EIGHT

OLD COUNTRY

PRESENT

The dream was an old one. Centuries old. And yet its images were fresh and clear as the night all had changed so many aeons ago.

Deep within his sleep, Xcor saw before him the apparition of a female of rage, the mist swirling about her white robes and frothing them up into the chilly air. Upon her appearance, he knew immediately why she had come out of the thick forest - but her target was as yet unaware of her presence or her purpose.

His father was too busy riding his steed down upon a human woman.

Except then the Bloodletter saw the ghost.

Thereafter, the sequence of events was as set as the lines in Xcor's brow: He yelled an alarm and spurred on his stallion whilst his sire dropped the human female he had caught and went gunning for the spirit. Xcor never made it in time. Always, he watched in horror as the female sprang up from the earth and took his father down.

And then the fire ... the fire the female wrought upon the Bloodletter's body was brilliant and white and instantaneous and it consumed Xcor's sire within moments, the stench of burning flesh -

Xcor bolted upright, his dagger hand gripping his chest, his lungs pumping and yet drawing no air.

Planting his palms onto his pallet of blankets, he propped himself up and was damned glad for being alone in his own quarters. No one needed to see him like this.

As he sought to come back unto reality, his breathing echoed and rebounded, the sounds bouncing off the barren walls and multiplying until they seemed like screams. In a rush, he willed the candle beside him on the floor to light. That was of aid. And then he got up to stretch his body, the process of pulling out his bones and muscles and resettling them into proper alignment helping his brain as well.

He needed food. And blood. And a fight.

Then he would be fully himself.

After dressing in well-worked leather, and putting a dagger into his belt, he went out of his room and into the drafty hallway. In the distance, deep voices and the clanking of pewter plates told him that First Meal had been served down below in the great hall.

The castle he and his band of bastards lived in was the one he had come upon that night his father had been killed, the one that overlooked the sleepy medieval hamlet that had matured into a preindustrial village and then grown in modern times into a small city of about fifty thousand humans.

Which, given the prevalence of Homo sapiens, was naught but a fern in a forest of oaks.

The stronghold suited him perfectly - and for the reasons that had first attracted him to the place. The stout walls of stone, and the moat with the bridge, were still very much in place, and they functioned well to keep people out. Added upon them were plenty of bloody fictions and full truths that cast a whispered pall over his lands and his home and his males. Indeed, for the last hundred years, he and his soldiers had done their duty to propagate the bullshit vampire myths by "haunting" the roads in the area from time to time.

Which was easy to do when you were a killer and you could dematerialized at your will.

Boo! had never been so fucking effective.

And yet there were issues. Having single-handedly decimated the lesser population in the Old World, they had had to find ways to keep their killing skills sharp. Fortunately, humans had stepped into the void - although, of course, he and his brothers had to remain in secret, with their true identities protected.

Enter the human urge for retaliation.

There was but a single laudable characteristic of humans and that was their wrath when it came to those among them who committed atrocities. By the vampires' hunting down only rapists and pedophiles and murderers, their "crimes" were tolerated far better. Fate knew that if you went for the moral types, humans were like bees streaming out of a hive to protect their turf, but the violators?

Eye for an eye, their Bible said.

And with that, his band of bastards had their target practice.

It had been thus for two decades, always with the hope that their true enemy, the Lessening Society, would send more appropriate foes for them. None had come, however, and the conclusion forming within him was that there were no more lessers left in Europe and none due to arrive. After all, he and his males had traveled hundreds of miles in all directions each night on their hunts for human villains, so they would have run across slayers somewhere, somehow.

Alas, there were none.

The absence was logical, however. The war had changed continents long ago: Back when the Black Dagger Brotherhood had left for the New World, the Lessening Society had followed them like dogs, leaving the dregs behind for Xcor and his bastards to clean up. For a long while it had been enough of a challenge, the slayers continuing to make themselves available and the battles proceeding apace and the fighting good. But that time had passed and humans were no true match.

At least lessers could be an amusing challenge.

A feeling of dense dissatisfaction crowded him as he descended the rough-honed stairwell, his boots crushing an ancient, threadbare runner that should have been replaced generations ago. Down below, the huge space that unfolded was a cave of stone, with naught but a tremendous oak table set afore a hearth that was big as a mountain. The humans who had built this fortress had lined its coarse walls with tapestries, but the scenes of warriors astride steeds of worth had aged no better than any of the rugs had: The shredded, faded fibers hung dejected from their pinnings, the bottom hems growing e'er longer until surely they would be floor coverings soon as well.

In front of the blazing fire, his band of bastards sat upon carved chairs, eating stag and grouse and pigeon that had been hunted upon the grounds of the estate and cleaned in the field and cooked in the hearth. They drank ale they steeped and fermented themselves in the root cellars beneath the earth, and they ate upon those pewter plates with hunting knives and stabbing forks.

There was little electricity in the manse - no need for it in Xcor's mind a'tall, but Throe had different thoughts. The male had insisted that there be a room for his computers and that required pesky wiring of descriptions that were neither very interesting nor terribly relatable. But there was a point to the modernization. Although Xcor didn't know how to read, Throe did, and humans were not only endless propagators of gore and depravity; they were fascinated by it as well - which was how prey was located throughout Europe.

The seat at the head of the table was open for him, and the second he sat down the others stopped eating, lowering their hands.

Throe was at his right, in the position of honor, and the vampire's pale eyes were alight. "How fare thee?"

That dream, that godforsaken dream. In truth, he was scattered in his skin, not that the others would e'er know. "Well enough." Xcor reached forward with his fork and speared a thigh. "By your expression, I would venture to say that you are with purpose."

"Aye." Throe proffered a thick print out of what seemed to be a compilation of newspaper articles. On the top, there was a prominent black-and-white photograph and he pointed to it. "I want him."

The human male depicted was a dark-haired tough fist with a broken nose and the low, heavy brow of an ape. The script under the photo and the columns of print were nothing but a pattern to Xcor's eyes; however, he understood clearly the malevolence in that visage.

"Why this particular man, trahyner?" Even though he knew.

"He killed women in London."

"How many?"

"Eleven."

"Not a square dozen then."

Throe's frown smacked of disapproval. Which was a delight, really. "He cut them up while they were alive and waited until they were dead to ... take them."

"Fuck them, you mean?" Xcor ripped the flesh from the bone with his fangs, and when there was no reply, he cocked a brow. "Do you mean that he fucked them, Throe."

"Yes."

"Ah." Xcor smiled with an edge. "Dirty little fool."

"There were eleven. Women."

"Yes, you mentioned. So he's a rather horny little perverted fool."

Throe took the papers back and flipped through them, staring down at the faces of the worthless human women. No doubt he was praying to the Scribe Virgin at this very moment, hoping to be granted the opportunity to perform a public service for a race that was nothing but an induction ceremony away from being their enemy.

Pathetic.

And there would be no solo traveling for him - which was why he looked so put upon: Alas, the oath these five males had taken the night of the Bloodletter's incineration tied them to Xcor with iron cables. They went nowhere without his consent and approval.

Although when it came to Throe, that male had been bound to him far earlier than that, hadn't he.

In the silence, tendrils of Xcor's dream resurged in his mind - as did the burn of knowing that he had never found that wraith of a female. Which was not right. Although he was more than willing to be the backbone of myths within human minds, he did not believe in ghosts or hauntings or spells and curses. His father had been taken by something of flesh and blood, and the hunter in him wanted to find it and kill it.

"What say you?" Throe demanded.

So like him. Such a hero. "Nothing. Or I would have spoken, yes?"

Throe's fingers started to tap against the old stained wood of the table, and Xcor was pleased to let him sit and play drummer boy. The others simply ate, content to wait for this battle to be resolved one way or the other. Unlike Throe, the rest did not care which targets were chosen - provided they were fed, watered, and well sexed, they were content to fight whenever and wherever were chosen for them.

Xcor stabbed another strip of meat and eased back into his massive oak chair, his eyes drawn to the decrepit tapestries. Within the faded folds, those images of humans going off to war on stallions that he approved of and weapons he could appreciate irked the shit out of him.

The sense that he was in the wrong place tingled along his shoulders, making him as twitchy as his number two.

Twenty years of no lessers and eradicating mere humans to keep up their skills was no kind of existence for his crew or himself. And yet there were some vampires who had stayed in the Old Country, and he had lingered on this continent in hopes of finding among them what he saw only in his dreams.

That female. Who had taken his father.

Where had all this tarrying gotten him, however?

The decision he had long toyed with crystallized in his mind once again, forming shape and structure, angles and arches. And whereas previously, the impetus had always faded, now, the nightmare gave it the kind of stay-power that turned mere idea into action.

"We shall go unto London," he pronounced.

Throe's fingers immediately stilled. "Thank you, my liege."

Xcor inclined his head and smiled to himself, thinking Throe might get a chance to off that human man. Or ... perhaps not.

Travel plans were indeed afoot, however.

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