Prologue

  Harlow 

  

  My heart is in my throat as I pace the room. Eyes fixated on the rapidly deteriorating condition of the person I love most in this world. My body shakes, tears carve streams down my face, my throat raw from hours upon hours of emotional pain. 

  

  If I close my eyes for a moment I can picture him as he should be, that dimple on his chin standing out with his breathtaking smile, dark hair flopping into his bright blue eyes. Strong, muscular, powerful. 

  

  One of the thirteen vampire lords, the best of them. The only one of his line after his mother Eve had chosen the true death. I don’t know exactly how old he is, even he doesn’t anymore but in that very long life he has never made another vampire. 

  

  Of all of the people that the hunters could have targeted with this horrific new bio weapon they have created, they have made a mistake. He has never harmed a soul, never fed from humans and uses his healing power as a doctor in the human world to save their lives. 

  

  We have been in an uproar the last six months with this new weapon, at first we thought it was truly fatal, targeting the blood at a cellular level. One of our own scientists came up with a counter only months later. If you could do a full blood transfusion with blood from your line you can be saved, the healing is long and painful but you will live. It takes at least four donors usually to give the full transfusion needed. 

  

  Here lies my pain, the thirteenth house, Erik, standing alone, no others of his bloodline. No one able to save him. His painful death is inevitable and my heart shatters. I never told him I loved him, what he meant to me and now he will die never knowing. 

  

  Not that it would matter his heart belongs to another. His sweet Lia, the only person he ever considered turning because he wanted to share eternity with her. I glance to her painting over his fireplace, still there even after she has been gone from this world well over a thousand years. 

  

  I have both admired and hated her over the last two hundred years. What must she have been like to capture his heart so truly that there is no space for another? That he would dedicate his life to healing forsaking his own happiness. 

  

  My eyes settle on Nicholas, his pain is rolling off of him in waves. Erik calls him Papa, in life he was his uncle, one of the original thirteen witches of the coven who cast the spell that would change the world forever more. 

  

  Hunted as witches, tired of loosing numbers, when their High Priest was captured and tortured to death they had said no more. His son Damian was driven by vengeance and a determination not to loose anyone else,  they worked day and night to create the most powerful spell ever cast. The spell of eternal life, they did not foresee the consequence of such a spell until it was too late and the blood lust took over. 

  

  As witches, the thirteen had powers that they discovered the humans they turned did not share. Blood affected some differently to others, the houses spilt. Eight went with the High Priest now the Vampire King and five went with the High Priestess Eve.  

  

  The eight believed they were superior and deserved to rule the world, that humans were less than them. Determined to keep maximum power Damian outlawed the turning of witches into vampires to ensure no others would ever be as powerful as the thirteen. Over the next century he waged a campaign of slaughter destroying any who had been turned. He issued a warrant of death on any vampire who turned a witch. 

  

  The five houses who had joined Eve valued humans, living in harmony with the world, they held onto more of their humanity. 

  

  Eve had vowed never to turn another, that no one else deserved this fate. The five were seen as weaker because they would not turn someone easily, they tended not to feed from humans if they could avoid it. When Erik became a grown man, Eve felt her heart could not take him growing old and dying, she went against her own vow and turned her son. 

  

  Perhaps because he was his own cousin or because of his natural power being the High Priestesses son Damian never came for Erik or Eve. As the centuries passed Eve grew weary of the world, the unnatural cycle of their lives and craved to end it all. She had begged her brother to help her end it all. Leaving Erik the last of his line and Nicolas the last of his siblings. 

  

  He has loved Erik like his very own son, they have always been together and I don’t know what it will do to him to loose Erik. I hate the hunters, they are indiscriminate, too filled with their single minded hatred of all vampires to realise we are not all the same. 

  

  The next twenty four hours will be a painful hell for Erik as the weapon rips through his system killing him slowly and painfully. I can not watch but I also can not leave him.