Worth Dying For by Luxie Ryder Page A

overwhelmed him but the first rays of the morning sun breaking over the roof of the police station stopped him. Finding shelter was more important, and not just for his sake. He’d be no good to her dead.
    A door down into the basement at the side of the building opened without resistance. Bane slipped inside, scanning the darkness of the room and finding the perfect spot to rest beside an old generator. Squeezing between the metal housing and the wall, he crawled to the back corner of the recess and sank down into a squat. Grateful that comfort was a luxury his kind could sleep without, he closed his eyes. Again, he stilled his own breathing to lock onto Amber’s heartbeat, coming from somewhere beyond the wall behind him.
    Little disturbed his rest in the hours that followed, save for a short time where he listened as she prayed fervently for help from her god. Bane grimaced while he listened to the good Catholic put her fate in the hands of a mythical being. The sad irony was that people didn’t believe in the vampires or werewolves living and walking amongst them, yet so many of them allowed their lives to be dominated by a blind faith in something they could not see, hear or touch.
    If such a supreme being existed, by whatever name, then Bane would not. No benevolent creator would allow such an atrocity. A loving god would not have stood idly by as Bane’s wife and child were slaughtered by one of Satan’s creatures. A heavenly father would not have condemned him to centuries of endless night filled with an anguish that would never fade.
    Yet he envied her. He longed for her faith and for her innocence—an innocence he would have to shatter very soon in order to make her understand why she needed his help.
    Back in the dark days when his existence revolved around making the world pay for his torment—when he would have hunted good Christians such as Amber—so many of her kind put their hope of salvation in the crucifixes they would clutch to protect themselves from him. Shattering their faith always gave him a perverse satisfaction, maybe even more so than taking their blood. As he let them know that the god they put their trust in would ultimately fail them too.
    In a relatively short time, for an immortal at least, he’d come to find the whole thing distasteful. He’d been about to take another victim—a strong, young slave—when his wife had thrown herself at Bane’s feet. Her pleas for mercy had no effect on his dead heart and extinct compassion and he had pushed her to one side. He would take her too. But the woman’s love for her husband outweighed her fear of death, and she cut her wrists with a jagged blade to draw Bane’s attention away from the man cowering in a corner. Bane had turned to her, coldly fascinated by her willingness to die, and asked her why she was so eager to sacrifice herself to save her husband.
    “I love him more than life,” was all she had said, her eyes wide with fear but holding the vampire’s gaze despite her obvious terror. She had looked over towards her husband, to find him crawling across the floor towards the open doorway of their pitiful shack, trying to escape. Something died in her eyes as she watched the love of her life abandon her to save his own skin. When she turned back to Bane to await her destiny, her face twisted in desolation, he knew anything he could do to her would be a blessed relief from the agony of her husband’s betrayal.
    She made him think of Mary and the way his wife might have begged for his life and that of their unborn child if she’d been given the chance. But the vampire she’d encountered that night had been Katerina. Katerina hadn’t been raised human and didn’t understand such emotions.
    The slave girl had closed her eyes, assuming her fate was sealed. For the first time, Bane fought against the instincts that drove him, knowing if he took her now he would be forever unworthy of Mary’s love. The control he gained over his