Underworld: Blood Enemy Read Online Free Page A

sandals, and stockings. All were uniformly filthy and in need of repair.
    The renegades’ behavior was even more appalling. Males and females rutted openly around the fire, while their neighbors laughed and egged them on. Others engaged in wrestling matches of uncommon viciousness, biting and clawing each other in sport, or anger, or both. Hungry lycans gnawed on the bloody bones of a disemboweled deer until their faces were liberally smeared with gore. Naked children ran amok, unheeded by the carousing adults. Grunts, groans, screams, snarls, and howls assaulted the ears.
    Lucian blushed with shame, humiliated to the depths of his soul by his kinship to these noisome brutes. They’re animals, he thought bitterly. Nothing but animals!
    Not for the first time, he wished with all his heart that he had been born a vampire instead.
    “Well done,” Lady Ilona whispered to him from her horse. Moving like shadows, the Death Dealers spread out around the clearing. Soren tugged on the leashes of his hounds, urging them to follow him as he vanished into the woods to the east on his way to the opposite side of the meadow.
    Expertly trained, the hunting dogs would keep silent until Soren set them loose.
    The lady waited until all the beaters had sufficient time to get into position before raising an ivory hunting horn to her immaculate lips. Behind her, grim-faced Death Dealers readied nets of iron mesh.
    Silver links were interspersed through the netting, adding to its potency. Lucian stepped to one side, to avoid getting in the way of the restless vampire warriors.
    He had done his part tonight. The rest was up to his undying masters.
    The horn sounded and was immediately answered by fearsome war cries and the baying of the hounds. Startled lycans, caught unaware amid their crude revelry, looked up in alarm as Soren and his dogs burst from the woods on the far side of the clearing, accompanied by vampiric pikesmen whose silver spearheads pierced the flesh of the nearest lycans, regardless of age or gender. The frenzied dogs fell upon unarmed savages, tearing out their throats in exquisitely poetic justice for the marauders’ own depredations. Letting go of the hounds’ leashes, Soren threw back his bearskin cloak, revealing a pair of silver whips wound around his shoulders. He uncoiled the whips, which were composed of sculpted silver vertebrae, and cracked them against the exposed flesh of a naked male. The twin lashes left steaming welts on the cur’s body.
    As anticipated, the other lycans ran frantically away from Soren and the other beaters—straight toward Lady Ilona and her Death Dealers. “In the Elders’ name!” she shouted boldly as, astride Lucifer, she charged into the throng of fleeing savages. Her crossbow released its deadly bolt, the silver-tipped missile lodging right between the bloodshot eyes of a shaggy male lycan. Lucifer reared up his hind legs, then brought his silver-shod hooves crashing down on lycan skulls. “Let none escape!” the lady commanded. “Not a single bitch or whelp!”
    Panicked renegades, evading Lucifer’s thunderous hooves, attempted to dart around the lady and her steed, only to ran directly into the upraised nets of the Death Dealers behind her. The metal webbing descended upon the hapless lycans, weighing them down to the grassy floor of the meadow They thrashed wildly within the nets, unable to break free, and howled in agony every time one of the intermittent silver links brushed against their skin. Straining Death Dealers held the nets in place, while their brothers in arms bludgeoned the trapped fugitives with silver-plated maces, knocking the fight out of them.
    It was less of a battle than a rout. Deprived of the full moon’s transforming light, the outmatched lycans were unable to unleash the mighty beasts within them. Accustomed to tearing mortal prey apart with nothing but their own teeth and claws, they were pitifully equipped with weaponry, having only a few crude