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One thing was certain. Of all the supernaturals crazy enough to take on Tutu’s… adragon shifterwould be willing to risk fighting another dragon shifter.

CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE

Considine

After a day of reading reports on the Dracos offspring and receiving updates from my own scant human staff—with quarterly taxes filed I had hoped my overly anxious accountant would be soothed, no such luck—I was feeling self-indulgent.

I stood in front of the sole window in my bedroom, carelessly lounging in the afternoon sunlight that so plagued the younger vampires, sipping at a glass of blood.

What shall I do today for fun? I could try to find the slayer’s family of origin. I wasn’t all that interested, but now it’s almost a game—

I cut the gleeful thought off when I glanced over at the elaborate wooden end table next to my bed.

Ambrose’s ring—gold with a red garnet—rested on a silver tray placed on top of the end table.

Immediately, my good mood soured.

The ring was both a cherished memory of my friend and a reminder of the promise that ruled my life—of what he had doomed me to.

“Ambrose…you were an idiot,” the words hissed out of me with an anger that had festered in me—growing over the centuries since Ambrose’s death.

I still couldn’t forgive him—that he’d died because he couldn’t stand the shock of his One dying.

She’d been human! He’d essentially gone and fallen for a human and then had the audacity to be surprised when shedied. The fool.

I approached the end table and picked up the ring to study it. “Humans die. It’s what they do—the lucky cretins. How could you have expected anything else to happen?”

I wasn’t even mad at his One—it was hardly her fault Ambrose was a moron with a positivity complex.

No, my fury rested with Ambrose, who’d meticulously chosen and turned vampire offspring over the centuries, caring for them and nurturing them so that when he left all of them, except Killian, they had been lost without his presence.

He’d created them—he’d sworn an oath of brotherhood to me—and then that weasel had escaped into death the first chance he had!

Of course, he hadn’t done that before extracting a promise from me that I’d watch his Dracos Family and make certain they lived—that I wouldn’t let them lose to the inevitable disinterest and melancholy that ate at all older vampires and caused them to sleep more and more until they simply never woke again.

A bitter laugh slipped out of me as I pushed the ring onto my right index finger.

It was ironic that I—who never wanted to sire a vampire Family—was stuck playing guardian to Ambrose’s self-destructive offspring.

“I’m sure you’d have thoughts about such a situation, my old friend,” I said aloud—like a loon—as if he could hear me.

Surely Ambrose would laugh if he could see me now, playing financial spy on his brats. He always had a laugh that…

I paused, struggling to remember what Ambrose’s laugh had been like and I couldn’t recall.

We spent millenniums together. Surely, I can remember.

But I couldn’t. As I struggled to bring up old memories, I couldn’t think of how Ambrose’s laugh sounded.

That wasn’t something we vampires ever discussed—the eventual and inevitable loss of our oldest memories.

We were immortal, sure, but did nature reallymeanfor beings to live so long? One could only hold onto hundreds of years’ worth of memories for so long before time started to chip away at them. Stealing them one by one.

“I’ll remember.” I turned back to the window to stand in the sunlight that had hurt me when I was only a few centuries old. “I merely need to dredge up the right memory.”

But my good mood had soured. This was another reason why being a vampire was more of a curse: you were fated to eventually lose everything you held dear. Fated to be alone and left only with memories that would eventually fade and leave you with a hole. You knew the pain of loss but couldn’t remember what you’d lost—

A groan, followed by hurried steps, leaked through the relatively thin walls of my apartment.