Page 18 of Vampires & Bikers

I shook my head, refusing to accept it.

“It could be the making of you,” she said, lightly.

I stepped forward, changing the topic. “Alexandra, what are the rulers saying? Are they still with us?”

She inclined her head. “They are divided. Some of the younger members are more open to the charms of a new elite, offering them money and land. I have heard of parties, of lavish gifts…”

Vampires were notoriously exclusive, we’d always been accused of not letting anyone in. I had warned Vlas that the world was changing and that we couldn’t keep everyone else out but he wouldn’t listen.

“I must go,” Alexandra said suddenly.

I nodded. “Thank you, for seeing me. You didn’t have to come here.”

She paused. “I don’t want things to be awkward between us,” she said.

“I appreciate that.”

She looked at me strangely.

“You are different,” she said. “This girl must be something.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t like the idea that my relationship with Ruby was weakening me in any way. I knew she was in my thoughts, but it had not occurred to me that in doing so, I was being distracted from my duties.

I couldn’t lose my focus on protecting my kind and my king. Even worse, Alexandra had suggested that I had ignored Matteo’s concerns, perhaps that I could’ve prevented his death. I felt anger rising in me and I knew I had to control it. Alexandra wanted to get a rise out of me, it was her way of showing me she was still in control.

“Oh, one last thing,” Alexandra said, turning back. “In consulting with the spheres, I have tried to see how this war will go, but it is unclear. All I can see is that there will be destruction and that many will die.” She waves her hand and I see a world filled with thick smoke and devastating flames.

“It means the outcome is not yet decided.”

Then she was gone.

The war would be worse than I feared, but all was not lost yet. There was a way to win it, but I had to find it. I thought of what she said about Matteo’s death. He had been betrayed, by one of us. It had to be someone in power, in a senior position. In whose interest could this murder be?

I thought of the silver dagger I had seen. That had not been just any weapon, but an expensive blade. Perhaps royal? Overpowering Matteo meant either numbers or a vampire of superior strength and there were not many like this left.

As I made my way back to the Castle, I thought of Ruby and wondered how she was getting on in Buzzard Creek. I would have liked to go back to check on her, but my focus had to be on the Capital.

I thought of Matteo and how I had not been there for him in the end. He had wanted to talk to me and I had been too busy and kept blowing him off. Whenever he told me about his concerns about the shifters, I told him he was seeing ghosts. Furry ghosts, with bad breath, but these ghosts had come back to haunt me, in the worst way.

There could be no happiness for me until I knew who had killed him and why.

I owed him that.

Chapter 9

Ruby

I had been with Shelley all afternoon, sitting in her backyard, drinking beer and talking about what was happening around us. Shelley was leaving the next day, she was convinced that the vampires would come to town and kill all of us while trying to get to the shifters.

She’d heard that our men were being trained to fight in armies in the east and north. None of the men we knew were particularly good at working with others in a team. They were good fighters, but they weren’t organized.

Inside, we could hear her family packing. She was living with her sister and two nieces. Both her brothers were in the motorbike gang working for Tomás. The whole town was working for him. All of us would be seen as being on the side of the shifters.

“My grandma told me what it’s like when the vampires come,” she said in a low voice. “It’s a feeling you get. You don’t see anything, but suddenly, you become cold all over. It’s like…you freeze, you’re unable to move. It’s terrible,” she said.

“Then you hear this, like, screeching noise. It cuts into your soul, she says, filling you with a kind of terror you can’t believe. When you do see them, it’s like a black cloud and that’s all you see before they rip into you, tear you to pieces.”

Shelley’s grandmother had survived a vampire attack on her family when she was a child by hiding in a basement. Her entire family had been killed and she had fled to a neighboring town, but she’d never lost her hatred of vampires.

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