Blood Born Read Free Page B

couldn’t enjoy all that was offered?
    The things he’d seen come into being during the past hundred and fifty years! Even he, who was seldom surprised by anything, had watched with bemusement as change piled on change. Electric lights, telephones, automobiles, airplanes—it was almost too much to take in, though he enjoyed them very much. He loved movies and television, the travel, the thrill of driving a fast car or getting on a plane and a few hours later being thousands of miles away. The humans had even managed to go into space; the audacity of such fragile creatures was either valiant or incredibly stupid, and despite two millennia studying them he hadn’t yet decided which it was. Both, perhaps.
    He had money, and he had time. If he was in the mood for city life he stayed in his place near Seattle, Washington. When he wanted peace and quiet, he came here. In a while he would tire of the quiet and move on, but for now … for now the solitude was as necessary to his survival as blood. Immortality didn’t come without a price.
    Still, he never stayed in one place very long—“long” being a relative term. A month might seem long to some, but to him it was the blink of the eye, a heartbeat. It wasn’t in his nature to nest. He was a hunter at heart, and he enjoyed the thrill of the chase even morethan the inevitable end when the prey was his. One day soon he would feel the call—or receive an actual call—and in a flash he would leave behind his beloved solitude to lose himself once more in the blood hunt.
    When twilight came, Luca left his cottage and walked out into the cool fresh air. This was the time of day he liked best, when the fading light and gathering darkness accentuated the aloneness he sometimes craved as if it were as tangible as the earth he walked upon. He took a course that led him through a fragrant meadow, with the craggy mountains looming over him and deepening the shadows. His boots cut slowly through the tall grass. There was no hurry in his movements, no need beyond the moment. He was old enough that he no longer had to feed very often, unless he was burning a lot of energy, which allowed him to escape from the world for days, even weeks, at a time. The hunger, the
need
, would eventually come, and when it did he would feed.
    But he wasn’t hungry tonight. Tonight he was satisfied to walk these stark, dramatic hills and remember the battles that had been fought here. There was a lot to remember, because there had been so many battles, so many wars. Easily destroyed or not, his human fellow warriors had thrown themselves into war with such complete lack of caution that he could only marvel. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know they were mortal; they did. And still they fought, often long past the point where sanity or common sense should have kicked in. Even after centuries of watching them, preying on them, sometimes fighting beside them, humans could still bemuse him.
    He didn’t know exactly how old he was; he knew he was over two thousand, but he couldn’t pin down a year or even a birth date, if he’d ever known it at all. Vampires in general weren’t big on calendars, evenassuming his mother had known the date he’d been born. He’d kept track for a while, the first four or five hundred years, but after that he’d lost interest because the number wasn’t important; after all, no one would be throwing a birthday party for him. All that was important was his personal power, which had grown with each passing century and would continue to increase, until now the number who equaled him in some ways could be counted on one hand. In power lay safety, and one of the first lessons he’d learned was to always watch his back, even with his own kind, which was why he didn’t live among them.
    He had everything he needed here. In a lot of ways he was more comfortable with humans than he was with the kindred, because he could relax with humans. He didn’t fear them, didn’t have to be