Remembering food brought back thoughts of other things. She hadn’t been allowed to go back for her mother’s cremation ceremony. She knew that her mother’s friends and male relatives would have looked after those things. But she wasn’t there for it. There was nothing to go back to. Only the Ganges River at dawn, her mother’s ashes would have been scattered long ago. Looking around at the deep tans and cloudy greys of the city around her, she thought of her home. She had been driven away twice now. She would return to one soon; after that, not even God would be able to stop her from returning to the second. She promised that to herself and her mother and to all the Das line before her.
* * * * *
Kenneth sat in the recently repaired glass clad office that at one point belonged to his late master, Alessandro. He folded his fingers in front of his face as a smile slowly crept across it. It was night, his House was strong and slowly encroaching upon territory that it should have held for a long time now. House Brandt couldn’t do anything about it either. He couldn’t really have foreseen how the werewolves would have defended their city, but throwing everything they had against House Brandt, completely decimating the forces of that old fool Wolfgang Hammerstein? That couldn’t have worked out better for him if he had been telling the wolves what to do.
He slowly rotated around in his chair. The night was in her full beauty. He could feel the safety and power of the shroud of darkness around him. He was in complete control and his House was stronger than ever. He had the complete loyalty of everyone in House Dukart, and why not? He had let his people have more freedom and allowed them to roam the streets freely. He kept the cops and city Hall, such that it was, in check. His people had never been happier and the last of the destroyed farms that the wolves had devastated were being replaced and new ‘volunteers’ were coming in almost daily.
And yet there was a strange nagging sense that tugged at his mind, something that he couldn’t quite get rid of. It was like that damned stain on the floor where Alessandro had died. His eyes rested on that spot. He had had the floor cleaned and recleaned. Those idiot contract cleaning people said that there was no spot there, that they had used every combination of cleaner, detergent, and club soda they had ever used on carpet or rug and there simply wasn’t a stain there. Maybe that was just another problem with human eyes, he could see the stain.
He forced himself to calm down. There was no point in worrying about it. He could always throw away the rug if he wanted. But he knew that if he did, somehow that would be him admitting that he couldn’t handle the memory of his predecessor. He wouldn’t give Alessandro the satisfaction. That bastard was rotting in hell and good riddance to him and his bullshit ideas of how things should be done. House Dukart would be the sole power on the west coast before too long and from there he would move east till House Dukart controlled all of America. His people would survive and there were no wolves to stop him.
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He had to move carefully though. House Himura was still very powerful and that bitch, Fumiko Nakahara, had strong ties with her home country. If she perceived a threat from him or that House Dukart was becoming too powerful, he knew that she would stop at nothing to see her enemy cut down in front of her.
And still there was something else deeper down in his still human brain that he had never been able to shake. It was a nagging feeling of needing to prove himself and with that, the feeling that there was someone or something higher than him, better than him, which he needed to prove himself to. It had taken forty-five years for him to prove to his former master that he was not to be underestimated. Now that he sat atop this tower, sitting in this office, as a symbol of his victory, he felt empty somehow. Humans professed that their kind was nothing without struggles and challenges to overcome. His challenge had consumed him for forty-five years, now that it was over he felt… uneasy.
He remembered his promise to himself. There were still loose ends to take care of. The vampire that had come here, defied him, and escaped. The fall might have killed him, but it would have been a slow and painful death. Brian had found nothing downstairs, just a small impact crater in the pavement as proof that the vampire had been there at all. But where had he gone? What help the man might have had was still a mystery that he needed to solve.
What remained of the inhabitants of that mountain city was still a mystery as well and not himself, his House, or his wolves had seen or found any trace of the werewolves that had escaped. His wolves had picked up a weak trail just outside the city and followed it down the side of the mountain into a small glade in the forest below the tree line. But once there, the trail vanished. He wasn’t paranoid, things don’t just vanish. But after three weeks neither he, nor his wolves, could explain or discover what might have happened there.
If there were survivors from his attack, then he was reasonably positive that they would be back. But would they come back in force and openly attack him and possibly House Himura as well? Or would they simply find another hole to slink into and restart their campaign of guerilla tactics and making a general nuisance of themselves, hindering him and his plans?
Whichever plan they chose to follow he would make sure that House Dukart was ready for them. Maybe even as the sole House remaining of the three.