Free Bitten Surrender by Rebecca Royce Page A

again? Flying somewhere else?”
    Adrienne blinked, and she was in a field. A dark landscape at night. The moon lit the grass, and Jerome stood to her right.
    “I wasn’t here for the battle to come. Once I stepped back into our township, I never could leave. For two thousand years, I’ve lived within the borders, one way or another, where I was born.”
    “Jerome.”
    She sucked in her breath. Hanzi had been put through hell and so had Jerome. She had no idea. He seemed so chipper. She was going to have to do something for him. Although she had no idea what an appropriate gift for him would be.
    “No feeling, remember? Not from me here.” He pointed at the field. “The scene in front of us is Feri’s memory the night he and Hanzi had their first battle. Thirty years later. The man who wanted their land is long dead, throat slit. So is the witch. Her son. All of their living relatives. And countless others.” He turned to look at her. “See the crowd forming over there?”
    She stared in the darkness. There did seem to be people there who hadn’t been seconds earlier. How had they gotten there so fast? “The scene in front of us is about to be very bad, isn’t it?”
    “You already know, I assume, that vampires are made through the sharing of saliva to blood during the feeding. They didn’t know right away. There were hundreds upon hundreds of vampires made in the three decades after my friends were turned. Consequently, the original vampires called themselves the royals. All new vampires were lesser creatures in liege to them. Those years were heady. My brothers had come to enjoy their dark selves. Hanzi’s vampires will kill Feri’s. Slaughter them in blood and flames.”
    Adrienne tried to make sense of what she had been told. She had a lot of information to process. Things which had never been explained before were starting to take shape in her mind. She wanted to scream from frustration.
    “They made an army of vampires. The ones I know from home, they’re them?”
    “Likely not. This poor group will be slaughtered soon. The ones who don’t die find they can do something the witch made impossible for my brothers to do without their destined mate—they can breed.”
    She sucked in her breath. “The new ability would mean hundreds make hundreds and more.”
    Her head hurt. The ramifications were startling. After enough generations passed, the world would be overrun with vampires.
    “When my foolish friends finally pulled their heads out of their asses, they realized they had a problem, if for no other reason than their food supply would soon be at risk. They finally stopped fighting long enough to remember we had once been close. Rules were set. If nothing else, the original vampires were stronger, faster. They became the police. Breeding policies were put into place. How and when to feed. The life you’ve lived back in the United States is controlled by a series of highly documented rules, the breaking of which would mean death to all of them. The royals are scary. They have talents. Feri can move into minds. Hanzi can find anyone. Others can manipulate the world around them.”
    “The vampires near where I grew up were very meticulous about things.”
    Jerome snorted. “They would have to be. No modern vampire wants the royal vampires showing up to enforce the law.”
    “And policing is what Hanzi does? He keeps things in order.”
    “No.” Jerome shook his head, and when he did he changed. She gasped as his whole form altered. Where one second he was Jerome, the next, with a switch of lighting, he was Feri. Hanzi’s brother stared back at her. The same distant gaze which had freaked her out before still did so. She wanted to take a step back, but shit, here was her dream. Where was she going to go?
    “Adrienne,” Feri reached out to touch her arm. “Hanzi is our hunter. When someone breaks the law, tries to run, Hanzi finds him or her. He delivers the deathblow. Without him, we would be