Page 9 of To Vanquish Darkness

It was said that vampires and other creatures of the night were created by Le Sombre, a god cursed to dwell in shadows, asleep in the underworld. Le Sombre was awoken by the evil and selfishness of mankind. He prowled the earth in search of men like him—men who were cruel, men who could not be saved—and gifted what he could offer. An eternity dwelling in shadow with him.

No one knew how many vampires and other shadow walkers he’d created, but there was no shortage of their appearances in legend. Demons who feasted on the young and old. Men transformed into creatures by moonlight. Spirits and the walking dead sent to curse men and women, a manifestation of the evil buried in their own hearts.

These shadow walkers sought their own pleasure, terrorized, and murdered, utilizing their eroded divinity with recklessabandon. Though the details of the stories changed with the telling, the result was always the same.

Humans suffered. Having no defense against the damned, they feared and cowered until the god of light took pity on them. They?—

She was falling.Her knees struck the floor. Was that it? Was she so weak and pathetic that a few seconds was all it took?

Her lungs burned, her hands clutching at her chest. Amalie whimpered.Who would protect Bethany?Who would protect all the other girls and boys growing up believing the Shadow only existed in stories?

She needed to tell Marcel about her mistake. She needed to convince her family to run, to move farther than they had after her mother's death—convince them that there was no safety here. She needed to board a ship and cross the ocean and hope the Shadow didn't follow there. She needed to do so much.To say so much.

Amalie would never get that chance.

A wave of nausea threaded itself through her consciousness.Dying felt much like consumption.At least it was familiar.

A sound reminiscent of a sigh dragged her up from the depths where she drowned. Just enough that she almost seemed to know her body again. Like if she reached, she could wiggle her toes or flex her fingers.

Another slip of breath and she was pulled as if from the bottom of a lake, her face suddenly breaking the surface. Amalie gasped, her hands gripping tight.

Amalie’s eyes flashed open. The sounds she'd heard were from her own lips.

Boots.Why was she staring at boots?

She lifted her head and shoved hard, but her fingers slipped. Her chest hit the floor with a crack. She scrambled back, her knees weak and her face throbbing as a hand reached for her.

"Don't touch me!” Amalie hissed. Theo loomed above her in a crouch, his chest heaving, a drip of what had to be her blood pooled on his lips. His tongue flicked out and swept it away. "I'm alive." Amalie didn't realize she'd said the words out loud until energy snapped between them.

Theo stood there, his face still trained on hers, contorted in pain or ecstasy she couldn't tell. She flattened her palms against the wood floors and crushed her fingers against the grooves.

She was alive.

She couldn't stop running those words through her head. It was impossible. More than that, she felt like herself. Terrified. Shaking. But her strength was returning faster than it should’ve been if he’d taken her blood.

What if he hadn’t taken her blood?Was there another option?

Amalie paled. “What did you do to me?”

Theo opened his mouth just as heavy steps sounded on the stairs outside her room. Theo tensed for such a brief moment that Amalie wondered if she was hallucinating. Even his slightest movement was graceful and dreamlike, as if he moved on a different plane, obeying different cosmic rules.

Perhaps this was death.Maybe she was lying on the floor, her lifeblood depleted, and she existed only now in memory, in spirit. She was seeing apparitions and?—

Another heavy footfall. This time, so close that Amalie felt the vibration through the floor. Theo spun and, without a sound, launched himself through the still-open window and into the night.

Amalie's heart jumped into her throat.She was alive. She was dead?She still couldn't make up her mind, but if she had somehow survived his attack, there was only one explanation.

She lifted a hand to the side of her neck where her skin still burned, then scrambled up from the floor. She braced herselfon the vanity and searched for her looking glass with unsteady hands.

Gripping the handle, she leaned toward the flickering candle and positioned it so she could view her flesh. Two tiny marks of deep crimson against her skin.

She inspected the rest of her features to find herself pale, but her cheeks were flushed. Dried blood on her upper lip, her nose swollen where she’d been hit. All of it was proof that her heart still beat deep in her chest.

No.Her thoughts buzzed around the only other possibility like a hornet.

There was a sharp rap of knuckles against wood. “Amalie?” Her uncle's voice called through the door.

Her head was so loud, she couldn’t remember how to speak.What did she know of this curse?

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