She focused on her car, and the proximity terrified her. In the back of her mind, she heard Gigante threaten her life.

Run! she thought. Except she was now a witness to some kind of a crime—because there was no way this was a suicide or an accident.

“My name is J-j-jo Early,” she said hoarsely. “I’m at the c-c-corner of Eighteenth and Kennedy and I need to report . . . a murder, a killing . . . he’s dead. Oh, God, his head . . . is not on his body anymore . . .”

Beight the next morning, Syn was a caged animal as he paced around his empty bedroom. He was not animated by food that he had consumed nor blood that he had swallowed. He was not well rested, either.

The sense that he was needed by that female and could not respond, that he was powerless in the face of the sun’s dominance, that he was not strong, but weak, gave him an energy that shook his hands and rattled his teeth. And as a result of the physical quaking, things under his conscious surface, things he had refused to let air for so many years, were threatening to break through.

He fought them back as best he could, but he lost the battle thanks to the bathroom mirror. It was there, standing naked before the sinks, that he bared his fangs—as if to prove to himself he still had them— and it happened.

The present disappeared and the past took him over, a storm unleashed . . .

Old Country, 1687

When Syn lifted his head, blood spooled out of his mouth, falling to the dirt floor of the hut. There was a ringing sound in his ears, surging and retreating by turns, and he thought of the sea that did the same at the base of the cliffs nearby. How long had he been without consciousness this time?

The inside of his nose was stuffed up so he swallowed to be better able to breathe through his lips. As his tongue brushed against where his front teeth should have been, there was a ragged gap, the two—no, four—empty sockets tender and tickly.

He went to try to stand up to see if aught was broken of his arms and legs, but he knew better.

With caution, he looked across to the only bedding pallet. Beneath a carpet’s worth of blankets, the great beast slept, the mound of flesh and muscle rising and falling, a gurgle marking the inhales. Even in repose, it had its priorities. A meaty hand protruded out of the woolen layers, the dirt- and blood-caked fingers resting protectively upon the open throat of a bladder of mead.

The snoring was the signal Syn could move, and as he pushed his torso up, he was sore in his shoulders and his ribs. The hut was never clean, never tidy, but after he had been beaten with a copper pot and thrown about like a bolt of cloth, there was more disorder than ever. The only thing that had not been disturbed was the mummified remains of his mahmen, the body, wrapped in its rags, as yet where it had been for the last ten years.

Gingerly setting his seat upon the packed floor, he made sure that the aches and pains were not from serious injury. Verily, his father seemed to know how far he could push the battering. No matter how drunk he was, he did not take the beatings unto death’s door. He stopped a hairsbreadth before the point of ne’er return.

The empty belly cradled between Syn’s pelvis became something he could not ignore, and not because his hunger was of sufficient urgency. He had been so long starved that the hollow feeling was a natural extension of his body, nothing of note. But the growling sounds it made were dangerous.

He did not want to rouse his sire, although it was hard to know what was worse—when the male was disturbed from his addled state and still of drunken mind, or when he awoke furious at the recession of the mead’s soporific properties.

As Syn attempted to stand, his legs wobbled, thin and unreliable beneath his slight frame, and he balanced himself only when he threw out his arms. His father’s pallet was set directly afore the heavy skin flap that covered the doorway to the outside, and given that Syn was a pretrans, he could not close his eyes and carry himself off upon the air. He must needed to ambulate about in a corporeal fashion.

Placing his palms upon his stomach, he pressed in whilst he held his breath. On the balls of his feet, he chose his path with care, disturbing naught, and he orientated his safety upon the bladder of mead and the fingertips resting upon it. His sire suffered from an unrelenting unsteadiness of extremity. If he were to awaken, his fingers would tell the tale through movement—

As Syn focused on the back of that hand, he saw something odd in the blood-caked flesh. There was a flash of brilliant white, and he thought that perhaps the strikes of the night—or the day, he knew not which—had been so hard, his sire had broken through the flesh of his knuckles, down to the bone.

But no.

That was not what it was.

Touching the heartbeat behind his upper lip, something stirred deep within Syn’s breast. He had no name upon which he could label the emotion, and there was, like so much in his life, nothing he could do to control the feeling.

It was, however, strong enough, insistent enough, that he committed the unthinkable. He approached the beast. Crouched down beside the pallet. Reached out with a hand no steadier than his sire’s.

Whereupon he removed a tiny fragment from the flesh of his father.

A tooth.

His own tooth.

As he held the piece of bone with care, as if he were cradling his broken body, he looked over to the remains of his mahmen. He missed her, but he was grateful she suffered no further. Indeed, her remains had not been kept within this horrid hut as a remembrance of love. They were a warning of what came when one did not obey.

Syn put his tooth into the pocket of his ribboned pants, and he glanced around at the floor. He should like to retrieve the other three. Perhaps he would—

“Where’d you think you go the now, young.”

Syn jumped back and began trembling. Ducking, he put his arms up and around his face. The response was ingrained. Trained. Second nature.

“I must needs go to get victuals,” he whispered. “I go to get food.”

There was a grunt from the pallet and his sire lifted his head. His beard was long and gnarled, a rope of coarse dark hair that was indistinguishable from the tangle that grew out from all sides of his skull. Glittering black eyes beneath fleshy brows glared.

“You get them and come back, young. Waste not time. I am hungry.”

“Yes, sire.”

His father looked down at the hand that was over the mead. A rivulet of blood, fresh and red, had welled and descended unto his forefinger, released by the tooth’s removal.

“I shall go the now,” Syn rushed in. “I shall beg fervently. I shall—”

Those eyes came back and narrowed. Hatred, like a swill upon the surface of a pond, came to the fore.

“I go now,” Syn said.

With a quick shuffle, he skirted around the pallet, but he had to slow at the heavy tarping. As a pretrans, he could survive the sunlight. His sire could not. The hut was backed in against the wall of a cave, its entry point well protected from direct light. But if he did not follow the way things were properly done upon departure, he would be put in the cage and submerged in the river’s current.

He would rather be beaten.

“You come back, young.” His father’s gravel voice was like the curse of the Omega, sly and invasive, with the promise of suffering. “Or I shall become bored and be forced to find something to do. If I haven’t already.”

Syn nodded and fell free of the hut, his stumble running him into the cave’s outcropping of damp stone.

If he hadn’t already? Syn thought. What had the male done?

Bolting out of the cave, in spite of the soreness in his legs and his torso, he threw himself into the night with all the alacrity he could summon. The moon overhead was low to the horizon and its position terrified him. How long had he been without consciousness? How long had his father been free to roam about the village and environs?

Fates, what had he done?

Fear parched Syn’s mouth, and the thirst took him unto the stream where he fell down onto his scabbed knees and put his face into the cold rush. The sting was nearly unbearable, but as he drank, his head cleared. When he righted himself, he wiped his eyes on his torn and bloodied sleeves. The night was cold, but for him, it seemed everything was always of lower temperature than he.

Upon the wind, carried from the south, smoke from a fire wafted unto him. Not just one fire. Several. The village was alive with bustling commerce, trade and service performed and provided during the dark hours before the sunlight brought a halt to it all.

The promise made unto his father called him in the direction of the other vampires. None would e’er take him in for fear of what his sire would do, but there were good souls who took pity upon Syn, recognizing the curses of his existence, remembering what had been done unto his mahmen—and knowing full well what would happen if Syn, weak as he was, did not feed the beast who lurked in that cave, in that hut.

Yet Syn did not go unto the village center. He would, later. As soon as he could.

Instead, he set out upon the forest, crossing o’er fallen trunk and low-level brush, moving like a deer, in silence. He traveled far and tired readily, but he kept going.

None too soon he came unto a clearing, and he was of care to seek shelter behind a thick tree. It would do no good for anyone to know of his proximity, and he wouldnae have come if he could have prevented it.

Across the wildflowers that grew with graceful, unabashed glory, the thatched cottage was modest, yet lovely, and he told himself to trust the lack of commotion. Nothing appeared to be on fire outside of the hearth. There was no bloodshed that he could see or scent. There was—

The wooden door opened wide and the sound of giggling rose like the singing of spring birds, and as with finches flushed from a perch, two figures scampered out. One was short and stocky, the little male running as fast as he could, a pink ribbon streaming behind him. The other was a taller female just out of her transition, her blond hair flying as a flag as she chased after her brother and the prize he had claimed. Together, they ran down to the vegetable garden that had been cultivated in the meadow, and then to the paddock wherein two healthy milking cows were penned.

Syn’s shoulders eased and he found he could breathe. As long as the female and her family were safe, that was all that he cared about. She was always so kind to him in the village, and fearless in her regard of him. Indeed, she seemed to notice not his rags and the way he smelled. She saw only his hunger and his suffering, and her eyes did not duck away from that as the stares of so many others, far older than her, did. Nor was she content to merely pity him. She snuck him clothes which, given the scent upon the cloth, she had made for him. He was the now wearing pants she had fashioned from a hearty, thick cloth, and his only coat, the one that kept him warm, but that he had left behind in his haste, had been a coverlet that she created for him.