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  Devil’s Cry

  Shade of Devil Book 2

  Shayne Silvers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Shayne Silvers

  Devil’s Cry

  Shade of Devil Book 2

  © 2019, Shayne Silvers / Argento Publishing, LLC

  [email protected]

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Dedication

  To that person in front of me at the coffee shop who didn’t pay for my drink…this book is dedicated to someone else.

  * * *

  And to anyone who thinks I didn’t deserve that drink, I once won a race against a billion other competitors. It was do or die. If you’re reading this, you probably deserve a coffee, too.

  And a laugh.

  Enjoy my words. This book is for you, because you’re a winner.

  I’m not buying you a coffee, though.

  * * *

  -Shayne

  Epigraph

  “There is no death. Only a change of worlds.”

  Chief Seattle

  Contents

  The Shade of Devil Series—A warning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  TRY: OBSIDIAN SON (NATE TEMPLE #1)

  MAKE A DIFFERENCE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT SHAYNE SILVERS

  BOOKS BY SHAYNE SILVERS

  The Shade of Devil Series—A warning

  Many vampires were harmed in the making of this story. Like…a lot of them.

  If you enjoyed the Blade or Underworld movies, you will love the Shade of Devil series.

  The greatest trick the First Vampire ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.

  Before the now-infamous Count Dracula ever tasted his first drop of blood, Sorin Ambrogio owned the night. Humanity fearfully called him the Devil.

  Cursed by the gods, Sorin spent centuries bathing Europe in oceans of blood with his best friends, Lucian and Nero, the world’s first Werewolf and Warlock—an unholy trinity if there ever was one. Until the three monsters grew weary of the carnage, choosing to leave it all behind and visit the brave New World across the ocean. As they befriended a Native American tribe, they quickly forgot that monsters can never escape their past.

  But Dracula—Sorin’s spawn—was willing to do anything to erase Sorin’s name from the pages of history so that he could claim the title of the world’s first vampire all for himself. Dracula hunts him down and slaughters the natives, fatally wounding Sorin in the attack. Except a Shaman manages to secretly cast Sorin into a healing slumber.

  For five hundred years.

  Until Sorin is awoken by a powerful Shaman in present-day New York City. In a world he doesn’t understand, Sorin only wants one thing—to kill Dracula and anyone else who stands in his path.

  The streets of New York City will flow with rivers of blood, and the fate of the world rests in the hands of the Devil, Sorin Ambrogio.

  Because this town isn’t big enough for the both of them.

  Now, our story begins in a brave New World…

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  1

  In my chambers far below the Museum of Natural History, I sat behind my desk, staring at the crackling flames in the fireplace. The steady hum of activity outside my doors made me smile, recalling the old days at my castle and the constant bustle of vampires going about their business.

  Back before I had changed the direction I wanted the vampires to take—the role I had demanded they play without giving them any warning whatsoever.

  That decision quickly resulted in my empire crumbling, the pieces secretly collected by Dracula as he amassed his own cabal of vampires who wanted to go back to the old ways. Luckily, I’d managed to escape before they could depose me in a more violent manner, and I’d absconded off to the New World with my best friends Lucian and Nero, the world’s first werewolf and warlock, respectively.

  My smile slowly faded as the memory brought up thoughts of why I had chosen to change my creed—the conquest of carnage and bloodlust that I had originally set my children on, sending them out to rampage across the lands and to take whatever they chose. Me wanting to punish the world for the cruel curses inflicted upon me by the sadistic Greek gods. For many years, the resulting bloodbaths had sustained me, granting me a measure of justice, even though humanity had never been to blame for my curses.

  But humanity worshipped those same gods—or gods just like them—and I’d considered it poetic justice to let them suffer the rewards of their gods’ actions.

  That their blind faith carried a price tag.

  I had never told a single person what had made me suddenly alter my course from a lifetime of vengeance. Not one.

  And I never would. I would carry that secret to my final resting place. Period.

  I realized I was staring at the newspaper on the desk. It was from a few weeks ago, but I’d kept it at hand for some unspoken reason. Nosh Griffin was featured on the front page in an article about his legal battle to reclaim his inheritance after the death of his parents—a task which had prevented us from communicating for multiple obvious reasons. Primarily that I was the prime suspect—or, more accurately, a nameless picture of me was the prime suspect.

  Mina Harker had coerced the Griffins to modify their will so that only blood relatives could accept their fortune and business, because she had learned that Nosh had been adopted and was not, in fact, related to them. Then Mina Harker had killed them, framing me for the gruesome crime.

  For what purpose, I still had no idea. She hadn’t known about my existence, so my involvement
had been pure bad luck, and I had yet to come up with an answer as to why she had targeted Nosh or his parents. The only thing I could think of was that she had wanted to obtain the magic tomahawks we had taken from his parents’ penthouse—but she’d never mentioned them outright. Even the Necromancer—whom I later learned was actually my old friend Nero—hadn’t known Mina’s intentions. He’d only been commanded to acquire Deganawida’s journal for Dracula, and he hadn’t even received an explanation for that.

  No one had known about me, and we’d found no direct reason for the attack on Nosh’s family. It was an unsolved mystery.

  But it was the newspaper article below Nosh’s picture that truly intrigued me—a related story about a beast of a man breaking into the evidence lock-up and destroying every shred of evidence the police had accumulated from the murder scene. The unknown culprit had simply bulldozed through the walls—without explosives or any kind of vehicle—and then lit the evidence on fire before leaving the same way he’d entered. Seven cops had opened fire on him, allegedly hitting him a dozen times.

  But the man was never found. Not even a drop of blood was found.

  Which had made the police look incredibly incompetent, almost drawing more attention than Nosh’s legal battle over the past few weeks, since he had appeared on every available talk show in the city to share the sad story.

  The destruction of the evidence had benefited Nosh because a test had been run on the DNA found at the crime scene, apparently proving that Nosh and his parents were not blood related, which would have ended his inheritance dispute for their gambling empire and various fortunes. Furthermore, another set of DNA from the murder scene—presumably mine—had shown a genetic match to Nosh. I still wasn’t entirely knowledgeable on what any of these scientific analyses meant or how they were determined, but I knew enough to accept the facts and results at face-value, leaving the processes to the scientists.

  Although it felt like a new kind of magic to me—the magic of science.

  And now all of that evidence was missing. Although everyone had tried to lay the blame for the evidence destruction at Nosh’s feet, I knew it had not been him. Unfortunately, that was all I knew. Whoever had done it had not taken credit. To be fair, I had considered sending in a team of vampires to enthrall every policeman and steal the evidence for myself, but this unknown beast of a man had done it all on his own, solving the problem for us.

  An added benefit was that it coincidentally destroyed all physical evidence of me at the crime scene. The picture of the prime suspect—me—that had been disseminated was still available, but the physical proof was now missing, and lawyers were making a healthy profit debating the legal merit of whether duplicates of my photo from the news could be considered evidence.

  Luckily, no one had learned my name.

  With all the evidence destroyed, I’d tasked an associate to run her own blood tests to see if Nosh and I did in fact share the same DNA, because the entire frame-job had been orchestrated by Mina Harker, so there was every possibility that the first blood test had been doctored in some way, claiming a false genetic match, so as to make Nosh look like a blood relative of the alleged murderer.

  I stared at Nosh’s picture on the front page. He was speaking into a microphone, the very essence of confidence and resolve—not an entitled brat as some of the media outlets had tried to portray him. I couldn’t see anything of my features in him, but it had been five hundred years since I last walked the earth. Since my son had been born.

  So…was Nosh my son? Immortal, thanks to my vampire curse?

  Or was he possibly a descendent?

  If either of those claims were true, he had to have known before teaming up with Deganawida to wake me up. Coincidences could happen, but never so many all at once, and all of them in perfect harmony with each other. Rather than improbable, it was impossible.

  Which would mean he had known about our blood relation, and had chosen to lie to me. On one hand, this infuriated me, but on the other, my fiery passion and fury had somewhat faded over the passing weeks. I had even grown somewhat empathetic to his suspected lie. When I had awoken, I had been violent and starving. If he’d told me he was my son or a descendent of mine, I would have likely killed him outright for being a liar.

  So, he had known and had lied to me or a series of impossible coincidences had taken place.

  Or—most likely—Mina’s evidence had been a flat-out lie. Which was why I had requested independent verification.

  The truth would come out tonight, one way or another. Evidence or not.

  Because Victoria Helsing and I were attending a dinner with Nosh and Isabella—the Sister of Mercy I had met at the auction a few weeks back. It was a calculated risk being seen together, but Victoria had found a restaurant outside of the city’s elites, and I had a very important ulterior motive to pursue. Apparently, the pair had been spending considerable time together since we first met. I was entirely certain that I would confront Nosh about our potential blood relation, since it was apparent that he had no desire to do so.

  I sighed tiredly, shifting my gaze away from the article. In my peripheral vision, I saw Renfield pause from his work on the couch as he checked to see if I needed anything. I didn’t look up. After a few moments of silence, he went back to work on the stack of cards before him.

  I stared at the old tattered journal occupying the opposite corner of my desk and pursed my lips. Deganawida’s journal—something that Dracula had wanted more than anything else in the city. I hadn’t determined exactly why he wanted it, although I had my suspicions. Even the Necromancer—Nero, my old warlock friend—he’d put in charge of New York City, hadn’t known the reasons for Dracula’s interest in the legendary Medicine Man’s journal.

  Despite learning that Nero had been working for Dracula against his will, I hadn’t entirely forgiven him, and I definitely didn’t yet trust him, despite his recent semi-successful efforts to assist me in deciphering the journal’s secrets. I’d even acquired a new collar to put around his neck in order to limit his powers—one not tied to Dracula.

  The journal was open to the cursed page that had plagued my thoughts for weeks.

  It was a list of names of just over one hundred vampires that Deganawida had killed in his unnaturally long life. The journal even had something called GPS coordinates—numbers that showed precise locations on a map that were accurate within fifteen feet—leading to where Deganawida had buried the bodies.

  The following pages consisted of a spell to raise those dead vampires—necromancy—followed by notes documenting Deganawida’s attempt to perform the dangerous magic. His experiment had been swiftly abandoned, summarized by a chilling footnote.

  Subjects neurotic and feral. Uncontrollable. Without a soul, they are mindless killers, only able to follow explicit commands, and only for a limited time before even that ability is absorbed by their animalistic tendencies. I believe it’s caused by an internal conflict—they remember dying and can’t understand why they are back. This makes them suspicious and paranoid since they cannot think for themselves. The subjects need another vampire master, but even that might not be enough for absolute control.

  The next page showed a brief spell that would destroy them from further necromantic experiments—by exploding their hearts within their chests.

  Although concerning, it hadn’t been what I’d hoped to find. If that had been Dracula’s focus, he would have told his sole necromancer—Nero—of his plan, because the spell required a warlock or shaman to perform it.

  I had hoped that the journal would have elaborated on the events of that fateful night when my family had been murdered and I’d been put into a magical slumber. Especially now that I had learned of the possibility that Nosh shared my ancestry somehow. But there had been very little mentioned on the topic of that night. Suspiciously little, as a matter of fact. I also hadn’t found much about Deganawida’s search for my missing—assumed dead—family, even though he’d told me he’d docu
mented it.

  Instead, I’d found signs of pages torn from the binding. Someone had removed them prior to giving the journal to Nero, and with Mina Harker dead, I had no one left to question.

  The Devil of New York City returns on January 7th, 2020 in DEVIL’S BLOOD. PREORDER HERE!

  Turn the page to read samples from Shayne’s other worldwide bestselling novels in The TempleVerse—The Nate Temple Series, the Feathers and Fire Series, and the Phantom Queen Dairies.

  2

  I sighed, withdrawing my phone from my pocket. Apparently, there were creatures called hackers who could steal information from electronic devices, so I’d resigned myself to using cheap, disposable ‘burner’ phones rather than the more sophisticated ‘smart’ phones.

  I used a new burner phone every day or two—and I wasn’t happy about it, even though I understood the necessity of secrecy.

  I had placed Renfield at the top of my new vampire command structure, tasking him with overseeing the three survivors of Dracula’s organization here in New York City—because he’d killed every vampire under his command here after I’d broken his control over Nero. Dracula hadn’t wanted to risk me stealing his entire organization, so he chose to simply murder them all in one fell swoop. I’d only managed to bond Hugo, Aristos, and Valentine before Dracula’s curse dropped over the city.