Chapter 75
When we are back at the castle, there’s a new set of guards at my door. A dark-haired giant with walnut-colored skin and deep brown eyes blocks my doorway when I try to move past.
“Infantries do not belong in the castle,” Brunar spits from my side.
The handsome infantry grins at Brunar. “King’s orders. You’ve been relieved.”
Brunar stiffens at my side, his face turning a mottled red. “I take my orders directly from the king—”
The brown-eyed infantry soldier pulls a soul gun out from under his dark, winter cloak and smashes it against Brunar’s temple, pushing down with the barrel until Brunar is leaning his head all the way to the side.
“The king had business to attend to and told me that if you put up a fight, well . . .” He pulls the hammer back on the revolver glistening with void gems. “I think you get the idea.”
“The code,” Brunar grits out, “What’s the code for me to stand down?”
The infantry’s eyes narrow. “The code,” he says with a wild grin, “is death.”
Brunar’s eyes flash to mine. It only takes one tiny shake of his head for me to understand—and for him to die.
The soul gun’s hammer slams down, ringing the sound of gunfire throughout my corridor.
The red tinge of Brunar’s soul rises as his body falls. Infantry soldiers surround my personal guard.
At the same time infantry swords sink through the chests of my guards, I’m hurling my dagger for the center of the leader’s forehead.
He stops it midair with a wave of silver smoke and tsks, “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“I do.”
I resort to the call of his blood, the call that whispers through me. I raise my hand and begin pinching off valuable, oxygenated blood to his brain.
He clutches at his throat. “The siphon,” he chokes out. “Get the siphon.”
Infantry-sized arms and hands tackle me to the ground and strap a collar around my neck with a black gem the size of my fist.
Instant, burning agony shatters through me in a never-ending pulse through my body.
I shove and kick men off me, going for the leader’s blood supply again, but nothing happens. Just intense waves of pain that make my knees shake.
I claw at the collar.
The brown-eyed leader holds a key in front of me. “Locked.”
I swipe for the key, but his silver vessel smoke yanks it from view.
The tension climbing down my muscles reminds me that I’m still bandaged around my torso, but my legs are just fine—if I’m not counting the unrelenting pain sliding down from my new necklace.
I jump for a kick to his jaw when he snatches my ankle with a crushing fist and slams my body to the cold stone floor.
He crouches down over me as my head throbs and the ceiling spins. “Let me rephrase that. If you annoy me, Little Princess, your Awom friend will die.”
Yisabell.
The leader plucks my daggers from their sheaths, and hands them off to his men. “Now get up and walk,” he snarls.
I climb to my feet, and he takes a position close behind me.
Tilting his head beside my ear, he says, “Don’t draw any attention to yourself, and we won’t have a problem.”
They lead me back down the stairs, down the next two floors, through the Hall of Kings.
Halix enters the hallway, stalking our way with a look that could kill.
She throws her arm out and a violent wind sweeps through the hall, knocking frames down from the wall. The gust changes direction and pulls the cloaks of the infantry soldiers over their heads, blinding them.
Halix moves fast, whipping out a dark sword in the shape of a wave and takes down two infantry men before the leader catches her by the throat and runs one of my daggers through her side. He leaves it buried in her ribs as he summons another to his hand from the collection under his cloak.
Her eyes widen before she disappears into a trail of mist.
The leader staggers back from the sudden absence of her weight in his outstretched arm. “You know our orders,” he barks to his men behind him. “Let’s go.”
They step over their fallen comrades, shoving me forward, into my father’s chambers. I’m man-handled down the steps, led under the castle by my own infantries. When the leader shoves my shoulder, I turn, winding up for a punch to his jugular, but he says, “Yisabell will pay for that.”
My fist halts midair before falling back to my side.
“Good little princess,” he says before kicking me in the back—which is still healing—and I fall down the stone steps.
They lead me all the way through the passage to where a white car I’ve never seen before sits in the middle of Dagen’s garage, its engine purring.
A man with bronze skin and a white eyebrow piercing opens the back door of the car for me. “I don’t think we’ve officially met.”
His smile darkens. “I’m Jasper, heir to the Zo Kingdom.”