“My Emine has a rare talent, one I thought was killed off by our kind several centuries ago. She’s rarer than a golden blood. She’s a dragon blood.” His eyes gleamed with the words.“She’s resistant to compulsion and other vampire tricks. And she naturally senses bloodlines.”
My eyes instantly went to Cam, the familiar description sending a chill down my spine.
I’d met a dragon blood once.
A human with sun-kissed skin, dark brown eyes, and long black hair.
Alluring.
And fucking deadly.
She’d tried to kill Cane, her naturally enhanced senses allowing her to see the predator lurking beneath his skin. However, he hadn’t recognized her true nature at first, his vampire side falling almost instantly in love with her.
She’d used him for months, gathering intelligence on known vampire nests and assassinating creatures of the night while playing the part of his lover.
He’d been considering turning her, only because he couldn’t make her hisErositasince she hadn’t been a virgin.
Except she’d tried to kill him instead.
Cam ended up having to rip her throat out—right after she’d driven a blade through his brother’s heart.
He’d saved Cane with mere minutes to spare as the female’s next move would have been to cut off his brother’s head.
Because she’d known how to slay vampires. And her unique genetic makeup had given her the strength and abilities to do so.
A human?Juliet asked, her mind connecting to mine as she absorbed the information from my past.
Not just any human,I told her.
“A slayer?” Jace asked, his eyebrows rising as he used the term I’d been about to share with Juliet.
Khalid shrugged. “I believe the term varies by royal.”
A slayer?Juliet repeated.
A human with unnatural strengths and abilities. They’re not immortal, but they’re not necessarily mortal either. I’ve only ever met one. The majority of them were supposedly assassinated before my time.
Cam had been the one to teach me about their existence, as well as demonstrate the need to kill them on sight.
However, he remained perfectly at ease now. Like the presence of a lethal human didn’t bother him in the slightest.
Does he not remember what happened?I wondered.Is that one of his misplaced memories?
The incident with Cane had happened after Cam had met Ismerelda. The whole experience was what had led to his brother choosing eternal sleep.
Cane had wanted to kill any and all mortals that he’d thought might be a threat, which had unfortunately led him to distrust and loathe most of humankind.
“We should enslave them all. Make them worship at our feet. Ensure bitches like that can never exist again,” his brother had said a few months after the slayer incident.
Cane had been enraged that a beautiful woman had duped him so spectacularly that he’d almost died as a result of his innate attraction to her.
When he’d started talking about mortal connections being a weakness—and claiming Cam’s link to Ismerelda was a curse, not a gift—Cam had convinced his brother to rest.
“He’s losing touch with his humanity,” Cam had told me. “It’s the downside of living for eternity—we often lose sight of why we exist in the first place.”
Why are they called slayers?Juliet asked me now, drawing me back to the present.
Because they can naturally sense vampires,I replied. And they used their talents to hunt and slay my kind.
