The Slayer Chronicles 2

This is part two of the Slayer Chronicles. Read Part One.

Journal Entry - September 15, 2023

I lied when I said I didn't shed a tear. Though I had known for a year or more that my beautiful, intelligent, and sexy wife's life had been consumed by Jamison, the love required to destroy the remaining shell was beyond the pale.

We had met in London. I had attended an international business conference while she finalized her doctoral thesis at Cambridge in anthropology. Our paths intersected on a tour of the Bodiam Castle. I was the tourist; she was the guide. The three-hour tour morphed into a four-hour dinner that became a five-year marriage. Unorthodox would define our relationship from the glorious beginning until its brutal end. I managed a billion-dollar legacy trust for my family, which I will not name; she chased a groundbreaking theory that the undead existed in every community. A letter she had discovered hidden in the archives of Cambridge had transformed her life, figuratively and literally. The writer was Sir Edward Dalyngrigge, a 14th-century celebrated knight of Richard II and, as the Ward of London, a slayer of the undead. The letter led to Lara's controversial anthropological success and transformation into the living dead.

I will never hold my vibrant, beautiful, and exotic wife again, for Jamison stole our life from us. Wiping the last tears from my eyes, I rechecked my weapons for the showdown that would surely come when the sun sunk below the horizon. Sir Edwards's confession and guide, buried in the basement archives, an embarrassment to the 14th-century royal family, had become my manifesto of war.

I doused my head with olive oil abhorrent to the undead as a rotten corpse to the living. I checked the tension on the Crossbow with its cedar arrows. The wooden shafts would not destroy the undead but would maim and weaken them long enough to entrap them. I tested the salinity of the swimming pool as salt water neutralized their ability to transform into various forms to escape. The gold chains gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight. The undead coveted gold. Its consumption reformed decayed tissue and maintained the appearance of youth. Externally, its purity restrained and bound them. The bear trap of silver resisted the undead's supernatural strength, and its jaws, once snapped closed, could not be broken. Last, I reviewed the weather report, disclosing clear skies tomorrow as the sun was my greatest weapon and executioner. I murmured words of thanks to Sir Edward, who had died imprisoned in an asylum, for his guide of wisdom.

Red streaks blazed across the sky as if the clouds were on fire as the sun's orb dipped past the horizon. I waited as shadows gathered and joined together to become nightfall. I sensed his morbid presence before I saw him. A tinge of fear pricked my heart, but justifiable hate pushed it aside as Jamison, the shaved head, black-eyed adonis and Charleston's Chief of Police, stood across the dark pool waters. Bats circled and squeaked above me with a fervency of hunger.

"Where is Lara, Jon? What have you done with my wife, my Queen?" he snarled. “What is that stench?”

***