“Morning,” he said gently. “Or… possibly afternoon.”
I smiled against his chest. “So, vampire morning, then,” I suggested.
He huffed a breath of amusement. “Something like that, yes.” Then he sobered, though his fingertips continued their slow massage. “I hope you’ll agree that our new goal in life should be to spend every single night exactly like this,” he said, his voice growing serious. “But… for now, maybe you should tell me what it was you learned in Hell about Nigellus and the Tithe.”
EPILOGUE
MY FEELINGS OF peaceful belonging faded slowly into sadness as I contemplated what I still needed to tell Rans about his mentor. I rolled onto an elbow so I could look down at him, noting that the clear blue eyes whose depths I’d drowned in last night had closed off. Not necessarily closed off from my presence, I knew—but closed off against what was coming. I wondered if Rans had harbored his own suspicions about Nigellus, or if this would come as a complete shock to him.
I took a deep breath to steel myself, and brushed my knuckles over Rans’ temple and cheek.
“I really didn’t want to have to tell you this,” I said, “but once the human tithelings in Hell reach adulthood, they’re given the option of imbibing a special kind of wine that heals them and slows their aging process to almost nothing. The demons use magic to produce enough of this drink that everyone who wants it can have some, because it relies on an ingredient of incredible rarity.”
Rans remained silent and still. I swallowed hard, and continued.
“It’s an ingredient… with only one surviving source in all of the three realms,” I said as evenly as I could. “Rans… Nigellus has been harvesting your blood without your knowledge. And he’s almost certainly been doing it since shortly after the end of the war.”
Blue eyes slipped closed before I could see the pain in them, though the face they were set in might have been carved from alabaster.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But there’s more. I think Myrial is trying to destroy the treaty and restart the war. She… he… is the incubus that got my grandmother pregnant. And I’m pretty sure she was also behind the attack at the club—an attack with silver knives and bullets. If she could kill you and make it look like the Fae did it, the peace would fall apart.”
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.”
finis
The Last Vampire series continues in Book Four.
If you enjoyed this collection, you might also like R. A. Steffan and Jaelynn Woolf’s completed vampire series, Circle of Blood.
The Last Vampire Box Set Page 53