In the Service of the King

Kael paced the length of his private sleeping chamber, avoiding the plush emerald carpet and keeping to the uncovered stone floor at the edge of the room. After an hour of ceaseless movement, the cold of the large polished slabs bit into the flesh of his bare feet and gave him something to focus on besides the Proffering, which he loathed but required. Three months had passed since his last feeding, and the Warrior King needed the blood of either his mate or a human virgin to maintain his immortality and the strength of his humanity. He had no mate, and no intention of acquiring one. But Kael the Fair never felt less like his name than when he stepped into his feeding chamber and found the Proffered waiting within.

“My lord? It is time.” Liam’s deep voice sounded through the door.

Kael halted before the wide carved mahogany door, his layered dark green and navy tartan robes settling around him. He rolled his shoulders, tilted his head to the side to stretch his neck. The familiar weight of the intricate jeweled braid on the left side of his head moved as he tried to release the tension seizing his muscles. The jewels were the most obvious of the physical marks of his royal rank; the rest were written into his skin. Tonight, of all nights, he felt the burden of the duty and obligation they represented.

“My lord?” Liam pushed the door open and stepped back.

Kael sliced his fangs into his tongue to keep from snapping at the man who had stood at his side for the past seven hundred years. Equally ancient and nearly physically matched, Liam was the brother Kael never had and knew the king as well as any living being could. On many occasions they had stood together against their enemy, the Soul Eaters, so named not just for draining the blood of their human victims, but for consuming their souls as well by drinking through the last stutter of their hearts. Then removing and eating it. All vampires required human blood, but only the Soul Eaters gave in to the lure of exsanguination, became addicted to the kill, and murdered their human prey. And their selfish and increasingly brazen actions were making it harder to hide their collective existence from the mass of humanity.

Kael and Liam didn’t speak as they navigated the worn stone corridors of the king’s ancestral estate. The underground compound was located far beneath the ancient walls of Castle Dunluce, within the craggy cliffs on the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland. Kael’s clan, the MacQuillans, had inhabited the land since the late sixteenth century and transformed a small existing tower house into a sprawling, indomitable fortification meant to provide Kael and his vampire brethren the privacy and security they required. In modern times, Kael chose to dispel unauthorized prying of the aboveground ruins by turning over their management to Northern Ireland as a state historic site. The arrangement provided maintenance to the castle remains and landscape during the problematic daylight hours, dedicated security, and humans loyal to the MacQuillan “descendants” who visited the site occasionally and supported its preservation with large, regular bequests. It was rather like hiding in plain sight.

The normally busy halls of the castle’s central manor house were empty, as Kael preferred on the Night of the Proffering, and only dimly lit by occasional wooden torches. The compound possessed every modern convenience and security mechanism, but firelight comforted the Warrior King, and put him in mind of times of old, before the conflict with the Soul Eaters had become so constant and tiresome.

On the castle’s walls, medieval tapestries hung next to Renaissance portraiture and modern art, but Kael gave his priceless collections little regard. He wanted the strength that feeding provided, but hated the means by which it was obtained. To be sure, the Proffering sustained him. He required it. But it also reminded him of all he’d lost, and what he’d never have again.

Finally and too quickly, they arrived at the antechamber to the set of apartments used by the Proffered when on the grounds. Liam opened the door and stood back, bowing his head of shoulder-length brown hair—braided at the left in the way of the warrior, and allowed the king to enter ahead of him. “After you, my lord.”

Kael stepped into the oval room and huffed. “Would you cut the ‘my lord’ crap already?” He rolled his neck again. As a room, it wasn’t particularly remarkable—it was bare except for a small altar at one end and hooks for his robes and a few ceremonial implements at the other. But it was so loaded with everyone’s expectations that the air felt thick as he drew it down his throat.

Liam grinned before schooling his expression. “As you wish, my lord.”

Kael growled and rolled his eyes, knowing even as he’d uttered the words Liam wouldn’t heed them. Fat lot of good being king was sometimes. But Liam was too steeped in the traditions of their people. He often treated Kael just as one of the warriors—which only a handful of the warriors were comfortable doing—but not on the Night of the Proffering. Tonight, to Liam, he was Kael the Fair, Warrior King of the Vampires, Chieftain of Clan MacQuillan. Like it or not, he had a role to play for his people, obligations to his men, and needs that required fulfillment. Out of tradition and deference, once the Night of the Proffering was scheduled, the rest of the clan warriors would not feed until their king had his sustenance, so despite Kael’s desire to put this night off—and his ability to go punishing stretches without feeding—he was acutely aware that denying himself meant denying his men. And the war with the Soul Eaters required well-blooded warriors. So Kael fed even when he might have gone without, and Liam’s adherence to the traditions helped him remember the significance of the night. It was bigger than his needs, his desires, his fears.

A familiar clattering sound drew Kael from his thoughts. He turned to find Liam on his knees, carefully covering the jade dais with hundreds of small, faceted emeralds. The stones looked nearly black in the low light of the single torch, but Kael could see their exact vivid shade of green in his mind’s eye. The emerald was the sacred stone of his people, representing life and renewal. Liam recited an old Celtic prayer to the spirits of the Chieftains as he worked, then he swiftly backed away and cleared the altar for the king’s sacrifice.

With purpose, Kael stepped up to the dais, opened his robes, and knelt onto the jewel-encrusted alter. The traditional pose required his knees, shins and feet be flush against the surface, and that he sit back but not relax his bottom against his heels. He had to hold the position for ninety-three minutes—one minute for each day since his last feeding—but his massive thighs never quivered for an instant, never once belied the strain his muscles endured as they settled his six-and-a-half-foot frame in a semiseated position.

Crimson and emerald mixed together on the platform almost immediately as the king’s blood dripped out of the dozens of cuts and punctures the jewels inflicted as a sacrifice on his lower legs. Liam stepped up behind him and removed the robes. Kael centered his mind and concentrated, easily tuning out the quiet sounds Liam made as he crossed the room to hang the garments. Later, after the Warrior King entered the feeding chamber, Liam would collect the bloodied stones into an ancient glass urn for display in the Hall of the Chieftains—the ceremonial center of the compound. The urn’s contents reaffirmed the ancient belief, “life gives blood gives life,” and its appearance in the hall signaled the warriors they could feed.

Kael chanted these ancient words in his head, words of life, bonds, sacrifice, honor. His focus was absolute—neither pain nor apprehension nor Liam’s efficient movements around the room distracted him from the precision of his position and prayer.

Instinctively, he knew when he’d served his sacrifice. He blinked open his eyes, which strained a little against the flickering yellow light. Liam was long gone, but he’d readied everything Kael needed, as he always did. Carefully, the king rose to his feet, stepped off the jeweled dais and gently removed the stones that were embedded in his flesh then returned them to rest with the others. He retrieved the cloth laid out on the edge of the altar and wiped the blood from his wounds. He healed quickly and cared little about the injuries, but there was no sense scaring the Proffered with unnecessary gore. She was probably already nervous enough.

His skin cleaned, Kael picked up the leather knife holster and strapped it to his thigh. The dagger it held was lean and vicious, but used correctly offered a quick and nearly painless cut that saved the Proffered from the piercing of his fangs into her soft flesh. Or, perhaps more accurately, the knife saved him from learning whether the woman could be his mate. Only by fully joining his body with the Proffered—by feeding directly from her veins as his cock took her virginity, could he determine if she had the potential to walk beside him as his partner in leadership, life and love.

But Kael didn’t want to know. Kael didn’t want a mate.

He’d had one. Meara and their newling son had died in childbirth following the stress of an attack by the Soul Eaters on Dunluce, the very attack that brought ruin to the castle and drove them to expand the existing underground apartments into a full-out compound. While Kael and his men had eradicated that fiercest and most troublemaking band of Soul Eaters of the eighteenth century, his clan’s losses had been great. Ever since, Kael had vowed never to chance again the lives of those he loved. Given the dire state of the war in recent years, that meant never chancing love again.

Yet, Kael’s very biology yearned to seek out the mate connection so strongly it was nearly painful—his fangs throbbed in search of the satisfying pressure of teeth slicing mated flesh, his balls clenched for the release of his unrealized progeny, his chest tightened against the centuries-old loneliness.

Still, he held fast, wanting to protect himself and the Proffered and her family. He would take only what he had to from her, and no more. He wouldn’t take her affection. He wouldn’t take her humanity. He wouldn’t risk her life. No matter how much she or his people might want—no matter how much, in those dark, nearly forgotten corners of his mind,
he
might want—he wouldn’t fall in love.

So the dagger was necessary. He’d soothe the Proffered using his hypnotic words and eyes, then bleed her into a goblet before sealing her wound with a quick swipe of his tongue—the closest he allowed himself to drinking from her, and then, only out of necessity. As the virgin blood from the goblet infused his system, his ancient chemistry would allow him to do no other than slake his body’s primal thirst for carnal connection with the woman in front of him. But there would be no biting, no feeding directly from her vein and, therefore, no chancing the mate connection.

The Proffered were specially groomed for this role by human families around the world in alliance with the vampires. The seven surviving vampire kings, related by ancient kinship ties or blood rites, each ruled over a region of the world. Together, they coordinated their offensive campaigns against the Soul Eaters. Over the years, one strategy they’d developed was the careful cultivation of influential human allies, known collectively as the Electorate. In exchange for the Electorate’s silence on the vampires’ existence, their assistance where necessary in diverting human attention from the war, and their providing of the Proffered—required because a vampire could only be born and not made, and all vampires newlings were male, the vampire kings repaid them with their protection and their blood, which cured disease and slowed the aging process significantly. The Electorate understood that mating their human daughters with the kings and their warriors would enshrine the Vampire-Electorate Alliance for all time, cementing a partnership through familial relations that otherwise existed through diplomacy alone.

But, as with Kael, the war had left many of his vampire brethren hesitant to develop emotional ties that could be used against them. Without mates, fewer newlings were born every year.

Knife holster in place, Kael walked to the hooks at the rear of the room and retrieved the innermost robe—a dark green silk that skimmed over his weary body and billowed behind him as he walked. He tied the belt around his waist in a careless knot and approached the feeding chamber.

Taking a deep, centering breath, the king eased the heavy wooden door open and stepped inside.

Kael pierced his tongue with his fangs to keep from making an utterance he had no business making. But for the love of all that was holy, the creature before him was magnificent.

Perfectly posed despite the thundering sprint of her heart, her long black-brown hair was braided and intertwined in the traditional way, ribbons and flowers threaded throughout. The sheerest of white silk robes did little to hide from his vision the sexy muscularity of her body. She was not thin, which pleased him. He had once turned away a Proffered for being too thin—he was 250 pounds and nearly feral once blooded, and he’d feared crushing her. Instead, this woman appeared strong, athletic. She was young, to be sure, but also womanly, with curves where women should have curves, with rounded flesh that would fill his exploring hands and strong grip.

He stepped before her kneeling, submissive form and swallowed the blood his fangs had drawn into his mouth. “Tell me, young one, what is your name?”