Lover Unleashed by J. R. Ward Page B

stallion whilst his sire dropped the human female he had caught and went gunning for the spirit. Xcor never made it in time. Always, he watched in horror as the female sprang up from the earth and took his father down.
    And then the fire . . . the fire the female wrought upon the Bloodletter’s body was brilliant and white and instantaneous and it consumed Xcor’s sire within moments, the stench of burning flesh—
    Xcor bolted upright, his dagger hand gripping his chest, his lungs pumping and yet drawing no air.
    Planting his palms onto his pallet of blankets, he propped himself up and was damned glad for being alone in his own quarters. No one needed to see him like this.
    As he sought to come back unto reality, his breathing echoed and rebounded, the sounds bouncing off the barren walls and multiplying until they seemed like screams. In a rush, he willed the candle beside him on the floor to light. That was of aid. And then he got up to stretch his body, the process of pulling out his bones and muscles and resettling them into proper alignment helping his brain as well.
    He needed food. And blood. And a fight.
    Then he would be fully himself.
    After dressing in well-worked leather, and putting a dagger into his belt, he went out of his room and into the drafty hallway. In the distance, deep voices and the clanking of pewter plates told him that First Meal had been served down below in the great hall.
    The castle he and his band of bastards lived in was the one he had come upon that night his father had been killed, the one that overlooked the sleepy medieval hamlet that had matured into a preindustrial village and then grown in modern times into a small city of about fifty thousand humans.
    Which, given the prevalence of Homo sapiens, was naught but a fern in a forest of oaks.
    The stronghold suited him perfectly—and for the reasons that had first attracted him to the place. The stout walls of stone, and the moat with the bridge, were still very much in place, and they functioned well to keep people out. Added upon them were plenty of bloody fictions and full truths that cast a whispered pall over his lands and his home and his males. Indeed, for the last hundred years, he and his soldiers had done their duty to propagate the bullshit vampire myths by “haunting” the roads in the area from time to time.
    Which was easy to do when you were a killer and you could dematerialized at your will.
    Boo! had never been so fucking effective.
    And yet there were issues. Having single-handedly decimated the lesser population in the Old World, they had had to find ways to keep their killing skills sharp. Fortunately, humans had stepped into the void—although, of course, he and his brothers had to remain in secret, with their true identities protected.
    Enter the human urge for retaliation.
    There was but a single laudable characteristic of humans and that was their wrath when it came to those among them who committed atrocities. By the vampires’ hunting down only rapists and pedophiles and murderers, their “crimes” were tolerated far better. Fate knew that if you went for the moral types, humans were like bees streaming out of a hive to protect their turf, but the violators?
    Eye for an eye, their Bible said.
    And with that, his band of bastards had their target practice.
    It had been thus for two decades, always with the hope that their true enemy, the Lessening Society, would send more appropriate foes for them. None had come, however, and the conclusion forming within him was that there were no more lessers left in Europe and none due to arrive. After all, he and his males had traveled hundreds of miles in all directions each night on their hunts for human villains, so they would have run across slayers somewhere, somehow.
    Alas, there were none.
    The absence was logical, however. The war had changed continents long ago: Back when the Black Dagger Brotherhood had left for the New World, the Lessening Society had