Chapter 8
Danton
"The rebellion is being led by the women of this planet!"
The roar that greeted the commander's pronouncement rocked the bleachers in the building the Vampyren had taken. Danton knew it had once been a school.
They'd remodeled it. Dug a basement. Put in cages.
Housed the human males that still sparked with danger in the dungeon, dropped food and water bottles once a day and let them fight for them.
Separated any that looked likely to collaborate.
Took them separately and threw them into the cages with the fertile females.
There was always a need for new foodstuffs.
"The planet is proving to be harder to put down than expected."
He stood by Lan, smoldering with rage. There were days Danton felt the call of his tribe as strongly as any of the others around him.
At dawn he had risen and run for miles in the unfamiliar wet air of the Earth city.
Even after a year his body craved the desert where he'd come from.
The salt air burned and the moisture in it made breathing difficult, so he ran off the weakness, then finished with a crushing bout of weight training and abdominal work, then showered in the coldest water he could stand.
Home had been dry and red and vast. Home had been a planet where his royal blood meant something beyond being first in line for the worst assignments. Here he was a warrior. Just a warrior. His lineage mattered less than his kill count.
He did not want to be thrown into the breeding program. Not with the human females to produce more of the Vampyren.
He couldn't have told anyone why. Vampyren wouldn't ask anyway. They'd simply execute him if he refused. So better to keep his arousal at bay.
The coldest water he could stand.
The commander was still talking. Statistics, Danton thought. Numbers of women captured. Numbers killed. Reports from cells across the continent — they'd learned to use the human term for it, continent, as though this planet's geography mattered to anyone who'd crossed a solar system to get here.
Something about the women, though. Something in the way the commander said it. Led by the women. As if that were shameful. As if a planet whose rebellion was driven by its females should be easier to crush.
He looked at Lan, who was staring at the commander with the blank focus of a soldier waiting for orders. But Danton had known Lan since they were boys running through the red dust. He could see the tension in his jaw. The slight forward lean that meant he was calculating something.
"They attack in groups," the commander went on. "Small cells. They target our entertainment, our supply lines, our breeding facilities. They are not trained soldiers. They are angry women with human weapons."
Laughter from the ranks. Danton forced himself to join in. Something about the laughter made his skin crawl.
He thought of the games last night. The women stepping onto the stage. The way they'd held their weapons — not like soldiers, no. Like people with nothing left to lose.
The beast was awake in him. He craved blood, violence, to hunt and kill and subdue the stupid beings on the planet. He was here to conquer. All his doubts had gone by the wayside.
Maybe it was the events at the games the night before.
Maybe a reawakening of his warrior spirit.
Maybe it would pass. For now, he roared his fury alongside Lan, his wounds from the attack at the theater freshly healed, and his brothers, Jayden, Tamel, Kev, the others in his unit.
On his own world, when the warriors roared, the sound carried across the desert for miles.
Here it bounced off tile walls and fluorescent lighting and smelled like the processed food the humans left behind in their schools.
It wasn't the same. Nothing here was the same and the longer he stayed, the more he noticed the difference between what conquest was supposed to feel like and what it actually did.
He was one of the warriors.
He was ready for patrol. He was ready to find splinter movements of humans and crush their spirit, throw them in to tank farms to harvest their blood. They only existed on the planet now to make conquest and colonization possible for the Vampyren. This was their world now.
He was one of the warriors.
Danton rode the crest of his rage and roared along with his brethren.
And told himself the rage was enough. That it would keep being enough.