by Misty Evans
I didn’t. I’d lived enough history for three demons and never found much point in hearing about more. But his voice was nice and I wanted him on my side later if the Noctifectors showed up. “How about the highlights?”
With each step up the plushy carpeted stairs, he reiterated a fact about the house, its construction, inhabitants and place in the Undead hierarchy. In some ways, it mimicked the Institute, providing housing, training and resources for its brand of supernaturals. At the top of the stairs, we faced a wide hallway, crimson colored doors on both sides. Hand-painted portraits of various important vamps hung in elaborate gold frames.
I recognized dark brows and haughty eyes in one as we passed the first crimson door. “Is that you?”
“Linen ruff and all.” He released my elbow and opened a door with a gold nameplate labeled Security Operations. “I hated those damn neck chokers.”
“At least you didn’t have to wear a corset.”
His eyes flashed, pupils darkening as his gaze grazed over the exposed skin of my décolletage. The strapless dress required a bra that pushed my meager assets to new heights, and I could see Dru imagining me in nothing but a fine boned corset.
Dream on, buddy boy. I had no intention of pursuing anything more than Dru’s allegiance, but flirting with him was fun and entertaining. Flirting was also the fastest way to secure a bond.
Cole and Maddy walked several steps behind us and Dru cut his eyes from my chest long enough to give Cole a look that suggested he wasn’t welcome in Carpathia’s security control center.
Cole’s return look said, fuck you.
“Your minions must wait outside,” Dru said to me, still locking eyes with Cole. The magic seeping from his body had shifted from sexy and flirty to edgy and hard.
“My bodyguard goes where I go.”
Maddy raised a hand. “Me, too.”
Dru positioned himself between me and them. He looked down at me, his eyes for once serious. “No one goes into the security room unless they have spoken an oath to my sire and pledged their allegiance to this house.”
Oaths. Dangerous stuff. Would have been nice if Damon had mentioned that little fact. Probably one of the things he’d wanted to discuss with me on the way over. “Then why take me in?”
“You’re queen-elect. At midnight, you’ll swear your fidelity to my sire. An oath to protect this house and our family.”
A champagne revolt ensued in my stomach. Really should have found out about that oath stuff beforehand. “What if I change my mind and don’t swear my fidelity to your dad?”
Dru let out a sad breath. “Then I’ll have to kill you.”
I thought maybe he was kidding in that, I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you way, but he still seemed dead serious.
All righty then. He could try to kill me, but he’d fail.
Of course, if I didn’t take the oath, Damon would find me in contempt of Bridge law and do something nasty to me and my blood slaves. Vicky was no longer a problem, but Arman and Rad were. I had no doubt Damon would eventually find out Rad was tied to me just like Arman.
“What happens when my temporary reign at queen is over?” I punched him lightly on the arm, trying to ease the tension. “Will you have to kill me then?”
Dru’s dark brows slanted down. “Temporary?”
“Yeah, you know. I’m only doing this queen gig until you guys find a qualified candidate to take Nudra’s place. By the way, I don’t recommend Toel Chase.”
My attempt at snarky humor failed. His frown deepened. “There is no ‘temporary’ oath, demon. If you pledge to be queen of the Undead of this region, it is for life.”
For half a second, I wondered if I could hurry the Noctifectors surprise attack along. No way was I pledging permanent allegiance to the Prince of the Undead. It was one thing to defend a nest of vamps against our common enemy, the Noctifectors. Another to bend over and take it in the ass from Vlad the Impaler.
Damon and I were definitely having a heart-to-heart before midnight.
I laid a hand on Dru’s arm to calm him and spoke to Cole. “I’ll be fine. Stay out here and wait for me.”
Cole’s expression never changed, but he nodded. He was pissed at being left behind and I didn’t really want him that far away from me if things went bad, as Rad had suggested they might, but I needed to see what kind of security Carpathia had. If the Noctifectors were going to hit, they’d do it at midnight during the ceremony. That was their best chance to take the vamps—and us demons—by surprise. I had an hour tops to scope out the grounds and house and come up with a defense plan.
“Come on, Alexandru.” I tugged him across the threshold into security command central. “Show me your weapons.”
Chapter Forty-five
The moment the door closed behind us, Dru backed me against the wall, raised the skirt of my dress and slid his fingers over my outer right thigh, landing on the stake secured there.
“Tsk, tsk,” he muttered, his face an inch from mine as he drew out the stake. “What do we have here?”
I could’ve fought him and I suspected he’d make a formidable opponent. Now wasn’t the time to prove my superiority. “Is this how you treat all your queens?”
“You’re not my queen. The only vampire I answer to is my sire.”
The Undead hierarchy was a mixed up mess of titles that made no sense to me, and I’d been around to see a lot kingdoms come and go. “The stake is for personal protection. You wouldn’t deny me that, would you?”
He stuck the sharpened wood in the waistband of his pants at the small of his back, trailed fingers over other parts of my body, searching for more weapons. “And the whip? That’s simply for adornment?”
Cheeky. “What can I say? I know how to accessorize.”
His laugh was low and deep. Satisfied I wasn’t carrying anything else, he stepped back, righted my skirt and didn’t try to take Volante. “Why would you agree to become queen of this House, Kali Sweet?”
A vamp who called me by the correct name. That earned him a kernel of truth. “The Bridge Council believes this arrangement will be mutually beneficial to both of our groups.”
“Do you always do what the Bridge Council wants?”
“Do you always do what your father wants?”
He conceded with a smile. “Come on. Let’s look at my security system.”
The room was well-lit and almost homey. Hardwood floors, bookshelves, a flatscreen on all four walls. In one corner, a dorm size fridge, microwave and sink. Across from it, a lounging area with sofas, end tables and a stack of magazines on a coffee table.
The bulk of computers were centered in the middle of the floor, comfortable looking chairs at each station. Males and females in black pants and white shirts wore headsets and watched the screens in front of them as well as those on the TVs. Views of the mansion, inside and out, as well as the grounds flashed on their displays.
Dru walked me through the room, introduced me to his people, gave me a laundry list of specs about the cameras, ground patrols, sentries and trip wires. He talked logistics and staffing with the same ease as I talked vengeance. The whole layout was impressive. Almost as impressive as the Institute’s.
More impressive was the Master vamp’s love of this part of his job. His voice and body language told me he enjoyed being point man in protecting the House. He loved being in charge of security, weapons and soldiers. He was proud of his kingdom and would protect it until the last breath left his body. He was Cole in Undead form.
“So you see, queen-elect, you’re in good hands inside Carpathia.”
Except that I had an ass full of vampires. So far, though, they’d all been on their best behavior. If they’d planned some underhanded assassination of me and Bridge Council, they’d probably already done their worst. Since I was still standing, odds were I was simply paranoid. The only vamp going to cause me trouble was Toel, and only if he somehow managed to slip past the guards. Even the Nocts were going to have a hard
time sliding under the radar in a sneak attack.
I wondered what Damon, Yasmin and Kirill were doing with the Prince. “Any chance as Master of this house, you could walk me through the ins and outs of the coronation ceremony before it actually goes down? All that oath stuff?”
His dark brows descended. “You really have no idea what you’re getting into, do you?”
Trouble. That’s what I was getting into. Nothing new about that. “I don’t have to drink anyone’s blood, do I? Or bathe in it?”
“Only the blood of your followers.”
The muscles in my jaws tightened involuntarily like I was going to hurl. “The vamps who kneeled in the ballroom? All of them?”
“There’s only a hundred or so. They represent the different districts in the Central region. They expose their neck in an act of submission and you drink from them.”
Only a hundred or so. Gaw. “But I’m not a vamp.”
“You have teeth, don’t you?”
“How about we shake hands instead?”
His laughter came slow and light, then deepened into belly laughs. “You should see your face right now.” He chucked my chin with his fist. “Priceless.”
“You’re yanking my chain.”
He wrapped an arm around my shoulders, led me to the door. “An outdated ritual, but one my sire still employs. He likes bloody ceremonies. This is America, and Carpathia, though, and I am Master of this House. If you don’t want to drink directly from you subjects, you don’t have to. They do have to swear allegiance to you, but it can be a handshake if you so desire.”
We stepped into the hall and Cole immediately zeroed in on Dru’s arm around my shoulders. He gave me a questioning look and I winked at him. “Anticlimactic, I imagine, for your father.”
“After almost six centuries, he’s a bit pompous. I’ll back you up.”
He steered us deeper into the second floor’s interior, stopping outside of a pair of wooden French doors stained almost black. A gold sign on the wall next to them announced this was Dru’s office. A touch of his hand and the doors swung open in a grand gesture.
Magic. It made even the little things fun.
Cole and Maddy followed us inside and Dru made no move to stop them.
The office, if you could call it that, resembled a swanky living room in an upscale European hotel. But where the rest of Carpathia was heavy on formal furniture and vintage trappings, Dru’s office was the height of modern casual. Chocolate leather sectionals, the latest gaming system hooked up to an enormous flatscreen, Linkin Park coming from the speakers overhead. His desk, a chrome and glass concoction, was littered with sport drink bottles and candy bar wrappers.
At the sectional, he dropped his arm, sauntered over to a built-in bar and opened a cabinet door to reveal a refrigerator. “Drink?”
More sport drinks, cans of soda and bottles of water. Not a container of any size or shape filled with blood.
Curioser and curioser.
Maddy dropped onto the sectional next to me. “I’ll have a root beer.”
Cole, hanging around the door and doing his warrior evaluation of the room’s strengths and weaknesses, shook his head.
Dru gave Maddy a disapproving look. “The queen-elect is served first, vampire. And she sits alone.”
Maddy stuck her tongue out at him, but rose, did an exaggerated curtsy and flounced over to other end of the sectional. “Root beer, please,” she said, giving Dru a false smile.
He ignored her impertinence, which I was grateful for. “Kali? Anything?”
“Just the details about the coronation.”
Dru handed Maddy her soda, grabbed a red sport drink for himself. He took a swig, leaned back on the cabinet and began peeling the paper off the outside of the bottle. “It’s rather like…a requiem. Formal. Father says his lines, you say yours. You agree to help guard, protect and lead the House and the Undead citizens of the Central region in following our rules and regulations. The vampires of the house come forth one at a time and pledge their allegiance to you and reaffirm their allegiance to my father. There’s a lot of archaic bullshit that no one actually holds you to, but Father insists we go through the motions. It’s over in a matter of minutes.”
“What exactly are my lines?”
Dru set down the drink, walked across the room to a bookcase loaded down with row after row of nearly identical leather-bound books. They resembled volumes of legal precedents you’d see in a lawyer’s office. He perused one particular shelf with a long finger and found the tomb he was looking for.
Returning to me on the sectional, he flipped open the book and thumbed through the beginning pages. “Here,” he said, holding the book out to me. “Memorize these lines.”
Sure enough, there was a script for the coronation, Vlad’s lines as well as mine laid out in order. Kings and queens, although of the same rank in the House, had different responsibilities to the members and to the Master and his sire. A queen’s vows were different than a king’s, and quite sexist, but we were dealing with a leader who’d grown up in the Middle Ages.
I flipped the page, skimming the promises I would verbally make to the Prince and his Undead nation and vaguely committing them to memory in case we got that far during the ceremony. For grins and giggles, I flipped through the next sections describing my duties once the vows were over. I stumbled upon a section titled, Servicing Your Master, and my flipping finger paused.
Pretty sure I didn’t want to know what that entailed, I still couldn’t divert my curiosity. My throat tightened as I read. ‘Servicing’ was part of the job description for both king and queen and defined as giving the Master of the House whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, in order to make his life easier.
I tapped the section and raised my eyes to Dru. “This is one of those archaic bullshit sections you were talking about, right?”
He didn’t even read the title, just smiled at me, pupils darkening. Magic enveloped me, heating the exposed skin at my throat and going lower. Taking the book from my hands, he tossed it on the coffee table and drew me off the couch.
“That policy, my sweet demon, is still in effect.” He leaned forward and laid a gentle kiss on my cheek. “And I intend to explore it fully with you once you’re queen.”
Chapter Forty-six
I stared into his eyes, magic swirling around us, and thought, maybe in another time and place. But there was no way. Not here. Not now. Not when he was a vampire and I was still a mixed up mess over Rad.
Besides, I was pretty sure he was yanking my chain again.
I was saved from replying by a knock on the door. Without taking his gaze from me, Dru called out, “Enter.”
A female servant in a black dress and white apron opened the door and bowed her head. “The Prince is ready.”
Dru took a step back, held out his arm. “Shall we?”
Vlad might have been ready, but I wasn’t. The time was finally here but there was no way I could go through with being vamp queen, regardless of the servicing stuff. I hated vamps, Dru and Maddy the exceptions.
Out of all the supernaturals I’d ever faced, vamps were my favorite to dust. I would have been more than happy if all of them, my two new friends again the exception, were wiped off the planet. But here I was, about to become vamp queen.
Damn Nudra. This was his fault. Even in death, he was still screwing me over.
Turning back wasn’t an option. I’d given my word to Damon that I would do this in order to save my blood slaves and my job. I would act as the Bridge Council’s tool to bridge—there was no better word for it—the chasm between the Council and the Undead nation, making us both stronger. I wouldn’t have to fight vamps anymore. Once this group swore fidelity to me, they also swore it to the Bridge Council, just like I was swearing allegiance to the Prince.
A new chapter was about to unfold in the supernatural world and I was making it happen.
I won’t lie. Pride swelled a bit inside my chest as I rested my a
rm in Dru’s. Besides the pretty boy being Master vamp and an entertaining challenge at that, there was a perk to becoming queen. Toel Chase was going to eat his grave dirt.
I gave Dru a smile. “You’ll help me deal with Toel after the coronation, right?”
“My pleasure.”
“Well, then, lead the way.”
My entrance into the ballroom was once again received with bowed heads, bent knees and a fresh flute of champagne. A raised dais had been uncovered on the north side, three royalty-worthy chairs propped on it. The largest sat in the middle on a second platform, raising it considerably above the other two chairs. Vlad’s I supposed, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Damon et al were on the right side in a second set of ornate chairs. To the left, Juliana and Rafael sat in full view of the crowd with an empty chair between them. Toel’s.
I whispered in Cole’s ear to stay near Damon and keep eye contact with me. He took Maddy’s arm and the two of them skirted the outside of the crowd.
I wanted to talk to Damon a moment before it all went down, so as Dru led me toward the dais, I told him I needed to do so. He dropped me off in front of Damon and walked up the stairs to take the seat on the right side of Vlad’s chair.
Upon my arrival, Damon rose and I tugged him off to the side. “How was your meeting?”
“Fortuitous. And your time with Alexandru?”
Fortuitous. Such a Damon word. “The same, although I have some deep reservations about what they’re asking me to agree to in order to be queen. You are going to come to bat for me and get me excused from some of the archaic bullshit, right?”
“One day at a time, Kali. Let’s get through tonight first. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle your reservations. Remember, this is historic, what you’re doing, and requires tact and compromise. A touch of humility would be welcome as well.”
Humility? Right.
