What if she was just another piece on the immortal chessboard?

Chapter 18

Day 4 of Servio Training

Nelek Castle

Logan shrieked like a five year old who’d angered a swarm of killer bees as Trinity chased her across the polished wood floor of the training room. She didn’t care if she sounded like a schoolyard sissy. The bitch had been trying to punch her for the last five minutes, and under no circumstances did she think becoming one with Superwhore’s fist was pertinent to her survival as a Servio.

“Logan!” Trinity’s exasperated voice echoed through the expansive room, bouncing off the plain white walls. “Stop running. You need to learn how to fight. You can’t live in New York City without knowing how to defend yourself.”

Logan glanced up at the wall of mirrors across from her, only to see Trinity gaining on her. “Bullshit! I’ve lived there all my life and I never got attacked. Not even by another homeless person. This is crap. I didn’t sign on for getting my ass kicked.”

“Fine. I promise I won’t punch you. Just stop running.”

She slowed when Trinity’s reflection stopped pursuing her, but turned around and kept moving backwards. “Something tells me not to trust you.”

Trinity rolled her black eyes. “If I really wanted to catch you, I’d call on my blood for speed and mow your ass down. You’re four days old. Do you really think you can get the drop on me?” She didn’t leave time for an answer. “Besides, there’s a very important reason why I need to hit you.”

Logan huffed out a breath and picked up the pace. “Didn’t you just promise you weren’t going to hit me?”

She flashed a wicked smile. “Oh, I’ll keep my promise. I promise.”

Before Logan could even reconcile the flash of black leather and tanned skin, pain exploded in her stomach and she found herself with a perfectly unblemished view of the ceiling. She squeezed her eyes closed and rolled onto her side, clutching her white cotton t-shirt to her abdomen.

It was a damn good thing she hadn’t eaten dinner.

“I promised I wouldn’t punch you,” Trinity laughed somewhere close by. “I never said I wouldn’t kick you.”

“You’re a bitch,” Logan groaned. She should have known to listen to Trinity’s exact words. They’d spent the last three days discussing vampire society and politics, and how the words a vampire or Servio chose could mean the difference between great success on an endeavor and abysmal failure.

She’d had no idea vampires were such ruthless, selfish, backstabbing bastards. The meanest, most corrupt CEO in the world didn’t have shit on a well-trained vampire. And the sharpest lawyer in New York couldn’t find as many loopholes in a set of rules as one motivated member of the undead race. The sheer amount of power a single vampire could wield over an entire city was startling.

If anything, she’d fallen asleep last night rather content in her choice to give up drugs and learn about what really went on around her all those nights she’d spent on the street.

Logan grimaced as another wave of nausea washed over her. Of course, right now she didn’t really appreciate the knowledge.

She sat up and opened her eyes for no reason other than to glare at Trinity. “What the hell did you kick me for?”

Trinity frowned. “Because we’re at the point where I need to teach you about the beast, and usually the best way to get the little monster riled is through inflicting pain. But it doesn’t seem to work on you.”

“Nope,” Logan coughed. “It just hurts and makes me want to puke.”

Trinity extended a manicured hand. “Come on, get up you sissy.”

Logan knocked her hand away and crawled to her feet on her own. “If you’d asked before you decided to obliterate my spleen, I’d have told you Odin and Kerestyan already explained a little bit about the beast to me.”

She chuckled. “Well, if anyone would know, it’d be them. What all did they say?”

Logan rubbed a hand over her upset stomach. “Odin said it’s the predatory side of a vampire that craves blood, power, and loves watching humans do things they shouldn’t. Kerestyan said the beast is pure instinct and only knows emotion.”

Trinity nodded. “That pretty much sums it up. It’s different for every vampire, and even more so for Servios. Your beast will never be as pronounced as mine, but it lives in the blood, and since you have vampiric blood in your body you get to have one, too.”

“You make it sound like it’s a present.”

She laughed. “The beast isn’t bad.” She tipped her head from side to side. “Well, it’s not all bad. If a vampire gets too much stimulation, be it from extreme emotions or injury, or sometimes even blood, the beast takes over and they attack and try to eat everyone around them. The younger a vampire is, the harder it is for them to control the beast, but the older a vampire is the more destruction they can cause.

“Servios are the same, it just takes a lot more provocation to get their monster riled. Oh, and anytime you hear a supernatural say monster, animal, predator, goblin, or pretty much any word like that, they’re referring to the beast.”

Logan smiled as the image of a little green goblin flashed in her mind. She could almost see it ripping out of her chest like some kind of alien and chasing people down the street with a Spork. “I think I’ll call it the goblin.” When Trinity frowned, Logan rolled her eyes. She’d seen that particular look a lot over the last three days, too. “I know, I know.” She raised her hands in mock surrender. “This is another serious piece of information and I need to treat it that way. I got it.”

“Good. I know your detached ass finds some of this funny, and it’s okay, as long as you understand this life isn’t always fun and games. I know Odin and I make it seem that way, but we’ve adapted really well to the modern world. Not all vampires and Servios have.” She motioned around them. “Some of us get stuck in a time period we really liked and refuse to let go. I love my Dad, I really do, but he’s a prime example of someone who won’t take well to your humor about parts of our condition that have literally toppled entire empires.”

Logan stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. “Toppled empires?”

She nodded rather sharply. “Ancient history, and not the kind you read about in a schoolbook some human wrote, but the kind I was there to see with my own eyes…is chock full of disasters caused by a vampire who lost themselves to the beast. Rome fell at the hands of an Ancient Warrior, which is the old term for a Thug, who went to sleep for two hundred years then woke up and got so pissed about how the city had changed in his absence, he flipped his lid and destroyed it. You don’t even wanna know how many humans died under his fangs.”

Logan lowered her eyes and studied where the black fabric of her running pants covered the top of her tennis shoe. For the first time since her training had begun, she felt kind of small and a little stupid. “Sorry.”

“Don’t feel bad. I just want to make sure you understand, much like your life on the street, immortality isn’t all roses. I’ve practically stuffed you full of information over the last few days, and you’ve done a really good job absorbing it all, even when you’re laughing so hard water shoots out your nose.”

Logan shook her head and smiled. “It wasn’t my fault you decided to use the phrase ‘testosterone driven penile fever’ to explain why Kerestyan’s body is cold one minute and hot the next. If you’d just said some of his human body functions kick back in when he’s aroused, the water would’ve never gotten into a position where it could shoot out my nostrils.”

“Hey, you asked,” Trinity laughed. “I just wanted to make sure you had a clear understanding of what was going on. Like I said, any vampire worth their salt can will their heart to beat and make their body warm back up to 98.6. Doing so uses a lot of the blood’s power, but it’s a great way to keep the Veil intact. Look at it this way, if you make Kerestyan so hot that the beast does it for him, he can just grab your ass whenever he needs to have a heartbeat and save himself the blood.”

Logan turned her back to Trinity when heat flamed in her cheeks. While she wasn’t at all ashamed of anything she’d done with Kerestyan, being teased about their exploits was still new for her. Hell, having someone to do those kinds of dirty things with, let alone someone around her long enough to tease her about them, was strange in its own right.

“Oh my God! Are you blushing? I didn’t think it was possible!”

“Shut up, Trinity.”

“Come on, Logan. Don’t close up on me,” her voice was more serious now. “There’s nothing wrong with missing Kerestyan. I know it’s foreign to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. If we’re lucky, it happens to the best of us.”

Logan slowly turned around. “I don’t like it. It feels wrong, like it’s not me.” She folded her arms over her chest as an odd sensation tingled through her. “I feel like there’s some other person inside me, and I don’t know who she is or what the hell she wants from me. I can’t figure it out.”