The Children of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

mistake,” Matthias replied, but Adrianus wasn’t listening. He was striding forward toward the blonde woman, gaining speed with each step.
    “You should have let them shoot me when you had the chance!” he roared, leaping forward. The blonde woman stood still, ready, and at the last possible moment she ducked. Adrianus’s arms passed over her head and he tripped on her outstretched leg, stumbling forward.
    Moving now with that same impossible speed she had shown before, the blonde woman stood and, even as Adrianus was falling, swung her sword in a downward arc. The blade chopped his head from his body and it rolled away, throwing fans of blood against the wall and coming to a stop near the bedroom door. Matthias watched as the corpse – a thing which had moments ago been his son – thudded to the ground, arms fluttering, spurting blood from its neck.
    Matthias could hear himself screaming, but the sound was warped and distant, as if it was echoing down to him through a long hallway. He stood rooted to the ground, unable to move, unable to do anything but voice his horror. Mikel, too, was screaming, and he had leapt to his feet.
    Matthias didn’t know whether Mikel would have attacked or not, but the blonde woman didn’t give him the opportunity. Lightning quick, still crouched, she reached to a clip at her breast and pulled from it two darts, which she flung across the room in a single motion. One hit Mikel in the chest, another in the arm, and his cries became immediately strangled. He took one step toward her and pitched forward, twisting in the air as he did so, landing on his side.
    Matthias watched in horror as his fledgling’s limbs began to seize up and a great torrent of bloody foam gushed forth from his mouth. Even his eyes had begun to bleed, and he was making choked cawing noises of agony that pierced Matthias like knives.
    “Have mercy on him!” Matthias cried. Begged.
    The blonde woman, up on her feet now and striding toward Mikel’s shuddering, jerking form, glanced over her shoulder.
    “There is only one mercy for him now,” she said, and she held the blade up over her head for a moment before driving it down and into his chest, piercing Mikel’s heart and ending his pain. She stood, cleaning the blood from the blade with a dark cloth. Both humans were sobbing now, wrestling with the men that held them but making no real headway in their attempts to escape.
    “It’s a pleasure watching you work, Captain,” the black woman said, though Matthias thought he could hear distaste in her voice. The blonde favored her with a sardonic smile.
    “Thank you, Vanessa.”
    “Oh, God help me,” Matthias moaned. He was still rooted to his spot, standing now between the bodies of his two dead children, shaking and unable to move. The blonde woman turned to him.
    “There is no God,” she said. “Even if there was, He wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”
    Matthias felt a surge of rage and hatred run through him, and in that moment he almost threw himself at this woman despite her superior speed and obvious skills as a fighter. At least then it would be over; he would be dead like his children, gone to whatever afterworld awaited. He tensed and the woman tilted her head, studying him.
    Then he thought of Hell, and of the punishments that might be waiting for the things he had done in his youth, newly made a vampire and intoxicated by the power and the need for blood. The desire to fight passed, replaced by a sort of hopeless anguish, and Matthias felt his body slump. He was a coward; he knew it and could see from the blonde woman’s eyes, her smile, the set of her body, that she knew it, too.
    “Will you take my message to the council?” she asked him. “Or will I leave three dead vampires here tonight?”
    “I will deliver your message,” Matthias told her, his voice hoarse. “I will find this council, and I will tell them what happened here, and surely they will send better men than me to