I Was Human Once: The Vermilion Countess Series, #2

By Victoria L. Szulc

As Stella, a vampire assassin with a repressed memory, begins to recall her past, she must dodge both enemies from her memories and present immortal life, that intend to eliminate her. All the while Stella continues working as an operative with her handsome younger handler, Mark, who raises her cougar desires.

When Kent, a fling from her past, wants to leave his Russian spy sleeper cell, Stella must choose between taking him out or keeping him alive, as he holds a major key to her unknown past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria L. Szulc
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781958760321

Victoria L. Szulc

Victoria L. Szulc is a multi-media artist and author from St. Louis, MO. She "lives" her art and has various hobbies including: drawing, writing, volunteering for animal charities, karate, yoga, karaoke, voice over work, belly dancing, and weather spotting. She specializes in pet portraiture through her company The Haute Hen. For character development she's currently learning chess, fencing, and whip cracking. Victoria blogs about these adventures at mysteampunkproject.wordpress.com. You can view book trailers and her other adventures starting here: https://youtu.be/y-Xja304rUs “Adventures abound and romance is to be had.” As always, thank you for reading, -Victoria

Book preview

I Was Human Once

The Vermilion Countess Series, v.2

––––––––

Victoria L. Szulc

Copyright © 2024  Victoria L. Schultz/Hen Publishing, a Hen Companies Brand

The Countess® is a registered trademark.

All rights reserved. Although there are references to actual historic events, places, and people, all of the characters, places, and dialogue in this book and its related stories, are fictitious, and any resemblance to any person living, dead, or undead is coincidental.

A gentle word to my readers/trigger warning: although my pieces are works of fiction, my books and stories contain scenes and depictions that may upset certain audiences.

Cover Photography/Art Direction: Victoria L. Szulc

ISBN: 978-1-958760-32-1

to those in deep reflection

Over the sins of an uncertain past, they must let go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to those who have discovered Stella’s story.

I Was Human Once

Iwas human once. A long time ago. I felt everything. Inside and out. Pain. Pleasure. I still feel those things. Only internally now. Nothing external. I still love. I still have passion. But the need for blood overwhelms everything else. I haven’t always been a vampire. The difference is that now I remember what it was like to be human.

A deluge of memories floods my mind, interrupting my focus. I’m meeting with Mark, my handler, in a few hours. I can’t put it off anymore. I’ve already rescheduled twice, claiming I needed to be out for a while. This time I really did need to be hidden. In the past I’d done this to recharge, cover my tracks. I needed to be twice as fastidious as before.

That first breakthrough was a bitch. I lay on the hotel bed for hours, writhing in agony, my brain overloaded with three hundred plus years of human and undead baggage. My hands shook while I texted Mark that our meeting at Mansford Ridge was off. His lack of response indicated that I needed to cool off before tackling the next assignment. I was nauseous but couldn’t vomit, tired but couldn’t rest. Each major remembrance raced through my body like a virus. I clutched the sheets and bit into my pillows. I felt like a small boat tossed on the ocean, every swell and dip of recollection brought me rotating rounds of horror, happiness, doom, depravity, ecstasy, extrication, and at last, a final sense of who I was.

I was remembering events that seemed impossible. Dreamlike. I didn’t question them like before though. The signs of recollections were popping up everywhere, all the time. Points of history. I am stunned at the amount of famous and infamous I have run into over the years. Things easily searched on the web or for deeper dives, libraries. I even remember a gap. A lack of memories between World Wars I and II bothers me, but I’m starting to piece together why. I started a timeline, a cataloging of sorts, because I’m surprised that my lack of memory hasn’t killed me yet.

I had always known that I was salvaged from a government project. I was born an adult, not knowing anything before 1945. I had enough restored skills that made me invaluable to them. Superior strength, ability to communicate in multiple languages, intelligence that now, I know didn’t come from study, but from life experience. After all, I was born around October 1730 to a wealthy aristocratic family.

Someone, very, very high up on the food chain of the United States government knows that I’m a vampire. It’s quite possible that other entities know my undead status as well.

I’d also been a spy and an assassin before 1914. My current talents were inherited from my previous human and undead lives. Those times are surreal. I was part of a group that I