Immortals After Dark 03 - No Rest for the Wicked

moaned again. Dark, mottled bruises marred her skin all over. Gritting his teeth with anger, he dressed her in his shirt and put her to bed, sitting beside her in the room’s one chair.
    He found himself feeling as if they were married already. He didn’t know if this was a symptom of the blooding, but he found himself thinking of her as a wife—one who despised him, wouldn’t share his bed, and, worse, wouldn’t allow him to protect her.
    And he continued dreaming about her each night, staggeringly vivid dreams.
    In many dreams, Kaderin spoke in an old language he had no knowledge of, yet he understood her. He heard her thoughts, felt her fears. Once he’d dreamed she was on a battlefield, absently marking the severed heads of vampires she’d killed, carving an X with her sword as she sought her next fight. He now knew she was marking them to come back for their fangs later.
    The more of her memories he garnered about the Horde, the more he instinctively knew he would never join their number. Since he’d taken Kaderin’s blood from her body, he’d never experienced even the slightest urge to drink another. He’d been around humans since then and hadn’t even thought about it.
    Near dawn, when he saw she was sleeping soundly, he finally nodded off, swiftly becoming immersed in a scene from her past.
    He could tell from Kaderin’s clothing that it was in the early nineteen hundreds. She was hastening after a raven-haired female named Furie—their half-Valkyrie, half-Fury queen. Furie was setting off to battle the Horde’s king, because a Valkyrie soothsayer named Nïx had told her it was her destiny.
    “Nïx told me you intend to fight Demestriu,” Kaderin said from behind her. “But all she knows is that you’re not coming back. I want to go with you and make sure that you do.”
    Furie turned. Overall, she resembled Kaderin’s kind—delicately built with feylike features—but Furie had more prominent fangs and claws. Her eyes were striking but odd, with dark rings around irises of a vivid purplish color. She could not have passed as a human as Kaderin could. “You can’t feel, child,” Furie intoned. “How will you help me?”
    Can’t feel? Yes—he’d dreamed Kaderin experiencing a deep, wrenching sorrow, but it hadn’t lasted long. One morning she woke... changed.
    “It makes me cold,” Kaderin said calmly. “It makes me good.”
    Something like affection might have glimmered in Furie’s uncanny eyes. Then she said, “I’m fated to go alone.”
    “Change fate.” Kaderin knew Furie would consider her words blasphemous. The Valkyrie didn’t believe in chance. For them, everything happened for a reason.
    “Have you lost your beliefs along with your emotions?” Furie’s anger was building. Kaderin could sense it like animals sense storms, but it didn’t deter her. “Only a coward would try to escape her fate. Remember that, Kaderin.” She continued on.
    “No, I’m going with you,” Kaderin insisted, hurrying to her side.
    Furie turned and tilted her head sharply. “To keep you here”—she snatched Kaderin’s wrist, twisting her arm back behind her—“and to ensure you always remember what I said... ” With one brutal yank she snapped Kaderin’s arm—her sword arm—then released her.
    Kaderin stumbled back to face her, but the heel of Furie’s palm slammed into her upper chest. Something else snapped. Kaderin flew a dozen feet back, the force rendering her unconscious before she hit the ground.
    He never got a chance to see how hurt she’d been, or how she’d recovered, because another scene arose.
    Kaderin’s boots clicked as she sprinted down foggy back alleys. The rookeries she passed were filled with Lore beings, their deadened eyes staring out of the mist. It was London in the eighteen hundreds.
    Her sword was strapped securely over her shoulder, and her thin shackles were tucked into her belt at her back. She was tracking two vampires, brothers, and her ears twitched when she sensed them. She drew her sword, but they were fast as they suddenly traced around her. One delivered a crushing blow to her head from behind, the other dealt a hit to her temple that nearly blacked her vision completely. A trap.
    They let her stumble away for a goddamned block. Playing with her.
    Tired. I just want to sit, she kept thinking in a daze. Just for a second. She finally collapsed, falling to her back.
    The vampires returned, one holding her down, the other raising his