by Bella Klaus
Pressing my lips together, I exhaled a ragged breath through my nostrils, not wanting to let her see my relief. Right now, I relished being underestimated as a stupid Neutral. Let her think I’d stumbled across a magical object and had activated it by accident.
Even though the adrenaline coursing through my veins had caused me to forget everything Aunt Arianna had suggested, this part of her plan might save us all from execution.
Captain Zella stepped back and flicked her head in my direction. The enforcer who had found the firestone bracelet wrapped his shadows around the stone and pulled them off my wrist.
“How could anyone have missed an item of such magical significance?” The captain turned her gaze to a small enforcer hovering by the door. “Didn’t you inspect the girl while she was unconscious?”
“I did,” the enforcer replied in a timid voice. “There wasn’t any sign of a bracelet.”
She was a blonde-haired woman a couple of years older than me. She didn’t have the overwhelming beauty of a faerie or a vampire, and nothing about her magic said she was a shifter. Not all enforcers were shadow mages like Captain Zella and the four restraining me. Some were witches and others shifters.
Captain Zella turned her gaze back to the male enforcer, who ran his device over my skin. This time, the object didn’t so much as beep.
“She’s clean, Captain.”
“Put her in another cell.”
“And the order to arrest the aunt?” asked the young enforcer at the door.
Captain Zella rubbed her temples. “Bring her in for questioning.”
The shadows around me loosened, and I dropped onto my hands and knees. One of the enforcers grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shoved me in the cell on Masood’s left. I turned around and placed my hands on the gap between its stone walls, already feeling the invisible barrier of magic.
My shoulders sagged, and I leaned against the magical barrier, watching the enforcers head toward the exit. With their dark glares now turned away from me, I could finally remember Aunt Arianna’s instructions.
“Captain Zella?” I asked.
She glared at me over her shoulder. “What?”
“May I see Valentine?”
“He’s dead.”
“If you give me back that bracelet, I might be able to heal him.”
Her brows rose, and she walked toward me with her hands curled into fists. “You admit to being in possession of firestone?”
I flinched, placing a hand over my chest. What was wrong with me today? I couldn’t even keep my lies straight. Something hard pressed against my breastbone, giving me another idea.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “After what happened, I’d give anything to see him once more.”
Captain Zella snorted. “After your execution, you’ll have all eternity to beg for his forgiveness.”
She strolled out of the room, leaving me staring at her back.
“Psst,” said Masood. “Was that true?”
“What?”
“Buying a firestone bracelet from a peddler?”
“Yes.”
He barked a laugh. “It was a lie.”
I shook my head and reached into the neckline of my prison uniform. The bracelet wasn’t the only thing my magical flare had unearthed. When Valentine had returned my engagement ring and asked me to wear it around my neck, I hadn’t imagined it would also soak into my body.
Wrapping my fingers around the diamond of Valentine’s engagement ring, I inhaled rapid, excited breaths.
If what Valentine had said about the stone being enchanted with calling magic was true, then I might be able to use my power to find him. Powerful immortals didn’t always use the stones to summon their slaves. Sometimes, the slaves could use the stone to appear before their masters.
For example, a slave sent across the Supernatural World to perform an urgent task might be able to inform their master that they had completed it, and have the master return them in an instant.
I glanced down at a cut on my arm and dipped the ring into the exposed blood. Even though I couldn’t harness my own magic, Neutral blood held power, and Istabelle had spent the best part of three years teaching me how to manipulate the magic of crystals.
With the right stone and the right amount of concentration, I could access memories, protect myself from psychic attacks, attract love, and heal others. But now, all I had was a full body of blood and a gut full of determination. Instead of pushing the magic out of my body the way we had practiced at the academy with grovers, I held it inside and focused on my heart.
Valentine’s face appeared in my mind’s eye. Not the cruel, exasperated expressions he had pulled on the palace steps or the arrogant smirks from when he had approached me in London.
I saw the real Valentine. The man who had risked everything to smuggle out a girl with forbidden power, the king willing to give up his life so that a Neutral could continue living.
Emotion swirled in my chest, and tears stung my eyes. I focused on the love I’d held for Valentine that I couldn’t suppress, even after three years of trying. It had been as futile as trying not to love myself. Valentine was in my heart, my veins, my soul. He had shaped my personality, transforming me from someone who hated being a Neutral to someone who found things to love about myself.
I loved Valentine without reservation, and I needed to be at his side. Now.
Cool air swirled through my hair, and bright light from the ceiling stopped streaming through my eyelids. I inhaled a breath, filling my nostrils with the faint scent of mildew, burned plastic, and cold, wet stone.
My eyes snapped open. I stood within what appeared to be a room within a museum with floors of gray marble, arched alcoves and dozens of raised plinths, each with lifelike statues of people lying with their arms crossed over their chests.
A breath caught in the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure if it was the call stone or my fire magic or both, but I was sure as hell glad to have escaped the prison’s wards.
I walked around the room’s perimeter, taking in mosaics, stone statues, frescoes that belonged in places like the Sistine Chapel. Was this where they were keeping Valentine?
Flaming torches stood within iron sconces, illuminating a rectangular space of about a hundred by fifty feet. The silence in the room was so absolute that it muffled my footsteps. The diamond call stone wouldn’t have taken me here for no reason, so where was he?
At the furthest corner of the room was a rectangular plinth that held the statue of a dark-skinned man whose hair seemed to meld with the shadows. Somehow, the artist had even captured his sweeping black lashes. I placed a hand on its cheek, and flesh yielded under my fingertips.
Cold shock barreled through my gut. I staggered back toward the nearest wall sconce and stared down at my fingers. That hadn’t been a statue—it had been a vampire, and what I thought was stone was a layer of dust over his face.
My heartbeat accelerated, and I clenched my teeth. Recent events had addled my brain. This was no museum. It was a bloody mausoleum. All the time I spent looking for Valentine, and I’d probably walked past him.
I jogged around the plinths, giving each devastatingly beautiful vampire a glance before moving on to the next. They weren’t exactly corpses—these were ancients whose souls had transcended to other realms. Former kings and queens and princes and princesses—Valentine’s ancestors from the Royal House of Sargon. At any time, they could travel back to their bodies and take their positions within vampire society.
After stumbling past a dark-haired woman with Valentine’s cupid’s bow lips, I found him—the only body that looked like a corpse. Every molecule of air escaped my lungs in a stunned breath, and I clapped a hand over my mouth.
The color had leached from his skin, leaving a grayish pallor completely devoid of vitality. I lowered a trembling hand to his cheek, finding it cold and hard, rather than the tepid softness of his darker-skinned ancestor.
A sob caught in the back of my throat. He wa
s really dead and not transcended. His soul had separated from his body and moved on. I swept my gaze down his form, over a tailored black jacket with a matching shirt and a tie so dark that it reflected only the barest of light.
“Valentine,” I whispered. “Please, forgive me.”
Aunt Arianna’s voice drifted back to the forefront of my memory. I wasn’t just a wielder of fire. I had phoenix flames. Flames that could burn him to ashes and make him arise alive and renewed.
“Sorry about this.” I placed a hand over his heart, and my fingernails brushed against something hard and metallic. My brows deepened into a frown. “What on earth is that?”
My throat dried. If this was a plaque or a vampire equivalent of a gravestone, burning it in my fire might mingle these foreign bodies with his new, awakened form. Whispering another apology, I unfastened the buttons of his shirt, exposing his dull flesh.
A raised incision spread down his center, from his collarbone to the end of his breastbone, held together by rough stitches. Protruding from the middle of his chest was a metal stake with a flattened cap the diameter of a teacup.
“No,” I cried.
I remembered something I had read in Istabelle’s library—the passage I’d read about preternatural vampires and putrefying hearts. Now that I knew that a fire user like Kresnik could revive a corpse with his magic, the information I’d read seemed like superstitious garbage.
They had violated Valentine’s body for nothing. They’d not only removed his heart but secured him to the stone plinth, thinking that would stop him from rising as a preternatural. I ran my fingers down his belly, his arms, his legs, searching for more of those terrible stakes and found one at each ankle.
My chest tightened, as did the muscles of my throat. My sinuses burned with a mix of grief and rage. Tears spilled down my cheeks, soaking into the fabric of his pants.
“How could they do this to you?” I sobbed. “Valentine, I’m so sorry.”
A voice in my head told me that now was not the time to fall apart. Valentine needed me, and crying over his desecrated corpse wouldn’t regenerate his body or bring him back from the afterlife.
With a deep breath, I pushed down those feelings into the pit of my belly and readied myself.
“This might hurt.” I wrapped my fingers around one of the stakes on his ankles and pulled.
Nothing happened.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered. Whoever fixed him to this lump of stone must have had the strength of a vampire.
The scraping of stone on stone echoed across the mausoleum’s walls, and panic imploded through my chest. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled away from Valentine’s raised plinth.
“There’s no way he is ever going to rise from the dead,” said a haughty male voice. “Not after we took all those precautions.”
“One can never be sure with preternaturals,” muttered another voice. “It’s not like anyone who fought Father lived to report back how they managed to defeat him.”
“I still think we should have cremated Valentine,” a third voice added. “He would rather be annihilated than rise as one of those monsters.”
“Perhaps we should,” said the second voice. “It’s better that his soul roams free than becomes trapped in an abomination.”
I held my breath, silently pleading with the men to return to the palace and leave Valentine alone. These were his brothers, who hadn’t been at the Supernatural Council meeting because they’d been guarding his corpse.
The three princes continued to argue about whether it was right to keep Valentine in this terrible state, and they gathered around his body.
“You see his clothes?” said the second voice. I peered around the corner to find it belonged to Ferdinand, Valentine’s red-haired brother. “He’s trying to free himself.”
A palpitation squeezed my heart. In a moment, they’d work out what I’d done and find me hiding on the other side of the plinth.
“No, he isn’t,” the first voice said. It was Constantine, Valentine’s blond-haired brother. “Someone probably came inside and became curious.”
“So they undressed the King of the Vampires, leaving him in this disheveled state?” asked Lazarus. He was the brother with mahogany hair several shades lighter than Valentine’s. “I told you to encase him in a sarcophagus.”
As the argument continued, I exhaled a long breath but not before I realized that only three of Valentine’s brothers were here. What happened to the fourth? If he hadn’t been at the Supernatural Council and wasn’t here guarding the mausoleum, where on earth was he and what was he doing?
“You three are idiots,” said the fourth voice, which belonged to Sylvester. He was the oldest of Valentine’s younger brothers with hair the exact shade of silver coins. “Why on earth would you argue over the state of a corpse, in the presence of something that smells so delicious?”
Every ounce of blood trickled down from my face and settled into my frantic heart.
The curse.
The blood lure.
I was still under the influence of the curse that had caused Valentine to set upon me like a rabid leech. Now, I was trapped in a mausoleum with four vampires who not only hated me for killing their brother but likely couldn’t resist my blood.
“We can smell it, too,” Constantine snapped.
“Unlike you, I prefer to let my wine breathe,” said Ferdinand.
Lazarus chuckled, although the sound contained more cruelty than mirth. “We wanted her to calm before we began the hunt.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I crouched behind the stone plinth, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to think about anything else but the four vampires who had caught my scent. Four vampires who had two compelling reasons to murder me in this mausoleum and leave my bones to rot.
Not only did they think I had killed their older brother and king, the wretched curse still snaking around my leg made my blood irresistible to their kind.
“Where are you?” Constantine whispered, his voice grating along my nerve endings.
Lazarus chuckled, the sound low and deep. “It’s not exactly going to tell you its location.”
“I don’t know about you, but I intend to get the first bite,” said Ferdinand.
Placing a hand over my mouth, I tried to muffle my ragged breaths. Maybe if I got my fire to flare, it might deter them the way it did when I successfully fought off Valentine the first two times.
Regret washed over me like a tidal wave. All that time in the cell, I’d been so focused on getting out when I should have spared a thought for the curse. Now, I was going to die at the fangs of Valentine’s brothers.
Raised voices echoed across the room as the brothers talked about my enticing scent and what they would do to me when they found where I was hiding.
My pulse pounded so loud, it muffled some of their more gruesome suggestions and gave me the courage to glance over my shoulder. Six feet away stood a statue of a woman wearing a medieval-style gown with her arms outstretched. She stood within one of the mausoleum’s many arched alcoves on a four-foot-high podium.
I bit down on my lip. That would be a better hiding place than behind this stone plinth. Glancing from left to right, I found Constantine and Lazarus inspecting a sarcophagus with their backs turned to me.
With all the stealth I could muster, I crawled on my hands and knees to the statue and squeezed myself into the narrow spot behind the alcove’s back wall and its stone podium.
A gust of wind swirled through the mausoleum, skimming my hiding place. I froze, not knowing what effect it would have on the brothers hunting me.
“Did you smell that?” asked Ferdinand.
“It just scuttled out through the door,” replied Constantine.
Lazarus’ gleeful laugh filled the mausoleum. “Then the hunt is on.”
Loud footsteps echoed across the vast space as the brothers jogged toward the exit. I clenched my teeth. They were drawing out the hunt, running slowly on
purpose to give their supposed prey time to escape. If they wanted, a mature vampire could catch even the fastest cheetah.
The stone door scraped across the floor and slammed shut with a resounding thud. I leaned against the stone, exhaling the longest breath and thanking every deity imaginable for that miraculous gust of wind.
Maybe this time, I should gather my flames before stepping out of my hiding place? That gust of wind would dissipate soon, and the brothers would probably return to retrace my scent. I breathed hard, trying to get my heart to calm.
After a slow count of a hundred, I focused on channeling my magic to my hands, and a soft glow shone from my palms.
I poked my head out from behind the statue to check the mausoleum was really empty. This time, when I saw Valentine, I wouldn’t speak or cry out to alert the brothers. I would focus on pushing more of my power into my hands and curing him. But first, I needed to get rid of the curse.
After spreading my glowing hands over my exposed leg, the thick, black mark on my flesh faded to gray and then disappeared. Triumph flared in my chest. I was one step closer to healing Valentine.
With tentative steps, I slipped out from behind the statue and headed back to where Valentine lay. The air was still, and fresher than it had been before the brothers had entered, and I inhaled several deep, calming breaths. After passing a few transcended vampires, I found the stone plinth that held Valentine’s corpse.
He was still unmoving, still gray, and still dead.
A wave of anguish crashed through my chest, stinging the backs of my eyes. I pressed a hand to my mouth, stifling tears. No matter how many times I got to see him, it would always be disturbing—the cruel end to a man who had loved me, protected me. A man who had sacrificed his life for mine.
I shook off those thoughts, inhaled a deep breath, and placed my palm directly on the metal rod embedded in Valentine’s chest. Maybe a bit of heat could melt the metal enough for me to lift it out from where it had been driven into the stone.
“What are you doing?” asked a haughty voice on my left.
