Free Almost Human by Secret Cravings Publishing Page A

together.
    He ignored my taut body, or didn’t care. “I
was thinking about Jairdan. He was the first person I ever turned.
Seeing Sherra again brought back horrible memories.”
    “Tell me.”
    “I came from a family of serfs. But I was
chosen to be a knight. My brothers stayed and worked the fields. I
rarely saw them. When I wasn’t fighting I was partying, and when I
was home it was like being around strangers. I was always angry
about that. Because of me, they had moved up in the world. They
lived on my land and ran my estate, but I wasn’t family to
them.”
    “One day I fell in battle. Darius found me
and turned me, which is a different story entirely. I returned home
a different man, knowing that if I’d died in that wretched battle
they probably wouldn’t have missed me. I wanted to know them. I
spent as much time as possible with them, all the while keeping my
new nature to myself. Back then I was a devout Catholic, and while
I firmly believed I was going to hell for what I was, I clung to
life. I taught my brothers what I knew best—killing.”
    He fell silent and remained that way for so
long I had to glance at him, to make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep.
“My lord arranged for me to be married. Another knight had died,
and he was required to marry off the man’s daughter. I reluctantly
agreed. I could have any woman who wanted me, and plenty of them
did. I knew I could only father children under very specific
circumstances, and the woman would have to know what I was for that
to happen.”
    He sighed. “But then Sherra arrived. All
thoughts of not wanting a wife fled from my head. She was
beautiful, graceful, and she became my world. My brothers were even
taken with her, and they had always been surly men.”
    For a second I felt an unreasonable stab of
jealousy. I was in no way a graceful, delicate flower like a woman
from his time period would have been. I couldn’t measure up to
that. I pushed it to the back of my mind and continued to listen to
his story.
    “I didn’t know she practiced witchcraft, or
that her servant’s child was actually Sherra’s. And I’ll never know
how she found out what I was. What I do know is that when I
returned home, I found the keep in ruins and my brothers were long
gone. One of her servants was waiting for me. I was instructed to
go to her old home, alone, or my brothers would die. So I
went.”
    He laughed bitterly. “But she didn’t know
that I was almost an army all on my own. I butchered the guards she
had stationed there, and I blood bonded her to myself so I could
control her forever. Hours later, she died. I didn’t know it then,
but a blood bond is poison for a witch. When I found my brothers,
the twins, Fallon and Misha, were banged up but would survive. But
Jairdan would have died if I hadn’t turned him.”
    It was hard not to understand where he was
coming from. Even if I felt he’d made his brothers into monsters,
if I’d had the power to save my sister’s life, it would have been
impossible not to take it. He had the same relationship with his
brothers that I had with my sister. He’d raised them. Stood back to
back with them to fight off the world. He’d had to save them, even
if he’d wondered if he was cursed.
    He tightened his hold on me. “She would have
killed them for knowing a vampire, and they would have never known
why. When I saw the state of them, I wished she were alive so I
could kill her slowly.”
    I wasn’t sure what to say to him. Sherra had
been a terrible woman. Even my mother wouldn’t have killed human
relatives of a vampire just for knowing him. Most people didn’t
know any better, and when they got past the shock, assumed their
vampire relations were still the same people. And that was if they
ever knew at all. I couldn’t find words to comfort him.
    I frowned. “Fallon and Misha are twins?”
    “Oh yeah. But they were turned at different
times. Misha caught the plague at eighteen, and I had to turn