Blood, Honor and Dreams (The Elder Blood Chronicles, #2)
by Melissa Myers
Prologue
Gaelyn
The taste of copper filled her mouth, harsh and metallic. Her eyes trailed down to the remains of the woman cooling before her. Her stomach growled at the sight of so much meat but she fought back the instinct to feed. She had scanned the woman’s mind while in the womb and no matter how broken the woman had been, she had loved the child growing inside her. In her scattered mind, the woman had believed her a child formed of love with a man named Hawk. The dead woman had even picked names for the child inside her, Emily if it was a girl and Jonathan if a boy. The woman had refused to believe a monster grew inside her. In her mind, she had pictured a pink, squirming little baby.
She shifted uncomfortably at the thought. She didn’t want to consider herself a monster, and yet she was no baby as the woman had imagined. Just the few shreds of meat she had consumed had helped her grow considerably. By human standards her body was the size of one of their toddlers. Her mind, however, was far advanced beyond that. She knew what the woman had known. She had spent long hours in that broken mind, sorting through the knowledge. Reaching hesitantly, she ran a finger across the dead woman’s cheek, brushing back the strands of brown hair that hung over her empty eyes. Her talon scored a narrow groove in the dead flesh and she hastily pulled her small hand back. She hadn’t meant to kill the woman any more than she had meant to damage the dead flesh with her talon. It had been pure instinct that demanded she tear herself free of the prison of flesh.
Settling back on her heels, she stared down at the corpse, unsure what to do. She knew the others watched her. She could feel their eyes on her back. They wondered why she didn’t feed. If she didn’t feed soon, it was possible they would claim the meat. It was also possible they would consider her defective. Moving slowly, she edged to the other side of the corpse and placed her back against the thick stone wall. The others shifted, watching her, their eyes glimmering like dark jewels in the faint light of the room. With hunger and disgust warring inside her, she reached a taloned hand down to the corpse and cut a strip of flesh from the arm. Gingerly, she took the first bite, chewing slowly and trying to think of it as only meat and not as the dead woman that had considered herself mother.
With each strip of meat she ate, she felt her body pushing against its current size. Muscles developed, bones grew, and senses became more acute. Closing her eyes, she cut strip after strip from the corpse, relishing in the taste of the blood and hating herself for enjoying it. It took all of her will to keep the predatory instincts down. She could feel the growl deep in her chest. The gaze of the others upon her hadn’t lessened and her primal side told her to warn them away. If they came closer, she would defend herself by talon and fang as needed. It wasn’t a fight she would win, there were seven of them in the room. Not all of them would walk away, though. She would ensure that.
By the time her hunger was sated, she was red to the elbows in sticky, drying blood. Careful to keep her eyes from the once beautiful face of the dead woman, she moved down the wall and away from what remained. The others would feed on the remaining meat and she had no desire to see that. Never taking her gaze from the others, she followed the wall until it ended in a rough wooden door. With her back to the door she slipped out and into the dark hallway. She sniffed the air and then focused on the inner sense that linked her with her brethren to see how many lurked in the shadows beyond. There were more to the left than right.
Pushing the door shut behind her silently, she paced down the hall to the right. The dead woman had no knowledge of the layout of this place, only a name for it, Eldagar. By what the woman had known of Eldagar and her current surroundings, she guessed herself to be somewhere below the fortress in the labyrinth of storage rooms. With senses alert, she moved swiftly and quietly through turn after turn, always choosing the path with the fewest Blights.
She didn’t want to associate with the things. She may be one of them, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. In the dead woman’s mind, pushed back to the furthest corners, there had been memories of the Blights and what they had done to the villages of Gaelyn. Farther back than that had been the memories of what they had done to Hawk, the man that should have been her father. To kill was a necessity for any predator. To torment and torture during the kill was corruption of the hunt. Torture was the only word to describe the way Hawk had died. With a frown, she focused on her surroundings and left the memories for when she was in a secure location. It wouldn’t take long for the Blights to realize she was not like them. What they did from there was beyond her field of guessing.