us. Otherwise we would have had no army.”
“You should consider it lucky that Caesar pardoned you as he did.”
“Lucky? He was a rapist and a murderer. You of all people know this.”
“You know nothing of that night.”
“What?” he asked her as she walked to the dying greenery and leaned down to touch it.
“I gave of myself willingly Marcus. I was not forced to do anything.”
He narrowed his eyes and stared at her as she stood up and turned to face him.
“I did it for you, for us. I paid a slave to beat me.”
“Tercia. Why? Why did you let me think that you had been raped and beaten?”
“Why? Because it made you into the warrior you are today. You needed my story to fulfill your own, so I sacrificed myself for you.”
Gunner looked at her in horror. “So everything I did was for a lie? I did it all for you Tercia.” Tercia started to laugh and looked him over.
“You did not do anything for me. You did it for you, for glory, for retribution, for power. You just needed a small nudge in the right direction and now what? You commit suicide once again only this time for her? You took your own life once, you did that after losing to Antony and Octavius in Philippi. That was not for me brother, that was for your own legend to endure, that was your ego and why you are damned. You can pretend all that you want to that you battled in my memory but I sat in Hell and watched you as you destroyed your own house and did it in my name as if it were true.”
“You knew our ways, we did not know then as we do now that suicide is a damnation, I was only following Rome and her traditions, it was not for me, not for pride.”
She stepped up to him and spoke softly.
“If you do this, you will die, we will all die and your pride will be the ruin of the world. You have to accept help from those you may have otherwise considered your enemy. There is no need to carry any more weight for me. I have told you the truth and that story ends today. You have to write this next part as only you can. You are a gifted man, a strategist, a leader, a born King. Act like it. Take us into battle to win and not to be defeated.”
He watched her as she walked back to the foliage and touched it once again, brown leaves crumbling under her fingertips and to the atriums floor.
“Maybe after that, some life can be restored in this house and not mere shadows of what we could have been.”
****
Dorin stood very still as the elevator doors remained open. No one had come to retrieve him and he was not frightened to step out as much as he did not want to step into a trap. He finally took an unneeded breath, an old habit vampires who were turned seem to have of breathing. Some habits are harder to break than others. He finally stepped out into the hallway of Hell and then looked up to see that it looked like the long hallway in the old castle he lived in with Vlad. He swallowed hard as his throat burned with thirst, but his strength increased with each passing moment. He walked along as he heard moaning. It was not uncommon to hear it in the castle on any given day. Vlad had a thirst for blood, all blood and he lured as many unsuspecting humans into the castle as he possibly could to feed on. Some he kept as slaves for years until their bodies wore out, but they were never aware of anything but the love and pleasure that he brought to them. A vampire is a demon, the most seductive demonic creature that has ever been or ever will be and perhaps that is why Lucifer loves them as if they were his own. He tends to take them in as often as they want to come to him. A surrogate of some sort, be it as perverted as it seems to be, but a vampire is a weapon he adores to have at his side.
Dorin stopped as a door lay open to his right and he peered in to see a bathhouse. Humans lying around being fed on by vampires, vampires that Vlad had created to serve him. The