Novella: Blood of the Damned - Shadows Over Riga: The Nosferatu Experiment by Andre Michael Pietroschek - HTML preview

Chapter 7: The Pattern Emerges th

It began with Lukas noticing that his night vision had improved wi ce

dramatically over the five days of flight. Where previously he had needed lamplight to work on art restoration, now he could see in

near-total darkness with perfect clarity. The shift had been gradual; he d hadn't noticed it happening.

It was on the fifth day, moving through the forest at dusk, that he ffi te realized he was seeing colors in the darkness. Not just shadows. Actual chromatic information. The brown of tree bark. The green of the

undergrowth. The distant silver of moonlight on water he couldn't yet iO ea

reach.

He mentioned it to Dārta in a whispered conversation while the others Cr ob slept.

"My senses are changing," he said. "My vision. My smell. It's like M something is waking up."

Dārta, the translator, had also begun to notice patterns in her experience.

"Shared dreams," she said. "I've been having them. We all have, I think. I

dream of a courtyard. I dream of a man's face. I dream of being pregnant, which makes no sense because I've never been pregnant. And the dreams are so specific. They're not my memories. They're someone else's memories. Genetic memory, maybe. Inherited

something." th

By the sixth day, when Magdalena and Thomas and the others began wi comparing notes, the pattern became undeniable:

They were changing. ce d

Not visibly, not yet. But internally. Sensory acuity expanding. Physical ffi te capabilities are increasing. The smell of blood triggers responses in the nervous system that suggest predatory inheritance. The presence of

other group members created a sense of cohesion that bordered on iO ea

telepathic.

And they all had the same dreams. Or similar enough that the Cr ob differences seemed like variations on a theme. A courtyard. A man. Occupation-era violence. Women are being forced into pregnancy. Birth. Inheritance. A thing that had been created in blood and suppressed

history and occupation trauma, persisting in descendants eighty years M later.

"We're related," Elina said. It was not a question. It was the articulation of what they had all sensed since the beginning but had been too terrified to fully acknowledge.

"More than related," Thomas replied. He was the intellectual among

them, the one accustomed to assembling information into coherent narratives. "We share genetic material in a way that goes beyond normal familial inheritance. We have the same markers. The same physical characteristics. We're descended from the same source."

"What source?" one of the others asked a woman named Ieva, who had th

been an architect before the breach, whose family was Latvian, and wi whose ancestral records went back further than the others.

"A single individual," Thomas said slowly. "Someone who passed on ce d genetic material to all of us. Someone with unusual characteristics that

got expressed across multiple generations." ffi They did not say his name yet. They did not yet know it with certainty. te

But the genealogy was becoming visible. A man. A nobleman. iO ea

Occupation-era Latvia. Women impregnated. Genetic inheritance passed down through multiple generations, now expressing in the fourth generation with startling clarity.

By the time they reached Riga's outskirts, the pattern had become Cr ob impossible to ignore. They were not human in the standard sense. They

carried something else. Something inherited. Something that made M them prey to mercenaries, objects of cultist obsession, and as rabid as the werewolves hunting them.

They were descendants of something. Something that had been created in violation and transformed in darkness.

And Riga, and the mansion beyond it, held the documentation of their

damnation or apotheosis. They did not yet know which.