Page 99 of After Darkness Falls

Speaking hurt his throat, so very dry he felt like he'd never drunk a drop of water. Water would not quench this thirst. Nothing would.

The creature lifted her arm to her sharp teeth and bit down before presenting it to him. His mouth closed on the gash and he drank, sealing his fate.

His vision cleared. His aching limbs had never felt better. He was alive. He was reborn in the image of the monster who'd destroyed him.

The creature was ecstatic, overjoyed. She felt better. Her need to kill had passed. She spoke of the future, a future where she didn't destroy city after city, because she'd have him, and many like him, at her side.

Eirikr laughed. He laughed so hard.

"I will destroy you. I will destroy everything you cherish. You're a demon, and this earth will not have peace while you walk among us."

For a time, he did just that.

For a time. And then, when he was no longer able to, his descendants did so on his behalf. They'd changed with the time. They no longer had to hunt all of Ariadne's creatures, as some had ceased to represent a threat to the world. Eirikr had little patience for their weakness. He was irritated, frustrated to be stuck in his prison.

For fifteen hundred years, he was displeased. Then came the betrayal he should have foreseen. His kind banded together and destroyed all of his children, and his children's children.

And then he knew despair. He'd never understood that this was his fate, his end. That he'd never again smell the air. That he'd never fulfill his vow. Until now. He had no one on Earth, no one to help him, no one to care if he turned into dust. His nights were long and dark. Many a time, he wished for an end, for a death that wouldn't come, even when he was parched and decaying. He was the first of the ancients, and therefore, the most powerful. Ariadne hadn't understood the process yet. She gave him so much of the divine blood running through her veins that she turned him into her equal. A mistake she never repeated.

Eirikr had stopped counting the days centuries ago. He didn't feel the wind or rain. He ignored the small rodents who walked by him as if he was nothing but stone. He was stone.

Until…

"What's down there?"

The voice cut through his mind’s fog like thunder in a cloudy sky. Then came a burst of wind carrying a scent he recognized. His.

"Nothing you should concern yourself with," someone told his daughter.

In the darkness of his prison, Eirikr lifted his head half an inch.

A squirrel walked by, unsuspecting. Too long had passed since creatures had been murdered in this cave for the squirrel to think better of it. Swift as shadow, Eirikr wrapped his hands around it and broke its neck. He brought it to his lips and drank it dry.

* * *

“Love the hair, by the way,” said one of the girls. “Good luck getting an ombre like that in town, though.”

Chloe laughed. “That won't be a problem,” she said, pointing to her head. “Natural color.”

“Cool,” Natalie told her.

The creature watching at the edge of the Wolvswoods narrowed his eyes and then broke into a run, heading up Night Hill.

"What is she?" Mikar demanded.

It wasn't in his character to demand anything of his liege. He'd served Levi for five hundred years, and in all this time, he'd never questioned one of his orders.

Because until now, they'd made sense.

"You call me back from a sensitive mission in Russia to babysit a regular? Fine. Your prerogative. You’re the boss. But now she outruns a killing machine and has magic fucking hair?"

Levi had entirely ignored him until then, writing at his desk, but this made him lift his head and smile.

"Magic hair?"

"Black, then silver. I don't know, man. She's definitely not normal."

"Do you think I would have recalled my right hand, along with my closest acquaintance, for the sake of someonenormal?" Levi asked pointedly.

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