Free Heroes by Susan Sizemore

was going to happen. Something was always going to happen, of course. Maybe she spent most of her life safely ensconced in her apartment, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware from a distance of all the twitches and tribulations that rode the psychic links which tangled her up with all her children. Generally, she tried not to tap into it, except for the occasional story idea. Too bad there was so little new to tell. Life was a soap opera, vampire life even more so. Eternity was the stuff of drama—and Valentine had always preferred comedy.
    “Or at least satire.”
    She pressed her lips together firmly, adding annoyed at talking to herself to her general annoyance. At least if Geoff were here, she could hold a conversation with someone else. Not that she actually needed another’s physical presence to hold conversations. If she wanted to talk to Geoffrey Sterling, all she had to do was reach out her mind.
    And if she did that, she was likely to become aware of other vampire minds out there, not all of them the sort of persons she wanted any contact with.
    Take Eddie, for example. Valentine had taken him a lot once upon a time. He’d never been a favorite of hers, but the pickings for companions were rather slim after the Black Death swept through the world.
    She remembered even now how dark the world had been then. Even for those like herself who dwelled in the night, the darkness had been suffocating. Darkness of spirit, darkness of hope had been all around. Decay and silence everywhere. But it was a painful silence that came hard and heavy after the cries for mercy rose to heaven, then turned to curses, to rattles of death and wails of mourning.
    The world of the Plague years existed in the sort of death-saturated atmosphere your modern Goth types would consider vamp heaven, but it hadn’t been any fun at all. There weren’t even that many vampires in the world at the time of the Black Death. So, even if it had been a vampire party waiting to happen, there wouldn’t have been many guests to exploit the pain and anarchy of the suffering mortal world.
    The grand experiment of a vampire city-state had died less than a century before. Most of the vampires in the world were destroyed when the Asian city fell. Valentine hadn’t been there. She didn’t know exactly what happened, but she hadn’t mourned when what few refugees there were brought word of the city’s demise. She hadn’t thought founding the city was a good idea to begin with. Nothing good came from the insularity and growing decadence of the place as far as she was concerned. If the Mongols hadn’t shown up to tear down the city walls, it would have blown up from the inside from slave rebellion or the experiments with dark magic.
    There were rumors that slaves and companions had revolted, letting the Mongols into the city. Those rumors, and much other knowledge, had been ruthlessly quashed and hidden by the Council that was formed to regulate the survivors of the city.
    Of course, no one asked the strigoi who’d never lived in the city to be on this new ruling Council. Most of the noncity vampires continued about their business, paying no attention to the refugees’ pretensions.
    When the refugees moved into Europe, Valentine took herself across the Channel to visit the White Lady, who’d been Nighthawk and Protector of the Isles since Roman times. The Lady didn’t hold with any foreign vampires in her territory, but she made an exception for Valentine, who was, after all, the bloodmother of the vampire that had sired the Lady herself.
    Valentine took up the life of a traveling minstrel, but at exactly the wrong time. As she roamed the country, she bore witness to the Plague running like wildfire through the towns and fiefdoms. Many, many of the Black Death’s victims were those born with psychic gifts. Vampires could not be touched by the Plague, but those born with the ability to be reborn into the vampire life were particularly susceptible to