While he’d been woolgathering, the half dozen rogue vampires gathered around him and Rolf.
He watched their anger build, that instinctive need to destroy outsiders. A glance at Rolf showed that Rolf didn’t feel it. And like Khent, Rolf didn’t seem to like the loss of all that tasty aggression.
Frankly, Khent found the entire venture simultaneously annoying, boring, and very much beneath him. He studied hisfingernails. “Rolf, I don’t want to get dirty. Handle that, would you?”
“Do we want them dead or alive?”
One of the upir snarled. “You’ll be lucky to survive me, draugr. You pathetic piece of?—”
Rolf sliced the upir’s head off mid-sentence, and everyone watched the creature’s body topple to the ground while his head rolled away. A youngling, apparently, as the dead upir didn’t burst into flame or crumble into ash right away.
“Kill him!” “Slowly.” “Painfully.” “Death to the Night Bloode!” The rogue group screamed and attacked as one.
Khent took a step back while Rolf dispatched them easily.
Making a huge mess, as usual.
Khent glared and flicked a few droplets of bloode from his shirt. Bloode—the mixture of magic and blood that filled a vampire made it very different from the typical blood they ingested from prey.
To Khent’s surprise, he felt something else in that bloode besides magic. Something darker. He brought a drop to his mouth. A small lick warned of gloom, of hellfire and rot. The bitterness of evil pervaded, and Khent spat to cleanse himself of the contamination that tasted all too familiar.
A few months ago, he’d been drawn into a battle in the hidden magir bazaar in the city. There, he’d encountered a powerful sorcerer and a necromancer. The necromancer had escaped, and it had taken him some time, but he’d eventually learned the identity of the pretty little death dealer.
How he learned of her identity still troubled him, and he’d been searching for her ever since.
But the sorcerer dealing in death and dark magic had left behind a stain and a scent.
Despite the sorcerer’s demise, that scent remained.
Hmm. Wasn’t that interesting?
“Look, I’m sorry you got dirty,” Rolf apologized, holding the arm of an upir while they watched the last one try to crawl away. Rolf scowled and threw the arm at him. “Stay there. I’m trying to have a conversation.”
“Rolf, we’ve got a problem.”
Rolf huffed as he stomped over bodies to the remaining upir and ripped his head off. “What problem? Though they’re young, they’ll turn to ash soon enough. No cleanup, bro. What could be better than that?”
Khent pinched the bridge of his nose, hating when Rolf or any of the others called him anything other than his name.I’m not your bro. I’m a Son of Osiris.
Rolf smirked at him, waiting for that exact comeback, something Khent had said a thousand times before. No longer a part of his old clan, the Sons of Osiris, Khent had trouble letting go of the past.
Still, he refused to be Rolf’s punchline, so he glared and said instead, “What could be better than no cleanup? How about finding the puppet master behinddeadvampires? Because these six have been mastered by a necromancer.”
Rolf blinked. “That’s not possible. We don’t have souls to control.”
“Tell that to whoever killed them then raised them from the dead. And trust me, it wasn’t a reaper.”
As they hurried home, Khent immediately recalled the necromancer he’d briefly fought in the bazaar before she’d escaped. Unfortunately, he’d been too busy fighting a sorcerer to go after her.
In the time since, he’d searched but hadn’t found her. Forced to focus on other missions for everyone else in his blasted clan, he’d had to put off finding his future prey, the delectable human he planned to drain one drop at a time.
Mages and sorcerers, though looking the part, weren’t human and used the magic inside themselves to craft spells. Witches, warlocks, and necromancers, on the other handwerehuman. They used sacrifice and outside magic to power their spells. Necromancers especially had been vilified by the magir community for years.
That a lesser being should consider herself worthy enough to battle a powerful specimen like Khent plainly baffled him. Yet she hadn’t died in their brief skirmish, and she’d remained mostly hidden, quite an impressive feat, actually. Still, he’d been preoccupied fighting a sorcerer bringing hell beasts into the world, or he’d have ended her then and there.
It irked him to know he’d dreamed of her, because vampires didn’t dream. Except he’d dreamed about her and the brief battle they’d fought. Only in the dream had he seen her clearly.
That image stayed with him. How dark her brown eyes had been. How lovely and ethereal she’d appeared…for a lesser being. And not just any lesser being, but the weakest of them all. Ahuman.
