Hunting Death

Chapter 23

According to the report, Luca had been born in the early part of the 15th century to a vampire named Tobias Romero, and a gypsy named Catalina Jull.

"He was a real hybrid?" Madison asked suddenly, looking up at Keith as her eyes sparkled with curiosity.

Keith would swear later on that his heart skipped a beat, the way she seemed so fascinated by it all, like her father had been. He saw no fear in Madison now, whereas he'd been terrified after seeing Cybil's true face. As beautiful as her brown eyes might have been, glowing almost red, like rubies, when her glistening fangs descended, when she'd torn into... No, he had to stop himself, he didn't have the time or the stomach for a trip down memory lane. Taking another swig from his thermos, he joined Madison once more at the table.

"I presume you've read the story of Romeo and Juliet?" He asked, throwing Madison completely off guard.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Check the names again Madison, do you notice anything, strange, about them?"

Madison took a moment to study the family tree again, shaking her head in the process, at first, she had no idea what Keith meant, until she saw it, her head darting up. "Romero? And Jull? Is that what you're talking about?"

Keith nodded. "Now, it's said, and obviously I can't prove this, but it's said, that Romeo and Juliet was based on the tale of the first hybrid."

"Interesting. Do tell."

"Well, the way I heard it, long before Luca had been born, before his parents had even met, lycans and vampires consorted regularly. That is, until a young lycan woman accidentally bit her vampire lover and he died. Nowadays, a person has a much higher chance, given the current advances in medicine, of surviving the bite of a werewolf and in all likelihood, probably wouldn't even turn, but at the time, a bite usually caused humans to go senile, since, as you're already aware, shapeshifting came from a virus, lycans are basically a walking rabies infection waiting to happen."

"So he got dementia?"

Keith shook his head. "No, not quite. That's usually what happened to the people bitten by werewolves since they weren't capable of treating the rabies virus, the vaccine hadn't been discovered yet, but a vampire bitten by a lycan deteriorates much faster. I guess it has something to do with them being made up of mostly blood rather than water like humans."

"So he died pretty quickly?"

"In a matter of days, and it was an agonizing process as the virus ate at his brain, and made him hallucinate, the works. As you can imagine, his sire, as well as the rest of his vampire family took offense to his death, and they sought out the young lycan. One of them lost control and bit her, and realized too late that she wouldn't be able to stop herself, she ended up draining the lycan dry, and only then did they discover, as her body basically caved in on itself, that she'd been several months pregnant."

Madison gasped. "Oh my God!"

"Up until that point, no one realized the possibility of carrying an immortal child, most mortal women died after a couple of weeks of conception, and here this lycan had gone almost five months already. It shook them to their core, and from that point on, they steered clear of each other. A bite from either proved fatal, and the idea of a hybrid, an unknown, scared them all to death."

"I can imagine. But that didn't stop Romeo and Juliet, did it?"

Keith laughed, he really enjoyed this, and Madison appeared to be eating it up. "Anyway," he continued. "Tobias, a direct descendant of John the Mason during the Roman empire and Catalina, a young lycan out of Greece, her parents related to the original clans of India, met and fell in love."