He nodded, to show he was still listening.
“The one thing I really don’t get is why the demons would want a village full of humans with really long life spans,” I went on. “It might make sense if we’d been right about them trying to breed more hybrids like me, but that’s not what’s happening. I don’t understand what they could be after.”
Eyes still closed, Rans pulled himself into a sitting position, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I think I might,” he said. “The demons have a source of human beings infused with Fae magic. They have a way to stockpile them, so to speak, rather than having the older ones constantly die off after seventy or eighty years. And they’ve ensured that the one fucking vampire that they managed to salvage from a magical Fae weapon during the war is protected—for a given definition of the word.”
Something clicked into place inside my mind, and my stomach flipped over.
“Oh my god,” I said, feeling suddenly nauseated. “Rans. You think they want to raise a new army of vampires... but this time, using humans that could be immune to the Fae weapon, because they already have Fae magic?”
Rans opened his eyes, staring into the distance with the look of someone who thought he’d awakened from one nightmare only to find himself trapped in another.
“I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I do know that this war cannot be allowed start up again. You’ve seen how deadly it is when it’s supposedly been over for two hundred years. But believe me when I say—things can still get much, much worse.”
End of Book Three
The Last Vampire: Book Four
By R. A. Steffan & Jaelynn Woolf
ONE
ONE THING ABOUT living out of a suitcase—it made moving from one place to another on short notice a fairly efficient process. Before the latest crisis, I’d felt like I was getting the hang of my new nomadic lifestyle, even considering the few weeks I’d spent staying at Dad’s hut in the titheling village in Hell.
That little jaunt had been akin to some sort of bizarre summer camp, only for humans who’d been kidnapped and replaced by Fae changelings before being bartered to the Fae’s demonic enemies as political chattel.
Before my brief walk on the Damned side, though, I’d been on the run with Ransley Thorpe, seven-hundred-year-old vampire war survivor and part-time white knight. I still didn’t know for certain what had first brought me to Rans’ attention, but for reasons of his own, he’d taken pity on a clueless demon hybrid being hunted by Unseelie Fae. If he hadn’t whisked me away from city to city, providing a false identity and a series of safe harbors for hiding out, I had little doubt that I’d be dead by now.
This particular move felt different, though. Somewhere along the way, I’d fallen for my rescuer, despite the fact that it was a total cliché. I’d done my best to hide the fact, of course. Because what would a powerful supernatural creature like him possibly want with a twenty-something waitress, whose only claim to fame was some seriously unfortunate parentage?
Answer—quite a bit... to my considerable shock. Frankly, I was still pinching myself over that one.
At any rate, now that my secret weakness for Rans was no longer a secret, everything had changed. Everything... and nothing. I was in love with the last vampire on Earth. The difference now was that I’d finally caved and told him so. I was still reeling from the fact that he hadn’t thrown it back in my face.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather than the polite rejection I’d expected, we’d spent a soul-searingly emotional night in his remote cottage near York, in England. By letting our guard down in such a way, we’d risked discovery and attack by the many forces that wanted to capture or kill me. But in exchange for that risk, we’d experienced the exquisite rapture of lying wrapped in each other’s arms, with no more lies between us.
And then, once the afterglow had faded, I’d looked Rans in the eye and told him that the demon he’d trusted as a friend and a mentor for centuries had been using him for his own self-serving ends.
Nigellus might have protected Rans after the genocide of the rest of the vampire race, but it now appeared he’d done so for selfish reasons, rather than out of any sense of altruism. For two hundred years, the demons had been collecting a tithe of souls from their Fae enemies in the form of human babies who’d been exchanged for Fae changelings on Earth. It had always seemed an odd form of tribute, to me—especially in the aftermath of the centuries-long conflict that Nigellus had once described as having come to a messy draw.
Now, I knew the reasoning behind it. Just before the end of the war between the Fae and the demons, all of the demon-allied vampires fell to a magical Fae weapon. Or rather... all of the vampires fell except for Rans. My vampire lover had no memory of the war or its immediate aftermath, but Nigellus had seen to it that Rans’ continued survival was a provision of the peace treaty between the two warring sides.
The Tithe to Hell was also a mandate of that treaty. In return for the souls the Fae sent them, the demons ceded control of the human realm to their enemies. It seemed a rather one-sided agreement on the surface. But I thought I understood it, now. The human tithelings were imbued with Fae magic after their time spent living in the Faerie realm of Dhuinne. Meanwhile, Nigellus had been periodically draining Rans of his blood, and erasing his memory after each violation.
That stolen vampire blood formed the basis of a drink that slowed the human tithelings’ ageing to nearly imperceptible levels, allowing them to live for centuries rather than mere decades. And now, Rans and
