The magic in my blood is weak. I’m a half-breed, and while that term might bother some people, it’s just a fact of life.
My human father? I don’t know anything about him, other than he was human. I don’t know why my mom decided to shack up with him, and I don’t know why he was never in our lives.
He’s just a non-entity.
My mother was aneira…think of Amazons, and imagine something more. Something magical. We were once a well-known race, assassins sent out to do the jobs no other could. Sometimes we were thieves, sent out to track down priceless treasures. We’d even been bounty hunters, if legend tells it right.
A proud, noble race.
Now we’re not much more than a memory and only a few hundred of us remain. My mother had died when I was young, leaving me in the care of my not-so-loving family.
The aneira didn’t smile on the half-bloods and I was worse than most, because I was half human. They’d rather kill me than care for me. Sometimes, I think the only reason they didn’t is because they figured they’d have more fun tormenting me for years. If they killed me, it would be over too soon.
So they kept me, raised me. And they made sure I never forgot that although I had aneira blood, I wasn’t one of them. I was just a mongrel. A useless waste.
My mother’s fucked-up mistake…that’s what they liked to tell me.
That was the heritage they decided to share with me. Her mistake.
But I had a few scattered memories of her…I could remember her singing. The faint echo of her voice.
Maybe I was her mistake, but I shared her heritage. I had the memory of her singing to me.
And her sword.
Alone in my gym, I practiced. Strike. Block. Downward cut.
I practiced alone. But in my mind, I saw Jude. The bastard.
Sneaking into my dreams again.
Bleed him out. If I did anything at close range, that was what I’d have to do. Nick the arteries. I was fast. He’d be faster. But vampires needed blood just as much as we did. If I injured him enough, maybe I could slow him enough to really hurt him.
It was a fun fantasy, anyway.
Not that I’d really have a chance.
Six years ago, I’d made the mistake of calling him when I tried to help a friend. I hadn’t known him, he hadn’t really known me, but he’d offered help just the same.
The daughter of a friend had gotten mixed up with a bad group. The worst kind—wererats. A werecreature, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad thing, but the rats in East Orlando had been notoriously bad. Criminally bad, even. I found out a few weeks after my little adventure the rats had been slated for extermination by the council, anyway.
And said friend’s daughter had gotten involved with one of them. She was sick, diagnosed with leukemia, and she’d gotten in her head that the bite would cure her. In all likelihood, it would just hasten her death. A were’s bite is a hard, brutal thing and less than twenty percent survive it, anyway. If you’re not healthy, you don’t stand a chance. She hadn’t been healthy.
If living was her only goal, she’d have been better off going to the vampires. Not that they were likely to have touched a sick, underage girl. Vamps were careful about that, for the most part.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered. She died less than a year after I brought her back to her mom.
She died hating me, too.
It was a weight I’d carry the rest of my life.
But I couldn’t let the rats keep her. They wouldn’t have saved her life and they wouldn’t have been kind about how they tried to mark her, either.
Too bad she had been too young to understand that.
Sometimes I felt like it was all for nothing.
All for nothing, and I still had an albatross by the name of Jude around my neck.
Bleed him. Dozens of nicks across that very fine body, preferably when he hadn’t fed for a while. That would be best. And then—
I whirled, bringing my sword across right where the level of his neck would be if he had actually been standing in the room with me.
Vamps couldn’t die of blood loss. It would slow him. Weaken him. But it wouldn’t kill him. The older ones could even handle a bit of sun. But if I took his damned head, he was dead.