tendon.

He gulped another breath, then sobbed, and then vomited unable to help it.

“Daemon!” He breathed when his stomach stopped protesting. “Mother!”

He moved across the space, rage and guilt speeding his moves as he pulled her down from crucifixion. He couldn’t delude himself. She was dead, mutilated…by his own father.

What had she done so wrong? Why had he taken her life for something as simple as bringing another life into the world? Was the covenant so damned important that a life hung in the balance for breaking it?

That was just it though, she intended to use him as a weapon, one more powerful than any dhampir ever known to exist. Meirakat must have figured that out, it must have been the reason for the Ancient to leave his east coast haunt and hound them until they were run to ground.

But why then did he not finish the job?

That thought plagued him a moment.

Garrett stood staring at the coven house before him, grimacing. He knew he could elicit help from them, a traveler far from home and in dire need was always welcome in the local houses. For a reason he couldn’t readily identify he felt that the coven was the last place he wanted to go.

Perhaps it was the lie he’d lived every day of his life, unbeknownst to him. Surely they would pick it out of the ether and drive him out as his own coven had. Or maybe it was the fact that Meirakat chose this building specifically to pin his mother’s body to. He knew this place housed witches and warlocks, even when he was not of this area. No brood would have a dhampir, the way vampires treated those half-blood progeny of their sexual escapades only led to violence. Vampires killed dhampirs on sight, and dhampirs held grudge over such a universal death sentence. With his newly gained perspective on the issue, Garret couldn’t argue the matter.

Garrett retreated from the scene of his mother’s death. His grip tightened on her bloody corpse. The towering cathedral in the center of town inexplicably drew his gaze.

The place held a reputation of its own, an organization that’s history was as long as either the covens or the broods. Mother had told him of that place as they approached the dome, warning him never to go near it. His heritage would not allow him access to such a facility. The humans who worked there hated witches and vampires equally. While their kind lived all over the remains of the United States, this was their central headquarters.

Victor Sierra – the Vampire slayers – the Witch hunters.

Yet the towering building drew him, called to him, and the idea that he could make them see the worth of his kind of talents gained life inside his skull. He knew in his bones that they held his future in their hands…they would help him avenge his mother’s murder.

A/N: I told myself I wasn't going to do this...that I was going to wait until I turned out a few more chapters. YEah best laid plans of mice and men, I know. At least I have a good roadmap in my head on how Garrett's life is going to go down! HEE...Yes this is the "parallel" story I was talking about to Only Half.

I didn't want to make it an exact duplicate of the layout of Cabal's story, so we are starting when Garrett is about seventeen and well established in his own skin. I hope that you like this beginning...and I hope I am able to turn out the updates at a fairly quick pace...but being that I haven't written more than this one chapter it will remain to be seen!

Thanks for reading and any and all feedback is welcome!

Darwin