Captive of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 2)

by Bella Klaus

  “So?” she said.

  I chewed my mouthful, still trying to work out a way of telling the truth without giving all the facts. “We went back to Notting Hill, but Valentine got attacked.”

  Beatrice placed a hand over her mouth, and her eyes went round. “Is he alright?”

  My shoulders drooped. “Not really. They’re keeping him for observation, but things aren’t looking good.” Saying the words made my voice crack. “All we can do is hope the people helping him will pull through.”

  Sympathy glistened in her eyes. “Did you report it to the police?”

  I shook my head. “Someone else did it for me. They came really quickly.”

  “Good.” She nodded. “Whoever did this to him needs to be punished. But what happened to you on Monday, Tuesday, and today? I kept calling, but the phone switched over to voicemail.”

  “I must have left it somewhere.” This was the first complete truth I’d told her all evening. “Everything moved so quickly when Valentine got attacked…”

  Beatrice reached out and placed a comforting hand on mine. “That’s understandable,” she murmured. “It must have been a terrible shock.”

  We fell silent for several moments, with Beatrice encouraging me to eat the spread of snacks she’d laid out for me, and taking my mug away for a refill. Guilt tightened my chest at being so guarded, but Beatrice just smiled at me and asked how I was coping with the upheaval.

  I took a bite of the Scotch egg and replied in vague terms. Beatrice was picturing a robbery while what had really happened to Valentine was the work of a manipulative being working behind the scenes.

  After I finished my tea and half a pack of chocolate digestives, Beatrice poured me a large glass of red wine, which eased away some of the tension I’d been carrying around in my muscles since Sunday.

  “He’s ridiculously handsome,” said Beatrice, her eyes glimmering with curiosity. “How did you meet?”

  Some of the tightness around my chest loosened, and I exhaled a long breath, returning Beatrice’s glance with a little smile. Now that I knew the truth about our relationship, it wasn’t such a painful subject. Hell, if I could get myself in front of a healer tomorrow, Valentine and I could be making love by Sunday evening.

  “Would you believe I joined his company as an intern?” I said.

  She leaned forward, her eyes wide. “What kind of business is he in?”

  “Property,” I replied. “His family collected and reinvested it over the centuries. Now they need an entire company just to manage their holdings.”

  “It all sounds very Fifty Shades,” she drawled. “Go on, give us a few juicy details.”

  My smile widened. After three years of living vicariously through Beatrice, I owed her the entire story, but our past had lots of chaste moments, culminating in one afternoon of steam. “Sorry to disappoint you.” I brought my mug to my lips. “Valentine was a complete gentleman while we were courting.”

  “That’s an old-fashioned way of putting things,” she said with a laugh.

  I had noticed Valentine years before we’d met. Everyone knew the seven monarchs who made up the Supernatural Council. The headquarters of his property company were located within the palace grounds, but he spent most of his time in the center on Council business. Like most vampires, he was extremely handsome, but I hadn’t fawned over him because he was so far above me in society that it would have been like lusting after a mythical being.

  Even when his assistant ordered me and a few others to accompany him to a probate auction, I still hadn’t thought much about him until he had seen me pick up a leather-bound edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. He had asked me if I had read any of the plays, and I stuttered out that I had, which had earned me a faint smile. But then after that, I got invited to more and more assignments in the human world, he started making sure I was working closer to him.

  Beatrice leaned forward, raising her brows in a prompt for me to ladle out the juice. “For the first year, he only ever gave me the most innocent of kisses.”

  “Really?” Her eyes bulged, and she snatched a chocolate muffin off the coffee table. “How did you resist a guy like that?”

  I stared into my cup, watching the steam billow from the surface of the freshly made tea. “I thought his attention was part of the job at first. He used to take a group of people from his company to events around London, like Les Miserables. For the first few months, we only had a few brief conversations.”

  She reared back. “And you never got an inkling that he was interested?”

  A laugh huffed out of my chest. “I’d just turned eighteen, and he was…” I tripped over my words, stopping myself from saying he was royalty and I was a powerless Neutral. “Well, you’ve seen him. He’s powerful, rich—”

  “And devastatingly delicious,” she added with a chuckle.

  I told Beatrice the rest of the story. How over the first year, the number of employees accompanying Valentine to these events dwindled until it just became him and me. Unlike most vampires, Valentine had a fascination with the human world and had watched the plays of Shakespeare during the reign of Elizabeth I, had travelled to Italy to meet Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other renaissance artists, and had even been a fan of more modern artists like Shelley, Lord Byron and John Keats.

  Of course, I had to edit my history with Valentine to make it human-friendly, but talking to her helped me understand a little more about why he was interested in me. Me and not any of the thousands of supernatural women with unearthly beauty and powerful magic.

  I think Valentine fell in love with the sense of wonder I had for the human world. It was a concept hard for supernaturals to grasp when they were capable of everything a human could do and more. For me, seeing human art made me breathless with awe because it proved what people could achieve with brainpower, dedication, and hard work. To this day, being among humans gave me faith that maybe I could achieve something as meaningful.

  Beatrice sighed. “Do you think he was taking things slowly because he wanted to make sure you liked him and not his money?”

  “That was definitely part of it.” I eyed the cracked surface of the muffin and swallowed at the sight of an oversized chocolate chip. “But I was mostly lucky to have stumbled across him when he was ready to settle down.”

  “Or stumbling across you made him want to put a ring on it.”

  A laugh huffed from my chest at the reference to her favorite song. I turned to Beatrice, waiting for her to make the hand movement Beyoncé and her backing singers made in the Single Ladies video.

  Instead, she set down her mug of tea and frowned. “If he’s that great, what went wrong?”

  I picked up the muffin and plucked the huge chip, which tasted like someone had broken up a bar of chocolate and added it to the muffin mix. “You know the story about Othello?”

  “The moor whose flag-bearer poured lies into his ear about his wife?” she asked.

  I nodded, thinking about the memory spell and wondering if I should have compared us to Romeo and Juliet. “Something like that happened to us, and they made me think I was just his plaything.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Even when all he gave you were kisses?”

  “It happened hours after we’d had sex.” I took a bite of muffin, letting its rich, chocolatey goodness calm my senses. Chocolate sauce oozed out from its interior, and I scooped a little out and sucked it off my finger.

  She leaned toward me and frowned. “Did you confront him?”

  “It’s…” My throat thickened, and I shook my head, trying to push away the memory of that night on the palace steps. Whoever had made me believe Valentine’s words had been true had robbed me of hope and filled my heart with a festering hatred that had lasted three years. “It’s complicated.”

  Beatrice placed a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  I swallowed my mouthful of muffin, which now felt too dry. “Thanks for being so understa
nding. It’s been a long few days. Do you mind if I go to bed?”

  She stood. “The spare room is already made up.”

  I thanked her again and trudged out of the living room into Beatrice’s second bedroom. One of the benefits of living in Outer London was the sheer space a person could get for their money. Her apartment was huge, with two bathrooms, each with its own tub.

  The spare room was covered in soft, white carpets and was large enough to fit an entire wall of closets, a bookshelf, and a huge chest of drawers in the same mahogany as the sleigh bed that took pride of place. It was covered in a silver-and-white quilt and faced a large sash window with a view of the garden.

  I stared at myself in the mirror, taking in the gray prisoner’s jumpsuit with its burned-off pants legs. Whoever created it must have included an enchantment to look like something else to humans because Beatrice hadn’t once glanced down at my bare legs or asked what on earth I was wearing. Peeling it off, I stared down at the cursed mark on my leg, and hissed as it disappeared into my panties. What next? Would the wretched thing climb up my body and end on my face?

  As I slipped on a nightgown I’d found folded on the foot of the bed, a patch of mist swirled in the garden and coalesced beneath an external light into a dark figure. I clapped a hand over my mouth to suppress a scream and edged forward. He stood about six-two, with broad shoulders and hair as dark as midnight.

  My pulse fluttered in my dry throat as he stepped toward me. The smoky energy of a vampire wrapped around my senses, but there was something more. A chill that I’d only ever felt earlier today in the mausoleum.

  The window exploded outward, spraying the figure with glass. I edged back toward the door, but the icy tendrils of wind wrapped around my waist and pulled me back toward the window. It was the same wind that had rescued me from four hungry vampire princes bent on draining my blood.

  As the wind slipped beneath my feet, propelling me toward the window, I met the being’s eyes, which glowed red in the dark.

  Without meaning to, I blurted out the word, “Valentine.”

  Chapter Four

  I threw myself backward to resist the pull of the wind, but it whistled through the spare room, propelling me toward the broken window. The dark figure standing in the garden took a step toward me, his eyes shining with unearthly red light.

  The closet doors flew open and the chest of drawers at the wall toppled to the ground with an almighty thud. Bedsheets and garments and shoes flew around the room in a whirlwind of power. Even the heavy sleigh bed inched toward the window.

  “Stop,” I cried.

  The jerking of the door handle made me turn my head toward the door. It opened a fraction but the force of the wind slammed it shut. When Beatrice couldn’t get into the room, she banged her fist against the door. “Mera, are you alright? What’s happening?”

  “Don’t come in,” I yelled.

  “I can’t,” she shouted, her voice rising with panic. “The door is jammed.”

  The wind continued to howl, sounding like a ghost. I turned to Valentine, who now stood a mere inch from the other side of the window with his hands pressed against an invisible barrier. My stomach dropped. It was true what we’d learned about preternatural vampires. He couldn’t come inside. That was why he was using his ability to control the wind to drag me to him.

  “No.” I raised both hands, trying to push my power into my palms, but all they did was glow. “Please, Valentine, I’m not ready.”

  As the wind brought me a foot away from the window, his lips parted, revealing a mouthful of fangs even larger than before. Every ounce of blood drained from my face and settled into my thrashing heart. It beat hard enough to rattle my ribcage and make every vessel on my body pulse with panic.

  I gulped. This was it. This was the moment the curse would incite Valentine’s bloodlust and he would drain me into a husk. The wind wrapped around my arms and pinned them to my sides. It was as though Valentine wanted me to be a compact little package that could slip through the window without catching myself on a pesky frame.

  Cold air swirled beneath the soles of my feet, lifting me off the ground. Valentine stepped back as his infernal wind carried me over the apartment’s threshold and into the flood-lit garden. Beatrice’s muffled voice was now as quiet as a whisper beyond the howling wind, and Valentine didn’t even give me a chance to turn around to look into the room before wrapping cold, strong arms around my back and launching himself into the sky.

  My stomach lurched from the sudden movement, and even more wind rushed between my ears, creating a painful vacuum. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the slice of his fangs across my jugular. When nothing happened, I cracked open an eye, only to meet Valentine’s blood-red gaze. His eyes burned like crimson flames, seeming to provide their own light. I inhaled and exhaled shallow breaths that barely touched the tops of my lungs. This had to be some kind of preternatural magic.

  “Vampires can’t fly,” I rasped as he continued to rise. “Are you affecting the weather?”

  Valentine didn’t answer.

  I dared to look down to find a small figure standing within the artificially illuminated courtyard garden. She turned from side to side and ran out through a door within its enclosed walls that led into Wimbledon Common. That had to be Beatrice, wondering where the hell I’d gone. I resisted the urge to shout, to make her look up. Catching my best friend’s attention would only put her in danger. If anyone was going to die tonight it would be me—nobody else.

  The chill of Valentine’s hard body seeped through my front, making him feel colder than the night air. I pressed a palm against his chest to pull myself free, but met flesh as solid as stone. Normally, his muscles would yield a little beneath my fingers. Was this rigor mortis or had he turned into something statue-like?

  “Are you in there?” I asked him.

  He turned his gaze toward the blackened horizon, flying over the swathe of parkland that was Wimbledon Common, over the houses and shops and streets of Putney, and over the River Thames. The moon disappeared behind the clouds, casting us in darkness. Not even a person looking at the sky would be able to spot him carrying me away.

  After about twenty minutes of flying, we reached a huge reservoir that reflected the stars but not Valentine. My head spun, and black dots appeared before my eyes. This didn’t feel like a symptom of panic. As he had shown so much self-restraint compared to his brothers, I no longer thought he would bite me, but my breath became more and more shallow. Then realization hit me upside the head. We were flying too high.

  “Valentine, I can’t breathe.” I slapped at his chest. “The air up here is too thin.”

  He finally tilted his head as though in question.

  “Could you fly down a little lower? Some of us need oxygen to survive.”

  Without a word, he lowered his altitude. The air became thicker and more comfortable to breathe. I sucked in huge lungfuls of air, trying not to hyperventilate. The rush of oxygen to my brain had me thinking about the possibilities. Valentine was carrying me away so as to feed on me later. Valentine wanted to make me his preternatural bride. Valentine blamed me for his death and this was part of an elaborate revenge.

  I shook off those thoughts. High stress situations could trigger a person’s survival instincts. If I could muster up enough terror, I could burn him to ash, and then he would rise a brand new Valentine.

  Forcing myself to relax in his arms, I took in the scenery. We’d left the main part of the reservoir and now flew several feet above a narrower stretch of water. A white figure reflected on its surface, looking like a banshee with her red hair and flowing nightgown. I turned to look at Valentine, who wrapped his arms beneath my chest and around my waist, and then back to the water. There was no sign of him.

  Preternatural vampires didn’t have reflections either.

  As he flew me a hundred feet above the ground alongside a busy six-lane highway, my lips pressed into a thin line. His brothers, or whoever had prepar
ed his body, had removed his heart. Goodness knew where that was hidden, and I wasn’t sure if Valentine would rise from the ashes with a new heart. But the biggest problem I had right now was being able to generate my flames.

  Valentine ran the tip of his nose against my neck, making the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. Even with the cold wind numbing the outer layer of my skin, I still felt the graze of his lips against the shell of my ear.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  A low grown reverberated in his chest, making my stomach plummet. “Please don’t tell me you’re hungry.”

  Valentine slipped my earlobe between his cold lips, sending jagged sparks of alarm through my heart.

  “Wait,” I shouted.

  He released my earlobe and stared at me with furrowed brows.

  Something was terribly wrong with Valentine, and not the part where he was dead. Preternatural vampires were supposed to be sly and able to convince others that they were still alive while doing the bidding of their master. Valentine was a reanimated corpse and didn’t seem to be able to speak. Had the removal of his heart turned him into this cold, uncommunicative creature?

  His red eyes bore into mine, seeming to reach into my soul and surround it with smoke. I felt a pull toward him that was hard to resist, even though I knew what he was and the danger that unleashing a creature like him posed to the world.

  “Please don’t do things like that.” I tried to keep the tremble out of my voice. When his features didn’t change, I added, “It makes me nervous.”

  Valentine turned his gaze back to the horizon, veering off from the side of the well-lit highway and into the dark. I gave it a final glance, wondering if that had been the M1 motorway that stretched from London to Scotland. If I was going to escape, I needed my bearings.

  He continued over a stretch of wooded areas and over meadows, small villages, streams and lakes. By now, the moon had emerged from behind the clouds, illuminating the landscape and making it more than clear that we had completely left London.