Read Dark Wolf Running (Bloodrunners) Online
Authors: Rhyannon Byrd
When the attendant had finished brushing Trinity’s hair to a glossy, chestnut sheen, she produced a shift similar to her own but much shorter and sheerer. It would do little to disguise the body beneath.
That, too, was no surprise.
The other prisoners were put through the same ordeal, and when the attendants were finished even the older women, dressed in more modest shifts, seemed nearly incandescent. Only their grim and frightened faces spoiled the effect.
“Be brave,” the elder attendant advised them. “Remember, your fate is at least partly in your own hands.”
The prisoners were led into the corridor where they met the equally dazed men, who were dressed in longer tunics and groomed to their greatest possible advantage. With the black-robed escorts around them, the humans were ushered into a large elevator, which swiftly ascended several floors.
When they arrived at their destination, the humans stepped into an entirely different world—not dark like the lower levels, but gleaming with saturated color like rich velvet and painted with golden symbols.
Trinity observed carefully as she was shown to a private cell, this one with a transparent front wall and no furnishings at all—the “display case” for the serfs to be claimed. Through the slightly opaque sidewalls she could make out the boy who had panicked earlier, though his face was only a blur.
Outside the clear wall was a semicircular room, a kind of covered amphitheater with rows of richly upholstered seats. Within minutes the first of the Opiri arrived, male and female, some dressed in embroidered robes that reached nearly to the floor, others in thigh-length tunics and loose pants tucked into handmade leather boots. Jewels cascaded from long white hair, at throats and belts; the men were as regally clothed as the women. Each and every one could pass as a king or queen of his or her own realm.
But one stood out from all the others. A silence fell among the murmuring Nightsiders as a tall lord wearing a long tunic, wide embroidered belt and trousers of deep blue entered the room. He appeared to be in his early thirties, but Trinity knew he could be anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand years old.
This man’s age wasn’t what interested her. He had raven-black hair. No Opiri except vassals, who retained their human coloring for some time, had anything but white hair. And this one’s skin, instead of being bone-white, was a very fair gold. His face was lean and handsome, and his eyes...
As if he sensed her stare, he looked directly at Trinity. His eyes were not the deep purple or maroon of a normal Opir’s; they were a pale tint of violet that would have been extraordinary in any human. Trinity could feel that gaze stripping her shift from her body.
Without taking his eyes from her, the Nightsider gestured to the young human male behind him. The attendant held a tall staff capped with what looked like an ancient Corinthian helmet cast of gold. He handed the staff to his master, and the Nightsider held it firmly planted on the floor beside his chair as if he were staking a claim to territory no one dared dispute.
He was powerful. Trinity didn’t need anything but simple observation to make that very clear. The other Bloodlords and Bloodladies kept their distance from him, and several seemed to regard his presence with surprise.
Trinity knew then that he was the one. She couldn’t have explained it rationally, but instinct told her she was right. Dhampir instinct. And she intended to trust what her half-vampire nature told her.
Even if it told her that she was feeling things she had no right or reason to feel. That suddenly she didn’t look upon surrendering her body and blood to a Nightsider as a terrible sacrifice.
And that feeling, unfamiliar and insane as it was, held far more danger than fear. Especially if her instincts were wrong, and this man was the cruelest, most barbaric bloodsucker in the Citadel of Night.
Copyright © 2013 by Susan Krinard
ISBN-13: 9781460323038
DARK WOLF RUNNING
Copyright © 2013 by Tabitha Bird
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