“The dog days are over,
The dog days are gone.
Can you hear the horses?
‘Cause here they come.”
- “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine
The black, polished shoes produced a perfect squeak as they shuffled down the corridor, a single sound bouncing from one wall to the next in the empty thoroughfare. Where ordinarily, there would be scores of people walking this way and that, headed to the various departments of these hallowed halls, tonight was different. The body of people typically assembled were already in a meeting room, sweating over coffee and cigarettes and Mark Johansen was running late.
In their long history, the Supernatural Order had faced world-ending situations before. The splintering of bloodlines which formed the vampire faction they hunted in the first place almost provoked a giant cluster-fuck which ended life as they knew it from their very inception. That had been a millennium ago, roughly. Back when humanity still believed in magic. Sorcerers, witches, and warlocks dotted the landscape of the Dark Ages and one magician in particular drifted further into the darkness, looking for immortality. That was the first time vampires learned to wield magic themselves. The genesis of a war.
Not that they ever told anybody but those in their employ about the other bloodline which existed, the older one the Order never tangled with except on very rare occasions. Or that there was much of a difference between the vampires humanity still denied existed in its blanket of blissful unawareness. Ignorance an intoxicant with the populace drunk on its spell, oh vampires had been around for more than the millennium the Supernatural Order existed, but they hid the truth like they hid every other truth from mortals who no longer believed in magic.
The time for ignorance had ended, though. The war had entered Phase Two. Read the rest of this entry
