Page 23 of The Vampire’s Mercy (Blood Melody #1)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

SILVANUS

Hunting. The human pleading for mercy.

Shafts of moonlight spilled through the dense canopy of leaves and branches above my head. High, so high, in the forest of pine.

“Please… Please help me…”

The bloodthirst thrummed, as wild as the lust of the hunt.

Blood…

Sweet blood.

Prey…

“He’s dangerously close to the cliffs,” a voice said. A fractured, undistinguishable voice.

“Who—”

The rain falls in the darkness.

The icy rain.

“Forest?” I said, the trees beginning to fade away.

“Please!’” the man wailed up ahead.

White rose petals fell around me, glowing in the rain.

But there was no rain falling in the trees.

The rain falls in the darkness.

The icy rain where there is…

Where there is…

Where it stands…

Where it…

Where it ends.

Where it begins.

I awoke from the dream, down in the cool dark of my sleeping pit. The distant, violent whisper of daylight still at full force.

Why did I always wake up so early?

Rolling onto my side, I closed my eyes again, waiting for the confusing dream to return. What did it want to show me? Was this something to do with Paris Raine and his song?

Dissonant voices reached my ears.

“What is he doing?”

“He’s lost the plot.”

“He’s too soft.”

“Why are those traitors in cells? He should kill them.”

“He can’t be serious, bringing that executioner here.”

“He’ll kill us all.”

“Something’s got to be done.”

Familiar voices, a familiar theme.

I moved onto my back, eyes wide, the voices unrelenting. Let them speak. With one word, I could command them into silence, force them to do anything else other than speak. But I liked to know what my thralls thought of me, to gather their truths.

Did I grant them too much freedom?

I returned to my side, my mind too heavy. Yet while the daylight reigned, my body languished in fatigue.

These hours weren’t mine.

I’d been hearing a lot of this dissent lately. Not just from thralls, but vampires too. They were concerned about my softness, this latest development with Paris already sending shockwaves across the world.

They didn’t understand me.

They could never understand me.

I didn’t even understand me.

How easy it was for them to condemn me without carrying my burden around their necks.

Teach them a lesson. Why tolerate it when you are their life source?

I should take them all aside and make them beg me for forgiveness.

Torture them, make them suffer for questioning my decisions.

Yet that would make me a tyrant, a weak creature who couldn’t take even the smallest amount of criticism.

Much like the president of the Human Domain who spread mines across his borders that were still there to this day.

A man who refused to listen, who didn’t take dissent well.

If the mortals were honest, I think they would say they were thankful to my dear friend Vaughn for tearing his throat out. Instead, they had to honor his memory at End Day memorials to commemorate the end of the war.

Don’t start thinking about the past, I told myself. That would stir my pot of trauma.

On my back again, I touched the cold walls of my pit, longing for sleep, deep inside a maelstrom of voices, a riot of questions turning every cog in my brain.

In the end, I shut the thralls out for peace, escaping into my unsettled dreams an hour later.