“You chose to become something other than what you were born to be. I have long hunted those who chose to damn their souls and imperil others,” Julian replied softly, almost gently. His voice was beautiful purity, its tones filling the cavern, pushing aside the stench of decay. “There was a time, Renaldo, when you hunted by my side. Even then you were not nearly of my strength and power. Why would you think yourself capable of challenging me now?” On the surface, it seemed an innocent enough question, but his voice was hypnotic, velvet, all the more powerful because it was nearly impossible to detect the hidden compulsion in it.
Darius had followed Julian into the mountain, remaining in the background to scan for other dangers, knowing from experience that the undead had many traps and deceptions and that they always tried to take those hunting them with them to their death. With the undead, nothing was ever as it seemed.
He found Julian’s soft, gentle approach to the vampire interesting. Darius was more direct, hunting the undead down and quickly dispatching them in a brief, ferocious battle. Julian was a bit like the vampire himself—indirect, deceptive, undermining the confidence of his opponent, sidetracking him, throwing him off, reminding him of his earlier, better days. Darius shook his head but remained silent and unseen. His sister’s mate was an interesting man, a renegade, going his own way in all things, a careless, sardonic humor spilling over when least expected. Julian appeared to be afraid of nothing, to respect few, and to be a law unto himself.
Darius’s curiosity stemmed from more than merely wanting to become better acquainted with the man who claimed his sister for his own. There was something eluding him about his sister’s chosen lifemate. Something dark and mysterious that nagged at him.
The vampire was moving in a circular direction, trying to position himself closer to the exit. Julian was not giving ground, merely turning with the monster in a strange, flowing dance. Julian could have been performing a minuet for all the stress he portrayed. “You know that I cannot allow you to live, Renaldo. It would be inhuman of me.”
“You have no regard for humans, Julian,” the vampire pointed out. “You follow no one, not even the Prince of all Carpathians. You think I do not feel the shadow lengthening and growing within you? You are of our blood. My challenge was not issued to you but to another, one not known to the people of our homeland. This one hoards more than one eligible woman for himself. This is against our laws.”
Julian’s white teeth gleamed in the darkness of the chamber. “And you follow those laws?” He asked it with deceptive mildness, but the vampire’s words had struck deeply. “You are of our blood.”
Even as he spoke, he felt the slight shift in the earth beneath his feet, the undead’s next deadly desperate assault beginning. At once he moved with lightning speed, going from a loose standing position to lunging straight at the vampire, his hand diving deep into the chest wall, extracting the pumping heart as he leapt away.
His image was so blurred, his speed so swift, even for one of their kind, that Darius thought for the space of a heartbeat that he might have imagined Savage’s skillful charge. The vampire swayed uncertainly, gasping from the blow, his grotesque features contorted into an even more grotesque mask. He fell in slow motion, landing nearly at Julian’s feet.
Julian tossed the heart some distance from the body and immediately gathered energy in his hands to cleanse the blood from his skin. He then directed an orange flame at the still-pulsating organ, incinerating it to a fine gray ash. The flame then leapt from his hand to the body, instantly cremating the remains so that the vampire could not possibly rise again.
The earth beneath his feet rolled, heaved, and bucked.
There was an ominous creaking of rock, a grinding of layers of stone as slabs of granite began to slide toward one another. Darius appeared and sprang toward the shifting crevice, his hands weaving a strange pattern as he sang something softly beneath his breath, slowing the vampire’s lethal trap. Julian didn’t wait for an engraved invitation. Shape-shifting on the wing, making himself as small as possible, he streaked through the closing crack toward open air and the night, Darius right beside him. The two burst out into the freedom of sky, the open expanse of air, just as the two sides of the crevice thunderously crashed together.
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