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Catherine through the woods, caught her, and was strangling the life out of her when Vincent finally got there and saved her. Steven Bass was then committed to an insane asylum with abdominal scarring from Vincent’s attack.

Chapter I “When That Hole-in-the-Ground is Home”
     
    It was mid-winter in the City of New York, but here, far below her streets, in a secret world long forgotten by the citizens living above, the weather outside didn’t matter. Here, it was safe and warm. In this large cavern, furnished in rustic masculine style, a man and a woman from these two different worlds stood by a bassinet. A three month old infant boy was in the woman’s arms.
    Diana Bennett didn’t look like a special crimes investigator any more than Vincent Wells looked like a poet, philosopher, and scholar. In fact at first glance, with her long auburn tresses pulled back in a loose feminine ponytail, Diana looked to be hardly more than a teenager. But, if you looked more closely, the careworn lines around her soft green eyes revealed years of struggle to protect the world from the dangerous predators she hunted. She was so good at her job that she was designated a member of the New York Police Department’s Unit 210, a lone
    investigator with her pick of violent crimes to solve.
    One of the most recent cases Diana had chosen to work on was the murder of the mother of the baby she now held in her arms, Catherine Chandler. The father of this baby boy, Vincent Wells, stood behind her right shoulder, gazing on both of them. That investigation was what had brought her into Vincent’s world, when she found Vincent seriously injured on Catherine’s grave on December 10 th . As a result of that discovery, she was now charged with the obligation and privilege of keeping this world of tunnels and caverns below the streets of New York City safe and hidden from the world above.
    If Diana’s appearance was misleading, Vincent’s was even more perplexing. He didn’t look like a soft-spoken gentleman in his mid-thirties. In fact, he didn’t even look human. He was well over six feet tall, with a wild golden mane of hair falling past his shoulders. Piercing blue eyes looked out of a feline-featured face covered, except for the center of his forehead and his cheekbones, with a fine coating of golden fur. His hands were also fur-covered, with nails much harder and darker than a normal human’s, extending beyond his fingertips with tapered points, giving them the appearance of claws. When he smiled, elongated sharp canines in both his upper and lower jaws showed, and they could only be described as fangs. What he did look like was a magnificent mythological lion-faced god, at once terrible and wonderful. Their clothing was also stark evidence that these two people came from different worlds. Diana’s outfit was very stylish, although comfortable, while Vincent’s was reminiscent of an eighteenth century frontiersman who made do with the materials at hand and dressed far more for practicality and comfort than for style.
    Vincent’s gentle expression of love for his tiny three-month-old son, who was perfect in every aspect of his very human appearance, was completely at odds with his own frightening features. If Diana’s eyes were careworn, Vincent’s revealed the unfathomable depths of pain and grief he was suffering over the loss of his beloved Catherine, taken from him by the violent cruelty of an human monster. That monster had stolen Vincent’s baby from the arms of his mother as she bore him, and then had her killed with a fatal shot of morphine. With Diana’s help, Vincent was able to rescue his child. Diana then shot Gabriel, the man responsible, straight through the heart with Catherine’s own gun, a fitting end to an evil tyrant responsible for a reign of terror.
    Gazing around Vincent’s spacious cavern chamber, even the most casual observer would have noted that books were very important to him. They were piled on every