Sonia was all smiles when they arrived at the castle. She greeted them in the grand entry as if she were the owner of the place, welcoming them and dispatching her assistants to show everyone to their rooms. Dinner, she promised, was being served in an hour and a half, and their host would be attending. She cautioned everyone to dress for dinner and to mind their manners, which made Katrina wonder exactly what the owner of the grand estate was like, but she supposed she’d learn soon enough.
The long day of traveling was getting to her, so she was happy to find that she and Ren had been given a suite at the top of one of the many staircases in the giant edifice. Their friends knew they were now a couple and had arranged the rooms accordingly, much to Katrina’s satisfaction.
“The view from up here is amazing,” she said, looking out one of the windows.
“We’re actually at the base of the west tower,” Ren commented, coming over to stand next to her. “The forest where we’re filming most of the woodland scenes is just visible from here. See the dip in the landscape? There’s a stream over there that’s going to be where I dump Little John into the water when we first meet.”
She turned into him, reaching up to wrap her arms around him. “You sound just a little too gleeful at the prospect,” she teased. “I don’t know Clive well, but he’s huge. I wouldn’t be too quick to want to mess with a guy that size.”
“Did you know he’s got Samoan blood? There’s a small Clan of jaguars in Arizona that are mostly his size and bigger. They’re monsters,” Ren said, sounding impressed, “but I’m still senior to him in the hierarchy, so I’m not too worried.”
“How does that work? Do you guys vote on who’s in what position?” she asked, puzzled.
Ren laughed outright. “Honey, it’s not a democracy. Shifters work the power structure out other ways. Mainly, it’s a dominance thing. While Clive might be stronger than most physically, he’s still quite young and lacks the experience and confidence to best me. That may change in the future, of course, but for right now, he knows he’d be fighting above his weight if he tried to take me on in jaguar form. Our inner cats know who’s who in the pecking order, even when our human sides don’t, sometimes.”
“That’s kind of fascinating, and a little scary,” she told him, reaching up to kiss his jaw.
Things were just about to get interesting when a gong rang in the distance, and Ren stepped away.
“That’s the warning gong,” he told her. “We have about a forty-five minutes to get ready, and we don’t want to keep our host waiting. These older guys can be tricky about formality and respect. We’re on his turf. We need to play by his rules.”
“Who is he?” Katrina asked, intrigued as Ren went to his bags and started unpacking, looking for something to wear to dinner, she supposed.
Ren gave her a sideways look as he paused in his unpacking. “You might not believe this, but the owner of this castle and pretty much all the land you can see from here is an ancient vampire. A nobleman who was turned centuries ago and has safeguarded this place ever since. Bloodletters—especially the older ones—can be very powerful in many different ways.”
“Bloodletters?” Katrina repeated, unfamiliar with the term.
“What they call themselves,” Ren told her. “I’ve met a few in my travels, and though you can never be quite sure, the ones I’ve dealt with have all been servants of the Light. Of course, they do have their bad apples, so never take an unknown bloodletter at his word unless you know, for certain, where he or she stands.”
His warning chilled her to the bone. She had a lot to learn about the world, apparently, and the people she was working with and encountering on this movie set. A thought occurred to her.
“You said Sonia was magical, but if she’s not a shifter and she’s not a bloodletter, then what is she?”
“Fey,” Ren answered, his head tilting slightly. “Frankly, I don’t know much about them. They mostly left the mortal realm well before I was born, though I hear a few travel back now and again. Some even interbred with mortals and they come back to check on their families, or so I’ve been told. Sonia only came back recently, to help us in the upcoming fight. She’s one of the good guys and highly magical in a way I don’t fully understand.”
Oddly reassured that someone with Ren’s powers seemed impressed by Sonia and that she was on the right side of all this, Katrina nodded. She would have to tread carefully around these powerful beings. She’d already been on her best behavior because Sonia was the all-powerful director who was giving her a big break, but with this new knowledge, Katrina would be even more respectful. She’d have to be on her toes at all times with all these new types of beings she was encountering. Particularly with the vampire. Even if the folklore had it wrong, there was something inherently scary about a being who lived off other people’s blood. She suppressed a shudder at the gruesome thought.
“Will I be likely to run into more of these…um…bloodletters, now that I know about your people?”
Ren seemed to consider as he went back to his unpacking. “Not many, I would think, though we are making strange allies in these dark times.”
“Dark times? You mentioned something about a flare up before. Is it really that bad?”
Ren sighed heavily and paused to look squarely at her. “There’s a lot you don’t know about the world. A lot most of humanity doesn’t know. In ancient times, it was different, but once the decision was made for magical folk to live in secret among the more populous humans, we did our best to erase all proof of our existence from the human record. Anything that remains is put down to legend and superstition.”
“Like the stories about werewolves and vampires,” she said, nodding. It made sense, though she never would have guessed had she not seen the reality of the jaguar people with her own eyes.
“Exactly,” Ren agreed, smiling a bit. “There’s a war going on between the forces of Light—namely us—and the forces of darkness. It’s an eternal sort of war, though our side had won the last round, and we all thought that was it. The main player on the dark side had been banished to forgotten realms from which nobody thought she could ever return. Turns out, it looks like we were wrong.”
“The big bad guy is a girl?” Katrina asked, hoping this was all a big joke but knowing it wasn’t.
“Elspeth is her name. Many call her the Destroyer. She’s fey, which means she’s the next best thing to immortal, and with her mastery of magic and legion of followers, she is effectively unstoppable, except by the concentrated efforts of the most powerful beings on our side of the fight.” Ren looked grim. “That’s how it happened before, when she was banished at the end of what humans call the Dark Ages. She caused the Dark Ages.” He shook his head and looked angry. “It’s taken humanity this long to recover from the setback she created in the evolution of their society. Magic was fading in this realm until Elspeth. It was supposed to be the time for man to emerge and create their non-magical world. Instead, she threw a monkey wrench into the entire equation and caused the chaos that has rippled out over the centuries to affect us all.”