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Ghost Pines Publishing, LLC

Acknowledgments

For Harold & Goldie, my celestial stars…

A special thanks to the following contributors:

Lidia Bircea, Romanian Translations

Miriam Grunhaus, Cover Art

Reba Hilbert, Editing

Ghost Pines Publishing, LLC

Additional Credits

A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens (1859)

“Unchained Melody” (1955), lyrics by Hy Zaret

The Blood Curse

In 800 BC, Prince Jadon and Prince Jaegar Demir were banished from their Romanian homeland after being cursed by a ghostly apparition:
the reincarnated Blood of their numerous female victims
. The princes belonged to an ancient society that sacrificed its females to the point of extinction, and the punishment was severe.

They were forced to roam the earth in darkness as creatures of the night. They were condemned to feed on the blood of the innocent and stripped of their ability to produce female offspring. They were damned to father twin sons by human hosts who would die wretchedly upon giving birth; and the firstborn of the first set would forever be required as a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of their forefathers.

Staggered by the enormity of
The Curse
, Prince Jadon, whose own hands had never shed blood, begged his accuser for leniency and received
four small mercies—
four exceptions to the curse that would apply to his house and his descendants, alone.

Ψ Though still creatures of the night, they would be allowed to walk in the sun.

Ψ Though still required to live on blood, they would not be forced to take the lives of the innocent.

Ψ While still incapable of producing female offspring, they would be given
one opportunity and thirty days
to obtain a mate—a human
destiny
chosen by the gods—following a sign that appeared in the heavens.

Ψ While they were still required to sacrifice a firstborn son, their twins would be born as one child of darkness and one child of light, allowing them to sacrifice the former while keeping the latter to carry on their race.

And so…forever banished from their homeland in the Transylvanian mountains of Eastern Europe, the descendants of Jaegar and the descendants of Jadon became the Vampyr of legend: roaming the earth, ruling the elements, living on the blood of others…forever bound by an ancient curse. They were brothers of the same species, separated only by degrees of light and shadow.

Prologue

Nachari Silivasi gripped the iron stakes on either side of his hands and shouted his pain as the harsh lash bit into his skin again and again. And again.

He would not beg.

He would not give them the satisfaction.

His body shook against the hard granite beneath him, and his back arched in unnatural contortions as his spilled blood pooled beneath his naked belly. It felt warm against the otherwise cool stone.

It had been three long months.

Three terrible months since he had descended into the Valley of Death and Shadows—and entered hell—in order to save the Vampyr king of the house of Jadon from a dark possession.

It had been three agonizing months since he had seen his brothers.

The lash struck again, catching him off guard on a violent exhale, and he almost passed out. His amulet, the one Shelby had given him, was cutting into his skin—it always did when they laid him facedown against the stone for his lashings—but he didn’t dare take it off. Once, a minion of the dark lord had tried to wrench it from his neck, and it had burned the demon’s hand like a hot branding iron.

As the lash struck lower this time, falling somewhere between his upper thighs and his buttocks, he heard himself whimper, and he cursed his momentary weakness. If only he could die. If only his brothers would renege on their promise to continue providing life support to his body until he returned. If only he could be free.

If Nachari could have laughed at the irony—which he couldn’t—he would have: In their desire to keep him alive, to hold him to the earth, his brothers were keeping him in a vampiric version of purgatory instead. As long as his earthly body remained safe and healthy, awaiting his spirit’s return to Dark Moon Vale, he could not fully die. Once dead, his corporeal body, which was holding his soul at bay, and his ethereal soul, which was projecting a corporeal form in order to sustain the endless torture, would merge. He would be one entity in one place, and the Dark Lord Ademordna could no longer enslave him.

Granted, he would be dead, never to return to his precious valley in the Rocky Mountains, never to see his Romanian homeland one last time, never to meet his
destiny,
but he would at least be at peace—for the dark lord who had taken him into the Valley of Death and Shadows could not hold him as one integrated being. His eternal soul would find its solace in the Valley of Spirit and Light where it belonged. With Shelby.

As the next stroke of the lash fell into the exact groove as the previous one, Nachari inadvertently bit his tongue:
Great
Celestial gods
, how much more could he endure? Day after endless day. Knowing his body would regenerate again and again only to prepare him for more torture.

Unable to withstand another moment of his torment, Nachari chose to take the only way out available to him…however temporary. Indeed, it was an escape he had taken one hundred times before. He threw back his head, his glorious mane of thick, raven hair spilling around his face and shoulders in wild waves of blood-crusted locks, and slammed his forehead against the stone.

The pain was indescribably profound.

Literally and figuratively stunning.

And then—mercifully—he collapsed against the stone, and the entire underworld went black.

Deanna Dubois knelt on her living room floor in deep concentration, rocking back and forth on her heels as she stared at the new set of drawings in front of her. She sighed in frustration and more than a little trepidation. The only reason she could call these drawings
new
was because she had drawn them last night—as opposed to the night before…

Or the night before that.

There was nothing new about her disturbing, ever-growing obsession.

She twirled a thick lock of ash-brown hair around her finger, noticing a particularly stark amber highlight, before turning back to the paintings.

Dear God, what was wrong with her?

BOOK: Blood Shadows

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