A beast of nine horns, p.1
A Beast of Nine Horns, page 1
part #3 of Into Vermilion Series
To everyone who has ever seen themselves in Coral, or Tamara, or Lena, or Clive, or Jase. To us, who dwell in the penumbra.
Copyright © 2023 by Bartholomew Lander
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise noted, all names, locations, businesses, and events contained herein are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or legal entities, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN (Print) 978-91-987334-9-5
ISBN (Digital) 978-91-987335-0-1
ISBN (Kindle) 978-91-987335-1-8
First Edition
10.2023 Ouroboros
Design and Typesetting: Corey Mark
Lunarium Books
Von Gerdesgatan 1
412 59 Gothenburg, Sweden
www.LunariumBooks.com
FATHER MOREAU: Yea, the final curtain falleth over day, bringing a red moon’s night. Weep for your fallen champion, children of God, that I might sup upon your woe.
[Enter ST. ISABEAU, wounded.]
ST. ISABEAU: Too soon by half dost thou revel, Moreau.
FATHER MOREAU: What is this! How canst thou stand!
ST. ISABEAU: This body doth not feel thy quarrel’s bite, nor this heart thy betrayal’s sting. For faith is mine aegis, and the Lord is my blade! I am the nine-in-one. Though I die, I am become the quietus of all hemomancers.
FATHER MOREAU: What jest! Thy sword is lost and thy body bloodless. O, but a beaten bitch can bay.
ST. ISABEAU: Aye, and no bitch biteth like the beaten. Now lift thy sabre, for thy judgment is come!
—Sacrament of the Lady Saint, Act V, Scene IV
The Story So Far
A Rose to the Torch
For better or worse, the world was shaped by hemomancers. From the Crimson Wars to the Red Death, they have tormented and preyed upon mankind for a thousand years. Times have changed, however. Where once they ruled from the shadows, now they have been pushed to the brink of extinction by technological progress and human tenacity. In a modern world, where the power to manipulate blood no longer carves them such a wide niche, the hemomancers have had to withdraw into the cracks of society just to survive.
But though the hemomancers’ glory days have waned, the wounds they left in history still weep. They are now actively hunted by humans, not only out of revenge but also to fuel the scientific advancement of the great hemotech corporations. All in all, it has never been a worse time to be a hemomancer than in the 21st century.
Coral Savary never wanted to be a hemomancer. Obviously. Growing up as a little girl with hemophilia, she was inundated by society’s hatred for the creatures and bombarded with warnings of their hunger. At a tender age, she learned that she had to keep her power a secret from everyone, even her parents, or she would end up just another dead body devoured by the ancient hatred between the races. And so she grew up, afraid of her own shadow, secure in her own falsehoods.
That is, until her eighteenth birthday, when she was cornered by a hemomancer, a man named Gavin Lyon, who seemed to know just a little too much about her. He claimed he was there to protect her from some organization she’d never heard of and didn’t really believe in. She ran from him, only to come face to face with the very people he had warned her about. Her attempts to escape this time availed her far less than the first. She was about to be taken by the Rosarium until Gavin showed up with his friend, Jase Finn. After a short fight, the assailants were defeated, and Gavin and Jase returned with Coral to the safety of her parents’ home to explain what was happening.
That’s when Gavin, with all the social grace of a drunken bison, inadvertently revealed to Coral’s parents that she was a hemomancer, shattering the family. The resulting argument saw Coral driven out of her home by those meant to love and protect her. Gavin’s barrage of apologies afterward did little to heal the damage, but the seed had been planted. How could Coral be a hemomancer if her parents weren’t?
With no home left to go to, and Gavin and Jase still insisting on protecting her, Coral had little choice but to follow them to the Orchid Veil, a militant order of hemomancers in the service of Lady Leblanc of the Orchid. On the way, Gavin taught Coral the fundamentals of hemomancy: advantage, the power of blood types, the dangers of foreign blood entering the body. As a nought, a hemomancer with O-negative blood, she ranked weakest among all hemomancers, because any hemomancer could wield and safely absorb her blood. This fact would soon become crushingly relevant to her.
Upon arriving at the Orchid Veil’s base in Saint Isabeau, Massachusetts, Coral learned about the war between the Orchid Veil and the Rosarium. The war had raged for a hundred years in the shadows, the casus belli of which was the murder of Lady Leblanc’s father by Lord Malthus of the Rose, the Rosarium’s leader. Malthus killed Leblanc’s father in a duel and absorbed his blood afterward, and in doing so had become inflicted with a debilitating bloodborne pathogen that crippled him to this day, and could only be cured with a complete blood transfusion with the blood of another nought. With the number of noughts vanishingly low, that made Coral a prime target for the Rosarium, which was why the Veil had come to her aid.
Coral attempted to cope with this crush of information and drama. It wasn’t easy; after all, the only things she knew about hemomancers she’d learned through movies and TV, which were turning out to be somewhat less than accurate. But she was now, in essence, a prisoner of the Veil; for her own protection, she was not allowed to leave. If Malthus got his hands on her, after all, he could be rejuvenated, and the last century of war would have been for nothing.
Confusion, loss, and loneliness ground on her. In desperation, she called her best friend Tamara Vena, hoping to find some refuge in familiarity. But she quickly realized a cold truth: Tamara would soon find out about her secret through her parents. Rather than let her find out that way, she made the painful choice to confess that she was a hemomancer. Tamara, however, proved just as cold and unaccepting as her parents and hung up on her. With Tamara’s rejection ringing in her ears, Coral began a spiral into depression.
Meanwhile, Gavin, increasingly suspicious of Coral’s parentage, visited Caduceus Industries headquarters in Detroit with his confidant and lover Lena Lockwood, where they intended to meet with a highly placed hemomancer. There, they learned that Coral was not born a hemomancer, but converted in a forbidden hemomantic ritual by the enigmatic Lady Descoteaux of the Hyacinth at the behest of Malthus. Gavin was then forced to confront a dark truth: Lady Leblanc was somehow involved with Coral, and the situation was not what it seemed.
During this time, Lena’s brother, Clive Lockwood, befriended Coral. He did his best to make her feel welcome and accepted among the other hemomancers—a tall order, given their apparent and inexplicable contempt for her. Coral, fatigued of the duplicity of her loved ones and weary of living a lie, asked Clive to help her learn what it meant to be a hemomancer. He agreed, though this decision later landed him in trouble with Jase, who seemed particularly concerned with keeping Coral safe from harm.
Some time later, three other Orchid Veil bases were raided, with two hundred of the Veil’s loyal killed. Signs pointed to an inside accomplice, which reinforced Gavin’s growing suspicion that there was a traitor among the Veil. It was then tactlessly revealed that standard operating procedure was for noughts to be murdered upon discovery, not protected as Coral had been led to believe. A stunned, horrified Coral suddenly connected several loose threads in her mind, and finally understood why she’d been so unwelcome. Despite Lady Leblanc’s insistence that the days of killing noughts were a relic of the past, the damage had been done. Coral’s spiral into despair continued, and she even began resenting Leblanc for forcing her to live in captivity rather than just killing her and being done with it.
Gavin couldn’t stand to see Coral suffering so. Haunted by his own demons, and realizing that Coral was not safe at the Veil, he resolved to help her escape at any cost. To that end, he made a fateful decision. He traveled to the seat of the Hyacinth bloodline in the Americas, prepared to pledge his life to their dark designs in exchange for them giving Coral safe harbor. There, he learned that Coral was not only turned into a hemomancer as an infant by Lady Descoteaux, but was also infected with a powerful but dormant disease at Leblanc’s request. And so it all clicked into place: Leblanc intended to activate the disease in the girl and then deliver her to Malthus. Believing the girl’s noughtblood to be his salvation, he would readily accept the poisoned blood into his veins, and finally succumb to the disease Leblanc’s father infected him with a century earlier.
Unwilling to let Leblanc sacrifice Coral, Gavin confided in Lena and Jase, who agreed to help with his plan. Together, they effected an escape from the Veil with both Coral and Clive under cover of darkness. They headed to an abandoned shipyard, aiming to travel over water to the Hyacinth’s island home. There, however, they were ambushed by the Veil’s elite strike force, Architeuthis.
After a tense stand-off, Lena bought Gavin and Coral time to escape. They headed to the docks where Jase was supposed to meet them with the boat, only to realize too late that it was all a trap and that Jase had betrayed them. Jase pleaded with Gavin to abandon his mission of freeing Coral. Gavin refused. In a final confrontation, Jase tearfully killed Gavin and a
Though Coral disabled Jase, she realized that there was no escape for her. With the Rosarium arriving in force to collect her for Malthus, there was no way she could fight and nowhere she could run. Coral succumbed then not only to despair but to petty revenge. Unwilling to die for Leblanc’s war, she instead resolved to spite the woman with her dying breath. And so, before she was sedated and abducted by the incoming Rosarium agents, she opened her veins and traded her O-negative blood for Gavin’s A-positive blood.
Coral later regained consciousness at a hospital, where her blood was planned to be extracted for Malthus’s transfusion. However, the lord of the Rose bloodline was not content to sit and idly wait for his blood, so he came to visit Coral before the procedure. There, he realized to his horror that Coral’s blood was not O-negative, and was thus useless to him. Enraged, Malthus concluded that somebody betrayed him. He ordered his honor guard to kill the agents who brought him Coral, and in the ensuing chaos Coral was able to break free of her restraints.
One of Malthus’s guards attempted to finish her off, but Coral, clinging to a vain but desperate survival instinct, lashed out with a hemocryst blade. As soon as her blade made contact with him, her mind was inundated with savage images and twisted thoughts. Overcome and empowered by bloodlust, Coral murdered the guard. When backup arrived to take her down, Coral attacked, breaking the limits of noughthood and butchering her assailants. Malthus, a broken shell of a man, begged her for mercy. But Coral was mad with hatred and desperation, euphoria and frenzy. Committing to the path of violence, she sliced his throat, single-handedly ending a hundred-year shadow war. Marinating in the afterglow of murder, her thoughts turned to revenge against Lady Leblanc.
Meanwhile, at the docks, Lena found Gavin’s corpse, and Clive found what remained of Coral’s belongings, including her cell phone. An unheard message sat on her phone’s screen. Thinking it could be a message from Leblanc to them, Lena took the phone and listened to it. Instead, it was a voicemail from Tamara, who had called to apologize for hanging up on Coral. Tearfully, Tamara pledged to be friends with Coral no matter what she was. Moved by the girl’s words, Lena wondered if it wasn’t yet too late for the wounds between hemomancers and humans to be mended.
Although, if those wounds could be mended, you wouldn’t know it for all the bleeding they were about to do.
The Story So Far
A Scourge Upon Them
After a hundred years, the Orchid-Rose war was finally over. With Lord Malthus dead and Lady Leblanc victorious, the darkness of the war’s final sordid days seemed poised to clear. But the war left wounds even among the victors. Lena and Clive, knowing they had no place among the Orchid any longer, left Saint Isabeau behind. Meanwhile, Jase fell into a deep depression over his murder of Gavin.
At the Orchid Veil, a party was thrown by Lady Leblanc and Kensuke Shimazono, the commander of Architeuthis and the Lady’s right hand. Across the world, all those loyal to the Veil joined in celebrating the downfall of the Rose. With a hundred years of strife behind them, Lady Leblanc declared that the remnants of the Rose would join with the Veil as the Sanguine Accord, a new hemomancer alliance to bring peace to the hemomantic political sphere.
But the celebrations were interrupted by Lady Descoteaux. She demanded to know what happened to Gavin and Coral, who never arrived at the Hyacinth exclave. When Leblanc told her of their sacrifice, Lady Descoteaux declared Leblanc the enemy of the Hyacinth for daring to lay a finger on those under her protection. Incredulous at this claim—and livid at Jase for withholding that Gavin and Coral had the Viscountess’s favor—Lady Leblanc commanded the newly formed and war-weary Sanguine Accord to prepare for the possibility of a new conflict.
Around the same time, Lena and Clive returned to their parents’ home in Pine Tusk, Kentucky. And while Clive was greeted warmly by their parents Lisette and Hadrian Lockwood, Lena was still unwelcome among the family for the dark deeds she committed in her youth. And so Lena simply began to wander, depressed and alone, without any reason to exist.
Several days later, Jase was assigned a new mission for the Accord: finding Lena and returning her to the Veil, so they could put her skills to use within the ranks of Architeuthis. With Jase’s loyalty to Leblanc crumbling, he instead sabotaged the disgraced Architeuthis elite Kingfisher during the mission—for Gavin’s final request was to protect Lena, and Jase had no intention of betraying his best friend again. But as he attempted to slow Kingfisher’s investigation, Jase suddenly broke out in hemorrhagic fever—the hallmark of hemomantic scourge. Confused and horrified, he realized he must have contracted the disease from Coral during their fight at the docks.
Jase knew he had little time. If he was infected with a scourge strain capable even of afflicting hemomancers, then his chance of survival was slim. Failing to get answers from Leblanc, he broke into the Veil under cover of darkness to search for answers in the computer networks. While searching, he came across a disturbing piece of news: a massive scourge outbreak had just occurred in the town of Balsam, Vermont. Worse, this outbreak was being intentionally spread by a violent faction of the crimson counterculture. The terrorists, calling themselves the Sons of Gavin, preached of apocalyptic revolution at the hands of a being known as the Scourge Maiden. Stricken by their choice of name, and with no other leads to follow, Jase set out for Balsam to find answers.
Meanwhile, Coral’s best friend Tamara returned from college for the winter holidays. Crushed that her calls to Coral had gone unanswered for weeks, she agonized over the conflicting emotions in her heart. As her family prodded and pried at her over Coral’s hemomancy—now a well-spread secret within the town of Wheatling—Tamara resolved to try calling her one more time. But when Clive picked up, her hope and suspicion were ignited in equal measure. Torn between her love for Coral and her fear of hemomancers, she wrangled the courage to go meet him. Leaving her family without a word of her betrayal, she left for Pine Tusk.
When Tamara met with Clive and his family, she learned of Coral’s death in the last days of the Orchid-Rose conflict—a truth Clive was too cowardly to tell her over the phone. But rather than reveling in Tamara’s pain, the Lockwoods showed her sympathy and kindness—kindness she knew her own family wouldn’t have given her under the circumstances. Bereaved and wounded, Tamara stayed with the Lockwoods as she tried to process her grief. During this time, she came to understand that hemomancers were not the demons society had taught her they were.
At which point, Architeuthis promptly broke into the Lockwood home and abducted the four of them, spiriting them away to Lady Leblanc’s mansion in Sherbrooke. Shortly thereafter, Kingfisher contacted Lena and told her they were holding her family as leverage. If she wanted to guarantee their safety, he told her, she would need to submit to Lady Leblanc’s wishes and lend her strength to Architeuthis. Kingfisher ordered her to meet him at the Veil’s base in Saint Isabeau, and Lena agreed.
Meanwhile in Balsam, Jase’s investigation of the Sons of Gavin took a grisly turn. After meeting with Zero, the leader of the Sons, Jase realized Coral wasn’t killed after being handed over to the Rosarium. Instead, she’d murdered Malthus and escaped. The outbreak had begun when Zero and his cohort drank her scourge-infected blood. Showing some supernatural connection to Coral—the Scourge Maiden—the Sons of Gavin abruptly attacked Jase, beating him near to death before he could be rescued by soldiers from the Center for Scourge Control.
After coming to in the care of the CSC, Jase met Astrid Falk, hemomancer and director of the Center. Falk realized then that Jase, a hemomancer infected by the Scourge Maiden’s viral strain, may have been the key to defeating the outbreak. Unfortunately for Jase, that meant he was soon subjected to horrific, torturous experimentation. With the help of Nissa Bridgeway, a young girl gifted with unnatural psychic abilities, Jase was forced to confront the foreshadowing of an apocalypse festering between all human minds: Kakrinolas, the demon from which the first hemomancers gained their powers over a thousand years ago.
