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  THE STORM CHRONICLES

  Stormrise

  Stormrage

  Stormwind

  Shadowstorm

  Raven

  Storm

  Nightraven

  Forget what you think you know about the world. There is another world, a darker world where true evil exists; vampires, lycans, demons, the bogeyman, all the things that go bump in the night walk among you, rub shoulders with you…and feed on you.

  I'm something different. I was born to a pureblood vampire and a human man. I have a bloodsucker's strength and almost none of their weaknesses. They call me dhampyr, or day walker. And that's when they're being nice. I'm a police detective for the Chicago Police, Homicide division. This is my city. When things go bump in the night, I'm the one who bumps back.

  I am the Night.

  I am Raven Storm.

  1526 ALKI AVENUE

  SEATTLE, WA. 2:00 A.M.

  RAVEN STORM OPENED HER EYES and stared at the ceiling. She still wasn’t used to it. Even her old apartment in Chicago had plaster walls and ceiling, this one was acoustic tile, and it made her feel like she’d been packed in Styrofoam. Considering the room was painted white and the furniture was a collection of antiques her mother had shipped out, the analogy was apt.

  She frowned at the ceiling. She’d been dreaming about joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It hadn’t been what she’d expected, to say the least. She’d spent the first three months in regular training at Quantico, then the next three as a trainee agent following some Mulder wannabe on cases she could have closed in a week back in Chicago. She was back with section thirteen and had been for almost three months, but in that time she had only been assigned one case, a group of bikers rampaging across Nebraska worshipping some ancient God from Mesopotamia. The last of them had been put behind bars last week and she’d been driving a desk ever since. The excitement just never stopped.

  But being bored wasn’t what had awakened her. It was something else, something in the darkness. She strained her ears and listened to the sounds of the night.

  There. A creak in the living room below. Their apartment was new, but the floors still groaned in the damp; by the sound, someone was just below their loft bedroom.

  Raven slipped from beneath the covers and blinked. The room went from cloying darkness to the soft blue and red of her vampiric sight. She could see the half wall next to her and her gun holster where it hung on a peg below the railing. She drew her silver Automag pistol and chambered a round as quietly as she could before leaning over the rail and looking down into the apartment below. She could see several figures moving in the darkness, all giving off the faintest of heat signatures in the gloom.

  Vampires, she thought.

  She picked up two spare magazines and leapt over the railing, her pink nightshirt flapping behind her like a cape and landed softly in the middle of the living room. A black-clad figure stood next to the white leather sofa, an Mp7 submachine gun in his hands.

  “I think you’re in the wrong house, bloodsucker,” Raven said.

  The figure turned in surprise and raised his weapon. Raven squeezed the Automag’s trigger and put a silver-plated bullet through his eye. He exploded into a fireball of ash that rained down on the sofa, making Raven wince.

  Aspen is going to kill me.

  She didn’t have time to worry. Two more vampires entered from the kitchen, weapons at the ready. Their silenced Heckler and Koch rifles spat lead in the darkness, sounding no louder than a cough compared to Raven’s hand-cannon. She felt bullets tear at her nightgown and she rolled, diving below the line of fire. When she came up, she put two bullets through the first vampire’s chest. He was still disintegrating into flame, a silent scream on his lips when she spun and put another two through the second vamp’s face. He swirled away into dust and she was left holding her Automag aimed at the windows that overlooked the ocean beyond. She could see two figures with rifles moving along the deck outside. She put a fresh magazine in her pistol and fired two shots through the glass. Both vampires exploded and Raven turned away, searching for the rest of the kill-squad.

  The large living room emptied into a spacious kitchen complete with stainless appliances and a long glass table surrounded by black chairs. Next to the kitchen was an entertainment room where Aspen had set up a game console and a TV bigger than her car. She’d been trying to get Raven interested in something called Halo, but Raven just didn’t see the point.

  She could see a figure moving through the entertainment room and she moved that way, staying close to the wall. At the end of the corridor, she turned left and was surprised by a vampire that grabbed her pistol. She jerked him forward off his feet and fired a shot into his leg. He howled in pain and collapsed to the floor clutching his wounded knee. She silenced his cries with a second shot to the head but was too slow. Two more vampires approached from the foyer. Raven grabbed the first one’s arm and used his momentum to put him through a glass wall into the kitchen then spun, dropped to her knees and put two bullets through the second vamp’s chest.

  The first was trying to pull himself out of the wreckage of the table when Raven stepped up and put the glowing muzzle of the Automag to his forehead. He raised his hands in surrender and looked up, his eyes wide behind his mask.

  “Your buddy just ruined my girlfriend’s new sofa,” she said. “Make it worth it. Who sent you?”

  "We were to punish you for not bringing tribute to the Master. As Fürstin to..."

  "Listen, bub," Raven growled. "You tell your Master I'm not paying tribute to him or anyone else. If I see any more of you clowns I'm sending them home in baggies. Get the hell out of my house.”

  She stepped back and let him stand. He reached for his fallen rifle and Raven stepped on it with her bare foot.

  “I don’t think so. Start walking.”

  He paused and Raven covered him with her pistol. “You already broke into my house. Don’t do anything else stupid.”

  He straightened and turned toward the door. He was reaching for the knob when it opened and Aspen Kincaid stepped through wearing nothing but a robe, her Book of Shadows held in her arms.

  Aspen blinked at the vampire then looked at Raven. “Who did you piss off this week?”

  SEDGEWICK STREET

  OLD TOWN, CHIAGO. 6:00 A.M.

  RUPERT LEVAC STEPPED OUT OF the elevator onto the Old Town Suites’ third floor. His beige long-coat flapped behind him like a cape as he walked and he nibbled on a
Hershey bar, his third since being roused by Lieutenant Mauser an hour before. He bobbed his head at the uniformed officer standing outside room 307 and stepped through the door.

  The room inside was worse than he’d expected and he had to take a breath before he could move closer to the carnage. It wasn’t that the room was bad. It was a fairly typical hotel room with two beds, a flat screen television and a door that led to the adjoining bathroom. A card table had been set up in one corner and was covered in poker chips and Hoyle playing cards.

  It was the seven bodies that lay around the room in a variety of positions. All were male, in their mid-thirties and each had bled out from a slashed throat. Sometime after death their tongues had been pulled through the cut in their throats and left dangling, a classic Russian Bowtie. On the surface it just looked like a mass culling, nothing weird about it at all.

  Levac rubbed at the two days of stubble clinging to his chin like lichen. “What do we have, Harvey?”

  Harvey Pocock turned from his examination of one of the victims. Sweat beaded on his wide forehead, making his pockmarked face look greasy in the room’s light.

  “Seven victims, male, all low-level bosses in the Riscassi crime family,” Pocock replied. “The Lieutenant has files on all of these guys.”

  Levac squatted next to one of the victims, a burly fellow with close-cropped grey hair and jowls that made him look like a fat bull mastiff. “This looks like a Russian hit squad; it happens every few months. Why was I called in?”

  “One sec,” Pocock said.

  The big man turned to one of the other technicians. “Yo, Jimmy, show the detective the cuts.”

  A short, thin man with an aquiline nose and black hair pulled back into a ponytail rolled over the victim nearest Levac. The back of the man’s bloodstained shirt had been torn away and Levac could see a place where a ragged patch of skin in the shape of an octagon had been cut away.

  “Do they all have these?” Levac asked.

  “Yes,” Jimmy replied. “Harvey thinks—”

  “That they were done with a hunting knife,” Pocock finished. “Two inches of flesh peeled away like the skin of a grape. Don’t try to tell me that ain’t weird.”

  “Did you find the pieces?” Levac asked.

  “Nope. Whoever did this took the pieces with them. Trophies or something, the kind of crap that puts this one on your desk,” Pocock said. “Mauser says it’s all yours, you’re flying solo.”

  Levac pulled on a pair of gloves and examined the wound. It did indeed look like a crude tool like a hunting knife had been used, but there was also damage to the muscle beneath. It almost looked as if it had been cooked. He pointed it out to Harvey who shifted his bulk for a closer look.

  “I’ll be damned, you’re right,” he said. “The flesh is cauterized in the middle of the wound. I’ll have to get Dr. Zhu to take a closer look, but it looks like something was pressed into the flesh before it was removed.”

  “I want to know what,” Levac said. “I also want time of death and an idea of what kind of weapon I’m looking for.”

  He pulled off his gloves and sealed them in an evidence bag. He then turned for the door.

  “That’s it?” Pocock asked.

  “Not hardly,” Levac replied. “I’m going to talk to the manager.”

  The Old Town Suites was a small, nondescript hotel on the edge of Old Town. It was constructed in the 1950s and the lobby had retained most of its original décor, down to the teal armchairs, dark carpet and crystal screens that separated the sitting areas from the lobby proper. Levac stepped up to the long white counter and tapped it with his badge. A dark-skinned woman with straight black hair looked up from her desk behind the counter and smiled. She stood, smoothing her red satin dress in the process, and joined him at the counter.

  “Good morning, detective, my name is Lupa Nunes,” she said. “How can I help you?”

  “Were you the one who found the victims upstairs?” Levac asked.

  Lupa shook her head, making her hair swish. “No, sir. The night clerk was responding to a noise complaint and found them early this morning.”

  Levac fished his notepad out of one of his pockets. “Is he available?”

  “He’s resting in the back. His nerves were frazzled when he saw all the, um, anyway I’ll fetch him,” Lupa replied.

  Levac watched her leave and jotted her name down on his pad. She returned a few moments later with a middle-aged man who looked like he stepped out of a 1950s advertisement for pomade, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie. He was pale as a sheet and his eyes were bloodshot behind his glasses.

  “You wanted to see me?” he asked.

  “Detective Levac, homicide District One,” Levac said. “I understand you were the one who found the victims?”

  The man licked dry, cracked lips. “I did. There was a noise complaint from Mrs. Kapinski in 306. When I arrived, I found the door open and the, the men.”

  “And you are?”

  “Larkin,” the clerk said. “Vince Larkin.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Larkin,” Levac said. “I apologize for the circumstances. Can you tell me if you saw anyone go up or come down prior to the complaint?”

  Larkin shook his head. “No, like I told the officers who responded, it was a quiet night. Mr. Occhino rented the room like he always did and his people streamed in over the next hour. They ordered in some pizza and I sent up three pitchers of beer from the kitchen and that was it until Mrs. Kapinski complained.”

  Levac chewed on the end of his pen for a moment. “Occhino, how often does he get a room here?”

  Larkin shrugged. “About every two weeks. He meets with some friends from work, they play poker for a few hours and leave just before dawn.”

  “Does anyone ever meet with them?”

  “Not that I know of. It’s a quiet place, detective.”

  “What about last night?” Levac pressed. “Someone had to come in.”

  Larkin took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, now that you mention it there was a redhead. A real looker with the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen. Came in around three in the morning and went straight up.”

  Levac scratched his chin with his pencil. “Straight up where? Did she have a room?”

  “I assume so,” Larkin replied. “She got on the elevator and went straight to the second floor.”

  “She left just after I arrived,” Lupa added. “Right before your officers.”

  Levac jotted several lines into is notebook. “Do you have any security footage of her?”

  Lupa shook her head. “I’m sorry, Detective Levac, the camera doesn’t work. Titan is supposed to be sending someone to have it fixed, I’ve called three times.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Levac muttered. Louder he said, “thank you. I’ll follow up on the statements you have the responding officers.”

  He placed one of his rumpled business cards on the counter in front of Larkin. “If you think of anything that might help, call me. Day or night.”

  Larkin took the card. “I will, detective. I’m going home to get some sleep. If I can sleep.”

  Levac smiled and turned away. He’d taken two steps when he turned back. “Just one more thing, if you don’t mind. This redhead, a little under six feet tall? Walks around like she owns the place?”

  “That’s her,” Larkin said. “Do you know her?”

  Levac scratched the side of his head. “Maybe. I thought she was out of town. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”

  He turned away again and walked toward the exit. He knew Raven was in Seattle, he’d spoken to her just a few hours before. So who had Larkin and Lupa just described?

  He pulled another Hershey bar from his pocket and unwrapped it while he walked. Chocolate helped him think. He preferred cheeseburgers, but no one sold them at seven in the morning.

  Part of him wanted to call Raven, but he knew she would be back soon, she was attendin
g a Halloween party at Isle of Night. Besides, all he could tell her was someone with red hair and green eyes was wandering around the city and may be involved in a multiple murder. Interesting but unlikely.

  He bit off another chuck of chocolate and stepped out into the pre-dawn light. For now he’d have to wait until Riscassi’s office opened, which meant he had plenty of time to grab a donut with Sloan.

  He climbed behind the wheel of his Nash and smiled. In many ways Sloan was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He loved Raven, she was the best friend and partner he would ever have, but with Sloan life was normal. Or at least as normal as it could be being the Fürstin’s familiar engaged to a were-eagle. He didn’t have to worry if his girlfriend was going to get in a fight and bleed to death, or shoot someone she shouldn’t or God-forbid die saving the city. Again. Sloan lived just like everyone one else with the added perk she could open cans with her fingernail.

  Life was normal, which seemed like a good thing. On the other hand, it was never this boring when Raven was around.

  He sighed and cranked up the old car. The engine coughed to life and he turned toward the rising sun. Sloan would be at the Vault any minute and it never paid to keep a were-eagle waiting.

  1110 3RD AVENUE

  SEATTLE, WA. 7:00 A.M.

  RAVEN HAD DRESSED IN BLACK pants and a sapphire blue blouse that made her red hair stand out and her eyes look even greener. Her silver Automag pistol was holstered beneath her left arm and she carried a new black jacket that would serve as an adequate top layer. Her new silver blades were sheathed in the top of knee high boots and her cross hung between her breasts, the silver only slightly bent from her fight with Bathory almost a year previously.

  She arrived at the Seattle FBI office just after dawn and took the elevator to the sub-basement where Section Thirteen’s main office was kept. She’d been with them for three months and still didn’t know why they were in the basement near the indoor shooting range nor what was behind the door that was guarded by two Marines, day and night. If King and his senior staff didn’t start coughing up some answers soon she was going to strangle someone.