Three turrets pierced the gray sky, each one crowned with a crumbling balcony of dark stone. The walls were massive—ancient brick blackened by centuries of weather and neglect, split with cracks that ran from foundation to roofline like old wounds that had never healed. Vines had claimed entire sections, slithering up the walls and choking the archways, their tendrils prying into every gap as if the mountain itself was trying to drag the castle back into the earth.
A pair of iron gates hung open at the entrance, one torn from its hinges, the other leaning at a drunken angle. Beyond them, a cobblestone courtyard stretched toward the main doors—massive oak things, weathered to gray, standing slightly ajar.
The scent poured from that opening like breath from a sleeping beast.
Every vampire instinct I had screamed two things at once.
Run toward it. And run away.
I leaned close to Rocco, my voice barely above a whisper. “Do you think this is where Vex is?”
“Looks like home sweet home for a demon,” he grumbled, his dark eyes sweeping the decaying facade.
I squeezed his hand tighter as we approached the gates. The iron was corroded, flaking rust like dead skin, but a metal sign bolted to the stone pillar beside them was still legible. The letters were old—ornate, sharp-edged, etched deep into the metal as if burned there by something other than a craftsman’s hand.
Sanguis Keep.
Blood Keep. Of course.
Valentin scanned the grounds beyond the gate—the overgrown courtyard, the cracked cobblestones, the shadows pooling in the archways like standing water. “I don’t think this one is on the tourist map.”
He was right. This castle had been deliberately erased. Hidden. The kind of place that didn’t appear on any map because someone—or something—wanted it that way.
Rose lifted her palm, holding it out toward the castle the way you might hold your hand over a flame to test its heat. Her eyes narrowed and her fingers trembled. “Dark magic is here. I can sense it.”
A chill spider-crawled down my spine. “You mean Vex is here?”
“Possibly.” Rose lowered her hand slowly, flexing her fingers like they’d gone numb. “But the magic I’m feeling is older than Vex. Much older. This has been soaked into these walls for centuries.”
Costin? Balthazar? Lucifer. It could be any one of them.
Alice stepped up beside her, her face pale, her arms wrapped around herself. “I feel it too. It’s evil. Something I never felt before.”
Silence settled over our group. The fog curled around our ankles, thick and cold.
I looked at Rocco first—his profile sharp against the mist, his body coiled tight. Then the faces around me—Rose, Valentin, Darius, Raven, Lucien. People who’d risked everything to help us. People who had no obligation to be here. And the terrible thought I’d been pushing away since New Orleans finally broke through: not all of us might make it back.
Rocco studied the castle, his gaze tracing the turrets, the crumbling walls, the vines that strangled every surface. “You mean like when Vlad made a deal with Balthazar and sold his soul?” He flashed me a surly smile. “That kind of evil magic.”
He stepped through the broken gate, his boots crunching on the gravel beyond it. "This is where it began." His voice was low, reverent despite himself. "Where Dracula sold his soul toLucifer. Where Balthazar brokered the deal. Where he became the first vampire."
I followed him, but my knees buckled as I passed through the gate.
I didn't expect it—one second I was standing, the next my legs gave out like the ground had been yanked from under me. Rocco caught me before I hit the gravel, his arm locking around my waist.
"Selena—"
"I'm fine." I wasn't fine. Something was happening inside me. My blood was doing something it had never done before—vibrating, humming, singing in my veins like it recognized this place on a molecular level. Like every drop of vampire blood I carried had memory, and those memories were waking up all at once.
I pressed my hand flat against my chest. My heartbeat was wrong—too fast, too loud, syncing to a rhythm that wasn't mine. Something older. Something that had been beating in these walls long before I was born.
This was where we came from. Not just vampires as a concept, not just a story told in academies and whispered around blood-wine. This. This soil. This air. This rotting, vine-choked monument to the worst deal ever struck.
I could feel it in my teeth. In my bones. In the hunger that was clawing at me so hard my vision kept shifting between normal and that sharp, predatory red.
Rocco was staring at me, his face tight with concern. "Talk to me."
"Can't you feel it?" My voice came out strange—thin and shaking. "It's like coming home to a place I've never been."
