Excerpt of Born In Chains by Caris Roane

Chained to a cavern wall, Adrien hung forward from his
shackles, arms shaking. The short length of the wrought iron
loops prevented him from falling to his knees, but after
hours of torture, he couldn’t stand up straight and his
shoulder joints were loose and screaming.

The torturers had come and gone.

Through his pain, he heard his half-brothers calling to him,
shouting his name, forcing him to concentrate.

He tried. But something else snagged him. The power that
always hovered just at the edge of consciousness, the power
of the Ancestrals that he rejected every day of his life,
whispered to him, She’s here.

The vision came over him and his heart seized. He could
feel the future in his bones as the images pressed in on
him, of a beautiful woman with soft highlights in her light
brown hair, gold earrings sparkling and dangling past her
chin, a warm smile on her lips. She wore a deep burgundy
velvet gown, the color of blood, trimmed with what looked
like gold crystals over a bodice that revealed a deep line
of cleavage. Her shoulders, arms and back were bare. And
he felt something for her, something that called to his
vampire soul, something that made him strain against his
manacles.

He needed to get to her, to be with her, to keep her safe.

The vision rolled.

Let’s go, she said. She extended her hand to him. He took
it but just as he felt the softness of her palm and fingers,
the vision ended, dissipating like dust in the wind.

But not the sensations left behind, the need he felt to be
with her, to get to her. He strained harder in his chains,
hurting himself all over again.
Suddenly, his stomach cramped and his body seized. He cried
out in agony. He heard his brothers shouting at him but he
couldn’t respond.
The vision of the woman had ignited his blood-hunger.

Getting just enough blood while chained up had been another
form of torture. He and his imprisoned brothers suffered
the agonies of blood hunger, the cramps, the saliva that
thickened in his mouth, the dreams during the daylight hours
of piercing a vein.

If some act of fortune didn’t break in his direction soon,
blood madness would follow.

“Adrien, talk to us. Adrien.”

He recognized the voice. Lucian, his oldest half-brother,
the one who carried the sins-of-the-father in his soul. He’d
been the one to break them out of their father’s compound,
leading them into a new life of shedding years of
intolerable pain and channeling all their ensuing rage into
fierce fighting skills. They’d become peacekeepers in their
world.

“Adrien, come back to us, brother.” Marius this time.

The pain ratcheted up, from both deep bruises and surface
cuts. He’d been whipped, then beaten with the stick end.
He wasn’t sure which hurt worse.

“Adrien, answer us.” Lucian again.

He tried to speak, but his throat felt washed with fire. In
the middle of everything, he’d shouted his pain and his rage.

Fortunately, his blood-hunger began to dissipate and he
opened his eyes. Manmade dry-stone walls separated him from
his two brothers, so that they were lined up on one side of
the cavern like horses in stalls.

“Adrien?”

“I’m here.” His voice was barely a whisper.

But vampires had excellent hearing, so Lucian and Marius
shouted their joy that he was still alive. They’d been in
this Himalayan hellhole for the past year, sent here by the
Council of Ancestrals, now ruled by Daniel Briggs, the
monster who had chained them up personally, adding a touch
of his preternatural power to the manacles so none of them
could escape.

Lucian called to him again. “Adrien, repeat the vows.”

The vows. Yes, the vows had held them together all these
centuries, from the time of their escape from the monster’s
experiments on his young.
Adrien tried to join in but only his lips moved. He
couldn’t make the sound come out.

“In times of chaos, what feeds the will?” Lucian shouted
the words.

“Blood!” His brother’s voice resounded through the cavern,
catching Adrien’s soul and easing his pain.

“What feeds us in the midst of destruction?” Lucian once more.

“Blood!” Marius cried.

“Throughout our lives, what serves the body?”

“Blood.”

“Blood,” Adrien whispered, trying to do his part, but a
thousand whip marks all over his body still trapped his voice.

Pain. So much pain.

His turn to recover today. They’d each been put under the
whip once a week, beaten and sliced up repeatedly.
Sometimes the women who performed the torture brought clubs
and battle chains just to mix things up.

“Adrien, do you hear me?” Lucian called out strong and loud.
“Give the response. We’re waiting for you.”

Adrien blinked back the stinging sweat that dripped into one
of the cuts on his cheek. His dark hair hung in damp clumps
in front of him. The humid air, the torture and his sweat
created a cloud of wet stink and pain. Hanging as he was,
his shoulders ached as though fire burned in each core. He
needed to draw himself back, but he could barely move.

“Adrien,” Lucian called out again, his voice sharp and
commanding. “Give the ritual response. Now.”

“Blood,” Adrien said, the word like a soft scratch against
wood, a mere hush in the dark vaulted cavern. A metallic
taste filled Adrien’s mouth.
He spit on the floor and tried again. “Blood.” Still a
hoarse whisper. “Blood.” Louder. “Blood.”

He repeated the word until his vocal chords decided to
function again and now he shouted into the jagged stone walls.

He kept shouting until his brothers joined him. “Blood,
blood, blood.”

His strength returned slowly until at last he reached back
and grabbed the heavy links of black wrought iron. He drew
himself upright, his cut feet bearing his weight and causing
a new round of agony. But at least his arms weren’t
threatening to pop out of their sockets. He hooked his
elbow in the slack loop of the chain and laid his head down
on his arm, the only way he could sleep.

Yes, sleep was what he needed but just as he might have
drifted off, his thoughts snagged on Daniel and the Council
he ruled, that had allowed him to send Adrien and his
brothers, to the vampire prison in the Himalayas.

Over the past two years, Daniel had ripped the vampire world
apart, removing authority from the five smaller, local
courts and transferring it to the weak-willed, poorly
governed Council of Ancestrals. He was growing in wealth in
a heinous, soulless manner, by dispossessing well-to-do
vampires of their fortunes and selling off extensive mineral
rights to a human named Harris Kiernan, a typical man of his
species, full of greed and little else.

Adrien wanted both Kiernan and Daniel dead so that they
could do no more harm against the vampire world. But mostly,
he wanted Daniel dead, his body burned, bones ground to
dust, and every last element salted.

He nodded against the chains, his body aching head to toe.
So help him God, yes, he’d see Daniel dead.

And with his determination shored up once more, he fell asleep.