Scarlet Night (Limited Edition) Read Online Free

ink in my neck begin to draw from the rage as I eyeball the money and realize what it represents. The old birds stroll off, squawking and clucking at their generosity, and I'm tempted to stand to my full height and let it be known that I'm neither a beggar nor am I in need of their charity; that I've got more money than the four of them and three of their future generations combined. The temptation rocks me, and I feel the muscles in my legs spring to attention with the hope that they'll be called upon rather than rotting beneath the wasted torso of a lost cause, but —still looking at the bill in the stein and the ever-darkening corner that's eagerly soaking in the residual fluid that, like me, can't get out—I'm unable to take any pride in my Swiss account and the hundreds of millions of dollars that working for Gregori and The Clan of Vail has earned me.
    S o I sit.
    I sit, a nd I stare.
    I stare—staring into the bottom of an empty beer stein holding a crisp ten dollar bill—and I see within the vacant depths, past the meager currency, what I have become.
    I was once a proud and revered warrior for a mythos clan that hunted and executed worthless, non-human wretches. Non-human wretches that threatened the secrecy of our kind and preyed on the lives of humans; non-human wretches that occupied space and air that they didn't deserve and had no intention of earning!
    Non-human wretches like me…
    As another clot of the theater-goers emerged, more-and-more of their charity found its way into my stein.
    Every dollar added to the glass steals from me what little pride I had left. That I've found myself in a position of such humiliation as to be accepting the scraps of these upper-class fuckers reflects back at me like a mirror I can't turn away from. A mirror that shows the filthy and worthless stain I've become.
    A mirror that shows me exactly what I've become…
    And I can't bring myself to care.
    Can't bring myself to defend an honor I once cherished that I now see no merit or worth in.
    Eventually the c rowd thins out and dies away. When the last of them have gone the lights in front of the theater vanish with them, and I find myself staring into the partially back-lit poster of the condescending girl housed within the cracked glass case and clutching a stolen glass filled with over a hundred bucks worth of donated money that assaults my nostrils with the pungent stench of shame.
    “ God-fucking-dammit, Gregori!” I growl at the stein, “What the hell did you see me doing? Where the hell did you see me going?” The money filled glass offers no response and I slam my head against the glass case again.
    And again.
    And again.
    I top off my self-destructive hat trick by bringing my free hand over my head and putting it through the tortured glass, letting the fragmented shards rain down on me and clatter on the pavement around me.
    “ You must find my daughter…” I mutter, mocking Gregori's dying wish, watching as my lacerated hand begins to pucker and reject the lingering shards and close behind them, leaving several small trails of blood with no source. The old vampire—the leader of the closest thing I had to a family—had expected me to honor his memory by replacing him?
    He actually expected me to disregard the years of respect he had earned from me in taking me in and training me and helping me find myself and overcome everything that had happened to me.
    He actually expected me to move on by shrugging off his death as a minor hiccup in my life and turning to his daughter—some arrogant little air-headed bitch that had abandoned him and the clan years before I'd even been graced by their generosity—as the new leader?
    I shake my head, growling at the stein and slamming it against my knee again, “I'd sooner see your legacy die with you than rot in the clutches of some ungrateful cunt!”
    “ Yo! Hobo fuck-tard! Who you fuckin' talkin' to? Havin' a lovers' quarrel with yer right hand?”
    I scowl, only