Author's Note

After consideration, (and after the fact) it seemed that the last chapter of Vendetta was the natural place to close out that part of the story, before beginning the third installment. Most of the main Dupont story lines had been wrapped and the vanago issues will be dealt with in the final installment, titled, appropriately enough, "Vanago".

So as not to leave all the folks who've already read chapter 9 hanging, wondering where the next chapter was, I thought I'd explain why the story had a suddenly been marked 'complete'.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of "Vanago". The entire chapter is also up under that title.

Thanks so much for reading and especially to all the folks who've been kind enough to feed an author's ego and leave feedback.

Vanago

1

Her name was Zlata Barinov and she'd been born on the streets of Kiev under the rule of the last Tsar of Russia. She had grown up and plied her trade amidst the bloody series of revolutions that burned across all the Russias. A cutpurse and a whore with a face like the stone angels in the cathedral of St. Volodymyr, who had found herself on the wrong side of the Bolsheviks when the revolutionaries toppled the Emperor's loyalists.

All this she remembered, after more years than she could comprehend, trapped in the shape of a beast, with a beast's mentality and a beast's inability to grasp the concept of time. And time had passed. A great deal of time. The world had changed, and she had changed with it. A hundred years a beast and the urges of the beast still lingered. The instincts still pulled at her, even as her human brain struggled to integrate with her new reality. She had been a predator before a Gypsy hag had cursed her with the last blood speckled breath from her wrinkled lips and turned her into a predator in form as well as mind. That hadn't changed. She was still that predator. The thrill of the kill still made her blood thrum, whether it be slitting the throat of a man who'd paid to lie between her thighs, or hunting down prey and ripping soft, vulnerable flesh with teeth and claws.

It was all the same. Men were still the same as they had always been. Loosing their sense of caution and reason at the sight of a pretty face. Much less the sight of a naked body stumbling out of the woods along the side of the road.

The truck screeched to a halt, the man behind the wheel gaping. He climbed out, approaching her carefully.

"You all right?" He couldn't take his eyes off her, even as he asked the question. He had a soft, pear-shaped body and thinning hair. "You hurt? Can I help you?"

Her grasp of English was precarious. There had been an English diplomat that enjoyed certain perversions that had kept her for half a year in comfort, in rooms on the nicer side of Kiev. She had picked up a rudimentary understanding of the language. But then, he hadn't wanted her for her skills of conversation. She'd left scars on his body and he'd enjoyed the getting of them.

"Yes," she said, staring up at him with large, helpless eyes. He fumbled for his coat, helping her into it.

"What happened? Somebody hurt you? You want I should call the sheriff?"

She shook her head and pointed up the road.

"You need a lift? I can give you a lift. Where you headed? Not far with no clothes, huh? What happened to your clothes?"

"I have - - what you call - - bad luck?" Her voice was rusty from disuse. But he seemed to understand her well enough. He opened the door on the passenger side for her, and she slid in, vinyl seat cold against her bare bottom. He got in, moistening his lips, eyes flicking over her legs.

"Where to?"

"East," she said. There was the faintest trace of a scent to the east.

Check out the rest of Chapter 1 under the fiction 'Vanago'