Chapter 16: Chapter 16

Chapter 16: Deserted

Lancelot’s P.O.V:

I was jealous, okay? I couldn’t watch you sleep with one woman after another and I couldn’t stand the fact that I was the one who had to call and make arrangements for you two to fuck when all I wanted to do was strangle the life out of you both!

Her words rang in my head as I licked her taste off my lips. I’d intentionally sucked some of her energy, just to show her how dangerous I could be, but as a result, I now had her taste in my tongue and her essence in my blood.

She tasted of strawberries and mint with a hint of spice...chilies? Simple and sweet with a bite, just like her personality.

I clenched my hands on the steering wheel, having already started driving ten minutes ago with Anna a silent presence beside me. It wasn’t just sweet and simple, it was also very addictive. I could feel her energy inside me, her life force. Incubi are immortals, the energy we need to keep on living is far more than what a human needs in one lifetime. Which is why I can only sleep with the same woman a maximum of seven to eight times, ten for some strong ones, but anymore and they die right then and there, their body shriveling up with no energy left in the cells to maintain the body structure.

An image of a dried up, shriveled up Anna flashed before my eyes and felt my jaw clench so hard it was agony.

“Lance!”

Anna’s startled cry from beside me made me pull over on the side of the road, only to have her dabbing at my chin with her handkerchief. When the white of the cloth became stained with red, I realized I’d bitten the inside of my lip while gritting my teeth.

“What did you do?” She asked, leaning on towards my side of the car to inspect my lips carefully. “Wh-?”

I caught her fingers in my hand as they were tracing my lips and with my free hand, pulled back my lower lip to show her the healing wound. Her eyes widened in disbelief as the wound closed up in a mere few seconds to leave completely healed skin in its wake.

“How?” She whispered, taken aback; but then she answered her own question. “You’re immortal.”

“Not all of us are,” I told her the truth since she already knew the basics and as my Scribt, she’ll need to know more. “There are some who choose to fade away by putting a halt to their energy consumption.”

“Why?” She looked at me with wide green eyes that shore with the purity of her soul. Anaya Johnson was supposed to have a long, happy life. Her lifeline pulsed with a pure, vibrant energy and the greedy demon inside me wanted that energy, that light all to myself. This is why I didn’t want Anna to be my Scribt. If she stays with me, she’ll have to experience things, see things that’ll change her for the worst…and I didn’t want that kind of life for her.

Which is why I decided that after she served the mandatory three-year contract at my company, I’ll erase her memories of us, erase everything she feels for me and send her on her way. She deserved better.

“They find someone especial that mean more to them than staying alive for centuries.” I answered her question.

“And you can’t be one of them.” She answered ruefully.

“No.” Anna was so easy to read. Her eyes betrayed everything that went on in her mind. “I’m their Prince, the heir apparent to the throne. I can’t afford to fade away.”

Even as her eyes widened, her lips curved up in a sarcastic smile. “Why am I not surprised anymore?”

“You’ll get used to it.” I told her before starting up the car. We had a destination to reach and we were already running late.

Anna will learn to quell her feelings eventually; she has to, or there will be several who would use that against her or me. As I drove to our hotel, I stole a look in her direction to find her staring straight ahead as if in a trance, her face set in firm lines. For a long time, I had believed my heart had died when a woman with stunning golden hair and mysterious blue eyes had so mercilessly crushed all my hopes by reveling her true self to me, but today, almost two hundred years later, I felt that heart become heavy. Today, I’ve done the same thing to Anna, crushed her hopes. But this was the right thing to do.

Erick’s P.O.V:

I crouched on the ground next to my Head of Security, Kendrick, hidden behind the shadows cast by the tall trees. No one would know we were here, neither humans nor vampires.

“Are you certain?” I asked Ken in a voice only he could hear from where he stood a few feet away from me to the right.

Ken nodded, clothed in a black turtleneck that was bulletproof paired with pants of similar material, he was one with the darkness that surrounded us. I was clothed dark clothing as well, dark blue jeans and a deep grey t-shirt with a similar dark cap on my head to hide my blonde hair. As we looked on in front of us, we saw an abandoned warehouse clothed in darkness with no indication that it had even been inhabited for years, except…there it was again…a whimper. Followed by another in a different voice, this one male.

The whispers were rare, hard to pick if you didn’t have super human hearing or if you didn’t stay in the same place for too long; but they were definitely there. Someone was holding people captive. Vampires.

Kendrick had tracked down this place a week earlier. We’d been looking through the missing vampire list that we believed to have fallen victim to the Ancient mage, Tuhin’s hunger. That ancient had devoured the hearts of hundred of vampires while trying to regain full strength. Thankfully, my wife, Alina had killed that son of a bitch at the right instant by thrusting the Arctic Blade, an ancient weapon, through him effectively cutting him in half. We’d matched the DNA records of the dead with nearly 93% of the missing vampire records, but a small amount hadn’t been found on the broken leftovers of what used to be a temple built to worship the Ancients.

Those vampires had all vanished in the last two years when Tuhin was awake and needed refueling. It had occurred to us a lot later that not all of the vampires that had gone in the recent years had been Tuhin’s dinner. Someone else was at work here. And they were capturing my people for the heck of it.

I lifted my hand and signaled for my soldiers, who were standing a few meters behind us, to attack and in a blink of an eye, the ten highly trained vampires had rushed past us and torn down the warehouse doors.

Ken and I followed behind them, making sure no one escaped, but when we heard no voices from inside, we picked up speed and went inside the warehouse to find it nearly empty.

“Search every corner!” I told my men as they dispersed in every direction.

Meanwhile, Ken and I headed in the direction of five cages that lined the back wall. The cages were small, fit to hold smaller animals, which is why the vampires inside them were curled in fetal positions, their bodies bent in angles that just wasn’t right. There was a saline stand next to each cage and heavy amounts of sedatives were being punched into their blood every minute. But it wasn’t required anymore. Because two out of the five captives were dead and the remaining three, two women and a man, all nude, were barely holding on to life by threads.

“Erick,” Ken came to stand beside me with a set of keys and I told him to open the cages.

Once opened, I teleported the injured to our healer, all at once, who was already on standby. When I returned back to get the dead bodies, all the guards had come back from their initial swipe of the perimeter. They all had solemn looks on their faces.

“Nothing?” I asked incredulously.

They all shook their heads.

“Stay here until a back up team arrives with DNA testing equipments.” I told them and then teleported out with the shrunken bodies of the dead. Ken stayed back to do further checking, his powers as a mage would help him find clues.

When I returned to our healer, Alina was waiting for me, her eyes welled up with tears even as she helped our healer lay down one of the girls on a bed and covered her naked form with a white sheet. I placed the dead vampires on two spare beds so the healer, Vladimir, can perform post mortem on them before they were returned to their families for a proper burial.

“Erick!”

I opened my arms for Alina when she came to me, holding on so tight that it almost cut my breath off. But still I held on to her. Alina was the Princess, soon to be Queen of our people, she needed to be here for the injured so they could recover. So they could believe that they were safe.

“It’s empty,” I told her about the warehouse. “It’s like no one ever went in there. Someone might have noticed Ken snooping around and decided to abandon their duty than get caught. Bastards!”

“No matter how clever they were, they couldn’t have cleaned after them,” said my gentle wife with her fierce heart. “They’re bound to have made mistakes and when we find out about those mistakes, we’ll find those bastards as well.”

A week later, the nine humans who’s DNA we’d recovered from the farmhouse were traced down to their lair. And when we reached the house, we found them all dead, throats slit open and blood splattered on the walls.

Whoever we were up against stayed one step ahead of us, and that was when I realized…we had a traitor in our midst.