Saber flicked his gaze to hers and shrugged. “Nah, Lorna,” he whispered. “It’s all good. At least the family reunion is over, and we can all drop the bullshit now. Why don’t you go back to your happy little home in your prim, puritan world and mourn the loss of whatever baby you think you once had. Wasn’t me then. Isn’t me now.” He winked at her, returned to the cot, lay down on the mattress, and crossed his feet at the ankles. As he leisurely folded his arms behind his head, he regarded them both through the corner of his eyes.
“Come on, Lorna,” Rafael said, his voice brooking no argument. “Let’s leave this monster in his cell.”
Lorna sidestepped around her large mate and boldly stepped up to the bars, where she leveled a devastated gaze at Saber. “Napolean is a just king; he rules with a fair and steady hand. He will not deny you basic comforts.” She raised her chin. “I will not allow him to.” She swallowed hard and pushed on. “If there is anything you need, send word through the sentinels, and I will try to get it for you.” She placed her hand over her heart and brushed away another falling tear. “You’re alive; that is all I need to know.” She smiled faintly then. “It is enough.” With that, she turned and rushed out of the room.
Saber didn’t stir.
He didn’t move a muscle.
Not only was he completely disinterested in the whole overly dramatic scene, but frankly, he didn’t feel a thing.
Nothing.
Whatever these vampires thought—whatever they referred to as their souls—his had long ago been extinguished. He was, indeed, a monster. If not born, then bred. And he still refused to believe he came from anything other than Damien’s seed and a tragic human life. Staring blankly ahead at the one called Rafael, he could appreciate the full measure of hate in the male’s eyes.
That he understood intimately.
As the warrior regarded him with silent contempt, Saber sank deeper into the mattress, and something in the pit of his stomach stirred.
He couldn’t quite name it—it was too unfamiliar.
And it only lasted a moment.
Nevertheless, it stirred.
four
Dane and Diablo stormed into their father’s lair, leaving the heavy wooden door open behind them. Their faces were flushed with anger, their eyes wide with disbelief.
“Have you heard the news?” Dane practically shouted, his wild, dark eyes dazed with confusion. “They say he didn’t burn! Saber. They say he’s still alive.”
“What the hell happened?” Diablo demanded.
Damien buried his head in his hands. Dark Lords, how am I going to talk my way out of this one? A piece of his heart rejoiced—Saber was still alive—yet the more rational part knew his own days were numbered now that his treason was certain to be uncovered. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I’m still trying to gather information, myself.”
“What the hell do you mean, you don’t know?” Diablo sneered. “Father, what is going on?”
Before Damien could come up with a plausible answer, a band of five soldiers stormed into the room, each bearing the official tattoo of the colony’s formal guard on his upper arm. The large circular tattoos undulated like snakes wrapped around hard muscle as each guard clutched his weapon in his right hand and dangled a diamond choker in his left.
The tallest of the five, a seven-foot male named Achilles Zahora, squared off to Damien and cleared his throat. “Damien Alexiares, we have been ordered by the Dark Council to detain you and your sons.”
His second-in-command, a shorter, barrel-chested male by the name of Blaise Liska, stepped forward to flank Achilles’s side, the gesture issuing an immediate threat to Damien.
Dane spun around in a fury, jumped in front of his father, and pushed Damien behind him. “What the hell are you talking about?” he stormed, impulsive as always. “Back up!” He released a wicked set of fangs and snarled. “I’m not playing with you, Blaise. Back. The. Hell. Up!”
The guard didn’t budge, and he was quickly joined by the remaining three soldiers. “Dane…” He softened his voice. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Diablo strolled into the mix then, taking a place beside his brother. “What is this?” he asked. He turned to look at his father. “Dad?”
Damien held both hands out in front of him, palms forward, in a gesture of surrender. “Soldiers, please.” He drew in a deep breath and gestured toward his sons. “This has nothing to do with my sons; I will go with you peacefully. Just leave my family out of it.”
Dane gasped in disbelief, but before he could speak, Achilles stepped forward. “Sorry, Damien. No deal. The council said all of you.” A scarlet lock of the soldier’s chin-length, black-and-red hair fell forward, blocking his left eye, and he let it hang, undisturbed. His right eye shone by contrast like a laser in the night sky, the oddly pale yet rich citrine color illuminated against his bronze complexion. He held out a pair of diamond-studded handcuffs.
“What are those for?” Diablo demanded, his own ire clearly rising to a dangerous level. The tension in the room could have been sliced with a knife.
“Diablo, don’t,” Damien said cautiously. He turned to regard Blaise with pleading eyes. “What does the Colony Guard want with my boys?”
“Sorry,” the soldier answered. “Not privy to that information. The council speaks; we act.”
Damien shook his head in frustration. So, this was what it had come to?
For the briefest moment, he considered fighting, knowing that his boys would have his back. The three of them could take out at least as many soldiers, maybe one more, but ultimately, they could not defeat Achilles or Blaise. The males were too seasoned as soldiers, trained to the nth degree in mortal combat as a way of being—hell, of breathing. The pair would get militant, and Damien and his sons would be subdued. He tried to reason rationally: What could they possibly want with his sons, other than to question them? This calmed him down a bit. Of course, questioning; that’s all the council wanted. After all, Oskar Vadovsky and his protégés had no idea what had happened eight hundred years ago. All they knew was that a member of the house of Jaegar had been staked to a post in the red canyons, sacrificed to the sun by their enemy, and the male hadn’t burned. They weren’t stupid. Two plus two was usually four—Dark One plus sun usually equaled death.
They knew Saber was an imposter.
And they wanted to know how…when…why.
Who knew?
Damien would give the chief of council the information he needed, clear his sons of all wrongdoing, and deal with the hand he was dealt afterward. It was his mess to clean up, after all. Looking at his sons, he made an instant decision. He wasn’t going to lose anyone else, not today. They were safer surrendering. He held his wrists out in front of him. “Damien, Diablo,”—he put more than a fair amount of authority into his voice—“don’t fight this.” He eyed them sternly, each one in turn. “I mean it.” He paused, considering his next words. “There are some things…about your brother…you don’t know. Some questions I need to answer for the council. Your names will be cleared in all of this as soon as I’m through. Trust me. Just go along, for now.” He leveled a threatening glare at the soldiers, hoping to make his intent crystal clear, if not implicit: You can have me, but if you mess with my boys, I will kill each and every one of you with my bare hands.
A wry smile curved along the corners of Achilles’s mouth, no doubt in response to the unspoken threat: Dark Ones didn’t take well to challenges, and they were always eager to fight.
Dane shook his head in utter bewilderment, his own need to lash out barely bridled beneath the surface. “What are you talking about, Dad?” He watched in disgust as the soldier snapped the cuffs on Damien’s wrists and locked them in place. “Is that really necessary?” he snapped.
“Orders, my man,” Achilles responded.
Diablo sneered at the guard, and a low, answering growl rumbled in the guard’s throat. He swept his angry gaze to Damien. “What don’t we
know about Saber?” he asked, his voice betraying his mounting dread.
Damien simply shook his head. As the soldiers displayed two more pair of handcuffs, Damien nodded with authority at his sons. “Submit…I mean it.”
“Talk, right now!” Diablo said, tucking both of his arms behind his back to avoid being cuffed. The male was this close to starting a fight the Alexiares clan could not ultimately win.
Damien shut his eyes. Dark Lords, he had never meant for this to happen. He raised his head, squared his jaw, and reopened his eyes, commanding the attention of both his sons. “Know this,” he bit out in a raspy yet remorseful voice. “Saber is your brother. He has always been your brother. He will always be your brother. That is all you need to know.” He swallowed his angst and gestured at the extra pairs of handcuffs. “Go ahead. They will not resist.”
“You bastard,” Dane whispered, his voice barely audible. “What did you do?”
Damien spun around angrily then, glaring at the youngest of the two twins. “I did what I had to, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
Diablo exhaled a reluctant breath and slowly shook his head. “It? What’s it, Dad?”
Damien drew from a waning well of courage and opened a private family bandwidth in order to communicate telepathically with his sons. He would not share his humiliation with the guards. Not now. Maybe not ever. Eight hundred years ago, when I set out to sire a family, to fulfill the demands of the Blood Curse, something went wrong. I was able to sacrifice the firstborn as required, but before I could stop it, the second child was murdered by the human woman’s brother: a vampire hunter. He swallowed hard and pressed on. Saber had just been born thirty days before—the words nearly got stuck in his psyche, but he forced them out—to a couple in the house of Jadon.
Diablo literally recoiled. His face turned pale, and he nearly staggered back. “Stop!” He spoke out loud, obviously hoping to halt the words before they became irretrievable.
Dane’s mouth fell open. “What did you do!” He rushed the words, sounding nearly hysterical.
Damien continued to speak telepathically. I was grief-stricken. I—
Stole an effin’ child from the house of Jadon? Diablo supplied incredulously.
Dane shook his head in disbelief. Tell me it was at least the Dark One, the evil twin that you took? he demanded.
The unnamed one had already been sacrificed…or I would have. If it were possible to whisper telepathically, Damien’s words would have been barely audible. But, he added quickly, Saber was consecrated by the Dark Lord S’nepres; he was ushered in to the house of Jaegar by the twin demon lord of his birth—you’ve seen his hair. He is truly one of us! I swear, down to the soulless cavern in his empty chest, by all that is unholy, Saber is your brother. He is my son!
Dane covered his mouth with his hands.
Diablo stared down at the ground.
And silence overwhelmed the dark lair.
The guards grew restless and shuffled their feet, yet still the silence lingered.
When, finally, enough time had passed for the males to process what they had heard, Diablo looked back up and regarded his father with disgust, the betrayal in his eyes as stark as it was unbearable to look upon. “You need to keep your mouth shut, Father. You need to ask for legal counsel before your head ends up on a pike…or worse. Do you understand?”
Damien nodded, feeling utterly helpless. “Yes, yes, of course. And the two of you—you don’t need to worry. You won’t be implicated. How could you be?”
Dane laughed then, loud and sardonic, the sarcasm in his voice echoing throughout the lair. “Have you lost your damn mind?” he snarled. “Do you not know who we are? Where we are?” He looked around the room, gestured at the garrison of soldiers standing before them, each male born and bred from evil since the day he was born, all of them immersed in a world where mercy and compassion were mocked as weaknesses. “Forget your eight-hundred-year-old logic. This is the house of Jaegar. We are his blood descendants. Our bodies have no souls; our lives have no value; and our brethren have no duty outside of obedience to the code of this house. You violated that code, and should Oskar Vadovsky get a wild hair up his ass to exact vengeance, just for the hell of it, we are all as good as dead.”
Damien nodded, almost unconsciously.
He watched as each of his sons was handcuffed in turn, restrained, and led to the door of the lair, surrounded by enemies of their own kind; and he couldn’t help but wonder: Was this the last time the three of them would ever gather together as free vampires?
Had he really lost everything?
Dear Dark Lords of Hell, what had he done?
Saber Alexiares awoke in a rage. He shot up from the cot, momentarily disoriented, and rushed toward the bars. He didn’t know what was driving him, but something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
His face flushed, his skin heated, and he felt his eyes change, the pupils growing narrow and more severe. “My brothers!” he shouted to no one in particular.
Ramsey Olaru rose slowly from a wide, leather armchair and sauntered toward the cell, regarding the prisoner warily. “Come again?”
Saber snarled, feeling almost mad with rage. “Dane…Diablo.” The words were nearly incoherent as he murmured them. “My brothers.”
Ramsey stopped short in front of the cell door. “You need to calm down, Chief.” He assessed Saber from head to toe. “You’re too weak in your current condition to put off this kind of aggression.”
Saber drew back on his haunches and hissed at the warrior, wishing for all he was worth that he could come through the bars. Of course he was too weak—they were keeping him drained of all but a few drops of blood, and he was virtually entombed in diamond. “Let me out, and we can talk about it,” he clipped.
Ramsey chuckled, although there was no humor in the sound. “Can’t do that, friend.”
Saber stalked slowly toward the cell door, his glare holding Ramsey’s in an unbroken glower of fury. “Sure you can,” he whispered. He gathered all his remaining strength; and then, moving as swiftly as he could, he released his claws, forced his arm through the bars, and swiped at the warrior’s face.
Ramsey drew back in the nick of time, just barely avoiding the wicked gashes that would have otherwise been left in Saber’s wake. “What the hell—”
“I want to see my brothers!”
“What?” Ramsey spat the word. His face was a mask of incredulity.
“My family! I want to see them. Call Napolean—let him know.”
“Yeah,” Ramsey said mockingly. “’Cause that’s gonna happen.”
“You bastard!” Saber snarled. “Keeping me in here like an animal, locked away from everything and everyone who matters!” He practically snorted in his fury. “You wanna kill me? Fine! Do it! But if not, then let me see my brothers.”
Santos Olaru rose from his languorous position in a matching armchair across the room. He traversed the space in a wide, vulturine circle and slinked to his brother’s side. “What’s the problem here?”
“Your boy is having a sudden bout of homesickness. Wants to see his brothers.”
“Dark Ones?” Santos asked, frowning.
“You know of any others?” Ramsey asked.
Saber hurled himself at the bars. He grabbed hold of the slats for all he was worth and began to tug and pull, howling his rage like an animal, spitting curses and threats like a demonic creature. While the bars didn’t move, the heavens above them did. The moonlit sky gave way to utter darkness, revealing the fact that the clouds were starting to grow restless, and then the cosmic show began: Thunder roared in the heavens. Lightning crackled in the sky. Wind began to howl outside the windows.
“Get me a sedative.” Ramsey’s voice was like a dark echo in a narrow tunnel, assaulting Saber’s ears from far away. His brain was too consumed with fury to decipher the meaning of individual words. He simply kept after the bars. He would break through eventually—or die trying.
/> Before he could register movement, the door to his cell swung open, and he leapt indiscriminately in the direction of his captors, his lethal fangs extended in preparation for attack.
The bite felt exquisite.
Did the blood belong to Ramsey or Santos? he wondered as he gulped it in hungry, desperate pulls. No matter. His jaw was locked down like a pit bull’s, and his feral growls were only interrupted by primal slurps and drunken swallows. Just then, he felt a sharp pain in his upper arm and thought he registered a syringe sticking out from his exposed flesh. He didn’t care.
Nothing mattered.
There was only blood.
Damien…
Diablo…
And the madness.
He began to stumble as his thoughts grew sluggish and the room began to expand and contract in great waves of illusion.
“Did you get it into him?” one of the sentinels asked the other.
“Yeah, I got him.” It sounded like Santos.
“Son-of-a-hyena! I think he ripped half my neck out!”
Saber drew back to look at his handiwork, the hanging, fleshy tissue around Ramsey’s throat. Yeah, it was Ramsey’s. And…and…why was the floor shifting like that?
For a second, his mind grappled with the question, trying to grasp hold of the answer: a sedative?
His captors had drugged him, but then…
The thought dissipated.
Along with his conscious awareness, the world around him collapsed into a cavern of pressing darkness and ghostly silence.
And then his body hit the ground.
five
Saber felt like an infant, curled up into a fetal position, staring up at flashing colors.
Moving shapes.
Dipping objects.
They swirled around his head as some funky music played in the background. Childish sounds.
Lullabies?
His stared wide-eyed at a soft green object: fluid, moving, twisting like the wind. It was covered in frogs—what the heck?—and little blue dragons. Was he hallucinating? He opened his mouth to speak, and the sound that came out was garbled and unintelligible.