“Good,” I say. “Let them fear our darkness.”
Because that’s what we are.The darkness. The night made flesh, born from evil, returning to evil, existing in the space between where all human hope goes to die.
This is who I am.
A monster.
I am born tocrave.
And I love every second of it.
Interlude
DRAVEN ‘CRAVE’
Centuries Later
Most of my scions arrive screaming. The transition strips them raw, takes their mortality, and replaces it with something that doesn’t care if they survive the process. But Valeria looks at me through all of it with burning, furious eyes, and when the transition is done, when the Bloodfire settles in her veins, and her fangs find their place, she smiles as if she’s been waiting for me her entire life.
I should have read that smile for what it is.
A warning.
Instead, I fall into her like a man who has lived ten thousand years and finally found something that surprises him.
She isextraordinary.
Wild in the way a wildfire is unpredictable, beautiful, absolute, and utterly indifferent to what it destroys. She feeds without restraint and laughs while doing it, and somehow that laugh sounds like music instead of madness. Khaos watches her with something approaching interest, which is the closest he ever gets to approval, and I feel something I haven’t felt since before I can remember.
Pride.
Together, we are chaos given a heartbeat.
We sweep through cities like a plague with good taste, we take what we want, drain who we want, and leave enough survivors to carry the terror forward. Valeria likes the fear as much as the blood. She says the two are the same thing, and for a long while, I agree with her.
She ismine.
I amhers.
And neither of us asks permission from anything.
For a time, nothing stands in our path.
Then the world begins to shift.
It is subtle at first. Hunts that should have been effortless feel…observed. Streets that once emptied at the scent of us hold their breath instead of scattering. In the forests outside Prague, in the outskirts of Vienna, in the quiet corridors between cities where monsters travel unseen, I begin to sense something that does not belong to prey.
Not defiance.
Not challenge.
A presence.
Valeria dismisses it. “Let them watch,” she says, blood bright against her mouth. “It changes nothing.”
But it does.
Because eventually, I see him.
