Tension floods the field around us again, and for once, even Elias is stunned into silence as I turn to glance at the three of them. All share the same wide-eyed and parted-lip expression. Behind them my fathers bristle with barely restrained frustration and anger as their eyes bore into me.
“Briar, do not give your life up for them,” Dad pleads with a trembling voice.
My chest aches with the pain I hear in his words and Mom exhales slowly, her hand trembling as it tightens on mine and draws my focus back.
“Fine,” she whispers at last, though her jaw stays clenched tight. “They’ll come with us for now, but not as free men.” Her eyes glint with the finality in her decision, even as her voice softens. “They’ll stand trial for their part in capturing andharming you. Until then, they’ll be protected in our realm as prisoners. That’s all I can give you, Briar.”
The relief dies in my mind when a low vibration skims along the edge of my hearing. At first it’s nothing but a tremor under my skin, faint enough I think I’ve imagined it, but then it swells, a rhythm too mechanical to belong to anything natural.
I lift my head, my breath snagging. My parents are already turning toward the sound, shoulders taut and eyes narrowed. The sharpness in their focus tells me they hear it clearer than I do.
The guys must notice our stillness and the way all of us tilt our focus toward the horizon, because Dante whispers, “What is that? What do you hear?”
The sound moves closer and turns into the undeniable sound of the chopping thrum of blades tearing through the night sky.
Helicopters.
Before the thought can fully take shape and be said out loud, my mother moves. Her arm clamps tight around mine, her voice a fierce demand against the night.
“Use your portal ring. Now. We can’t be the ones to hold a portal open, in case we need to fight.”
The order slams into me and my stomach twists with unease as I nod, stumbling back a step as I glance done at the ring.“How did you even know I had the ring?”
The weight of her gaze snaps my eyes to her as she gives me a flat look. “Aunt Deva told us about it when we told her you went missing, and she told us she built a secondary tracking spell into the ring. We tried to track you with it, but something was blocking the spell from working.”
Alongside the rhythmic chopping of helicopter blades, the low growl of engines cuts through the night, and she grits her teeth, growling at me, “Now get that portal open before they’re on top of us.”
Her focus shifts to my fathers who glower at the humans in their grips as she snaps, “We will figure out the rest of this with these hunter boys once everyone is home and safe. Not a second before.”
I close my eyes and try to build the picture of our castle in mind, expecting to feel the warmth of the ring responding, but nothing comes.
Father’s reply is a deep command that distracts me from trying to focus on connecting with my ring’s magic. “I will not bring them there,Comoara. As the King of Sanguis, I have a responsibility to our people.”
The weight of those words lands before I can stop it, and I hear the humans gasp with their realization of who we are. WhoIam. The missing puzzle piece I never gave up to Terrance through it all.
Their gazes whip toward me, wide and disbelieving.
Callum’s words come out rough and shaking, his eyes fixed on mine. “You’re…the Van Helsing princess?”
My hands fumble with the ring in an attempt to avoid the situation at hand, twisting it again and again as I focus on the mental image of our home, but nothing sparks. No glow, no pull, no hum of power. Just silence.
My chest burns with frustration and I drag a shaking hand down my face. “Yes,” I snap, my fear of what’s going to happen to us if I don’t get this damn portal open weaving through every word. “Yes, I’m the fucking Princess of Sanguis, who can’t even get her damn portal ring to work.”
Dante snaps out of his stunned silence, his voice cutting through my panic. “The ring,” he says quickly, eyes narrowing as if a thought just clicked into place. “We know they had it in the lab. We don’t know what the scientists were doing to it before we grabbed it. They could’ve tampered with it and disrupted its power.”
My stomach twists. He’s probably right.
“Shit,” I hiss, looking to my mother for a solution.
Mom doesn’t even pause, already yanking her own ring from her finger with a sharp twist and flinging it toward me, the metal catching moonlight before my hand closes around it.
I was so frantic in my thoughts that it didn’t even hit me that they’d likely have their own portal ring. This is why I’m not the leader of Sanguis and never want to be. I’d crumble under the pressure of a split-second decision.
“Use mine,” she commands, her voice ringing over the rumble of the caravan and choppers nearing our location, each word clipped with urgency that leaves no room for hesitation. “Now.”
The thrum of power is instant as I jam the band onto my finger, my pulse hammering so loudly in my ears it drowns out the rest of the world. I draw in a breath and try to focus, but my concentration is fractured once more by the voices that clash around me.
“You may be the king,” my mother spits, turning on Father with a fury that is normally never used on them, “but I am the queen, and I will not let our daughter suffer another second. Not while I draw breath and I can stop it. I will not stand by and watch her break apart because you insist on clinging to political issues while the humans who carried her out of whatever hell she suffered are left behind.”
