Dark Embrace (Principatus) Read Online Free Page A

immeasurable powers and knowledge of their target. Few of those targeted escaped to brag of the battle. Still, the divine assassins could be beaten. If you were strong. And ready to face ultimate death yourself.
    Releasing his hold on Haral’s throat, Ezryn took a step back, noting the feverish light in his brother’s eyes. There was more to this than Haral would have him believe. “Why do you want me to do this? Are you not capable of the task yourself?” He flicked his gaze over his twin’s soft, round body, remembering a time when it was almost a carbon copy of his own. “Are you having performance problems, Harry? Tsk, tsk . At your young age too.”
    The overlord drew himself straighter, his incensed stare fixed on Ezryn. “I charged you with a task, Master Navarr. If you do not obey your lord, you will see yourself punished by our laws.”
    “Punished? Laws?” Ezryn raised his eyebrows, struggling to control the growing fury seeping through his veins. His twin always had been a pompous pain in the ass. Now it seemed his position of power had finally gone to his empty head. “Any laws worthy of respect you perverted on ascension, Harry. As for punishment, remember who you’re talking to. Every vampire on earth knows who the true overlord is. Do you really think your punishment would be dealt?”
    His brother snarled at him, demon face glowering with contempt and hatred. “Yes, of course, the true overlord. Born first by a mere contraction of our mother’s womb. And yet that simple order was proved false, wasn’t it? By the blood trial itself, the doctor who named you first born was proved a liar and executed. Thanks to ritual, the rightful son finally claimed his rightful title.” He paused, his smile smug. “I always knew I was better than you, Ezryn. It just took the words of a semi-catatonic virgin to prove it to the rest of our race.”
    With a silent hiss, Ezryn grabbed Haral’s throat again, sinking his fingers into his brother’s fleshy neck before Haral could stop him. Cold contempt laced through the anger simmering inside him. The blood trial. Even the words made him sick.
    The blood trial had not been invoked for over two thousand years. Why would it have been? It was an ancient ritual from a superstitious, barbaric past before common sense prevailed and the position of overlord became decided by birthright. Two master vampires would feed on a human virgin selected for her purity and spiritual nature to be the “voice” of the oracle. Almost draining her of her blood, they would let her linger in the void between expiration and transformation until she was a heartbeat away from death. When her pulse began to fade, when her lips began to turn ashen and her body began to convulse, each vampire would open their own vein and let a single drop of their undead blood fall onto her tongue. The vampire whose name she uttered into the waiting oracle’s ear, seconds before he claimed her virginity, was pronounced overlord.
    It disgusted Ezryn, going against everything he believed in about the vampire/human relationship.
    That Haral had invoked the blood trial the day after their father’s death had shocked everyone. As had the name the dying virgin had whispered. No one had expected the young woman to whisper Haral’s name. No one except Ezryn. He knew what his brother lusted for most of all. What Haral had always lusted for—the position and power of overlord, supreme ruler of their kind.
    A mere week after their father’s end, Ezryn discovered his brother had been fucking the oracle. Unfortunately, he’d had no way of proving the forbidden relationship. Ezryn also knew his father’s advisors had been unhappy with Ezryn’s approaching ascension. His father, a two-thousand-year-old vampire less interested in ruling his people and more interested in sticking his prick in anything wearing a skirt, had been a ruler they could manipulate, control. Ezryn, on the other hand, had proved difficult to