Strigoi Boyfriend: Briareos (special preview)

It was a well known fact your family had been hunters. Earning their fame and fortune by using their skills to track and dispose of creatures who were more on the supernatural side of nature. As a child, your grandfather told you stories about how he hunted and killed vampires, werewolves, became trained to carry out exorcisms, how to take control when a possession occurred on him.

All your life you were surrounded by the occult, often subjected to the screams coming from the basement. You trained in the family business, learning marksmanship and fighting skills from your mother, while learning tracking and supernatural history from your father. Like your mother’s side of the family, you were a natural. Unlike them though, you hated it with a passion. You interests lied more in the study of these creatures, rather than the eradication of them. In your mind, the idea that learning about them would help lessen the stigmatization upon them. You had seen evil in mankind, perhaps there was goodness in these so-called monsters.

There had been an accident several years ago. Your parents and grandfather were killed in a rock slide along the mountains where they frequently traveled. There was no sign of their carriage, no sign of life despite an exhausting search. You were left everything since you were the last of the bloodline. Your family’s whole trip, perhaps the reason for the demise, was because they were going to meet a prospective husband for you. You took it as a sign you were never meant to marry, and gleefully took to the role of the eccentric spinster.

You used a sum of our new fortune to remodel the old house. You removed the trappings of hunting, locked away the weapons and keepsakes of your families’ hunts into a wing you designated a museum. You turned the underground basement, laboratory, dungeon hell hole into something more inviting and liveable. No longer would you be a hunter, you would be a scholar. You invited others like you to come to your home who also wished to study the occult, the supernatural, and yes, the monsters that were supposedly a plague on the earth.

There were not many of you, but it was enough to get the ball rolling. You revealed a family secret to them, which had allowed your ancestors to become the powerful hunters they were. Your bloodline had a certain amount of psychic power, and over the years, and through selective breeding, had tried to create the most powerful psychic. This would have been your child had they succeeded in bringing back your proposed husband. So now, it was simply you who was the most powerful psychic in the bloodline.

“I believe that the same methods your family used to hunt can be used to communicate and reach out to a multitude of creatures!” Dr. Novara had been a veterinarian who was fascinated by monsters, particularly werewolves. “If we can even find one, we could study them, befriend them. Prove it is possible that not all monsters are evil.”

“It will be dangerous. We can’t just make the creature feel like a prisoner either, but a member of the household. Part of the reasons the supernatural feels it must be defensive and last out, is because they are ostracized.” Irini Roudouli was a philosopher, poet, and had been fascinated by the mind ever since youth. Her theories on supernatural behaviour had begun when she believed she had sex with an incubus.

“That is what the underground is for,” you reply. “They will have their own home, separate, yet still with us. They may come and as they please, have their freedom, as well as protection.”

“But how will we make them stay?” Irini asks. “We can try all we might, but given the advantage to run, we may never keep one.”

You smile knowingly, already a few steps ahead of your colleagues. “I already have an idea.” You stand and approach the blackboard which Dr. Novara has already been scribbling upon. “I have been tracing my grandfather’s journals and I believe I know the whereabouts of a nest of Strigoi in the upper Saliscouche Mountains.”

“Strigoi?” Irini’s brow creases. “I thought they were gone, legend.”

“My grandfather journals mention him chasing them into the mountains, but never seeing them come out. It is possible they no longer exist, but it believe they are merely hiding up there. If that is they case, they are probably desperate to rebuild their numbers.”

Dr. Novara turns and looks at you incredulously. “My lady, am I to believe you are willing to offer yourself as a breeding vessel to the Strigoi?”

Irini raises her hand. “I volunteer as well.”

Dr. Novara scoffs and flops his mouth open and closed. “You do not even know if this is possible! Let alone if they would even want mortal flesh.”

“You don’t know how werewolves mate and yet you want to let yourself be offered up that same way,” Irini smarts to him.