A sequel to the Gun Princess Royale. Yanked off the streets of New Angeles by the tenebrous Pantheon organisation, and gifted with a deadly avatar known as a Diva, Nikola 'Sola' Raynar is a Lanfear - a huntress of Bloodliners and Wolvren. When she isn't hunting down the denizens of the night, she's busy finding ways to build up her nest egg for the day of her retirement from Pantheon. But when her rampant greed carries her a little too far, she finds herself in a mess that wasn't entirely of her own making. And things only get worse when the one who recruited her, the Goddess Aphrodite, decides to use Nikola to draw an enemy of Pantheon's out of the darkness and into the light.

The question regarding the nature of Pantheon has persistently antagonized Bloodliner and Wolvren historians for centuries.

Even in the modern age of cyberspace, where vast oceans of information lie, evidence of the existence and identity of Pantheon fails to go beyond the anecdotal.

Thus, what do the Bloodliners and Wolvren know about Pantheon?

For that matter, what do any of us know about Pantheon?

First of all, let’s establish that we are not discussing the ancient Roman temple to the gods.

Rather, we are referring to the shadowy organization (dare we say ‘entity’) known in underground circles simply as Pantheon. And it is Pantheon that has firmly interposed itself between the rival species formally known as the Bloodliners and the Wolvren. Its origin is unknown and what hearsay has been recorded indicates it has existed since before antiquity. It is also known that this organization is ruled by eleven entities that go by the names of the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon, with one notable absence: the goddess Artemis.

However, her legacy lives on in the form of the Aventis-Fury system that she inspired to create.

In fact, there are several hundred Aventis spread out across the world. These individuals are Pantheon’s claws and fangs. They are the wolves that hunt in the dark corners of mortal society. They are judge, jury, and executioner, spreading Pantheon law without regard for borders and jurisdictions. And the Aventis have wolves of their own, namely their Furies, creatures bearing the appearance of young women yet possessing preternatural speed, strength, and combat prowess.

Therefore, if we are to address the question of whether or not Pantheon exists, the answer is unequivocally, ‘yes’, and the staunchest evidence lies in the bloodied halls, rooms, and dark, dank alleyways where Bloodliners and Wolvren have met their demise at the end of a Fury’s sword or spear.

Yet even if we assert that Pantheon is real, its objectives outside of maintaining the peace between the Bloodlines and the Wolvren Clans are unknown. What can be conjectured from the evidence at hand is that Pantheon possesses a technology sufficiently advanced to elevate it to the realm of the gods, and if they ever chose to turn the Aventis and their Furies lose upon humanity then Heaven help us all.

At its simplest, modern Vampire or Bloodliner society is organized as follows.
Every nation with a Vampire presence has a Senate populated by the Primatriarchs and lesser ranked Primogen Praetor and Primogen Consul.
The highest ranked Bloodliner without a seat on the Senate is the Primogen Legate.
Bloodliner Primogens have direct control over their Prides.
Prides come in sizes large and small, and their members number from the dozens to the hundreds. Within a Pride are the Chapter Houses, and their members rank from lowly grunts to those who serve as a Primogen’s lieutenants.
Although their greater society is loosely modelled around the governing hierarchy of ancient Rome, the structure of the individual Prides can mirror that of the criminal organizations with whom many are closely tied. But the seven Vampire Bloodlines are also intertwined in the dealings of major corporations, for there isn’t a single sizeable business entity across any nation that doesn’t have a Bloodliner or two pulling at its strings.

Sola is my unofficial middle name.

In other words, it’s the nickname that most of the Aventis with whom I’m on friendly terms call me by, thereby the reason why Zen called me Sola before rushing off into the city’s subterranean wilds.

In a sense, it’s quite fitting.

Sola is feminine for ‘alone’.

That’s me.

I have a few friends like Zen and other Aventis girls who serve Pantheon. I have a Handler – sort of like a manager – who keeps me busy and on track with my various assignments handed down from the offices of the gods. Hence, I have people that I can talk to, but they don’t change the nature of my loneliness.

No one can, or rather, I haven’t met anyone who’s been able to.

Thus, for now all I can do is serve my time chained to Pantheon and hope that the self-proclaimed Aphrodite – bitch Goddess of Love – will honor her promise to me once my sentence is up. And the nature of my sentence is serving Pantheon for seven years as one of their Lanfears, and the master of a very powerful Diva by the name of Anthea.

So, what is my full name?

Nikola “Sola” Raynar.

I have to admit, I do like the name I was given by Aphrodite, however, the Sola part came later when it became widely known that I preferred carrying out my missions alone, and that included my patrols, such as the one I was performing tonight which had me venturing out into the city to perform a sweep of my assigned area of responsibility, otherwise known as my Zone, my jurisdiction, or simply my turf.

New Angeles was a sprawling, towering megalopolis that sat on the ruins of a washed away L.A., a half dozen national forests, and a great deal of arid land, stretching for more than two hundred miles along the west coast, and protected by a massive sea wall that grew longer by the day. Any year now, that wall would join up with the one sheltering San Fran from an angry ocean. And pretty soon, San Fran and New Angeles would morph together to form a Technopolis rivaling those of the east coast.

What would this mean for me?

It would mean more ground to cover.

Or as some of the Triple-A ranked Aventis were fond of saying, ‘More territory to rule’.

I left the marketplace behind in search for a quiet, desolate alleyway.

I needed some place out of sight and mind to summon my Cradle and swap places with my Diva, Anthea, currently snug in the metal sarcophagus.

Unfortunately, finding a deserted spot was easier said than done.

Street level New Angeles in my Zone was a maze of side streets and alleyways. Neither was it flat, so at times one would arrive at a deteriorated flight of permacrete stairs leading either up or down to the next street or dank alley. There were also tunnels and underpasses forming a man-made warren beneath the megascrapers, circling around their foundations that plunged deep into the bedrock.

Both the streets, the alleys, and the underpasses had much in common such as an overabundance of homeless people.

Walking around for a while down a handful of narrow alleys and a couple of side streets, I stepped past derelict after derelict, before coming across a dead body stripped clean of its meager possessions. I knew it was dead because there was no lifeforce aura surrounding the corpse of a middle aged man with premature grey hair who’d been left naked to rest beside a drainage pipe in the crook of a back alley service door to a high rise building.

I can’t say the dead tugged at my heartstrings.

Nor can I say that I felt pity for them.

Rather, it was more like bitterness and resentment that welled up inside me.

It wasn’t directed at the dead, nor the living, but at the entity that was New Angeles.

I blamed the city for how people lived and how they met their ends.

Someone once described New Angeles as a meat grinder.

I didn’t quite agree.

I saw the city as an example of Hell on Earth, and because of that, I couldn’t leave the dead that I encountered as they were. It just felt wrong of me to walk by and not doing something for them, so I chose to tag the corpses for the authorities to recover.

The cops that rarely ventured down to the streets carried photronic markers they could attach to a deceased body. More often than not, it was an enforcement bot that did the bulk of the tagging. Then a robot Undertaker – a coffin shaped disposal droid – would then fly in and collect the corpse. If their gene print was on record, then their file in the city registry would be updated and closed. If not, they would be recorded, classified as dead, and then incinerated in one of New Angeles’ scores of crematoriums. It was hardly a fitting sendoff to the afterlife, but to me it was better than just leaving them to rot away or be eaten down to the bone by rats in a forgotten corner of the city.

I kept a sizeable supply of those photronic markers in the Cradle that followed me around in its pocket of folded space-time. Summoning the immense sarcophagus shaped device, I watched the air beside me ripple like the surface of a pool of water as the Pocket Space surrounding the Cradle unfolded a little, and a metallic tentacle emerged from the region of disturbed air to deliver a marker to my waiting hand. The Cradle then retreated deep into its self-generated Pocket Space, while I attached the marker to the dead man.

Then I hung back and waited for the coffin-bot to show up and claim the body.

Minutes later, a robot Undertaker flew in on jets of superheated air.

To my mild surprise, it wasn’t shaped like a coffin, but instead resembled a giant flying cockroach.

Not having seen it before, I briefly wondered if this was a new model being trialed in the city.

The mechanical roach navigated down the narrow alley, hovered over the deceased, then shut off its lifters as it dropped to the ground on spindly legs. To make thing easier for the bot, I’d laid the dead man on his back in the middle of the alleyway. The machine positioned itself over the corpse, opened its belly, then lowered itself over the body to collect it. Once the corpse was swallowed up, the roach-bot fired up its thrusters and then launched itself into the air.

I watched all this happen from a secluded doorway shrouded in darkness, peering at the Undertaker as it rocketed up the manmade canyon formed by the surrounding megascrapers. When it disappeared from view, I stepped out and then continued along my merry way.

It wasn’t long before I arrived at another dead body.

But the situation was markedly different this time.

For starters, the dude had perished inside a ramshackle plastic shack that he’d had called home. But two destitute old men were in the process of dragging the corpse out of its abode. They probably intended to make the place their own. It irked me to see them do this without any regard for the deceased, however, I waited until they’d dumped the body on the cracked permacrete and turned their backs on it before making my move.

Sneaking up on them, I tagged the corpse while they were busy inventorying the few possessions the previous owner had kept in the shack. As such, it took them a short while to notice me. Startled by my presence, they grew quickly wary of me, but it wasn’t long before they turned brave.

Some men choose to hide their vile intentions behind a cocky swagger.

Some disguise it behind innocent words.

Then there are those who prefer the silent, slow, and intimidating approach.

These two were the latter.

Moving in harmony, they headed toward me with hard expressions on their faces, and a hungry light in their eyes.

No doubt, they saw me as an easy target. After all, for all intents and purposes, I looked like a slender, sixteen-year old girl dressed in worn clothing, the very image of a runaway teenager, possibly eking out an existence as a street whore.

Unfortunately for them, looks can be deceiving.

Facing the pair of homeless men, I hid both my hands behind my back as I summoned my Cradle again with a thought pulse. My body concealed the small region of distorted air from their view, so they were unaware of the Cradle using its tentacles to drop off two knives to my waiting hands. Feeling their grips in my palms, I recognized them as my favorite hunting knives. Holding them firmly but not tightly, I watched the two men approach me for a short while before bringing my hands into view. The sight of the blades stopped them dead in their tracks and gave them something to think about.

For example, where had I been hiding those menacing looking knives?

What kind of girl roamed the back alleys with weapons on hand?

And last, but not least, was I here to skewer them and possibly rob them?

I decided it was best to open and forthcoming with these two gentlemen down on their luck. But first, I quickly twirled both knives, though my heart almost stopped when I nearly dropped one. Fortunately, I maintained my cool girl façade while staring at the two elderly men.

“I didn’t come here to hunt you. I came to make sure this body is properly disposed of. An Undertaker bot will come to collect it.” I gave the men a fearless smile. “If you’ll just be patient for a few minutes, I’d really appreciate it.”

They traded looks before one of them asked, “What the Hell are you talking about?”

My smile wavered. “Hmm?”

“You come here flashing your fancy knives—telling us to be patient?”

“Yes…and?”

“Where do you get off telling us to be patient?”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re not going to be patient?”

“I’m going to call the authorities. I’m sure if we yell loud enough, we’ll attract a cop-drone. Then you get to tell the cops to be patient. How does that sound?”

Perhaps emboldened by his brazen companion, the other old homeless man threw in his two-cents worth. “How ‘bout’s we tell the cops you threaten us with your knives? We tell ’em you charged us. We tell ’em you came at us. We tell ’em you try’n to kill us. How does that sound? Maybe we get some reward.”

They did have a point.

A third party observing the scene would easily assume I was the aggressor, what with the foot long knives I was wielding while staring down two old men in a back alley that had never seen better days, and corpse lying nearby to boot. However, I had no intention of backing down, so I ran through my options and quickly settled on one.

I smiled politely at the two old men. “Then you won’t mind if I take the body with me.”

They frowned unhappily.

Obviously, they’d intended to strip the dead man down for all he was worth.

I continued smiling at them. “I’ll move the body so that it’s out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind, right?”

Once again, they traded looks, and I decided to watch them intently.

Specifically, I was studying their weakly glowing lifeforce aura’s.

Why?

Because there’s always a tell – a sign of when someone decides upon a course of action and then acts upon it. It’s a coalescing of energies into a little bundle that then erupts from their aura like a miniature solar flare. That’s what I’d been watching for – the swirling contraction of golden light that would precede the eruption.

Sometimes the two happen in quick succession.

Sometimes, it’s a slow buildup leading to the sudden outburst of energy.

But if I watched for it, I’d be able to anticipate their move, and that’s how I was ready when the old man to my left made his move.

The moment I saw some of his lifeforce build up inside him, I lowered my stance, then darted toward him with all the speed I’d been gifted when I became a Lanfear.

However, he still managed to shout out before I got to him.

“Help—oof!”

Fortunately, I quickly silenced him when I speared his gut with my sneakered right foot, folding him in two. All the air expelled from his lungs with a loud woosh, and the only thing keeping him on his feet was my outstretched leg, but he dropped to his knees when I pulled it back. Gasping for air, he soon balled over into a fetal crouch on the dank, alley floor.

He wasn’t going to be shouting for a good while, but the second old man proved more of a problem.

He made a run for it as soon as his companion went down.

Watching him flee, I stood still while debating what to do about him.

Was chasing after him worth the effort?

And what would I do to him after I caught him?

Glancing down at the old man at my feet, I grimaced in self-reproach.

Ah, shit!

This wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but a simple tag and disposal had turned into a one-sided smackdown, and now one of the old timers had bolted with surprising agility for a man his age.

Still holding onto a knife, I smacked my forehead with a hand.

“…idiot….”

Then summoning my Cradle, I returned the hunting knives to its care.

Undoubtedly, word of this encounter was going to spread, first amongst the homeless community and then onto the street folk.

I could imagine how that old guy would embellish and exaggerate the encounter.

He’d spread a mixture lies and half-truths to those willing to listen to him, recounting how he’d survived a terrifying encounter with a psychotic, teenage serial killer that roamed the underside of the city, hacking and slashing the down and downtrodden into quivering, shivering bloody sushi.

In short, my carelessness and stupidity had just given birth to a new urban legend.