Lailah (The Styclar Saga) Read Online Free Page A

through him.
    I sat for a while, calmly weighing my next move. “You can call me Cessie, by the way.”
    He raised his eyebrows a little, encouraging an explanation.
    “My friends called me Cessie.”
    “Past tense?” he asked.
    “I haven’t seen them for a while, but that’s what they called me. I guess you can, too.”
    With the faintest curve of his lip he said, “Honored, I’m sure.”
    Hoping the olive branch had softened him to me, I tried again. “You didn’t answer my question before—how can I help you? You’re in a lot of pain. I can see.”
    He looked at me emptily. Finally, through gritted teeth, he said, “My friends will take care of that.”
    “Who are these friends of yours? What happened to you?”
    He contemplated his reply and then offered it, albeit reluctantly. “My friends are the ones I travel with now. We came here, hoping to rescue another, well, another Vampire like me.” He paused. “It didn’t exactly go to plan, and the Pureblood’s clan took me captive.” He snarled angrily, revealing his fangs.
    The sight of them caught me off guard and I took a second to collect myself. “The Pureblood’s clan? I don’t understand.”
    “Purebloods were the first Vampires to inhabit the Earth. I was human—once. But I was bitten, changed, turned—whatever term you’d prefer to coin. That makes me a Second Generation Vampire. Vampires serve the Pureblood who changed them, as part of their clan, or army, if you’d rather.” He struggled on, shaking.
    “If you serve one of these Purebloods, then how is it you have your freedom?”
    “Vampires are evil, infected with venom; their souls become submerged in darkness from the change. Free will is not something they seek. But, sometimes, just sometimes, we might see light. Long enough to remember who we were before. My companions are Vampires like me, freed from our Pureblood Master, with some help.… We don’t want to be slaves to them anymore.”
    “But you are still a Vampire,” I stated.
    “Yes, and I still drink blood to survive. We all do. But we’re selective over our meals.” Pausing before he continued, he said, “I don’t want to have to kill, you know. I wasn’t exactly given a choice.”
    I raised my eyebrows at his statement. I felt compassion for him, but I didn’t believe anyone should play God when it came to who deserved to die. “What did they do when they … captured you?” I pushed, wanting to know more.
    “I was not turned by the Pureblood of that clan. It was not the right of the Gualtiero—Eligio—to end me.” He saw my confusion and answered it. “Gualtiero means the Leader, the Master. Eligio is the Pureblood’s name.” He inhaled sharply. “They locked me away with no…” He stopped, searching carefully for his next word. “Food.”
    He looked at me blankly as I flinched.
    “Withholding my ability to feed is torture. I don’t know how long I’ve been kept in the darkness. They had me bound in silver.” He nodded to his wrists. “I managed to escape, but I’ve got nothing left inside me to be able to fight them if my companions don’t find me first.”
    “Would the Pureblood have eventually ended you?” I asked.
    “No. My Gualtiero was coming to end me himself,” he replied.
    “Is that what Eligio told you?”
    “No. My Gualtiero—Emery—and I are still connected, though not so much now that I’ve been parted from him and the clan for some time. But I can still sense him to a degree.”
    I was trying to comprehend what he was telling me. It was an existence I knew nothing about.
    “Eligio will know I have gone by now. It won’t take him and his clan long to track me down.”
    A sense of alarm rang through me—would they come here? Could they track him to this house? Just as I was contemplating the notion of a Vampire ambush, the ground beneath me started to vibrate and shake. Panic began to run through me and I sprinted to the window, checking that the boards were in