Chapter 9 Velra
~Velra~
“Aww, come on, you know well now just how sweet I am to those I allow close to me. Don’t tell anyone. Gotta maintain the Halfblood Hound rep.”
Those had been Lazriel’s words to me, his gentle words that he’d uttered in that loveable playful way of his.
To the outside world, he appeared tough, hardened, and even abrasive.
But to those he held dear, those he bravely risked opening up to, that protective facade fell away.
He was a true sweetheart.
And all he’d ever wanted was belonging and love.
To be accepted as he was.
To be able to show who he was without being guilted, shamed, or rejected.
He had that now in us.
But Victor Halrow aimed to steal that away.
It made me so fucking sick to my stomach.
So much so, I’d literally been sick—vomiting again so many times since Lazriel had been gone.
The act of the kidnapping itself was bad enough. And then there was the demented sadism that Victor was capable of, along with his deranged fixation on Lazriel.
But it was also the fact that Lazriel had come so very far.
He’d conquered the repression he’d been trapped within his whole life.
He’d accepted himself in so many ways and not just become comfortable with who he truly was and all the facets of himself, but come to revel in it as well. That was no small feat.
Victor Halrow was known for his mind games, which had become apparent with every encounter he’d had with Lazriel. And I just… I was so scared for Lazriel that the sick son of a bitch would cut into all that progress, undermine it, maybe even twist it.
The four of us coming together had helped each of us deal with things we hadn’t thought possible to properly overcome. But things worked between us because we’d each evolved, we’d each worked at it, at what we had. So if Victor… twisted Lazriel up… it could… no. Stop. Just fucking stop it!
He wouldn’t succeed. Not only was Lazriel strong, adaptable, and possessing a warrior’s heart and courage, I was also working on ensuring Victor didn’t get that far where his sadism and psychotic rhetoric would have time to get it’s claws—or talons—into Lazriel.
Cassius had passed on the intel I’d given him that Sorin had blurted out in his rage—that Gregor Varsellis, a Light Fae, was the leader of Puritas.
Ryker Morgan had been made aware and the Guardian Movement was already now working that angle, because with a name came connections—contacts, trails to follow.
Cassius was currently with Vorzyr and Jaxon at the Shifter Stabilization Unit, mobilizing key personnel and trackers there to seek out Victor’s location.
All tracking spells had failed. We’d even had Ariana and Cornelius combine their massive power to perform a souped-up version of a tracking spell, and that had resulted in nothing. No fucking leads at all.
So when magic failed, there was animal instinct.
We also had Kai working with Lucian to basically meld the magic and instinctual approach as one. They were trying to track the trajectory of the portal that Victor had formed with that Specus Relic.
Basically, everyone was on it. All bases were covered.
And I was supposed to be keeping my mind occupied by attending classes.
I also had Graceyn from Thryne messaging me constantly wanting an update on Sorin.
She didn’t know what had gone down there.
I was supposed to be working on locating my despicable parents.
But I couldn’t focus on any of that until Lazriel was home safe.
Besides, I had my own strategy on how to find my sweetheart love—one nobody else was even going to attempt, because of the risks.
With Cassius occupied and Sylas underground and working the angle of The Shadowed in order to find Lazriel, there was no interference to be had. I could get down to this.
Unfortunately, not without a load of guilt bearing down on me. Or Lazriel’s words to me in Sorin’s cell swirling around my mind, despite my best efforts to focus on our other banter, our love, times of fun and elation.
“You care about people, value life and choices. Shit, you’re the glue that holds our foursome together.
But if you do something like this, so against your nature, it’ll change you.
And that will also change us. And we’re too fucking awesome together as a unit to let anything—or anyone—fuck with that, right? ”
He’d been right in that situation, when I’d come close to murdering my brother.
But this was different.
I sucked in a breath and shifted a little in my cross-legged position on the floor of my dorm room. A circle of my frost surrounded me as I sat in the fixed point at the center. Just a foot in front of me and still within the boundary was an open vial filled with several drops of blood.
Victor Halrow’s blood.
After that monster had snatched Lazriel and escaped through the portal he’d created, Cassius had been frantically trying to latch onto the portal’s residue and use that to force it back open.
While he’d been doing that, I’d noticed blood on the ground.
A quick magical assessment on the blood had identified it as Victor’s, and then I’d gathered it with my power and sealed it away.
In case the tracking experts we had in play hadn’t succeeded. And they hadn’t.
Just not as yet—that was what Cassius kept telling me.
It wasn’t good enough.
Of course, I knew they were all busting their asses, and I valued and appreciated that, but it wasn’t good enough in the sense that the longer Victor had free reign with Lazriel, the more severe the damage could become.
No.
That wasn’t fucking happening.
I twisted my right hand and guided my frost from the top of the circle, spreading it straight down toward the vial.
As soon as it touched it, the vial tipped, and then my frost was there swirling around the blood, infusing with it.
As that held steady, I released my frost magic, then swept my purple Dark Fae power across my palms, drawing blood, grunting at the searing pain of it as I cut deep. My blood needed to continue to flow throughout the entirety of the spell.
I turned my palms upward, blood dripping down into the circle and making a sharp hissing sound—a sign the spell had been initialized proficiently.
And then I called my shadows, drawing hard, until they were swirling around the inside of the circle within moments.
The hissing increased in volume and frequency.
My frost spread, filling the inside of the circle, bit by bit.
Sparks went off in the air within the confines of the frosted circumference.
Those sparks were everything—they meant they’d latched onto Victor’s essence.
When a vampire was created, upon their death in their human form, there was something left behind in the Valley of the Dead—trace aspects of their being when they had been in the state between death and life. Undead life, also known as the vampiric condition.
With my Wraith side, I had the ability to walk among the dead through my shadows, an ability, unlike before when my brother killed me and Sylas had to pull me out and back to life, I had to invoke while I was living—something I had to control.
But with me having touched the Valley so recently, I couldn’t risk even trying to invoke that in the normal sense without now being pulled in and having the spirits there overriding my will and autonomy even as Wraith.
And there was no way I was going to risk my men like that, or put them through anything like that again.
So, instead, I was going to astral project into the Valley of the Dead, using Victor’s blood to access his trace essence, which I could then use to connect to his vampiric form in the land of the living, his current state of being. It wouldn’t just connect, it would lead me straight to him.
The only issue was—and, yeah, it was a big one—while I was astral projecting into the Valley, the moment I found that essence, I needed a way to grab hold of it and pull it out.
To avoid dying by reaching in myself, I needed to use black magic in order to override metaphysical law briefly that would allow me to pull that through without being harmed.
My shadows swirled around like a tornado of black and deep gray smoke, growing in height and potency, thickening, and reinforcing.
Victor’s blood started boiling, cracking the hold of my frost, but I gritted my teeth and constrained it with more.
The sparks threatened to compromise my vision, like a mixture of the disorientating sight of flash lightning and strobe lights.
I held steady—as if I was gonna let a freaky magical lightshow and boiling blood scare me. Not when Lazriel’s wellbeing and that of our foursome by extension was on the line.
A translucent haze materialized right in front of me, an oval-shaped almost-portal.
I was about to close my eyes and take the invitation to allow my mind through to the Valley.
But then black tendrils began oozing from my blood that continued to drip inside the circle.
A gasp escaped me as they headed straight for me, then even rose up off the ground, seeking the wounds in my palms.
Black magic.
It was trying to seep into me.
I gathered my power and tried to ease its pace, to control it, but it wouldn’t allow the restriction.
It wanted to call the shots.
It wanted to rule me.
I knew it had to touch me for me to be able to invoke it, so I could override metaphysical law to get what I needed, but if that happened when it had complete control, it could take me. It could dominate and rule me—and not just during the spell.
“Fuck,” I ground out.
I had to stop the spell and start it again.
Something was wrong.
My will was absolute. I should have been able to control it. What the fuck was happening?
That nausea from earlier rose up and it took way too much effort to push it down.
Oh my God. Was that what was screwing with the spell? Something about this incessant nausea I’d been experiencing recently? Was it more than a trauma response, more than the fallout of everything?
I tried again.