Page 6 of Marked By Him

Something in the cold, soulless depths of his eyes told me he was right.

3

Roman

Before I senther back out into the world, I needed to know what she was running from. Before I let her go, I had an obligation to my people to make sure no one else was coming after her.

She didn’t want to give me answers, and that was fine.

I’d take them.

I wasn’t a patient man. I wasn’t a lenient leader. There were rules,myrules. Soon, she would know that.

The wooden steps leading from the basement to my kitchen creaked under my weight. Light didn’t flood the room when I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door. There was only darkness to match her silence.

The door clicked closed behind me. She couldn’t get out of the restraints. I’d zip-tied her to the chair, but locked the knob just in case.

She let out a sound somewhere between a howl and a scream. It was futile.

I wasn’t lying when I said no one would hear her. My cottage was set apart from the others, tucked in the back. Solitary. Alone, just like me.

Moonlight spilled into the kitchen from the window above the sink. Wood crackled in the fireplace. The fire released an amber glow across the living room. Days here were comfortable. Nights were cold. The girl wore nothing except a thin t-shirt and small shorts. She was still wet from crossing the stream that surrounded our community.

She had to be freezing.

That’s not your problem, Roman.

Making her comfortable wasn’t my job. Keeping our community safe was. We were a sanctuary, a peaceful paradise off the grid called Sanctum Sanguinem.

Holy blood.

The blood of the holy. The righteous. Those put in place to bring the world back to the way it was meant to be. Bloodlines chosen by God. Before the virus that sucked the soul out of men and turned them into monsters.

We were set up at the base of the Tecumholm mountains, surrounded by a stream and a chain link fence with barbed wire at the top. On this side of the fence and stream, there was a twenty-foot-high stone wall, covered in sweet-smelling honeysuckle and ivy vines. Between the chain link fence and stone wall, there was a stretch of garlic fields that surrounded our entire border. And just inside our gate was a single cottage with two armed guards and barrels of animal blood.

Centuries of hard work separated us from the rest of the world. We may not have had the modern luxuries of the bigger cities, like technology or hydropower. But we were happy. We were at peace. No one invaded our sanctuary.

There weren’t enough resources here that were useful to the vampires. Even if they ventured along the border, they didn’t come near the garlic. To the naked eye, it looked like nothing more than tall grass. To a vampire, the vapors alone from a field that size was deadly. If they ever did manage to get close enough, we shot tranquilizer darts filled with animal’s blood into their veins, poisoning them from the inside out.

Humans rarely attempted to cross the stream. Those who did, never made it past the guards. They always fought back, and they always lost.

There were only two reasons anyone ever came through our gate:

They were looking for war. They wanted to take, to destroy, or to ruin.

Or they were searching for peace. They needed sanctuary. Forgiveness. Escape.

This woman was a fighter, but she didn’t comehereto fight.

So, what is she trying to escape?

Humans?

Vampires?

I wasn’t one ofthem,but I did prefer the night over day. That was when my thoughts were my own. My time was my own. While the community slept, I planned.

I protected.

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