“That is not your destiny.”
“I will make it mine.” Duran began to memorize every pore, each eyelash, all the flecks in those muddy hazel eyes. “And I shall not fail.”
“Such optimism. I hope it persists as I look forward to ridding you of it. Last chance. Tell me where your father is, and I will let you go.”
“I’ll see you in Dhunhd before that happens.”
Chalen shook his head and straightened. “Just remember, you could have stopped this . . .”
1
Present Day
THERE ARE STILL SECRETS in America. In spite of population density, the internet, modern law enforcement, and the constant intrusion of cell phone cameras, there remain, across this great nation, whole tracts of hill and dale that are largely uninhabited. Uninvestigated. Unpenetrated by the prying eye.
For both humans and vampires.
Ahmare, blooded daughter of Ahmat, drove through the night, alone on highways that rose and fell over the heaving earth of the Appalachian Mountains. She was far from Caldwell, New York, by now, a good seven hours into her trip and close to her destination. She had stopped only once, at a roadside gas station to refuel. She had timed herself. Eight minutes from insertion of credit card to reclose of gas cap.
A human male who had been doing the same to his motorcycle had looked across at her, his eyes lingering on her body, his sexual hunger obvious under the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights.
When he’d sauntered over to her, all cock and swagger, she had debated castrating him both to get him off her back and as a public service.
But she couldn’t afford the delay—and more to the point, she might fantasize about doing something like that, but she wasn’t a natural born killer.
She’d just learned that firsthand.
The leering bastard did deserve a corrective event, however, and if she’d been hardwired differently, she was exactly the kind of destiny to deliver it to him. Vampires were a far superior species to those rats without tails, so it would be the work of a moment for her to overpower him, drag him behind the gas station, and take out her hunting knife.
The trouble with humans, however, was that they were an invasion of non-lethal pests, ants intruding on an otherwise enjoyable picnic. And the last thing she needed was a bunch of—what state was she in now? Maryland?—cops with Southern accents flashing their lights and pulling her over ten miles down the highway for aggravated assault because the attendant in that little glass box with the lotto ads all over it had positive-ID’d her.
Which wouldn’t be tough. There weren’t a lot of six-foot-tall, black-haired, black-clothed females stopping to pump gas at three in the morning. And the security cameras no doubt had the license plate on her Explorer.
So, yup, instead of taking action, she’d told the human with the bright ideas that he’d have more success fucking off than fucking her. Then she’d gotten back in her SUV and returned to the highway, reflecting that her ability to override her aggression for a greater purpose proved another truism in the long list of differences between Homo sapiens and vampires: For the most part, her kind had a higher evolved rationality.
Although perhaps that quality wasn’t intrinsic to divergences in the cerebral makeup between the two species, but rather the result of the much longer life spans of vampires. If you lived long enough, you tended to put things in better perspective. Stay focused on your goals. Understand that present sacrifice yielded tenfold future gain.
Which explained why she was going to get her far younger brother out of a warlord’s dungeon.
Overhead, lightning tripped and fell across the velvet black sky, and just as hail struck her windshield like marbles poured out of a sack, her exit glowed green and white in the headlights.
Getting off the interstate, she traveled over a series of roads that grew narrower and more degraded. By the time she pulled onto a dirt lane ten minutes later, the summer storm was raging, great gusts of wind and lashing rain bending the fat-topped, kudzu-choked trees and releasing them just before they snapped free of their root systems.
And there it was.
Chalen the Conqueror’s century-old stronghold in the New World.
Either that or a Disney antagonist had jumped out of a movie to get away from all the damn singing and set up shop in this sweaty forest to kick puppies and scare children.
The stone fortress had high walls with thin slits to shoot out of and defensible positions all along its roofline parapet. The entrance even had a bridge that could be drawn up from a murky moat and locked into place. All that was missing were the alligators—and there was a good possibility they weren’t missing.
Oh, look, they were waiting for her.