Three Dark Kings and the Winter Blade (Three Dark Kings #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Thyra

Vampyr.

My heart breaks as Antony’s fangs scrape across my neck, the sharp tips easing over my earlobe and around my jaw, a harsh path becoming whisper light.

His voice is guttural. Unnatural. Not himself. “You should have run while you could, Thyra.”

He holds me tightly in the shadows of a tunnel hidden deep in the black mountains of the bloodlands.

His monstrous blue eagle, Azul, shivers in the gloom at his master’s back.

Outside this tunnel, swarming and starving vampyrs shriek through the endless night that covers the bloodlands, their cries promising death.

Too many steps behind me, a silvery light glows softly, a safe haven from the vampyrs… if I could reach it.

I chose not to run, a decision I refuse to regret.

“Antony.” My voice chokes as I try to breathe through the pain gripping my heart, the rising grief that, after all I fought for, after the trust we built between us, I’m losing him. “Stay with me.”

I don’t know how or when he was bitten, or by what means he has kept his vampyric nature at bay until now.

All I know is that until moments ago, he was still himself.

He was fighting the poison that now darkens his green eyes, clouding his irises and threatening to turn them black.

His response comes harsh and dangerous, his fangs sharp against the corner of my lips, threatening to cut me. “Don’t call me Antony. Whoever I was, that fae doesn’t exist anymore.”

For once, I fear he’s speaking the truth.

Moments ago, he told me he didn’t want this, but now his arms are like iron around me, and his soft breaths burn with insatiable hunger.

Heartbeats ago, he told me he needed me to stay alive, but now every prick of his fangs promises torturous pain and a slow death.

Then he told me to call him Vampyr…

No. I won’t.

Clamping my left palm harder against his cheek, pressing my body closer to his, my right arm trapped between us and my silver armor gleaming softly, I enunciate carefully. Forcefully. “Antony. Fight this.”

“Too late,” he snarls. “The iron is gone.”

My brow creases. I need to know what he’s talking about. I need to know what happened, so, despite the imminent danger, I dare to ask, “What iron?”

He moves faster than he ever has before, his reflexes now breathtakingly quick, one hand snapping from my back to close over the hand I’m pressing to his heart, where a near-gaping wound bleeds.

“The iron blade that has occupied my heart for nearly seventeen years,” he says, his darkening eyes burning me. “The iron blade that stopped the vampyric poison from claiming my mind, although my body fell victim to a vampyr’s impulses. Without the iron, the poison has resumed its work.”

The wound beneath my palm is slick with blood. “A dagger in your heart. A vampyr’s poison… But…how?”

He drags my right hand from his chest and up to his other cheek so I’m now cupping his face in both hands.

At my touch, his eyes close, he nuzzles his cheek to my palm, and his shoulders slump.

When he speaks, his voice is ragged. A hint of himself. “It was me that night, Thyra. The night the Vividari were slaughtered.”

Hot tears burn behind my eyes at his admission.

His birth mother, Aeliana Vividari, and her people were slaughtered by a vampyr when Antony was only eleven years old.

The story I was told is that Antony’s father set a vampyr loose among them in an act of cruelty that made way for his lover, the last Vividari woman, Galla Vividari, to become his queen.

“Do you remember how I told you my father forced me into the catacombs?” Antony asks, his eyes still closed.

“Yes.”

The catacombs beneath the Constellation, which is a series of white towers where the royal family lives, are secured by blood magic that ensures only the current, living king can enter the catacombs.

Antony’s father carried him through the magical entrance, risking Antony’s life while testing the theory that the king could carry another fae through if he wished.

“He had captured and trapped a vampyr down there,” Antony continues, words now pouring out of him, broken and cursed, each one more ragged than the last. “A starving vampyr. The one everyone thinks killed the Vividari. He fed me to that vampyr. I fought so fucking hard while my father watched and laughed and told me I’d either die or choose to be turned, and he didn’t care which because he had plans either way. ”

Antony’s lips draw even further back from his teeth. “I killed that vampyr. I chose to drink its blood right before it drained me dry. After that, I was so fucking hungry that when my father let me loose on Mount Vividari, I did exactly what he wanted.”

Tears escape down Antony’s cheeks, trapped against my palms.

“I killed and I fed. And I kept killing and feeding. The Vividari didn’t fight back at first because I was Aeliana’s son. The young prince had come to visit them. They fucking welcomed me.”

His teeth snap together, his fangs slicing across his lower lip, but he doesn’t seem to care. “They didn’t stand a chance. I was a vampyr with the strength of an iron king and a built-in immunity to starlight because I was born with starlight power.”

Grief threatens to tear my heart into pieces, my vision blurring as I piece together the puzzle of his life. The small signs that were in front of me, between which I saw no connection…

The blood all over him when he returned from hunting. Feeding. The fact that he never ate food in front of me or seemed to need water. The moment when the cut on my cheek, that small trickle of blood, had nearly driven him out of his mind.

And the way he spoke of his mother when he described the night she had been killed by a vampyr…

I remember the way his voice choked when he’d said he couldn’t stop any of it.

What he really meant was: he couldn’t stop.

My fingertips brush Antony’s cheeks. “Her face was cut up. She was running from you.”

“She tripped. Or appeared to. She scooped up an iron dagger that one of her dead brethren had dropped. She stabbed me with it before she died,” he says, a new tension forming around his eyes, a new snarl in his voice.

“Right through my heart. That’s when my mind returned to me.

The iron burned my flesh and stopped the poison before it took all of me.

It was too late to save her. And my fucking father… ”

Antony shakes his head slowly, without dislodging my hands, while both of his arms tighten against my back.

“He was afraid of me then. Because I was myself. In control. He tried to end me, but I was stronger than him. Stronger even than I was born to be. I left him alive, went back to the Constellation, broke the hilt off the dagger, leaving the iron blade in place, and then I washed off the blood. Cold water. Fucking freezing water. The next day, I acted as if nothing had happened.”

Fresh tears burn behind my eyes as I remember the way Antony bathed me in a stream of cold water after an assassin had tried to kill me.

Antony said to me: Do you see? The blood is draining away. The past is falling away with it, and soon it will be gone, and you won’t have to fear it anymore. You will remember only the water running clear.

“After that, my body grew like normal,” he says. “I made sure I behaved as normal. I devised a leather strap to cover my heart that would look like armor. I quietly found blood sources in herds of animals and, as soon as I could, I asked Victor for steel armor.

“For the remaining three years of my father’s life, he looked at me with fear in his eyes. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about draining him dry, but Galla already held power over the kingdom as the last living Vividari.”

Antony’s voice hardens. “The iron blade is gone now. The poison has done the remainder of its work. Eating my mind. Stealing my hope.”

He opens his eyes. His cold, green irises have turned completely black.

“No—” My denial cuts short as I search his face for even a shred of who he was, but the Antony I knew never would have told me any of this.

He caged his secrets, giving me only half-truths, weaving truth and lies into a tapestry he created just for me.

The moment he started speaking of his past, I should have known he was disappearing with every passing heartbeat.

Many times over the last three days, I wished I could see his expression. I wanted him to take off his helmet and expose his feelings to me. But when he first took off his armor, I realized how much it caged his brutal nature.

Now…

His eyes are hollow. Blank. Devoid of sanity and emotion.

Now, I would welcome his fury. Anything but this awful nothingness that tells me I must fight for my life. Not with physical strength, and not with the love I was sure I’d glimpsed in him only hours ago, a love that was the smallest, most fragile treasure between us…

But with guile and malice, a mirror to the hollow nothingness that has claimed his heart and mind.

Because from deep within my mind comes the lesson my father tried to teach me, and which I have only begun to understand.

I am all things to all people.

Just as I faced Galla Vividari, mirroring her cruelty, so I must now reflect Antony’s darkness. Even if it only buys me a few more moments of life.

His lips twitch into a cold smile as he asks me softly, near-crooning, “Will you try to run now, Thyra?”

I take a deep, slow breath, trying to calm the thumping beat of my heart, a thump of blood that can only tempt him to drive his fangs into my throat without delay.

Just as softly, I lean closer, raise myself up on my tiptoes, brush my lips to his jaw, and ask, “Do you want me to?”

He shrugs but says, “Yes.”

I bite my lip. Slowly. Making sure he’s watching as I draw it between my teeth, releasing my lip again before I ask, “What if I run into the light?”

Again, his broad shoulders rise and fall. “I’m immune to light.”

“Liar,” I whisper. I don’t know what’s emitting the light behind me, but… “Starlight stings you.”