Chapter 106 The Vampiric Crown
The next morning smelled like antiseptic and smoke.
Even before the sun fully rose, the affected pack territory was already moving. Healers rotated shifts. Patrol units reinforced the tree lines. Ash still lingered in the air where outbuildings had burned. Grief hung heavier than the fog.
I stood near the temporary medical tents, watching as the injured were stabilized for transport. Some would recover fully. Some wouldn’t shift again for months. A few would carry scars that never quite faded.
Every time someone looked at me, I felt it again. Relief. Curiosity. Fear.Blame.
Fred arrived just after sunrise with a convoy, two reinforced transport vehicles, a mobile containment unit and a small team of Council scientists. They moved efficiently, professionally, but there was no disguising the unease in their faces as they approached the tarped bodies laid out under guard.
He stepped out already wearing gloves, his expression sharper than usual. He looked exhausted, but focused. Around him, the team of scientists and field medics began cataloging the remains of the hybrids the pack had managed to kill.
The bodies were laid out on tarps near the treeline.
Even in death, they were unsettling.
Limbs slightly elongated beyond natural proportions. Veins dark and pronounced beneath pale skin. Bone density irregular. Claws partially formed but not fully stabilized into wolf structure.
They were half-finished creations.
Fred crouched beside one of them, gloved hands careful as he examined the distortions. His jaw tightened.
“These aren’t stable integrations,” he muttered.
Darius joined him, arms folded. “We already knew that.”
“No,” Fred said quietly. “You don’t.”
He stood slowly, removing his gloves with deliberate precision.
“There’s something you both need to see.”
His eyes found mine.
We didn’t waste time.
We left the pack territory under heightened patrol and flew straight to Council headquarters. The helicopter ride felt longer this time. Heavier.
Darius stayed close but silent. I could feel the tension radiating from him. Whatever Fred had discovered, it wasn’t minor.
An hour later, we were inside the secured laboratory wing at Council Headquarters. The Council laboratory sat beneath the main headquarters, levels down where reinforced steel and stone insulated secrets from the outside world. The sterile scent hit immediately upon entry. The corridors felt colder than usual, fluorescent lights humming overhead. Fred led us past reinforced observation rooms and biometric doors until we reached a sealed observation wing.
He hesitated before entering.
“The live hybrid we captured,” Fred said quietly, stopping near a reinforced containment chamber. “It died four hours ago during observation.”
Darius’s head and mine snapped toward him as we both spoke at once. “How?”
“That’s the problem,” Fred replied. “We don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer,” Darius said sharply.
I stepped closer to the glass. The chamber had already been cleared, sanitized, but faint claw marks remained on the inner walls.
“It was sedated,” Fred rubbed a hand down his face as he continued. “Its vitals were unstable from the start. Cellular degradation accelerated suddenly. Organs began shutting down simultaneously. It wasn’t natural failure,it was systemic collapse.”
“Shut it down?” I repeated.
He nodded grimly. “Its systems didn’t fail naturally. It was as if a switch flipped.”
Silence settled between us.
A kill switch.
“Like a failsafe?” I asked.
Fred’s eyes flicked to mine. “Possibly.”
A chill crept down my spine.
“You think someone built a kill switch into them,” Darius said.
Fred didn’t answer directly.
Fred motioned for us to follow him deeper into the lab.
“Before it died,” he continued, “we ran full genomic sequencing.”
He pulled up holographic projections in the central lab space. DNA strands rotated in midair—complex, layered, violent in their instability.
“At first glance, they resemble you,” he said, glancing at me.
My stomach tightened.
The projection shifted, highlighting unstable segments, genetic mapping overlays.Three distinct markers glowed across the display.
“Here’s why this disturbs me,” Fred said quietly.
He enlarged sections of the DNA structure.
“These hybrids are vampire-werewolf combinations.”
My pulse slowed.
Like me.
“But,” he continued, zooming in further, “the mutations are sloppy. Inconsistent splice points. Accelerated regenerative triggers without stability safeguards. It’s rushed work. Unethical. Crude.”
He looked at me then,not with blame, but with unease.
“Someone is copying old research,” he said. “But without restraint.”
The word restraint hung in the air. The words landed like ice water down my spine.Old research. My father’s research. I swallowed.
“Old research,” Darius repeated. “Meaning…?”
Fred’s jaw tightened. “Meaning someone accessed archived hybrid experimentation protocols. Council-sealed files.”
Darius’s eyes hardened. “Those are restricted.”
“They were,” Fred corrected softly.
Silence settled.
Whoever was making hybrids now wasn’t rogue in ignorance. They were informed. They were educated. They know what they are doing.
“Whoever it is,” Fred continued, “they’re operating off-ledger. No official documentation. No supply requisitions. No lab authorizations.”
Black market science. Which meant no ethics oversight. No stabilization protocols.
No care if the subjects survived beyond usefulness.
I stared at the frozen genetic map of the dead hybrid.
It wasn’t just violent.
It was disposable.
“What about mine?” I asked quietly.
Fred hesitated.
Darius’s head turned sharply toward him.
Fred nodded slowly. “We took fresh blood samples from you yesterday.”
“You did what?” Darius’s voice was ice.
“She consented,” Fred said calmly.
I had. I needed answers.
Fred tapped another screen.
My genetic structure appeared beside the hybrid’s.
The difference was immediate.
Mine was stable.
Integrated.
Balanced.
Theirs was jagged. Fragmented.
“You were created using precise integration,” Fred explained. “Your father’s wolf DNA was carefully mapped. The vampire contribution wasn’t random.”
My chest tightened, a separate display activated.
My name and face appeared across the screen.
Subject Designation: LY-01.
I went still.
“We took additional blood samples from you last time when you got injured,” Fred said carefully. “Ran comparative lineage mapping.”
Darius’s eyes flicked to me but he said nothing.
“We wanted to identify your maternal line,” Fred continued. “Which coven your vampire half originated from. It could help us trace where someone might be acquiring rare blood.”
I folded my arms instinctively. “Why are you looking for my mother?”
Fred didn’t flinch. “I assumed you’d want to know.”
That answer unsettled me more than the science.
He continued.
“We entered your markers into the full vampire database. Cross-referenced coven registries. Ancestral logs.”
“And?” Darius pressed.
Fred’s jaw tightened.
“She doesn’t exist.”
I blinked. “What do you mean she doesn’t exist?”
“She’s not in any recorded coven lineage. No registry match. No burial records. No migration history.”
“That’s impossible,” Darius said sharply.
Fred shook his head. “It gets stranger.”
He brought up another projection. “It’s as if someone is actively blocking the search. Every query redirects. Every lineage branch ends in encryption.”
“That’s not possible, if someone with Crown-level clearance is suppressing it,” Darius said.
“Exactly.”Fred replied.
Crown-level.I felt the word before I understood it.
Fred zoomed in on my genetic map again.
“There’s more,” he said quietly.
He highlighted ancient markers embedded deep within my vampire sequence.
“These aren’t standard coven identifiers.”
My throat felt dry.
“Not just vampire,” Fred said slowly. “Not just wolf.”
He swallowed.
“Royal vampire lineage markers.”
The room felt smaller and Colder.
Darius stiffened. “Explain.”
Fred hesitated again, like he was weighing whether saying it aloud would make it real.
“These markers only appear in one bloodline,” he said carefully.
My voice barely felt like mine when I spoke.
“Which one?”
Fred looked directly at me.
“The Vampire Crown.”
The words landed like a fracture through glass.
“The First Bloods.”
Silence. Not the tense kind. The catastrophic kind.
I stared at the screen.
The ancient ruling line of vampire society. Not just powerful, foundational. The bloodline that predated covens. The line that held political authority over vampire law.
Now something else was shifting.
If my father had used his own DNA, And that of a royal vampire, This wasn’t random ambition.
This was strategic.
Calculated.
“You said the markers are ancient,” Darius said. “How ancient?”
“Original line,” Fred answered. “Direct descent. No dilution.Pure”
Pure. The word echoed.
“That’s why the system blocked us,” Fred added. “The Vampire Crown maintains its own sealed genealogical registry. It doesn’t feed into the public database.”
My mind reeled.
“You’re saying my mother was,what? Royal?” I demanded.
“I’m saying your DNA contains markers exclusive to that bloodline.”
Fred stepped closer to the projection.
“These markers don’t dilute easily. They’re dominant. Potent. Rare.”
My pulse pounded in my ears.
“If someone was trying to recreate you,” Fred continued slowly, “they wouldn’t just need wolf DNA or normal Vampire DNA.”
He looked at me pointedly.
“They’d need this.”
Royal vampire blood. Suddenly the twisted hybrids made a new kind of sense. If someone was attempting to replicate my stability, They were missing a critical component. My mother.
Which explained the mutations. The instability. The suffering.
“Why wasn’t my vampiric bloodline in my file?” I asked quietly.
Fred exhaled.
“It should have been.”
Darius’s expression hardened into something lethal.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning either the data was buried intentionally,” Fred said, “or someone with high clearance removed it.”
The first crack.
That’s what it felt like.
The ground beneath everything I believed about myself splintering. My father had engineered me using his DNA. And a vampire.
But not just any vampire.
Royal lineage. A First Blood.
Which meant. He hadn’t chosen randomly.He had selected blood tied to power.To hierarchy.
And someone now was trying to reverse engineer it.
Without access to that same lineage.
“Could someone be using archived samples?” Darius asked.
Fred shook his head.
“If they had true First Blood markers, their hybrids wouldn’t look like that, they would look like Lyra or her shifted form”
Which meant whoever was building monsters now didn’t have access to the royal line.
They were improvising. Copying incomplete research. Creating unstable weapons.