Page 7 of Marked By Him

I prepared.

I spent most of my nights sitting on my front porch with a bottle of whiskey, staring out over my domain.

‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’

It was in black and white, on the thin, worn pages of the leather-bound book my father gave me before he died. He’d said it had been passed down for generations. It was thousands of years old.

It was sacred.

He’d said no one else had the book. We’d gotten the last one.

The words were barely legible. The pages were bent. Some were torn. But I’d memorized it. I knew every word inside. It spoke of a paradise, of men ruling over animals—ruling overevery living thing. Dominating. It spoke of plagues that had been cast and sins that had been washed away. The virus that created the vampires was one of those plagues. It resulted from decades of sin and it was our job to have it washed away.

The book had been handed down to me, so it was up to me to make this world that place. It was up to me to save the lost.

I was the shepherd.

I opened the front door to look out over my flock.

Silas stood on the porch, like the faithful guard he was. His gray hair was long enough to pull back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He wore dark blue pants and a matching button-up shirt. His dark brown eyes held the weight of years of experience, of intimate knowledge of all the things that were out there. He and my father were best friends. He made a promise to look after me when Dad died, and he spent every day in the guard’s cabin up front doing exactly that. I trusted him. So, when he showed up at my door with a broken woman in his arms, telling me she needed our help, I let him bring her inside.

He would have killed anyone else, then given me a report the next day.

The end of a joint lit up as he breathed in, smoke swirling around his face and into the night air when he blew back out.

I nodded toward the front gate, where he’d found the girl. “Everything clear out there?”

“Yeah. It looks like she’s alone, and whatever she was running from gave up on chasing her. You think she’s part of the Resistance?” he asked, passing the weed to me.

The Human Resistance was an army of people who thought they had the power to go to war with the vampires. There was rebellion in her veins, but she wasn’t one of them. I could tell.

I held up a hand, declining his offer. “No. And you know how I feel about smoking during a shift.”

We didn’t have things like modern health care. Our medicine was all herbal. Sometimes, people like Silas—people who saw shit no one should ever have to see—took a stash for personal use. I didn’t approve of it, but I did understand the need for it. So, I usually let it go. There were bigger things out there for me to worry about.

He took another drag, then blew out a puff with a smile. “And you know I’m an old man who doesn’t give a shit.” He flicked the joint onto the ground and stomped it out, anyway. “She’s not a familiar. I can smell those wannabes from a mile away. Blood fuckers.”

He was right. Familiars were humans who served vampires as though they were some kind of royalty. This woman served no one.

I leaned one shoulder against a wooden post, then stared up at the midnight sky. I couldn’t stop thinking about her eyes, picturing their brown depths and the sadness within them. The cuts on her body. The blood and the dried mud. Her long dark hair, matted and tangled.

“Maybe she’s just lost.”

He chuckled. “Then, I guess it’s a good thing we found her.”

She might not think so once she learns who I am and what I’m capable of.

My gaze met his. “A good thing for who?”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You’re the smart one. You’ll figure it out.” And then he chuckled and walked away.

4

Eve

The soundof wood scraping against the concrete floor jarred me awake. I raised my head. My neck was sore from sleeping sitting up. The morning sun brightened the room.

The man from last night sat in front of me, straddling a chair the wrong way. The round wooden-spindle backrest faced me. His tattooed forearms rested along the top rail. His large frame swallowed the chair, making it look smaller than it probably was.

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