The Children of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

emotions. He was looking at one of the human women. She was lying on the floor, a trickle of blood running from her nose to the carpet. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her bare breasts were not rising and falling. Matthias realized she was dead.
    The other two humans were each being held with their hands behind their backs by another member of this strike force. Both were still fully clothed, though the man’s shirt was unbuttoned. He had a black eye and livid red marks around his neck, just below the edges of his dark hair. The one next to him, a tall woman with a large mass of tightly curled red hair pulled back into a ponytail, was weeping quietly but seemed unharmed.
    The black woman was standing at the far end of the apartment, looking out at the city. She glanced over her shoulder as they came into the room, watching Matthias’s slow progression forward, and then resumed looking out the window.
    “What a lovely scene,” the blonde woman commented from behind him, and Matthias could hear the sarcasm in her voice. He came to a stop in the middle of the room, and she didn’t object to this.
    “Girl wouldn’t shut up,” said a tall, burly man with brown, crew-cut hair.
    “So you thought you’d break her neck?” the blonde woman asked.
    “I got a little overzealous, Captain,” the man admitted.
    “Right. Next time, wait for my orders.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Are you the one in charge here? What the fuck do you want?” Adrianus demanded in his thickly accented English, and the blonde woman turned to him.
    “Speak to me like that again and I’ll have them kill another one of your blood whores.”
    Adrianus said nothing, merely glared at the woman. The human girl’s sobbing had redoubled at the confirmation that her friend was dead, and for a moment it was the only sound in the room.
    “Please,” Matthias said. “We wish to avoid any further trouble. Tell us what it is you want from us.”
    “Normally, you’d already be dead,” the blonde-haired woman told him. “But that’s not what I’m here for tonight. Instead I’m here to send a message. You’re going to deliver it for me.”
    “A message to whom?” Matthias asked her.
    The woman moved in front of him now, holding her blade at her side. “You’re going to tell the American Council of Vampires in New York that the day of reckoning has come.”
    “I do not know anyone on the council. I am not from this country,” Matthias said.
    “I don’t care,” the woman replied.
    From the couch, Adrianus muttered something under his breath. The blonde woman turned to him.
    “Say that again.”
    “I said, ‘this is ridiculous,’” Adrianus told her. “I will not be held captive and given orders by a group of humans with delusions of grandeur.”
    “Adrianus, please …” Matthias began, but his fledgling overrode him.
    “You invade our home, murder our friend, hold our patron at swordpoint and threaten him … now you expect us to deliver your ridiculous message to a group of vampires we don’t even know? Go away, human. Go away before something terrible happens.”
    The woman frowned at him. “It’s a bad idea to try and give me orders. I serve only one master: the Emperor of the Sun. I am an instrument of his light.”
    “This is nonsense!” Adrianus snarled. He stood up, and the humans on either side drew their guns, pointing them at him. The black woman turned from the window, an odd smile on her face.
    “Put your guns down,” the blonde woman told the soldiers.
    “But, Captain …” one of them began, and she glared at him.
    “What part of the Captain’s orders didn’t you understand, Janus?” the black girl asked from across the room. The man who had spoken glanced at her and, after a moment’s hesitation, lowered his weapon. His fellow guard, the man with the crew cut, did the same.
    “Adrianus, you are making a terrible mistake,” Matthias said.
    “I do not fear these humans,” Adrianus told him.
    “That is the