Chapter 7
Lux
Drak’s hand trailed along the inside of my bare thigh, his fingers rough against the smooth skin, but his touch feathery and teasing. My breath hitched as he dragged two fingers over my slick core.
We shared the throne as if we were already husband and wife.
Moaning, I arched into him as he called himself my God. But such words were blasphemous, and each time he spoke ill of Odin and Freya, I flinched.
Except this time.
What the Hel was wrong with me? How could I ache for a Godless creature?
When he brought my wetness to my mouth, I licked his fingers greedily, tasting my desire for him. Drak knew how to touch me.
As if he’d already taken me, he knew exactly what ignited me, and what beckoned the slickness between my legs. It seemed he’d memorized every inch of my body, as if he’d set me on fire hundreds of times before.
Everything about the king was unbidden, selfish, honest to a fault, free. And I ate it up. I went from hiding under my sister’s name and lying about my entire life to becoming the Gods’ instrument of death.
“And you will kill him too,” a voice in my mind said. Odin spoke to me, sending lightning pain through my skull as his tone carved into my head. An image filled my mind—my hand wrapped around the stake as I forced it through Drak’s chest.
I shoved the thought behind the wall I had built, because all I wanted was to be alone with Drak before the Gods interrupted. They always would because I belonged to them.
“Give me more,” I begged Drak.
The tip of his fang brushed against my ear. I flipped around, spreading my legs to either side of his hips. A sly, wicked smile tugged at his lips as his icy eyes poured over every inch of my naked body.
Leaning into me, his breath brushed over the tips of my taut nipples, then found its way to my neck. Stinging pain suddenly shot through the soft flesh just below my jaw.
I did not give him permission to bite me.
I tried to jerk away from him, but he vanished. When the throne melted away, I woke with a gulp of icy air.
Absorbing the reality around me, I opened my eyes to a vampire crouched over me, his mouth on my throat.
And it wasn’t my future husband.
But I was in no immediate danger, aside from the sting of the bite. This idiot trying to feed on me was no threat; a vampire lost to bloodlust was an easy kill. My heart slowed as my focus narrowed.
I writhed in the tangle of blankets and my nightgown, freeing myself to reach for my weapon and stab him.
The vampire whimpered, suddenly pulling back as he clutched his throat. Feeding on me was painful for all of them, and apparently this idiot hadn’t gotten the message. His red eyes widened as his jaw went slack and steam rippled from his burnt tongue.
I ripped the stake from my thigh and slammed the tip into the vampire’s ribcage.
His black blood spread over his body, turning his skin and bones to ash where it touched.
In a matter of seconds, his body disintegrated.
Drops of blood stained my nightgown, and the ash scattered over the white bedcovers.
I rolled away from the remains of the vampire I’d destroyed only to catch sight of a figure emerging from the shadows.
Silver sent more than one this time.
I spoke the compulsion into the darkness. “Show yourself, vampire. Your existence ends here.” The effort weighed on my eyelids and knotted my throat. I gripped the tree pendant in my other hand, having slipped it from the pocket of my nightgown.
A wiry man appeared in the moonlight, his eyes already glazed from my compulsion.
I advanced on him, raising the stake, but after a bout of shallow sleep, I was shaking and weak.
Dreams of Drak, the Gods’ words cutting through my sleep, and staying in the library late into the night had ruined my chance for rest.
My eye twitched, and the muscles of my jaw ached. I could not hold the compulsion.
As soon as I dropped it, the vampire dashed back into the shadows, but not before I slashed him with the tip of the Y Tree.
After watching his partner’s destruction, he must have decided his loyalty to Silver’s plan wasn’t worth it. I gritted my teeth and stalked after him into the maze of hallways.
This wasn’t how I wanted to spend the morning of my wedding.
I hated the endless corridors that led to nowhere, the fireplaces that had the dual purpose of hiding secret rooms, and that damn draft.
Actually, as cold as the hallways were, the draft was the part that I hated the least. The icy air that bit at my nose and scraped over my pebbled skin reminded me of home.
Every gust of wind took me back to the place I hadn’t witnessed with my own eyes in weeks.
The place I’d probably never see again.
My heart sank, twisting in my gut as my best friend’s face flashed in my mind. I’d convinced the king to free Ragna, but she’d returned to a different Skaldir, one now torn apart by Silver’s army. I shook my head to clear the thoughts and focus on listening for the intruder’s footsteps.
Grey surrounded me at every turn. Each corner looked identical to the last, and the only sound was the echo of my own footfalls until the hiss of someone in pain stopped me short.
Creeping to the end of the corner where the hall forked in two, I peered around the edge to locate the source of the hiss and found the dim outline of a figure slumped against the wall.
The silver injured him, making the skin on his cheek bubble from the pure metal cursed to melt his kind.
But he would recover fast, and if he didn’t fully recover, it wouldn’t matter.
Vampires had a way of suppressing pain while they fought.
The torment of their hunger and anger overwhelmed any distress from a bit of congealed flesh.
I froze in the hall. My fingers had numbed so much from lack of blood flow and the frigid air that the stake in my grip slipped. I snatched it, affirming my clumsy hold around the base of the rough wood, but not before a gasp broke through my lips.
Crimson eyes snapped up. I ducked back behind the safety of the wall, but the pounding in my chest was loud enough to alert him of exactly where I was, flipping me from huntress to hunted.
Fuck.
Vampires had heightened senses in the world around them, but I had a lifetime of learning the nuances of my own senses, knowing my body’s every ability and every limitation. Knowing exactly when I would faint and when my nerves would fray.
This awareness led me to Loki’s power. I could tame it by naming the sensations the same way I calmed myself in a fit of nerves. “I feel the freezing air; I hear the shaking in my voice.” No matter how many times I destroyed a vampire, I’d never be completely without fear. “I see him.”
My heart stopped at the sight of the figure upon me.
In a single blink, he’d flashed from his place around the corner and pinned me against the stone.
Flickers of light reflected from the torch on the wall, catching the fire in his eyes as the base of his palm slammed into my chin and shoved my face to the side.
Saliva dripped from his fangs as he struck, pressing his mouth to the thickest vein in my neck where my pulse pounded uncontrollably. An excruciating sting cut through my throat, hot with the instant draw of my blood to his hollow, sucking fangs.
As he bit me, the focus of my compulsion split apart. The pain, more intense this time because he bit my existing wound. It was too late to talk my way through this, but I’d practiced the angle with which to shove a weapon through a vampire’s ribcage hundreds of times, if not thousands.
My wrist knew how to bend, my muscles remembering for me as I tipped the pointed end up and between the bones protecting his dead heart.
He reeled back, but not from the stake. I’d barely pushed the tip into his flesh when he started heaving from the burn of consuming my blood.
I almost rolled my eyes at this blood-lusting idiot as I charged forward.
After the second bite, my head was spinning, and collapse threatened at the corners of my blackened vision.
My aim was a little off, but I buried the stake into his chest anyway for shock, then pulled back and tried a truer aim.
A hand caught my elbow, and another arm wrapped around my throat.
“Thanks for the bait, Sterak.” A woman’s voice curled around me, cold and raspy like she inhaled too much smoke from an open fire. Sterak stumbled back, still heaving from the burn of my blood. “Maybe the burning will stop when Lux is dead,” she said, pity almost softening her tone.
Still suffering, Sterak fell against the opposite wall and slid down as pitifully as the tone this woman afforded him.
I squeezed my eyes shut in the seconds that she placed her hands on my neck, ready to snap my spine.
Guttural fear pulsed through me with every misstep of my dancing heart, but it was in this fear that my focus sharpened.
I’d known fear my entire life. With the illness plaguing my heart, it felt every beat could be my last. My numb fingers and heavy limbs, my tendency to lose consciousness if I pushed myself too hard, the swelling in my ankles and belly, and the never-ending ache beneath my chest bone had prepared me to zero in on every sensation.
And I’d gotten much faster at it after killing nineteen vampires, as long as pain didn’t distract me.
I taste blood and smell the acrid burn of flesh.
Her body pressed into mine, bicep against my ear, poised to strike, and in a single breath, I unleashed the compulsion.
“Back away,” I said, my voice so unlike my own as Loki’s words tainted it. I controlled what I said, but channeled his power through the words. It’d become more muddled lately, with his voice in my mind trying to manipulate my words as he and Odin and Freya argued.
My mind was a crowded place, confusing more often than at peace, but the compulsion worked.
The vampire immediately released me and stepped back.
I spun with the stake still in my fist. She was taller, leaner, more haunting in the gaunt hollows of her cheeks than my last kill, and she fell faster when I slammed the stake up into her ribcage.
She dropped as I pulled it back, and her dead heart spewed blood toxic to her own body.
In seconds, she would be nothing but specks under my feet.
I turned to Sterak, who was still reeling from the pain of my blood, his lack of control over bloodlust leading to his downfall.
He scrambled to his feet as if to fight me, but his attempt to back away really was pitiful.
Slamming the bloodied weapon into his heart, I ended another undead life, tallying my kills to twenty-one since I’d become the huntress.
But as he dropped in front of me, withering to ash, my pounding heart didn’t slow. “Long live the queen,” he breathed. “For Silver.”
The sound of her name on his lips—of the name I’d claimed for so long—hollowed me faster than his blood did to him. Another shudder rippled through my muscles, my bones.
When the truth came out that I’d stolen her identity, the vampires infiltrating the castle loved throwing her name in my face, even though I never wanted to take it as my own. None of my names had ever felt right. Lux, Silver, Huntress.
I didn’t like any of these.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my wife,” a voice behind me drawled.
I groaned, because of all the names and titles I despised, being called Drak’s wife was once the one I hated the most.
But I didn’t exactly hate it anymore…
Relief washed over me when I saw Drak leaning against the wall, concern furrowing his brow. He had threatened me before, like the other vampires, but now I felt safe—he was the first and only person to see my struggles, warm my hands, and insist I rest.
And damn if I didn’t need rest right now.
When I took a shaky step toward him, he bolted forward, catching me before exhaustion sent me face-first against the stone floor.