Crimson Heir: Rise Of The First Blood

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CHAPTER 1

THE GHOST OF HOUSE VANE

The undercity of Nyxara had no sun, no moon, and obviously no mercy.

Rylan Vane pressed his back against the damp stone wall, feeling the slow, cold pulse of his own blood. The stone was slick with moisture and something else, something darker that had seeped into these tunnels over centuries of death and decay. He didn’t think about it. Thinking was a luxury Crimsons could not afford.

Who would be able to think after being unable to feed for four days?

Hunger gnawed at his insides like a trapped animal clawing at the walls of his stomach. But hunger was an old friend. He had learned to live with it a century ago, when his uncle Cassian had stripped him of his blood-right and thrown him into the gutters like a broken toy.

Without warning, the memory surfaced again and it was like it was happening all over again. His father's head rolled across the marble floors, his mother's dream cut short when her heart was ripped out of her chest. And Cassian’s smile was cold as he pressed the ritual knife into young Dylan's throat.

Born as a noble but with the weak blood of a crimson, his uncle dealt him the final blow.

"You are nothing now. Less than nothing."

Those words had been true for a hundred years.

Rylan looked down at his hands that were now pale and thin. The fingers trembled slightly from the slow starvation that had become his daily existence. His silver hair, once a mark of noble lineage from House Vane, was now matted and dull. Another reason for enforcers to remember his face. His grey eyes that were dead and hollow had not held hope in over a century.

He was now a Crimson. The lowest caste in the Dominion of Eternal Night. A vampire so weak that even mortal rats tasted better than he did. His blood deficiency, a curse he had been born with, had made him an outcast even among his own family before the fall.

And aafter the fall, it had made him prey.

Two hundred years old and he had nothing to show for it. No power, no name, no future.

A sound echoed through the drainage tunnel and Rylan’s body went rigid. His ears, dulled by hunger but still sharper than any mortal's, caught the rhythm immediately. The heavy sound of multiple pairs of boot worn by house enforcers echoed through the tunnels.

He knew for sure they were the ones because their shoes had reinforced soles for crushing skulls.

His heart, weak as it was, still knew how to pound.

He had been hiding in these tunnels for three weeks, ever since word spread through the undercity that Lord Cassian Vane was purging the last remnants of fallen houses. Rylan's house. The same house his uncle had burned to ash and salt.

“Split up,” a voice commanded from the darkness ahead. The voice was deep, bored, like a man who had done this a thousand times.

“The Crimson is here somewhere, Lord Vane wants him alive. He wants to watch him die personally.”

A second voice laughed. “Alive? He'll barely be breathing by the time we drag him out of these rat holes.”

Rylan's jaw tightened until his teeth ached. He had no power, weapons or allies. Only Mira, the cynical Crimson woman who sometimes shared scraps of information and a few drops of stolen blood in exchange for his company.

But she was not there at the moment, he was all alone.

His subconsciousness screamed at him to move… to survive.

The enforcers spread out, the sound of their boots filling the air. Rylan counted five of them, each one a full-blooded vampire with decades of combat training. Their blood was rich and strong, he could smell it from where he was. Against them, he was less than a threat. He was a stain waiting to be cleaned from the stone.

Cursing underneath his breath, he slipped into a side passage, his bare feet silent on the wet stone. The passage narrowed, forcing him to turn sideways making the walls scrape against his ribs. Behind him, the enforcers' voices grew louder.

“Fresh blood,” one of them said. “He went this way.”

Rylan didn't know where he was going, he had never ventured this deep into the undercity. The tunnels here were older, stranger and carved with symbols that predated the Dominion itself. The air grew thick with the smell of old blood and older decay.

He knew it deep within his bones that there was something strange about the part of the tunnel he had ventured into.

Then the whisper came.

“Find me.”

Rylan froze as recognition hit him. He had heard it before, a faint, ancient voice that had been growing louder in his skull for months. He had dismissed it as hunger madness, the desperate hallucination of a starving mind.

But now, with enforcers closing in, the whisper became a scream.

“FIND ME. OR DIE.”

He turned left, then right, following the sound of the voice. Rylan went down a spiral staircase he had never seen before, carved into the living rock. The steps were slick with something that pulsed under his feet as the walls began to change. They were no longer stone, they were now flesh. Warm, wet, moving and breathing.

Rylan stopped at the bottom of the stairs, realization dawning on him with rigid horror.

He had entered the Catacombs of Flesh.

Behind him, the enforcers reached the top of the staircase, their scent filling his nostrils in strong waves. They didn’t descend, even they knew better than to enter that place.

Rylan heard the first voice mutter: “Let him rot in there. Nothing comes out of the Catacombs alive.”

Finally, their footsteps retreated.

Rylan was left alone in the darkness, surrounded by walls that breathed and eyes that were just beginning to open in the ceiling above him.

He had no choice, he went deeper.