Sanctuary (Forsaken Realms Trilogy) by Lillian Sage Page A

scent...
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     

"Be careful out there Natalia, the wind has a foul taste to it tonight." whispered Tym. 
     
    For several months he'd been complaining about an uneasy feeling to anyone who would listen.
     
    "It's just hunger, Tym has always been superstitious." thought Natalia.
     
    "Don't worry, when have I ever not been careful?" she murmured over her shoulder as she crawled out of the sewer and into the dusky beginning of night.
     
    She was one of the Forsaken; Clanless wanderers forced to live on the fringes of Vampire society. Hunted by the other Kindred, they maintained a desperate life wherever they could.
     
    Natalia's family lived deep within the sewers where they survived on the blood from rats and whatever else found its way deep beneath the ground. 
     
    Lately the rats had grown few, and Natalia needed to venture out to hunt for something more substantial or her family would starve.
     
    Any trip above ground was dangerous, but rumor had it that the Elder Council was in town for a Board meeting tomorrow, so wandering out tonight could prove fatal...yet her family needed food.
     
    As she moved warily down the street, she silently cursed the Medai and their war that had unified the Clans centuries earlier by forging a common cause against the Forsaken.
     
    Natalia was young when the war had started over 400 years ago, but she remembered.  She remembered the night when most of her family were systematically wiped out without mercy. 
     
    She remembered the shame that burned as she fled; knowing that everyone she knew and loved had died to make sure she could escape.
     
    Her "father", the vampire who had originally turned her, was a powerful leader and Natalia had been his heir. Emotion was rare in most Vampires, but the Forsaken had always been a little strange by Vampire standards and Natalia's sire had treated her like a true daughter.
     
    She missed him fiercely.
     
    Now she had a new family made up of a handful of straggling Forsaken who had banded together out of desperation and forged themselves into a sort of family.
     
    They relied on each other and they survived.
     
    There were other Forsaken out there, but no one was really sure exactly how many or where. At most there were only small groups spread throughout the wide world here and there. Most Forsaken lived alone and scratched out their meager lives as best they could.
     
    Natalia didn't want to accept the fact that her own father was partially responsible for the war. 
     
    For centuries he had been gathering other clanless Vampires into a sort of loose knit society that had grown stronger, richer, and more politically powerful...strong enough to begin openly threatening the interests of even the powerful Medai Clan.
     
    But the Medai were not to be threatened... and eventually they acted. 
     
    The Forsaken, as they became known after the culling , had grown too powerful for any one clan to destroy which was why Natalia's father had been caught unawares.
     
    No one dreamed that the Medai could unify all the Clans against the Forsaken because their interests were too widely disparate and their feud's too ancient.
     
    But that is exactly what had happened, and without a whisper of warning.
     
    The only solace that Natalia had was the fact that her father had killed Ruark the head of the Medai Clan, who had been maneuvered into leading the final assault on the Forsaken by the other Clans who eventually came to make up the Elder Council.
     
    But it didn't really matter in the end. Natalia's father was so greatly weakened during his final combat with Ruark that he was quickly dispatched by Medai foot soldiers afterwards.
     
    And anyway, destroying Ruark had only elevated his son Alexander to command, and no Vampire before or since was as brilliant, deadly, and ruthlessly competent as Alexander. 
     
    In the years following the culling, he managed to forge his father's original loose alliance of Clans into the