Chapter 4
Loren
Daily, Sav grew more dangerous.
In part, Loren knew, that was because his own beliefs were out of keeping with who he was and how he was supposed to feel.
Or not feel. They weren't here to adapt or protect.
They were on Earth to conquer and take. Everything else was bonus and that included finding suitable human females to use as breeding stock.
Watching as the prisoners were loaded into the vans, he could hear Sav's victim screaming, the screams now starting to die down and fade. He'd be dead soon.
That was Vampyren. That was blood sport and feeding.
But the unmitigated savagery of the winter was wearing on him.
Whatever the humans thought, whatever they saw, there were Vampyren back on their home planet who raised blood animals without terror or pain, who slaughtered as best they could without causing additional harm.
The cold was the real enemy here. Not the humans with their pipe bombs and desperate ambushes.
The cold. Vampyren were desert creatures, evolved under twin suns that never fully set, their blood running thick and slow in a way that demanded heat the way a lung demanded air.
Chicago in January was a cruelty no commander had planned for.
He could feel it now, the sluggishness creeping into his limbs, the dull ache settling behind his eyes like a headache that never quite arrived.
His fingers were stiff inside his gloves.
Two soldiers in the 4th division had gone feral last week, their higher reasoning shutting down as their bodies fought to conserve warmth, and they'd torn apart a family of five before anyone could restrain them.
The commanders called it regrettable. Loren called it inevitable.
Cold-blooded meant something different when the blood actually started to slow.
Every race had its warriors. The Vampyren simply had more and they were the invaders as Earth people called them, the ones who moved between the stars, conquering and taking what they needed, using wormhole technology to take their prizes home before heading out again.
It was an ever-expanding population, no matter how vicious the female Vampyren were.
They needed blood, they needed the space of new worlds.
When they'd come to Earth, though, most of them had admired the resilience of the humans.
They fought back. They gathered in small cells and made ineffectual strikes, but he thought they were learning.
He'd told this to the commanders and been punished for his insolence.
The whip marks had yet to fade from his back and the commanders were now as mad as the majority of the Vampyren with the cold and early dark of winter.
He wouldn't warn them again.
Loren Vassilynt was seventeenth in line for the throne on his home planet. Occasionally he considered the fates that would have to befall every other vampire in line for the throne before he could seize power and it amused him.
It amused him, usually, to consider how his ambitious, savage brother Sav raged when he believed himself out of earshot at the line of succession that put him eighteenth, behind Loren.
Other times it made Loren consider...
He'd angered Sav. Not that doing so was difficult, especially given how conditions on Earth were.
Sav had always been fond of creature comforts.
Military service was required of all Vampyren, ten years of it, a nothing in their long lives unless they were killed while serving.
But with the Lucian as enemies turning up on every habitable planet the Vampyren found and then trying to, and usually succeeding in wresting control of those planets, military service was necessary.
Exploration and conquest were necessary.
Taking the planet. Necessary. They needed it. They needed girls like the one he'd so recently and confusingly been holding.
He kept returning to that. The confusion of it.
She'd hit him hard enough to split his lip and he'd tasted his own blood, which should have triggered the kill reflex, the ancient impulse buried in every Vampyren male that said threat, eliminate, move on.
Instead he'd stood there like an idiot with copper on his tongue and something else entirely moving through him.
She'd been shaking. Not from submission.
From fury. Her small fist had connected with real intent, real violence, and some broken part of him had thought good.
On his home world the females were beautiful in the way a blade was beautiful.
You admired them and then you kept your distance or they opened your throat.
This human girl fought like she had Vampyren blood in her and didn't know it.
He had pulled her close not to subdue her but to keep the others from seeing what she'd done, because if they had, she would already be dead.
He could still feel the phantom weight of her against his chest. The heat of her. Humans ran so impossibly warm.
Back on Vassilynt Prime, there was a courtyard in his family's estate where the red sand held the heat of the day long into the dark hours.
He used to lie on the stones as a boy with his eyes closed, feeling the warmth seep up through his spine, and the world made sense in a way it never did anywhere else.
His mother had been killed by his father's second mate before Loren was old enough to remember her face.
That was also Vampyren. The females destroyed what came before them.
It was biological, not cruelty, though the distinction offered no comfort when you were the orphan.
He wondered sometimes if that was why he flinched at unnecessary killing.
Some deficiency in his making. Some softness his mother had left in him before she died.
And he'd made Sav angry. Now there'd be a battle and the girl would be the prize. From trying to keep her safe, he'd put her at risk.
If this was how his plans turned out, it was a good thing he was seventeenth from the throne.
And an even better thing that Sav was eighteenth from it.