Karla stopped dead and spun back to Junior; a look of confusion on her face. What she had heard was too much of a coincidence.
“The vampire who wrote the letter also wrote a collection of journals, I checked on the library database and Father has them in a room just down there.” Junior said excitedly, pointing behind him. “I think we may be about to find out what happened to Eloim, somehow I suspect he's ended up in the past.”
Karla strode forward pushing Junior to one side as she started down the corridor. “What room do we want? If you are right, when we find him, I'll make him wish he had been dragged into the demon realm.” Karla stopped and turned back to Junior. “And why hasn't anyone worked this out before now?”
Junior stood and watched Karla as she turned again to stride down the corridor. “Because I only just found the letter in a stack of papers that hadn't been catalogued and the journals are in a room full of unprocessed books, the database just says Jieller Wilkham, five journals.”
Karla stopped again and looked around. “Which room?” she demanded. “And who is Jieller Wilkham?”
Junior indicated a room to her right. “He's the vampire that spoke to Eloim.”
1686 NORTHERN ENGLAND
Jieller Wilkham moved carefully through the ruins of the castle, the building was a victim of the civil war or the dark days under the Lord Protector Cromwell. He knew he lived in a land that was in constant civil turmoil and had been since the death of Queen Elizabeth, her leadership had led to a brief period of calm for the commoners of the land. Jieller had been around long enough to witness how quickly a mighty state could fall. The seventeenth century had been a disaster for England, from the loss of its greatest queen, through civil war and all the horrors that followed.
Worse was coming as the Catholic Church regained favour with the rise of the new King James II. The land faced an increase of secret Vatican forces that aimed to claim back the country and had begun to hunt down his kind. For centuries the secret war had raged across Europe but for a while, England had been a relatively safe haven. The Protestant leaders who ruled the land didn’t have the forces or knowledge to hunt vampires, such information was jealously guarded by Rome. Within months of the new king’s coronation, the Vatican had dispatched their hunters and the battles had begun. Vampires across the south had been hunted down but in the north the clans had stopped and defeated them.
While the humans fought for control of the nation, the vampire clans and church fought their own secret war. The secret war had taken a disastrous turn when first the nest living in the caves of Nottingham had been destroyed and quickly after, both Lincoln and Coventry clans had fallen too. A few desperate survivors told of what was most feared: the Knights of Blood were on English shores. Jieller had escaped York just in time and had been hiding out in the countryside for almost a month; England was at the point of being lost.
To be continued.