War of the Chosen Read online

  Other books by Elizabeth Dunlap

  Born Vampire Series

  Knight of the Hunted

  Child of the Outcast

  War of the Chosen

  by Elizabeth Dunlap

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  WAR OF THE CHOSEN

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Dunlap

  Cover design by Elizabeth Dunlap

  Cover layout by Muhammad Asad

  Cover photo by Irina Bogolapova

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  First Printing: March, 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition: March, 2018

  Dedicated to my best friend, Sara.

  No matter what time of day, I came to you for help on this book and you were always there, no matter how you felt.

  You've said you felt like these books were partly yours because you've been there through most of them being written.

  Now it's partly yours, for reals <3

  Prologue

  I never thought I’d ever be in this moment. When I was a child, I never fantasized about it. I never even dreamed about it. It was something I had put from my mind, stored away, to never be thought or spoken of. I was content with that, except having ignored it as a possibility made the actuality that much more unsettling when that moment finally arrived.

  It came in the ruins of Cachtice Castle, a castle that was once in Transylvania, but that country no longer existed. It was known as Slovakia now. The structure was crumbling around me, every tower and wall suffering with age and the constant battering of the elements. Even so, it had become a tourist attraction, with humans constantly in and out of the ruins. There were none around at that moment, all gone home for the evening.

  Staring at the ancient castle walls, I could feel something stir inside me. A memory that I couldn’t quite catch hold of. Something about the way the stones looked, or the beautiful rare plants it was known for, though I wasn’t sure how I knew about them. The memory was old. I focused more on it, and I realized the castle in my memory wasn’t crumbling in ruins. I’d been here before. But when? I had a perfect vampiric memory. The broken whispers confused me.

  “This way,” Clara said. She stood in front of me, smiling, her purple eyes the same as mine. It was still jarring, even though I’d been staring at them for over an hour as we’d trekked up to the castle on foot from the nearby town.

  “Sorry,” I apologized, and continued following her up a crumbling stair case that led to the only tower still standing. Though most of the walls were intact, one side of the circular room was missing a good portion, casting a ray of sunlight across the floor.

  “Careful,” Clara cautioned. The floor was missing a few bits of stone, exposing the room underneath. I watched Clara’s steps and made sure to copy every movement she made. We eventually made it to the window. There was a person sitting next to it, staring out the window at the vast countryside below. Her hair was black and in tangles. She wore a black dress that looked ancient, both because of the style and the fact that it was dirty and torn in several places. Her bare feet were caked with mud.

  “Ana,” Clara whispered. The woman sitting at the window didn’t respond, with words or with her body. She was comatose, just staring out into space. I realized then that a small part of me had somehow formed preconceptions about this moment, and this filthy lethargic creature was not what I had expected or wished for. Was I disappointed? No. But I felt something fade away inside me, something I hadn’t known was there. If I could have put a name to it, I would’ve called it a girlish hope.

  “Ana, I’ve brought someone to see you,” Clara tried again, so gentle and tender, like she was used to the other woman lashing out at her. But she loved her. That much was evident.

  I could see Clara take stock of the other woman’s state, like I had, and her face saddened. “I apologize for her appearance,” Clara said to me. “This is what happens when she runs away.” She bent down in front of the other woman and carefully took her hands. “Ana, there’s someone here for you.” Clara helped the other woman turn towards me. Her purple eyes were blank. They saw nothing in front of her, though there was nothing wrong with her sight. Clara looked up at me and smiled warmly.

  “Lisbeth, this is your mother, Anastasia Bathory.”

  Chapter 1

  Life is full of irrefutable truths.

  Truths that you can’t ignore. Truths that you can’t escape. And truth is the greatest weapon life has to offer. There were many truths in my life up to that point, and many that would follow thereafter, but none were as painful as the truth I now knew.

  The truth that Knight was alive.

  I’d gone for an entire year believing that the Lycans executed him, but not knowing for sure if they had. I’d moved on as much as a vampire possibly could from losing someone they love. The evidence of me trying to forget him was currently cuddled in her father’s arms.

  My newborn vampire-Incubus hybrid.

  She looked like a vampire in every way possible, and if it hadn’t already spread around the entire Order what she was, they could’ve easily been convinced she was an ordinary Born vampire baby. Except that she wasn’t. Unlike regular vampire babies, my daughter drank vampire blood.

  Fresh from giving birth not even an hour before, I don’t know how I got through that summit with the Lycan Alphas.

  Balthazar held the tiny bundle our newborn daughter was wrapped in, and I had to resist turning towards her when she made even the smallest sound. They were standing on my right from my seat at the Council half circle desk. In front of me stood the Alphas from all the North American packs. Knight stood on the left of their ranks. I was making painstaking efforts to not look in his direction, but I could feel his eyes on me.

  I knew he hated me. How could he not? I betrayed him. I had a child with another man when I promised in my heart to love Knight forever. I’d never said the word love to him, but I’d felt it and that was the same thing.

  My brief glimpse of him when I entered the room had been sufficient to at least see how he was doing. His hair was longer, starting to curl past his neck, and he was wearing the exact outfit I’d conjured for him in my delusions several weeks ago: a faded brown and white plaid shirt with blue jeans, though he was not barefoot like he had been in my fantasy, he was wearing black boots. I tried not to think about how accurate I’d been in his appearance. It was probably just a coincidence.

  “The summit will come to order,” Castilla said suddenly, making me jump in my seat.

  One of the council members, Estinien, if I remembered correctly, and of course I did, stood up. He looked older, like Othello had, with thin aged skin and wrinkles to emphasize his frown. He was also one of the three Council members that hadn’t voted in favor of this meeting. “I want it known that I do not condone this meeting. Lycans are our enemies.”

  “The vote to bring them here passed, Estinien,” Castilla pointed out smoothly.

  “That’s because she,” he pointed his long gnarled finger in my direction, “said we would die without their help. Poppycock.”

  Defending myself would have gotten me nowhere, since it was clear he, and probably others, would gladly turn on me in my inexperience.

  One of the other old men, Thaddeus, spoke up. “Have you
forgotten what happened at Gennadi?” His accented voice was shaky, and he appeared older than anyone else there, and not just because he looked ancient. Knowing what I knew about what Anastasia had done, however, he couldn’t have been much older than the rest of the Council, he just looked it.

  No one else objected after that, so Thaddeus nodded in my direction for me to begin. Wait, me leading? Since when was I spearheading this thing? I had just had a baby, for crying out loud. I glanced at Castilla, and she confirmed it with a nod and a smile. Great. Of all the meetings I had to oversee, it had to be the one with my ex-boyfriend in the room. Ex. Was he my ex? We were never officially a couple. Could he still be my ex if we hadn’t been official?

  Sigh.

  I stood up and buttoned the button on my jacket in an official manner meant to make me look cooler and more business-like. I felt like old Lisbeth, the one who had never met Knight, and only cared about objects and looking pretty. Maybe it was the fact that I was dressing like her again, in designer dresses and kitten heels.

  “Welcome, our esteemed guests. We appreciate you honoring our truce and taking the time to come here to discuss terms of an alliance between our two species.”

  Don’t look at Knight. Don’t look at Knight.

  A short gangly Alpha wearing an unbuttoned black vest spoke first. “We wouldn’t have come if Alexander and Jesse hadn’t spoken for you.” He glanced to the side of the group I wasn’t going to look at. “And that one too.”

  Meaning Knight.

  “This circumstance goes beyond personal feelings, and I’m glad that everyone understands that.” Mr. Black Vest didn’t look quite as agreeable as I was making him out to be, but he stopped complaining at least. “I trust you were all briefed on the situation?”

  “We have some questions,” Jesse said with a respectful nod.

  “Of course. Feel free to ask anything you need to know.”

  Please ask something easy, like how many vampires were left, did the kitchen have a Keurig, or what our strategy was. We had a strategy, right?

  “How did this happen?”

  Pickle sticks.

  I rolled it around in my head, all the diplomatic answers that I would be expected to say so the situation didn’t seem as bad as it actually was, except the Lycans were, or had been, our enemies. If we lied to them, they wouldn’t trust us, and the alliance would be over before it began.

  I sighed. “I’m going to be honest. This happened because turned vampires felt like they were being treated as inferiors to Born vampires.” The whispers that followed indicated my fellow Council members were not pleased I was being so candid.

  “What sparked the dissention?” Jesse probed. This was the Spanish inquisition all over again.

  “We held an execution for some turned vampires who killed one of our companions. Our laws about killing humans are slightly lax, so naturally they were outraged. And to answer your next question, it’s because I broke a different law that I wasn’t executed for, and that law is vastly more specific than the one about killing humans.”

  “This war started because of what you did for Simon,” Alexander said, his face falling. “Your people were slaughtered.” Though I expected some comments from others at the desk around me, blaming me for it all, they were silent.

  “Do you blame us?” Alexander asked the rest of the Council. “Or her?”

  “No,” Castilla spoke up. “This was never about her. From what we’ve learned, the turned have been planning this for a very long time. Lisbeth was simply in the line of fire.”

  “And now, you want to align yourselves with your enemies, to save yourself from an army that you created,” said the vest Lycan.

  I took a deep measured breath. “The turned will destroy us. They have thousands in their ranks, and they hate Lycans as much as they hate Born vampires. When they’re finished with us, they might turn on you too.”

  “Might,” the vest Lycan pointed out.

  “Are you willing to take that chance?” Alexander asked him.

  “Even if we weren’t facing annihilation at their hands, the turned have no respect for humans,” Castilla continued. “They took our companions as their slaves, and I promise you those humans will beg for death before their new masters are finished with them.” From the reactions around the table, I could tell she’d kept this a secret, since even I hadn’t known. “We couldn’t protect them.” She was on the verge of weeping, and took a drink of water to hide it. “The turned are not interested in staying secret from humans, or treating them with respect and civility. They will raze the human world to the ground if they have no one to stop them, and we are all that stands in their way.”

  “You said they had thousands,” Knight said, finally speaking, his clear deep voice sparking a shiver up my spine. Don’t look, don’t look. “The packs in North America don’t have nearly enough wolves for that.”

  “There are packs all over the world. If we align with as many as we can, we will have the numbers,” Castilla answered.

  My daughter squealed and I couldn’t stop myself from looking in her direction to make sure she was okay, only Balthazar had moved, and when I looked in the direction the noise had come from, I was staring straight into Knight’s eyes.

  Balthazar, I hate you.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Ready?” Olivier asked me. We stood under the shade of a tree in the woods behind our castle. She had rushed back home after hearing I’d gone into labor, and just barely managed to miss the summit, which I knew was on purpose.

  The summit was long over, but we were far from finished with the alliance talks. It was nice to see Lycans and vampires banding together. I was surprised they hadn’t been more difficult about joining their enemies. I suspected the three Alphas I had a connection to had argued our case for us, and we owed this complicity to them.

  I still cried after the summit was over. I grabbed my daughter from Balthazar as soon as they said, ‘farewell, catch you later,’ and ran out of the bigger drawing room. I almost brushed Knight’s sleeve I think. It smelled like him. That made me run faster, down the hallway and up the stairs, until I was safe inside my suite. Slamming the door startled my birds, and they fluttered around in their cage trying to calm down.

  I placed my baby inside her crib in her perfect little nursery, where she instantly fell asleep. I found the nearest corner in my living room and stood in it with my nose pressed to the wall.

  Knight wasn’t dead. He was still alive and breathing, and being the perfection that was him. He wasn’t cold and pale inside the ground, forever a scar in my heart, one that would never be healed. Yes, even with him alive we’d never be together, but knowing he wasn’t dead would be worth the pain. I could burn a candle for him forever providing he was still alive and happy.

  I was wet and boogery when Arthur came into the room. I sobbed a few more times before I turned around. I couldn’t see who it was through the tears in my eyes, but I could smell him. He walked closer and handed me a box of tissues, which I used liberally on my face.

  “He’s in the hallway,” Arthur told me. I started crying again. “Stop crying, I won’t let him in unless you tell me to.” Which I would never do.

  On my orders, all but one of the Alphas had gone to stay with Alexander’s pack, and would return as needed. The one that was still here was, of course, Knight. After crying like a snotty baby, I’d been avoiding him as much as possible, but even I knew it wouldn’t last. I’d have to talk to him eventually, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Oh, you said you loved me and then you got knocked up? Fancy. Laters, fang lady.

  Knight would totally say fang lady. Or something offensive, if he was feeling cranky. When he finally cornered me, I doubted I could relay any of his rant because it would probably all be swear words.

  Which brings us here, 21 hours later, standing under a tree with Olivier. Balthazar was already gone again, leaving me to care for our daughter by myself. I couldn’t say that I was surp
rised, but I was more than a little disappointed. I hoped one day he would stop leaving me and stay nearby forever, mostly because I could use some friendship right about now, what with my not-dead ex-boyfriend here.

  Now wasn’t the time to think about him. Bundled in my arms, dressed in a long white dress, was my daughter. Her wispy black curls waved playfully, and she twisted in my arms as she slept. She was exactly 21 hours old, and it was time for her vampire christening, where I would promise to raise her to uphold vampiric law, and announce to everyone what her name would be.

  I’d already delayed leaving our secluded spot for as long as possible, changing my daughter’s diaper twice when she wasn’t dirty, and then feeding her, burping her, trying to make her fall asleep again. After ten minutes, Olivier stopped pretending to check her phone and slipped it into her pocket.

  “You have to face him sometime,” she said quietly.

  No, I didn’t have to, and even if Knight was using the alliance meetings as an excuse to stay here, eventually this thing with the turned would end and he would have to leave, and then my life would continue. He’ll go off and become a fruit picker, and marry… the thought of him marrying someone else left a bad taste in my mouth. Okay, fine. He’ll marry some chick who loves his jokes and would never cheat on him, like his loser ex-girlfriend. He’ll lie awake at night thinking about how much he hates me while his arm is wrapped around a curvy girl who drinks kale shakes. Nah. He’d never marry someone who couldn’t appreciate a good cheeseburger. The important part is he’ll move on and find someone better than me. Just kidding, there’s no one better than me. He’ll find the second-best girl for him. And he’ll be happy. Just like I’ll be happy, raising my daughter alone.

  Olivier checked her wrist watch. “We can’t be late. The ceremony is very time specific.”