Blood and Kisses - By Karin Shah Page 0,78

her voice to draw men to her. Despite his need for isolation, he’d liked her. She’d had a witty charm that could make one forget inconvenient memories.

He’d been forced to behead her before she brought the entire constabulary of Bordeaux down upon them.

John, a simple yeoman farmer, who had craved the excitement and supremacy of the vampire gifts. How he’d gloried in learning, something forbidden him in his mortal life.

Before becoming addicted to the Claiming, John had made it a practice to turn every pretty girl he saw. After, he used his blood ties with his eyasses to form his own personal army.

Edward, a young fop of the Regency era who’d dallied with the wife of the wrong man and eaten grass for breakfast, as he’d like to say. Edward had been a sad case. He’d been a man of his times who’d outlived them. No doubt if he’d still been mortal, he would have become an alcoholic or an opium eater.

And there’d been so many others. They’d died and lived again, but learned nothing from the experience.

“And before that? How many murders have you committed?”

“When I was a boy, I arranged to have enemies killed.” He didn’t remember their faces. They seemed as distant now as the craggy surface of the moon. Sometimes the moon seemed closer.

“And these enemies. They were innocents?”

“I wouldn’t call them innocents,” he hedged. He could see where she was going, but she was wrong. “They were ambitious men. Men who saw a young prince as an obstacle to their own advancement.”

“Men who were willing to kill to remove that obstacle?” Thalia accentuated her point with the rise of her delicate eyebrows, her gaze riveted on his face.

“That doesn’t change the fact it was my order that led to their deaths.”

“Doesn’t it? You told me you were a sickly boy. If you had met these grown soldiers on the field of battle, what chance would you have had? They would have killed you—little more than a child—without a moment’s remorse. Wouldn’t they?”

Gideon didn’t, couldn’t speak.

“Wouldn’t they?”

“And later, when Inanna betrayed you, would you have killed her, if she hadn’t attacked you? What would you have done if it had been someone else who had spied against you? What would have been the penalty?

“How many of your soldiers died because of her? Because of information she’d passed to Akos? She handed you and your men to him time and time again. It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”

He shook his head. He’d told himself the same thing, but it excused nothing.

“I can’t condemn you because you fought to live. And I don’t think you should condemn yourself.”

She didn’t blame him? A part of him rejoiced in her forgiveness, but the rational part of him struggled to forgive himself. Could it be true? Had his actions been self-defense? You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? Breathed that voice inside him.

Flashes of memory seared across his mind’s eye.

He was a child, trembling in his narrow cot, each night consumed by fear. Would they come for him in his sleep? Or would the next day bring the slip of a bronze sword, the ill-timed backswing of a mace, a spear gone astray?

He was a young man, triumphant, waiting for an audience with the king, expecting praise from a remote father he should finally have pleased, only to overhear the king ordering his death.

Years later, still young, but leaning on a cane, debilitated from the effects of poison as he watched his half-sister led to her death.

She held her head high as they took her to the square. Her mouth pinched, her eyes, so like his, so like his father’s, had been flat and dead. Then she’d tuned on him. “Usurper! I’m the older!” she’d said, struggling against the two men restraining her. “This all should have been mine. You should have died. Why couldn’t you die?” Her venom still rang in his ears, though millennia had passed.

And then, Inanna’s betrayal just when he thought he’d found true happiness. The coppery gleam of her dagger in the lamplight as she rushed toward him. The fury in her eyes, then the horror as his curved sword pierced her flesh.

Catching up with Akos later at his campsite. The visions that had disturbed his sleep for thousands of years, faces set in masks of rage and fear, lips drawn back in desperate grimaces, eyes wide, pupils dark. Blood the color of mud and pitch in the uncertain light of the torches. And at last,