Christine Feehan: Dark Challenge (Dark Series - book 5)

“They shot me.” She made it a statement.

“I do not know how I failed to detect the danger to you in time.” Darius looked gray and drained. Desari stroked his strong jaw. “You need to feed, brother. You have given me too much blood.”

Darius shook his head, then glanced surreptitiously toward the police. “I gave to Barack and Dayan. They were hit also. Six mortals, Desari, all wanted to kill you.”

“Barack and Dayan? Are they all right?” she demanded quickly, worry in her soft, dark eyes. She looked around frantically for the other two members of the band. She had been raised with the two men and loved them nearly as much as her own brother.

He nodded. “I have sent them to ground. They will heal more quickly. I had little time for proper mending, but I did my best for them. The police were pouring into the bar. I made certain they could not see us. We have trouble though. It was not me who gave you blood. It was another. He was strong and powerful.”

Alarmed, Desari stared up at her brother. “Someone else gave me blood? You are certain? There is no mistake?”

Darius shook his head. “I would not have reached you in time. You were already unconscious. You did not have time to shut down your heart and lungs as the others did, so you bled profusely. I examined you afterward, Desari. You would have died of your wounds. He saved your life.”

She dragged up her knees and burrowed closer to him. “His blood is in me?” She sounded lost and forlorn, frightened.

Darius swore eloquently. For centuries he had looked after his family. Desari, Syndil, Barack, Dayan, and Savon. The only others similar to their kind they had ever encountered had been the undead, the evil ones. This creature had slipped past him as a strange, cold wind that had pushed its way through the bar. Darius had been uneasy, worried; he had felt the presence of another, yet he had not caught the stench of evil. The undead. Vampire. He should have acted, he had been sidetracked by the vicious mortals emerging from the crowd.

Why had Desari been suddenly targeted by these people? Had his family members somehow given themselves away? He knew that from time to time throughout history there had been eruptions of hysteria among humans, particularly in Europe, about vampires. And over the last seventy-five years a string of murders in Europe had been attributed to members of some secret society hunting down these alleged creatures of the night.

Darius had purposely kept his family from that continent, not wanting to expose them to either these dangerous humans or to what could be the tainted blood of vampires. There was plenty of room in the world without going near Europe. His memories of his original homeland were vague and terrible. Marauders driving stakes through women and children still living, hanging them in the sun to die a death of excruciating pain. Beheadings, burnings, torture, and mutilation. If any of his race had survived, they had long ago turned vampire. If any other children had escaped as they had, they were probably better left unfound.

“Darius?” Desari clutched at his shirt. “You did not answer me. Am I going to turn? Did he make me the undead?” Her beautiful voice quavered with fear.

He circled her with one strong arm to comfort her, his face a hard, implacable mask of resolve. “Nothing is going to harm you, Desari. I would not allow it.”

“Can we remove his blood, replace it with yours?”

“I sent myself into your body. I could find no evidence of evil. I do not know what he is, but I was able to mark him as he marked me.” He lifted the arm he had clamped to his side. His palm came away from his belly coated in blood.

Desari gasped and went to her knees. “Seal your own wounds now, Darius. You have already lost too much blood. You have to tend to yourself.”

“I am tired, Desari,” he acknowledged softly.

The confession startled her. Shocked her. Terrified her. She had never once, in all their centuries together, remembered her brother admitting such a thing. He had gone into battle countless times, had been savaged by wild animals, wounded by mortals, had hunted and killed the most dangerous of all, the vampire.

She slipped her arm around his broad back. “You need blood, Darius, right now. Where is Syndil?” Desari knew she was far too weak herself to help her brother. She looked around the scene of chaos and realized her brother was still shielding them from the sight of the mortal policemen. He must have been maintaining the illusion for some time. That in itself was very draining.

She clenched her teeth and dragged him to his feet. “We will call Syndil, Darius. She must be hiding deep within the ground not to have been aware of this disturbance. It is time she came back to the world of the living.”

Darius shook his head, but he leaned his towering frame against Desari. “It is too soon for her. She is still traumatized.”

Syndil, we are in much trouble. You must come for us. You must heed our call.

Desari sent for the woman she regarded as her closest friend and a sister. She felt sorrow for Syndil, outrage on her behalf, but they needed her now.

There had been six of them, children thrown together in a time of war and cruelty. Darius had been six years of age, Desari six months. Savon had been four. Dayan had been three, Barack two, and Syndil a year. They had grown up together, depending only on one another, looking to Darius for leadership, protection, and their very survival.

Their parents had been caught just before the sun was at its peak, weak and lethargic, paralyzed in the way of their race. The marauders had overrun the village and killed every adult, including the Carpathians attempting to aid them. Children had been herded like cattle into a shack and the building set on fire.

Darius had noticed a peasant woman escaping unseen by the attackers. Since the sun did not affect Carpathian children as severely as it did the adults, Darius had awaited his opportunity, hiding five younger children from the murderous insanity. He managed, through sheer force of his will, to cloak the presence of the human woman and the Carpathian children, even as he planted the compulsion in her to take them with her. Unaware of their race, she had led them down the mountains to the sea, where her lover had a boat. Despite their terror of the ocean, they had set out, more afraid of the cruelty and sheer numbers of the marauders than of sea serpents or sailing off the edge of the world.

Hidden in the boat, the children remained quiet. Afraid of the war, knowing of no safe shore, the man took the boat much farther than he ever had. High winds pushed it even farther out to sea. There a terrible storm buffeted the vessel until it broke up and went down, the mortals sinking beneath the rolling waves.

Darius had once again saved the children. Even at six he had been unusually strong, his father’s blood pure and ancient. He took on the image of a powerful bird, a raptor, and, clutching the small ones in his talons, had flown to the nearest land mass.

Their lives had been extremely difficult in those early days, the coast of Africa still wild and merciless. Carpathian children needed blood but were unable to hunt. They also needed herbs and other nutrients. Even then most children did not survive their first year of life. It was a tribute to Darius’s strength of will that all six children had survived. He learned to hunt with the leopard. He found the little ones shelter and soil and began to learn the healing arts. None of the lessons had been easy. He was sometimes wounded in his hunts. Many of his experiments failed or backfired. But he persevered, determined he would not allow any of them to die. He often poisoned himself trying new foods for the children, and he learned to force the poison from his own body.