Vampire Empress
VAMPIRE EMPRESS
Vampire for Hire #21
by
J.R. RAIN
MATTHEW S. COX
Other Books by J.R. Rain
The World of Samantha Moon
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE
Moon Dance
Vampire Moon
American Vampire
Moon Child
Christmas Moon (novella)
Vampire Dawn
Vampire Games
Moon Island
Moon River
Vampire Sun
Moon Dragon
Moon Shadow
Vampire Fire
Midnight Moon
Moon Angel
Vampire Sire
Moon Master
Dead Moon
Lost Moon
Vampire Destiny
Infinite Moon
Vampire Empress
Vampire Train (coming soon)
Moon Warrior (coming soon)
SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES
Moon Bayou (with Rod Kierkegaard)
Blood Moon (with Matthew S. Cox)
Parallel Moon (with Kris Carey)
Vampire Reign (with Chanel Smith, coming soon)
SAMANTHA MOON ORIGINS
with Matthew S. Cox
New Moon Rising
Moon Mourning
Haunted Moon
SAMANTHA MOON ADVENTURES
with Matthew S. Cox
Banshee Moon
Moon Monster
Moon Ripper
Witch Moon
Moon Goddess
Moon Blaze
Golem Moon
Moon Maidens
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE COLLECTIONS
Vampire for Hire Boxed Set: Books 1 and 2
Samantha Moon: Books 1-4
Samantha Moon Rising: Books 5-7
Samantha Moon Forever: Books 8-10
Samantha Moon Fatalis: Books 11-14
Samantha Moon Hellfire: Books 15-17
Samantha Moon Reborn: Books 18-21 (coming soon)
Samantha Moon: Books 1-8
Samantha Moon Phantasm: Books 9-16
Vampire for Hire: First Four Stories
Moon Tales: Eight Short Stories
Moon Shots: Eight Short Stories
Moon Quakes: Eight Short Stories (coming soon)
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE EXTRAS
Vampire Alley (poem)
Moon Extras (Bonus Scenes)
Moon Dance (Deluxe Edition)
Other Books and Series
STANDALONE NOVELS
A Small Sea Rises (coming soon)
The Pale Cold Light
All the Way Back Home
Winter Wind
Silent Echo
The Body Departed
The Grail Quest
Elvis Has Not Left the Building
The Lost Ark
The Journey (with Piers Anthony)
The Worm Returns (with Piers Anthony)
Lavabull (with Piers Anthony)
Jack and the Giants (with Piers Anthony)
Dolfin Tayle (with Piers Anthony)
Dragon Assassin (with Piers Anthony)
Lost Eden (with Elizabeth Basque)
Judas Silver (with Elizabeth Basque)
The Vampire Club (with Scott Nicholson)
Cursed (with Scott Nicholson)
Ghost College (with Scott Nicholson)
The Black Fang Betrayal (with multiple authors)
JIM KNIGHTHORSE SERIES
Dark Horse
The Mummy Case
Hail Mary
Clean Slate
Night Run (coming soon)
THE WITCHES SERIES
The Witch and the Gentleman
The Witch and the Englishman
The Witch and the Huntsman (with Rod Kierkegaard)
The Witch and the Wolfman (with Rod Kierkegaard)
The Witch and the Hangman (with Matthew S. Cox, coming soon)
NICK CAINE SERIES
with Aiden James
Temple of the Jaguar
Treasure of the Deep
Pyramid of the Gods
Legend of the Thunderbird (coming soon)
THE WATSON FILES
with Chanel Smith
Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare
Sherlock Holmes and the Lost Da Vinci
Sherlock Holmes and the Werewolf of West End
Sherlock Holmes and the Kiss of the Vampire (coming soon)
WINTER SOLTSICE SERIES
with Matthew S. Cox
Convergence
Containment
Catalyst
Catacombs
Centurion (coming soon)
ALEXIS SILVER SERIES
with Matthew S. Cox
Silver Light
Deep Silver
Silver Quarrel
Silver Cauldron
Silver Fox (coming soon)
MADDY WIMSEY SERIES
with Matthew S. Cox
The Devil’s Eye
The Drifting Gloom
Dark Mercy
The Queen’s Gambit (coming soon)
DEAD DETECTIVE SERIES
with Rod Kierkegaard
The Dead Detective
Deadbeat Dad
Deadwood (coming soon)
MAJOR QUATERMAIN
The Spear (with Randy Keys)
The Cross (with Randy Keys, coming soon)
ICE WOLF
Ice Wolf (with H.P. Mallory)
She Wolf (with Crystal-Rain Love, coming soon)
IMMORTAL OPERATIVE
(with Matthew S. Cox)
Broken Ice
Broken Wing (coming soon)
THE GABRIEL FILES
with Aiden James
The Soul Taker
The Ghost Maker (coming soon)
THE PSI QUARTET
with A.K. Alexander
Hear No Evil
See No Evil
Speak No Evil
Touch No Evil
THE SPINOZA TRILOGY
The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo
The Vampire Who Played Dead
The Vampire in the Iron Mask
FOUR ELEMENTS TRILOGY
with Matthew S. Cox
The Elementalist
The Black Rose
The Wakefield Curse
THE ALADDIN TRILOGY
with Piers Anthony
Aladdin Relighted
Aladdin Sins Bad
Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman
THE WALKING PLAGUE TRILOGY
with Elizabeth Basque
Zombie Patrol
Zombie Rage
Zombie Mountain
THE SPIDER TRILOGY
Bad Blood (with Scott Nicholson, H.T. Night)
Spider Web (with Scott Nicholson)
Spider Bite (with Scott Nicholson)
TEAM QUANTUM TRILOGY
The Accidental Superheroine (with Kris Carey)
My Big Fat Accidental Superheroine Wedding (with Kris Carey)
Accidental No More (with Matthew S. Cox)
SHORT STORIES
The Bleeder: A Short Story
The Santa Call and Other Stories
Vampire Rain and Other Stories
Teeth and Other Stories
Vampire Nights and Other Stories
Vampire Blues and Other Stories
Vampire Dreams and Other Stories
Halloween Moon and Other Stories
Vampire Gold and Other Stories
Blue Moon and Other Stories
Dark Side of the Moon: A Samantha Moon Story
Vampire Requiem: A Samantha Moon Story
Moon Love: A Samantha Moon Story
The Vampire on the Train: A Spinoza Story
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Easy Rider: A Jim Knighthorse Story
Skeleton Jim: A Short Story
Vampire Road and Other Stories
Moon Musings and Other Stories
Moon Beast: A Samantha Moon Story
Vampire Widow and Other Stories
Moon Maze: A Samantha Moon Story (coming soon)
Silver Hammer: A Samantha Moon Story (coming soon)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Silver Rain: Stories (coming soon)
Dark Rain: Stories
Blood Rain: Stories
Black Rain: Stories
Red Rain: Forty-One Stories
Moonlight & Monsters: Ten Vampires Tales
For Young Readers
STANDALONE NOVELS
The Emerald River
Forever Silent
The Angel and the Gift
Spirit Mountain (with Alexandra Swan)
YOUR CHOICE BOOKS
Deep Sea Danger
The Legend of Eagle Eye Mountain
Playoff Pressure
THE ROBOT TWINS
The Mystery of the Walking Statue
The Secret of Stonehead Island (with Randy Keys)
The Mystery of the Lightning Cave (with Randy Keys, coming soon)
KIDQUEST ADVENTURES
The Secret of the Sphinx
Treasure of Oak Island (with Randy Keys, coming soon)
THE DISTANT WORLD TRILOGY
Dare to Enter a Distant World
Dare to Rule a Distant World (with Alexandra Swan, coming soon)
Dare to Escape a Distant World (with Alexandra Swan, coming soon)
TEAM LEGEND
The Enchantress (with Randy Keys)
The Giants (with Randy Keys, coming soon)
Vampire Empress
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2020 by J.R. Rain
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Reading Sample: Cursed
Reading Sample: Judas Silver
About J.R. Rain
About Matthew S. Cox
Vampire Empress
Chapter One
Unfair
Resigned to the whim of fate, I walk to the edge of the charred patch of ground and stare out at the jungle.
I’m almost upset at the animals out there for being unaware of what happened here. Perhaps a little jealousy on my part. They say ignorance is bliss, but animals are happy right up until something kills them. I wonder if pigs love the farmer the way dogs feel about their owners. Do they understand they’re going to be betrayed at some point? What’s the last thing to go through a pig’s mind before it’s slaughtered, other than a bullet?
Why am I even thinking this, being jealous of jungle birds and monkeys? It’s not their fault I’m about to do something reckless and dangerous. There’s too much on my mind for me to trust myself making any big decisions. Too much emotion and adrenaline—or whatever passes for adrenaline in my body now. Guess since I’m technically alive again and my body does seem to need actual food, maybe adrenaline is more than a metaphor.
So, yeah. Venezuela.
Freakin’ Elizabeth.
She’s seriously pissed me off in two big ways. Well, three, but her plan to take over an entire alternate world isn’t as in my face as what she did to my kids. She threw us all—me, the kids, Allison, Kingsley, the creators she kidnapped, and some light warriors—into what people have been calling an ‘eternity prison,’ essentially a fake dimension floating out in the empty space between permanent dimensions.
Things are getting confusing here since everyone’s calling different things ‘dimensions.’ There are two meanings to the word. First, the vertical meaning. The entirety of all creation exists as a series of 100 dimensional planes. Being a mere human—or at least having the brainpower of one—it’s impossible for me to see their true arrangement, but suffice to say they’re kind of like a column standing on top of each other like a pile of boxes. Earth, our reality, is on the third dimension. With each dimension one goes ‘up,’ things get exponentially more powerful… and weirder. For example, creatures native to the ninth dimension can mentally alter the realities of dimensions below them. Super advanced crap. Anyway, the 100th dimension is where the Origin resides. As far as I know, the 100th dimension is the Origin.
So, that’s the up and down concept.
In addition to talking about one-to-one-hundred, the word ‘dimension’ is also used to describe going sideways within the same vertical level. Think of it like a tall filing cabinet with 100 drawers. Earth, our world, is in the third drawer up from the floor. Inside our drawer, there exists an infinite number of folders. Each of those folders represents an alternate reality containing the entire universe we can see. All solar systems, planets, galaxies, and so forth straight out to the theoretical leading edge of matter expanding from the Big Bang. All of it fits into our third-dimensional folder.
Beings can survive on any dimension they are native to. For instance, a third dimensional being, like a human, can go sideways as far as they want as long as they stay inside the third drawer. Going up has bad effects, more severe the further from level three one goes. The worst effect is typically complete disintegration. It happens much faster the farther from home one goes vertically.
Going down has other problems. One doesn’t risk disintegration, but de-volution. A higher dimensional being going down becomes weaker, starts to lose their powers, may lose intelligence, and could end up trapped with no way to go back where they belong.
However, as long as we stay in our respective drawers, we can go, say, two lateral dimensions over or two million away from where we were born without suffering crazy side effects.
So this eternity prison sat in the dead space between these ‘folders’ in the third drawer. By means of magic way beyond my understanding, while our physical bodies floated inside tiny prisons, our souls, spirits, ghosts, or consciousness—whatever you want to call it—were shot out across the third dimensional level into other alternate realities. Elizabeth found a way to throw us into worlds quite like ours, which happened to be aligned chronologically with painful or significant moments in the lives of our alternate selves. Time is a constant, but dimensions aren’t necessarily all on the same page.
For example, in one dimension, it’s still 1983 when I was only nine. The Sam there is nine, too.
See, with an infinite number of possible realities, it’s almost guaranteed that some worlds will exist where a highly similar set of circumstances produced a highly similar situation. For example, a woman named Samantha Radiance Sundance married a man named Danny Moon—and weird crappola happened to them—in at least 1,432 separate realities. Elizabeth forced our astral selves to visit these other worlds while our bodies remained locked inside crystal prisons. I’m still not completely sure what her goal was. No, I do know. It was meant to distract us... possibly forever.
Prison indeed.
And each reality I visited felt an awful lot like some kind of test or video game scenario which I escaped only after taking some
action that ‘solved’ the scenario. Once I got the answer correct, my astral self leapt to another world. Since it doesn’t make any sense for Elizabeth to ‘test’ us, my guess is she either wanted to mess with our heads or keep us overwhelmed with grief, fear, panic, or helplessness. Again, forever.
Such a bitch.
Something else I considered. Sitting in an interdimensional prison is undoubtedly a strong risk factor for developing insanity, so she likely had to keep our minds busy. I figure as soon as someone goes insane, they probably can’t be trapped in a dimensional prison... and somehow slip out.
Regarding me. No, I didn’t break out because I went insane. I broke out to avoid going insane. And to stop Elizabeth. Her prison had been highly effective. Only myself, Anthony, and Max managed to escape on our own. Fortunately, we broke everyone else out on our way to the exit before the whole place collapsed.
Back to why I’m pissed at her.
The many, many reasons why I’m pissed at her.
Tammy’s experience involved meeting a fourteen-year-old version of herself in a reality where both me as well as Anthony had died, and Danny turned into a sleazeball manager of an adult strip club who ran the women like prostitutes while claiming not to realize ‘such things went on there.’ The Tammy from said reality crashed hard, becoming a drug-using wild child totally out of control and… my Tammy happened to land there on the day the poor girl got herself killed during a high-speed police chase.
If the creator, Quentin, is to be believed—and my fingers are crossed he is—he’s modified that reality so my death there had been faked by me, in an effort to conceal having become a vampire. With any luck, alternate Tammy won’t be dying in a gruesome traffic accident... and will meet me again soon. I sure hope ‘alternate me’ can talk her down.
But I’m not pissed at Elizabeth for that, though. The events of an alternate reality would have played out the way they played out regardless. No, I’m pissed at her for making Tammy witness herself in such a state. She now believes the only reason she didn’t end up in the same situation is me. And… the scary part is, if I’d listened to Danny soon after becoming a vampire and actually left, pretending to die… it’s frighteningly likely the same thing would have happened here, too.