Page 131

The growl that tears from my throat is not a conscious decision. It rips from somewhere deep in my chest, carrying the weight of a command that goes beyond words. A sound that every vampire in this kingdom has been bred to obey at the cellular level. They freeze mid-stride, their boots sinking into the soft dirt. Shoving myself upright, I pin them with my gaze, and their eyes drop to the ground.

They know.

Every single one of them knows.

The woman kneeling in that field is not a target or a threat to be neutralized. She is mine, and the next creature that moves toward her will learn exactly what that means through a lesson they won’t survive.

“Stand down,” I mindlink. “Every one of you. Off the field. Now.”

They retreat quickly, their discipline overriding whatever protective instinct sent them forward in the first place. Dirt falls from my coat, and I brush it away with steady hands. The practical part of my mind catalogs the damage to my authority. The questions this will raise, the rumors that will spread by morning about the mage who knocked the Vampire King on his back. The rest of me doesn’t care. The rest of me is watching her.

“Little mage, I swear to the fates . . .”

She ploughs her hands into the dirt, and the moment she does, the air around her hums. It’s a vibration I can feel in the soles of my boots. A sound that comes from the earth itself, responding to whatever she is pushing into it.

Hair falls around her face, her shoulders are rigid with concentration, and the faint tremor in our bond tells me how weak she is. The magic she spent at the docks this morning, the collapse afterward, none of it has been recovered. She is burning through reserves she doesn’t have, and the hollowing sensation in my own chest echoes the emptiness building in hers.

She is going to break every condition I set. The terms I laid out in that bedroom not even two hours ago, every boundary I placed to keep her alive, none of it matters.

Eagan is already moving, cutting across the field toward her, but we are too late. The tremor starts deep, far beneath the surface. I feel it traveling upward through the stone and soil. The packed earth beneath my feet shifts, a movement that forces me to widen my stance.

When I look down, I see thin, jagged lines splitting the ground in a web that radiates outward from where Alessia kneels. Every finger in the soil creates a fracture that wasn’t there a moment ago.

A warm liquid glow seeps upward from the cracks. It’s as if the earth itself has caught fire underground. Alessia is covered in glowing veins, and the ground pulses with a rhythm I recognize as her heartbeat.

The bond has never been this loud. Since the moment my fangs pierced her throat in the blood bank, I have felt the thread of her presence at the edge of my awareness. A constant low hum that tells me where she is and whether she is safe, and sometimes, when her emotions run hot enough, I can feel what she is feeling. Right now, it’s gone from a hum to a roar.

Her exhaustion floods through the connection, as if my body is trying to share the cost she is paying. The fundamental energy that keeps a body breathing is fading. The sensation sends ice through my veins. I know what happens when a mage draws from those reserves. I have seen it. I watched it happen nearly two decades ago with her mother.

She was on her knees, cradling her lifeless husband, and my father loomed over her with sick satisfaction. She tried to revive him, gold strands of magic wrapping around him like ribbons. But he was gone. A life my father took carelessly the moment she refused to go to war for him.

“Alessia!” Eagan calls, his voice carrying the edge of fear I’ve rarely heard from him. He sees what I can feel. The blood darkening her upper lip. The trembling in her arms as the power consumes her from the inside out.

The crowd at the fence line scatters. The light intensifies, shifting from warm gold to something brighter and hotter. Now white at the center with gold bleeding outward at the edges. The air above the field shimmers and distorts the same way air warps above a fire, bending the view of the night sky and the barren hills beyond.

I have seen kingdoms burn. I was there when the ocean swallowed the coastline of our former kingdom and dragged three cities beneath the waves in a single night. I have watched armies clash in battles that painted the ground red for miles in every direction. I have witnessed the worst this world has to offer. But I have never felt fear this strongly before.

She is using too much power, but instead of stopping, she reaches deeper, and her magic finds something else to feed on. Something older and larger than her own life force. I feel it rise through her, and the sensation is staggering. A tidal wave of power that doesn’t belong to her alone.

The ground stops shaking.

For one heartbeat. Two. The silence that follows is absolute. No wind. No waves from the distant shore. No sound from the crowd. Nothing but the faint, persistent hum of the glowing veins in the soil pulsing with their stolen heartbeat.

Eagan skids to a stop as a ghostly figure materializes behind my bond. Then the field erupts.

Green explodes from the earth, and the first thing I see is garlic. Dozens of stalks twisting skyward in thick spiraling columns that climb two feet, three feet, four, their broad leaves opening. The stalks don’t grow the way plants grow. They erupt, punching through the soil with a force that sends clumps of dirt flying.

Tomatoes come next. Shoots burst from the soil thicker than my wrist, branching into heavy limbs that bend under the weight of fruit. Red globes the size of plates swell on the vines in clusters of three and four. Their skin taut and glistening, so heavy that the branches bow toward the ground in deep arcs.

The vines crawl outward across the dirt in every direction, tangling and reaching for more soil to claim. Potato plants split the earth in massive clusters. Their dark green foliage spreads across the ground between the furrows while mounds lift, unable to contain what is growing beneath.

Rosemary thickens into shrubs. The stems harden into woody trunks, and the branches spread outward and upward until they stand taller than a man. Their needle-covered limbs release a fragrance so potent I can taste it. Feverfew erupts in carpets of white-petaled flowers that cover every inch of ground the other plants haven’t claimed. Finally, yarrow spreads in dense clusters of golden heads.

Every plant is monstrous in size and perfection. Row after row of food, stretching across a field that was black and dead, makes my mind stutter. One of those tomatoes could feed an entire family. A single cluster of potatoes could fill a pantry for a week. The garlic alone, pulled and dried, would last months if not years. The herbs spreading in thick mats could supply every kingdom for months.

This would not just feed my kingdom; This could sustain it for a year.

The remaining crowd has gone silent. Every mouth is open. A woman near the fallen fence has dropped to her knees, hands pressed to her face, shoulders shaking with sobs.