All the while, the female stood over the contorting, twitching body. . the flickering orange glow illuminating her cruel, beautiful face.

The bitch was smiling.

And that was when she lifted her face to him. As Xcor got a proper view of her visage, at first he refused to believe what he saw. And yet the flames’ glow told no lies.

He was staring at a female version of the Bloodletter. Same black hair and pale skin and pale eyes. Same bone structure. Moreover, the same vengeful light in her near-violent eyes, that rapture and satisfaction at causing death a combination Xcor himself knew all too well.

She was gone a moment later, fading into the fog in a manner that was not as his kind dematerialized, but rather that of a waft of smoke, departing by inches and then feet.

As soon as he was able, Xcor rushed to his father, but there was nothing left to save. . barely anything to bury. Sinking to his knees afore the smoldering bones and the stench, he had a moment of deplorable weakness: Tears sprang to his eyes. The Bloodletter had been a brute, but as his only claimed male offspring, Xcor and he had been close. . Indeed, they were one of another.

«By all that is holy,» Zypher said hoarsely. «Whate’er was that?»

Xcor blinked hard before he glared over his shoulder. «She killed him.»

«Aye. And then some.»

As the band of bastards came to stand about him, one by one, Xcor had to think of what to say, what to do.

Stiffly rising to a stand, he wanted to call for his stallion, but his mouth was too dry to whistle. His father. . long his nemesis and yet his grounding, too, was dead. Dead. And it had happened so fast, too fast.

By a female.

His father, gone.

When he could, he looked at each of the males afore him, the two on horseback, the two on foot, the one to his right. With weighty realization, he knew that whatever destiny lay ahead, it would be shaped by what he did in this moment, right here, right now.