Chapter 0002

Emory

“Take my daughter… to be a feeder.”

My father’s words echo around the throne room as I stand behind him with my throat so constricted, I can hardly breathe, let alone speak. I can’t believe the words that have come from his mouth, and by the look on Vampire King Kane’s face, neither can he.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” the king asks. “You want me to take your daughter? To replace the debt you still owe me for waging war against my lands for all of these years?” He is standing on a dais, but as he speaks, he descends one step. He’s still a good ten feet away from us and probably three feet taller than my father in this position, who is six foot one. I’m sure that King Kane is taller than my father anyway, but from this angle, he looks like a giant baring down on my father, an angry giant.

I am more than a little angry myself as I try to process what is happening. I hear Lola begin to whimper, and with her cries, my father flinches. I’ve also heard a startled gasp from either Darius behind me or his mother, Margaret, or maybe both of them. I still don’t know what to say. All I can think is that I’m missing something. Surely, my parents must be using this opening as some way of getting the upper hand on the vampires. It must be part of some nefarious plan I am unaware of.

They can’t really mean to sell me—can they? I can’t even process what that would mean. I’m meant to be the next Alpha, after all. It doesn’t matter that I am female. My father has been training me to take over the pack since I was a little girl. No, something isn’t right.

“Please explain yourself, Bernard,” Kane says, resting his elbow on a folded arm as his long, slender fingers stroke his cheek in contemplation. “Explain to me how your daughter, whichever of these females that happens to be, is of more use to me than the money you agreed to pay me.”

When he says the words “these females” his eyes briefly passed over all of us, and for a moment our eyes lock, as if he is saying he knows that my father has to be referring to me. I am the only woman here who is young enough to be his daughter, other than Lola, and she’s just a child. None of the warriors we brought along with us are women, so that only leaves my mother and Darius’s mom besides me. Clearly, they are not his daughter.

Reasoning through this makes another bolt of fear pass through my body. What would it mean to stay here and become a feeder for the Vampire King? I can’t even let my mind ponder it. All of the feeder stories I have heard are worse than even death on the battlefield.

Again, my father must clear his throat before he speaks, which at least indicates that he isn’t particularly pleased with this plan, but the betrayal that settles in my heart is unreal as I consider what he is doing right now.

My mind flutters over the various images I have of my father and I as I grew up and he taught me so very much about so many things. Special memories stick out to me—the first time he gave me a ride on his wolf’s back through the forest, watching the Northern Lights at solstice when I was younger, how he’d taught me to catch a fish with my bare hands.

No, it can’t be that my father, the man I used to call daddy, is now selling me to this monster, our enemy. He may look like the perfect man, with his handsome face and tight, muscular form, but he doesn’t fool me. He is the devil himself.

So what the hell is happening?

“Well,” my father begins, gulping for air. “I think you shall find that she will be the perfect feeder for you. She comes from good stock, obviously, since I am her father. She’s intelligent, obedient, and may even be an asset to you at court one day, if she li—if you allow her to be.”

If she lives that long… that’s what my father was going to say. I have to swallow back my own outburst as I want to ask him how he can do this.

My eyes flicker to my mother, and it appears as if she’s wearing a bit of a grin around her red lips. I am puzzled. My mother and I have always been close. Just like my father, I have learned so much from her. She taught me how to be a lady, how to dance, sew, entertain. Now, is she truly going to stand there with that smirk on her face as her only daughter is sold away?

I don’t understand it. I think of how devastated she was when Lola was born, how betrayed she’d felt that my father could do that to her, have a child with another woman, and how it had been me to comfort her and assure her that everything would be all right.

Now, she is just going to let my father trade me to our enemy for a war debt? It doesn’t matter to me that the debt is so high, that some might think it an honor to be priced at such a rate. I can’t imagine selling my child. I look down at Lola, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a child at my young age, and I see the tears streaming down her cheeks. No, I could never, ever give her up.

I mouth to my sister, “It’s okay,” but that doesn’t keep her from crying. She knows we are about to be torn away from one another, and then she will have no one, and I cannot trust my father to take care of her.

I want to turn to Darius, to beg him to watch over Lola, but I can’t find the will to look at him right now. Will he speak up for me? And if I am not to be the next leader of the pack, then who will be?

My head swivels to my brother, and on Coit’s face, I see the same hint of a smile our mother wears. So he is happy to see me go so that he can become the Alpha after all.

“I’m afraid I simply don’t understand.” King Kane turns around and goes back up the steps, walking to his throne, and drops down into it. The men on either side of it adjust their postures slightly. My eyes flicker to them, but they don’t stay there long. With the king in the room, no one else is worthy of much more than a fleeting glance.

Right now, I’m not staring at him because of his visual appeal, though. I’m staring at him because I’m awaiting his verdict. Clearly, he doesn’t know why one feeder is worth so much, and neither do I.

“Please, Your Highness.” My father literally drops to his knees, dragging my mother down with him. “The war… it’s taken everything from my people. We just shipped out our stock piles of natural resources to you. As it is, we may not make it through the winter. We have nothing left to trade or sell…. My people are starving. I don’t have enough money left in the accounts to pay you even a third of what I owe you, but I promise you, she is worth it.”

King Kane is shaking his head. “If you didn’t have the money to pay me back, you should’ve never borrowed it to begin with. Didn’t we have this same discussion fifteen years ago, Bernard? Back when you told me if I loaned you ten million drakes you would be able to use that money to conquer the packs around you, in which case you would easily pay me back twenty million? I told you then I didn’t think it was a good idea, but you insisted, and because of your father’s relationship with my father, I decided to allow it. Now, here we are, ten years after repayment was due, and you are still falling short on your end of the bargain.”

I listen to King Kane’s words, and my mouth wants to fall open. So that’s what the war has been about? Because my father wasn’t able to repay a debt? I do remember, vaguely, the wars with the other packs from when I was a little girl, but I had been told—as had all of the children who were school aged at the time—that the other packs had attacked us.

My father was quickly becoming a stranger to me.

“It was a fool’s errand!” My father releases Mom’s hand to lay prostrate on the floor, sobbing. “I cannot blame your anger, Sir. I cannot. I meant to make a name for myself independent of my father, and I failed. Please, have mercy on me.”

“I did have mercy on you!” King Kane doesn’t seem nearly as agitated as he should be. “I wrote off over half of the debt before we even began to fight. And then, you still refused to give me even that, so I had to take your eastern lands as payment. I know you lost tens of thousands of warriors in the battle, but it wasn’t without a price for me either, you know? If I were to add the toll of the war onto what you owed me, you wouldn’t be able to repay it in ten of my lifetimes.”

His comment makes the man on his left chuckle under his breath, and I suppose it might be a funny remark for a vampire who would live forever if he was never murdered to say he had ten lifetimes.

But no one else is laughing, least of all me.

I understand now that this situation is much different than I ever thought it was. All along, I’ve believed that the vampires, like the other packs, attacked us, that they simply wanted what was ours, that they even wanted us to feed on. Unlike humans, feeding on wolf shifters doesn’t run the risk of creating another vampire, something it is my understanding is against the law for their kind without specific permission from the king for population control issues. We cannot become like them because our bodies naturally know how to combat the venom that turns humans into the undead.

But we can die.

If greedy vampires take too much, we can be drained and killed. While it’s not illegal for a vampire to kill a wolf shifter by draining them, it is frowned upon. Most of them prefer our blood or human blood to animals, so it is easier to simply keep a supply of wolf shifters on hand to feed from. Humans can’t be kept that way because they must be completely drained and killed with one feeding so as not to break the law about creating more vampires.

Thus, many of our warriors carry tablets containing poison to prevent themselves from being captured and living the miserable life of a feeder.

I have no idea what will happen if the Vampire King refuses my father’s offer, but I know we can never repay a sum of that size.

My bottom lip trembles as I begin to formulate a sentence. I need to try and convince King Kane to take me, that I am worth that amount of money, that I will somehow make it worth his while to keep me as a feeder, but before I can open my mouth, my father is standing again.

“I promise you, she’s worth it. Look at her. See how beautiful she is?” He turns and beckons in my direction, but his next statement has bile rising up the back of my throat.

“Come here, darling. Come and meet the king… Lola.”