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1
GWYNEIRA
Darkness writhed within me, trying to devour all I’d ever been. My mind. My memories.
My love for the men I’d just left behind.
Everything had been going well. My scholarly giant, Byron, had just cast a spell that gave me back something I hadn’t possessed since I was turned into a vampire by my stepmother—the ability to walk in sunlight. My vampire lover, the Zeniryan king named Casimir, was able to use the spell on himself as well. With him and my giants, I’d watched my first sunrise in what felt like an eternity, even if it was actually only a short while since I’d been turned.
But then it all went wrong.
When we’d neared the border of my kingdom, Aneira, an earthquake shook everything, tearing fissures in the earth that weren’t just products of the shaking. No, they’d been shredded open by magic, and that magic had somehow allowed creatures from the empty realms to ride the destruction into this world.
The Voidborn. They came in black smoke, writhing like eels with vicious metal teeth and multicolored eyes that glowed like a deranged rainbow in the darkness. Everything I’d learned from Byron and from the witches of the Jeweled Coven with whom we’d stayed for a short time said that the Voidborn shouldn’t be able to enter this world. Reality itself repelled them. They couldn’t survive in it.
Someone had obviously forgotten to tell them that.
They’d attacked, striking me and filling my mind with their darkness. Their touch had unleashed the worst aspects of the vampire I’d become. The hunger. The need to feed and kill, no matter who was my prey. Once upon a time, the Voidborn had been the creators of the vampires, and it was their plan for us to be a force of unmitigated destruction in this world.
My giants had saved me from that fate once. Their blood was one of the few things in existence that could break the hold of that rabid madness and bring a vampire back to their own humanity. But that had been when I was first turned, when my stepmother was the only one trying to draw out the ravenous predator within me. And that time, it had taken all seven of them working together to stop me from draining them dry.
This time, I’d been alone with Ozias, the scarred and secretive giant who I thought wanted nothing to do with me. No one could have reached us. No one could have saved him if I’d attacked.
Still he’d offered himself.
Right before he called me his treluria, a giant’s fated mate.
His true love.
So I’d gathered the last of my sanity, and I fled from him. From all of them. It was that or kill everyone I could sink my fangs into, and I’d do anything to save those men.
Even if it cost me myself.
Half-mad with hunger and fear, I careened through the forest now, the smoke of the Voidborn pursuing my body while their whispers hounded me through my mind. I prayed the creatures had left Ozias be. That he was back there helping the others trapped on the other side of the earthquake’s fissures now.
That he wasn’t chasing me.
Because my vampire side was taking over, and my ravenous hunger was growing worse with every second. Already, I had no pulse. No breath. No warmth in my skin so pale it looked like snow. Soon, there’d be nothing left of me at all, and no thought in my mind but to feed.
Ozias’s blood might save me, but I knew without question I’d kill him if I bit him now.
My body moved faster and faster, flashing between human form and something else I’d only seen but never experienced. As smoke and shadow, I left the ground behind in fits and starts, crashing back to the earth in human form and then taking off into the sky again.
Trying to escape what could not be escaped, and craving blood that would only damn me.
Because human blood, witch blood, any sentient creature’s blood but that of a giant or a vampire would give this darkness even more of a foothold. To kill a human or witch would only mean surrendering fully to the madness of the creatures chasing me. But murdering my men to save myself would kill my soul.
I slammed into something hard and rebounded away. A tree, maybe. I couldn’t tell. But the Voidborn pursuing me took the opening. Surging closer, they swept across my body with a feeling like cold, dead hands dragging over my skin.
I screamed.
Flinging myself away again, I took fully to the sky, skittering between a falling human form and a flying shadow one. But I could feel the Voidborn stronger now, their voices inside my mind like rushing water carrying the murmurs of the dead. I couldn’t see the forest anymore. Couldn’t hear anything but the sibilant whisper of their commands in my head.
To feed.
To kill.
To let the vampire rage.
