Let This Be Our Final Battlefield

Alexandru groaned as he leaned over Dracul's neck. The pain he'd felt twice before slammed into him as it burned along his nerves even more fiercely than the previous times. He held to the horse, desperate to not pause for even a moment. Doamna or Radu is dying, his mind whispered again.

"No," he groaned to his horse. He endured the pain, gripping the animal's neck as he fought to stay in the saddle, the horse slowing to a walk but still carrying him home. "Please, Dracul... please," he begged, knowing the horse wouldn't understand him, but praying all the same the animal wouldn't stop.

Dracul didn't stop, and as the horsed plodded along, the pain slowly faded. His teeth cliched with impotent fury, his heart breaking with indescribable loss, Alexandru forced himself upright in the saddle. He knew it was no man that had taken his family from him, and he knew who would pay. He kicked Dracul firmly. Nothing mattered now except getting to his family. If Dracul died, then he'd run on his own two legs until his own heart burst.

Twenty minutes later, Alexandru leapt from Dracul. The horse's head was down, and his mouth was covered with red tinged foam, but Dracul had brought him home as swiftly as any animal could. He ran first to their bedrooms, frantically calling names, but the castle was as silent as a tomb. He found the bodies in the dining hall. He paused in the doorway for the briefest of instances, stunned by the scene before him, before rushing into the room. Amongst the scattered dishes and food was an incubus, his wife and son, and his two servants, and his wife, Ștefana.

"No," he moaned as he settled beside his wife and son. It was obvious the bodies had been carefully arranged for him.

The incubus was on his back with Doamna draped across his chest, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling with the demon's massive, hard cock inside her womanhood. Radu had been draped over his mother's chest with his equally large and hard cock forced into Doamna's pussy alongside the incubus's, all three of their faces twisted into masks of lust and effort. Whimpering, he carefully pulled Radu from Doamna, holding his undead son in a long, fierce embrace before gently placing his son's body on the floor and lifting his wife off the demon.

"No," he whimpered again, closing his eyes as he pulled her into his arms, holding Doamna's still warm face to his as he rocked slowly.

He knew she was gone, but with his eyes closed and her body still warm as she existed between life and death, he could imagine her yet alive. He continued to rock, moaning softly as he remembered her as she was with her long, curled, golden hair, beautiful face, and eyes the blue of a still mountain lake reflecting a cloudless sky. As tears ran down his cheeks, he recalled how she'd looked at him with such profound love, and how he'd returned her gaze with the same.

"No... I'm so sorry I wasn't here... I'm so sorry I wasn't here.... I'm so sorry I wasn't here..." he murmured over and over again as he continued to rock her.

After a long moment, wiping away his tears, he carefully placed Doamna's head on the floor before moving to Nicu and Ștefana, the elderly man and woman serving his family has their parents, and their parents before them had... and as their children, and their children's children would. They were separate from the tableau of his wife and son in a massive pool of blood, stripped of clothing and carefully arranged with Nicu between his wife's legs, laying over her body as if they were making love.

Alexandru careful separated the man and woman. Unlike Doamna, Radu, and the incubus, who lingered in the undead state, Nicu and Ștefana were clearly lifeless, though their bodies were still warm and the stiffness of death hadn't yet taken them. The old couple had been brutally stabbed many times, and then arranged to hide their wounds. He looked at the blood on his hands. The blood didn't interest him, the nourishment value of the liquid destroyed within seconds of leaving the host's body.

He slowly turned in the room. No demon had ever struck at a Bătrân so openly before, the inhabitants of underworld preferring to lurk in the shadows like the murdering thieves they were. A rage like no other welled up inside him until it burst forth with a scream. He fell to his knees beside his son as he screamed, a wild, animal like shriek of pure pain.

"I'll kill them! I'll kill them all!" he screamed to the ceiling as his fingers curved into talons.

The castle of Alexandru Bătrân echoed with his anguished screams for many hours as he grieved over the loss of this wife and child, his cries becoming even more tormented as he felt the loss of first one parent then the other.

Alexandru Bătrân had once been held in high regard by those in the nearby village of Târgșor, but after that fateful night, none dared approach the castle again. For generations thereafter the villagers swore that late at night, the walls of castle Bătrân echoed with Alexandru's screams still.

Alex sat at a table in the corner while watching the mingle of people, his seltzer sweating in a glass in front of him. He was hungry, but it was so much more dangerous to feed now that he had to be careful and smart. Fortunately, over his long life, he had much practice in avoiding detection and learning how to defeat the latest police techniques as they were developed and refined.

He was tired. In his more than ten centuries of life, he'd witnessed much... the birth and deaths of nations, of men learning to tame the land, air, and seas with their machines, and then finally stepping foot on another celestial body. His task complete, he was ready to die. He didn't know how much longer he might live, and he had no memory of anyone else in his bloodline having lived so long, all having fallen to a demon before reaching his advanced age. Despite his age beyond imagining, he looked little older than he had when he'd transformed. Tall and heavily muscled, with piercing dark eyes and hair more ebony than the deepest night, he looked to be perhaps forty, not his true age of approximately one thousand, and he would continue to do so until he could no longer take nourishment from those he fed upon. When that day came, he would begin his slow spiral into death. He assumed there would be no sign his death was approaching, the magic of his family preventing his body from deteriorating as he slowly starved until, eventually, he would simply perish.

He took a sip from his glass. He was certain he was the last of his kind, the sole survivor of the long war against the underworld. He found bleak amusement that he, and the rest of the Bătrân, were likely the source of the vampire legend as they'd battled the demons in that centuries long war. It was the very traits that made people think of the Bătrân as monsters that allowed them to protect humanity from the true monsters since before the Roman Empire. While most of the lore surrounding vampires was fanciful poppycock, there were a few grains of truth hidden in the ancient stories.

He drank human blood to survive, because of the sun's UV rays he couldn't venture into daylight without great pain and damage to his flesh, and he was immensely strong and old, but that's where the similarities to the vampire legends ended.

He couldn't turn into a bat and fly around, garlic presented no more problem than any other human food, he slept in a king-sized bed with silk sheets, not in a coffin, and holy water, consecrated ground, or a cross affected him no more than anyone else. The myths had other facts wrong as well. Mirrors were no issue and he had several in his house, if he were defeated in battle and fell into the undead state, he'd never wake from it, and a wooden stake through the heart would severely piss him off but not kill him.

Of all the legendary vampire traits, the most troubling by far was his need to feed on human blood. He had to feed every few months, taking a victim when his need overwhelmed his control. He'd tried animal blood, but the attempt had made him violently ill. There was no nourishment to be found there and his need only increased. He'd also once drank from the supplies of a blood bank, but as he expected, there was no nourishment to be found there either. The Bătrân's need for fresh human blood was the sacrifice humans were required to make for their protection from the underworld... except they no longer needed his protection.

Alex had killed the last demon, in London, more than 130 years before. Hearing of the brutal murders by, as the London press had dubbed him at the time, the Whitechapel Murderer, then later Jack the Ripper, Alex had traveled from Paris, intending to feed upon a man who no longer deserved to live and who's sudden disappearance wouldn't be investigated too closely.

He'd arrived in London believing the Whitechapel Murderer was nothing more than an evil or disturbed man, someone that he would feed upon before disposing of the body. It had taken him weeks of skulking in the darkness before catching up to the man... only to discover the killer wasn't a man at all. More than two hundred years before to his trip to London Alex had battled a succubus. He'd thought at the time that evil bitch was the last of her kind, so it came as much surprise the man the London police were looking for was no man at all, but an incubus.

Alex had interrupted the killer as he was mutilating a young, ginger woman that may have been pretty once, perhaps to cover his nature, perhaps because the incubus derived some sick pleasure from doing so, or perhaps for another reason known only to demons. Naked and covered in the woman's blood, the incubus had attacked, but the demon had quickly realized Alex was a hunter and had turned and fled. Alex gave chase, but the demon was far faster than even his magic enhanced body and had escaped. He'd spent hours searching in the darkness, knowing that unless the demon had managed to open a portal and escape to the underworld, something difficult to do without being seen in a crowded metropolis, the incubus had to be hiding where beams of sunlight never reached and where his nocturnal nature wouldn't be noticed.

Near dawn, just before he was going to give up and find a place to wait for nightfall to resume his search, he'd found his prey hiding in the tunnels of the London Underground Railway. There, as the coke fired locomotives hissed, chuffed, and squealed their way past, Alex and the incubus had battled in furious, naked, combat, the sounds of the passing trains drowning out their own screams of effort, pleasure, and pain. Alex and the demon began by fucking after the incubus absorbed his penis and opened a vagina, but after several hours of brutal combat, the incubus had grown exhausted from the effort of maintaining his metamorphosis, and he and Alex had finished their duel with the demon in the incubus's natural state, the two night creatures battling against their enemy's cock with hands, mouths, and their own rigid cock.

While fucking each other mercilessly, their flesh became darkened and stained black from rolling around in the coal cinders and the sharp-edged gravel of the roadbed supporting the tracks, pressing each other against the sticky, smoke-stained walls, or in one terrifying instance, battling between the rails, furiously sucking and stroking each other's huge cock as an engine bore down on them. Even as the train approached, they remained locked in violent combat, squirming and thrusting cocks into mouths as the sharp stones opened cuts on their bodies that instantly healed. Thick, powerful arms bulging and twisting with effort, they strained to escape their enemy's crushing embrace while maintaining their own, so engaged in their fight they ignored all other danger.

Hips lunging violently, their massive cocks throbbing with their rapture, the night creatures filled their enemy's mouth with their essence, their cries of effort and pleasure muffled as hunter and hunted strained against each other. Inner-light glowing from the tips of their fast-plunging cocks, Alex and the demon consumed their enemy's feeble flow of light as they continued their erotic battle without pause, tumbling over each other and the rail to relative safety with scant moments to spare.

Their battle lasted more than seven hours until Alex, battered and covered in soot, consumed the last of the incubus's light, taking the incubus into a death kiss as his tightly clenched fist stroked the monster's giant, steel hard cock with manic fury. The Incubus had been incredibly strong, the strongest demon he'd ever faced, but not strong enough. During their battle, the demon had taken from him six times, but Alex's eighth taking of the incubus's light had been his last.

His chest still heaving from the hardest fought battle of his life, Alex carried the demon's body deeper into the tunnels, hiding there until darkness returned. Late at night, after dressing himself in the tattered remains of his once fine suit, Alex had then hauled the demon out of the tunnel, weighted the body with scraps of rail he found in the demon's lair, and then dumped the incubus's body into the Thames. There the spawn of the underworld would drown, be reborn into the undead state, only to drown again in a never-ending cycle until the incubus's final death came months later.

Alex smiled with the memory, hoping that incubus bastard knew everything that was happening to him and that he lived in the hell of the undead for a long, long time.

Feeding on the incubus had satisfied his hunger for a time, but now there were no more demons to feed upon and he was forced to take his nourishment from the humans. With a grim set of his jaw as he contemplated the distasteful task ahead of him, his dark eyes flicked about the crowd, watching and waiting for his victim.

Harley stepped into the dark interior of Las Deux. She was hungry and was searching for her next victim. Her previous feeding, only a week ago in Moscow, had been unsatisfactory, the man's inner-light surprisingly weak and his will fragile, especially considering his apparent robust health and obvious strength and size. She'd been so hungry that she'd been overcome during his harvest and he'd sensed her taking. He didn't even put up a fight, cringing back into a corner like the sheep he was when he realized her true nature, begging for his life, his tiny little cock limp and useless.

No longer of use to her, she'd killed him without a second thought. She missed the men of old, men who resisted her to their last, men preferring to die while trying to fight and fuck their way out of her grasp than to cower in the corner like a frightened mouse. Because she was the last of her kind, the world was now her table. Since there were no other demons to block her opening of a portal, she could go anyplace she chose to feed... and yet she seemed to be constantly hungry.

"Hey, sexy lady. Buy you a drink?"

She evaluated the man making the offer. He was handsome enough in his own way, but he lacked robustness. While physical size wasn't an absolute indicator of the strength of a man's will or the size of his reservoir of light, as had been reinforced by her previous choice, often the two coincided. A big, strong, well-muscled man usually lasted longer during a forced harvest, willing and able to fight longer and harder as she took his light, than a thinner, weaker male.

"Maybe later," she said as she moved deeper into the bar.

In the hundreds of years of progress since the war with the Bătrân began, it had become increasingly difficult to harvest light from sleeping males. Not because she lacked the ability, but because her victims were often beyond her reach after she made the link. In the olden days, someone rarely traveled more than a mile or two, well within her ability to sense and track. Now, however, in the modern world, she could touch a man to create the link, and then he simply... vanished. Traveling by car or train, the man could quickly move beyond her range of detection. It was unimaginably frustrating to know that she could travel anywhere in the world in a handful of seconds, yet couldn't follow a man across town because stepping through a portal severed any link she'd created.

She'd tried following her prey in her own car, and while that sometimes worked, often she was then thwarted by a stoplight, secured building, gated community, or some other modern inconvenience. Like all denizens of the underworld, she could only open a portal outside, lacking the ability to portal through anything other than air. She also had to be cautious and keep her nature a secret, lest she panic the sheep that was humanity and make her hunting that much more difficult. Like all demons always had, she was careful to open her portals only in locations where her arrival, and disappearance, wouldn't be observed to protect her ability to hunt.

In the past, with her ability to feed so erratic, she'd often felt like she was slowly starving, but things were better now. In the past several decades, with most people no longer waiting for marriage to begin fucking, she'd changed her tactics. Now she allowed a man to pick her up, take her somewhere private, and then she literally fucked him to death. She tried to not damage the man during the harvest to avoid scrutiny of the event, but it was hard, so hard sometimes, to contain her need... especially when she was so hungry and the man resisted her harvesting.

Being succubus, she wasn't limited to one location, and she made sure she never harvested more than one human from a location at a time. Though she left behind a string of dead males, nobody was able to connect the deaths, much less ascribe them to one person. Depending on her victim, the body she left might be badly broken from the violence of her harvest, or perhaps the man appeared to have passed peacefully if she could harvest him as he slept. The remains she left after her feedings were a varied as the men she harvested.

Harley moved slowly through the throng, her dark eyes flicking around the room as she searched for her next victim. So much food... yet so difficult to obtain.

She'd gotten her war with the Bătrân, but it had been more costly than any of original five had anticipated. Three of the four demons that had been sent to harvest Mircea and Eupraxia had perished in the attempt. Three days later, as she and she and Mazrel, the Incubus who survived the harvesting of Mircea and Eupraxia, prepared to harvest Alexandru, they'd been attacked by a group of ten demons, intent on driving them out of the underworld and taking their ability to feed for bringing them to war with the Bătrân.

Despite their combined strength, she and Mazrel had no hope of defeating so many demons in combat. They'd survived the attack by fleeing to the surface where they'd wandered, hiding by day to avoid the debilitating rays of the sun, and feeding with care at night to avoid drawing attention of the Bătrân or their brethren. Each time they tried to return to the underworld, they were again attacked and driven out, until after hundreds of years, there was no one left to drive them out.

For the next 200 years, they'd lived in luxurious freedom, gorging themselves on light, untroubled by the hunters. Then, one day, Mazrel failed to return to the underworld. She'd thought all the hunters dead, but clearly at least one remained. Or had.

It became her mission to eradicate the last Bătrân, the one who had taken her sole companion, and remove their scourge from the earth forever. In the early nineteen hundreds she'd finally tracked down the last hunter, a man living in South Africa, by following the whispers of a monster that emerged from the water at night to drag the unsuspecting back into the ocean where they were drained of blood. She suspected the 'monster' was a hunter that was taking humans for food and then disposing of their bodies by dumping them into the ocean.