The Merciless Alpha(erotica)

There was a moment of quiet in the clearing. This listeners, almost as if part of a group mind, together realized that this moment had been one of the most important in history. If Sadie’s . . . Eve’s meager army had lost, then vampires would have ruled the world. And it was a secret that this one woman had carried alone for so long.

Sadie continued. “Adam had grabbed a young man and hauled him into the air. I saw that the human was terrified. I couldn’t let him die . . . not like that. The wound in my back hurt so much, but I had to stop Adam. I launched into the air and grabbed the young man away from him. I protected him as much as I could while getting him to the ground, but Adam was in a rage. He tried to slash up my back, but I managed to evade. We fought in the sky as the battle went on below, and I knew that I was losing. He was so much stronger than I was. But he was distracted when he saw that the vampires had been backed up to the cliff. While I had distracted him, the humans had rallied. With his attention drawn elsewhere, I plunged the Thorn into his heart, then drove both of us into Solomon. I knocked Solomon down, but Adam and I went over the edge. Adam was dead and I was close to it. With Adam gone, Solomon fled the battle, and the rest of the vampires were killed and pushed over the cliff. That was how I finally died, bleeding to death under the corpses of my enemies.” She could still taste their dead blood running into her mouth as she was unable to move, and the suffocating feeling of corpses piled up on top of her. The humans she had wanted to save thought she was dead, so she was left there.

“The bodies on top of me acting as my earth, and even as they charred and turned to ash above me, they apparently counted as protection. When night fell I . . . I got myself out of the pile of bodies.”

Again it was Melissa who heard the part that had been left unspoken, but it was something that didn’t need to be shared with the mob. She could taste dead flesh and feel it under her own nails as assuredly as if she had been there with Eve when it happened. Mel’s creator had litterally clawed and chewed her way to freedom.

Sadie stared up at the night sky. “I was mad by the time I was freed, as in ‘stark raving mad’. Everything that had happened . . . just too much. I fled into the wilderness, surviving as best I could off the blood of animals.” Animal blood could do in a pinch, but it isn’t healthy for a vamp to try and stay on it too long. It had probably kept her mind unstable for as long as it did. “I think I was lost for decades before I encountered a nomadic tribe. I found a young girl alone by a river and I saw her as prey, so I jumped on her and fed. But her blood helped bring my mind back, and I stopped before I killed her or Turned her. I released her and apologized profusely, but she didn’t understand a word that I said. But she was unhurt and was curious about me despite what I had done and the very sexual reaction she had to it. I let her look me over while I tried to figure out some way of making amends for taking her blood. She took me back to her tribe, and there was someone there who spoke my language. They heard about what had happened and saw that I was powerful. They said that if that I served them for three years as a protector during the night, and they would protect me during the day. I was mostly immune to the sun by then, but I still needed to rest sometime.”

“So you stayed with them?” Vlad asked.

“Yes. I think that’s where my love of traveling started. I saw so much of that tiny world and was fascinated by all of it. Once the tribesmen and women realized that my bite had very pleasant side-effects, finding donors was not a problem. Everyone got a chance to donate before I would repeat anyone. I figured out that if I didn’t immediately mix my blood with someone else’s that it had magical properties all its own. It could be used to heal, but I had to be careful not to use it on someone whose blood I had recently shared. After seeing what had happened with Solomon and Adam, I swore that I wouldn’t create any more like me.” She looked at Mel and touched the girl’s face. “I kept that promise for seven thousand years, but don’t think I regret saving you. I hope you don’t hate me for what I did.”

“Why would I hate you?”

Sadie’s eyes misted over. “I made you part demon. Except for myself, you and Solomon are closer to the source of our power than any other vampire.”

Captain Grom looked perplexed and awed. “So with Lilith gone, your brother gone, and Solomon being one of your ‘children,’ then that means . . . good God, you’re the mother of every vampire alive today in some way or another.”

The crowd was hushed again. The rules of the world, both vampire and otherwise, had just changed irrevocably.

Vlad’s face was almost unreadable when he asked, “Why didn’t you go after Solomon? Why not take him out before now?”

Sadie’s face fell. “Communication wasn’t the same back then. You could live just five miles away from someone for your entire life and never know they existed. Solomon had fled far north before suffering his first death, after which he had run even further. I later found out that he was terrified that he’d be discovered. I never formed a bond with him like I did with Melissa, so he and I didn’t even know the other was still alive. It was a thousand years before I had ever heard of him again, and almost five hundred more years until I discovered that he was holed up in Russia somewhere. The people up there were suspicious of him, so he wasn’t able to amass an army like Adam had tried to do. He had created some vampires and had them Turn others, then he killed his immediate children.”

“Why?” Fitzpatrick asked.

Grom understood the basics here. “Let me guess . . . the closer to the original source of vampire power, the more powerful you are. He probably did it to make sure that none of his underlings could ever challenge him.”

Sadie agreed. “That would be my guess. And fifteen hundred years was a long time to continuously hold a grudge. It would have taken a much bigger war to drag him out of his hideout, and the vampires those days were neither as fanatically obedient nor as violent as Adam’s had been. Solomon was more obsessed with personal glory than conquering the world, so I decided it was best to let the vampire race make its own way. If Solomon had known I still lived, then there would have been another fight, and the known world would have had no choice but to take sides. So for the sake of everyone, I decided to disappear forever. I found a village shaman in Africa who helped me control my animal side, allowing me to hide my wings and keep my presence under wraps. I became just another vampire, including taking a new name.” She looked at Melissa and gave her daughter a shy smile. “I’ve had about twenty. I started changing more often once the Book of Names was created.” She looked back to the crowd. “I stayed away from my own kind as much as I could, staying off of the radar of anyone who might report back to Solomon. Finally, ‘Eve’ was nothing more than a distant memory in the mythology that Solomon had created, and I was fine with that. I didn’t want to be Eve ever again.” She laughed a dark laugh and said, “Fat lot of good that did.”

“There’s no running this time, is there?” Vlad asked.

“No. I could never just vanish again. I don’t want to. I like being Sadie Hewitt. I like being here. And now that I know that Solomon wishes to follow in Adam’s footsteps, I can’t let him go.”

Grom looked abashed when he said, “He may be an evil son of a bitch, but he hasn’t actually broken any laws yet. How are you going to stop him?”

“Can you use vampire law?” Devlin asked.

Sadie pursed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“By vampire law, a child who turns against his or her creator or otherwise acts in a way that endangers vampires in their associations with the mortal races can be punished by their creator in whatever way he/she sees fit.”

Sadie smiled. “You really WERE doing your homework weren’t you.?”

Devlin blushed. “I had free time on my hands.”

Sadie stood before the assembled crowd that had been hanging on her every word. She felt a profound sense of relief. She had born that cross of memories for a long time, and it was nice to finally be able to share some of the load. “The question is, do any of you believe me?”

There was an awkward silence that was finally broken by an unknown voice. A human male stepped forward and it took Sadie a moment to recognize him as the man she had saved in the warehouse.

“I do,” he said softly but firmly.

“And you are –” Grom started.

“My name is Thomas Jervin.” Thomas’s . . . or Tommy’s . . . eyes never left Sadie, and it was a look of admiration and a deep, soul-searching kind of love. “She saved my in that warehouse fire. I’ve been working up the courage to come here, but when I heard about tonight . . . You can’t be a thing of evil. I had lost my mind as was on the verge of losing my life, and you saved both. Nothing evil would have done that. My thoughts are my own for the first time in years. You know what that means, don’t you? When you recovered from your own madness, what was it like?”

She sighed. “Like life was beginning again.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.”

Vlad looked from Sadie to Tommy and back. “You used your blood? It wasn’t a backlash of the spell at all, was it? You could’ve been discovered –”Property of Nô)(velDr(a)ma.Org.

“I couldn’t let him die,” she whispered, her eyes on the man in front of her.

Vlad walked up the stairs and stood next to her, drawing her eyes to him. He could see how badly she wanted to cry and break. “Tell the world, he said. “Let them know what Solomon is going to do. Don’t the vampires have to follow you now?”

“If they believed me, then maybe. I’m the oldest of us, but changing a mindset that is this old isn’t easy.”

Vlad looked out to the crowd this time, drawing himself up as an alpha wolf and saying, “Who here believes her? Who believes what this woman has said?”

Almost every hand went up.

Vlad nodded. “Remember what Devlin said . . . the wraiths do not aid those with selfish motives.”

The rest of the hands went up.