Read I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) for Free Online

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radiation. Even when he was safe and secure in his own redoubt, he
knew when the sun shone upon his portion of the earth.
    It was the way of things, part of the deal.
This new generation of his kind, however, was challenging the
established order.
    Not that Rainford considered himself a
conservative or a reactionary creature. Change in and of itself was
not to be feared. Rainford had embraced this city and the
cosmopolitan centers of western Europe, the best he felt humans had
to offer.
    And thus it was that predilection, habit, and
nostalgia had driven him back to North America for what he
conceived of as his final years. He had been here for the
Independence. He had returned here after the excesses of the Terror
made France inhospitable. With the War Between the States he had
left again, and only a conflict the scale of which was unimaginable
to the minds of the men and women drove him from the Continent. The
poor fools had marched off to war in August of 1914 and thought
they’d be back in their homes by Christ’s Mass. More than fifteen
million of them never returned.
    Rainford was content to live out the rest of
his days in a city he had watched grow. From a former Dutch colony
to the center of English political and military operations against
the patriots, to a jungle of concrete and steel structures seeking
to outbid Babel in their reach to the heavens, Manhattan and its
sister boroughs had afforded Rainford and his kind the protection
of anonymity amid millions. It also provided an abundant and ready
food supply.
    So, feeling the weight of his years and
travails, Rainford had repaired to New York for what he conceived
of as his dotage. Here he was largely unknown, even to his own
kind, unless he chose to reveal himself. To those to whom he was
known, he was feared. The mere mention of his name, or the name of
his brother and sister, was enough to produce fear and respect in
the cognoscenti. The cognoscenti, those in the know, though there
were fewer and fewer of them these days.
    The younger generations of his kind, lamented
Rainford, had no sense of history. Either of their own or the
history of the species they lived symbiotically with. Which went
far in explaining how children of the night could war on one
another amidst a world that would see them all dead.
    But Rainford was not allowed to remain alone.
They—the Europeans—had sent their envoys. Rainford had wanted
nothing to do with them, but to turn these visitors back was to
risk a confrontation that would ultimately prove detrimental to all
concerned. Better to do what was asked, and in time the interlopers
would return from whence they came, and Rainford would be left with
his port and his books to while out the remainder of his days.
    Which is how he now found himself sitting in
the presence of that vile and cursed creature, the Albanian
Kreshnik, and its minions.
    The room was dank and cavernous and echoed
with the unseen drip of water from some pipe. Rainford sat in the
center of the room in a garish chair, a stage theater throne stolen
from who knew where. In his days, Rainford had dined with kings and
royalty. He had eaten off the crème plates designed for Catherine
by Wedgewood and sat on jewel-encrusted, golden thrones. For all
this, he was not a thing that craved the trappings of ceremony or
affluence. In fact, his years had instilled a disdain for those who
looked contemptuously upon themselves as social betters. Yet he
wondered if those that had provided this seat for him had done so
to belittle him, providing a mere theater prop for a creature of
his years and experience.
    “Please don’t kill me,” the woman on the
floor begged.
    She had been young and comely once, even
strikingly so. Rainford’s grey-blue eyes told him such. In his
times he had had many like her. Service to his kind had drained her
of her youth and her beauty, leaving her ashen and anemic. That was
another aspect he detested about this younger generations. They