Chapter 1
Oleg
He walked behind them in the darkness, creeping through the edge of a forest near the border of Latvia. The warehouse was unimportant. The cargo was unimpressive. The men guarding it? Incidental.
They would take it anyway.
Oleg cloaked his power and covered his face; it wouldn’t serve his purpose for the men and vampires inside the warehouse to recognize his scent or his elemental power. He was there to observe.
“Wind vampires landing in moments.” The woman who whispered to the scattered group of immortals hiding in the trees was a child of his clan, a daughter of one of his daughters.
Normally a vampire with her pedigree wouldn’t bother herself with a raid like this, but it gave Oleg pleasure to see the calculation on her face.
Raiding was a family tradition, after all.
“Three minutes.”
Oleg heard shuffling from the human soldiers with them, but a single look from Polina’s daughter Yeva froze them in their tracks.
Unlike some of his brothers, his children did not entertain idiots in their ranks.
Oleg had survived as a mortal by raiding and trading among river towns from Novgorod to the Black Sea, journeying though the waterways of Eastern Europe with his brothers until one fateful night when the men of his clan were captured by the immortal children of Truvor the Red.
Yeva looked up, her hand lifted, ready to signal the others.
Truvor was a powerful earth vampire who’d systematically plucked the strongest men from mortal clans, then culled those who could not survive harsh life as servants to immortal masters. He considered humans lesser beings than vampires and treated them like livestock.
Yeva’s fingers dropped, and the company scattered from the shadow of the woods, over the chain-link fence and barbed wire, and into the yard that surrounded the warehouse.
One guard went down, and the scent of blood touched the night air. It would be only seconds before the vampires in the warehouse realized something was wrong.
A single shot was the only indication that the operation had been detected by those inside. A door swung open, and gold light flooded the yard, immediately followed by three dark shadows that shot from the darkness. Then the door slammed shut and there was scattered shooting until there wasn’t.
More blood.
Then silence.
Oleg, having watched the swift and efficient incursion by Yeva’s soldiers, strode across the yard, kicking away a gun that a fallen soldier was reaching for. Then Oleg kicked the man’s head and he lay still again.
The human’s heart was still beating; he would be fine.
Unlike Truvor, Oleg wasn’t a monster unless it was necessary.
After he’d been captured, all Oleg had wanted was to survive. All he remembered from his human years was the hunger for revenge and the sick sound of Truvor’s laughter.
His cruel sire had enjoyed how Oleg defied the odds and even how he refused to bend the knee. The earth vampire had thrown his toughest humans into battle against Oleg, and Oleg had killed them one by one. Eventually he learned how vampires fought, and he could sometimes kill them too.
Earth vampires lost their step if you caught them on snow.
Wind vampires were useless fighting on the ground.
Water vampires were the toughest because water was everywhere, and the most skilled could even freeze a human in their tracks.
But Oleg never gave up.
As he walked toward the warehouse, he kept his hood up and secured the scarf that covered his face in the cold night air. The forest was cloaked in fog, and the damp air was redolent with pine and cedar. There was a metallic hint in the air, and the mist carried the acrid scent of gunpowder.
“You there.” One of Yeva’s men walked out and waved a hand at him in a come-along gesture. “You wanted to see, yeah? Come on then.”
