Refugee (The Captive Series Book 3) Read Online Free Page A

shoulders shook with
laughter as he covered his mouth in order to stifle the noise. “It
didn’t always look like this,” Braith assured her.
    “What did it look like?” William
wondered.
    “It was pretty, and it was fast. Very
fast.”
    “Faster than a real mustang?” William
inquired.
    Ashby was laughing harder now and
Braith wanted to throttle him. “Yes,” Braith answered.
    They both looked even more confused.
Aria shook her head; her hair tumbled around her shoulders and down
her back. For a moment he was captivated by the dark red color that
flashed with strands of brilliant gold in the bright sun. “Weird,”
she muttered.
    He didn’t know how to explain to her
that it hadn’t been weird at the time. That he had, in fact,
actually enjoyed his cars. “Why did they stop making them?” William
asked.
    Ashby had stopped laughing, he had
turned back to them but there was no merriment left on his face.
“There was no one to make them after the war was over. They
required upkeep and without someone to do that…” Braith shrugged as
he ran a hand through his hair. “After a time they became obsolete.
Vampires don’t need them to get around so no one particularly cared
when they were gone.”
    Ashby had moved back to them, he was
brave enough to lean against the building as he crossed one leg
over the other. “Those first humans, the ones immediately after the
war, must have had a tough time,” Aria mused.
    Braith had never thought about the
humans after the war, never thought about how they had adjusted to
their new, and far more brutal, lives. But he had also been newly
blinded at the time, (by the jackass leaning against the garage
that Braith hoped would crumple under his weight), and trying to
adjust to his own difficulties. Turning his thoughts from the past,
he grasped hold of her hood and tugged it back into place. She
smiled at him; her eyes sparkled as he tucked her hair away and
caressed her cheek.
    “I’m sure they did,” he
agreed.
    “Was it really so different?” she
asked.
    “It was.” She peered up at him as his
hands lingered on the hood of her cloak.
    William took a step closer, curiosity
evident in his eyes that were the same bright shade of blue as his
sister’s. “Why did it change so much?” William wondered.
    Braith shrugged. “Technology was never
a real necessity for us. I spent seven hundred years of my life
without it. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed some of it, but I didn’t
mind seeing most of it go. My father and a lot of the others felt
the same way. They didn’t overtly try to get rid of most things,
but they didn’t try to maintain them either.”
    “What else was there besides
automobiles?”
    “There were trains and planes,
computers and TV’s; there was the internet and game stations, cell
phones…”
    “I never did like those things,” Ashby
muttered.
    Braith silently agreed, they had been
irritating as hell. “There were so many new things developing every
day that at times it became impossible to keep up. We didn’t get
rid of it all. Indoor plumbing stayed, as did electricity, but
that’s mostly around the palace now. The outer areas didn’t, and
still don’t, have the resources to sustain the upkeep for
it.
    “The golden chain,” Aria’s nose
scrunched, resentment burned in her eyes at the reminder. “It’s
also part of that technology. It recognizes fingerprints, and only
responds to the prints of the one that owns it. That’s why only the
owner can remove it from their slave. There is also a device in it
that allows a slave to be tracked if they escape while wearing the
chain.”
    “It should be done away with,” Aria
said fiercely.
    He didn’t argue with her, he’d never
thought about it in the same way she did until he’d met her. Hell,
she was the only person he’d ever put the chain on, and she still
bore the faded marks on her wrist from that debacle. If they were
successful he’d have a bonfire using the chains as fuel.