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Why was I thinking these ridiculous things? It wasn’t any business of mine, and none of that happened. This was the irrationality of envy speaking.
Mine…
Paris is mine…
“The traitor elf is a vampire fucker and he’ll burn with you!” He struggled against me.
Mine…
Paris is mine…
Acutely aware of time slipping through my moonlit fingers, I pushed my thoughts aside and drank the rot from him, then left him unconscious on the floor while I spent the last minutes clearing as much of the rot from my people as possible.
Paris and the wolf.
Once this was done, I’d find the elf. I could do that now, his location a bright spark in the mental map of my mind.
My spark.
Not my spark.
This is torment.
I reached the dungeons in the last seconds of my palace sweep.
Eight vampires hissed at me, infected with Aidan’s rot. At the same moment, the lunar power left my body.
“Our king is a failure,” Bryan spat. A rebel vampire who I’d released from his cell recently. Follower of Tilly, a rebel I’d killed.
Her absence was a cold hole in the Heart of All.
The others nodded in agreement, a woman pushing herself to the front. Neve. “Your end is coming. We’ll lock you away and join with him. Things are changing, Your Majesty. We can’t keep living like this.”
No Aidan rot for them. This was all their own hate.
“There is nothing that can be done for these fools,” Selene lamented. “Apart from death.”
Dread pooled low in my stomach.
“Aidan is the way,” Neve added. “Tilly understood this.”
The dread came with wicked bites. Yes, she wanted to join with the deity despite Paris’s memory-restoring song showing all vampires the truth of his manipulations.
Beyond these broken walls, the sounds of the warchoppers hummed, voices calling, the clean-up beginning.
Were there any Aidan-touched out there? It didn’t sound like it.
“I’m not having this conversation with you,” I returned.
“Kill them, Silvanus,” Selene instructed. “They are beyond help.”
I’d warned my people of unity or death. If any vampire didn’t want to follow me, they wouldn’t be locked in a cell anymore to ponder their choices. They would face death instead.
No mercy.
Like my brother showed no mercy.
“Kill them, darling king.”
