Chapter 13
Drak
Lux’s voice burst through the pain, but it was that one single word that left my chest tight.
Rune.
He’s not like the men in the sagas anymore.
Phantom pain radiated through my ribcage as her words settled in my mind: I was not like them.
I was never a warrior, but I swore I felt the axe cut my flesh. A thick blade seemed to crunch the bones at the base of my neck and those that caged my heart. A heart that no longer beat but filled with black blood, ready to push out and poison my skin until I became nothing but ash.
I was the vampire Silver created.
Before that, I was just a young man in the shadows of Mara’s Keep. So why did I remember an injury I’d never suffered?
“Rune!” Lux screamed, but she sounded so far away.
I peeled my eyes open to a sea of bodies.
The tendrils of her auburn hair were wet with blood and sweat.
Clawed hands reached out for me, her fingernails thick and black with tainted magic and the dried blood of the dead beneath her.
She no longer looked at me, instead fixated on something above me.
“Don’t touch him!” Her voice was shrill and stretched with agony.
I tried to reach for her, but my arm was too heavy, and the axe kept me pinned to the earth like I was a weapon mounted to the wall. Something solid, smooth, and shaped to the divots of my fingers was still in my hand.
Twisting my head, I grunted as searing pain radiated through my neck and chest. Still, I forced myself to turn, desperate to see what was in my hand. I was dying, but my grip on the spear wouldn’t let go. Blood dripped from the iron tip—the blood of the men and women who lay beside me.
My gaze slid to the woman crawling toward me.
Behind her, gray clouds split like shredded fabric, blazing with red and orange and a swirl of other colors at their center. From where I lay on the ground, the crumbling stone structures loomed, reaching skyward.
Lux heaved herself forward, clutching the limp leg of a dead man and using it as leverage to pull her failing body closer and closer. I dropped the spear and reached for her, the tips of our fingers brushing when her jaw unhinged and a guttural scream erupted from her.
“Drak!”
The pain evaporated.
The spear, the axe, and the bodies vanishing with it.
My eyes split open a second time as if I had a layer of eyelids, each with a distinct memory curled beneath it.
Lux leaned over me, at last free of Kayn—thank the stars and skies.
Behind her, a slab of solid gray stone rose in place of the sky.
In her other hand, the tip of the Y Tree gleamed like light trapped between her fingers.
A shadow cast over her from the flickering of candles mounted along the hallway walls.
Her lips parted. “Drak, I need you.” Emotion frayed with each breath, and concern fractured the ease I’d seen on her face last night, when we’d left one another drained from pleasure and full of peace.
The cruel face of her sister filled the blank space behind her. Silver gripped the back of Lux’s neck and wrenched her away from me.
I opened my mouth, but Lux’s shriek cut off my cry. “Drak!”
Silver threw her sister against the opposite wall across the corridor.
The sickening thud of her body slamming into stone filled my veins with rage.
Silver was a scrappy adversary, not fast like a vampire, but unpredictable.
The most significant contrast between the two was that Lux wasn’t willing to kill her sister.
Silver had no such qualms.
This was obvious in the way Silver grasped a fistful of Lux’s hair and tried to rip it from her scalp. Lux cried out, shoving Silver off her easily, but Silver never gave up. She slammed the heel of her palm against Lux’s jaw.
I bared my fangs and bolted toward them. But as much as I wanted to take her down, Silver was my maker and held immense power over me.
Before I could even touch her, she craned her neck and halted me with her barbed gaze. Every part of me fought against the cage of her compulsion, my limbs moving as if they belonged to someone else. I flexed my fists—the only movement I managed to control.
“Go after Kayn,” Lux said to me between heaving breaths.
“My compulsion didn’t reach him.” She launched off the stone and drew the serrated branches of the tree pendant across Silver’s arm, the shock enough to shatter the compulsion.
The pressure pushing down on me lifted. Silver hissed, but she did not back down, and I knew her savagery had no bounds.
I could not bear the thought of leaving Lux alone with her.
Silver seized Lux’s wrist and twisted it backward until Lux cried out and dropped the pendant, but her advantage lasted only a single breath. Lux snapped her arm back, curling her fingers around her sister’s, spinning Silver and pinning her arm to her spine.
Silver hissed again, but the troubled smile cracking her face didn’t match the tone.
A strange laugh spilled out of her. “What is this about your compulsion, sister? You didn’t bind yourself to the vampire after all, then?
I thought that was an attempt to compel Kayn for a second, but then when it didn’t work.
” Another laugh. “But you wouldn’t have tried if it wasn’t possible, would you?
That means you still have your powers. Of course, I knew that with you, Lux, lying was likely.
Or should I call you Silver? You stole my identity and lied about it your entire life.
” She laughed again. “You figured, why not lie about marriage to the king? I’ll give you this: it was a smart move.
It got me here. But you don’t think I’d come without a backup plan, do you?
If I don’t walk out of this castle with you within the hour, they’ll all die. ”
Lux ignored her, eyes pinned on me. “Please, Drak. Go after Kayn. He’s being forced to kill her prisoners—”
Silver cut in, her voice jagged. “Unless you bow to me in front of Mara.”
“You will not ruin Vylheim,” Lux spoke through her teeth as she bent Silver’s other hand behind her.
“And you won’t kill me or imprison me,” Silver said.
“Why the fuck not?” I spoke for Lux, though I didn’t dare take a step toward Silver. I wouldn’t lose control like that again and give her any reason to compel me. It seemed, however, that she didn’t even need to. Silver already had control of the situation, and she knew it.
She grinned. “Obviously, because my sister won’t let you. She has a soft spot for the people I’ve brought here to visit her.”
Lux grunted as she yanked harder on Silver’s hands. A hint of vulnerability flared across Silver’s face with a wince.
“What did you do to Kayn to make him comply?” I asked. I didn’t trust that bastard Exile, but I knew he wouldn’t kill Lux, not when he was so desperate for his stupid soul so that he could honor the gods, or whatever the fuck his goals were. He needed Lux alive—as a successful huntress.
“It was either I compel him to kill her, or he kills her friends.” She turned her head, forgetting me now as she spoke to her sister. “Kayn is a good boy. He behaves unlike this vampire I made.”
Silver flashed a smirk at me. I sank my fangs into my bottom lip, swallowing every impulse to attack her, knowing Lux would not want it.
This wasn’t part of our agreement. I would fight the vampires, and she would face her sister.
Lux didn’t trust me not to kill Silver…if I even could.
The moment she spoke again, all I thought of was silencing her.
“Drak needs compulsion to listen, and I really hate having to spend extra energy dealing with him, but here’s the thing.
” “You and Kayn are equally matched, and he has a head start.”
Catching Lux off guard, Silver flung her head back and smashed her skull into Lux’s nose.
Lux reeled back, but quickly gained control of the fight as she grabbed Silver’s wrist and threw her to the cold floor at her feet.
Blood trickled from Lux’s nose, following the rivulets above her mouth and tinting the lines of her lips like miniature rivers of red.
“Drak,” Lux said. “Go!”
I hated leaving her as Silver lunged for the pendant, driving it into Lux’s ankle. But this was the fucking plan: I would hold off the vampires while Lux subdued Silver. Since sister couldn’t compel sister, Lux would then use her skills as a huntress against Silver’s undead army.
What the fuck was I going to do to stop Kayn? Lux would gut me if I killed him, but I was supposed to keep him from executing these so-called prisoners. It was an impossible fight, and I already knew somebody was going to die.
It just better not be Lux.
Everybody else could fall—like the bodies I saw strewn across the battlefield. That image was clear as the fjords, and I knew it was more than just a daydream.
It was a memory.
I just didn’t know if it was my memory.
I tracked the distant fall of Kayn’s footsteps down the corridor and caught the echo of a door slamming at the front of Mara’s Keep. Stepping into the widest hallway, I fixed my gaze on the heavy double doors leading outside. I hadn’t crossed that threshold in weeks.
We should have fucking expected Silver to show up with hostages.
I struck the heels of my palms against both doors and shoved through. The bright moon greeted me, sharp and uncomfortable to my sensitive eyes. As expected, those still loyal to me stood guard outside Mara’s Keep, but Silver’s army surrounded the front steps.
Kayn paced before five people on their knees. The captive man’s dirty blonde hair dangled in his face, and the woman’s neck was stiff as she mouthed something to the three children.
Fuck. Children.
When the doors fell shut behind me, the woman’s head twisted, and I recognized her as Lux’s friend from Skaldir. Her silvery eyes were almost iridescent as they blazed with a blend of outrage and reckless grief.
“Ragna.” I raked my fingers through my mess of hair and cut my fang along the inside of my lip. Silver had selected her hostages deliberately. Ragna knelt with her entire family before the vampire chosen to execute them.
Another vampire from Silver’s army stepped forward. Every human who had forsaken me as their king to serve her bore a weapon, many plundered from my own armory.
Most of these humans were executioners who blamed me for their lot in life before I’d even come to the throne. The human offered Kayn her weapon—a cross-hilt crucible sword. One I’d trained with beneath Mara’s Keep to stay ready for any kind of fight.
A fight like this.
Kayn strode to the end of the line and faced the youngest child, a girl with golden, sun-like hair wrapped in a braided crown.
Fuck. He was actually going through with Silver’s orders and starting with the little girl.
Kayn flipped the tip of the sword to point at the sky and directed the child to put her head down.
I bolted from the steps of the castle in a blur and slammed into Kayn.
Gripping his throat in one hand, I threw him to the ground, making his spine crunch against hard-packed dirt.
The clash of steel rang out from both my men and Silver’s, but Kayn and I were trapped in our own struggle. No one could aid us or harm us.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Exile?” I fumed as my hands flew to his throat again.
He tried to wrench away. “The huntress must not die. I have to do this.”
“Don’t you think I fucking know that? I would never let her die.”
“You swore to kill her before—”
I shook him, rage blazing through me, though half of it turned inward. Through clenched teeth, I confessed to Kayn, not as the stranger who had entered my mother’s life years ago, but as someone I might once have called a friend. “Hurting Lux was a mistake, but at least I can admit it.”
Ignoring this, he groaned. “Silver makes good on her promises. If I don’t start executing the hostages, she will destroy Lux now that Lux doesn’t have her powers. You have to die to sever the bond, and then we can only hope her abilities return—”
“You fucking idiot.” I clutched his throat tighter, though it did nothing but detain him.
“We lied about the marriage.” With my free hand, I snatched the hilt of the sword and released my grip on his neck.
Holding the blade at his throat, I shifted my attention to my men who clashed with Silver’s army. “Get the prisoners inside!”
“What are you saying?” Kayn’s voice strained. “Is she still the huntress?”
I glared at the pathetic Exile at my feet. “How about you ask me if she’s okay?”
Kayn’s jaw shifted, grinding with impatience or irritation or whatever the fuck was wrong with him.
The two armies collided around us, humans toppling first—and there were far too many humans on our side.
I winced at how unbalanced the battle had become.
The battle didn’t matter though, not now that the doors to Mara’s Keep swung open and anyone not locked in a fight swept their attention to the castle.
A chill shot through my inky veins as Silver marched out with her fingers clamped at the back of Lux’s neck, and a sickly, triumphant smile across her face. There was no way Lux had lost that fight.
Which meant she’d surrendered.
For the prisoners.