by E. M. Knight
The light swells and then constricts. It concentrates into a point at the staff’s top.
Still unable to control my body, I thrust the tip down, straight into the floor.
A sound like thunder crashing comes from the spot I struck. And all the light, all the energy, all the magic, all of The Ancient’s hate surges down into the stone, into the very marrow of the castle. My body starts to convulse, but still I cannot do anything. I cannot let go. It feels like I’m being burned alive, burned from the inside, the power raging through me is so foreign and great.
In a wink it cuts out. For a second all is still. I recover from my daze and hurl both amulet and staff away.
But then the ground starts to shake.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
ELEIRA
A deep-set, heavy male voice pitches through the darkness.
“WAKE, ELEIRA. WAKE, YOU ARE NEEDED. WAKE!”
The final scream jerks me to my senses. I open my eyes, feeling the phantom after-effects of the lashing pain that raced through my head after the connection with Victoria broke.
I roll over with a groan. I steady both hands against the floor, start to push myself up—
A terrible shaking takes the room.
I’m on my feet quickly. Not another earthquake, I think. But then I sense a great effluence of power coming from the other side of the door. Enormous power, terrible power, enough magical energy to make me instantly afraid.
There comes a sound like glass breaking. A giant, splintering fissure races across the floor. I jump away, and wobble when I inadvertently land in a place where the silver’s power is amplified.
For a moment, all is still. And then the fissure breaks—and the whole floor gives way from under me.
I scream as I fly down with the rubble. All the silver artifacts rain down with me. I hit the story below. Great rocks come crashing down from the ceiling as it caves in from above. I shield my head with my hands, knowing if one of those slabs lands on my I’ll be done for, vampire or not.
Then the breaking stops. Everything goes still, still and eerily silent. I open my eyes hesitantly, amazed that I wasn’t hit.
And there, in front of me, picking themselves up from the dust, are Raul, Smithson, James, Victoria, and the Queen.
They all look as dazed as I feel. Except for Victoria, who is unconscious. I gasp when I see the awful wounds on her body.
The reunion lasts no longer than the second it takes to make eye contact. Another deep groan takes the castle. The floor we’re standing on pitches in on itself and collapses down.
I scream again as I’m sent throttling through the air.
We crash from one level to the next. The entire castle starts to collapse inward, as if a great gaping hole has been opened in the earth beneath its core.
My body strikes one hard surface after the next. I’m bounced around like a ragdoll. Down, down, down I continue to fall, as the Queen’s castle crumbles around me.
We hit the ground floor and stop. The reprieve lasts barely a second. Another massive roar comes from beneath the earth. A gaping hole opens in the middle of the castle floor.
All of us go screaming down.
It all happens so fast. I’m tossed this way and that in the landslide, rebounding off rocks and objects I cannot even see. The fall into the earth takes eternity. If this ever ends, I swear—
The final impact knocks all the air from my lungs. I only have the vaguest sense of my body. All I know is that the motion has stopped. We’re no longer falling.
Beyond me, the sound of settling debris continues. I close my eyes and mutter a prayer of gratitude. Somehow, through all that, I’m still alive. Somehow.
I look up. We’re far beneath the earth. There’s a gaping hole above me, and the night sky is so distant I can barely see the stars. All the broken pieces of the fallen castle surround me.
I know the only reason I survived was my vampire strength. But it seems incredible that any sort of creature could live through a fall like that.
Alarm grips me when I realize my leg is pinned beneath a boulder. I cry out. I can’t even feel the pain!
I try to yank my leg free. But even if my body is whole, it’s still in a very weakened state. The adrenaline is ebbing away, and a weary exhaustion starts to take over. Dust catches in my throat. I start to cough violently.
“Eleira?” Raul’s voice, distant and fragile, calls for me. “Eleira, where are you?”
“Here,” I croak. “I’m over here.”
I hear him curse, and then, a few moments later, see him stumble down a pile of rocks.
He looks like absolute hell. His clothes are torn, there are long cuts all over his face and body. He staggers to a stop, searching the ruins for me. The moment he sees me he picks up the pace, then drops to the ground at my side.
“You’re hurt,” he says. Concern paints his voice.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
He looks me up and down. “Your leg,” he says. “Hold on.”
He stands and shoves his shoulder into the boulder. It takes him considerable effort, but he manages to lift it just enough for me to pull my leg free.
“It’s not broken,” he observes, a trace of wonder in his voice.
“No,” I echo. In fact, considering the distance I fell—we all fell—I would have thought we’d suffer more injuries. “How is it we’re still alive?”
“Vampires are a resilient bunch,” he mutters.
“No kidding.”
The sound of scraping stone makes us both spin around. James is picking himself up from the dirt.
Before I know it Raul is on him. He pins his brother to the ground.
“You have ten words to explain what you did up there,” Raul growls.
James coughs, and I think it might be an attempt at a laugh. “Only ten?” he starts. “Surely that isn’t enough—”
“Four left,” Raul warns. “Make them count.”
James leers up at his brother. He must see something frightening in Raul’s gaze, because he sighs and rumbles out exactly four words, “Father wanted the staff.”
“The staff!” Raul curses. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”
“It wasn’t me.” James shakes his head. “I was possessed. The Ancient—”
“—used you as a surrogate to mount an attack on The Haven.”
All three of us turn to see Morgan emerge from darkness. Smithson trails her, carrying an unconscious Victoria in his arms.
“He succeeded,” the Queen concludes.
I’m surprised by how little anger I hear in her voice. She simply sounds… weary.
“If you’re wondering how we survived the fall,” she continues. “I cast a protective spell over each of us the moment I realized what was happening. Good thing, too.” She looks around. “We would have been crushed were it not for that.”
I stand up and face her, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.
“What she giveth, she taketh away,” Morgan mutters. She makes an intricate, circular motion with her fingers. A faint blue orb, about the size of a fist, retracts from each of our chests and flies back to her.
As soon as it happens all the pains and aches of my body crash into me. I stagger down. I’m barely able to hold myself upright. I grit my teeth against the pain.
Slowly, it starts to ebb away as my body begins healing itself. The process is not pleasant. Being shielded by Morgan’s spell and then having it ripped away is like being wakened from a pleasant dream by being dunked into a tub of ice.
I look around me. All the other vampires are suffering similar afflictions. I presume, because of my strength, I’m the first to recover.
All the others, that is, except Morgan. Her eyes land on me, and she sends me such a look of revulsion, such a look of disgust, that I feel no better than a maggot she might have found in a stale piece of bread.
Raul is the next one to stand. He lumbers to me. I meet him halfway. We fall into each other’s arms.
He holds me against his hard body and strokes my hair.
“You’re safe,” he whispers. I’m not sure if the words are meant to assure him or me. “You’re here, you’re with me, you are safe.”
I gulp down the welling emotions that try to rise in me from the sincerity in his voice.
He really does care for me, I think.
“AS IF THAT WAS IN ANY DOUBT.”
I jerk away. “What was that?”
Raul looks at me in concern. “I didn’t say anything.”
It takes my frazzled brain an extra second to process that the Voice came from inside my head. When the realization hits…
“YOUR LOVE IS YOUR WEAKNESS,” the menacing Voice booms. “IT WILL BE THE END OF YOU. IT IS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. ONLY I CAN BE YOUR SALVATION. FOR THAT TO HAPPEN, YOU MUST COME TO ME.”
“I… no!” I grip the sides of my head and stagger away from Raul. My foot catches a stray rock. I trip and fall.
“YOU WILL COME TO ME. IT IS NOT A CHOICE.”
“Get out of my head!” I scream. I try to block the Voice’s presence, just as I did Victoria’s. But I cannot pinpoint its source. It’s all-pervasive, sounding from every corner of my mind at once. It’s not a single link but an envelopment of my mind.
“YOU WILL COME,” the Voice threatens, “WHETHER YOU WILL IT OR NOT.” Then it laughs. “YOU MUST BE PERSUADED FIRST. I SEE THAT. WITNESS MY STRENGTH!”
The ground starts to shake once more. A piercing blue light comes from a crevice in the stone beside me. With a start I realize I didn’t trip over a rock.
I tripped over the Queen’s staff. My ankle is still touching it.
“Eleira!” Morgan screams. “The torrial, get away from it! Get away from it now!”
I try to move but my body is paralyzed. An external force takes control of my limbs. It’s the Voice, taking over my body. Without willing it, I reach down and pick up the staff...
A glorious flash of light bursts from the end. James, Smithson, and Victoria are knocked backwards. Raul is, too.
Only the Queen is spared.
She looks at me. “Eleira…” she begins.
“NO!” I scream, and the words that come from my throat are not my own, but that of the Voice. They echo through the cavernous enclosure and boom around with the stark intensity of the deranged.
“YOU WANT TO SEE POWER, YOU WANT TO SEE MIGHT? WITNESS ME AS I STAND BEFORE YOU! WITNESS ME AS I MAKE YOUR KINGDOM CRUMBLE TO DUST!”
With a savage, uncontrollable roar, I slam the staff into the ground. Magical energy pours through me and into its end. It concentrates there, many times greater than what a single witch could conceivable hold.
Then it all lashes out, as a thunderbolt, in the direction opposite where all the vampires are standing. It flashes and shoots straight as an arrow into the farthest reaches of the cave.
With that, the foreign force vacates my body. The power in the staff dies. The top of it is singed and black and ruined.
I barely have time to recover when a piercing shriek comes from the depths of the cavern. It’s taken up immediately by hundreds more.
I know that sound. But Morgan gives voice to exactly what I fear.
“The Convicted,” she gasps. “They’ve been released.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
RAUL
I fly to Eleira’s side as the horde of Convicted races toward us. There are hundreds of them, but through some trick of the light their numbers seem greater. “Stay behind me,” I tell Eleira in a tight voice. “You’re in no condition to fight.”
“Neither are you!” she protests, taking in my torn clothes and many cuts.
“None of us are,” Morgan says wearily. She steps to our side. “Luckily, this isn’t our fight. Look.”
As if on cue, the first of the running Convicted make a sharp turn and start scampering up the wall toward the open night sky.
“They’re escaping,” I breathe.
“The barriers holding them down are gone,” Mother says. “Obliterated by the power of the one who manipulated you and James. There’s nothing keeping them here anymore.”
I twist on her. “You have to get the barriers back!” I exclaim. The mass of Convicted is already halfway up to freedom. “You cannot let them run loose!”
Mother picks up the staff, and just as quickly tosses it aside. “Without this,” she says. “There is nothing I can do.”
“Where’s James?” I spin around and look for my older brother. He is the cause of all this. How he got back, how he betrayed us yet again…
About three-quarters of the way up, the mass of Convicted find a ledge and pool onto it. I watch as they regroup for a moment and then start to move once again.
But they’re not going for the opening above us anymore. No, they’ve turned to go deeper in the caves.
But why…
“The humans!” Eleira gasps at exactly the same time the thought hits me. “The Convicted are going for the villagers!”
I curse. But how would Eleira know the humans had been taken underground in advance of the other coven’s arrival? She was locked away when it happened.
I ask her as much.
“I can sense the humans in the distance,” she replies. “All of them.”
“That’s because of your strength,” Mother interrupts. She’s pacing the small spot in front of us, her skirt swishing at her legs. “The Convicted do not have senses as attuned to that as you. No, it is the Voice that is directing The Convicted. The Voice that is telling them where to go.”
“How can you know that?” Eleira asks.
“Because,” Mother says. “I hear it too.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t just stay here!” Eleira protests. “We have to help!”
“I agree,” I say. “Smithson, get the guards. I’ll collect the rest of The Haven vampires to help. We won’t stand pat and let The Convicted slaughter our villagers! Smithson? Smithson!”
But as I look around, the Captain Commander is nowhere to be seen.
“He’s gone,” Mother says softly.
She sounds… completely resigned.
“What’s wrong with you?” I scream at her. “Your kingdom is under attack! The humans are about to be slaughtered! The Convicted have just escaped!”
She shakes her head. Self-pity as I’ve never seen it haunts her eyes.
“I’ve failed,” she says under her breath. “I’ve failed The Haven. I’ve failed my people. I failed, I failed, I failed...”
“Snap out of it!” I yell. “You’re the Queen, you’re the Monarch!” The sounds of The Convicted are becoming dimmer and dimmer. The longer we wait, the farther they get from us…
And the closer they get to the humans.
Mother looks back at the remains of her castle. “Six centuries…” her voice cracks. “Six centuries it stood, only to be lost like this.” A despairing sob comes from her throat. “It’s gone. It’s really gone, it’s all gone…”
Eleira steps up to her and swings her arm. Her angry slap connects with Mother’s left cheek.
Morgan looks at her, eyes wide, almost trembling.
“You are a powerful witch,” Eleira says in a steely voice. “You are the ruler of The Haven. You owe it to your subjects to show your strength. The castle fell—so what? It can be rebuilt, just as the village was rebuilt. The barriers are down—but you can erect them again! And I’m not,” she stresses, “a dark witch. Whatever you think that means, it is not me. Not who I am. Not here.”
She touches her chest, right at the heart. “Maybe something happened when I was a child, but I can fight it. I will fight it, if you guide me, and together, we will defeat it.”
She takes hold of Morgan’s shoulders. “But right now, that’s not the threat. If you stay here and bemoan what has happened, then your kingdom will be ruined. Then you’ll lose all you have built. But if you show courage, and if you fight—The Haven vampires will fight alongside you. That I know.”
Who
a. Chills run through me at that rising speech. I see Eleira in a new light.
Suddenly, she seems to realize what she’s doing, who she’s talking to. She gives a small gasp and shrinks back.
But I’m right there. I grab her waist, spin her around, and kiss her passionately.
When I let go, she looks at me with wonder-filled eyes. “What was that for?” she breathes.
“For kicking ass,” I say. “And for being amazing.”
I turn to Mother, who seems to have been roused from her mini pity party.
“Will you stand with us?” I ask. “Or will you cower and hide?”
Mother looks at me, then pushes herself up to full height. “A Queen,” she says loftily, “never hides.”
She’s back, I think.
For now, the thought comes with no small measure of relief.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
JAMES
I stumble in a half-crazed daze after Smithson. He runs fast, urging me along, through caverns that I should know as well as the back of my own hand.
When he grabbed my arm and pushed me to go, in the aftermath of our fall into the earth, at first I resisted. But then he said the words that made me know he was the one who’d arranged my passage in:
“Beatrice would want you safe.”
So I went with him. I ran from my Mother and brother and Victoria and Eleira, while being consumed with shame at what I’d done. I let my Father play me like a second-hand fiddle. I thought he’d wanted the staff, the torrial, for himself.
I did not ever imagine that he wanted it for The Ancient to destroy The Haven.
But the first domino has fallen. And I am wholly responsible.
Somewhere from beyond us come the shrieks of The Convicted. They’ve been let out, thanks to me. And now, after being deprived of blood, for so long, they will wreak havoc on the world above.
Smithson darts into a crevice in the rock. I follow him—and am blindsided when his first catches me square in the jaw.
