“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.

Mark sighed, rubbing his temples which already ached from the hours he spent at the computer searching every viral video on the Internet. Hours spent squinting at hazy, amateur photojournalism, watching one video upload only to disappear moments later. The vampires had gotten good at their game. Money Mark couldn’t even begin to fathom was being funneled in the effort to keep their anonymity intact, by the other bloodline which could be captured by photography. The one the Order had not cursed. “Fucking smart, you sons of bitches,” Mark muttered as he turned and approached the door to the meeting room.

His hand hesitated. Then it wrapped around the knob and twisted. The door swung open and Mark entered to voices already raised around him.

Nobody paid any attention to him as he shut the door and pressed his back against the solid piece of wood separating him from the empty corridor. Mark stole a moment to survey the group gathered. The conference table populated by representatives of each job description the Order boasted of, bright green eyes blazed fury from each haunted face he scanned. The trait as important as their still beating hearts, each emerald gaze belonged to beings who could obliterate each other merely with a thought. Psychics, all of them, and Mark could only claim to be a scholar, somebody not often gifted with the powers the other members of the Order needed on the front lines.

A tall, wiry Asian man stood from his seat and pointed at a short, fiery woman standing across from him. His lips hurtled accusations of ineptitude, while strands of hair flew from the tight bun fixed on the back of the woman’s head, her finger pointing back at her verbal sparring partner. Mark recognized the man as being a seer, the Order’s vampire hunters with the most power to boast outside of the High Council’s elders board. Undoubtedly, the woman was his watcher, an assistant and sorceress who accompanied each seer on their missions.

Mark shifted his focus away. People he recognized as being spell-casters, leadership, and fellow scholars seemed unable to break away from the heated exchange to so much as offer Mark a passing glance. He cleared his throat once. When this did not produce the desired result, Mark pushed his wire-framed glasses further up his nose and yelled, “Hey! I have the results of the Internet scan!”

At once, a hush settled on the room. The eyes of no less than thirty people met Mark’s and suddenly, he felt like a small fish in a tank full of piranhas. Mark coughed and found the person he reported to, the highest ranking scholar in the Order’s employ. “Cynthia, it’s as we suspected. The vampires have gotten smarter.”

The middle-aged woman bore more lines on her face than a haggard chain smoker, which the frown touching the corners of her lips only accentuated. Her gaze turned from annoyed to inquisitive within seconds. “What did you find, Mark?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow to punctuate her question.

Mark sighed. He jerked at his collar. “Well, I spent the better part of the day on Google, YouTube, and every other site you can imagine and…” He lifted his hands, his shoulders rising in a shrug. “… They have a lot of fucking money. That’s all I can tell you. The few I caught went up in smoke within a minute, sometimes less.”

“Fuck.” Cynthia produced the expletive without apology. Leaning against the conference table with both hands pressed against the mahogany wood, she shook her head and lowered her gaze toward the polished surface. “Nothing? You mean to tell me there’s not a goddamn thing?”

“No, nothing.” Mark frowned. “Like I said, they’re getting smarter. They have to have a team of people being paid to do nothing but kill videos all damn day.”

“Well, there goes that idea.” The new voice entering the fray belonged to Spencer Phillips, another vampire hunter who Mark recognized as being one of their master seers. Barely into his thirties, his sandy brown hair already boasted of a few gray streaks Mark could only assume were caused from stress. Spencer threw up a hand and looked at Cynthia. “I don’t know what the fuck you thought spending all that time would accomplish. I’m telling you, we need to move in and blow them the fuck away. The gloves are off now.”

“Blowing them away isn’t going to solve anything.” Cynthia lifted her eyes to regard Spencer. “We still have the natural order to protect.”

“Fuck the natural order!” Spencer’s hand formed a fist, which struck the table in a hard blow. “They’ve already fucked it all to hell by consorting with the other bloodline. That’s conspiracy and we need to end this now. You know damn well what could happen if both of them learn how to wield black magic.”

“It’s all our damn fault.” Mark’s eyes shifted to the new speaker, a man remaining seated Mark couldn’t name by sight, but knew to be an elder’s assistant. The assistant sighed, looking from Cynthia to Spencer. “We’re the ones who provoked them to start talking in the first place after the massacre in Europe twenty years ago.”

Spencer pointed a finger at the assistant. “That was no massacre, and may I remind you, we lost one of our master seers due to that whole debacle. We could have fucked them over a hell of a lot more for massacring us in the first damn place.”

“Bullshit!” The assistant stood. “I was there, remember?” He pointed at his chest. While his lips read of bravado, the tremor of his hand suggested otherwise. “I saw the way we sliced through vampires like fucking butter, not even giving two shits about which bloodline they belonged to. Yeah, we were hunting the antagonistic bastards, but we took everybody else down with them and no doubt, all of ‘em thought we were hunting them down to extinction.”

“Fuckers all deserve to be exterminated.”

“The natural order, Spencer.” Cynthia stared down Spencer with the sternest gaze Mark had ever seen her muster. “Try to kill them all and the scales will find a balance. Do you want us all to be fucked?”

“I think we’re going about this the wrong way.”

Mark hardly realized the words came from his lips until he heard the way they settled across the room. So used to stifling his opinion, Mark didn’t even believe himself when he realized he spoke his thoughts out loud. As such, the remainder of his thought locked up somewhere between his lungs and vocal chords.

Nobody spoke. Mark’s eyes shifted nervously from one face to the next, waiting for somebody to say something more intelligent. When his gaze settled on one man in particular, Mark couldn’t help but to swallow hard past a lump forming in his throat. The intimidating figure rose to his feet, and everybody else gathered looked at him, sitting as though receiving a silent cue.

Mark glanced at the others, then back at the imposing figure. His hair and beard fully colored white, Wallace Alexander would never claim to being the head of the Supernatural Order, but he might as well have been. His family were bred and born for this purpose, to serve as leadership, and Wallace himself remained the last of his generation in the Alexander family. His son already sat beside him on the Order’s High Council and bore an air of royalty much the same as his father. The heir apparent of a king.

Wallace stared down Mark. “Sit, Mr. Johansen,” he said, his voice low, yet booming. “And tell us how we’re mistaken.”

Mark studied the chiseled features of the elder, looking for a sign of whether the man was pissed or pleased, but his face hinted at neither. Mark sat in the closest vacant chair and adjusted himself within the plush leather before clearing his throat and speaking. “Well, we have a problem, there’s no doubt about that. Spencer…” Mark glanced at the master seer upon speaking his name. “… Is right that the two bloodlines talking could lead to mixing. Hell, this is why we’ve been calling these meetings in the first place, if I’m not mistaken.”

Wallace settled back into his chair. He folded his hands on the table top and nodded. “Yes, although I highly doubt any of us need a reminder of this fact, Mr. Johansen.”

Mark felt his face become flushed, but struggled to retain his composure. “Yes, sir, my apologies. But still… I think we’re losing sight of the big picture.” This time he fought against the compulsion to allow his gaze to stray. His eyes remained settled on the elder seated before him. “Cynthia’s right that going in with both guns blazing is going to backfire in our faces. If the two bloodlines assemble, they’ll go after us and I don’t think we can manage an onslaught of vampires all descending on Seattle and London. You know as well as I do the London office is understaffed as it is.”

A cough broke Mark’s focus to the one issuing it. Mark frowned in an apologetic manner at the female elder representing the London High Council before glancing back at Wallace. “Hell,” he said, continuing. “We have a pretty hefty staff and we’d all go down in a blaze of glory before taking a few down with us. We just don’t have that kind of firepower.”

Wallace frowned. Mark gulped silently at the shift in Wallace’s facial expression. “Which is why the Council neither consents, nor condones, the idea that we should enter into mass genocide,” Wallace said. “What happened in Europe still haunts the Order and the Council has no desire to revisit this strategy. Which is exactly why we assigned you and every other scholar in the Order with the task we set before you.”

Wallace raised an accusatory eyebrow at Mark. Mark nodded. “I know, sir. You asked us to find evidence that humans were becoming more aware of vampires in their midst and I know I thought it was a smart idea to try and use these videos and articles as blackmail to keep the Lamiae in check. The problem is, both sides have a heavy amount of resources they’re pouring into the effort to stay underground and they’ve bought out more people than we can begin trying to outbid.”

Mark paused, indulging in a deep breath and exhaling it slowly, his eyes drifting away before returning to Wallace. Wallace continued staring, his frown relaxing as though he plucked the next thought from Mark’s mind and was coaxing him to speak it out loud. Mark nodded in silent acknowledgment, then glanced at each face gathered in the meeting room. “Using the information and technology modern day has given us is a good idea, but I think we’re going about this all wrong. Instead of looking for information other people are gathering, why don’t we…” Mark paused, hesitating. He swallowed hard, forcing the words out. “What if we… planted information ourselves?”

“What?!” Spencer stood, glaring at Mark. “That’s idiotic. If they’re killing the information others are providing, what the fuck do you think they’re going to do with anything we…”

“Spencer.” Wallace looked to the master seer and scowled. “Sit and hear Mr. Johansen out.” Wallace waited for Spencer to nod and settle into his chair again. Then, he looked at Mark once more. “Mr. Phillips does have a point. How is this going to work in our favor?”

Mark allowed the corner of his mouth to curl in a coy grin. “We can buy people off, too, can’t we? I know it’s underhanded, but all we need are a few reporters in a few major markets and some hackers stopping the people pulling videos from the Internet. We won’t be able to stop everything, but if we stop enough of them, the videos will spread faster than the vampires can put out the fire.”

Cynthia leaned forward in her chair. “Mark,” she said. “If we sponsor that kind of information leak, then we’ll have more on our hands than a little blackmail. This could prove the existence of vampires enough to out them altogether.”

“Is that so wrong, though, Cynthia?” Gaining confidence, Mark lifted an eyebrow at his superior and mirrored Wallace’s posture, folding his hands together on the table in front of him. “I mean, for a thousand years, since this Order has been in existence, we’ve been spending a lot of our resources on keeping all this information from the public while failing to see the one massive weapon we have against the vampires themselves. They don’t want to be outed. But times have changed and even they have to know this sort of information leak is inevitable. Especially since the Lamiae can be photographed.”

“Then how will leaking information help?” the sorceress who had been arguing with the Asian seer asked, breaking into the conversation. “If they already know it’s inevitable, won’t they be prepared to handle this?”

Mark shifted his focus to her. “The sheer fact that they’re still trying to prevent it from getting out there suggests they’re not ready for this.” A shit-eating grin surfaced on his face. “Think about it this way, they’ve got to be pouring millions of dollars into keeping their anonymity. Millions. And who can blame them, really? Picture them trying to explain how they get their food, trying to launch a P.R. campaign costing them millions more claiming they don’t kill people or some shit like that. If we force them to deal with this, then watch… I bet you one month’s pay check the Revenir will scatter and disown the Lamiae. They have an even worse P.R. nightmare on their hands. Black magic and slaughtering humans?” Mark whistled. “I wouldn’t want to be the one trying to explain all of that.”

His words were followed by a deafening silence. Mark’s confidence threatened to flood out of him like a tidal wave at seeing the lack of response, until Wallace Alexander cleared his throat and broke the quiet with a question. “How… difficult would this be to accomplish? Do we have the kind of staff we’d need to see this through?”

Mark’s eyes returned to Wallace. “To spread the information, yeah, although we’d need a few more computer savvy people to block the vampires’ attempts to take down the videos we submit. But a few scholars could be reassigned to forging information and maybe the seers and some of the watchers could provide us with some high definition videos of the vampires feeding and glamoring humans so we could build a case against them. From there, I don’t know how you’d go about bribing a few reporters, but all you need are some articles in the New York Times or Washington Post to throw the Associated Press into a tail spin.”

A silence settled on the meeting room again, but this time Wallace Alexander began to smile and in his grin, Mark saw a fledgling form of deviousness which might have alarmed him if he wasn’t busy feeling pleased with himself. Wallace nodded. “I think we have a working idea, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s reassign our personnel and see if this concept holds any merit.” Wallace grinned especially at Mark. “Good job, Mr. Johansen. Finally, somebody with a brain steps up and gets the juices flowing in this dusty, old establishment.”

Mark smiled and continued smiling while the others gathered began to discuss the ins and outs of making his idea come to fruition. While the zealous junior scholar had thrown a card onto the table the Supernatural Order seemed bent to play, little could he have realized that in that moment, the world had already shifted on its axis.

What followed would change life as he knew it. And it all started with the Internet.

***

“Whiskey tango foxtrot…”

The words pierced what had otherwise been a silent room, causing Phil Jenkins to turn his attention to the man seated beside him. Thin, with long, unkempt hair, Len McAlister was the epitome of a computer nerd, from the thick-rimmed glasses situated over his eyes, to the messy shirt littered with stains from their fast-food dinner. Phil, a much more portly fellow, blinked several times in rapid succession at his partner. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.

Len didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on the computer monitor in front of him, fingers pounding the keys of his keyboard in a harsh manner, as though they were fighting him. He shook his head, mouth hanging agape. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“What?” Phil lowered the soft drink he’d been nursing since five o’clock that evening and brushed off his hands before wheeling his chair closer to Len’s terminal. He craned his neck for a better view. His eyes widened as he studied Len’s screen. “Is that what I think it is?”

Len nodded slowly. “Yup, it is. High def, I’m not shitting you, and I can’t hack this motherfucking firewall to save my life.”

“Let me see that.” Phil assumed control of the keyboard as Len slid out of the way. Len’s eyes remained fixed on the monitor, his pulse quickening as he watched his friend hit all the same keystrokes Len attempted no more than a few seconds prior. Phil frowned a few attempts into the effort, grunting as his fingers paused for a moment. “Gonna have to take down the whole fucking server.”

Len raised an eyebrow. “A DDoS? We haven’t had to do one of those before.”

“Yeah, but this is a persistent motherfucker.” Phil sighed, raising his hand once to rub at his eyes before settling it back down atop the keyboard. “And this fucking video’s been up too long as it is.”

Nodding, Len watched, his hands knitting together as he watched his friend pull out what they considered the ‘big guns’. After all this time, video after video pulled down with all the finesse of a virtuoso handling an instrument, the brute force solution seemed like bringing a bazooka to a blade fight, but they’d worry about that later. Time was of the essence and every moment wasted was another moment this thing could be captured and saved on someone else’s computer. Len breathed a sigh of relief. At least they had some solution to this problem firewall, excessive or not. He glanced away, allowing his heart rate to settle again, until Phil said, “Shit. Motherfucking shit on a shingle, holy mother of fucking hell. No.”

Len winced as the litany of blasphemous profanity spilled from Phil’s lips. Turning his gaze back to the monitor, he saw the video mocking them, two of the best computer hackers employed by some of the wealthiest beings on the planet. “What is it Phil?” he asked.

“It’s back. Dammit to hell, it’s back.”

“What do you mean, back? Didn’t you take down the IP?”

“Different IP.” Phil paused, as if for impact. “Different server.”

“Different…” The word trailed off as Len watched Phil continue working, keystrokes pounding out a fevered tempo of desperation before each time he hit enter. One IP would fall, but it almost seemed like two more stood in its wake and beads of sweat began collecting on Phil’s forehead, running down his neck. Finally, Phil pushed away from the terminal. His palms touched his knees and trembled where they sat.

Phil Jenkins and Len McAlister stared at the screen for long moments, both of them eyeing the time elapsed as though studying the countdown to their own demise. Finally, Len swallowed past a dry throat and frowned. “This is serious. I’ve got to call Mitch. He’s not going to be happy, but he has to know.”

Phil nodded, swallowing as well, his eyes closing while he muttered underneath his breath. No, Mitch was going to birth small kittens and if there was one thing Phil had learned over the last three years, it was never to piss off a vampire. His lids lifted to eye the mocking video one more time.

One hand raised and one finger clicked the left mouse button, starting the playback once again.

A young woman holding a purse screamed as two creatures, moving faster than light, descended on her and captured her in their embrace. Both shared a hearty laugh over her pleas for mercy, one whispering that it would all be over in a few seconds. White fangs glistened in the moonlight and crimson red flowed from her neck and wrist when they bit in. Phil winced when the woman screamed one final time. The video ceased a few frames into their feeding, remaining frozen on the image of unadulterated terror contorting the victim’s face.

“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Phil whispered to himself. “Please don’t let this hit the torrents. This is going to spread like the fucking Bubonic Plague.”

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