The moon has shown her face in near full glory. Damian Von Shrieder has not been so close to home in nearly a thousand years. However, it is not a social visit that brings him to the Carpathian Mountains. Duty has brought him here. Duty and a vow. He is a warrior, a hunter, like the other men in his family. Even now, he can sense his cousins, Vikirnoff and Nicolae, are not too far away. He was but a fledgling when the two brothers left to hunt vampires. He would like to see them again—to see them happy and with their lifemates but his vow keeps him from crossing deeper into the mountains. This vow—the plea of his long time friend and comrade in arms—to kill him if he became vampire. And he is close to fulfilling his vow, so close he can smell it.
It has taken him long enough, he recalls as he crouches low and fists the soft earth. Long enough to return and longer than it should to fulfill his vow. Over nine hundred years ago he was sent on a crusade to kill the vermin of their kind along with his boyhood friend, Sebastian. They traveled across Europe and so far as the United States of America to carry out their duty. It's been a little more than twelve years since Sebastian drank a man dry, forfeiting his soul and becoming a vampire. And Damian has been hunting his friend ever since.
He lets the soil fall from his hand and stands, eyeing the bait for his trap—the human man he has strung up to a tree. If he has learned anything about his prey's habits, it is that a vampire can never pass up a meal. Damian doesn't care if the man lives or dies, as long as tonight is the night. If he managed to kill Sebastian before, he would end the man himself. He steps over to his bait, unconscious and unaware of his current predicament. This will not do. Damian chose this man specifically. Like his usual prey, the vampire, he studied the man who would be his bait. The man before him was recently released from a correctional facility after serving a sentence for child pornography and raping an underage boy. Such vermin are just as bad as vampires. This man does not deserve to reenter society. And he does not deserve to go out easy.
Damian extends a finger and promptly jabs the man in the gut. It does just as he intended when his bait breathes a whoosh of air and his beady eyes pop open. Damian had sought to the man's mouth before strapping him to the tree, gagging him to prevent him from talking. When the man's eyes settle on Damian they threaten to bulge from his head. In a few moments he is coated in a sheen of sweat and his struggling only makes his confinement more uncomfortable.
"Struggle or don't struggle. It will be over soon enough."
The man's heart rate increases as his fear escalates and Damian can't help admiring how both carotid arteries repetitively jump in his neck. He is caught in the trance of it, the sweet music of the man's life blood thrumming through his body. Sure he could take a pint or two for himself. But this man is not his to feed on. This man serves a purpose—bait. And bait he will be.
With the same finger Damian had used to poke the man to consciousness, Damian brings his lengthening nail to his bait's neck. He makes a point to avoid both arteries, as to not bleed the man out too quickly, and swipes his nail along the soft flesh of the bait's neck, effectively slicing skin and drawing blood.
Damian stands back to admire his handiwork and to remind him to exercise his own willpower. A breeze rolls down the mountains. Good. That will carry the blood to him.
He crouches low to the earth again, cupping the soil in his hands. It has to be tonight. He releases the soil for the last time before he melts into the cluster of trees around him.
It shouldn't take long. He knows he must be ready for when the time comes.
Minutes go by. Possibly the longest minutes in his thousand plus years of life. Just when Damian wonders how much longer he'll have to wait, he senses Sebastian close and moving fast.
In an instant Sebastian whorls past him and Damian moves from the tree cover to see Sebastian latched to the bait's neck. The sounds of his friend slurping the blood from the pedophile's neck echos through the night. Sebastian keeps sucking and biting until he's nearly severed the man's head from his body.
Damian uses that moment to strike. Pining Sebastian to his victim and the tree, Damian punches his fist through the back of his prey, his fist opening only to wrap his fingers around Sebastian's heart. When his grip is secure, he wrenches back his arm, pulling free Sebastian's heart. The tearing of his aorta and vena cavas make a popping sound, the likes of which Damian will never forget. The sound will ring in his ears for the rest of his life. And if it all goes to plan, it won't be much longer.
He calls upon lightning from the sky as the Carpathian people do, effectively setting Sebastian's heart on fire.
"Finally," Sebastian utters just before his heart turns to ash in Damian's hand.
He lets the lightning clean his hand of Sebastian's blood but when it's gone he swears he can still feel the warm liquid and the pumping of his friend's heart.
Next, he releases the human body from the tree, the bloody mess it is, and destroys it; any and all evidence of what occurred here this night.
When the adrenaline leaves his body he is left feeling utterly empty. Empty of emotion other than that he gets during a hunt. Empty of color in his vision even during the last sights he will ever have of his homeland. Empty of his only true companion for the last thousand years. Empty of a lifemate that he will never know.
There is nothing left for him to do but to meet the dawn. It's better to end it now then to become a vampire, with no one to vow to destroy me.
He walks his way up the nearest mountain, not wanting to exert any more energy. He has not fed this night and his hunger will not be abated for much longer. The sun will rise in a few hours and he needs to be at the top of the mountain when it does. The less time he has up there to change his mind, the better.
It doesn't take him long, having easily navigated the mountain's smooth terrain. It is evermore quiet when he reaches the top. Nothing but the moon and the stars above him. He turns to face the direction the sun will rise, wanting to greet the sun head on like a Carpathian should before it's too late.
Movement catches his eye and he focuses to see a figure no more than fifty feet from him. It's a woman, no doubt by her hourglass figure. Though all he can see is her silhouette, he can tell her back is to him. His hunger gnawing at him and his blood surges through his body with renewed effort. She is a feast just for him, here when he needed it most. He lunges without meaning to and in a heartbeat he is behind her. She senses him then and turns in shock, her brown eyes wide. And then she disappears and Damian's arms wrap around empty air.
His knees sink to the ground. In his last moments he is driven by delusions. Delusions of a brown-eyed woman—
Brown. Eyes. Color.
At this time his imagination regained the ability to recall color—an ability that was lost to him for centuries. It is impossible. So impossible in fact that the only explanation for him seeing color was that he had come into contact with his lifemate.
That woman. Could she be? How had she disappeared?
Damian suddenly feels the pull to go to ground, his instincts telling him the sun will rise soon. He can't very well be on this mountain when it does, not when the possibility of finding his lifemate seems so close at hand. Pushing off the ground he resolves to go to ground if only to find this brown-eyed woman.