Flesh Shadows: The Heir Apparent

By Lenka Dusek

Sam has high expectations for the newest vampire in the city - a young man called Ben. She should have... she was the one who converted him. As a mortal Ben had been strong, sharp-minded, and dashing, with a well developed dark side, so he should have made a great prince on the other side.

But Sam soon starts to wonder about her choice, especially when she finds herself wet-nursing the new recruit. It seems that Ben is a long way off from the formidable menace that she had envisaged.

And as if that's not enough to worry about, Sam runs into trouble down at the dockyards. Usually that place is a great hunting ground in the dead of night, what with all its shadowy traps and dead ends, but on this occasion the hunt goes terribly wrong.

As a result of that trouble a pack of would-be slayers gets wind of the fact that there are vampires in town. The game is on. The slayers are about to dust off their weapons and turn the hunters into the hunted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lenka Dusek
• Release date: Dec 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301126569

Lenka Dusek

Lenka Dusek was born in the Czech Republic. She immigrated with her family to the UK in 2002. Having studied English literature at university (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) she decided to take up writing, and became a freelance ghost writer for a number of UK authors. She has had a lifelong interest in mythology. As a teenager she and a group of like-minded students were privileged enough to be able to stay overnight at some of the most notorious haunted castles in Europe, including Moosham Castle in Unternberg, Austria, and Predjama Castle In Slovenia. She has been all over Europe searching for evidence of paranormal activity, and has undertaken extensive research into vampire folklore. Her fascination for the supernatural has never waned. Most of the characters in her works are modeled on the real people, particularly those people she traveled with and who shared her interest in the occult.

Book preview

The Heir Apparent

Flesh Shadows: Book 1

Lenka Dusek

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012, Lenka Dusek

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 9781301126569

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New Prince

The Grand Duke Hotel was a sombre place. The towering building had once been a place of light and joy, but now it was a place of darkness and despair.

Squatters and drifters often made a home in such a large unutilised premisis. But they didn’t use this one. They steered well clear. For wrapped around the outside walls was a cold and sinister cloak that pervaded the very air. A passer-by would feel a chill suddenly run down their spine, and if they were to look down at their hands they might see them trembling inexplicably. Best to hasten one’s step; best to give the building a wide berth.

Even people who were barely conscious of the world around them knew better than to venture near that place. The needle-jabbing streetwalkers who needed somewhere out of the way to turn tricks, the cold-blooded gang leaders who needed somewhere discreet to stash dope, the paper-bag cuddling hobos who needed somewhere dry to drink their cheap wine - most of them either too stoned or liquored up to remember who they were or what planet they were on – all avoided the hotel. They could sense its sinister presence just as well as any sober person, maybe even better.

It was a sad state of affairs for what had once been a handsome building. The Grand Duke was a stately exemplar of the art deco movement, and was built back in the 1930’s.Its seven stories were topped with a chain of bold, unadorned window arches, each of which was tucked beneath the steep-pitched chateaux roof.

In its hay day the interior had been pure enchantment too. It had proudly boasted an ornate reception area, a chandelier dining-hall, iron-gated elevators, and a tinkling grand piano. Gold, crystal and ebony finishing had beguiled the eyes in every direction. And the spiralling marble pillars that supported the ceilings complemented the finer details with strength and boldness.

It had truly been an artistically gratifying place.

But time had been cruel to the Grand Duke. Now it was an old and dilapidated building, condemned for its structural subsidence and abandoned to the elements. The dapper people from days of yore had long vanished and the music no longer played. The floors had been stripped of chattels of any value and the windows of the bottom floor had been smashed in and boarded up. Bitter wintry drafts now blew through the cracked shutters.

The building couldn’t be pulled down due to its listing as a historic site, but no business could see the pay-off for its restoration. The cost of bringing it up to standard was criminal, and at any rate the neighbourhood around it had depreciated into a world of drugs, alcohol, and street prostitution. So the old hotel just sat there degenerating. People would walk past and shake their heads and wonder when something was going to be done about it.

But Sam wasn’t one of them. She hoped it would stay the way it was for a very long time. The young woman could sense that cloak of darkness too, but it had a different affect on her. While for others it brought fear and trepidation, for her it brought welcome and comfort. She was at one with that coldness, with that darkness, with that foreboding. She was the only soul to call the Grand Duke home.

Sam didn’t live down on the grimy ground floor with all of the dust and rubbish and graffiti and reeking odour. She lived up in the penthouse suite, which in stark contrast to the rest of the building still had all the hotel’s original furnishings. The room had been styled in the 1930’s, with chairs and desks and bedposts and curtains all belonging that era. That was particularly agreeable for Sam, because it matched perfectly to her time as a human.

Tonight she was returning home from a hunt. It had been a successful sortie. As the hem of her liquid black dress flickered in the night air she levitated up to the seventh floor and drifted over the balcony rail. In her arms the corpse of a young man.

She was a vampire. A fairly tall and elegant vampire. She’d been one for the best part of eighty years.

Back in the nineteen thirties she’d been a young woman in her late teens with secret ambitions of becoming a journalist. That was up until that fateful night, when she was sneaking across a grassy square on the way to a dance that she wasn’t permitted to go to. On that night there came the unexpected sound of cotton flapping and snapping in the air behind her, like a giant bird of prey pulling out of a dive and smacking its wings together. Then she was struck. Things were over in an awful hurry. There was hardly time enough for her to look over her shoulder and see what was coming, so lightening fast and savage was the attack. And so she was converted.

But that was all that was ancient history now. She’d been a vampire for so long she hardly recalled much about that distant past – or at least didn’t care to - and had absolutely no memory about that particular incident. The attacker, who should rightfully have become her master, she never saw again.

She looked down at the limp figure in her arms. The luckless man was her prey for tonight. His limbs were hanging down limply and his head was slumped back, making him appear lifeless, but he was not yet departed from this world.

As Sam came over top of the balcony rail the big French doors swept opened before her. The dark green curtains suddenly ballooned with a flurry inside the penthouse to make way for her passage. That gave plenty of width for both her and the body to pass through without having to turn sideways. She floated silently over the threshold and touched down softly in the middle of the main floor.

Ben was waiting for her. A young vampire that had only recently been converted, just days ago in fact, he was not up to the hunt himself tonight. He rushed over from a dark corner of the room to inspect the body. His head trembled with excitement and he licked his lips with childish enthusiasm.

‘What did you get?’ he demanded to know. ‘What did you get?’

Sam took the body over to the dining table and laid it down on gently on the wooden surface. She didn’t pay the other young vampire much heed.

Ben followed with boisterous movements and looked eagerly over her shoulders. Then he screwed his face up with disgust and hissed loudly. ‘It’s a man! Why did you get another man? I thought we agreed on a woman this time!’

Sam didn’t make the effort to look at the new apprentice.

‘It was my honest intention to get a man,’ she said with unaffected calmness. ‘But when you put yourself upon the hunt one’s instincts rise above one’s intentions. You understand that, don’t you?’

Ben hissed again. ‘I need woman’s blood!’

‘I understand,’ said Sam. ‘Really, I do. But if you want to secure a woman so urgently then you should partake in the hunt. It is the hunter chooses the prey, not the carrion. That is the way of things.’

Ben raised a hand and pointed at his damaged mouth. ‘You know I can’t hunt with this!’ He grimaced to show his shattered teeth and emphasise his point. One of the long canine fangs had completely snapped off.

Sam turned and looked at them for the hundredth time. She didn’t particularly feel sorry for him… she simply was not the sort of entity that felt pity. If there was any feeling that came over her it was disappointment.

In truth much about Ben had been a disappointment. He was meant to be her new prince of darkness - the bigger, blacker shadow that commanded the night with the utmost power and terror. But he wasn’t taking up that mantle. If anything he was walking in her shadow.

Sam had converted him only a week ago. Ben was just another young teenager who had gone out clubbing with friends on Saturday night and got himself heavily intoxicated. In the early hours of the following morning when the nightlife was starting to die down, the students were all heading home, and the veil of darkness was its blackest, he left the pub and stumbled into an alleyway by himself. He wouldn’t usually stumble down a blind alley but he needed to throw up and the toilets were too far away.

Down on hands and knees he was easy prey. Too busy heaving and spitting to notice much about the world around him, he didn’t hear the ruffle of fabric as Sam swooped from the rooftops. She collected him with a swift strike that all but knocked him out in one hit. He rolled a couple of times and she smothered him.

Yet he recovered surprisingly well. He was in good shape. He elbowed his attacker in the neck and managed to knock her off. In the ensuing fight he continued to put up a good struggle and succeeded in striking Sam several times around her face and upper body.

It was only ever going to end one way though. Ben was never going to be strong enough to fend off a hardened vampire with such a ferociously aggressive nature as hers. Sam took the hits and made pretty short work of him.

In his death throws Ben showed surprising character. While the blood was dripping from deep puncture bite marks around his neck and shoulders he threw back some surprisingly snide remarks. Not many victims showed that sort of fighting spirit. Few could stare into the chasm of certain death and keep a sharp wit about them. Yet he kept challenging and insulting her as if he stood a chance.

Sam was so impressed by his behaviour she made the biggest on the spot judgement she’d made in decades… she decided to convert him rather than kill him. That wasn’t a course of action to be taken lightly because there were only a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants in the city, and at most the population could accommodate two vampires. If she chose him to be that other vampire then she was bound to him for a very long time. Eternity perhaps.

Yet it wasn’t something she dwelt on. She relied entirely on instinct for those sorts of calls. If her instincts said to convert him, then converted him she did. And that was all there was to it. So she cast her spell with the thoughtless precision of a spider spinning a web and brought him over to the eternal darkness.

It took three days after the conversion before he rose again. By that time Sam was eager to find out what sort of mate she had created. The moment of an attack often became a foggy memory in later days so she couldn’t recall his nature perfectly any more. But she trusted that her instincts would have made a good call at the time. She believed that he must surely be her chosen prince – her partner of destiny - otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.

But the moment that Ben opened his eyes she began to have doubts. There should have been a great presence about him; a wave of implacable evil that rushed out far and wide and swept through her body like ripples of pure ecstasy. Or at least that’s what she’d expected. Yet when Ben looked at her she felt very little. He didn’t have a strong presence about him at all, at least not as much as she would have thought. He just sat up in his coffin and looked around and got his bearings, and that was about it. There wasn’t a great aura in the room as if a dark prince had just risen.

There was no doubt about him being a vampire though. He had the haunting eyes and the sharp fangs and the powers that such a revenant should have. So Sam accepted him for what he was and tried to make the most of it. She encouraged him to go and hunt his first kill. He needed to replenish his body, which was quite drained of blood after the conversion, so she opened the French doors and pointed the way.

But what a fiasco his first hunt had been. It wasn’t exactly meant to be a baptism of fire, but unfortunately for Ben that’s what eventuated. Sam herself had never thought much about the perils of levitating in all her eighty years of eternal damnation. She just seemed to find her way around in the dark using instinct without any problems. But Ben had no such luck. Perhaps it was because he was new to the game? Perhaps because it was because his powers were a fraction weaker?

Whatever it was, he had a very bad start. Per chance he managed to float into one of the few old suburban streets that still had overhead power lines. And he didn’t miss them. For twenty bright and spectacular seconds he became one with the national grid. What was left of him at the end of those dazzling moments dropped like a stone onto the pavement, and didn’t move again.

Sam had waited a long time for him to come back from the hunt, but when sunrise began to approach she realised something was wrong and went out looking for him. Her instincts again led the way and she eventually found him lying on the ground where he’d gone down. He was in a smouldering heap, reeking of acrid soot - his forearms reduced almost to charcoal and the majority of his clothing burnt away. She picked him up in her arms and carried him all the way back to the Grand Duke.

This was now a precarious time for the new prince. His bones were brittle and weak, and it turned out that he’d smashed many of his teeth on the pavement. He really needed to feed quickly before he became feeble and decayed to the point that he couldn’t be rejuvenated.

Tonight’s feed would have helped him. The body that she’d thrown down on the table was still full of blood – in fact the victim was not completely dead - and thus would go a long way to replenishing the vampire’s damaged body. Ben just needed to partake in the claret coloured river that flowed in its veins. Yet he was being childishly stubborn about it. He refused to do take from a male. He was determined to revitalise himself from a female victim.

‘Hunt for yourself then,’ said Sam, showing no hint of empathy. ‘You are a predator, are you not?’

At that Ben held up his blackened, brittle hands. ‘Can I hold prey with these?’ Then he showed his teeth again. ‘Or bite them with this? A predator needs weapons. I have none!’

‘But you do have weapons,’ replied Sam. ‘You can hypnotise people. A lady in a trance does not fight back. Or you can slip up quietly and knock them quite unconscious. There are many ways to come by a meal.’

‘Or you could get me a woman,’ growled Ben. ‘Why do you always choose males?’

Sam returned a callous smile. ‘They taste so much better. I fancy the blood is rather meatier in its flavour… more gamy.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve tasted women and I find the flavour too weak for my palette.’ She stroked the victim across the cheek with her long nails. ‘What I prefer is a strong athletic male with a lean build. Some nights I wait until they are a hundred meters from where I want to effect the strike and then I corral them toward that place.’

Ben shot her a dark scowl. ‘You see it as a sport. You get a kick out of seeing them run.’

Sam stared back at him. ‘Seeing terror in their quivering white eyes is indeed a tremendous delight, my dark prince. But the true reward is when you catch up with your victim and bite into his jugular. The blood is pumping so hard it erupts like a fountain into your face. Nothing I know can equal that warm splash of pure, delectable ecstasy.’

Ben looked at the man’s veins, which were now pumping weakly. ‘Women?’

‘Simply no sport,’ said Sam. ‘You can hunt them easily… even in your condition. Fear alone will cripple most women. Their legs give and they fall to the ground. They usually duck their heads so that they don’t see what’s coming. It’s all tragically disappointing… a shameful display of spinelessness by the fairer sex. To be certain, it is no honourable conquest to vanquish the feeble.’

Ben grunted and took a closer look at the contours of the shadowy face on the table. Suddenly he reeled back in alarm. He knew that person lying there. He knew him rather well.

Competitive Banquet

‘It’s Dwayne Calaway,’ Ben said with his nose scrunched up in a grimace.

Sam didn’t look the least bit apologetic. ‘Friend of yours?’

‘No, one of the students from school.’

‘But not a friend?’

Ben shook his head.

‘Makes things a little more palatable for you,’ said Sam. ‘Though that’s not to say that your former friends and acquaintances should be excluded from the menu, because of course you have no friends and acquaintances any more. Do you.’

Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t care about this guy anyhow. He was a year ahead of me. I never had much to do with him.’

Sam nodded. ‘Your banquet awaits.’

Ben looked again at the corpse on the dining table and screwed up his face again. ‘No,’ he said resolutely.

‘No?’ repeated Sam, her tone not concealing her annoyance.

‘I’m not going to drink Dwayne’s blood,’ said Ben.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to bite the neck of another man. That’s why not. Especially someone I know.’

‘You are a vampire now. We’re very pragmatic about that sort of thing.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means we don’t care what sex the prey is.’

Ben shook his head. ‘You expect me to touch that man’s neck with my lips? That’s more than just a little bit camp.’

‘He’ll be dead soon,’ replied Sam. ‘He won’t tell. And I would suggest you get moving before he dies of natural causes and his blood coagulates.’

‘I can’t,’ said Ben turning away. ‘Sorry, but I can’t suck on another guy.’

‘It’s only his blood.’

‘Say what you will,’ answered Ben. ‘I don’t want to do it.’

Sam was becoming more and more disappointed with her apprentice. The language Ben spoke was not the sort of language that befitted a servant of the night. She thought the transition to becoming a vampire would destroy any vestiges of the child within, completely obliterating the youngster and the adolescent. Thereafter the spoken words should be grave and succinct, with no hint of juvenile colloquialism. It was better that way. It was right.

Moreover, a vampire should have little need to talk at all. They were a class of revenant that could read each other’s mind and convey thoughts without even looking at each other. The bond between her and Ben was meant to be as one mind sharing two bodies.

Yet Ben wasn’t like that. His language was boyishly callow; out of place for his new existence. And there was no telepathic communication between the two of them to speak of. Sam tried to converse using just thoughts every now and then, but there would never be an answer.

Perhaps he had been just a little too young? Despite his manly frame and good physique he was, after all, just a teenager. Maybe nineteen was just a fraction too green for a successful conversion?

She swung her arm in the direction of the French doors. At her command they flew open and the dark green curtains billowed out into the night air.

‘Leave that there,’ she said, referring to the man stretched out on the big wooden table. ‘Go and take a young virgin woman. There are plenty on the streets tonight. Go and take one for yourself.’

Ben hissed back. ‘You are in better shape. You get me one!’

‘No,’ said Sam. She was surprised how easy it was to say that.

‘I command you to get a woman!’ snapped Ben.

Sam looked up at him. Such a sharp reprimand from a prince of darkness should have compelled her to go and do his bidding. It should have been an irresistible force. Yet she felt little more than a shimmer of danger in the air. She certainly wasn’t swept off her feet.

It only served to deepen her disappointment. To hear such words and to not feel threatened… to not feel like she was on the knife-edge of destruction… to not feel at the mercy of a man who could rip her soul asunder at the mere wave of a hand. There was no excitement in those words if that menace was missing. There was just nothing.

She pointed at the door. The cool night air was seeping in through the open doorway, extending a welcome to the servants of the night. Outside could be heard the echoing drone of city traffic. The acute hearing of a vampire could also make out some murmuring voices of potential prey, several city blocks away. The portal to the mortal world of flesh beckoned.

Sam shook her pointing hand. ‘Go forth and feast my dark prince.’

Ben growled and snarled like a dog. He didn’t appreciate the goading because he simply wasn’t ready to go out into the darkness again in his weakened state. He felt too vulnerable with his burnt and debilitated body. There was no way that he was willing to risk making another bad judgement out there, and in the state he was in now he felt that was a high probability. If his body deteriorated any further, before he had the chance to feed and regenerate, then he may become too weak to recover and simply fade into nothingness. His body would become a vacant corpse.

Accepting that, he finally surrendered to Sam’s first command… drinking from tonight’s victim. He walked up to the table, leant over the young man, and began to bite into the throat.

Unfortunately his teeth were too broken to affect a good puncture of the vein. He tried biting in a few times and just couldn’t hit the right spot neatly.

Eventually he gave up and snapped at Sam. ‘Get him started would you.’

Suddenly the victim, who had still been very much alive for all that time, regained consciousness. He’d been roused by the agitation to his neck and had finally blinked his eyes open.

Dwayne sat up with a start and looked at the ashen-faced man in front of him. His expression was one of bewilderment for the first few seconds as he tried to come to terms with the strange environment.

‘What the hell are you doing, Ben?’ he finally asked in a