Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Christian
The evening passes in a substantially less sexy manner if I do say so myself.
The taste of her blood and the pulse of her orgasm is still buzzing through my body. Even as I sit patiently in the fae’s war room with uncomfortably stiff posture. Thorn is seated at the head of a massive mahogany table that’s etched with a sword in the middle.
The symbol of a sword in a war room is usually a notion of strength, but it’s not in this one. Because crawling up the sharp edge of the blade are endless vines of thorned roses swooping extravagantly around the weapon in a way that seems more righteous than militant.
It reminds me of my mother and her decor I’ve kept safe in the Blood Kingdom like forgotten artifacts. She was the Fae Queen. She was loved. How did I not know that? How did an entire vampire court so carefully bury that dark secret?
My father did. And he did it well.
I wonder if he’s noticed me missing yet.
I stare down the long table at the Fae King, and his attention bores into mine before passing to Seven on my left and Rorrick on my right.
Aerin, the charming fae fucker I met earlier, is absent from this little get-together, and I know at the back of his mind, that fact is gnawing at him.
Curiously, to his immediate right is Crymson.
She sits quietly with her hands neatly folded in front of her.
His brother, Carver, is across from her to Thorn’s left.
Carver interests me more than Thorn. Not because of the sweet little moment we shared in the gardens, but because he’s more relaxed than his brother: easier to get information from.
“You said you could feel her. Her who?” My fingers lace together firmly, and my jaw is just as tightly hinged as I wait for the Blood Carver to spill his information.
“The woman, the leader of the Dead is a woman. She’s their Queen,” Carver stares blankly back as if the fun fact makes all the irrational sense in the world.
“I’m sorry, what?” I exhale slowly, paining myself with patience I don’t possess.
Thorn’s long tangled hair shifts as he, too, waits for his brother’s reply.
“When I was little, for years, she’d come to my bedroom window at night. She’d watch me with glowing red eyes and bloody lips. They call her the Queen of the Dead.”
“What?!” Thorn blinks hard at this creepy little fairy tale, and I, too, am starting to understand why the Prince of the Fae is a fucking morbid oddity in their hierarchy of chaos.
“She was nice,” he argues. “She’d leave me fun little bones on my windowsill from the Burned Border. I liked her.” His manic smile and hundred-yard stare are immensely unsettling, and yet still, Crymson reaches her tiny hand across the table and slips her fingers over his.
“That sounds nice,” she murmurs with a small encouraging smile, and every male at this table is sending her SOS signals with their eyes right now.
“Right. Anyway,” I utter swiftly to get on with the rest of our business before Thorn shoves us out the front door on our asses.
“I’ve lost men to the things in the Dark Lands.
One bite from their fangs is a death sentence.
” I pause and look to the man at my side.
Seven’s eyes are bright and watchful. His body is bigger, bulkier than I’ve ever seen from him.
He isn’t dying. He’s thriving. “How did you do it?” I ask flatly.
Thorn’s lips twitch with a pleased arrogance. There’s that righteousness.
“Your men–rest their heartless souls–abused my mother before taking her to the Blood Lands. They fed from her. They turned her. She was a Fae Queen, and they made her their halfling. It had . . . side effects on the baby she was carrying.” Thorn’s gaze remains hard on the center of the table like he could cut through the etched blade there with a single striking look.
“Our healers took my blood to heal my brother. They were too scared to test their magic on him. We, too, have lost men. When the simple blood transfer didn’t work, they passed something else, something stronger, into me.
I don’t know what that magic was that night, but I thought they were killing me to save him.
Pain like I’ll never forget ripped through my veins.
It didn't kill me. But it made me stronger.” His gaze slips to Carver’s for a moment, and their silence screams loudly through the room for several passing seconds.
“The new blood transfusion the next morning saved Carver’s life. ”
“And that’s what you gave Seven? Your . . . mutated blood?” The energy inside of me hums restlessly to get to the part they’re clearly leaving out.
“A variant of it, yes.”
“Varian’?” Rorrick echoes with a curl of his lips.
Thorn nods.
“It isn’t just my blood,” Thorn says casually, and alarm bells are fucking blaring through my messy mind now. “A concoction of old magic, the venom of the dead, and yes, my mutated blood gives the results you’re seeing in your friend.”
The venom of the dead.
What the unholy fuck.
Christian, calm down, Crymson says in a gentle voice that tip toes through the cracks of my crumbling mind. He saved Seven’s life. He almost died.
My fingers drum an erratic tempo across the wooden table as I take a few steady breaths and appraise Seven at my side.
That easy intelligence still shines in his gaze.
I feel his calming energy washing all through the room like damage control.
He’s the same. But not. His eyes are ringed with red, but the crawling lines around his throat are what really itch beneath my skin.
Because he looks like me.
“You made him–” I swallow hard, and still my fingers tap, tap, tap away against the table before I completely fucking explode with rage. “You fucking made him like me!”
“Christian,” Crymson says softly, and I can’t fucking look at her.
Thorn glances from me to Seven and then back again.
“Like you?” the Fae King asks stupidly.
Fuck! He took something good and pure and . . .
I shove back from the war room table, and with rumbling dark magic, I burst from the inside out in a rush of bats to the door at the back of the room.
Chaotic flapping wings settle back into place, pulling me back together in the blink of an eye.
When my palm catches the smooth wooden knob, the warmth of her hand settles over mine.
She’s faster now.
Christian, look at me, she pleads, and her voice is a soothing balm across my broken, bloody thoughts.
The energy beneath my flesh crawls with discomfort. When her palm slides over the wrinkled fabric across my bicep . . . I don’t pull away from her. I peer down at big green eyes that I want to lose myself in. I want–I want her words and her touch and her comfort to make it all better.
But she can’t.
In a flash of movement, I snatch her wrist up, and the breathy gasp along her lips is a delicious distracting sound. I turn her palm in my hand, bring her knuckles to my lips, and kiss ever so softly along her warm flesh.
“They made him like me,” I say in a broken whisper once more across the back of her hand with a tired closing of my heavy eyelids.
“Powerful, you mean?” she asks, and I can physically feel the coyness of her smile along her praising words.
My lashes lift slowly. I level her with a tired look.
I know what she’s doing. I’m not some stupid fae boy who can be appeased with pompous pretty words.
“Handsome?” she asks before rapid firing even more pretty words. “Cunning? Magnetic? Big-dicked?”
At that, I do smile. Hard.
“You’re maddeningly adorable. Do you know that, pet?” I ask as I pull her closer by just the small of her back.
She falls into me with ease. I meld her against me, wrapping her tightly in my arms and letting her energy calm my own.
A wave of magic cools against my racing emotions, and when I turn slightly, I already know he’s there.
Seven’s jewel-like eyes meet mine from over her head.
“You have to give it to her. She’s right about that last one.” He smiles slowly, and where there was once carefulness in him, there’s confidence.
For a single shaking moment, it feels like maybe . . . just maybe, everything will be alright.