Installment 4: Shelter

Author: Terraphim

Rating: Mature for sexuality and violence

Disclaimer: I don’t own Underworld. It is the intellectual property of Len Wiseman, Danny McBride, and Kevin Grevioux and the fiscal property of Screen Gems and Sony Entertainment. I do wish I owned this wonderful franchise, and especially Michael, but that’s for my own nefarious reasons…

Spoiler Warning: Underworld and Underworld Evolution

Summary: When history is based on a lie, what would you do to expose the truth?

 

The following succession of days became a blur as they traveled, without a set destination, across the frozen roads of Hungary, occasionally crossing into its neighbors for small amounts of time. They stayed nowhere longer than a day, moving on quickly and not returning to any specific place. Mostly, they moved at night, spending the shortening day-lit hours, resting and planning their next stop, renting cheap rooms in heavily-populated areas, leaving just before the sun went down, and starting all over again. Although Selene was no longer in danger from the sunlight, her reasoning for this arrangement was that they would be safer having their guards down when the other vampires could not come after them without being burned themselves. Michael suspected her other reason was simply that she was accustomed to working at night, and after six hundred years of such a lifestyle, it only made sense that it would take her some time to adjust.

After nearly two and a half weeks of this, a brief visit to a vampire safe house was a break in the monotony of the seemingly-endless trek, and had yielded two things: blood and information. The former they found in the obligatory freezer, pulling out bags of the chilled red liquid to be stored in yet more synthetic environments in the stolen coven car, until it would be consumed. The information was less substantial; while there, Selene discovered that the vampire mainframe was still online.

“So it wasn’t based in the mansion?” he asked.

“I thought it was, but it seems not,” she replied, while typing some kind of code. Immediately, images flashed on the screen – photographs of her and Michael, as well as a “detailed” account of how they had killed Viktor, which had entire points entirely wrong or distorted, including her motivations and Michael’s origins. According to this report, Marcus was “missing, presumed dead”, and there was no mention at all of his being a hybrid. Amelia was reported as having been assassinated by “enemy agents in league with traitors”, and although it mentioned no traitors had been named, the entirety of the account hinted toward Selene rather than Kraven. In fact, Kraven had not been mentioned at all, nor had Lucian; everything about this statement pointed to Selene being the sole lycan conspirator.

Michael studied her face closely as she read the notice, but nothing in her expression betrayed any kind of emotion. He wondered if she was even better at hiding her pain than he had thought, or if she was unsurprised by this development.

“Well, one thing is for certain,” she said, her voice normal. “We need to be even more careful now.”

“Why, what is it?” he asked.

She moved slightly so he could look more closely at the computer screen. Beneath the report of the Elders’ respective demises, there was more writing, which stated that there was “hereby a complete recall of all mobilized Death Dealers”.

“Mobilized?”

“On assignment somewhere else. It usually means things like envoys to different branches of the coven, or to guard assets like Ziodex. There were also ones specifically serving as plants in the households of prominent human politicians, in case there was a policy that threatened our privacy. It could also…” she trailed off.

“What?” Now she looked unsettled.

“Special Operatives.”

His lack of a reaction have reminded her how little he knew about his new world, for she sighed and sat back in the chair. “I told you how Death Dealers are the elite anyway, right?” He nodded. “Well, the Special Operations company is even higher than that. They’re brutal, efficient, and quite lethal, even more than normal Death Dealers, and very serious about what they do.”

“You know that could be said about you,” he reminded her, “before this all happened.”

She nodded. “And that’s because I used to be one of them.”

“When?”

“For about twelve years, in the late Eighteenth Century.” She gave him a sideways smile when he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, still so unused to the idea of centuries, but the smile quickly faded.

“Why did you stop? Why weren’t you with them?”

Discernible discomfort flickered in her eyes. “There were things even I wouldn’t do to win the war,” she said in a low voice. And before he could ask what she meant, she turned back towards the computer, typing in a new code. “According to this, Ziodex is still delivering regular shipments of blood to all the safehouses.” There was more typing. “And all the coven’s accounts are still active.”

“Does that mean there were survivors?”

“It must,” she said; Michael couldn’t tell if she was relieved by this or not. “And if that is the case, we need to leave here now.” She quickly stood and moved to the armory, pulling more clips and a set of hunting knives from the caged walls. Michael was suddenly reminded of the morning after he’d become the hybrid, when she had done much the same thing, asking him to stay behind. Now she beckoned him to her. “Take this.” She handed him one of the knives, sheathed in a study leather case.

“Selene…”

“It’s not just for killing,” she told him, moving from the wall back towards the entrance. “You never know when you might need it.”

He wanted to protest, but when she turned back to him, he was struck with this indescribable sense of worry emanating from her eyes. That was enough to make him rethink his reluctance, and he nodded as he took it from her offering hand.

 

Only hours later, the snow began to fall. Although they had been expecting this, they had not anticipated just how quickly it would turn from a light sprinkle to a full-out storm. Their car was fine in this weather; it had been prepared for winter by nature of what season most suited vampires’ inability to handle light, but most roads were cut off from Selene and Michael’s access. Due to this, their planned trip into another larger town was cancelled, and so the driving had continued, as the snow fell in increasingly thicker flakes outside. And then the sun began to rise and Selene began to experience something she had not felt in over six centuries.

Selene was no stranger to headaches. Centuries of bottled-up emotions had often manifested themselves as pressure based in the center of her brain, so much so that she had felt like explosion would have been an agreeable release. Her remedy had normally involved beating the living hell out of Death Dealer trainees. Frustration had its very own category and gauging system, and even a long list of usual reasons: Kraven, the war, dual sets of two centuries spent waiting for Viktor, Kraven, her fellow vampires in general, the ridiculous, inefficient organization of the Death Dealer ranking system, Kraven, and just a general dissatisfaction she had never been able to place. But all of those factors were gone, or at least no longer issues in her mind. And as for the Special Operatives, well…she had been expecting them since Viktor’s death, so she could hazard a guess that this was not the reason either. No, this was something entirely new, and it wasn’t until she momentarily stopped the car at an intersection and shut her eyes to think better that she realized what the problem was.

It was a stress-induced headache, after all, but not stress in her mind…

“Selene?” She opened her eyes again, and saw confusion on Michael’s face. “Are you alright?”

“Everything’s fine,” she assured him. “But would you mind driving for a while?”

“Not at all,” he said and, rather quickly, he pushed open his door and crossed in front of the car, while she slid into the warm space he had vacated. Trying not to smile at his enthusiasm over being something other than a passive passenger, Selene shut here eyes against the harsh snow-reflected light, and immediately her headache began to withdraw. She heard the driver-side door shut, and the car began to move again.

“Your head hurts, doesn’t it?” He sounded uncomfortable, as if the question had taken a great deal of effort to ask.

She turned to stare at him. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t know…” Michael said, sounding embarrassed. “You…shut your eyes, and you’ve never really driven in the sunlight before, and winter light can be brutal.” He waved nonspecifically at a shining snow drift outside, and made a slight left to avoid a patch of ice on the road.

Selene narrowed her eyes at his explanation; while it was sound and made perfect sense, she couldn’t help but think there was something else behind it. Rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands in confusion, she sank further back into the seat.

“Anyway, how do you feel now?”

“Better,” she said. At least she was outside during the day, when only a month ago she would have been ash by now. “But I still don’t know how you knew so …accurately.”

He shrugged. “It’s what I do—did,” he corrected himself.

She looked at him fully; in the clear morning light, she could detect the slight furrowing in his brow. “I’m so sorry, Michael.”

The disappointed expression immediately left his face. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “I don’t miss it, not really – the insane hours, the constant feeling of helplessness, the lack of sleep, the…” He shook his head. “Fuck it; I don’t miss it at all.”

She almost laughed at his decidedness. “Still, figuring out a glare-induced headache is still pretty impressive.”

He shook his head. “Not really.” That uncomfortable tone had crept back into his voice. What was wrong with him, if he was not missing his old life? He wasn’t truly acting strangely, just a little unsettled. Perhaps he was thinking of what she’d told him about the Special Operatives that were heading their way.

Now that was something to worry about. Yes, both Michael and she were both very strong, much stronger than normal immortals, but that did not change the facts. In the case of Viktor’s death, they had won simply by virtue of taking him by surprise. And the Special Operatives were ruthlessly efficient as a team, even in ways that the normal Death Dealers were not. It was no longer a question of strength but one of sheer skill – something Michael simply did not have. His style of fighting was something that consisted half of graceless instinct and blind brutality, and if she were honest with herself, Selene would have to admit that his face-off with William should have had a very different outcome.

As she became lost in her thoughts, the subject of them flipped on the car’s radio, and began to search for some station. For a moment, his hand stayed as some kind of harsh music filled the cab, albeit at a low volume. But then he changed it again, and stopped again at a news report. Her focus still mostly on the horrific image in her head of Michael fighting a losing battle against her former comrades, it was a few seconds before she realized what it was she was hearing coming out of the radio. The report was in German, and the man giving it sounded panicked.

“…utter chaos in Vienna, where a series of car bombs went off all over the city. The exact number of casualties is unknown, but police are reporting that so far two have been found dead. At the moment, the exact perpetrators of this terrorist act are unknown; however, Europol is considering it to be the act of a large group, and have consequently set roadblocks throughout all of Eastern Europe. There will –”

“Shit” she hissed. “Oh fuck!”

“What is it?” Michael demanded. “What did he say?”

She remembered that he didn’t know German. “There was a massive terrorist attack in Vienna,” she said hurriedly. “The humans are putting roadblocks all over the area.”

“Jesus Christ,” he shook his head, and then looked at her. “That means…”

She grimaced. “That means they’ll be focusing there search on the men that did this, but they’ll certainly take one Michael Corvin, fugitive from Hungarian justice.”

“If they catch him,” he growled, and changed into another gear. “Do you know of anywhere close to here we can get off the main road?”

Selene glanced outside. In her reverie, she had not really looked at their surroundings for some time. In the time they had been traveling like this, there had not been any real destination – the plan was just to move, and keep moving, without any concern for where they were heading. Now, even in this strange daylight that made even familiar things look different, Selene did recognize where they were. More so, in less than an hour Michael would as well. They had been heading in the same direction only a month before, when they had sought the reason why a now-deceased vampire Elder had pursued them so persistently for an ancient necklace and a memory.

“Keep driving on this road,” she told him.

He didn’t ask where they were headed, only nodded.

About thirty-five minutes later, the car passed a recognizable rock formation that opened to a side road. “Turn here.” As he followed her direction, Michael too became conscious of where they were; a scowl crossed his face when the side of a mountain revealed a giant, centuries-old, carved cross.

Although it hardly mattered, she hoped Tanis hadn’t upgraded his security system since their last visit.

 

While Michael shut the driver’s seat door quietly, Selene slammed her door and pounded her heavy boots in the snow-covered gravel. It dawned on him that she was trying to get the monastery’s occupant to notice them – so that she could have the upper hand on him when they once again invaded his retreat. A smile tugged on the corners of his mouth when he recalled how, without ever laying a finger on the historian, Selene had reduced him to a compliant, albeit rude source of information. Tanis obviously feared Selene – why else would he have aimed his lycan bodyguards at them without even so much as finding out what they wanted? And Michael himself, who had immediately distrusted the vampire, felt a savage pride at the recollection of Tanis’s nervous way of speaking to them both.

Selene led the way to the small opening that he had used to enter the place, after she had disappeared through the trap door. He followed close behind, through the complicated maze that served as yet another determent to intruders. The further the got into the tunnels, the more Michael felt that something was wrong. He couldn’t explain the feeling, but it made the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. Selene blue-within-blue eyes confirmed his suspicions; he hadn’t seen them take that color since they had left the ruins of the vampire mansion.

“You too?” he asked quietly. The back of his throat was gluey and the words felt stuck there. Impulsively, he reached for her hand, careful not to dig into her skin with his extending claws. The walked forward and passed through into another tunnel.

That’s when the smell hit.

When it struck Michael’s nose and passed to his brain, recollections of medical school dissections hit him like a lightning strike. Nothing triggered memories in the mind better than scent, he had once been told, and for the first time, he truly believed it. Only now, he was part werewolf, and could smell about twenty times better than he could when he had been twenty-three and had gotten violently sick on the floor of the classroom.

Needless to say, he felt a little ill.

The whole place reeked of death.

He wondered why this surprised him. Between Selene and himself, four lycans and two vampires had died here only a little over a month ago. Perhaps Tanis had not gotten rid of the bodies…?

“It shouldn’t be the bodies of the bodyguards. Or of his companions,” Selene startled him when she spoke these words, ones that eerily echoed his thoughts. “Tanis was far too fastidious to leave corpses lying around.”

Michael felt even sicker at her blasé way of speaking about the “corpses”, bodies of the first people – and they were people – that Michael had ever destroyed. He knew his new world was to its very core one of kill-or-be-killed, but in his mind, it made no difference at all.

“Let’s go,” she said quietly, giving his hand a tight squeeze before starting to walk again. It was then that he caught a glimpse of her face. She looked like exhaustion and horror were fighting for dominance in her brain. Michael knew why. If the smell of death was coming from the bodies of the lycans and vampires, than it meant that Tanis had gone, had fled even before thinking to tend to the dead. The other option was that Tanis himself was dead, and that it was his body they now smelled.

The tunnel opened into the hallway that Michael had crashed through the wall to get to, to attack the man who had been pointing a gun at Selene. This was where Selene had killed the two vampire women. There were no bodies to be found.

Maybe he moved the bodies of the vampires, but not the lycans’, he thought, trying to be, if not optimistic, at least less horrified. If Tanis had mourned their deaths, which Michael hoped meant beyond the loss of their breasts and blood, he would have not left them where they died. But he had called lycans “disgusting”; perhaps he considered burying their bodies to be beneath him.

But if that were so, why had they not seen any lycan bodies in the tunnels, or for that matter, outside in the snow? Certainly if the Cleaners had shown up, this place would not still have the smell of death like it did.

Selene seemed to be as perplexed by all this. But it really didn’t matter. She slowly walked toward the main room, Michael silently following behind her. They were both preparing themselves for what they knew they’d find. Selene opened the door.

Inside, it was freezing cold, a blessing if they did indeed find a body. They glanced around the room. In the dark, they didn’t see much beyond shapes. Selene reached into the bag slung around her shoulder and fished out a glow-stick; in the black, it glowed its odd yellow, washing the room in a sickly-colored illumination.

At first, nothing in the room but the darkness hinted at the lack of life within. There was no sign of the vampire historian, or his corpse. But then Michael saw the long dining table at the center of the room, and knew.

It was covered in blood, far too much blood; more than a normal vampire could ever survive losing. It had long-since dried, the puddle now a half-gluey, half-powder mess that trailed from the table to a far-off corner of the room. Hesitantly, he followed that grisly line.

He saw the body of Andreas Tanis, curled into a fetal position, his head bent almost as if he were sleeping rather than dead. But dead he obviously was, two large chunks of flesh missing from each side of his chest.

Knowing what he’d find, Michael knelt down and checked for a pulse, breath, or any sign of life. Nothing; just as he had expected. The historian had hemorrhaged and died of massive blood loss, perhaps even only hours they had departed.

Selene walked slowly up to the body of the man she had known for so long, a stony expression on her face. He was not wearing the same clothes he had worn when they had last left. “I wonder when this happened; how closely Marcus was on our tails”, she said. But they both had known that already; the Elder had arrived mere moments after her tense, angry exchange with Corvinus on his ship had started.

Michael continued to examine the body. He found large, angry bite marks on Tanis’s neck. “I think this is how he found us at the harbor,” he said quietly, pointing to the wound.

Selene’s lips tightened as she gazed impassively at the vampire’s corpse. “He was defenseless,” she said distantly, as if she was not even talking to him. “He wasn’t a warrior; he couldn’t even hold a gun straight.”

Michael looked closely at her face, trying to decipher what she meant by that.

“We left him defenseless,” she curtly said and walked away.

Guilt flooded through Michael anew. They had killed the historian’s security guards. When Marcus had arrived, Tanis had been completely alone.

Even if we had left the lycans there, they would have been killed by Marcus, too, he sensibly told himself, but it made no difference.

Hands shaking, Michael pulled a curtain from the alcove that inefficiently hid the ultraviolet weaponry, and laid it over the dead historian. Then he went to find Selene.

He found her back in the maze-like passageway, where two corridors met. In here, several tunnels came down in sharp decline, letting sunlight stream in from outside. She was crouching on the floor, running what looked like fine dirt through her thumb and finger before letting it fall. Sighing, she stood, dusting her hands.

“I wonder what he did with the lycan bodies,” she said quietly, not really talking to him. “The ground’s too frozen for burial.”

Michael looked down at the ground, and was sick to realize that it wasn’t dirt at all that he was standing in. Ashes littered the floor. This was apparently all that was left of the two vampire women.

Well, at least this answers one of your questions, he told himself practically, in an attempt not to lose control of his stomach contents. Dead vampires still burn in the sunlight.

“I don’t know,” he replied, unable to put any emotion in his voice. The masses of dust reminded him of Sonja’s death, and even though there were not the distinguishable shapes of bodies like Sonja’s remains had been, and although he knew these women had been dead when they had burned, he wanted to leave this place a great deal. Lucian’s memories still came to him in inconvenient flashes – three days before he had awoken Selene as well as himself after witnessing the death of a small lycan child at the hands of an armored Death Dealer, while her mother shrieked in chains. Sometimes he wondered if he couldn’t still hear those piteous screams in the back of his mind while waking.

Selene sighed, shaking him from his reverie. “We need to do the same for him,” she said quietly. “Not here, though. This place is…”

Haunted, Michael supplied internally when she didn’t continue to speak. It feels like it is, at any rate.

“Let’s go,” he suggested, trying not to sound as unsettled as he felt.

She silently nodded and turned to leave, giving the pile of ashes a wide berth as she went back into the monastery proper.

Over the next few hours, Selene and Michael attempted to clean up the mess of blood that Tanis had lost before his death. The body of the historian was placed, still wrapped in the curtain, in one of the freezing tunnels. Without speaking, they made it clear that neither of them wished to drag the body out into the waning sunlight, to feel it begin to burn in their hands. Selene’s normal stoicism turned to outright iciness as the sorry bundle that had once been her fellow vampire was stowed in the passageway, only meters from where he had unceremoniously dumped the bodies of his companions before his own death.

They both stared at the wrapped body for a few minutes, not speaking. Suddenly, without speaking, Selene turned on her boot heel and stamped away, up through the tunnels into the sunlight outside. Michael followed.

Outside, he found her leaning against the stone that formed the giant cross of the monastery. Her eyes closed, she had her face tilted to the light of the setting sun. She didn’t acknowledge his presence, although he suspected she knew he was there.

Not speaking, he merely dusted the powdery snow from a large rock near her and sat, waiting for her to say something.

It wasn’t until the sun was nothing but a memory that she sat next to him.

“Are you alright?” he asked quietly.

She appeared to think over her response for several minutes. “I…should be surprised, but I’m not.

Michael blinked, not understanding.

“Tanis was once Amelia’s favorite, the way I was Viktor’s,” she spat out the once-revered name. “It only makes sense that Marcus would come after him, even if he wasn’t searching for information. And as he was…” she shook her head. “I should have warned him.”

“You think he didn’t know?” Michael pointed out.

“What?” She looked at him, confusion on her face.

“Tanis was…” Michael shook his head, unwilling to speak ill of the dead, despite everything, “…flawed, but he was intelligent. He probably knew. It’s not your fault he didn’t prepare well. And did any of them,” he pointed to the cave opening, where the vampire women were now dust, “stand any more of a chance against him? Probably not. Tanis should have made a run for it, started to pack even before we left.”

“He couldn’t, even if I wasn’t aiming a gun at him” she said.

“Why not?”

She pointed to a pile of snow several meters away, set in wide space between the trees and mountain face. A hand – Selene’s he hoped – had dusted away at a bit of the snow, and underneath were burnt bits of what looked like sticks. Michael stood up and walked closer.

It wasn’t sticks at all, but the charred remains of fingers. Michael stared in horror.

“He burned them, the lycans, after we left,” she said in his ear, startling him. He hadn’t realized she had walked up behind him, he had been so focused on the sight before him.

“He probably started the fire and went back to take care of the other bodies. It requires a lot less effort to take care of vampire remains. Just put them outside and wait for sunrise.”

Her voice sounded so uncaring, so callous, that Michael shivered. He wondered if this attitude was the product of watching her fellow soldiers die, or just her way of dealing with everything she had been through. He looked at her closely. Indeed, she looked more haunted than he had ever seen her, except for when she had told him of the murder of her nieces. It was all a façade, her seeming coldness.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s go back inside.”

She nodded. As they crossed from the deep darkness of the cave-like hallways into the main room, Selene began to speak.

“Michael, I think you should begin to learn some simple fighting moves…”