Chapter One
Thyra
Vampyr.
My heart breaks as Antony’s fangs scrape across my neck, the sharp tips easing over my earlobe and around my jaw, a harsh path becoming whisper light.
His voice is guttural. Unnatural. Not himself. “You should have run while you could, Thyra.”
He holds me tightly in the shadows of a tunnel hidden deep in the black mountains of the bloodlands. His monstrous blue eagle, Azul, shivers in the gloom at his master’s back. Outside this tunnel, swarming and starving vampyrs shriek through the endless night that covers the bloodlands, their cries promising death. Too many steps behind me, a silvery light glows softly, a safe haven from the vampyrs…if I could reach it.
I chose not to run, a decision I refuse to regret.
“Antony.” My voice chokes as I try to breathe through the pain gripping my heart, the rising grief that, after all I fought for, after the trust we built between us, I’m losing him. “Stay with me.”
I don’t know how or when he was bitten, or by what means he has kept his vampyric nature at bay until now.
All I know is that until moments ago, he was still himself.
He was fighting the poison that now darkens his green eyes, clouding his irises and threatening to turn them black.
His response comes harsh and dangerous, his fangs sharp against the corner of my lips, threatening to cut me. “Don’t call meAntony. Whoever I was, that fae doesn’t exist anymore.”
For once, I fear he’s speaking the truth.
Moments ago, he told me he didn’t want this, but now his arms are like iron around me, and his soft breaths burn with insatiable hunger.
Heartbeats ago, he told me he needed me to stay alive, but now every prick of his fangs promises torturous pain and a slow death.
Then he told me to call himVampyr…
No. I won’t.
Clamping my left palm harder against his cheek, pressing my body closer to his, my right arm trapped between us and my silver armor gleaming softly, I enunciate carefully. Forcefully. “Antony. Fight this.”
“Too late,” he snarls. “The iron is gone.”
My brow creases. I need to know what he’s talking about. I need to know what happened, so, despite the imminent danger, I dare to ask, “What iron?”
He moves faster than he ever has before, his reflexes now breathtakingly quick, one hand snapping from my back to close over the hand I’m pressing to his heart, where a near-gaping wound bleeds.
“The iron blade that has occupied my heart for nearly seventeen years,” he says, his darkening eyes burning me. “The iron blade that stopped the vampyric poison from claiming my mind, although my body fell victim to avampyr’s impulses. Without the iron, the poison has resumed its work.”
The wound beneath my palm is slick with blood. “A dagger in your heart. A vampyr’s poison… But…how?”
He drags my right hand from his chest and up to his other cheek so I’m now cupping his face in both hands.
At my touch, his eyes close, he nuzzles his cheek to my palm, and his shoulders slump.
When he speaks, his voice is ragged. A hint of himself. “It was me that night, Thyra. The night the Vividari were slaughtered.”
Hot tears burn behind my eyes at his admission. His birth mother, Aeliana Vividari, and her people were slaughtered by a vampyr when Antony was only eleven years old. The story I was told is that Antony’s father set a vampyr loose among them in an act of cruelty that made way for his lover, the last Vividari woman, Galla Vividari, to become his queen.
“Do you remember how I told you my father forced me into the catacombs?” Antony asks, his eyes still closed.
“Yes.”
The catacombs beneath the Constellation, which is a series of white towers where the royal family lives, are secured by blood magic that ensures only the current, living king can enter the catacombs. Antony’s father carried him through the magical entrance, risking Antony’s life while testing the theory that the king could carry another fae through if he wished.
