Twenty minutes later, the sports car pulled up to the outskirts of an ancient castle.
The fortress sat in a massive clearing, surrounded by dense, sprawling forest. Its architecture was ancient and imposing, with towering spires and stone walls choked with thick ivy. Under the moonlight, it looked like a sleeping leviathan.
"This is the Vampire coven," Selene said.
Raphael stared up at the massive structure.
"Where are the guards?"
Selene pushed her door open. "I'm a Death Dealer bringing a prisoner back for interrogation. No one is going to stop us."
Raphael followed her out of the car. His hands were loosely bound with a piece of rope—a purely cosmetic prop for the guards' benefit.
The heavy iron gates of the castle slowly ground open.
Behind them lay a steep stone staircase plunging deep underground. Dim, amber wall sconces cast flickering shadows across the stone masonry. Every thirty feet stood a Vampire guard draped in a heavy black cloak.
Seeing Selene, they immediately bowed their heads in respect.
Selene walked past them, her face an unreadable mask of ice. Raphael trailed right behind her, keeping his eyes dead ahead.
Not a single person asked a question.
At the end of the corridor was another set of doors.
Beyond them opened up a massive, circular grand hall, its vaulted ceiling reaching almost as high as the castle itself. The perimeter of the hall was honeycombed with dozens of intersecting passageways and tunnels.
The two of them walked straight into a hidden, secured chamber. Selene shot a sharp command to the adjacent security room.
"Kraven wants to see you!"
The Vampire guard obediently left his post. Before leaving, he even thoughtfully pulled the heavy door shut behind him.
And then...
With Raphael watching closely, Selene bypassed the heavy stone seals and manually raised the massive metallic sarcophagi from beneath the floor.
Standing upright, suspended in transparent vats like desiccated corpses, were the Vampire Elders—Viktor and Marcus.
They were in deep hibernation.
A third sarcophagus sat completely empty.
That was Amelia's resting place; she was currently en route back to the coven.
Selene stopped dead in her tracks.
Raphael could feel her entire body vibrating with a minute, violent tremor. It wasn't out of fear. It was because the creature resting right in front of her was the monster who had butchered her entire family.
"That's them?" Raphael asked quietly.
Selene nodded.
There was no need for any more talking.
She walked straight up to Viktor's vat and hit the release mechanism.
The transparent hatch slowly hissed open, exposing Viktor's body—withered, ash-gray, looking exactly like a thousand-year-old mummy.
At the exact same time, Raphael stepped up to Marcus's vat and punched the identical release button.
Both sarcophagi opened simultaneously.
"What are you doing?" Selene frowned.
"I call it killing two birds with one stone," Raphael said, his eyes flashing with dark calculation. Having the perfect opportunity to permanently flatline two Vampire Elders in one trip? It was too good to pass up.
Selene shot him a look but didn't argue.
She drew the tactical knife from her waist—pure silver, explicitly designed to butcher Vampires.
Raphael smoothly drew his own matching blade.
They locked eyes for a fraction of a second.
Then they went to work.
Selene drove her blade violently into Viktor's heart, the steel punching straight through his sternum and bursting out his back.
She ruthlessly twisted her wrist and ripped the blade sideways, slicing his entire chest cavity wide open. Thick, coagulated black blood spilled out like rotting gravel.
Viktor's eyelids spasmed violently; he was desperately trying to wake up.
But Selene didn't give him the chance.
Her second strike severed his cervical spine.
Her third completely decapitated him.
The ancient Elder's head hit the stone floor with a heavy, sickening thud.
Raphael's execution was just as brutally efficient.
Marcus's body was even more desiccated than Viktor's; the blade met practically zero resistance as it carved into him.
Raphael sank the first strike deep into his heart, used the second to hack cleanly through his neck, and brought the third down hard, cleaving the severed head cleanly in two.
The entire slaughter took less than ten seconds.
"Burn them," Selene ordered.
Raphael grabbed a blazing torch off the wall and tossed it directly into the residual fluid pooling inside the vats—some highly combustible chemical mixture.
A massive fireball erupted, instantly engulfing the two mutilated corpses.
The roaring flames cast harsh, flickering shadows across Selene's face.
She stared dead-eyed into the inferno, watching the two fleshy masses rapidly burn down to ash. There was absolutely no sorrow in her eyes—only a profound, soul-deep exhaustion finally giving way to peace.
Right at that exact moment, heavy footsteps echoed from the entrance of the grand hall.
"What is that noise?" a man's voice demanded, thick with suspicion and alarm.
Selene turned her head.
Kraven.
Viktor's sycophant right-hand man and the current acting regent of the coven. He was standing right in the archway, backed up by at least eight heavily armed Death Dealers.
He stared at the blazing vats. He saw the pulverized chunks of skull scattered across the floor. He saw Selene and Raphael standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the firelight.
His pupils dilated in sheer, paralyzing horror.
"Selene... what have you..."
Selene didn't bother explaining a damn thing.
She just drew her gun.
BANG!
Kraven violently threw himself to the side. The hollow-point slammed into the chest of a guard right behind him. The Vampire screamed and hit the deck, but scrambled back up almost immediately—the silver-nitrate rounds custom-built to liquefy Lycan insides were practically useless against their own kind.
"Kill them!" Kraven shrieked.
The guards swarmed them.
Selene squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession, dropping three guards instantly.
Raphael exploded into motion.
Flooding his legs with the Force, he blurred into a lethal shadow, closing the gap on the nearest two Death Dealers in a fraction of a second.
His silver blade tore through their throats, brutally severing their cervical spines. Both heads launched into the air simultaneously.
Freezing, foul-smelling blood sprayed across his face.
He didn't even break stride.
A third guard swung a heavy combat knife at his head. Raphael pivoted inside the arc and drove his blade backward, sinking it to the hilt straight through the Vampire's eye socket.
The steel punched out the back of the guard's skull. The body locked up for a single, agonizing second before collapsing into a dead weight.
Selene had already butchered the remaining three.
Kraven was completely gone.
"He ran," Raphael stated.
Selene wiped her blade. "Hunt him down."
The two of them sprinted out of the grand hall, tearing back up the labyrinth of corridors.
More Death Dealers poured out of the intersecting tunnels, desperately trying to lock them down.
Selene laid down lethal suppressing fire while Raphael carved through the frontline. The two of them moved like a synchronized meat grinder, slaughtering everything stupid enough to step in their path.
When guns ran dry, they used knives.
When blades chipped and dulled on bone, they stripped fresh weapons from the dead and kept hacking.
The stone corridors were painted in gore, heavily littered with severed limbs and decapitated torsos.
By the time they finally breached the castle's surface level, they had left a trail of over a dozen butchered corpses in their wake.
Kraven was standing just outside the main gates. He had managed to rally a firing squad of at least twenty heavily armed guards around him.
"Selene, you murdered an Elder—you are completely finished."
A smug, arrogant sneer twisted his face. "The entire coven is going to hunt you to the ends of the earth. Drop your weapons right now, and I promise I'll make your death quick."
Selene just stared at him.
She didn't say a goddamn word.
She just took a slow, deliberate step forward.
Right behind her, Raphael took a step too.
Shoulder to shoulder, the two of them walked dead into the teeth of twenty armed Vampires.
"Kill them! Rip them to shreds!" Kraven shrieked.
The Death Dealers charged.
This time, Selene completely took the leash off.
Her ancient blood boiled in her veins. She hadn't consumed the blood of Alexander Corvinus yet, but the sheer, apocalyptic rage radiating off her was enough to push her baseline physical limits into the red zone.
She slammed into the frontline like a bolt of black lightning.
Every single time her blade flashed, a severed head hit the dirt.
Raphael was right on her flank, his Force perception dialed up to the absolute maximum.
His hybrid combat style—Dom Toretto's savage, dirty street-brawling perfectly fused with the lethal precision of a Jedi Knight—was devastatingly effective in a massive melee.
Three minutes later.
Out of the twenty guards, eighteen of them were in pieces on the ground.
The remaining few were literally on their knees, shaking uncontrollably in pure terror.
Kraven was already a hundred yards down the driveway, frantically sprinting toward the tree line to save his own skin.
Selene didn't chase him.
She casually reached down, stripped a combat knife from the belt of a kneeling guard, and cocked her arm back.
She threw it.
The heavy steel ripped through the night air and buried itself flawlessly into the back of Kraven's knee joint.
Kraven let out an agonizing scream and violently ate dirt.
Selene stalked over and planted her heavy combat boot dead center on his chest, pinning him to the ground.
"You..." Kraven choked out, his face utterly paralyzed by fear. "You can't kill me... I am the acting regent..."
Selene stared down at him like he was a bug on the pavement.
"Do you know why I slaughtered Viktor?"
Kraven frantically shook his head.
"Because he butchered my entire family," Selene said icily. "Six hundred years ago. And you knew about it the entire time."
Kraven's face completely froze.
"But you..." Selene continued, pressing her boot down harder. "You conspired with Lycans and sold out your own kind. You deserve to die even more than he did."
She didn't waste another breath on him.
She dragged her blade violently across his throat, carving it wide open.
Kraven's severed head rolled onto the wet grass, his eyes bulging wide in eternal, paralyzed shock.
Selene stood up tall and snapped her wrist, flicking the thick blood off her blade.
Raphael walked up next to her.
"What's next?"
Selene stared out at the distant horizon, where the first faint, gray light of dawn was beginning to bleed into the sky.
"Next, a merciless, endless wave of our own kind is going to hunt us down."
"You scared?"
"I knew exactly how this was going to end the second I decided to pull the trigger."
"Then let's move," Raphael said. "We're going to find the Immortal, Alexander Corvinus. Getting a taste of his bloodline will jack your power levels through the roof."
The two of them turned their backs and vanished completely into the dark cover of the forest.
Behind them, a massive inferno raged out of control inside the castle—whoever started it was irrelevant, maybe a rogue torch knocked loose during the slaughter.
The towering flames violently licked the sky, illuminating half the night in a hellish orange glow.
The remaining Vampires cowering inside the coven had grown soft from centuries of peace. They had completely forgotten the brutal reality of actual warfare. A few of them saw Selene speeding off into the night, but absolutely no one had the balls to chase her.
Three days later.
A heavily concealed private dock off the jagged coast of Norway.
Raphael and Selene were holed up inside an abandoned, rotting warehouse, peering through the shattered windowpanes to monitor the freezing ocean waters.
"Are you absolutely sure he's here?" Selene asked.
"Positive."
Raphael leaned back casually against a stack of wooden shipping crates. "Alexander Corvinus. The original Immortal. Father to both Marcus and William. He's been alive for well over a millennium, operating strictly in the shadows, constantly monitoring the endless blood war between Vampires and Lycans. His mobile fortress is a massive commercial oil tanker that permanently cruises the Arctic Ocean."
"It's all part of the movie plot, obviously."
Selene stayed quiet for a few seconds.
"Is he going to help us?"
"Not a chance in hell."
Raphael shook his head. "We literally just butchered his son. Do you honestly think he's going to pop champagne and throw us a party?"
Selene gave him a flat look.
"Then what exactly are we doing here?"
"We're going to make him bleed."
Raphael stood up, rolling his shoulders to get loose. "His pure blood acts as a master key for Vampire evolution. Once you feed on him, your physical baseline is going to skyrocket."
"And then what?"
"And then..."
Raphael met her gaze. "There's one last stop we have to make. Nordic Coven—you probably know it. There's a sect of witches out there guarding the most ancient rituals of your kind. Once you're stacked with both the Corvinus strain and the ancient ritual enhancement, you'll be the undisputed Vampire Queen."
Selene's eyebrows crept up a fraction of an inch.
"You really do know everything, don't you?"
"I read the script." Raphael flashed a quick grin. "Come on. It's time to pay the old man a visit."
The Arctic Ocean. A dead zone completely choked by massive ice floes.
A colossal oil tanker sat dead in the ice. Its hull was painted pitch black, completely stripped of any identifying registry markers. Faint silhouettes of heavily armed paramilitary patrols could be seen moving rhythmically across the main deck.
Raphael and Selene were riding low in a stolen Zodiac speedboat, using the pitch-black night cover to close the distance on the massive vessel.
"Guards on deck," Selene whispered into the freezing wind. "At least fifty of them. Heavily armed."
"They're just regular humans. I can handle it." Raphael didn't sound even remotely concerned.
The Zodiac bumped smoothly against the steel hull of the tanker. The two of them immediately grabbed the rusted iron rungs and rapidly scaled the side of the ship.
The second their heads cleared the railing, two heavily armed patrollers spotted them dead to rights.
"Hey! Who the hell—"