Darkness Comes by A.C. Warneke Read Free Book Online Page A

done as he told me.” She watched as he deliberated silently for a few moments, trying to get his emotions under control. It was apparent that there was much he was leaving out, but perhaps there was much he didn’t know. Finally, he took a deep breath, and met her eyes. “It had to have been an Aradian that bit you; it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
    “Thank God,” Mal’s mumbled words obviously surprising her father. He cocked his head to the side and looked at her until she sighed, feeling the color stain her cheeks as she admitted, “Thank God he wasn’t a vampire.”
    “I don’t know if an Aradian bite is any better,” he scowled, his thoughts contorting his handsome face. “I should have told you, warned you, but I had never seen one, I didn’t understand. In truth, I figured they were more myth than reality until….”
    He fell silent for a long time, letting his words play in Malorie’s head. She knew that he was thinking about the incident at the mall, about her getting bit. “Tell me what your father told you.”
    “Our blood is very potent to an Aradian and because we replenish it so quickly, they can feast on us for long, long periods of time….
    “I hate that bastard for not preparing me,” Gus spat out with some venom, ignoring the bewilderment coloring Mal’s face. “My father knew what the Aradians were, how they enslaved our kind for their own purposes, their own pleasure. He told me just enough to hate them but not enough to resist them. He was an angry and bitter man, Malorie; his perception of the Aradians are based on the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman and she gave birth to his child.”
    “You,” Mal reiterated, her head spinning with all of this. No wonder why Gus didn’t look much older than she did; if he was nearly five hundred years old, there was some serious power in his blood, his genetics. Did she share the same long life expectancy? Was her grandfather still alive? There were so many questions and she had the feeling that her father didn’t know the answers to them any more than she did.
    He nodded again. “Yes. He had hoped she would run away with him before she was chosen to be a… consort to one of the Aradians. But she laughed at him, telling him that it was her duty, her honor, to consort with their masters, that he was a fool to think otherwise. He was crushed, especially when the ceremony was performed and he had to… watch her with an Aradian….”
    Mal gasped, knowing what her father was going to say. “No.”
    “Yes,” he grimaced. “Father explained when one of our females was ready she would be given to an Aradian male during a festival of sorts. The female would be cleansed and pampered before being laid upon an alter where the chosen Aradian would lie with her, taking her and using her body and drinking her blood throughout the night in front of the entire village. She would bear his mark until he had his fill and then she’d be given to a different Aradian. If she survived.
    “They hosted many other festivals throughout the year as well,” Gus continued, lost in the story and oblivious to Mal’s difficulty in grasping everything he was telling her. “Our men were forced to fuck as many women – human women – as they could, in the hopes of producing more of our kind.
    “Father spoke of women being brought in by the dozens since many children were born but only a few had our… unique abilities. And females, the most highly desired by the Aradians, were even more rare; only a handful over many, many years. Several Aradians would be at the festivals, arousing our men and women into states of sexual frenzy, until it devolved into a gluttony of carnal excess,” Gus recited from memory, almost by rote, as if he had heard the stories many times and the words didn’t have any meaning. Until now. “Our people had no choice.”
    “I don’t think it was too much of a chore for them,” Malorie admitted softly, her