Ruler [Blood Magic, Book 3]

Prologue

"Your Majesty, we can't ignore this any longer. This is the third attempt on your life in as many weeks."

"You speak as if I don't know that," the Nosferatu king grunted, spearing Boras, his chief of security, with a look of unadulterated annoyance. His eyes flared bright and angry within their dark, recessed sockets, like twin red giants churning in the night sky. Yet Boras neither hunched nor flinched under the heavy stare.

"You're not the one with the..." The king's voice drifted off as he tilted his impossibly pale face down at his arm, which was completely obscured by his crimson bone-lined robe, silently completing his thought. Neither vampire needed to see the cast to know what he was referring to. Two hours earlier they had watched it being set in the infirmary, while His Majesty debriefed them on the latest attack. The arm had been broken in two places, right before the king broke his attacker in twice as many.

None of the assassins - would-be usurpers, each and every one of them - ever lived to tell of their failure, yet they kept coming. "Clockwork suicide," was the term Arthos, the king's most trusted advisor, had coined after the second attack. Now the broken arm would only give the next assailant hope, and launch the desperate throne dreams of who knows how many more. The king's youth, as it turned out, brought with it an added liability: time had not yet entirely replaced teenage impetuousness with reason, and the violence of the transition and the hunger that stalked like a tireless beast in its wake still clouded His Majesty's perception, as it did the minds of all the freshly turned Nosferatu. Making his rule more precarious was the fact that until the king produced an heir, the royal crown would be donned by whoever felled him. It was a rare opportunity, and one that could see a new bloodline rise to rule, so from arena fighters to topside reconnaissance experts, they tried. And eventually one would succeed. Arthos knew it was a simple matter of time and statistics. Something needed to be done.

All around them order was crumbling - every hour seemed to bring more traitors, more spies, new threats - and over the last couple of days, Arthos had watched the king grow more and more withdrawn, and more obsessively preoccupied with whether he'd survive to tell of his own failure. So much so, that, incredibly, it was distracting him from his other obsessions.

"The stocks are overflowing with conspirators; we've had to lock up the last few with the cattle," Boras reported. "I don't think I need to tell you this situation is untenable. We're going to have riots in addition to the mutiny if we don't rein in this dissent. "

Arthos nodded, confirming what he and Boras were certain the king already knew. Very little went on within the compound's walls that His Majesty did not have some inkling of, conspiracies and potential political coups included, which only made the frequency of the attempts on his life that much more troubling. With this insider information, he should have been able to avoid them entirely, but he almost seemed to be seeking his aggressors out, effectively saying, "Come at me. I dare you."

Neither Boras nor Arthos knew where he attained his intel; like his father before him, this king had secrets and protected them religiously, and both knew better than to pry for details. A Nosferatu king's power was absolute, and so were the punishments for impropriety. The throne room had seen its share of bloodshed at the hands of this king, as well as those who came before him. It was second only to the spectacle of the arena.

"That must be an exquisite kind of torture," the king said, taking in what Boras just told him. He leaned back against the leather upholstery of his throne, tanned from human skin decades before his birth, and the tiniest hint of a smirk danced across his face. "Prisoner rations and all." The king's expression turned serious again as he idly stroked the polished cranium of the skull affixed to the end of the throne's armrest with his right hand, as if it were a crystal ball and he was cajoling it for a peek into his future. "Perhaps some executions would quell the uprising. We could declare it a public holiday and pit the traitors against each other in fights to the death in the arena; offer their cattle up in a lottery for the loyalists."