Cubari Romanus: Real World, #6

Chapter one

Zoe, something big is coming.

Looking up at her uncle’s dark, sapphire blue eyes, Zoe Woods frowned deeply; he seemed so convinced by what he was saying, but to her it sounded totally nuts. I don’t understand. What’s coming?

"The end of the world. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but it’s true. You know there’s more to the world than most humans realise. Your own aunt looks younger than you; Scott doesn’t look much older, and he went to school with your grandfather. And you know you’ve got something not human in you too, though we don’t know what.

"Please, Zoe, prepare somewhere safe, a hideaway where you can stay out of it. When you can do it safely, come and find us. We’ll be in Cadenbourne in Sussex."

He finished with a gentle smile tinged with worry. He would have been a wonderful father, but his wife wasn’t capable of bearing children, and she would have made an appalling mother. Zoe had frequently thought the whole world should be thankful her aunt hadn’t reproduced.

Uncle Alex, you know this sounds completely mental, don’t you? she responded carefully. He was her uncle by marriage and had always been around in her life, as far as she knew. His wife, her father’s sister, wasn’t an easy person to like, though Zoe knew some of the reasons why. She didn’t particularly like Natalie herself; as with most people she just suffered Natalie because of Alex. The third person in the strange marriage, Scott, was Natalie’s halfbreed mate. Quite how Alex could put up with his wife’s lover around, Zoe had no idea, but it worked for them. As long as they were happy, it wasn’t for her to say anything, no matter how bizarre she thought it all.

Just promise me you’ll make preparations, Alex went on, his expression earnestly pleading for her to agree. Start now. Don’t leave it until it’s too late. Get food and water stored. Make sure you can stay safe and secure.

Biting her bottom lip a little as she frowned in confusion, Zoe nodded. Even if it did seem completely insane, she would do what he asked, simply because it seemed so important to him. It wouldn’t really hurt for her to keep her word, then the next time she saw him she could say she had done it and he would be happy.

It struck Zoe as a very odd conversation to have whilst surrounded by Christmas decorations and gifts. The whole idea of the world ending was totally alien when she was surrounded by friends and family, what family there was left.

Hearing her aunt’s voice rising stridently, she thought she better go and rescue whichever of her friends had been foolish enough to try and talk to Natalie. It had to have been the worst idea she had ever had, inviting friends around for drinks while her aunt was staying. Zoe wondered at her own stupidity. What the hell had possessed her?

Once the holiday season was out of the way and her relatives had gone home, Zoe began her preparations: she had her attic made secure and started to stockpile tinned food and bottled water up there. She sorted out a camp bed and blankets, bought torches, batteries and wind-up lamps, and even stashed books up there so she had a way to pass the time. She had a tiny window put in, one that wouldn’t be easily noticed, and practiced her quick ascent and locking in every day. It all felt so odd to her, but it became habit and she stuck it out.

Then the first murder happened.

No one realised at the time what it heralded. How could they? But days later, the murder rate was escalating at an alarming rate. The police lost control, law and order broke down completely; everyone seemed to turn on those closest to them, killing without thought, without reason. Looking out of her tiny attic window, Zoe thought hell must have opened up.

The end of the world had arrived.

Locked in her attic, Zoe kept as quiet as she could through the days of chaos, read her books, eked her food out as she didn’t know how long she would be there, and prayed when she heard screams inside her own home that no one would find her.

She sobbed silently, wishing she had left for Sussex after that first death, but it was too late. There was no way she would get safely south on her own. She should have taken more notice of what was happening and headed south when it would have been safe to go.

It had been quiet for a couple of weeks when she finally ventured back into her small house. The place had been trashed completely. In the sitting room, she found the mutilated corpse of a man. He’d been hacked apart. One of his arms lay a couple of feet away from the rest of him, and most of his insides were spread across the floor; blood coated the carpet and splattered the walls, and the smell was unbearable, sickly, rotten; dead.

Swallowing down hard before she vomited, Zoe went to the kitchen, or what was left of it, found the black rubbish bags under the sink, and steeled herself for removing bits of a putrid body from her home. She stacked the bags in the small back garden and went back inside, sincerely hoping she never had to do anything like that again.

After doing her best to block up the front door and collecting a few things from her bedroom, she retreated back to her attic to wait and watch. She’d seen a few humans were still killing when they got the chance, so didn’t dare go outside yet.

Her food and water would last a few weeks yet; she could wait for it to be safe.

Secure in her hideout, she took a few minutes to deal with her appearance, although there wasn’t a huge amount she could do with the way she looked. Brushing through her light brown bobbed hair, she looked at herself in the mirror she had brought up with her. Her skin needed some attention before she started to get spots from not being able to wash properly.

Taking one of the facial wipes from the packet she had grabbed, she cleaned her high forehead, wiped around her pale blue eyes, over her cheekbones that were a little sharper than they had been before she had retreated, meaning she had lost weight while rationing her food. After wiping her face, she picked up the stick of lip balm and smoothed it over her mouth, following the curves of her full lips as carefully as if she had been applying lipstick.

She still wasn’t happy about the way she looked. Her light brown hair had almost grown out of its style, leaving it too long to just leave down and too short to put up. All she could do was pin it off her face with hairpins.

Deciding she need to be a bit cleaner everywhere, she stripped off her clothes and used the facial wipes over her whole body. It wasn’t as good as having a shower, but at least she no longer had the feeling she was standing too close to herself.

If the house hadn’t smelled so badly of the dead, she would have collected fresh clothes from her wardrobe, but she hadn’t wanted to bring that awful smell up to her safe place. It was bad enough she could smell it anyway, without making herself stink like that. The clothes she had might not be so clean, but at least she could freshen them by the window.

Content she had done as much as possible for the moment, she fluffed up the sleeping bag on the camp bed and picked up the book she was in the middle of. With a grim smile, she realised the end of the world was giving her a good chance to catch up on her reading. A K Michaels had written several more books since Zoe had last had the opportunity to read and, thankfully, she had bought the paperbacks. It was a habit she had got into ever since her uncle’s warning. It hadn’t been hard to guess that, if the apocalypse did happen, electricity would be one of the first things lost.

Opening the book, one of the Black Rose Chronicles, she lay back with a hand behind her head, trying to pretend she was actually lying on her own bed in her bedroom.

As she read, her eyes began to get heavier, until the book finally dropped from her fingers onto her chest.

She dreamed of a man, someone whose face she couldn’t quite see. He was stood by a window, naked, the sun streaming through and bathing his firm body in a softly glowing light. Zoe felt as if she had no substance, like a ghost watching the living, unable to communicate.

The scene he looked out on gave the impression of being in Italy somewhere. It was rural, tranquil, and picturesque. The end of the world hadn’t touched it; hadn’t touched him.

His naked body took all her attention, so she was only aware of the view peripherally. His long physique was slim, although his shoulders had some width and obvious strength. His long legs were muscular without being too thick, the skin on them bronzed naturally from the sun.

Trying to move around him to see his face, she suddenly snapped awake.

Pushing back the hairs that had escaped from the pins holding them in place, Zoe sat up and sighed, the dream slipping aware from her before she could grasp any of the details with her conscious mind. 

Rolling her eyes at herself for dropping off, she reorganised herself with the sleeping bag bunched up against the wall so she could curl up leaning against it. Hopefully, she wouldn’t fall asleep again. 

Chapter two

Blasius Maximus Renatus, one time citizen of Rome and Optio in the Legio II of the Roman Imperial Army, rolled over in his wide bed, stretched and opened his deep brown and bright crimson eyes on his luxurious bedroom flooded with morning sun. He flexed his muscles as the warm light fell on his bare, tanned, supple body.

Stretching out, he wished he wasn’t alone. Someone else in his bed would be very welcome. He wouldn’t mind who it was, as long as they had a pulse.

These days, he was known as Biaggio Renatus in his current home town of Vaglia, north-west of Florence. When he lived in France or England, he used the name Blaise. He had lived all over Europe through his life, but always came back to Italy after a few years. In his heart, it would always be his home; he was Italian to the core, although he could make himself at home anywhere in the world.

He rose from his bed and crossed to the window, pushing back the sheer white curtain so he could gaze out at the Tuscan village laid out down the hill. The sight was stunning: the rolling hills, the quaint houses typical of the area, with their orange terracotta roofs; a perfect scene of rural Tuscany.

What was missing was the bustle of people, the voices, the activity; the life. It was as if all humanity had simply been wiped away, like some mad god had swept a hand across the country and removed it all, leaving everything else in place.

Blaise sighed heavily.

Other than a few days of excitement around midsummer, nothing happened here. For those few days, he had shut his gates and waited to see what would come. After those days, the screams and violence had died down and silence had filled the void of existence. Of course, the birds still chattered and the insects still buzzed around, but there was never any interruption to still the fauna and replace its continuous song with that of words.

Now most of the humans were gone, Blaise was struggling to find enough energy. On top of that, he really missed technology. He was even missing television. It was the lack of people hitting him hardest though.

Blaise desperately needed sex.

As a cubari, he ideally needed sex every day, but now it was nearly a week since he had come across anyone willing to forget their troubles in his bed for a few hours. The young woman he had spent an energetic night with had slipped away in the early hours of the morning, insisting she had to find her family. Blaise offered to help her, but the offer was turned down. He would have liked to have something to do other than just sitting around regretting the loss of the modern world he had grown used to.

Combing his dark brown curls off his forehead with long fingers, Blaise made a decision: he would go back to England. England had those delightful creatures called halfbreeds. Unfortunately, no other country in Europe had gone along with the peculiar breakthrough a couple of centuries ago that had created the strange mutation of the vampiros. It was a terrible shame really; halfbreeds were such entertaining creatures.

The main advantage of halfbreeds was their all-consuming need for sex; it suited a cubari perfectly. The cubarii were the origins of the human myth of incubi and succubae. Most of the lore about his species was total nonsense, but one thing mythology had got right was that the cubarii had extremely voracious sexual appetites.

A rather dispersed population of cubarii had once been spread over most of the European continent, but few of them had ever ventured into the British Isles. Blaise was one of the only ones to have braved that strange little island full of odd creatures and frequently odder humans. But there was something strangely appealing about that land of rain and oddballs. Each nationality had its own characteristics that showed in most of its population, but those of Britain were probably the strangest, and those of each country that made up the British Isles was markedly different, although they all had that tendency to eccentricity.

Only a country that welcomed that peculiarity could have made something useful of the vampiros disease.

Blaise turned to look around his bedroom, knowing he wouldn’t be sleeping here again. He might well come back to the region at some point in the future, but he would never return to a home after he’d left it. The trick to living for over two millennia was always moving on. Five to ten years was quite long enough in one place. He’d been here for seven years now, so even if the world hadn’t changed irrevocably, it would have time to think about leaving soon anyway.

Things were going to be very different now the Mondo Reale wasn’t hidden in the way it always had been, but a lifetime’s habit couldn’t be changed overnight.

After washing in some not overly warm water, Blaise began to sort through his possessions, making choices about what he would take with him. Travelling light was the key; not getting bogged down in pointless possessions.

If fortune favoured him, he would come across people who had managed to salvage something civilised from the ruin. He might have come from a time when the struggle of daily life was infinitely harder, but he was used to the comforts of an organised, mostly law-abiding world, with all the conveniences afforded by technology. Should he come across anywhere that still had those conveniences on his journey, he might be tempted to stay for a while and break up his trek to England.

Even a hot shower seemed an almost unimaginable luxury to him now, though only a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have thought twice about having one. A cold shower might be invigorating, but it lacked that feeling of indulgence. When the world fell apart, it was the simplest things lost that hit those left the most.

Blaise doubted his journey would be simple; since the humans had gone mad, all the other creatures in the world were coming to the fore, and many of them were wary of his kind, to say the least. Over the last few months, Blaise had had to deal with fata, elfi, folletto and marciello. On top of all the mundane creatures of the Mondo Reale, there was also vampiri, lupo mannaro and benandanti to contend with.

The two different types of wolf-men usually kept each other quite busy. The benandanti were also known as Cani di Dio, the Hounds of God, and they kept control of the wild and dangerous lupo mannaro. Unfortunately, anyone who got between the two varieties of wolf-man species tended to get seriously injured. On top of that, the benandanti could be a little on the fanatical side.

The vampiri were much more of a problem; predatory and ravenous, they killed indiscriminately, and now they had licence to do it openly, and there were few with the strength to stop them. They hunted by night, attacking the sleeping and unsuspecting, feasting on them and leaving only a mess of bodies behind. Given the chance, they would sweep through the land killing or turning everyone. What would become of them when they had done that though? Would they turn on each other until they wiped themselves out?

That was the other appeal of that misty little island off the end of Europe: no vampiri. Blaise hadn’t seen any in the area so far, but he doubted it would be long before they descended to start a killing spree of any still alive. Although useful with a sword and able to administer the killing blow it took to behead a vampiros, he didn’t like his chances if he had to face a larger pack alone. He was brave, not suicidal.

The lukos were another oddity of that strange land. Although they were all over Europe, it was only really in Britain that they were controlled and safe to be around, after a fashion. They did tend to have rather explosive tempers, but if you were careful they were no problem.

He had to stop wondering about what he would find and get on with his preparations to leave.

Pulling out a backpack, Blaise sorted through his clothes and packed a few things. He was quite happy to spend time naked, but he would need clothes to be around others. He had hardly dressed at all lately, preferring to take what enjoyment he could from his solitude by indulging in persistent nudity. And he enjoyed his body, having kept it trim and well-toned.

Sighing in annoyance, he glanced down at his sudden erection. He really needed