by

LIANNDRA

The night was close, hugging him tight, shrouding him in the shadows of forever. He stood there, his back against the brick wall, breathing deeply of the night, tickling the inside of his nose with the scents of life around him. He could hear deep within him the throbbing thrum of millions upon millions of heartbeats pounding away in the darkness. The sound of life was almost painful in its intensity, and the monster found he was Hungry.

He raised his head and looked up at the dark sky and smiled a bitter smile. This was the way it was for him, the Hunger that seemed to enter into his soul, stealing him away from himself. He was no longer what he had been, what he might have become in some twilight summer. This was what he was, a monster that haunted the night stealing the blood and lives of innocents.

He knew if he wanted he could leave all of his victims alive, but deep inside, he knew he wanted to see them all dead. All of those beautiful beings that were able to live the lives he couldn’t have, to do the many things he could never do.

When he was in a better mood, he would leave his victims alive to dream of him late in the night when their minds were no longer their own. They would awake in the morning groggy and afraid, yet strangely sad and filled with yearning--yearning for what, they would never know. For as the morning light seeped into their brains, that shadow imagery would fade away and they would live their daytime lives as normal. But still, there would be that vague drawing, that feeling of wanting something they could never have, could never remember and rejoice in.

That was the curse he left upon his victims, the curse of the Kiss. To know they had touched something fiery bright and wonderful, but were found unworthy and set aside.

The victims he drained and allowed to seep into the nothingness of death were the ones he truly worshipped and loved. The ones he let loose from that wordless desire, that feeling of being examined and found wanting. He set them free from that, laying them deep within the heart of the world to breathe in the light of the stars and rise high into the universe and enter into the rays of the moon to pass on into infinity.

Those were the ones he truly loved. The ones he set free and let dissipate into the nothingness unmarked by the pain of having once had him.

The monster looked up at that sliver of moon hidden behind the tall forms of skyscrapers and ancient buildings that were falling apart. He communicated some silent message to that veiled form, then rose high into the night in search of food for his Hunger.

The girl passed through the shadows, he watched her Hungrily. Saliva dripped from between his parted lips onto the lot’s pavement. She was about thirteen, maybe younger, maybe older. It didn’t really matter. It was just that young flesh was more tender than mature.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and walked, almost silently, out to meet her, his shoes kicking small pebbles up in his wake. The pebbles landed with a soft clatter like bones landing. It was a soft, quiet game of the dead. Knucklebones.

"Can you help me, please? My mommy went away without me and I’m scared. I don’t like the dark," his voice was high and frightened, filled with the pain of unshed tears. As though he really were a child, frightened out of youthful bravado and back into the simple fear of darkness and the unknown.

The girl yipped in startled surprise before she saw who had addressed her. "Oh, sorry," she said, laughing a little nervously. "Your mom left you? Out here? Jeez, what a bitch. Come on, I’ll help you find her. This way." She grasped his small hand in hers, her touch warm.

He couldn’t help smiling in the shadows from where he stood near the lamppost; not quite in the light; not quite in the dark.

She was standing directly under the streetlight, waiting for a mother or father to pick her up after the movie. Her friends had left already and the darkness was scaring her. Little did she know how frightened she should have been.

He followed her out of the parking lot, and when they were out from under the lights he took her.

Her blood filled him with warmth and happiness. She moaned only once before she died. Her eyes turned the silvery gray of the dead, her body going still, its minute trembling ceasing with a finality that was almost sad.

He could almost regret that she wasn’t the right kind of person to be part of his House. Almost.

She hadn’t been the right kind of person to join the ranks of those that followed him and relied on him for information, help when they were in trouble, and most of all a place to retreat to and live when there was need. They were like a family or an army, and she just wouldn’t have fit in.

The girl/child had been too filled with kindness and a kind of unbending morality. He could read it in her blood, the scripture writ out in iron letters upon her soul, unyielding to his form of temptation.

What he needed were people of the blackest heart. Or if he found a perfect innocent, he could change them, corrupt that innocence, turn that person into a creature of perfect evil, a well-worked tool.

The grin slid off of Lianndra’s face as he glanced at his watch: ten-thirty. He had to hurry or he would be late.

Before he left, he touched the girl’s softly still face. In life she had been pretty, but in the eternal sleep of death, beauty seemed to radiate off her. At least to him.

Sometimes he wondered what made him what he was. There had been no reason for her to die. Yet he had killed her anyway. Perhaps it was simply the mood he was in.

He seemed to live a life of cycles. Sometimes he couldn’t have killed a fly even if it deserved it, and other times there didn’t seem to be any reason for him to keep any of his victims alive. At times there didn’t seem to be a reason that anyone should live, and when mortals got in his way, he fulfilled that thought, at least to a small degree.

He whirled around. He was going to be late--that and he had to get away from his own thoughts before they filled him up and overflowed, drowning him in the deep abyss of melancholia. Covering him in all the ideas and issues of the world that were like filth, always there and never to be gotten rid of.

Lianndra began to hurry, his short legs pumping as he ran. To any mortal that happened to look up at the moment he passed, he appeared as a black-white blur. Yet still, he wasn’t going as fast as he might have.

If he had been running as fast as he was able, the human eye would have been unable to track him and he would have been invisible. He would have been like a ghost, a shadow flitting across mortal vision, seen and gone before he registered on the mind.

When he held still, he looked to be only seven, the age he had been when he was granted the BloodTouch. The age of his irrevocable change into the creature he was now, what some might have called a "bloodsucking monster."

His once black hair had turned a sort of ethereal white; in some lights it exuded a radiance all its own. His once plump, healthy, little boy’s body had turned a smooth, even white. The plumpness had gone out of it, leaving it muscled and lean. He may not have looked very strong, but his body was surprisingly well muscled for something so small and delicate in appearance. He was like a miniature adult crammed down into a shell of childhood.

As a trademark he wore mostly black when once he had worn bright cheery clothes that had made mothers croon "adorable." Now mothers called him a "handsome little man" and gave him money to buy candy or games.

The things about him that had changed the most, though, were his eyes--they were still dark blue, but now they glowed with a dangerous and unholy light. They shone in the darkness, mirroring the light of his soul, so bright they were hard to meet for long.

As his body was that of a little boy, his mind was the mind of a predator or virtual hunter. What anger he felt came in jagged bursts like lightning, while humor was a dark and terrible thing constantly peering over his shoulder.

He hurried toward the hospital.

Karetta thought giving him bags of blood from the hospital blood bank would stop his need to kill and Feed. What she didn’t seem to understand was that he enjoyed the hunt of mortal prey and he was so strong he probably didn’t need to Feed anymore, or at least not as often.

As he drew up to the hospital, the doors were pushed open and a gaggle of whispering, giggling nurses piled out. They were like children.

He scanned the faces. Where was Karetta? She knew if she wasn’t outside on time, he’d go in and search for her and a few patients would checkout ahead of schedule.

He sat down on a stone block in front of the main doors, his face blank and unemotional, and his black sneakers barely brushing the ground with the tips of their toes. Where was she? He began to feel frustrated. He had no patience when it came to waiting for something he wanted.

As he sat there, a newspaper blew by his foot. Idly he bent down and picked it up. The headline read: Slasher Attacks, Leaves Victims Bloodless

He growled and tossed it away, the wind lifting it high before it came swirling down again, something like twenty feet away.

After ten minutes had passed, he was all out of patience.

Lianndra stood and passed through the doors into the hospital. He made no sound except for the rustle as his shirt brushed his pants. He passed doctors and nurses, each seeing him differently: one saw him as an angel, while another saw him as a demon, and perhaps both were right.

When he reached the nurses station and asked about his "sister" Karetta, he was told that a very white and pale man had picked her up. One nurse said he had looked like an albino, which gave Lianndra his first clue.

The man had been like him--a vampire.

As he left the nurses’ station, he felt rage suffuse him. Another was hunting in his territory. He was angry more about that then the disappearance of Karetta.

As he was leaving, he had an urge to visit the trauma ward. It was one of those formless whims that, in his current mood, he refused to ignore.

He walked up to a doctor and asked for directions, explaining that his big brother had been in a car accident and was there.

When he arrived, he felt like putting a few patients out of their misery.

Whenever he Fed, he got a feeling of safety and closeness to another being. It reminded him of his mother and how much she had loved him, even when he had come home one night as a vampire.

He had visited her the day she had died of old age, a ten-time grandmother and great-grandmother.

Lianndra still visited his family now and again. Some of them held him in awe, waiting for the visit of a great ancestor, while others hated him and how he would Feed on one or two of them, occasionally Making them into vampires or bringing them into the fold of his bloodstock. The ones that hated him the most were those denied either the BloodTouch or the ecstasy of his embrace.

Some of them thought that the only reason he visited the family was to toy with them. They seemed to think he viewed most of them as food to be played with. Sort of like people driving through the countryside mooing at the cows as they passed, knowing full well that in a little while they would be eating hamburgers and French fries. He had to admit they weren’t far wrong.

He came to the trauma ward with all of its strange scents and equally strange beeping sounds, most of them mechanical. Occasionally there were moans of pain to be heard, sounds that made him think of people in ultimate agony and hopelessness.

Mixed with all the flat sterility that filled the air here, there was also the scent of fresh blood and dying decay. There were people on the brink of death here. People with their whole lives before them, lives they weren’t going to experience. He felt a strange fluttering in his belly at the thought.

As he looked in through the little window of a door he was passing, he saw something that changed his life in some way that had nothing to do with the event itself or the person he saw there.

Lying on a bed, wrapped in blankets, was a boy of about seven or eight. Lianndra felt something strange inside. This boy was about the same age he had been when he had been given the BloodTouch.

The boy was dying and in great pain, something he could understand in his mind, but not really in his heart. He had always been the way he was. He would live forever, and what being that knows it is immortal will worry about the little things, like the life of one small boy?

Yet at the same time, how could he look at this boy and not see himself as he might have been? How could he not imagine that he himself might have been sick and dying, either of old age or some incurable illness or disease? How could he not look at this boy who was so very ill and not think of such a terrible and inevitable darkness as death?

The boy had bright red hair that covered his pillow like a spray of blood on the snow. His eyes were closed, the tender, silky-soft skin beneath them appearing bruised, though the face around his eyes was peaceful as he slept. Lianndra felt a drawing to the boy, something that was more than simple Hunger and the need for sustenance.

The boy looked so innocent and still. How would he like the excitement of the Feed? The complete wildness of stalking the night, knowing nothing could stop him?

With great care so as not to waken him, Lianndra drew the door open and walked to the boy’s bedside. The boy was trying so hard to draw breath on his own, but the breathing tubes interfered. There was something so tragic about that.

Lianndra looked down at that thin, drawn face and felt something akin to sorrow. He would not be turning this boy into a vampire. If he did, the boy would be confined to a bed for as long as he lived, which was forever if someone brought him fresh blood. Or, if he were cured, he would be like Lianndra, forever damned to the guise of a child, never to grow older by a day, always to be looked down upon by the adults around him.

The boy looked so peaceful, but already the taint of death was crawling through his circulatory system. He would be dead in a few days, if that long. This drew something out of Lianndra that had been left alone for many years.

It was his belief in God.

There had to be a God, for how else was he here? If there was a Satan, there had to be God.

Vampire lore said that Satan had created the first vampire by sucking the blood of a mortal, then giving the mortal his blood in return. The translation being that they really were the children of the night. It meant they were the offspring of the Dark One Himself, and as such must revile all things good and right.

He didn’t know if he could really believe in a Satan, but it was possible to believe in a God, especially if God resided in the caring and loving heart of every living being. If He was actually the realization of everything that was good in the world, the personification of everything that rested deep in the folds of every person’s heart. So, it might be that God wasn’t a person per se, but really just the ideal that everyone should be good and kind and care for those around them. It could work.

With a slow and sweet voice--the BloodTouch had given him a power over his vocal chords that allowed him to reach any pitch--he began a hymn. It was one he remembered from when he was a true child of the world and not the dark remnant of life he was now.

For a second, he felt a familiar presence in the room. It was not God, but his mother.

The boy in the bed smiled sweetly then went flat-line. His last breath whispered out.

Lianndra heard sobs and whirled around. Patients, doctors and nurses were there, all looking at him; a few were crying.

"That reminds me of my sister. When she died, they sang that song at her funeral. I miss her so much," an old man said, tears streaming down his wrinkled face.

A tiny girl holding a teddy bear looked up at Lianndra. "Are you an angel?" she asked. The taint of death hung over her head like a dark cloud, the IV twisting through her skin like a worm, trying to give her back her life, but it was too late. She was only the shadow of the girl she had once been, and soon she would be gone forever, sucked away into the darkness and the light.

"It made me feel as if God were in the room while you sang," a nurse said, tears dripping down his cheeks.

Lianndra looked at them all in shock. How was he going to get out? Maybe he should try his backup plan, his scared little boy tactic?

"I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so loud," Lianndra said, "but I wanted to see my brother. He always liked that song, so I sang it for him." He made his eyes big and round as he spoke.

A nurse knelt down in front of him and hugged him tight against her. He felt the dark urge to bite her just for the fun of it, but nestled his face into her neck instead, breathing in the warmth of life. It would be enough--for now.

"Will you sing something for us? I know it’s not Christmas, but can you sing a Christmas song anyway?" the little girl asked. There was a breathy quality to her voice that was one of the signs of her imminent death. The inability to draw enough air into her lungs.

"Okay, but you have to close your eyes," he said. "I don’t want anyone to look at me while I sing. Keep your eyes closed, promise me."

They each promised and he began to sing Silent Night, making sure their eyes were safely shut. As he sang, he edged toward the door. By the time he finished, he was outside in the hall.

He smiled a flash of fangs at an old woman strapped voicelessly to a gurney and began to run. Lianndra moved so fast that nobody saw him; not even as a flicker out of the corner of their eye.

He was gone.

SARAPHINE

Levitating high above the city could be dangerous. A sudden updraft could have blown her into orbit where she would have been burned up in the atmosphere. Then there was always the problem of being spotted from below. But she had always been one for taking risks when it came to having fun.

Being a vampire had given her the opportunity to enjoy life to the fullest. She had been born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a peasant in London, and was given the BloodTouch when she was nineteen, on her wedding day. Since then, she had put her mortal life behind her and become a true creature of the night.

If asked now, she would have said that she had been a duchess or some such. She couldn’t stand to be known as a mere peasant girl with dreams of marrying and having dozens of babies to watch and care for.

She shuddered at the thought, now that she had grown up and tasted what the world had to offer. There was still a faint want of children, but she could battle it down.

She was half-glad she couldn’t have children naturally. She didn’t really want to have mortal flesh, flesh that could be injured, flesh that could hurt, flesh that could want. Besides, if she really wanted a child, all she would have to do was consult a magician and buy a spell to make herself fertile for just long enough to conceive and give birth. But in the regular way of things, no, she couldn’t have children, which definitely cut back on the risk of accidents happening.

Now, though, was a time for enjoyment and living on the edge. She had all of forever before her, and she planned on enjoying it.

She had read the Book of Vampires, which had been written by a vampire in the mid-nineteenth century. It was mostly just mad ramblings about an insatiable bloodlust and how good young children tasted. There were some things in it that held some meaning though, for her at least. Like why the sunlight and stakes through the heart could kill a vampire.

Mortals and living things that lived above ground needed the sunlight to survive. Trees were also living things. All of those things were parts of nature. Vampires were the opposite. They were unnatural, born of the dead and all that, and so could not survive in synch with nature.

What she figured was that because of how they were Made in a brutal bloodsucking frenzy and all that, if a stake were stuck through her heart, she would die from the shock. Or if sunlight touched her skin, which had turned a smooth even white, she would get a really bad sunburn and die from the pain.

Over the years Saraphine had gotten so used to not seeing the sun that she didn’t really miss it. It was just a break time from having all of the fun she’d been enjoying. And getting a stake through the heart by some deranged mortal was just a nuisance, like a drive-by shooting. Besides, if she stuck a stake through the heart of a mortal, they would die too, so it wasn’t really what she would consider a real loss. If she were mortal, she would die from it anyway, so there was no real reason to go around sweating blood and tearing out her hair about it.

The one thing she couldn’t understand about the vampire legend was garlic. She really did enjoy good garlic bread. How was it supposed to hurt her? All it could do was give her breath that could knock somebody unconscious.

Crosses didn’t hurt her either. She still went to Sunday Mass and all. She had even tasted a priest’s blood; it was the same as everyone else’s. The only thing she couldn’t stand was salt water. She couldn’t swim and saltwater made her feel heavy and fat. Bloated out.

Nothing seemed to be any different from before, now that she was one of the undead, except for the fact that she drank blood, Slept during the day and partied all night. She felt like a teenager.

Saraphine brought her rambling thoughts to a halt. It was time for the meeting. She floated slowly down to the tarry roof of the hotel.

As she opened the roof door and headed down the cement stairs, she felt something flutter at the edges of her consciousness. It was something she recognized from years and years of feeling it.

It was the presence of Lianndra. He must have made the meeting after all.

Brightness entered her dark soul, and for an instant she allowed herself to rejoice. She was on time. She would be able to warn him about the coming of the darkness.

By the time she reached the dining room, she was dressed in a hunter green evening gown, her jeans and tee shirt stashed in an out-of-the-way corner, and she was positive that Lianndra had made it.

When she opened the door, there he was--a little figure in a pressed suit, looking rather adorable. For a second she wished she did have children, maybe a son like Lianndra.

"Saraphine, so glad you could make it," he said. "I was almost certain that you would be here, but you know how it is. We could have passed each other like ships in the night, none the wiser." His piping voice always made her smile. She had known him for over ninety-seven years and the sweet little voice invariably took her by surprise.

"You should have known I would be here. I only come to these meetings in the hopes of seeing your handsome face and feeling your tireless youth," Saraphine replied to his greeting, stepping forward and holding out a hand which he kissed gently. No matter how childlike he appeared, inside he was an adult and a gentleman.

"Come, let us catch up on all of the things we have missed in each others’ lives since our last meeting," she said, holding onto his hand. She wasn’t going to let go of him until she was absolutely certain he was real. It had been that long.

Saraphine led him toward a table where they could sit and talk. They hadn’t seen each other in over twenty-five years and had a lot to catch up on. She sat down across from him.

He looked at her out of his piercing blue eyes, something strange in his gaze. It was almost something she recognized, but when she concentrated on trying to figure out what it was, it was gone and he was his usual self-confident self, nothing strange there.

"How have you fared, my darling Saraphine?" A soft hand reached over the table to touch her own. While her skin was soft, it didn’t have the baby fineness of his. Lianndra’s touch was like velvet across her naked flesh, smooth and unbroken.

She looked deep into his eyes and began to speak: "Lianndra, I have something rather important to discuss with you. I know this sounds a bit paranoid, but I’ve been getting strange Feelings and having my dreams again. You know, my dreams?"

He nodded. Lianndra knew her more intimately than any other person had in hundreds of years. He knew that sometimes, when the moon and stars were right and she was at optimum health, the dreams would creep into the shadows of her mind to weaken her resolve for immortality. They would come and whisper in her ear of things that would happen in the future, frightening, terrible things. Things that always came true no matter how hard she tried to stop them.

"Somewhere out there, there is a vampire that is totally ruthless," Saraphine said. "He or she preys upon fellow vampires, which is against all of the rules. And now, when I gaze into the dreamscapes, I see your face. You are one of the next victims, my beloved. The creature wants your soul. What shall we do? What shall we do?"

His face closed down. He had been having a fairly good evening before this news, she saw with sorrow tinged with regret. He deserved a chance to lay down his burden of responsibility and enjoy himself for a little while, even if it was only for one night.

Lianndra’s eyes grew brighter and brighter as thought flashed across his brain. Her hand had been dropped the moment she spoke. She wished now that she could feel his cool skin against hers again. There was something oddly comforting about his touch.

It had always been a part of Lianndra that he seemed to know her deepest and most intimate thoughts and feelings, sometimes even before she knew them herself. It was just something about Lianndra, one of the many things that made him so special and dear to her heart.

"I know that they’ve been killed. I Felt Valdimar calling to me as he was torn apart," he said. "I just didn’t think that anyone else had noticed that anything was going on." he paused for a moment of thought.

"I’m sorry to say that I was rather hoping that no one had noticed all of the deaths, that they might have been marked off as random occurrences," Lianndra said. "Too bad this couldn’t have waited for at least another couple of days when I could have been better prepared. But if you’ve noticed all of the disappearances, than others probably have too."

He stood, pushing away from the table. He was going to speak to them all, something he had not done in a long time. She calculated it in her head. He had not spoken to the group as a whole since the fifth meeting she had attended, which had been in 1906.

"We must call an actual meeting of the Brethren." Lianndra’s voice wasn’t very loud, but it carried across the entire room, as though he was speaking into a hidden microphone that no one else could see. "All must appear, even the Graveyard Sisters." When he spoke the name, she couldn’t help shivering. The Graveyard Sisters were the most disgusting of all vampires. They had come from Transylvania, which was in Romania, about the same time Dracula supposedly walked the earth.

Most vampires knew there wasn’t a real Dracula, it was just the imaginings of the mortals. Only the Graveyard Sisters truly believed. They had a ratty old copy of the book, handwritten, and they followed it to the letter.

They waited, not Feeding, for years on end, then attacked the nearby mortals in a frenzy of blood. They were to be looked down upon by all other vampires and pitied for their stupidity. Their eating habits aside, there was also a definite lack of hygiene--they never bathed. There were rumors that one of them hadn’t taken a bath since the 1500’s, and then she had only fallen into a river, which didn’t really count. Saraphine shuddered at the thought, mostly because it was something she could easily believe. The Graveyard Sisters stunk up whole areas of the landscape without even trying.

She listened to Lianndra speak. Sometimes she really noticed how much older he was. There was a thirty-one year difference between their ages and about a three hundred year gap in their experiences. He knew so much more than she did about the workings of the world and the many ways to get what he wanted.

Lianndra’s face was shadowed, the thoughts and worries of a grown man overlaying that child-face. So young and tender when he was Made and brought across to the darkness of immortal night, he was the very epitome of all of those children raised in darkness and despair. Only he was their leader and god, raised up to show the world what they could be if they were only given that one single chance they deserved.

Just looking at him sometimes hurt, seeing that brightness shining out of him. It was hard to see what he was and know that she could never match him. And at the same time, it was a comfort to know that if trouble ever came for her, Lianndra would be there as a protector and guide. He was strong in a way she could only imagine.

"There is a vampire that hunts his own kind," he was saying. "Who has disappeared so far?"

"Amadeus, Ishpah and Valdimar the Elder," Saraphine supplied from where she sat.

He looked at her for a moment, silent and thoughtful. "This is not good, not at all. If someone could kill Amadeus, we may all be doomed, even the Queen."

At the mention of the Queen, the room’s occupants froze. Hardly any had been listening until her name was spoken.

Queen Tispith, oldest of all vampires and mother to them all, was cruel and evil. While most vampires still had a little humanity left in them, she was so old that she had none, it had been burned away by the passage of years.

In the early 1600’s, for the good of all, Tispith was entombed in a vault deep in the hills of Greece. Over the door was mounted a sign that was meant as a warning and a ward--telling people to keep the door sealed and locking the Queen inside forever. Tispith may have been the Queen of the vampires, their ruler, but none wanted her walking the earth. She was just too terrible.

Saraphine stared at Lianndra. No vampire would dare to harm the Queen--would they?

"Who would try to harm the Queen? She is the mother of us all. No one would even think of it!" her voice, which should have been a strident denial, came out as a hoarse whisper, barely audible even in the stillness.

"Only one person would dare, and we all know him. You cannot be absolutely certain that he is truly dead. The Queen banished him into the sunlight, but did he really die? I have heard tell that several of the Elders, and the Queen herself, have stepped out into the sunlight without harm." Lianndra paused theatrically. "Who is the man that hates her the most, the man that would kill us all without a single thought? One of the Elders that fell from grace?" His eyes grew brighter and brighter, the blue almost seemed to be aflame.

Saraphine lifted her hand to her mouth. "You don’t mean him, do you?"

He nodded slowly. She felt as if a pit had opened up under her feet and she was falling through it.

"Who are you talking about?" a boy in the back demanded. He was none other than the great questioner of the accused, Baldwin Falkiri, one of the Elders.

Lianndra turned to face him, a flinty smile twisting his lips. "We are talking about the great and powerful Ralsbet," he said. "Saraphine and I have heard many a story of him. I have heard of an untraceable murderer going through the city. He slashes his victims’ throats and leaves them totally bloodless on the street."

"You mean the ‘Hacker and Slasher’?" Baldwin asked, raising an eyebrow. His cupid bow lips were twisted with derision.

Lianndra nodded. "I think he took my mortal Karetta Goldspik." When he spoke her name, his voice, which had been so emotionless, was full of anger. Not anger about the disappearance of the woman, but about the fact that anyone would dare to poach in his preserve of little mortals. No one likes someone stomping through their territory, Lianndra least of all. He could be very territorial.

Saraphine looked at him, her eyes filled with horror. Ralsbet was completely without remorse. He killed without a thought, humans and vampires alike.

The Council of the Night had made it illegal for one vampire to kill another without a proper Challenge or a very good, defendable reason. Due mostly to the fact that there was probably someone out there that would be dumb enough to kill off all of the weaker vampires, leaving the stronger without servants and the like. The Council had seen the consequences of a bunch of vampire lords having to care for themselves and had immediately taken action, writing up The Revised Rules and Regulations. A tome of gargantuan proportions, heavy and awkward to carry.

Ralsbet had supposedly been executed because of his crimes against vampire kind. Not to mention the fact that no one had much liked him, so there was no one to defend him when the Council’s soldiers came after him. Secretly, many people had rejoiced at his death, glad that the reign of terror was finally over. He had been like a mad dog, killing without thought or remorse, just attacking with no warning anyone that stood in his way.

If Ralsbet were still alive, it would mean that he was one of the truly strong breed and would want revenge for the acts against him. And there was a long list of people that had stood against him and "crimes" committed on his person. He would have good reason for seeking revenge.

When one vampire kills another outside of a Challenge, he or she is seen as being without honor, so that when their sentence is carried out, they are stripped of everything: their riches, their reputations, the power they have stored up, and for males, their sexuality. It was a painful, demeaning process that could last days depending on the mood of the executioners.

Now Ralsbet would most likely be out for the worst sort of vengeance: the killing of his fellow Brethren in the most awful manner. Ralsbet could very well try to push the Elders he hated out into the sunlight, as he had been pushed.

Baldwin Falkiri’s eyes went blank. He had been the accuser. His had been the word that had sentenced Ralsbet to his fate. He would most likely be the next victim of Ralsbet’s anger. He didn’t even flinch at the thought and neither did any of the others. It was a horrible thing not even to be contemplated, and if it wasn’t to be contemplated then there was no reason to worry because it was never going to happen. They were far beyond such petty issues as death and disfigurement.

It should be said that vampires are the most pigheaded creatures on the earth. Mortals were pigheaded as well, but vampires have had the time to perfect and hone their mulishness. And at the moment, they had decided to ignore the threat against them. If they thought hard and long enough about nothing, then the threat against them would be gone, right?