by Seth Eden
Property of the Vampyren Prince
Seth Eden
Synopsis
She remade herself in the wake of the alien invasion. Kiera could work on cars and plumbing, and scavenge for food.
She didn't know how to survive the attentions of a Vampyren prince, one of Earth's invaders.
He was seventeenth in line for the Vampyren throne. Just enough privilege to ask the Council to give her to him, and to keep her family alive.
Not enough to save her from brutal punishment when her actions threatened Vampyren interests.
Their different worlds make them opposites of each other.
Opposites attract.
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Also by Seth Eden
Download the prequel - Arrival of the Vampyren now!
The Vampyren invaded Earth, coming from the places between the stars. They came to slake their most brutal appetites: For blood. For sex. For conquest. Within weeks their superior strength, technology and weapons turned Earth into a fallen battleground.
But love can blossom in the most unlikely places.
Stephanie was looking for food, for safety, and for her brother when the Vampyren patrol caught her on the blown-up streets of Las Vegas.
Dray Fierro was one of the Vampyren, a hero who could take his pick of women to claim as his war prize. He wasn't looking for more than a woman to satisfy his needs for sex and blood.
Neither was prepared for what they got.
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Contents
1. Kiera
2. Loren
3. Kiera
4. Loren
5. Kiera
6. Loren
7. Kiera
8. Kiera
9. Loren
10. Kiera
11. Loren
12. Twelve
13. Loren
14. Kiera
15. Kiera
16. Loren
17. Kiera
A Message To My Readers
Other Books By The Author
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Kiera
The pipe wouldn't come loose.
She'd been working on it for at least ten minutes, her hands becoming increasingly cold but she couldn't stop. The Chicago winter wasn't going to warm up suddenly just because she didn't have gloves to keep her hands warm, or anything that would help her force the pipe to let loose.
The house she was in had not been ransacked before her raiding party arrived. Kiera hadn't anticipated that. Usually you had to go further afield now to find food, and the fact that there was still stuff in the house worth taking meant the owners had disappeared recently.
That was creepy.
Food wasn't even what they were after today, though they'd take it. Since the alien invaders had taken Earth, going on a year ago as February wore down, there'd grown a strange kind of unseen and unacknowledged barter system in metro areas, at least between some factions. Prescription drugs were largely left untouched in homes where the owners had "vanished" (there were all sorts of polite euphemisms for "been killed" these days). If you had need of something, you took it. If you didn't, you left it, and that included everything from inhalers and Ibuprofen to – well, not heroin. The world was pretty shitty since the Vampyren "overlords" came and people needed to find their escapes where they could.
What most people didn't need was part of the plumbing. Kiera did, and she was about to take a big swing and whack the damn U-joint with her wrench if it didn't let loose. She'd come here with her "little brother" Will – William, two years younger than her twenty-three, who towered over her five-two with his six-two and liked to rub it in – and her little sister, Kate, who at sixteen felt like a liability more than a partner in the raiding party.
They called themselves that. They talked like pirates and they made stupid jokes because it hurt to go into abandoned houses and homes that weren't at all abandoned but the owners were just never coming home.
"Come. The fuck. Off!" She gave in and whacked the hell out of the pipe. All it should have done was make a dull clank that would scare her but not honestly be that loud and then rattle a bit and subside.
Instead, the pipe finally loosened. "Yes!" Still seated on the floor, she did a little cha-cha. When the alien invaders had come, most of them six or seven or eight feet tall, all muscle and dark smoldering good looks – the men and the women – and most of them wearing full beards (the males only) at first Earth had been so shocked and so amazed, its peoples failed to notice the military aspect.
That lasted about five minutes and only happened at all because the Vampyren materialized out of thin air. They had ships capable of wormhole transport. They had technology capable of finding planets where the blood of those beings living on the planets was nourishing for them and the women capable of being bred by them and where they thought they'd have a reprieve from their enemies, the Lucian, if only for a couple months.
Going on a year since the Vampyren had come, now the Lucian had come to Earth as well. The two sides of the alien battle were pitched against each other and still as the frozen winter continued in North America, the two sides continued to pick at the human survivors.
"Did you get it?"
Kiera jolted under the kitchen sink and smashed her head into the underside. She said something very unfortunate and from the far side, Kate laughed.
"Didn't mean to startle you."
"Then don't sneak up on me!" She threw the wrench and she almost threw the pipe, but she'd gone through too much to get it and she needed it.
Her father needed it. The house they'd holed up in was suburban enough to almost be rural on the outskirts of Chicago. The space vampires weren't overly enthused about rural areas, with the exception of Earth's deserts, which they usually weren't allowed to go into by their chain of command because they'd go native and just stay there. That was what the local news programs said and apparently the Vampyren didn't find those reports important enough to censor (which generally included killing the reporters and anchors.
So give them a desert, and they went native. Native, but no less dangerous. From what little anyone had been able to make out, they came from a desert planet and they were cold on Earth, which meant that the Chicago winter could be deadly for them. That made them angry and they were taking it out on the urban population.
That meant that lately encounters with the Vampyren were more hazardous, if not instantly deadly, than they had been. That wasn't the norm. The invaders did kill – for sport, for sex, strangely enough, and for the example the executions set. But until winter had set in there was at least reasoning, however alien and horrible, behind killings.
Metro areas had been hard hit with the advent of the invaders, sections of cities taken out with precision alien weapons and just plain old fashioned bombs. Rural wasn't as interesting to them. The Vampyren liked to stock up. They liked quantity over quality and they took to the metro areas where there were enough people in the population that they could turn to those alien killings: killing for sport. For food. For sex. They drank blood. They bred with the women to produce their own young. Their females, deadly in breeding with their own kind, bred with human men to produce food stock.
They were unstoppable.
So far.
There were resistance bands
starting up. Small rebellions. Most of them were rumored and the rumors placed them in the rural communities across the country, which made it that much more mysterious that the invaders didn't find rural interesting.
Kiera did. She was determined to find one of the grassroots rebellions starting up. But that meant getting her parents to a place where they could survive more easily on their own. They weren't that old, only in their fifties, but with her father sick, her mother was completely distracted. They needed to be self-sufficient before Kiera trusted going off without them.
Then it would just be the finding of a resistance cell. She thought when she did, they'd take her in. She'd worked hard to make herself valuable to her family and she'd be valuable to a force resisting the damned vampires. Since the siege had begun, Kiera had learned everything an unemployed, overweight, twenty-three year old waitress could do wasn't enough to make a difference in the new world.
So she learned. Feeling a little like the character from Terminator 2, she learned from men who crossed her path, rarely trading anything she wasn't willing to give. More often people needed practical things, physical belongings that could be traded for some lessons in starting an older car with a balky carburetor or replacing an alternator. She knew how to work with the plumbing because of a man on the run who'd needed nothing more than shelter for two nights until the party of Vampyren chasing him had given up and gone away.
That was when they learned about perfumes and confusing the Vampyren sense of smell. That was something she and her family kept to themselves because it would instantly cause all fragrances to become the hottest trade item. They'd become hard to find.
It didn't take a lot of scent to throw off the space vampire senses. In fact, too much scent was a dead giveaway, no unpleasant pun intended, she thought, as she stood at the sink she'd just savaged, looking out into the backyard of someone who was never going to come back and see how their garden fared in the spring.
To throw off a chasing Vampyren, it took just the amount of scent that Kiera herself found unpleasant and then the vampires couldn't tell one human from the next and their code of ethics – fortunately stupid for the sake of humans – was that if they lost track of somebody in the hunt, having started chasing the human for sport or because the human had run – they couldn't replace one human for another. If the runner escaped, the runner escaped.
Which was fine unless the Vampyren caught up to them again, so keeping a signature scent of Not me, not the human you're looking for was important.
Keeping her family safe was important also, so Kiera had kept that information to herself and her family when they needed it, and since coming to this home, had already confiscated all the bottles of disgusting perfume, cologne, body spray and aftershave that she could find.
Today's raiding party consisted of Kate the Willful, William the Tall, Dave the Destroyer – William's best friend and in Kiera's opinion, Dave the Dweeb – and Kevin, the third of their triad. Kiera's best friends Amanda, a short, curvy brunette whose automatic laugh had been silenced by the advent of the invaders, and her other best friend Sarra, perpetually nearsighted and nervous. They'd also come with a new couple she didn't quite trust and hadn't wanted to invite.
The group of friends called themselves by cheesy pirate names and tried to make a game of it, pirate speak and all, but nobody really found it fun or funny. It was more whistling past the graveyard and they all knew it.
Everyone was pretending to put on a brave face for everyone else in case it caught on.
So far it hadn't. Local news was spotty, but most network affiliate stations still ran it two times a day, staggering their hours to complement the other stations rather than compete, because they were no longer in competition for viewers. Amazingly, the one thing that seemed to draw humans together even when there was still business going on, was wholesale slaughter. The Vampyren had made competing secondary to surviving.
She laughed to herself. Cynical, much?
"What've you got?" William arrived in the kitchen loudly enough he didn't surprise her. William was loud. Big, bluff, buff and beautiful. He stuck a hand out and pulled her to her feet from the kitchen floor.
"U-joint," she said, brandishing it like the prize it was.
"Awesome," her brother mocked. "You really have all the things a girl wants."
Right. She remembered wanting pretty clothes, money for the next tattoo, a diet that worked.
Well, she had that. Fear of the Vampyren and constantly running, working out, learning to defend herself and being too scared to eat had whittled her down into the kind of shape she'd once have drooled over having.
So what she wanted now was – well, clothes that fit. Enough food to feel safe. A healthy family. A boyfriend who wasn't on the run. "Where's Amanda?" Because she'd heard Sarra a couple minutes ago talking about digging through the closets in the master bedroom.
"In the back bedroom. She found curtains she insists she can turn into sleeping bags. Is she crazy or – " He drew out the word "or."
"Mad talented," Kiera said. "If she says she can, she can." She stood, cracking her neck, arching her back, shaking out the kinks. The U-joint glinted in her hand.
Their father, only 53 and until last year had been a marathon runner, vegetarian, lean and fast and funny, before leukemia brought him down to lean to the point of skeletal, his eyes frighteningly hollow. The chemo had been working until a couple months ago when his doctor had run afoul of a contingent of vamps.
The doctor was executed, drained and finding new providers was harder than healthcare had been in the U.S. before the vampires came.
They'd watched their father become weaker and sicker and not been able to do much at all except the holistic stuff they could find online and making sure everything they could provide for him they did.
When the utilities went down again and the pipes in the kitchen froze, it made it too hard for him to get water. Wheelchair-bound or not, Hank Thomas was independent and stubborn and wanted to trouble everyone around him as little as possible.
So Kiera had need of a U-joint. But outside the sun was either going lower with the day or the storm was getting worse. Either meant they needed to think about going home.
"Diane and Stu are looking for clothes next door," William said and Kiera felt the telltale tingle of unease crawl across her skin. The couple was the low end of middle age, maybe just about forty. Clean, neat, polite and on the run. They'd showed up in the last snowstorm and looked so woefully unprepared for the temperatures that William had brought them home.
Kiera didn't trust them. Kate didn't either. William seemed immune to worrying about them but there was just something too squirrely about them.
"Any chance you think we could ditch them?" she asked, staring out the window as if the couple might appear. "This is a nice house. they could stay here." She knew better.
William laughed at her. "You do realize they can probably find their way back to the house."
Kiera grinned ruefully. "Yeah, I knew there was a problem I was overlooking. So, what did you get"
Magic, she thought. We need to magically find all the things listed on the website for holistic leukemia treatment.
The strangest things still worked the same as they always had in the wake of the Vampyren arrival. The internet was strong as ever – the invaders had no use for it. if they monitored communications between humans no one could tell.
"Painkillers. We have need this time, right?"
They did, and the drugs weren't expired either, the bottle full.
"Kate's got some almost fresh produce," Kiera said, even though Kate had left the kitchen a while ago.
Neither of them wanted to mention that a find of mostly fresh vegetables meant the owners of the home hadn't been gone that long. "Dave's getting one of the cars working."
Kiera nodded. Theoretically the Vampyren didn't just hunt but winter had an effect. Darkness had an effect. At night the vampires turned closer to the human cinematic
version, all fangs, blood lust and a rage that entirely suffused them. Chicago's hellish winter brought darkness as early as four p.m.
Which meant vampires on the loose, all of them in hunger pain and furious with the cold. She missed summer when it was possible to glide through the shadows without the vampires automatically coming after her.
She missed last spring, if she was going to go there. Last spring she'd been working as a waitress, finishing up her MFA so she could teach creative writing and write her own novels, as useless a degree as she could imagine in this new world.
Last spring she'd been dating Aaron, the two of them considering getting a place together and maybe making things permanent.
Last spring.
Right before the Vampyren came through the wormhole, the ships appearing and dotting the skies everywhere around the world simultaneously, governments falling and people dying and humanity learning there was something else in the universe, their own evil put aside.
"Knock it off," Will said, pulling her into a half-hug. "Things will get better again. You'll see."
"How?" Her voice was muffled against the thick sweater he wore against the cold.
"That's the fun of it. We can never know. So whatever it is that turns everything around, it will appear as a total surprise."