Free Drew D'Amato:Bloodlines:02 by Drew D'Amato Page B

everything we gave to him he should leave us the choice to stay vampires or not.”
    “How about what he gave to you?  You would have been dead in some French fort over three hundred years ago if not for him.”
    The two of them stared each other down.  Michael blinked first.  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.  “This place gives me the creeps.”
     
    4
    J ericho followed his master.  He knew he wouldn’t want to be left alone.  Vlad walked up to the square tower—the original part of the castle before Vlad decided to build around it.  Vlad went to the balcony.  When he got there he wasn’t sure if he saw a ghost or a flashback, but he saw something. It was his first wife Elizabetta in an all-white dress looking at him.  She looked just like Jasmin.  The image was fluid, yet very vivid.  He saw in her eyes, her love for him.  He saw that in her.  He smelled her.  His heart stopped.  He broke into a sweat.  He tried to speak to her but then she turned away from him and moved toward the balcony.  She leapt from it.  Vlad stood there frozen, timid, cold.
    Reality came back into focus.  Now he just saw the stone opening of the balcony with a metal rod across it to protect anyone from accidentally falling down to the Arges River. 
    “This is where she died, Jericho.  This is where she fell to her death.  This is where Radu killed her.” 
    “He didn’t actually kill her,” Jericho said, hoping that would some how make him feel better.
    “She had no options, she couldn’t surrender, that would mean death and rape.  She leaped to avoid her fate at Radu’s hands,” Vlad continued.  Malachi had heard this story before, many times, but he never saw before what he saw next.
    Vlad started to cry.  Vlad turned around and looked down at the Arges River before him.  He wiped away his tears.  He uttered words he had never said, but words he had thought for centuries.
    “I killed her.”
    “No you didn’t, Vlad.”  Jericho went and put his arm on his master’s shoulder.  Vlad was quiet for a moment. 
    “I left her alone, I wasn’t here to protect her.”  He had blamed Radu over the years to rationalize it, but the hardest person to forgive is yourself.  “Jasmine,” Vlad said under his breath.  He looked up ahead of him.  “She has now come back to me in the form of Jasmine.”
    “Vlad, you can’t be sure of that.”
    “I am sure, it is fate.  In all the death I caused, I am not innocent, but I am not evil.  I did what I did for the greater good.  I’m a moral enigma, like Judas himself.  My young life as a tortured prisoner distorted my view, and made me feel what I did was just.  My time as a vampire has been to make up for these sins, my purgatory, and now it will all be over soon.  And I will be in Heaven at some point, with my love—Jasmine.  This is fate Jericho, and you cannot deter fate.”
    “But what if she is not?  What if she is not Elizabetta reborn?  Will you still love her?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what if she doesn’t love you?  What if it all falls apart in a few weeks?  Then would you regret becoming a human again?”
    “No, everything I did as a ruler, no matter how macabre it was, I did because I thought it was the right thing to do for the safety of my country.  I thought that it was in some way noble.  I can valiadate my existence as a vampire and living off the blood of humans, because I have to save the human race from the threat of Radu.  Once that threat is eliminated then what?  What am I a vampire for?  Jericho, you were a soldier.  You did not believe in murder, but on the battlefield you killed people.  It was war that allowed this action.  This is the same with living the life of a vampire.  In order to keep Radu in check we kill who we kill for the sake of the war, but once the war is over we are just…”
    “Murderers.”
    “Refusing temptation is one of the noblest things someone can do.  It’s probably one of the