* * *
My fangs sank into the neck of the man I gripped with claws I did not know I had before this moment.
His scream was as delicious as his blood.
I drank and drank my fill of his terror, filling myself with the substance that I had never imagined I’d enjoy.
But, oh, these humans were a sweet treat.
It was no wonder the vampires had rules against going to the villages and prohibitions against blood stables. It would be so easy to subjugate these weak creatures to feed their needs.
He dropped out of my grip, dead. Or almost dead. One didn’t drain a human completely—dead blood was bad blood.
I understood why Savion had left prisoners alive in their cages and collected their blood. If they were alive, the blood was drinkable and sustaining.
No amount of hate or anger would make me into my father, but I was reveling in destroying these creatures who had destroyed my very soul.
There were three women in the tent where I had dropped the nearly dead man, and they were clinging together and weeping.
I shoved the sword back into the scabbard I had found for it. “Go home. Don’t play war. You won’t win this.”
“You’re…not going to kill us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Your tears are real. Your fear is for others. It’s not the fear that you can no longer pursue power and destruction after death. Go home.”
I strode out of the tent to see what I had wrought to this place. It was burning. There were screams and moans from the dying. There were a few who were unharmed—for the same reason those women still breathed and were now scurrying around trying to attend to the dead and dying.
Let them. It was futile. I made sure those whose souls were as sullied as the general’s soul wouldn’t live to see another sunrise. Some were already dead, and some would suffer.
Those who suffered had shown me they gloried in the pain and destruction of others.
Somewhere my mind was trying to tell me that I was no better than they were, but that was untrue. Completely untrue.
This was necessary.
The death of my twins—my sweet, steady Rilen and my sarcastic delightful Roran—demanded this.
Their death meant the prophecy could never come to pass as it was written.
This world would be trapped in war, eternally.
What better way to mourn an eternal war than to destroy those who had doomed it to such?
I had learned what some of the epaulets meant on each of the jackets the soldiers wore. I found one lying and dying from wounds and lifted him from the ground.
“Tell me where your next encampment is, and I’ll let you go.”
He coughed, then spit blood on my face. I dragged a finger through and cleaned the finger off with a perverse sound of delight.
“Tell me. I know you don’t want to die with the fangs of a vampire sunk into your neck, draining your life.”
The horror crossed his face and then twisted into hate. I didn’t care. Hatred did not bother me, not from them.
“Tell me. Or I will leave you to bleed and die.”
