Love Your Entity by Cat Devon

yourself!” he said, louder this time.
    Again nothing.
    So no ghost. Just the lingering scent of cigar smoke reminding him of Vox. Moving at vamp superspeed, Ronan knocked on the walls and the floor. He tore up more floorboards and had to put it all back. He hated this. Not the work, but the frustration.
    Voz had granted Ronan his freedom and then reeled him right back in by holding his sister’s soul hostage. Ronan didn’t even realize he’d punched a hole in the wall until after the fact. He’d used such force that his bones cracked and broke.
    He didn’t care. As a vampire, he healed quickly. He welcomed the intervening pain.
    What if this was a mission for which there was no chance of success?
    Was this his punishment then? Were the fates conspiring against him for becoming a vampire, a monster? Not that he’d been given a choice. He later learned that vampires are supposed to ask for permission before turning a human. And even then, a large percentage of the fledgling vamps didn’t survive the transformation.
    But Master Vampires were immune to those rules. At least they were in Europe and Russia where vampire history went back to the beginning of time. There they could enslave a human, turning them into an indentured vampire at will to fight and to kill at their master’s bidding. That was how they got their jollies, but most importantly it was how they maintained their power among rival vampire clans.
    There was no bargain involved, no requirement for the human to agree to the transaction. This was no volunteer vampire army. Voz drafted those he wanted, those he felt would be strong enough to fight his battles. Dressed as a medic there on the battlefield in northern France, Voz forced Ronan to drink blood, blood from Voz’s own vein where he’d sliced open his wrist. Then he’d moved Ronan to Romania and his remote castle there. Or to be more specific, he’d moved him in a flash to the cold and brutal dungeon beneath the castle.
    The transition had been horrific. Only the strong survived. Ronan heard the tortured howls from those who didn’t make the grade. It was a relief when their voices and their afterlives were stopped.
    The smell of blood had been all around him in that dark dungeon just as it had been in the trenches in France. But there had been a big difference. Now he was hungry for that blood.
    When he’d been released from that hellhole, he’d gone on a feeding frenzy promoted by Voz. Only then, when he’d drunk his full, was he told he’d be indentured for a hundred years. Voz likened it to the gladiators in ancient Rome, battling it out. Voz didn’t like the hundred-year rule; he wanted it to be for an eternity, but that century limit, which had been decreed by the Ancients, had been in place forever.
    Vamps could get time off for exceptional valor, shortening their hundred years by a few years. After that point additional bargains could be made. A handful in Voz’s army had signed agreements in blood to extend their term beyond the first century. They’d become addicted to the killing and now they were there for an eternity or until a strong, smarter, faster vamp destroyed them.
    There was a limit to how many humans could be transformed into an indentured vampire in any given year, or so Voz had told him. But then he’d told him that Adele was well and had lived a long life.
    Ronan had believed that his sister had done well. It was the only thing that kept him sane during the nearly hundred years of bloodshed at Voz’s bidding. He’d had no choice or voice in who was killed. The guilt of that would stay with him forever. There were moments when he’d wanted to die, when he’d wanted to end it all.
    But that hadn’t happened. Instead he’d fought on. Been covered in blood from numerous vampire uprisings of various rival clans. So many that Ronan had lost count.
    But each time it happened, Ronan was reminded of the blood of the battlefield at Cantigny in northern France. He had