And stared at the shambles of the last of her prized possessions, now just fragments of charred wood and ash.
Which suddenly made her panic.
“Mormo, I need to get a message to Talon.”
But when they arrived at the Beast Brigade HQ, she saw they were too late.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Vladimir of the Void,Spectre, Vladimir the Wicked. Offal. Good for nothing. Useless boy.
He’d been many names over many years. Not always feared, but he’d worked hard to change that.
Used to being viewed as evil, he certainly hadn’t started out that way. A small child, always on the brink of starvation, cast out of village after village, Vladimir had done his best simply to exist.
Feared when he’d craved acceptance, he’d cause little trouble. At first. But people didn’t tolerate differences. Especially when they involved magic that humans found hard to understand.
Vladimir stood on the bow of the small ship taking him toward the White Castle, a place of power. From what he understood, the current White Sea Witch had recently conquered her predecessor but refused to take possession of the island, leaving the keep under new control.
It would normally hide in the pocket dimension in which it resided, but the object called for its maker. And it told that part of Nergal inside Vladimir exactly where to find it.
The nice part about today was not having to battle the most powerful sea witch on the eastern side of the Pacific. He was conserving his strength for his eventual battle against the foes hunting him.
He’d been aware of a certain someone for some time. Searching but never finding.
Like most of his kind, Vladimir had been hiding for as long as he’d been alive. He had no problem staying very small. Because he had, he’d become very large. A force that no one could stop. And soon, he’d ally with the most powerful presence in creation.
A cosmic entity full of chaos and darkness, a mirror to the hell he’d been forced to live with his entire life.
He’d once had a mother, a father, sisters and brothers. Plagues had hit them all hard. Then wars fought for territory, for food, and for loyalty to a king who loved only himself. So much strife until only Vladimir and his older sister remained.
But she’d left him on his sixth birthday, marrying into a family that provided her food and shelter with no room for another mouth to feed.
He’d consigned himself to dying out in the forests, where the rusalka lured helpless men into the water to drown. Where the nezhit caused illness and disease in the healthiest of humans, the milosnitse spread plagues, and the besomar, often mistaken for vampires, fed upon the dead.
Instead, he’d found life among the spirits, power where misfortune hit hardest.
He’d learned that adversity favored the strong, and the word “surrender” had left his vocabulary.
Years of being bullied by the prosperous and magical left a rift in his ability to feel compassion, until Vladimir grew to thrive on misery.
To his shock, he learned he could take power from illness and grief, anger and frustration fueling him to be more. To know more.
Old gods reached out to him, hoping for new life. But Vladimir didn’t care to trade one kind of prison for another, hating the worship that went to beings not worthy of it.
He desired only the power to crush his enemies. To all those who hated necromancers—born through no fault of their own—he wished nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering.
He’d found staunch allies in Irkalla, where he’d first encouraged Hanbi to rise up and find a place among humanity. Unlike other underworlds, and there were many, the Mesopotamian realm felt like home. It wasn’t evil as much as it was a pale imprint of life. An existence that was a shadow of the torture Vladimir had once survived.
Unfortunately, neither Hanbi nor his son, Pazuzu, had managed to get a foothold into the human world. Hanbi had returned to Irkalla a shell of his former evil self. Pazuzu had disappeared. But Nergal had proved a tempting target.
What Nergal craved, Vladimir didn’t. He couldn’t tell the god that though. Nergal thought himself superior in every way. Vladimir didn’t blame him for that. Gods were what they were, designed to believe in their own supremacy.
But Nergal had never been tested the way Vladimir had. Born to rule, given powers over the dead, Nergal lamented a great gift.
Vladimir had spent several lifetimes fighting then consuming his rivals, growing stronger. Better because of it.
