Dark Demon Read Free Page B

running down his face. "I'm going to kill you," he snapped, glaring at Natalya.
    "Do shut up," Natalya said. "You're becoming so repetitive."
    "You will not escape this time," Arturo said. "You cannot best Henrik, me and the wolves. Do you hear them? They are on their way to assist us."
    "You take all the fun out of fighting because you never fight fair," Natalya complained. "You have no honor."
    Arturo smiled at her with his perfect white teeth. "What is honor after all, Natalya? It is worth nothing."
     
    Vikirnoff Von Shrieder knew the moment he entered the heavy woods that something evil waited there. The warning came in the silence of the forest, the way the earth shuddered and the trees cringed. Not a single living creature moved. It mattered little. He was a hunter and he expected danger to find him. It was his accepted way of life and had been for centuries.
    He took a step and stopped abruptly as the grass shivered beneath his feet. He looked down, half expecting to see the stalks shrivel. Was the forest shrinking from direct contact with him ? Had it sensed the darkness shadowing him with every step, with each breath he took? Nature could very well be naming him monster—vampire, a Carpathian male who had deliberately chosen to give up his soul for the momentary rush of power and emotion a kill while feeding brought.
    It was a choice, wasn't it? Had he made a decision and was no longer aware of whether he was good or evil? Was there even such a thing? The thought should have distressed him, but it didn't. He felt nothing at all even as he contemplated the idea that he was no longer fully a Carpathian male; that the predator in him had consumed all but some small spark left in his soul.
    He dropped to his knees, his hands digging through layers of leaves and twigs covering the forest floor and plunging deep into the rich, dark soil beneath. He lifted his face to the night sky. " Susu ," he whispered aloud. "I am home." His native language rolled off his tongue naturally, his accent thicker than usual as if somehow by just being in the Carpathian Mountains he could go back in time.
    After so many centuries of exile in service to his people, he had finally returned to his birthplace. He knelt in utter silence waiting for something. Anything. Some flicker of emotion, or remembrance. He expected the soil to bring peace, to bring him serenity, to bring him something , but there was the same barren void he woke to every rising.
    Nothing. He felt absolutely nothing. He bowed his head and sank back on his heels, looking around him. What he wanted or even needed, he didn't know, but there was no flood of emotion. No elation. No disappointment. Not even despair. The forest looked bleak and gray with twisted, malevolent shadows waiting for him. The endless cycle of his life remained. Kill or be killed.
    Hunger was ever present now, a soft seductive whisper in his mind. The call to power, to salvation, and false though he knew it to be, it had gained strength with every rising. He had fought battles, far too many to count, destroying old friends, men he respected and admired, watching the fall of his people and all for what? "Tell me the reason," he whispered to the night. "Let me understand the complete waste of my life."
    Had he fed this night? He tried to recall the occasion of his wakening, but it seemed too much trouble. Surely he hadn't taken a life while feeding. Was this how it happened then? Was there no real choice, but a slow indifference pervading one's mind until one kill ran into another? Until one feeding became mixed with a kill and his indifference became the weapon of his own destruction?
    He looked toward the south where he knew the prince of his people resided. The wind began to pick up speed and strength, rushing through the forest in a southerly direction. "Honor is a damnable trait and one that may not last eternity." Vikirnoff murmured the words with a small sigh as he rose to his full height and drew