What was that nature? No one ever told her. It was something they said each had to learn on their own. She hugged her stomach and turned back to the cackling lord and the mesmerized, dying Ash. Oh how she loved him, always had loved him, loved his child, though a seedling, already spiritually strong, glowing from within, telling her ... telling her....

A soft, slow smile appeared as she heard the whisper. She saw Darth in a fresh way. She saw him as the tormented being he was, as the wretched man who gave up his soul for the love of a woman who ended up hating him. She knew the totality of his crimes against her, against her mother, against probably countless people throughout his life. She knew if she didn't obey the whispers of her unborn child, Darth' s shadows would grow and consume more and more of the light.

With quiet steps she went to him, stood before him.

He sensed something. The laughter stopped.

She lifted up her arms and hugged him gently. "I forgive you, Lord Darth. And, the One, He loves you

still."

It was as if she had punctured him with a blazing dagger. His screech ricocheted off the walls. He stumbled backwards, holding his head. Light began to pour out of his eyes, out of his fingers, out of his heart. He screamed again and again, each step taking him further from her. His body began to crackle, light streamed from those cracks. It seemed to go on endlessly.

Candles and torches sprang to life. Shadows began to retreat. Spider-wolves poured out of nooks and crevices, chambers and dungeons, howling like crazed beasts as they jumped into the Well. Darth continued to shriek. Pieces of his body dropped and disintegrated. Until finally, with a last wail, what remained of him leapt into the Well.

The portrait of Violet's mother burst into flames, and Ash fell from the chair. Violet went to him, cradledhim, cooed softly. "It's over, my love."

Months later, Violet's laughter chimed through the hall just outside the dining room as she studied Ash's frills and velvet attire. "Ash, what are you wearing?"

He pointed to Daniore, who managed to escape the spider-wolves, but still suffered a limp from the ordeal. "I made him dress like this for an interview with my father. He told me if I dressed like this for at least one meal, he won't tell anyone I cheated the Seraglio out of their coin."

Violet wrapped her arm around Ash's waist. "You look adorable. I think it will be all the new rage.""My father will think I've gone court happy.""Well, we have lived here since...." She paused, wet her lip and swallowed. Every now and then, her mind drifted, evidence that the ordeal with Darth still haunted her. "We have lived here a while now, so I guess he would be right."

"You okay, love?"

"Aye," she whispered, and then more forcefully, "your father might not be after I finish my discourse on destroying the Seraglio and coming up with a more honorable way of uniting people in marriage."

"Oh, another discourse," Daniore said and took a step backward. "I don't think I'm that hungry, after all.

I mean the last one about girls not being sold to the Seraglio gave the King a choking fit."

"He survived," Violet said calmly.

"Aye, it was the rest of us that had to hear his outbursts for the next month on how I chose the only untrained la.s.s the Seraglio every produced."

"And aren't you just proud of that fact?" Violet asked, smiling."So proud, love, I'm going to the pub with Daniore for a nice roasted--""Oh no you don't." Violet said, pushing them both ahead of her. "The father of the future Queen should not dawdle in pubs. Neither should the child's sun-father."

"But," they both said in unison, and then in complete shock, "Queen?"

"Aye, it is a girl I carry and didn't your father recently sign that contract saying your firstborn shall rule?""Um, aye.""Well, it didn't mention the gender, you know."Again, Violet's laugh pealed out as she watched horror give way to grins on the faces of her two favorite men.

"Just promise me, love, that I'm not around when you tell the king about the firstborn's gender."

"I want in on that promise," piped Daniore.

Brushing past the two of them, she rolled her eyes heavenwards and muttered. "Chickens, both of you."

With a fresh bout of laughter rolling through the air, she composed herself and entered the dining room,

rubbing the slight swell that contained her child.

Miles away, deep in the darkest shadows of a dismal manor, Amlet rubbed her own unborn's nest.

The End.

Blackthorne's Light.

by Marie Harte.

Prologue.

With a husky groan the shadowed figure continued to feed, his mouth moving hungrily over the smooth white neck of the limp woman he held tightly in his arms, his body primally thrusting into hers, hungry and ecstatic to feed on both her blood and her s.e.xual essence.

He groaned as he sucked at her neck, his teeth keeping her veins open as his tongue laved her lifesblood like cream. His hard body drew moans and gasps of delight from her, even though she surely knew she would not survive this night. Her red hair swung like a bloodied scarf from her wan features, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy, her lips pale and trembling under the constant pleasure-pain of his touch.

And as he climaxed, drenching her womb with his fiery pa.s.sion, he drained the last drop of bright red blood from her body as she found her own fulfillment. He released her and watched as the sated woman cried out for more, needing his body in hers like a starved addict. But he could only watch as her body suddenly lost its golden glow of life and faded under the inky blackness of her dark soul.

Like a flickering light, he watched as she pa.s.sed into the world beyond, where those better than he would judge her. His eyes darkened in pain but not regret. He knew his course in this world, and only prayed he would gain enough redemption to save himself such misery in the next life.

Chapter One.

"Ms. Vansant? This is what you wanted, right?" the young woman asked in a husky voice as she cracked her gum. She handed Adara a leaflet showcasing the hottest club in town.

Adara glanced at the page and smiled, then handed the desperate young woman a twenty and left the small p.o.r.n shop where she'd been doing some of her research. Now won't this make a fantastic article, she thought to herself as she narrowly avoided tripping over a homeless man lying on the sidewalk.

She tossed a bill out of her pocket to him with a small shake of her head and quickly moved out of this section of town. She didn't exactly scorn the nightlife, but anyone stupid enough to foray around this area of Rathan after dark was begging for trouble.

She glanced up at the glimmering moon, taken with the dark blue blanket of sky fading to black, the indigo clouds racing with the wind in the chill October air. Shaken out of her contemplation of the night sky by a few lewd propositions, Adara quickly hopped into her car and drove towards her home. She had enough material to start this new journalistic endeavor and felt a strange excitement. She had a feeling that this story would definitely cap all the others.

As Adara pa.s.sed several better neighborhoods, she sighed at the disregard that had caused the western part of Rathan to fall to shambles. A good-sized suburb just north of Philadelphia, Rathan had both its good and bad sections of town.

Adara lived in the nice section, the part of town where the middle-cla.s.s lived comfortably and longed to join the wealthy in Society Hill. Unfortunately, layoffs and business closings had contributed to the neglected western half of town, the half that lately had been attracting a very dark element.

She pursed her lips as she drove down her street, a quiet neighborhood of smaller houses catering to singles and newly married couples. Adara left her car and unlocked her front door, bitterly aware that no one awaited her return.

She grabbed the mail that had collected on the ground under her mail slot and shuffled through the bills and advertis.e.m.e.nts with a huff.

"Nothing," she told her dark haired reflection in the mirror above a small wall table. She tossed the mail on the table, replayed her answering machine and managed a small grin at Maria's message.

"Your article idea seems interesting. Go for it," her editor's voice grumbled. "But let me know if you find anything out there that leads to better o.r.g.a.s.ms. Quite frankly, I'm getting tired of Herb."

Maria and Herb had been married for over twenty years, and happily so, Adara thought enviously. Yet it was Maria's quirky sense of humor and candid speech that had made her an instant friend. Maria had taken to Adara upon first meeting her and the business they did together blossomed as quickly as their friendship. Maria edited for Chic Ventures, a racy woman's magazine that had begun undertaking more serious topics of late.

Maria, however, maintained that as long as Chic Ventures continued to talk about s.e.x, s.e.x, and more s.e.x, the magazine would never go out of print.

Adara threw a frozen dinner into the microwave and tossed her satchel on the kitchen counter. As she waited for the meal to cook, she eyed the newspaper article that had sparked the interest for her next story. She read again the news that a fourth woman had turned up missing in the past two weeks, making that now sixteen women in the last four months in the lower southeastern corner of Pennsylvania that had disappeared.

Apparently the few ties the women had were that all of them were quite beautiful, and none of them were particularly well-liked or behaved in life. Several of the lewd women, some prost.i.tutes, drug users and a few alleged criminals had mysteriously vanished, no trace of their bodies ever found. The author of the article had nicknamed the case The Evils of Beauty, and the police had no leads on the crimes.

The microwave beeped and Adara grabbed the hot tray with a muttered curse. She ate hungrily, resolving tomorrow not to skip lunch and settled down at the table. She had tossed the idea around in her head several times. Most of these missing women had been speculated to visit the seedier side of life. Since Adara and most of the women she knew rarely ventured into the dark worlds of s.e.x and eroticism, she thought she might generate a bit of interest in the subject with her article.

Good girls weren't supposed to engage in s.e.x without a relationship presumably leading to marriage. Adara smiled grimly to herself. But then, good girls didn't always get Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome all wrapped up with marriage in a bow. Sometimes Mr. Handsome slept with your best friend. Sometimes his complaints about boring s.e.x with his fiancee sounded because he was too tired from a previous fling with said best friend earlier that day.

Adara swore again just thinking about how blind she'd been. Today she felt more than glad that she'd found out about Marci and James's defection. Her s.e.x life hadn't been all that great with James but she had thought, naively, that with time they would grow closer.

She wondered again about her article. Maybe the 'bad girls' in life had it right. They played by their own rules and didn't get hurt as much, well, with the exception of the missing women. But, she thought wryly, it's not as if she planned on robbing or killing anyone. And who was to say that enjoying one's body was a bad thing anyways? She grabbed her notebook out of her bag off the counter and stared again at the leaflet she'd been handed.

She had a list of several well-known nightclubs but this one, she tapped the red paper, this one had a reputation all its own. Known for its Goth-dressing patrons, vampire hopefuls and no-holds-barred s.e.xual dalliances both in the bar and in the back rooms behind it, Vampland had become the new underground hot spot for singles wanting sizzling, steamy s.e.x and few strings attached.

Adara nodded. Yes. This would definitely be a piece that drove her readers wild. After all, it took a lot of guts and very little fear to enter into a world where anything was allowed.

Trey surveyed the moon outside his window and smiled, his teeth bright and white as he grinned in appreciation of the clear October night sky. He didn't grin much lately, his job wearing on his weary mind and soul. He figured the least he could do to lighten his burdens would be to appreciate the beauty of this world.

He sighed and sat back in his office, watching through several monitors the gyrating bodies fleshed out on the dance floor like cattle being led to the slaughter. A knock at the door sounded and he called out for John to enter.

His young manager smiled and nodded towards the large monitor in the wall Trey had been studying.

"Isn't it great, boss? I mean, Trey, this place is jumping with people! Ever since you introduced this new Goth theme, we've been all over the map. In fact," he leaned towards Trey, his blue eyes sparkling with mischief, "We've got several more keys awaiting your interest," John said and threw them down on Trey' s desk.

Trey merely sighed and shook his head. "Give them back or keep them, I don't care which." He gestured for John to grab them.

John merely shook his head as he eyed his boss in confusion. At twenty-eight, John considered himself a prime catch. He had an athlete's build, stood over six-two and had a handsome face to match his charm and keen wit. He never suffered for female companionship, but Trey? Man, he'd never seen a guy get more offers for s.e.x than his boss. And Trey never seemed to accept them.

He knew the guy had to be getting s.e.x from somewhere, but Trey was as mysterious about his s.e.x life as he was about his comings and goings. John covertly studied the man's face as Trey stared into the monitor overlooking his bar.

He looked like he belonged in this place, John thought, a lot more than John did with his boy-next-door good looks. John's last date had said that his boss reminded her of a vampire with his dark hair, black eyes and white skin. But as John studied him, he thought Trey's skin looked more golden than white, his eyes more brown than black.

Trey glanced over at him with a quizzical expression and John flushed, grinning as he grabbed the keys and left. Not only did Trey have a great face that the women loved to watch, but he also had a frame that most guys labored at the gym to build. And John knew Trey didn't work out. He didn't need to. Good genes, he thought with a shrug and rejoined the madness around him.

Trey waited until John had departed down the stairs before he clutched at his head and sunk into the bleak darkness that threatened to overwhelm him did he not heed its call. He searched within himself looking for peace, but found another awaited him. He felt revulsion that he looked forward to the task and berated himself for falling deeper into the blackness that awaited his soul. Trey looked again at the monitor before him, seeing now what he hadn't wanted to see earlier.

A woman in the corner danced with several friends, her long blond hair flying around her as she bounced to the music. Hungrily, he noted her slim body with full b.r.e.a.s.t.s bared almost fully through the low dress that she wore. She didn't have too much height and he noticed that though she danced with the others, the black aura that engulfed her didn't drift to anyone else but stayed directly over her head.

The night pa.s.sed rather swiftly for him as he waited for her to leave. She stayed until the very end and he smiled grimly, glad at least that his club had given her vast entertainment before she had to meet her end.

He locked himself in his office and separated himself from his flesh, moving his spirit through the air on wings of purpose. He hovered over her, attracted to the darkness of her soul. He watched her as she left with one of the men dancing with her. Then Trey moved back with the couple to an apartment to study the blond woman.

Once inside the apartment, she immediately moved in on the man, teasing him with her body, not the least surprised or hurt when he slapped her harshly and pushed her around, looking as he if were taking her by force.

He watched as the man ripped her clothing from her body and plunged into her with haste, his frenzy further exciting the woman. Then he watched as she waited for the right moment.

The minute the man climaxed, she brought a large rock down upon his head with a solid thump. Then she kicked him off of her, running a finger over his b.l.o.o.d.y head and licking it with a shudder than made Trey hungry to take her now.

The woman moved quickly through the house, grabbing anything she deemed of value, finally stripping the unconscious man of his wallet and watch. She straightened her clothing, put a new shirt on that she slipped out of her bag, and left the house. She walked down the street and caught a cab. Trey followed her to the address, made a note and returned to his body.

Chapter Two.