Carpathian 18 - Dark Possesion

them and rested her chin on top, waiting for him to continue.
    Manolito took a slow, careful look around and wove more safeguards, this time enclosing them within a sound barrier to give them even more privacy. "Sometimes the forest has ears."
    She nodded, not interrupting, but somewhere in the pit of her stomach she was beginning to believe that what he was going to tell her was of monumental importance to both of them.
    Manolito rested his elbows on the railing and looked down at the forest floor beneath them. "My family was always a little different from most of the other warriors around us. For one thing, most families never have children within fifty to a hundred years of one another. Of course it happens, but rarely. My parents had all five of us with no more than fifteen years separating us, other than Zacarias. He's nearly a hundred years older, but we were raised together."
    She could instantly see the problems that might go along with such closeness, particularly young boys feeling the first taste of power. "You had a gang mentality."
    There was a small silence while he absorbed that. "I suppose that could be so. We were above average in intelligence and we all knew it; we heard it enough times from our father as well as the other men. We were fast and learned quickly, and we heard that, too, as well as it being drilled into us what our duty was to be."
    MaryAnn frowned. She'd never thought about Manolito or his brothers being children, growing up in uncertain times. "Even then, were more males being born than females?"
    He nodded. '"The prince was concerned and we all knew it. So many children died. The women were beginning to have to go above-ground to give birth, and some children could not tolerate the ground in infancy; others could. Changes were happening, and the tension grew. We were trained as warriors but given as much schooling as possible in all the other arts. Resentment began to grow in us when others, not quite as intelligent, were given chances at higher learning while we had to hone our fighting skills on the battlefield."
    "Do you believe, looking back, that you had reason for that resentment?" she asked.
    He shrugged, his powerful shoulders rolling, the muscles in his back rippling. "Maybe. Yes. At the time we did. Now, as a warrior and seeing what has happened to our people, certainly the prince needed us to fight.
    The vampires were growing in numbers, and to protect our species as well as the others, our fighting skills were needed perhaps more than our brains."
    He sighed as he looked down from the treetops. "When we first came here, you have to remember, there were few, almost no, people at all. We were alone, only occasionally pitting our skills against an enemy. Five of us with our emotions growing dim and the memory of our people and our homeland fading along with the colors around us. We thought that was bad. And then we began to face more and more old friends who had turned. Our lives as we had known them as Carpathians were long gone."
    MaryAnn's teeth bit at her lower lip. "Did your prince give you a choice to leave the Carpathian Mountains?
    Or did he just send you?"
    "We were given a choice. All warriors were told of what was to come and how we were needed. We could have stayed, but honor would never have allowed that. Our family was considered as having among the best fighting skills."
    "But you could have," she said, persisting. "Your fighting skills must have been needed there as well."
    "Considering what happened, yes," Manolito agreed.
    For the first time he tasted bitterness on his tongue. They had agreed to go when the prince had put out the call to his oldest warriors, thinking, believing, the prince knew the future, knew what was best for his people.
    When the ranks thinned and their enemies moved in. the prince had aligned himself with humans. All had been lost when they had tried to protect their human allies.
    Centuries later, now, when he could once again feel, he was still angry over that decision, still disagreeing and not understanding how Vlad could have made such a mistake. Had sentiment overruled reason? If so, no De La Cruz would ever make such a mistake.
    "You're angry," she said, feeling the waves of his antagonism washing over her.
    He turned around to lean his hip against the railing. "Yes. I had no idea I was angry with him, but yes, I am.
    After hundreds of years, I still blame the prince for going into a battle they couldn't win."
    "You know that