Hemophobia by Breanna Lynn (free romance novels txt) 📕

droplets that stained Anton’s shirt and ringed his lips. He had evidently been interrupted in the middle of feeding, and had most likely been evading his pursuers all this time.
“I do,” Annabelle answered, and when she turned, her eyes were ablaze with fury. “This is our land. My land. I will not allow them to take it from us. I fought for this feeding ground once before, and I will fight for it now. What say you?” She swept the room with her eyes, letting her gaze linger on each of us in turn. “Do we run? Or do we stand and fight for that which is rightfully ours?”
Leon was the first to reply. “Fight,” he said, standing and clenching his hands into fists. Eliza stared at him disbelievingly, while Anton took a step forward.
“We fight,” he said, nodding. After a long moment of contemplation, Eliza jerked her head in an affirmative motion, never moving her gaze from Leon’s face. The two of them seemed to be having a silent argument.
I finally tore my gaze away from the blood on Anton’s shirt and gathered enough strength to run from the room, keeping my nose and mouth covered. Just before I was out of earshot, I heard the words that Annabelle echoed, in a tone that left no room for arguments or questions.
“We fight.”

_______________________________________________________________

When Anton came to find me, he was dressed in a fresh shirt and his mouth was wiped clean, though I still shuddered at the memory of the blood drying on his lips and chin. He knelt on the floor near the corner in which I sat, studying me silently.
Finally I cracked under the pressure of his icy gaze. “How long do we have until…until the others arrive?” I asked, my voice hoarse with the effort of forcing the words through my dry throat. Despite the faith Annabelle had in all of us, I knew we were doomed.
“The other coven, if you can call it that, is moving quickly,” Anton said, avoiding my gaze. “The sun was hardly an hour away from rising when I arrived on the boundary of our land. There is no chance of them crossing the field in broad daylight. But I know that they are lying in wait in the caves on the edge of the land, biding their time until darkness descends once more. Then, they will strike. When they do, we must be ready.”
“You don’t believe that such a vast number of our kind can assemble peacefully.” I phrased it as a statement rather than a question, and Anton inclined his head.
“I do not,” he replied. “Though I stand by what I said. I saw them with my own eyes. As it was, it was difficult to outrun such a large number.” His irises hardened so that it seemed that he was staring at me through two chips of ice. “They are young and foolish. They think that they can defeat us easily and claim the land as their own.”
His eyes narrowed and his mouth contorted in a grimace. “They are mistaken. As your sister said, this is our land. And no group of bloodthirsty renegades will take it from us. This I swear.”
With that, he stood and marched out of the room, his back ramrod straight. I watched him go, my eyes fixed on the doorway long after he was gone. I pretended I had heard neither the breathless, reverent way he spoke of my sister nor the steely edge to his usually lighthearted tone. I forced myself not to seize up and tremble in fear at the mention of blood.
Anton had vanished, and in his place was a true lieutenant. He may have been my friend, but he knew his duty. A furious war loomed in the near future, one that neither Annabelle nor Anton had any intention of losing.

***

Annabelle was adamant about the inevitability of the fight. When I entered her room, she was lacing thick-soled black boots onto her feet, her head bent in concentration as her fingers flew over the intricate laces and knots. Her hair was raked back and tied in a tight knot at the back of her head, and when she raised her head, her eyes shone with determination.
“We will not lose this battle,” she said, giving me a hard stare. “This is our land. Do not forget that.”
I nodded quickly, trying to hold her gaze. “I know that. But Anna…Eliza is right. This is madness. We cannot succeed. Young or not, they outnumber us far too greatly.”
In a flash, she was on her feet, her usually light footsteps seeming to echo like gunshots in the sudden silence as she marched toward me.
When we no more than a foot away from each other, she reached out and pulled me closer by the front of my shirt, baring her fangs at me. “You think we cannot defeat them? You underestimate me, brother.” She let a low growl slip between her clenched teeth. “Have you so easily forgotten how we came to own this land?”
No, I had not forgotten. I remembered that day all too well.

***

On that bleak winter night, a thin layer of ice coated the dead grass, blanketed with fresh-fallen snow. A blizzard was brewing, though at the moment only occasional light snowflakes drifted from the grey clouds above. The moon was full and the stars must have been a magnificent sight, but their splendor was wasted, as the clouds coalesced to drape the sky with a gloomy mantle.
Anton, Annabelle and I crept along the overgrown hedges and gnarled oak trees that ringed the edge of a small town they had been watching for days. The three of us burned with thirst, although I forced myself to think of anything but the blood that would soothe the ache in my throat.
None of us were bothered by the chill or the snow. While humans might have complained of freezing temperatures and snowstorms, the ice was no colder than our wintry skin and our heightened vision pierced through the darkness easily.
Anton wanted nothing more than to quench his thirst, while Annabelle had other plans. She had discovered that another coven lived nearby, a small one that had staked a claim on this land. She intended to take it from them.
I was growing weary of waiting, my thirst nearly powerful enough to overpower my fear. Just as I opened my mouth, however, a hand clamped over it. I stared at Anton, my eyes wide with disbelief, and he shook his head and pressed a finger to his lips. As he released me, I looked past him to see my sister standing stock-still, her head cocked to the side and her expression one of intense concentration.
We sidled closer to a particularly tangled clump of nettles, and when Annabelle reached out and pushed a few thorny vines aside, I went rigid at the sight before us.
A vampire crouched on the frozen ground, his hands wrapped around the upper arms of a girl who looked to be no older than sixteen. He raised his head, his eyes the color of coal as they pierced through us. Blood dripped off his fangs and rolled down his chin, and ever so slowly his tongue flicked out and he lapped up the droplets.
Splinters of pain erupted behind my eyes just as the burn in my throat intensified to an open flame. The vampire tossed the body of the girl aside as if she were a rag doll, her limp head lolling on her bloody neck as she crumpled to the ground. In my peripheral vision, I saw white shapes rising to surround us, and within seconds the three of us were trapped within a ring of vampires. Their eyes glowed in the darkness, watching our every move as they circled us slowly.
I shook with terror. Blood pooled on the ground below human corpses, staining the snow red, strands of hair threaded into the oozing crimson puddles beneath their heads. That alone was enough to render me motionless, my eyes searching for an escape. But there was none. The bloody corpses lay all around us, slowly forming a ring of red slush behind the vampires that were closing in on us, their fangs bared and venom already dripping from the razor-sharp points. I counted seven of them before I began to close my eyes and pray for them to kill us quickly.
By some unseen signal, or perhaps sheer coincidence, Anton and Annabelle both struck at once. They had been standing back-to-back, and now they leaped forward at opposite sides of our ring of captors.
I watched in frozen horror as my sister grappled with a vampire twice her size, his meaty hands closing around her waist as he lifted her off the ground and threw her bodily into a tree fifty yards away. She was on her feet and back at my side before I could blink, lashing out with a sharp kick that was punctuated with the sound of ribs crunching as another vampire flew backward into the snow.
“Fight!” she shouted to me, whirling to avoid another attack. “Fight, Stefan!”
I stumbled forward clumsily, a haze settling over my mind. The ring of vampires drifted in and out of focus. I watched Anton sink his fangs into the shoulder of one of his attackers, ripping out a large piece of flesh. He wrapped his thin fingers around the vampire’s throat and, before the other could pull away, twisted his arms to the side with enough force and speed to snap the vampire’s neck.
Venom oozed from his torso as he toppled to the ground, the snow and ice sizzling when the venom burned through it. Anton side-stepped the falling body and turned toward me, shouting a word that was seemed to echo unnaturally, becoming so distorted that I could not make sense of what he was saying. He opened his mouth to shout it again, but just then the haze constricted and my world went black.
When my eyes focused again, I saw hands reaching for the neck of a vampire that cowered before me, his eyes wide and pleading. To my shock, the hands were attached to my body. I did not feel them, and yet I watched as they wrapped around the vampire’s neck, the fingers overlapping as they tightened, causing the vampire’s eyes to bulge. He choked out a last plea for mercy before the hands twisted rapidly, the sound of the crunching bones echoing in the silence that followed.
When I looked up, I saw nothing but bodies. There were limbs torn from torsos that had been shredded to pieces. Heads lolled on broken necks or rolled over the snow, dripping venom from what was left of the neck, mouth and eye sockets. A swatch of black hair fanned over the ice, wide lilac eyes staring upward. Annabelle.
“Anna!” I shouted, feeling returning to my hands as I yanked them off the broken neck of the vampire. I sprang to my feet and whirled around when I felt a hand clasp my shoulder, but I relaxed immediately when my eyes met Anton’s. Together we approached my sister, who was mercifully beginning to sit up, staring around groggily.
“Stefan,” she gasped, her voice sounding like it was coming from underwater. She reached for me with fumbling hands. I helped her stand, watching how she gingerly tested her ankle and hissed, her fingers reaching down to feel the bones that even I could see jutting out at a strange angle. The bones had already started to set in place, her ankle healing rapidly, but I let her lean on me as she surveyed the damage.
“You did well,” she said, and for the briefest instant I imagined that her eyes had