by Bella Klaus
Bonds of the Vampire King
Bella Klaus
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Fifteen Years Later
Chapter One
Kresnik’s arms tightened around my chest, holding me to his larger body. Flames filled my vision, lashed at my feathers, burning paths of panic along my raw nerves.
My breath caught. Kresnik was trying to transport me out of the tunnel.
Valentine’s roar of fury echoed through the confined space, and blasts of magic thudded against the ward Kresnik had erected around our bodies. No one could save me—not Valentine, not Hades, not Caiman or any of the mercenaries stuck in the underground passageway. I had to save myself.
I lurched forward, stretched out my wings, tried to fly out of his grip, but the fiery arms encasing my torso turned solid.
“Mera!” Valentine pushed through the flames, and the wards surrounding us splintered into a million shards.
“Out.” Kresnik’s muscular arm shot forward with a palm strike, encasing Valentine in fire, making him back away with a scream that rang through my ears.
My stomach lurched. What if Kresnik and my combined flames were reducing him to ash?
I had to escape. Escape before we caused any more damage. Escape before Kresnik took me somewhere no one could ever follow. Escape before Kresnik put another needle through my heart. Escape. Escape. Escape.
Heat surged through my veins, hotter than any kind of fire I could produce as a phoenix. The flames around us blurred and flickered, and for a moment, I could feel the cold fury, the relentless determination, and the raging hatred of my father.
“Stop,” I whispered.
Kresnik was trying to flicker, the process fire wielders used to transport themselves from one location to another. It would mean melding our magic—something I needed to resist.
As every molecule in my body vibrated in sync with Kresnik’s, I clacked my beak and focused on my love for Valentine, on my desire to stay here and check that he had survived the flames.
I thrashed from side to side, trying to pull my magic back into my chakras, but the arms restricting my chest rose to my neck.
“Stop fighting me.” Kresnik tightened his grip.
“Get off,” I squawked, not knowing if we were still in the tunnel, had flickered to Kresnik’s lair, or were somewhere in between. Our location didn’t matter. Not when he was cutting off my air.
My head swam, and confusion sloshed through my skull. The flames receded from the edges of my vision, darkening into a deep crimson until everything turned black.
A heartbeat later, I awoke with a noisy gasp, and the weight of Kresnik’s larger body pushed me forward until it felt like I was lying horizontally with my wings outstretched. Still blinded, I thrashed from side to side, trying to shake him off, but his muscular thighs tightened around my waist.
Wind rushed in my ears, accompanied by Kresnik’s harried breath. “Calm down, or we’ll both meet the fate of Icarus.”
My heart plummeted. Why did this feel like he was riding on my back?
Rumbling traffic filled my ears, mingled with the sound of horns. I opened and closed my eyes, clearing my vision of the dark flames.
The sun had already set, and headlights illuminated the busy street below, with tall lamp posts lighting up the sidewalks. We were too high up for me to see the shops’ window displays, but from the black cabs and double-decker buses, I was guessing we were still in London. From the wide expanse of parkland on our distant right, it looked like we were flying over Notting Hill Gate.
“I thought it would take a little more coaxing for you to transform,” Kresnik’s snarling voice reverberated through my mind. “However, I didn’t anticipate that you would resist me with such passion.”
Terror squeezed my heart in its icy grip. My wings splayed out, and I tilted to the side, trying to dislodge the monster clinging onto my back.
Kresnik’s grip tightened on my body, and his manic laugh rattled across my skull. “What a spirited little thing!”
“Get off me!” My words came out an anguished screech.
“We can communicate, you know.” He tapped the side of my head. “Mind to mind.”
I righted myself and took another look at our immediate surroundings. A halo of fire surrounded my head, reminding me of the time Racon and Gail sat together in the training room connecting minds with a process Coral explained could only be done by soulmates or close family members.
This was the method Jonathan had used to infiltrate my mind, impersonate Valentine, and lock me into a series of nightmares.
That still didn’t stop me from asking the question in my head, “How are you doing this?”
A dull explosion sounded from the street. Flames spurted out of every manhole on the road, and my chest filled with cold despair. This was Kresnik’s doing. I only hoped that Hades had managed to transport everyone out of the tunnel before Kresnik had detonated another of his traps.
The blare of sirens became louder as police cars and fire engines raced down Kensington Church Street, making the cars mount the sidewalk.
Kresnik leaned back and cackled. “Look at the humans below,” he bellowed out loud. “It’s like pouring water on ants.”
My throat dried. Where was Valentine? Where were Caiman and Hades? Why was Kresnik still hanging around?
The traffic stopped, and people piled out of their vehicles, out of shops and pubs and restaurants, their faces turned to the sky. I sucked in a deep breath through my beak. They were watching us—the phoenix and the ifrit—battle in mid air.
As I struggled against Kresnik’s might, feathers worked their way loose, falling down to the street below like droplets of molten fire. These people needed to run, not gape.
“Thanks to your meddling vampire lover, I no longer have the power to flicker long distances.” Kresnik’s sharp voice sliced through my panic. “No matter. The power I seek is more precious than anything I can obtain from my children.”
“What do you still want with me, then?” I accompanied that thought with a squawk of outrage.
“You’re the only creature who can fly me to the Realm of the Gods.” The halo of crackling magic surrounding my crown looped over my head and settled over my neck.
“Good luck getting me to do anything.” I twisted my head to the right, tried to spit out a fireball at Kresnik, but he ducked to my left.
A guttural roar sounded from below. I glanced down to find an armor-clad figure emerging from one of the burning manholes, causing a double-decker bus to swerve to the other side and crash into a black cab.
My chest inflated with hope. Valentine had survived.
Kresnik slammed a fist into the space between my wing bones, making me lurch forward. “Valentine is annoyingly tenacious.”
“It’s called loyalty.” I glanced over my shoulder to find Valentine hurtling up toward us. “Something a psycho like you could never understand.”
“There’s a reason why the gods made be
asts of burden mute.” Kresnik pulled on the halo, making me splutter and gag. “It was so their masters didn’t kill them outright for their insolence.”
Without meaning to, my wings sliced through the air, propelling us forward. I cried out, tried to tell Kresnik to stop, but he’d taken control of my body and was now flying me toward Hyde Park.
We glided over the rooftops of Notting Hill, over the embassies that bordered the Kensington Palace Gardens, and over the palace.
“Release my mate.” Valentine’s snarl was loud enough to shake my feathers.
Every muscle in my body strained to turn away, to fly toward Valentine and get close enough so he could stick a firestone sword through Kresnik’s eyes. No matter how much I tried to resist, the halo encasing my neck had taken control of my motor functions, and none of my screams to be set free reached Kresnik.
“Are you a preternatural, or not?” Kresnik laughed.
From his jerky motion on my back, I guessed he was throwing fireballs at Valentine, who was dodging if I was right about the slicing sound of his movements.
The whump, whump, whump of rotor blades sounded from above. I raised my eyes and stared into the telephoto lens of an oversized camera. A man wearing a red puffer jacket and matching ear muffs sat in the open door of a helicopter, securing the recording device with both arms.
His right leg dangled over the edge of the chopper, while he tucked his right beneath a metal bar. The cameraman moved his head from behind his eyepiece attachment and gaped as though he couldn’t believe what he was recording.
I sucked in a ragged breath. For all my fretting about complying with the Supernatural World secrecy laws, my magic would be the first to be exposed to the humans.
Shit. If I ever got out of this alive, I was in serious trouble.
“Bugger off.” Kresnik tossed a fireball at the camera, making its operator fall backward into the helicopter.
With a high-pitched scream, the man’s arms thrashed to put out the flames engulfing his jacket, and the camera fell loose from his fingers. Kresnik threw a fireball and another and another until the aircraft swooped away.
“Stop,” I cawed out loud.
As bad as I felt for the man who got burned, I really wanted the filming to stop. Kresnik failed to understand that the camera was either broadcasting its footage live or recording it onto a card that would likely survive even a helicopter crash.
I rolled my eyes. What was I talking about? Kresnik didn’t give a damn about protecting the Supernatural World.
He flew us past the Round Pound that backed onto Kensington Palace and beside the Serpentine, our fiery bodies reflecting on the winding lake that formed the border of Hyde Park.
Up ahead stood the Wellington Arch, a five-story-tall stone monument to the Napoleonic Wars that supported a winged woman riding a four-horse chariot. The light of our combined flames glinted on the laurel wreath she held aloft.
My throat dried as I figured out what lay ahead. Green Park. Buckingham Palace on our left, Saint Jame’s Palace… and Trafalgar Square.
Trafalgar Square was where Captain Theodore had hidden Kresnik’s immortal body. Kresnik now knew its location, wanted to discard Father Jude’s form that Valentine and his guards had damaged, and intended to upgrade before flying me to the Realm of the Gods.
I focused my power, trying to burn him into ash, but how could I burn an ifrit who had taken control of my magic?
Silence stretched out as we continued along our path, without so much as a helicopter hovering in the distance. Even the traffic below halted. I couldn’t hear Valentine anymore. Whether that was because one of Kresnik’s fireballs had landed or because Valentine had also worked out Kresnik’s destination, I wasn’t sure.
“Everything’s going to plan,” said Kresnik. “You’ll get to see the very mountain where I spent thirty-thousand years of suffering. Maybe I’ll secure you to that stone so you can get a taste of what it feels like to be punished.”
A whimper reverberated in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to get torn apart even once by Kresnik’s eagle, let alone for an eternity. If I didn't do something before we reached Trafalgar Square, no one would save me from that fate.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I focused on the flames coursing through my meridians and eased them back toward my chakras. The beat of my wings slowed, and we lost altitude.
“What are you doing?” Kresnik yanked on the halo around my neck, choking off my air.
I gagged, and yellow sparks appeared in my vision. His magic continued to force me to flap my wings, but they soon became shorter, more sparse and solid instead of hollow—just like human arms.
“Oh, no you don’t.” A hot surge of power rushed through the base of my neck, filling me down to my tailbone.
Kresnik’s magic stretched across my shoulder blades, making my arms lengthen once more into wings. A sob tore from my throat, and tears filled my eyes. I’d failed, and now he had more control over me than ever.
Trafalgar Square was seconds away. Unusually deserted of tourists, the only activity on the paved plaza came from a pair of fountains spraying water illuminated by LED lights set within their geometrically shaped pools.
To our left stood the National Gallery, a huge stone building the size of a palace. At its entrance was a grand portico of a triangular roof supported by two-story columns, and behind it, a dome and turrets ran along the building’s vast roof.
“Here we are,” he said, his voice breathy with excitement. “Watch me reduce this shit-hole to rubble to answer the call of my body.”
Dread settled through the lining of my stomach as we drifted toward the space between the fountains. It was stupid to worry about what Kresnik would do to a centuries-old landmark when the fate of the world was at stake, but I’d grown attached to London and didn’t want it to change for the worse.
As my feet landed on the paving stones, I didn’t dare glance at what stood behind the fountains on our right. Not at its stone-and-bronze pedestal, not at the four bronze lions surrounding it, and definitely not at the statue hundreds of feet above, housing the immortal body of Prometheus.
Poor Theodore had told Kresnik the body was beneath the square. I needed Kresnik to waste time looking in the wrong place at least until Valentine could catch up with reinforcements.
He slid off my back. “Can I trust you not to fly away while we hunt for my true body?” He chuckled, threading a flaming hand through the noose of fire surrounding my neck and lifting me off my feet. “The body you occupy belongs to me, and my power over it is absolute. Do you hear me?”
Up close, Kresnik was molten lava. Thin streams of fire curled from his bulging muscles, making the air around him ripple. His eyes glowed the pale yellow of candle flames with pinprick pupils that resembled wicks.
His cruel mouth split into a grin of brilliant white teeth. “Do I need to tether you to the ground while I search for my body?”
I stared into his flaming eyes, breathing hard, and trying to shake my head. As much as I yearned to move, his magic wouldn’t release its hold over my body.
Gunshots rang through the air, and Kresnik convulsed. Dark spots appeared across his chest as the bullets soaked in his magic. All the air left my lungs, and my eyes darted from side to side.
“Miss Griffin,” shouted a voice from afar. “Run.”
A cry caught in the back of my throat. The bastard still had control of my motor functions, and I couldn’t move.
Enforcers streamed from the cafe and the restrooms opposite the fountains on our left and from behind Nelson’s Column on our right. I gulped. Valentine and Hades must have told them where Kresnik would be headed.
A stray bullet or two clipped my shoulder, making my stomach lurch. Did these people think I remained here because I was his accomplice?
He turned with his arms outstretched, thrashing from side to side, grunting with pain as the gunfire landed on his ifrit form. His fire dimmed, but he didn’t move from his position. Was he
shielding me?
“I am your god.” He hurled cannonball-sized fireballs at the marksmen, making them scatter.
A missile flew in from the direction of the National Gallery on our right and landed in his gut, making the magic encasing my spine vanish with a snap.
I sucked in a breath. This was my chance.
Uncurling my wings, I raised them above my head and leaped. I sliced downward, letting the air propel me upward, and curled my knees to my chest.
With every ounce of my strength, I flapped up, up, high above the stream of bullets, over Kresnik’s floundering body, and over the lower structures of Trafalgar Square.
Shouts and screams and gunfire filled my ears, mingling with the boom of explosives, but I didn’t stop. Nelson’s Column loomed ahead. Atop it stood the admiral’s stone statue posing with the sleeve of his right arm tucked into his jacket.
As I flew parallel to the top of the column, the air above thickened, signifying a ward.
“Damn it.” I stretched out my wings, gliding over the edges of the square, trying to find a way out, but the wards encased us on all sides.
The enforcers had probably erected it so Kresnik wouldn’t escape. I flew over to the National Gallery and perched atop the roof of its portico to watch the battle.
Kresnik stumbled toward Nelson’s Column, swinging his torso from side to side the way someone would struggle against the might of a hurricane. The enforcers continued to riddle his body with bullets, and dark patches appeared in his fiery form, only to disappear.
“You cannot restrain me,” Kresnik bellowed over the sound of gunfire. “I am the undying.”
My breath came in shallow pants. Those bullets were supposed to contain firestone to absorb his power, but it seemed like he had an endless supply. How many of his followers had he absorbed to be able to withstand such punishment?
