Page 6 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Wyn sighed. “It was simply a thought. Just remember that she’s likely as upset about this as you are, Bane. Maybe you could…”

“Find common ground in our horror and form a beautiful friendship against all odds?”

“Yes.”

“What would I do without your undying sense of optimism, Wyn?”

She arched a pale brow. “You’d most likely find a way to utterly ruin everything we worked for and let Veladar be overrun by dogs again.”

I sighed and leaned my head back, only seconds before the carriage rattled and the sound of horse shoes on cobblestone filled the air. We’d reached the outskirts of the city.

The trip to Argent took several days by carriage, the reinforced body of which was weighty and slow. But the securitywas a necessity for carrying my bride home; Wyn had refused to let her come with me on horseback, and rightfully so.

It would take two days to return to Ravenscry, the ancient seat of my hold. We would stop for the night outside the bounds of the Rift; it was too dangerous a journey to make by night with a soft, defenseless human woman in tow.

But even with our defenses shored up, the new vampire legions’ patrols, and the human guards I’d personally trained, the wargs still found ways to slip through the cracks.

I could not risk my new bride’s death at their hands. Not only because the humans would be required to procure a new one immediately—and I had no wish to make the return trip to Argent—but because it would be a terribly unfair fate to heap on the head of a young woman who had never asked to be bound to a monster.

But it would not be my last journey to the stronghold of the humans. I would not give my blood to a woman who wanted nothing to do with me, prolonging her misery.

In a hundred years, the girl would be an old woman. She would die—likely a relief, in her eyes.

But the Blood Accords possessed no ending date. So long as I remained the guardian of the Rift, I must have a pure-blooded Veladari wife to represent her kind.

In a hundred years, I would be making this same journey, to bring another girl home to become the new Lady of the Rift.

And a hundred years after that…

“Bane. You’re looking quite funereal again. Kindly cease.”

“Companionship would be pleasant.” I closed my eyes, envisioning the visage of the girl who would be tied to me, the revulsion in her eyes.

Unlikely. That was the more accurate word.

“You have the love of our people.” The scratching of Wyn’s pen paused. “I know you would not have chosen this for yourself,but remember that you have made life not only bearable, but truly pleasant for many of our kind. The sacrifice ofyourlife is not in vain. But, if the girl is intolerable… there are other options. I wouldn’t see you suffer needlessly.”

I peered at her through the slits of my eyelids as she scribbled something else on her list of demands.

Wyn was much older than myself. Born to a vampire mother and a human father, she was what the humans had sneeringly called ‘leechspawn’ for decades—an unholy offspring from hell, according to the tenets of the Silver Cathedral.

Vampires did not despise the half-and-half children of our unions. Bloodwitches had been held in high regard since the Red Epoch, able to manipulate the liquid of life in ways that were beyond a full vampire.

I had been able to transmute my body into a monstrous killing machine—but Wyn could cleanse nearly any disease, heal the wounded, scry across vast distances.

She was a treasure, and when I had signed my life away on that parchment with three other vampire knights, agreeing to the permanent transmutation and marriage to a human, we had ensured that no bloodwitch would ever be burned at the stake again.

The girl who would marry me… she might live in despair, but because of her my people would no longer be forced to hide in the shadows beneath the earth.

Because of her, our bloodwitches would no longer fear the flames.

For that, she would be treated like gold by my people.

I was spared having to come up with a response for Wyn, something to settle her nerves that I might back out of the agreement—the walls of Argent loomed outside the carriage.

Ancient walls, several feet thick and nearly thirty feet high, inlaid with hundreds of thousands of silver stars—eachsupposedly placed for every human who died during the fall of the Red Epoch five hundred years ago, when the Veladari people rebelled against the last vampire empress, Liliach Daromir.

I didn’t doubt the veracity of that claim. Driven underground by the rebels, the surviving vampires had had many centuries to come to terms with the fact that the humans were treated as little more than livestock during the empress’s reign.

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