Blood & Honey #1

*Chapter Sixteen*

Thick, warm burgundy covers every inch of my skin and what is left of my clothes. The blood clings to me in layers. Fresh crimson trickles down the labyrinth of crusted red that is caked onto me. Some of the blood is days old, some seconds fresh. I'm a walking canvas splatted with different shades of ruby.

A sea of corpses surrounds me: vampire, human, angel, and demon. There are thousands heaped in piles as pyres burn hot while dead, rotten flesh floats into the sky becoming ash.

I continue to press forward, ignoring the petrified screams and the clashes of swords and weapons I have never before seen. My eyes are narrowed, focused on the figure I can barely make out through the haze of war.

It doesn't matter that fire stands in my way. I walk through it, possessed by the rage and darkness that flows within me like a hellfire sent from Hades.

I'm almost to the figure that is trying to conceal their identity with a brown cloak that matches the charred and burned lands.

The figure whirls around when I emerge from the smoke and fire, every bit the demon I am, for vampires are just demons on another scale. The light of her skin burns my eyes, too bright for me to make out the angel's features, but I can make out the bundled blanket she has pressed tightly to her chest.

The angel's fierce stance signals she is willing to put her life on the line to protect what is in her arms. The thing is it's not hers to protect—it's mine.

Before I can get any closer, the black sky opens up and a ray of light roars down from the heavens with a deafening blast as it makes impact with the land my kind have seeped in the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.

The ground shakes from the power of pure magic invading the dark that has consumed these lands for fifteen years. After the blindness washes from my eyes, I find the angel is gone. The cloak she had on flutters to the ground as she takes to the sky taking what I'm after with her.

I gather my energy, stealing from the lives I stripped to power me until I am a black raging force unlike anything this earth has ever seen. Before I can reach the apex of my power, I see a hand sticking out of my chest. Blood rises in my mouth as I turn and stare at a face I was least expecting to see.

"The time is not now."

Darkness, unrelenting darkness sends me into the realm of what feels like eternal slumber.

I wake, my cheek pressed against the cold stone of the bathroom floor as glass shards are littered around me. I grab onto my head. It's still fogged over from the dream.

Pushing to my feet, I see bits of the mirror piled into the sink like a pool of shimmering water.

Is it possible we are heading toward another fifteen-year war like my ancestors fought? Is this dream a warning of what is to come if I don't stop the war brewing amongst my kind?

So much blood and death, and not of just the humans. My kind were killed by the droves as well.

I must have been seeing the Great War through the warrior's eyes, or maybe the Beast of the Damned himself. Whatever the case, this dream was an ingrained memory passed down from within my bloodline.

What I need to figure out is why it surfaced now.

Kinley is sound asleep when I walk into my room, sunlight streaming in through the drapes. I was out for the whole night.

Popping my neck to loosen the stiffness sleeping on the hard floor of the bathroom has caused, I walk over to the mirror attached to the dresser in my room. Relief washes over me when I find no black veins covering me and that my eyes have returned to normal.