Luke stared out the window of the Airbus A330 as they taxied down the runway of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. He’d spent the days after his Liege adventure haunting the various cafes of Antwerp while digging into the international news, searching for supernatural happenings outside Belgium. What he found made him cut his trip short. The city that sent up the most red flags was his current hometown.
Portland, Oregon was experiencing a rash of disappearances among its young people. He knew it was only the tip of the iceberg—newsworthy disappearances were never the first stage of a vampire infestation. Once he saw the missing persons reports making international news, he knew it was time to dug deeper. After finding out affluent people were disappearing without a trace, it was confirmation things had reached dangerous levels. Those disappearances, coupled with the missing young people, had jumped from the front pages of local news outlets onto the international stage, churning into a froth of ratings-driven excitement.
Besides the likely vampire outbreak, he had another reason to go home—he missed his cat, Alfred. The orange tabby was his only companion. The family bonds and easy camaraderie of the van den Berghs and their associates reminded Luke of what he didn’t have in his life—anyone.
He’d been fighting vampires for most of his nearly two thousand years. He longed for the first decade of his adult life when all he had to deal with was the tedium of fort life on the Germania front or the brief periods of excitement and danger of campaigning in Dacia and Parthia with the Roman Legions of the Emperor Trajan. Too many centuries were stacked up between the era when he was renowned as Lucius Silvanius Ferrata, the Centurio Immortalis and today, when he was known to virtually no one and used the name Luke Irontree.
The plane lifted off. In nine hours, he would touch down in Portland. Gladius and rudis at the ready, he’d be back on the streets stalking the monsters who were preying on the city he’d chosen as his current home. The gutters would run with blood; he just hoped it would be vampire blood and not their victims’—or his.
Portland was on the brink of supernatural disaster, and it had no idea what was coming.
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