Chapter One

Aro Volturi

The smoke was slow to clear, the breeze had died down and so the plumes of thick purple smoke hung in the air scenting it cloyingly. we hadn't believed it could happen, we had grown complacent and arrogant over the years as no one came to challenge us for the leadership of our world.

The Romanians had crawled back into their hole and been silent for centuries and although we kept an eye on them at first other things had slowly taken our attention away. Now we were paying for our sins as our numbers were decimated by overwhelming forces, the cream of the guard destroyed, our home, our citadel, reduced to mere rubble and even the town lay in ruins.

"We have to leave now, while we still can Aro. There is nothing you can do now except survive to fight back another day."

I turned to look at Felix, my oldest and most faithful servant, one arm hanging by no more than a thread was cradled in the other, his face a mixture of emotions. He was correct of course, if we delayed any longer the Romanians would hunt us down and execute us too.

Caius stood, head down, shaking as he had been since hearing of his wife's death at the hands of Stefan's mate who had found a way into our citadel as a companion to our wives. Little had we realised we were allowing a serpent into our midst. Would he survive Athenadora's death? I had no way of knowing, Marcus had but that was largely down to Chelsea's gift tying him to me but Chelsea was dead, one of the smoking pyres that lay outside the town walls. We had escaped by the skin of our teeth, warned just in time by Felix who had seen faces he recognised in the town square. How the Romanians had gotten so close without alerting us was a mystery but we suspected they had spies, double agents, working within the citadel itself. We had hurried down to the old catacombs where forgotten tunnels, once used as sewers, had led outside to freedom and possibly escape, halfway down the mountainside.

Somehow Felix had arranged for two of the newer guards to fetch a car and be waiting for us when we emerged. Marcus, Felix, Sulpicia, Heidi, and I squeezed into it leaving the others to find their own way out of Italy, back to our ancestral home in Greece. I was relieved that we had decided to keep the villa as a sanctuary should any danger befall us and this certainly qualified. It was kept a secret even from the most trusted of our guard, except of course Felix looked after by a human couple who belonged to a family that had passed the task down the generations. It would do in the short term as somewhere to gather whatever of our forces still survived. They knew only to make their way to Piraeus and wait for further instructions.

As we drove away Felix started to make a list of those we had lost in the fighting and with each name I understood more clearly just how difficult it was going to be to reclaim our thrones from Stefan and Vladimir. The greatest loss was the twins, Jane, and Alec, the Romanians had targeted them first knowing how powerful they were. It was overwhelming odds that allowed this, that and the speed and surprise of the attack. Jane couldn't stop so many at once and Alec wasn't given time to build up his gift and as a result was one of the first to fall.

The jet was waiting at the private airfield close to Pisa and we were in the air before the Romanians could reach us. They had killed the pilot as a precaution before the attack but Felix could fly the jet albeit awkwardly one handed, and the crude bomb they had planted on the plane had been discovered by Heidi and thrown out before it could explode, once we were in the air. We filed a false flight plan and flew low enough to evade the air traffic control radar system, landing at a small private and very exclusive airfield in our home country, Greece.

We called it home but none of us had set foot here in centuries. Yet, looking around it seemed initially as if nothing had really changed, the fields, the rolling countryside, the mountains in the distance, but as I turned the encroachment of towns and villages became more apparent.

Sulpicia took my arm,

" Look, Aro, home. We made it, we're safe for now."

"Home? Yes, perhaps. Safe? No, my dear. On the contrary, we will never be safe as long as Stefan and Vladimir are alive. We may have evaded them for the time being but they will never give up looking for us. They can never be sure of their grip on power so long as we are still alive. Caius is gone but Marcus and I still exist and they know we will never stop until we have them warming our throne room with their pyre."

"But Volterra is in ruins, we can never go back there."

"We must. Volterra will rise from the ashes and we will rise with it. I shall build a new citadel on the buried heads of our enemies."

Sulpicia shuddered, she was much more soft-hearted than I but even she must realise our only safety lie in overpowering our enemies and making sure they could never threaten us again.

The villa, our ancestral home, still looked familiar and the couple who had been looking after it were happy enough to be given a year's pay in advance and be sent on their way. They asked no questions and took the car we had rented back down to the rental company. The first thing Felix did was to order Heidi back to Piraeus to collect together those of the guard who appeared and send them on to the villa then he and Marcus went to check on the perimeter of the villa grounds to make sure there were no surprises lurking around before setting off to hunt and heal completely.

Sulpicia took Athenadora inside but I had my doubts that she would stay although, in truth, there was nowhere else for her to go. I wondered too about Marcus, he was no longer under Chelsea's influence so would he stay or would he abandon me now? As if he knew I was thinking about him he strode over and sat beside me on one of the low garden walls.

"The perimeter is clear but as soon as we have some men I will set up a watch, we can't take our safety for granted, even here."

I nodded my thanks and waited sensing he hadn't finished speaking yet.

"Well, what now brother? You no longer have your gifted protégés, no army, no castle to defend. What do you intend doing?"

Was this a way of finding out how I was thinking? Whether I intended to surrender?

"I intend taking our crowns back from the usurpers, would you expect anything less of me?"

He laughed, a genuine laugh full of mirth and I turned to look at him,

"If you had said anything else I would be worried but it won't be easy. The Romanians have the advantages now and we….."

He looked around,

"It appears we have nothing…...except, of course, for each other."

"So, you intend staying with me, Marcus? You don't think a new start might be more advantageous to you?"

"Where else would I go? Did you really think I would leave you? That the only reason I stayed was because I had no choice? You underestimate me, Aro. If I had wanted to I could have broken free of Chelsea a long time ago. I learned to live with your crime, with the murder of my mate. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that if I left then the Volturi would be left to you and Caius and would be extremely unbalanced. You need me to temper your excesses, or at least until now. Now I have a purpose again, a reason to go on. The Romanians must be toppled from our thrones before they destroy not only our world but that of the humans too. They have no idea how to live in the shadows, their arrogance will have them turning the humans into cattle, the world will be swimming in blood and humans and vampires will be at open war."

I hadn't really thought that far ahead but he was right of course. When the Romanians had ruled our kind centuries ago there had been terrible wars, the humans hunting the blood drinking monsters who hunted them and vampire fighting vampire for the best hunting grounds. Our kind had come close to extinction. This time, Stefan and Vladimir would ensure they had control over all others on the planet, human and vampire alike, and everything that mattered to us, art, literature, music, would all be destroyed as they ransacked cities and towns spreading death and destruction as they took control of everything.

"You really think they will take the same approach that lost them the thrones before?"

"I guarantee it, but this time, they will be more ruthless and act far more quickly. You saw how they blitzed us, and that was just a beginning."