Slowly Locke and Darian lowered to their knees, and Asher helped me move Prince Azaren from my lap to the couch before we did the same. Kade shifted back to his human form and knelt close to Darian. Rings of fire burning around each of our necks.
“They’ve killed the prince,” a fae guard said to the female with auburn hair. “We need to alert the king!”
“Raine,” Darian wheezed, trying to reach for me, but then the world went dark.
CHAPTER 16
~ Locke ~
Myeyespeeledopen,and thick steel bars appeared in my hazy vision. I lifted my head from the stone floor and climbed to my feet. My wings sagged toward the ground as I swayed on the spot, and I staggered over to the bars, mostly to have something to hold on to.
The moment my hands touched the metal, pain raced up my fingers, and I jerked backward, falling with a jarring thud onto my ass. “Fuck!”
I shook my head, trying to clear it, but all I could focus on was the deep ache in my body, the telltale sign of bloodlust. It had been days since I’d last fed, and now that the dazra’s venom had worn off, I craved blood like a newly turned.
Where are the others?
My gaze swiped around the cell I was in, but I scented her before my eyes found her curled, unconscious, against the far wall.Raine.Kade and the others were nowhere to be seen, but Raine was in the cellwith me.
I stumbled for her but stopped myself after two steps. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me to sink my fangs into her soft flesh and drink until the ache within me subsided. Grinding my jaw, I fought against the urge.
Fucking bastards.Our fae captors didn’t know what they’d done by placing us in the same cell. She couldn’t be around me while I was like this.
I staggered closer to the bars, careful this time not to touch them, and peered down the empty hallway. “You can’t leave her in here with me!” I yelled, hoping to get the attention of the prison guards. “She’ll fucking die! She’s not a monster!” The faint thudding of two separate heartbeats came from somewhere down the rows of cells, but no one answered me. A long string of curses left my lips, and I peered back at Raine’s unmoving form. The little female’s heartbeat was weaker than usual, but it was steady.
My breathing grew ragged as I fought against the bloodlust that was taking over my every thought. For days, I’d been able to live without the curse. I’d been able to eat food and enjoy living rather than having to obsess about controlling my cravings. But not now. Now I was right back where I started. The hunger in me was so primal, so deep, that I wanted to howl in agony.
Memories of when I’d first turned into a vampire as a child came rushing at me, and I slumped to my knees, my head hanging down. Every suppressed memory of when my father had conducted experiments on me tormented my mind, driving me back to that dark place I’d been in two centuries ago.
A shudder rippled through me as I remembered when Warrick had trapped me in that stone room with a group of other newly turned children.
Demons, shifters, goblins, they were all there. They were all orphans, and some of them were my friends. Warrick began by running tests to observe our strength, speed, and any abilities we had. He would inflict pain on the shifters to see how fast their bodies would contort and shift as they instinctively changed into their more powerful forms. He would break our bones, shattering our shins to see how fast we would heal. But despite the pain, none of us cried.
After weeks of experimenting, eventually he stopped sending us rations of food and blood. The large room had no windows and no escape. I held out as long as I could until the bloodlust took over me. Then one after another, I drained them dry, and they weren’t able to stop me. Some of them were too frightened and confused to use their own abilities, but others fought back. Not that it mattered in the end. With every soul I took, my strength grew, and soon it wasn’t just the bloodlust that was controlling me. It was the desire for power. By the time there were only two of us left, I’d become a creature without any shred of humanity.
Garan, a young boy who’d been turned into a gargoyle, managed to survive until the end. He was larger than the others, and his exterior was made of stone, making his blood almost undetectable, but I knew he had to die. That was what Warrick wanted, I’d realized. To pit us against each other until there was only one left.
But Garan didn’t go down easy like the others. The pair of us fought for hours, our clumsy, newfound strength evenly matched. We pounded into each other, claws scraping against stone and fists smashing against ribs until we were heaving on the floor. That was when Garan hit me with the images.
Using his gargoyle abilities, Garan transferred images into my mind. Spoken words couldn’t break through to the monster I had become, but those images penetrated into my core. At first, Garan showed me images of the other children, the other monsters. Of what I’d done to them. Once a day, curls of black smoke would creep under the door, and Warrick would remove the corpses while we were unconscious. There was no evidence of my cruelty once we awoke other than the blood smearing the floor, but Garan remembered, and he assaulted me with the memories.
The endless stream of images eventually sowed the seeds of guilt, but it was when Garan showed me images of myself that I finally managed to reach out and grasp onto the remaining shred of humanity that had been buried deep within me.
Garan and I hadn’t been friends before the change, but he’d seen me playing with the other children when we were human, and he flooded my brain with images of my smiling face as I played innocently, running around on the cobblestones playing tag, and sharing treats from the local candy shop. For hours more, he plagued my mind with image after image, and eventually, I was able to see through the fog of hatred, violence, and bloodlust. Because of Garan, I was able to recapture parts of the boy I’d once been, and once that happened, my head was clear enough that together we were able to come up with a plan. While Warrick had been using his experiments to learn about us and our abilities, it also taught us to understand what we were. And I learned a particularly useful piece of information: vampires didn’t need to breathe.
I couldn’t send images back to Garan, so instead, in the far corner, I wrote two small words on the stone floor using my own blood as ink. It read, PLAY DEAD. I pretended to drink Garan dry until he fell limp to the ground, his gray body remaining still on the floor. Gargoyles had hearts of stone, and Garan was able to slow his heart rate until it was barely detectable. We hoped Warrick wouldn’t realize Garan was still alive until it was too late.
That night when black tendrils seeped under the door, I pretended to fall unconscious, and when Warwick entered the room and went to collect Garan’s body, I attacked. I couldn’t know whether Warrick would set me free after Garan’s death, and in any case, I now had enough humanity that I was determined to save the gargoyle’s life. My fangs sank into my father’s neck, tearing deep. Garan, who had only pretended to die and had held his breath when the black smoke came, rose from the ground and slashed at Warrick’s body with his long claws.
Warrick managed to fight us off, throwing us both across the room, but we landed near the doorway and were able to scramble through and lock the door behind us before Warrick could follow. Oh, how I relished the sound of my father’s angry bellows. Neither Garan nor I stayed to find out what would happen next. We fled into the city and remained in hiding for the weeks that followed. I later learned that Warrick had been freed from the cell by his goblin assistant, Gosren.
It was my mother who found me first, and she eventually convinced me to return to the House of Nesarin with the assurances that she wouldn’t let my father treat me so poorly again. I refused at first, but when she started to threaten the lives of others if I didn’t comply, I went back, if only to ensure no one else was harmed because of me and my parents. Warrick never did try to experiment on me again, and he never spoke about Garan and me locking him in that cell, but over time I learned about his mission to find a way to break the curse. Warrick exploited my interest, and before I knew it, I had become another tool in his arsenal. I always understood he was manipulating me, but my desperate desire to be human drove me to keep working for him. As long as I wasn’t hurting other monsters, I could tolerate his requests. His orders.
But then he wanted me to take over the House of Nesarin. The cruelty of the monsters in that house almost matched Warrick’s, and I despised the idea of being their leader. I’d befriended Kade, Asher, and Darian in the weeks when I’d been hiding in the city, and I still caught up with them frequently.
So when Warrick had begun pressuring me to fight for my place as alpha of the House of Nesarin, I’d left the house entirely.
And after all that, now here I was, once again fighting my bloodlust while trapped with someone I cared about. Except this time, it was worse. Because this time it wasRaine.An angry cry burst from me, and then I was on my feet, running at the steel bars.
