Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rocco
Raven didn’t seem to tire. Hour after hour, her massive wings beat a steady rhythm against the night sky, carrying us over an endless stretch of black ocean.
The stars had begun to shift—constellations I recognized from my youth slowly giving way to unfamiliar patterns as we crossed into the Eastern Hemisphere. We were getting closer.
The thought should have brought relief. Instead, my chest tightened.
Closer to the shard meant closer to Vex.
Closer to the castles meant closer to Costin’s territory—and we were about to break into one of Dracula’s homes while Dracula himself wanted us dead.
Every mile Raven ate up was one mile closer to either salvation or a grave.
Selena leaned against me, her body heavy and warm, her breathing slow and even. She’d fallen asleep somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, her head tucked beneath my chin, her fingers still loosely curled around my forearm. Even in sleep, she held on to me.
I tightened my arms around her and pressed my lips to her hair. She smelled like Rose’s shampoo and salt air and something underneath that was purely her—something my blood recognized now on an instinctual level that made my chest ache.
Mine. The word pulsed through me, quiet and fierce. I’d denied it for two years. I wouldn’t deny it again.
So far, no one had followed us. I’d been checking—scanning the sky behind us every few minutes, searching for any dark shape cutting through the clouds.
I glanced over my shoulder again.
After hours of flying, Lucien had given in to exhaustion somewhere over the Atlantic.
He was stretched across Raven’s broad back behind the others, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling with slow, deep breaths.
Whatever Anton’s vial had given him, it had burned through his system hours ago. The flight had taken everything he had.
But Darius was still airborne.
He cut through the clouds beside Raven, his dark form tireless and relentless, matching her pace stroke for stroke.
He was a Runner—that ancient, inexhaustible energy humming through his body like a second heartbeat, sustaining him long past the point where any normal vampire would have dropped from the sky.
His silver eyes glowed faintly in the gray light, alert and watchful, scanning the clouds around us like a sentinel who never stood down.
I envied that. The ability to keep going when everything in you screamed to stop.
I doubted a bat could make this flight, even an ancient vampire in full shift. The distance was too vast, the wind too punishing. A vampire’s bat form was built for stealth, not endurance. Not this kind of endurance.
But Angelo didn’t need wings.
He had a private jet. Resources. Contacts in every corner of the supernatural world. If he figured out where we were headed, he could have people waiting for us before we ever touched down.
The question was whether he knew.
Only Tinkerbell had that information. She was the thread connecting us to Angelo, the one person who knew our destination. Could she remain silent? Could she hold that secret against the full weight of Angelo Santi’s fury?
Another person in danger because of me. The list kept growing—Selena, my mother, Rose, Valentin, Alice, Darius, Lucien, Raven, and now Tinkerbell. Everyone who got close to this mess ended up with a target on their back, and I was the one who’d painted it there.
Angelo could be very persuasive. Creative, even, when it came to extracting information.
I’d seen the aftermath of his interrogations—the hollow eyes, the trembling hands, the way people flinched at shadows for months afterward.
He didn’t need to resort to violence. He had ways of crawling inside your head and finding the one thing you couldn’t bear to lose, then holding it over you until you broke.
I wasn’t sure even a witch as powerful as Tinkerbell could survive that. Not because she was weak—she wasn’t. But Angelo had centuries of practice at finding the cracks in people. And everyone had cracks.
Selena stirred against me, murmuring something unintelligible, and burrowed closer. I pulled her tighter against my chest.
If Angelo found out where we were going, we’d be walking into a trap. If Tinkerbell broke, we’d have enemies waiting on both ends—Angelo behind us and whatever horrors Vex had prepared at Dracula’s castle ahead.
I stared out at the dark horizon and counted the hours we had left.
Not enough. It was never enough.
Our shred of hope was that Vex didn’t know we were coming. If it wasn’t for Balthazar, we wouldn’t know where he was going. It was a big risk trusting him. Not that I did.
The bastard could be setting us up. We could be walking into a trap. But it was our only lead.
With each mile, the darkness softened. The black sky bled into deep violet, then pale gray, and I spotted land on the horizon—a dark, jagged line rising from the sea like the spine of some ancient beast. Europe.
Something loosened in my chest. Not relief—not yet—but the fragile thread of hope that we might actually make it.
Raven banked upward without warning, her powerful wings driving us higher until the clouds swallowed us whole.
Cold, damp air enveloped my skin and visibility dropped to nothing.
Smart. Dawn meant exposure, and a silver dragon with a wingspan wider than a city block, glinting in the morning light, wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
The clouds would give us cover until we reached Transylvania.
Selena shifted against me, still asleep. I pulled her closer and turned my eyes back to the horizon.
Almost there.
Then the mountains came.
They rose up out of nowhere—massive, jagged peaks that erupted from the farmland like the earth had split open and reached for the sky.
Dense forest blanketed the slopes in every direction, pine and spruce so thick and dark it swallowed the light whole.
Mist clung to the valleys, curling through the trees like something alive, filling the hollows with pale, shifting fog that never seemed to burn off.
The air changed too. Even at this altitude, I could feel it—heavier, colder, charged with something I couldn’t name. Something old. Something that seeped up from the earth itself and settled into your bones like a warning.
I’d never been to this part of the world.
But something deep inside me—something ancient in my blood—recognized it.
This was a land that belonged to vampires.
This was where Dracula came from. The first vampire.
The father of all of us—born and made vampires alike.
I could feel it the way you feel a storm coming before the first crack of thunder.
I sniffed, searching for some trace of the castle—the scent Balthazar had promised would lead us to the right one. Nothing. Just pine and cold and damp earth.
Four castles. And the Solstice was tonight.
Balthazar was probably enjoying this. Sitting in whatever hellhole he called home, savoring the image of us stumbling through the Carpathians like rats in a maze. One of his sadistic games with a ticking clock and impossible odds.
Selena stirred against me, blinking awake. She looked down and her breath caught.
“We’re here,” she whispered.
Somewhere down there, hidden among the mist and ancient forest, Dracula’s castles were waiting. We just didn’t know which one. I expected to see the tops of turrets rising above the tree line—some glimpse of the legendary fortress that had haunted vampire mythology for millennia.
Nothing. Just endless forest and fog.
That was somehow worse. Castles you could see, you could plan for. Castles that were swallowed whole by the land itself? That meant it didn’t want to be found.
Raven tilted her wings and began her descent, spiraling down toward a dense stretch of forest below. The temperature plummeted as we dropped—the air turning bitter and sharp, each exhale leaving a cloud of white vapor hanging in front of my face. Selena shivered against me, and I pulled her closer.
No roads. No villages. No people. Just an endless expanse of ancient trees standing shoulder to shoulder, their dark branches interlocking overhead like a cathedral ceiling. The kind of place where things could hide and never be found.
Raven broke through the canopy and landed in a small clearing, her massive body touching down with a grace that seemed impossible for a creature her size.
The ground trembled beneath the impact, sending birds scattering from the surrounding trees.
She lowered herself onto her belly, her silver scales dulling in the pale light filtering through the branches.
Solid ground. My legs were stiff, my back ached, and every muscle in my body had been clenched for hours. But we’d made it. We were in Transylvania—Costin’s homeland, the birthplace of Dracula—and we were still alive.
For now, that was enough.
I slid off first, my boots sinking into soft, damp earth that smelled of moss and decay. Then I reached up and caught Selena by the waist, lifting her down. She gripped my shoulders, her cheeks flushed from the cold, her breath coming in quick white puffs.
The others followed—Rose climbing down carefully, Alice after her, Valentin dropping to the ground with practiced ease.
Once everyone had gotten off, Raven shifted back.
I turned away, giving her privacy, and took in the forest around us—ancient oaks and towering spruce, their trunks thick with moss, the air heavy with the scent of damp earth and something wild I couldn’t name.
This was Costin’s homeland. I could feel it in my bones.
“It’s freezing,” Raven said behind me.
Lucien was already moving. I heard the rustle of the backpack, the zip of a jacket. When I turned back, she was dressed, Lucien close at her side—blocking the wind, blocking everything that wasn’t her.
Then the scent hit me.
Blood. Rich, ancient, and overwhelmingly powerful—rolling down the mountainside like an invisible tide.
It flooded my senses, drowning out the pine and the damp earth and the cold.
My fangs punched through my gums before I could stop them, and a hunger unlike anything I’d ever experienced ripped through my gut.
Not the manageable ache of needing to feed.
This was something primal. Something feral. Every instinct I had screamed at me to hunt, to feed, to tear into whatever was producing that scent and drink until there was nothing left.
My hands trembled. My vision sharpened, colors bleeding away until the world narrowed to shades of red and shadow.
What the hell was happening to me?
I glanced at Selena. Her eyes had gone wide, her lips parted, her own fangs descending. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, her body swaying slightly, fighting the same pull that was tearing through me.
Rose had gone pale, her fingers gripping Valentin’s arm, her breath coming in shallow gasps. And Valentin himself was rigid beside her—nostrils flaring, a vein pulsing at his temple, his hands balled into fists at his sides.
Every vampire in the group was being hit. Hard.
Darius frowned, his silver eyes darting between us. “What’s happening to you?”
Lucien stepped closer to Raven, instinctively putting himself between her and whatever was affecting us. Alice hung back, watching with wide, wary eyes.
They couldn’t smell it. They couldn’t feel it. This was for us. Only us.
Valentin looked up a steep hill that disappeared into the mist, his jaw clenched against the hunger clawing at him. “It’s up there.” His voice was strained, barely controlled. “Can you smell it? It’s overpowering.”
The castle. The blood was coming from the castle.
Dracula’s fortress was calling to its children. And every drop of vampire blood in my veins was answering.