My Immortal The Vampires of Berlin - Chapter 15

Berlin Cathedral. April 30, 1945

Berlin Cathedral. April 30, 1945

Flames from a burning Panther tank licked at the night, the glow reflecting in the last surviving windows of the cathedral like dying embers in a shattered mirror. The city groaned around it; smoke rising, stone crumbling, history itself bleeding out onto the streets.

Inside, a pair of darting blue eyes peered through a broken windowpane. The face behind them was smeared with soot and blood, barely recognizable beneath the blackened grime of battle. For a moment, silence fell—an unnatural pause in the chaos, as if even war had to take a breath.

Then the sky answered. Sixteen points of light appeared on the horizon, climbing like slow-motion fireworks. But these were no celebration. They were a warning.

Sebastian Brindl’s eyes widened as the sound reached him, a high-pitched mechanical shriek. Katyusha rockets. He didn’t have time to think. The twenty-three-year-old tank driver spun from the window and hurled himself to the ground.

An instant later, the windows exploded inward. A shockwave tore through the sanctuary. Stained glass shattered into razored confetti, and pulverized stone cascaded from the vaulted ceiling. Holy silence was replaced by unholy thunder.

Glass fell in glittering arcs, slicing the air like falling stars. The once-sacred walls became a killing ground, and the cathedral’s long history collapsed in on itself—reduced to rubble and ruin.

Then, stillness.

A minute passed before Sebastian stirred. He opened his eyes and blinked through the dust. Every bone in his body screamed in protest. His ears rang like tuning forks. But the blood on his uniform was minimal, mostly superficial cuts. Somehow, he was alive.

The cathedral was not. Once a monument to faith, it now lay in ruins. Once, choirs had filled these walls with hymns that soared toward the heavens. Now, only the wind passed through, thin and mournful, as if the building itself was trying to remember the sound of peace. The corpses of soldiers and civilians were sprawled across the floor, twisted in death among broken pews and smoldering beams. Smoke curled through holes in a ceiling where saints had once gazed down on Berliners in serenity.

Sebastian got up slowly, unsteady but upright. His broad shoulders squared, more out of reflex than courage. His face, angular and pale beneath the soot, was handsome in a quiet, haunted way. Blond hair clung to his skull in damp clumps, his jaw tight with tension.

Sebastian had the body of a soldier, but not the heart of one. He was a violinist. Before the war, he taught children in a Dresden music shop, his days filled with sonatas and laughter, not gunfire. He worshipped Mozart, not Hitler.

But none of that mattered after Stalingrad, when Berlin ordered all remaining able bodies to the front. The Eastern Front chewed through young men like a buzz saw. Sebastian drove a tank in the war because he had no choice.

Now the tank was gone, his comrades dead, and the war had come home. And there was nowhere left to run.

Somewhere in the ringing silence, he noticed the way the glass shards had fallen—scattered in patterns across the stone floor like the notes of a broken sonata. His fingers twitched, as if remembering a melody. Then the pain returned, and the war came rushing back.

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Sebastian grabbed a discarded rifle from the rubble and began to move through the cathedral, stepping over shattered pews and the dead. The air was thick with dust and smoke; the silence was so unnatural it hummed.

He finally spotted a familiar figure kneeling behind a half-collapsed column—broad-shouldered, battle-scarred, unbowed.

Major Wolfgang “Wolf” Kepler.

Wolf didn’t flinch as Sebastian approached. He knelt motionless, head bowed, one massive hand resting on the cool stone as if in prayer. His uniform was torn open along one arm and singed black down the back, evidence of a near-suicidal escape from their burning tank. Soot clung to the deep creases in his face, but his pale blue eyes were sharp and lucid. Too calm for this hell.

He didn’t look up as he loaded his MP-40 submachine gun, methodical and focused. Each round clicked into the magazine with a crisp finality.

Sebastian hesitated, watching with a mix of fear and reverence. “I need ammo, sir,” he said quietly.

Wolf’s voice came low and even, like gravel wrapped in steel. “We’ve got time to find some. They’ll sleep now.”

Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “How do you know that?”

“It’s dark,” Wolf replied without looking up. “Artillery spotters can’t see in the dark. It’s as dangerous to them as it is to us right now. We’ve got a few hours, maybe. But when the sun comes up...” He inserted the magazine and chambered a round. “We run. Or we die. Simple as that. Let’s gather the rest of the crew.”

Sebastian lowered his gaze. “Nobody else got out.”

Wolf finally looked up. His eyes moved slowly across the cathedral—over the twisted limbs, the scorched bodies, the quiet carnage that had once been his tank crew. His men. His responsibility.

Wolf didn’t curse. He didn’t punch a wall or scream to the heavens. He simply nodded, then reached down and brushed a bit of rubble from his scorched sleeve—as if straightening a uniform that no longer mattered. A soldier’s reflex. A ghost of discipline in a war that had lost all order.

But surrender was not an option.

Wolf had seen what the SS had done in the name of the Reich. He’d watched atrocities carried out by fanatics who still thought they could win a war long since lost. If the Russians captured him, there’d be no mercy. No Geneva Convention. Just a nameless grave beneath a Siberian sky and a death so cold and forgotten it might as well have never happened.

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