“And your children?”
“Probably not.”
Before she could question him further, he turned and walked away from her. She remained where she was, standing by the doorway and staring out at the snow. She had to return to Badwin, to the children, but there was no way they were going to be able to find their way back in this blizzard.
***
Tempest sat near the fire, the flames dancing across her face as she watched William walk toward the front of the cave and back again. His pacing had intensified while the storm continued endlessly on through the night and into the next day. Against his thigh, the small crossbow he had strapped to him bounced a little with every step he took. For a vampire, he was far more comfortable around weapons that could kill him than she ever would have been.
“How old are you?” she inquired.
“Nineteen,” he replied. “Though most times I feel far older.”
He looked older. She would have guessed at least twenty-five, maybe twenty-seven or eight. “Don’t we all,” she replied with a smile. He finally stopped pacing to look at her. “You’ve seen a lot in such a short time.”
“I have.”
“And you survived the change despite the odds.”
“It’s believed there is vampire DNA in our line.”
“Really?” She was unable to keep the disbelief from her voice. “Amazing. Who would have thought the leader of the rebels would be descended from the very thing they fought so hard against.”
“It was a surprise to us as well.”
“What was it like, the battle that overthrew the old king?”
His eyes were distant. For a minute she didn’t think he would answer, then he walked to the other side of the fire and settled onto the ground across from her.
CHAPTER 12
William drew up his knee and draped his arm across it. Her deep brown eyes were questioning as she watched him; the brown lashes surrounding them swept toward her dark blonde eyebrows. She was older than he was, yet she looked younger, far more innocent and unknowing of the atrocities of the world. Atrocities he’d encountered time and again in his relatively short life. How did he tell her about the endless nightmares that woke him every night and haunted him during the day?
He didn’t know how and right now, he didn’t feel like talking about it.
“What was it like to grow up in your village?” he inquired instead.
She tilted her head to the side, pursing her mouth as she studied him. “Quiet, often lonely.” Her soft voice carried over the crackling of the fire. He may not have been able to hear her clearly as a human, but he heard her clearly now. “Most of the vampires running the home while I was growing up were far from kind. I learned early to stay out of the way.
“I spent a lot of time exploring the surrounding mountains and caves. When I was growing up, we learned to fend for ourselves, and as we got older, we helped to take care of the younger children amongst us. It wasn’t often we got word of the outside world or had visitors. It was probably three months before we’d learned there had been a war, that it was over, and things were to change.”
“What did you think of that?” he asked.
“It was a good thing,” she said. “But it didn’t much change things for me. There were blood slaves in our town, but I was too poor to have ever owned one. As children, we learned to rely on animal blood, and the blood of those who had done something wrong and were forced to donate. I never really considered the life of the humans. I was too busy getting through my own days and trying to keep the younger ones alive.”
“Understandable.”
“And what was life like in the forest, amongst the rebels?”
His fingers tapped against his shin while he contemplated her question. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as his thoughts turned to those days that in some ways had been far simpler and far more brutal. “A battle for survival, freeing, fun, deadly.”
“What an odd combination.”
He released a small snort of laughter. “So was being a rebel. Every day we worried we would be discovered, but we spent many of those days irritating vampires, setting traps, hunting for food, and just being with each other. We were a large, extended family.”
“And now?”
“That family has grown to include people and vampires I never thought it would, and it’s growing more every day. Jack was recently married.”
“Who is Jack?”
“You may know him as Jericho, the youngest brother of the king.”
“Oh,” her rosebud mouth parted. “It’s so weird to hear someone talk of them so freely and with so much knowledge.”
“I imagine it is; I know I never thought I’d know them the way I do.”
“What was the war like?”
He should have known she wouldn’t so easily let her question go. Of course, she was curious about what had happened; he imagined many were. Looking away from her, his eyes focused on the shadows dancing across the wall. His hand instinctively grasped his thigh, where the scar from the spear that had punctured him during the war still marred his flesh. The screams that had echoed through the throne room resonated within his head. His own screams amongst those as the spear had pinned him like a bug and nearly crippled him.
“It was war,” he murmured as he rose to his feet once more.
“Was it…? It was awful.”
He glanced back at her as he began to pace again. The damn walls were beginning to grate on his nerves, or maybe it wasn’t the walls but the memories encompassing him that he couldn’t tolerate right now. “All war is. All death is.”
“I’m sorry.”
He rolled his shoulders, stretching his tense back. “Don’t be. The world is a better place because of what happened.”
That knowledge didn’t assuage the screams in his head or erase the cloying scent of blood in his nostrils. So many had fallen, not only at the raid on the palace, but also in Chippman, where he had finally lost his life. His hand ran over the puckered scar on his stomach before falling to his side. So many scars, but most of them were on the inside, invisible to the naked eye.
Walking to the back of the cave, he pulled out another canteen of blood, the last one. They’d gone through it faster than he’d anticipated. He returned to the main room and handed the canteen over to her. “That’s it,” he told her.
She waved it away. “We should probably save it then.”
“The storm will break soon.” He hoped. “Drink.”
“Sometimes they can last for a week or more.”
Ugh, he groaned inwardly, but he could do nothing about the weather. “Then I will go hunting for more. There’s not enough to last us another week; there’s no point in turning it down.”
The pale blue veins in the back of her hand were clearly visible when she took the canteen from him and unscrewed the cap. His fangs pricked at the sight of those veins; a heavy pressure built within his canines as she tilted it back and took a swallow of blood. The muscles in her throat and neck flexed; his eyes latched onto her throat as she consumed the liquid.
It had been months since he’d been with a woman, not since before he’d died. Between trying to adjust to his new life, what he’d become, and what he was now capable of, he’d had little time for women. And truth be told, he hadn’t known if he could trust himself not to hurt someone in the beginning. Didn’t know what would happen if he allowed himself to relinquish any of the unyielding restraint he’d been keeping himself under over the past five months.
He’d never felt the urge to drink from another vampire before, humans yes, but not a vampire. Desire for her slithered hotly through him and was far more intense than he’d experienced with anyone else before. He knew from Aria that vampires rarely shared blood with each other, but he was new, they were trapped in a cave together, and he was hungry. This was probably one more thing he would have to come to terms with now that he wasn’t human.
Her delicate features were striking,
her silvery hair and doe colored eyes enticing. No wonder he was thinking about sinking his teeth and himself into her. Her alluring scent of fresh air and snow tickled his nose. “I always loved the winters, until now,” she murmured before tilting the canteen back to her mouth again.
William took a step away from her to put some distance between them. His mind searched for a way to distract himself from his growing hunger for her. “When we were children Aria, Daniel, and I would often build snowmen and forts in the winter. We’d also make snow angels.”
She lowered the canteen from her mouth and wiped away the blood staining her lips. She held it out to him. He took the half-filled canteen from her and took a gulp before capping it off again. Not much remained, but the last of it was for her.
“We did that too, often. Snow usually remains on the ground for about six months of the year in our valley.”
He laughed and placed the remaining blood on the ground beside her. “Luckily it didn’t last that long where we were,” he replied.
“What else did you do for fun?”
He rested his palm against the wall. “We’d go swimming, hunting, climb trees, and play jokes on each other and my father.”
The mention of his father didn’t bring the acute, nearly crippling grief it used to bring to his heart, but only a sense of melancholy at what could have been if he’d survived. So many things had happened he wished to share with him, so many conversations he longed to have. His father had been the wisest man he knew; there wasn’t a day he didn’t miss him. He often longed for just one more day, but it was not to be, and he’d come to accept that more over the last year and a half, though he knew he would miss him forever.
“It sounds like fun,” she said.
“Some days it really was, but we always knew we’d grow up to fight against the oppression we lived under.”
“You never had a choice on that?”
“If we did it was a choice we were never going to take. None of us would have walked away from the fight.”
Without realizing it, she lifted her fingers and began to bite at her nails as she stared across the cave. He’d come to realize she often didn’t know she was doing it. “I never considered leaving our village.” Pulling her hand away from her mouth, she scowled at her fingers before putting her hand into her lap and clasping it there. “I never really wanted to either. Many of the children in the home grew up and took off. There was nothing keeping them there, but it was the only home I’d ever known, and Pallas is the closest friend I’ve ever had.”
“She didn’t want to leave either?”
“No, she felt like I did, and we both doubted there was much out there for two orphans with no money and no real power to speak of.”
“I can understand that.”
“I’ve also never been overly adventurous.”
“Until you decided to climb a mountain and walk through a blizzard.”
She gave a little laugh. “Yeah, until then.”
The shuffle of Achilles hooves drew his attention to the horse. He walked away from her and toward the mouth of the cave to care for him.
CHAPTER 13
The next day, William kept the hood close against his face as he trudged through the knee-high snow. Drifts of it were everywhere on the open plain, he’d already had the misfortune of stepping into one that had caused the snow to rise to his chest. The driving flakes stung when they hit his chilled skin; the wind howled as relentlessly as wolves on the scent of prey. Beside him, Tempest walked onward without complaint, her head bowed against the storm and her hair tucked beneath her hood.
Resting her hand on his arm, she drew his attention away from the snow as she pointed up a craggy hill. The pointed edges of some boulders poked out from the top of a mound of snow. He studied the set of rocks before walking with her up the hill. Behind the boulders, burrowed into the side of a rock wall they discovered a little den. The scent of fox wafted up to him before he knelt in the snow to dig through it.
He dug almost four feet down before uncovering the animals, hidden within the shelter of the rocks. The first one squirmed and bit at him when he pulled it free. The idea of frightening the animal bothered him more than intimidating the human in the tavern had.
As a human, he’d hunted animals in order to survive, and he did so now as a vampire. The only difference was he didn’t always have to kill them in order to feed now. He’d feel less guilty about striking down a human than an animal if they were standing in his way. He didn’t know what that said about him anymore, and he didn’t want to think about it.
He handed the animal over to Tempest before reaching in and pulling the second fox free. His hands ran over the velvety fur in an attempt to soothe the animal in some small way. Sinking his fangs into the creature’s neck, he welcomed the rush of warm blood filling his mouth. He greedily drank it down, easing the hunger churning in his gut. The fox’s fur tickled the inside of his mouth, its musky scent filled his nostrils, but he ignored them both as he welcomed the potent wave of life filling his body. Across from him, Tempest’s eyes closed while she consumed the blood of the other fox.
William pulled the animal away from him, gave his coat a pat and placed him back in the den. The animal’s eyes hung half closed, its heart had slowed, but it would survive the blood loss. He didn’t tell Tempest what to do, didn’t try to take the other animal from her, she would do what she had to, but she still pulled the animal away before she impaired it too much. His eyes latched onto her mouth when her tongue slid out to lick the blood from her lips before she placed the animal into the hole.
William pushed the snow back into place, took hold of her hand and rose to his feet. Her hand was small within his and delicate. Her smooth flesh was so different than the callouses and scars covering his hands. He couldn’t stop his fingers from sliding over the bones in the back of her hand. Her head came up to his, her mouth pursed questioningly.
He jerked his head to indicate heading back the way they’d come and forced himself to release her hand. The bow bounced against his back as he made his way down the hill. The snow kicked up around him as patches of it skidded out beneath him on the rocks underneath. They were almost to the bottom of the hill when he detected a different sound over the incessant wind.
Spinning, he grabbed hold of Tempest’s arm just as something emerged from the blinding white of the day. The figure flashed in and out between the downdrafts and gusts kicking the snow up around them. William jerked the bow from his back as the snow cleared enough to reveal the pale, bald creature rushing toward them.
Tempest let out a startled cry; William pushed her back as he nocked an arrow against the bow and took aim at what he barely recognized as a man anymore. Lifting the arrow, he took into account the wind, but knew there was no way to predict when a strong gust might surge across the land. He had to wait until the man got closer before he could take the chance of shooting.
The man was only five feet away when William let the arrow fly. The wind drowned out the twang of the bowstring and the whistle of the arrow as it flew through the air into the creature’s chest. It squealed as it flipped backwards into the snow. Its hands clawed at the arrow protruding from its chest. Its feet kicked and beat against the snow-covered ground. Striding forward, William pulled a stake free from the loop inside his cloak before arriving at the creature’s side. It didn’t matter though; the arrow had flown straight into the vampire’s heart.
He stood for a minute, watching it in its death throes before bending down and yanking the arrow free of its chest. The vibrant red of the blood seeping from the fatal wound didn’t prick his appetite; instead, it brought back memories of screams and terror, of the scent of death in battle. Shaking his head, he cleared it of the images as he wiped the arrow in the snow and slid it back into his quiver.
“What is that?” Tempest inquired as she stared down at the bald, barely clad body lying on the ground. Its skin was almost as white as the snow surrounding it.
&nb
sp; “A vampire.”
Her eyes flew up to his. He stared at her for a minute before focusing on the swirling white world around them. His gaze darted around in search of the others that were most likely out there, on the loose and starving.
“What happened to it?” she inquired.
“Starvation. This is what the ones in Chester looked like.” Her head snapped back and forth between him and the dead vampire. He wrapped his hand around her elbow, tugging her away from the body. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
He led her the rest of the way down the hill and across the open plains again. He struggled to see through the swirling snow and to sense anything of menace hiding in the storm. Her name made perfect sense if this was what the weather had been like the night she’d been left on the doorstep.
He couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning her in such a way and during such a vulnerable time in her life. The orphanage may not have been the best place to grow up, but she would have died without it. He shuddered at the image of what a starving newborn or child would look like, or having to kill one. It was bad enough killing the adults.
The memory of Chester and the vampires he’d slaughtered there made his stomach twist. He’d lost track of time since he’d left the town and been caught up in the storm. He may only have another week to get word back to Aria before she came after him, something he couldn’t allow to happen, not after what Tempest had revealed. If Aria was killed or captured again because of him, he’d never forgive himself.
They had to get to that town and see what was going on; he had to have some information for his family, before they moved forward. He didn’t doubt what Tempest had told him; she’d have had no way to know he was out here or his relation to the queen before meeting him.