Page 101 of After Darkness Falls

Levi's fingers hammered impatiently against the closest wall.

He'd told her the truth about wanting to snap her neck. She was old enough to turn. He stopped himself only because she had no idea what she was yet. Fledglings were prepared their entire lives for the change. They knew what came before, during, and after. She didn't. In a perfect world, he could just tell her, show her the skills she had to gain before her transition. But the moment those words crossed his lips, the six most powerful families in this world would set aside all conflict and team up to destroy her before she became their greatest fear.

Five centuries had passed since a member of the seventh founding family had turned. Anyone else would have thought it was impossible. They would have thought that she was just an obscure descendant from one of the other six, somehow lost in their careful records. They'd wiped out her entire line, for good reason.

But Levi remembered the day they'd come for the last survivors, here on this very hill. He'd been in his home when he'd heard the commotion; however, he knew one thing no one else did. There had been a little boy, three years old, who was fond of swimming in the lake. His nurse had taken him outside that morning, and as every member of his family was torn apart, he swam in blissful oblivion.

Levi could have ended everything. Instead, he took the child and dropped him in front of a church.

Drowning the boy would have been smarter for many reasons, but Levi couldn't bring himself to do it.

Five hundred years without any sign, any news. He'd believed the line had died out, until he saw her, the spitting image of her forefathers down to that hair. Dark at the roots, blonde after an inch. When she turned, it would be silver.

Levi did his homework after she emerged, researching her family. The trail of bodies following her line was subtle but staggering. No wonder. The longer a born vampire took to turn, the more bloodthirsty and brutal they became. Levi had waited until he was thirty-two, and it had been a push. Her family tree wasn't complete, but wherever he could trace it, he found inexplicable, ritualistic murders. Chloe's father, at forty-nine, was a murderer and a cannibal because he had needs he hadn't understood—the need for blood and the hunt. The needs of a vampire in the body of a mortal. No doubt most of her ancestors who'd reached that age had also lost their minds. The only difference was that they hadn't been caught.

She was an Eirikrson.

They were monsters. Vampires who only drank vampire blood. The head of their family had created the huntsmen to hunt down and murder any vampire—not just the rogues, at the beginning. When she turned, she'd be just like them, the nightmare they whispered about in the dark.

The reasonable thing would be to destroy her before she could obliterate hundreds of years of peace. She wasn't a little boy Levi couldn't bring himself to murder. He should have beheaded her in London. He should have ordered Mikar to burn her alive, if he was too squeamish to do it himself. But he couldn't, because fate was a bitch. Like it or not, he was on the girl's side.

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