the door open.
Never expecting to see what was waiting on the other side.
The room was empty except for an old, wooden desk. A lone figure sat behind the desk, perusing an ancient text. The figure looked up, appearing annoyed by the sudden intrusion. He closed the book and it disappeared as if it had never been there.
Bram couldn’t move, frozen in the entryway as his teammates begged to know what it was that he was seeing.
The figure came around the desk to stare at him, and Bram could not help but be overwhelmed with emotion.
“I’m the Archivist,” the man said. “How can I be of service?”
Bram was speechless, staring at the neatly dressed man standing before him, looking exactly as he had the last time Bram saw him.
The Archivist looked exactly like his father.
How dare you bring this … thing into my home,” Mr. Tiberius Stanton said, his fat face flushed red with anger.
Lewis shook his head as he strolled farther into the room, Mason and Vladek behind him. “You don’t want to say things like that,” he warned. “It’s not healthy.”
It seemed as though they had interrupted one of Stan-ton’s little gatherings. The room was filled with old men and women wearing hooded silk robes, a gold, five-pointed star embroidered on the chest.
Quite stylish
, Lewis thought.
Stanton’s little group had hired him and his team to acquire some items of power hidden away in a secret Brimstone Network storage place, but instead, they had found something much more dangerous. Lewis was sure that his employer was going to be greatly disappointed, but what could he do?
Lewis had a new employer now.
Vladek came forward, snarling at the overweight old man in his fancy silken robes.
“You all stink of sorcery,” the vampire lord snarled, his nostrils curling up as he sniffed at the air in the old, English mansion.
“We are all powerful wielders of magick,” the old man said, puffing out his chest as he turned to his gathering of friends. “And we would advise you … and your rabble to leave at once before we are forced to—”
Vladek’s movements were a blur. He pounced upon Stanton, draining nearly every drop of the sorcerer’s blood in mere seconds.
The vampire held the man by the front of his scarlet robes, letting the withered body drop to the beautiful hardwood floor.
“This one insulted me,” he said to the gathering of sorcerers now standing closer together. He nudged the corpse of Stanton with his armored toe. “And for that I have denied him a second life. This one’s corpse will not rise again, but instead will rot like fruit fallen uneaten from a tree.”
One of the other sorcerers came forward, a skeletal figure with a long, hooked nose. If Lewis’s memory hadn’tfailed him, this one’s name was Masterton, and every time that Lewis had dealt with him he was reminded of a buzzard, or some other ugly type of bird.
“Are we going to allow him to get away with this?” the sorcerer said to the others. “Are we going to just stand here and let this monstrosity order us around?”
Lewis had walked over to the portable bar in the corner of the room. He handed Mason a glass and filled it with ice before picking up a glass of his own.
“I would if I were you, but that’s just me,” Lewis said, pouring some brandy from a crystal decanter.
Another of the sorcerers—a woman with flaming red hair beneath her hood—pushed Masterton to the background and stepped forward.
“You’ve obviously come here for a reason,” she said. “Tell us what you want.”
Vladek smiled at the woman, showing her his razor-sharp teeth. “Finally, someone with manners,” he said.
“What do you want from us?” she demanded.
“I need your help to find someone,” Vladek stated. “Someone I can sense out there just beyond the pale but I know is not to be found on this earthly plain.”
Lewis could see the worry in the sorcerers’ eyes as they looked at one another.
“The sorcerer who will help