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“Real loyalty is stronger than something that can be broken by a few words from a stranger. I trust Samuel with my life, and if he requires it from me, I will give it willingly.”
“Why?” Nick asked.
Barden stepped forward. “You want to know about Samuel?”
“I do.”
Jay looked at him like he was crazy, but Nick kept his eyes on Barden.
"Samuel is over 400 years old, and he never changed. Kind, strong, merciful. Powerful, yes, but he kept himself in check. Can you imagine how rare that is? 400 years. He saw dynasties rise and fall, countries turn to rubble and ruin, and continents transform. And yet, he stayed the same.”
“Sounds like the life of the party,” Nick said.
Jay frowned at him, but Barden just laughed.
“Samuel had a feeling about you, too. He saw potential.”
“I’m a void.”
“Not just that. Samuel understands people. He knows them. He knows you.”
“I barely know me.”
“Time has a tendency to erode the soul inside us,” Barden said.
“Vampires don’t have souls,” Jay said.
Barden ignored him. “Years pass, and they turn us into ghosts of the people we used to be. Somehow, Samuel survived. He stayed himself.”
“I think we might be talking about different Samuels,” Nick said.
“We are. My Samuel died in 1962. Not physically, but everything that mattered was lost.”
“How?” Jay asked.
“The voids came for us.”
Nick lowered his weapon. “Voids?”
“Your children were raised on ghost stories and boogeymen and monsters hiding under beds. Ours were raised with stories of the voids. In spring, 1962, all those horror stories came true. The living nightmare came to Edinburgh, and they took everything from us.”
“What happened?”
“The vampire clans were fighting over territory. Something minor, in hindsight, but it distracted them. The witches were engaged in a political power vacuum, soon to be solved by a cleverly arranged marriage between two major families.”
“You were distracted,” Nick prompted.
“Yes. And the voids knew. They came quietly, at first, and they gathered information. Found our weaknesses. They struck when we were at our most vulnerable. Took out our leaders, our warriors, the best of us.”
Nick glanced at Jay. “Is that true?”
He nodded. “I don’t know about vampires, but it lines up pretty closely with the stories my parents told me about our coven.”
Nick looked back to Barden. "So what happened? How did you stop them?"
"We didn't. Samuel did."
“Samuel? By himself?”
