Brothers to the Death (The Saga of Larten Crepsley) by Darren Shan

make sure that the rogue vampaneze paid for what he had done.
    Larten made no headway for a long time. The vampaneze, like the vampires, were keeping their heads down during the calamitous war, harder to locate than ever. Larten only found two in the first couple of years. Both accepted his challenge and died at his hand, but neither knew anything of Randel Chayne.
    With the third he got his first sniff of a break, though in many ways he wished that he had never met this particular vampaneze at all.
    Her name was Holly-Jane Galinec and she was a few decades older than Larten. She was the only female of her breed that he had ever encountered. The vampaneze were even stricter with new recruits than vampires were and almost never admitted a woman into their ranks. Holly-Jane must have been a warrior of high standing for them to have accepted her as an equal.
    But Holly-Jane’s nights as a warrior were behind her. She was holed up in an under-fire city when Larten tracked her down, and her left leg had been blown off at the knee. She was waiting for the battle to end, planning to drag herself out of the rubble to seek an honorable death. She was delighted when Larten confronted her. She had assumed that she would have to perish in a fight with a pack of vile Nazis. The chance to die at the hands of a vampire filled her with glee.
    “It must be fate!” Holly-Jane kept whooping as they drank from a bottle of wine that she had been holding back for a special occasion. She was living beneath the streets, where bombs couldn’t strike, and had only left her den in recent months to feed.
    “I drank from the dead,” she explained. “It would have been wrong to kill one of the living when thereare so many corpses lying around. It’s not our way to feed without killing, but in this crazy time I felt it would be unjust to add to the woes of these poor people.”
    Larten could see that Holly-Jane must have been a good-looking woman once, pretty in a tough way, like Arra, but now she was filthy and wild-eyed. Disease had eaten into the stump of her leg and she’d had to cut it shorter on four different occasions. “Or was it five?” she mused aloud, studying what was left of her thigh. “I had to get drunk—the pain would have been too much to bear otherwise—and I think I may have operated twice one time. I get carried away when I’m excited.”
    Although they were not overly sympathetic by nature, Larten and Arra felt sorry for the fallen vampaneze. She had a cheerful manner, which was uncommon for one of her kind. They didn’t want to like the one-legged wreck but instinctively found themselves warming to her.
    It took Larten a few hours to tell Holly-Jane of his mission. When they first discovered her in her putrid hole beneath the earth, Holly-Jane wept with joy and insisted they dine with her and share her wine. Larten tried to explain about his quest, but Holly-Jane wavedhis explanation away and said it could wait. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere soon,” she quipped. Not wanting to refuse her hospitality, they chewed on the stale bread and scraps of rancid meat that she had saved up, and pretended to savor the disgusting wine.
    When Larten finally broached the subject of Randel Chayne, Holly-Jane stunned him by saying, “Randel? Of course I know him. He’s one of my best friends. Why are you interested in that old bear?”
    For a long moment Larten couldn’t respond. He and Arra shared an astonished, skeptical look. Holly-Jane saw that they didn’t believe her. She laughed and described Randel Chayne in detail. By the time she’d finished, Larten doubted no longer.
    “I wish to challenge him,” Larten said. “He killed someone close to me and I seek revenge. I will face him cleanly, openly. It will be a fair fight. If you wish to protect him from me, I understand, and I will not press you for—”
    “No, no,” Holly-Jane said quickly. “Randel loves a good fight. I’m sure he’d want me to tell you