Prologue

What can you do, when your life has ended for the third time?

First, with a downpour of too thick, too dark, bone-encased blood, clinging and sticking to his throat, oozing across and across and into his whole body and he was drowning he couldn't breathe he needed air -

Who would have known that it would be even worse the second time? He wife's voice, whispering, barely trembling, for oh, she was so brave. 'Do it now.' The words metamorphosed into groans, then screams, until he finally realised that the awful, anguished cry, reverberating through the coombs below the abbey, it was his.

He would rather face her screams than never hear her voice again. His wife, Mirena.

But how selfish he was, how egotistical, wishing agony on his heart's soul. Mirena was in a far better place, one that he would never reach.

He knew that he was focussing on the sounds, on her fingers clasping, digging into his arm, to avoid the remembrance of the fangs against his lips, and that sweet, sweet blood trickling through his lips, distracting him, surrounding him, overwhelming him…

He did not expect to awaken the third time. But perhaps awaken is the wrong word to use for one who would never sleep again. Any ability to sleep had soared away from him with his wife and the final dregs of his hope for humanity.

Sleep no more. Ha! He had murdered everything but sleep.

A drop - blood upon his lips. Dissolving into them. Another. And then another. Small splashes. He heard his own breath. Deep. Heavy. Laboured.

The sound grew less distinct. Now he could hear the wind, the tent awnings flapping.

Eyes wide open. The gypsy was standing over him. It felt like beetles were scuttling over every inch of his skin. 'Drink, master.' And he did. How could something so foul taste so fair?

Blood soaking down the stake of an impaled man. The body's fruitless final writhing only increased the speed. Blood flowing down. Soaking into the wood.

Men, lying on the ground, thousands of them around him. Each one with blood staining their armour, their skin, even the dark ground. A broken skull, a poor imitation of a goblet with its broken, jagged rims, and the opaque blood pooled against the white bone. Blood, and pain and death.

He had been a soldier. Every man knew that blood brought death.

Why did blood bring him to life?

It must be that he was death.