Deathless (The Vein Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Deathless

  The Vein Chronicles #2

  Anne Malcom

  Contents

  Deathless

  Glossary

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Malcom

  Deathless

  The Vein Chronicles #2

  Anne Malcom

  Copyright 2017

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away.

  Cover Design: Simply Defined Art

  Edited by: Hot Tree Editing

  Cover image Copyright 2017

  Dedication

  To all the vampires out there in the ‘real’ world, whose blood of choice is black in color and caffeinated in nature.

  To the insomniacs who both suffer and thrive on the monsters that come in the dark.

  Sometimes words need darkness to be born.

  Sometimes minds need darkness to survive.

  Glossary

  Awakening: In the first two hundred and fifty, then five hundred years of undeath, a female vampire’s heart begins to beat once more, for one year. In which time the body is more vulnerable to attack and the unyielding and cold body becomes accommodating to life. Accommodating enough to conceive and carry a child to term.

  Apollo: Olympian deity, recognized to be the god of sun and light, among other things. Also responsible for the curse of the vampire. Immortal.

  Ambrogio: The first vampire. A human man turned immortal by the wrath and the gifts of the gods themselves. Mortal. And then immortal.

  Artemis: Apollo’s twin sister, goddess of the hunt. Immortal.

  Extermuis: Supernatural bar which caters to the most depraved of immortals and invites all sadistic pleasures.

  Eleos: One of the lesser known and lesser seen of the gods. Often seen wandering the woods in human form. Goddess of mercy and compassion with the ability to see the future of mortals and god alike.

  Hybrids: A weapon created by dark magic. Humans turned into animalistic form of vampire, with all the strength of a traditional vampire but little to no mental capacity, expect loyalty to their ‘parent’ vampire.

  Hades: God of the Underworld, where every dead soul is banished to upon leaving the earth. Owner of every dead, and undead soul. Immortal.

  Ichor: The blood of the gods which was bestowed, or cursed, upon the first vampire to enable immortality.

  Mortimeus: Vampire learning institution, whereupon vampires learn the history of their race and are schooled in murder, torture and sadism. Only vampires of the highest Vein Lines are able to attend.

  Praestes: Literal Latin translation of ‘protector’. A generation of humans designed to fight vampires and supernatural creatures. Their blood one of the only things fatal to vampires. Mortal.

  Selene: Human destined to be sacrificed to Apollo and instead falls in love with a human man. The love is the death of her and the birth of all vampires on this earth. Mortal.

  Prologue

  “The curse. The deathless night. The blood will run.

  From the Ichor of the gods to the veins of a mortal.

  The blood will run.

  In the moon the sunshine will die, yet in the sunshine the moon shall endure, watching over the light with a shadow that is not menacing nor comforting,

  merely the deathless night that will swallow mankind with its wrath,

  or save it with its harmony.

  Fatal to the destined.

  Harmony in death.”

  The beginning.

  Stories of gods always start with humans. Because without mortals, immortals would not exist. Gods would not be great, for they would have no lesser beings to lord their powers over.

  For supernatural creatures to exist, their natural, weaker counterparts must endure, for without them the world would perish.

  It is on the bones of the weak that the flesh of the strong is created.

  But then even the powers of the gods sometimes couldn’t rival those of humans. Because sometimes it is in weakness where the strongest of things are born.

  Ambrogio wasn’t extraordinary. He was a traveler, a human who was more aware of his mortality than most, so he sought adventure to fill his short life.

  He found it in a woman, as men often do.

  She was a great beauty, though that was not the reason for the adventure to be found within her. Sometimes it was as simple as a soul recognizing itself in another.

  Such a concept may be considered supernatural or fantastical in a society forward in time where simplicity of love was complicated by the wretchedness of humans. But back in the days where life was more than fleeting, and humans still believed in gods and monsters, such things were commonplace.

  For monsters to exist, love like theirs had to as well. They were one in the same, after all.

  Selene and Ambrogio walked together in the sunlight, basking in the rays, the gentle warmth on their skin nothing compared to the inferno flowing through their veins from their intertwined hands.

  On their walk through the woods in the shadow of the temple to which the residents of Selene’s town offered gods their worship—which, unbeknownst to Selene, would be her, for she was the loveliest of all, with the purest of souls—they encountered a goddess who was closer to mortal than god.

  Eloes’s compassion for those who were weaker in mind, body and spirit distanced her from the gods who found humans of little consequence, though it was in the sacrifice of humans that gods derived their divinity.

  Destined to walk between the two worlds, she often wandered in those same woods. Upon seeing the couple, a powerful premonition swept through her, one she knew would be the beginning of something bigger than either gods or mortals could imagine.

  Her ability to empathize with the humans gave way for her to see the future of those destined for both greatness and depravity in the human race.

  She saw both such things in the lovers.

  Light and darkness.

  “The curse. The deathless night. The blood will run.

  From the Ichor of the gods to the veins of a mortal.

  The blood will run.

  In the moon the sunshine will die, yet in the sunshine the moon shall endure, watching over the light with a shadow that is not menacing nor comforting, merely the deathless night that will swallow mankind with its wrath,

  or save it with its harmony.

  Fatal to two.

  Harmony in death.”

&nb
sp; Her musical words filtered through the twilight of the woods and into the ears of the young lovers, too blind to see the god but not too deaf to hear the words of their future.

  Of their demise.

  The words shivered them, despite their inferno, but didn’t scare them, for if there ever were mortals so fearless it was those under the enchantment of love.

  A love so strong and powerful the gods themselves, for all their powers, could not reproduce it.

  Apollo, the god of sunlight, watched with a much simpler and more poisonous emotion. Jealousy coursed through the veins of the god who coveted the mortal woman with hair the color of fire and eyes carved from emeralds themselves. She was, after all, destined to be his, forever in her death. The sacrifice written in the sun that shined down upon the humans, the sacrifice they planned so that warmth would continue without the wrath from the god with whom their fickle mortality was poised.

  Apollo watched his destined walk the woods with another, the prophecy not silent to his ears either.

  The human man had no powers of a god, no immortality. He simply walked in the sunshine with his love and took what Apollo so craved. Walked in the light of what Apollo himself had gifted the humans.

  With the power of jealousy—the closest human emotion the god possessed—and the immortal powers no human could aspire to, he cursed sunlight to reside in Selene’s skin, and then made it so Ambrogio could no longer wander in daylight. Nor could he touch the skin of his lover, as the sunlight resided within her. It was Nyx, the god born of chaos with dominion over the darkness, who was too happy to help Apollo banish the mortal man to the shadows of the night.

  Unwilling to banish his own love to the darkness too, Ambrogio left the town in which he found his greatest adventure, his love and his destruction.

  Selene still fostered the love for a man she could not touch, or see in the sunlight. She followed his journey away from those woods, across oceans, and therefore from the temple that would bring her to Apollo.

  Though Selene followed her love, the sunlight still held Ambrogio’s demise and the sunlight still resided in her skin. So the lovers were sentenced to be separated, for mere mortals couldn’t change the actions of gods.

  Ambrogio knew this, and sought out the only god who could take him from the darkness. The god who resided in darkness. Hades took his soul so Ambrogio could be reunited with his sweetheart once more.

  Hades was not a being to bestow a gift without a curse.

  Ambrogio’s was to feed on the blood of others to keep his heart beating, which it did only for her.

  It was this deal with Hades that angered Apollo’s sister, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Such a creature, neither human nor mortal, hunting on the flesh that was hers angered the goddess. Artemis cursed Ambrogio with immortality, for immortality was a curse when the heart of an immortal lived within a mortal human.

  She snuck into the darkness where Selene slept and fed Ambrogio the Ichor of the gods, turning him from the creature of the night that fed on flesh into the deathless one. The first human to be cursed with immortality.

  The first human to become a vampire.

  Eleos had watched the lovers with interest after her first premonition and hated the wrath of her brothers and sisters, for it was bitterness and anger that the gods bestowed on the purest and most innocent of emotions. Though it was only from the purest and innocent of emotions that evil could be birthed.

  She appeared after Artemis, giving Ambrogio the opportunity to make Selene an immortal of sorts. It was not in her power to take death away from a mortal, but she could give life in death and make Selene the goddess of the moonlight, so Ambrogio could walk with her in the darkness that would always reside in his soul.

  It was only under the bequest of his love that Ambrogio agreed, with the knowledge that his soul would never meet with Selene’s as it was in the possession of Hades for eternity.

  So he drained the blood from his one true love, sending her to the heavens to give her somewhat of an eternal life. Not quite living, not quite dead.

  Deathless.

  It was through Selene’s watchful but cold embrace in the moonlight that Ambrogio grew dark and twisted from the lives he took with the loneliness of a being without a heart or a soul.

  And as the years passed and his mind turned sour and unrecognizable to the one who watched over his darkness, Ambrogio yearned for something darker than him. Someone darker than him.

  For even an immoral being was created from a human. Even the twisted murderous ones needed a companion to wade through the pools of blood they created. So he craved one, one without the heart that had caused him the eternity of pain.

  Hades, with a greedy heart of his own, gifted the first vampire with Lilith, so they would create more creatures whose souls would belong to the king of the underworld also.

  The children of the Vein Line created from love, hate, and blood.

  Ambrogio’s heart stopped beating the moment his love was drained dry. The truest vampire, in its final form, was created.

  The gods witnessed their creation, their vampire. Apollo, satisfied since he had won in the end. Artemis was melancholy because the goddess of the hunt now had new predators to contend with, deadlier than she intended and stronger and more heartless than once thought.

  Hades was as happy as the Devil could have been, because with the soul he owned—and the ones to come—it meant he would always win.

  The Devil always did, in the end.

  But then it wasn’t the end, was it?

  Eleos had been watching the events of the years, the interference of gods in mortal matters for such things as worship, jealousy and the price of a soul. She knew the prophecy of such a love and knew that one day, the world would be at the precipice, fed with the evil lust for power. It would need something more than humanity but less than godliness.

  Another mix of Selene and Ambrogio.

  “And so it shall be that the one with hair like fire

  and the one with the love to frighten even a god

  will once more walk this earth in the sunlight.

  And it will be in the blood that her survival is written.

  That earth’s survival will be written.

  And it is in the deathless soul of Ambrogio and Selene

  that the fates will be decided.

  The blood will run.”

  Isla

  The end.

  Endings always wrap up everything so neatly, don’t they? All of life’s and death’s complications and disasters seem to rectify themselves with supernatural speed and efficiency as we hurtle past the big heroic climax to chase those two words to the end of forever.

  Or at least that was how it worked in fictional narratives.

  Real life, or real undeath, was a lot different.

  The end came and went, endings weaving through reality without any of the theatrical finality we’ve come to expect. Mostly it was a sizzle. A quiet snuffing of the candle. Nothing was normally wrapped up, healed, satisfied at an ending. No, things were usually messier than they3 would ever be.

  Harmony was a long way away from this ending.

  Chaos, on the other hand, well it tangled up in this end like a snake around its prey.

  This end, of undeath as I knew it, came first with the ecstasy of warm blood filling my mouth. Filling my black, twisted, and warped soul.

  The one that had, until moments before, been dying a rather unfortunate and painful death.

  It was the last image I properly saw—the vision of another soul dying inside those eyes that had become something half of me resided in. I thought that would be the last image on my mind before the Devil himself came to clutch me and drag me downstairs for an eternity of torment.

  Boy, was he in for a surprise.

  Not just over the fact that I’d shake shit up and show him what real torment was.

  No, over the fact that his hot, clawed hands sank into me, grazed my flesh but didn’t find purchase.
/>
  Because my fangs sank into something else.

  Something I was so sure would be the end of me.

  And maybe it still was.

  But what an exquisite way to go.

  Thorne lifted his lips from mine as if he could sense the cold creeping up my throat.

  “I love you, Isla,” he rasped, eyes wet. “I’ll find you,” he promised. “Wherever you are.”

  I blinked away the redness in my vision. “I love you,” I whispered back. Then I leaned forward as he exposed his neck to me.

  I sank my fangs into his skin and welcomed the grave.

  He had been the last anchor that kept me attached to this earth. Then there was nothing but the crimson in my mouth, in my mind, in every part of me. In that crimson, he disappeared.

  And as I continued my feast, I disappeared too.

  Maybe that was the trick the Devil pulled. The greatest. Not convincing the world he didn’t exist, but convincing the souls he came for that they were safe.

  So he could feast on that hope.

  Stupid me for hoping, really.

  Hope combined with love, after all, was fatal.

  Oh, and a thousand-year-old witch’s curse. Think that also factored in.

  But whatever it was, the details, they didn’t matter.

  The crimson, the sweet nectar of life on my tongue, was the only thing that did.

  And then it was the death that chased it away.

  All of it.

  Clear me a drawer, Lucifer. I’m moving in.

  Chapter 1

  Sophie

  Death was a part of life.

  Sophie knew that.