From the way she said it, I assumed accelerating healing was another benefit of being a Nephilim.
I did as she said, making an identical cut in my own palm. It stung, but I breathed through the pain, not wanting to show any weakness. I held my palm up, not wanting the blood to drip on any of her furniture.
“I swear that while you, Annika the Nephilim, are on the grounds of the Haven, I’ll do everything I can to protect you, I won’t harm you, and I won’t conspire with anyone with the intent to harm you,” Mary said, her eyes locked on mine. “Do you agree to this blood oath?”
“I do,” I said, and then she gripped her hand in mine.
A warm light rushed through my body, binding the promise.
When she pulled her hand away, both of our cuts were healed.
Annika
Now that Mary had sworn her allegiance, I caught her up on everything she needed to know—starting from my kidnapping, and ending at Laila’s death.
“I killed the three guards, and then reached for the ring and commanded Geneva to bring me here,” I concluded. “That’s how I ended up in the courtyard.”
“Very interesting.” Mary eyed me up, as if seeing me for the first time. “A unique story indeed. But there’s one part that piques my curiosity the most.”
“Which part is that?” I asked.
“To keep up your disguise while you were in the palace, you needed to drink vampire princess blood and transformation potion each day,” she said. “From what I know about witchcraft—and I know quite a bit, since I’ve been around for a few centuries—the vampire blood and human DNA needed to have been fresh each day. How was that managed?”
“I don’t know.” I turned to Geneva, since she was the one who had that answer—not me.
The witch still had her back to me, refusing to meet my eyes.
“Geneva?” I said her name softly, not wanting to startle her.
“Yes, master?” She hissed the last word, leaning back on the sofa and crossing her legs away from me.
She’d always had her fair bit of sass, but this was a whole new level, even for her. However, I needed answers. And at this point, I wasn’t above using my command over her to get them.
“Answer Mary’s question,” I said. “I command you.”
“I kidnapped a vampire princess and two random humans,” she said simply. “I brought them to an abandoned supernatural prison—one that used to be used by Nephilim—and kept them there to get their blood and DNA each day.”
“What?” I gasped. “You never told me any of this.”
“You never asked.” She stared right at me with a look that could kill.
“Which vampire princess did you capture?” Mary asked.
Geneva leaned back and crossed her arms, saying nothing.
“You’ll need to ask her,” Mary told me. “She’s not bound to answer to me.”
“Answer Mary’s question,” I told Geneva. “You’ll answer each one of our questions until this conversation is done.”
“Princess Stephenie.” She looked at Mary as she spoke, not at me. “The princess of the Vale was partying in the Tower, so drunk on tequila that it was easy to sneak up on her and transport her to the prison. She’s known for disappearing for days—sometimes weeks—at a time. No one would come looking for her. She was the perfect princess to use for the plan.”
I’d never met Princess Stephenie, but I’d heard of her a few times—both when I was a blood slave in the human village and passing myself off as Princess Ana in the palace. Princess Stephenie was a young vampire—only a few decades old. She’d been turned soon after the Great War had ended. And what Geneva had said was true—Princess Stephenie spent more time traveling than at home, hopping between all the kingdoms and who knew where else.
She’d been absent during Jacen’s selection process, but everyone assumed she was out on another one of her jaunts and would return home eventually. If she’d remained missing, surely it would have raised suspicion, but Geneva was right. No one had seemed overly concerned about the jet-setting princess’s whereabouts.
“The princess and the humans are still alive?” I asked Geneva.
“Of course.” She shrugged, still refusing to look at me. “They needed to be kept alive so I could get the ingredients for the potion.”
“They need to be set free,” I said. “At once.”
“That might not be a good idea.” Mary held up a hand, and both Geneva and I looked to her.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Those two humans now have knowledge of the supernatural world,” she said. “We can’t simply let them loose. Who knows what they’ll do or say?”
“Good point,” I said. “Then what should we do with them? We can’t bring them here, since humans aren’t allowed in the Haven.”
“In normal circumstances, that’s true,” she said. “But these are hardly normal circumstances. We need to figure out what to do with them, and to do that we’ll need them brought here. We can have Geneva cast a spell around my cabin to contain their scents, as to not alert the other vampires of their presence. Once they’re here, we’ll figure out how to proceed.”
“Very well.” I turned to Geneva, ready to give her the command. “You’re to free Princess Stephenie and drop her off at the Vale. Then you need to return to the prison and transport the two humans to this cabin, making sure to cast a boundary spell around it so the residents of the Haven won’t smell the human blood. This is all to be done as quickly as possible, starting now.”
“Your wish is my command,” she said, her tone dripping with sarcasm.
She gave me one final glare, and then she was gone.
Camelia
I added the final ingredient to the potion and stirred it until it was mixed in. Then I stepped back and glanced at my watch.
Thirty minutes. That was how long the potion needed to sit until it would be ready for me to drink.
Once I drank it, I wouldn’t have to worry about any chance of becoming pregnant.
I wished I could look back at losing my virginity to the faerie prince with disgust—after all, he’d tricked me into it with the deal we’d made—but I couldn’t do that. All I could remember was the softness of his lips on mine, and the way my body had welcomed his as he’d slipped himself inside of me. The pleasure I’d experienced with him in that magical faerie garden had been unlike anything I’d ever known.
It was faerie magic—it had to be.
Even so, I couldn’t deny that I’d enjoyed it.
I paced around the living room, trying to push the memories of my time with Prince Devyn out of my mind. I had more important things to worry about right now.
Such as Queen Laila being dead.
With Laila gone, my chance of becoming a vampire princess was gone with her. But now that she was gone, she could no longer keep me in the Vale, forcing me to use an obscene amount of magic to uphold the boundary.
At the rate I was going, I would use up all my magic within ten years.
For all of my life, leaving had never been an option. Queen Laila would have sent the vampire guards after me to bring me back. She would likely have invoked help from the other kingdoms, too.
If I’d left, I surely would have been dead long before I’d have a chance to die from exhausting my magic.
I’d been so close to getting Geneva’s sapphire ring. Once I had the ring, Laila would have been bound by the blood oath we’d made to turn me into a vampire princess. But no—Laila had to go and act all smug in front of the human girl. She’d wanted to demonstrate how indestructible she was, and how foolish the human had been to think she could kill an original vampire.
The last thing any of us had expected was for the human to be a Nephilim. The Nephilim were supposed to be extinct. They’d all been killed in the Great War.
But apparently, at least one of them had lived.
It explained why Annika had been able to enter the Crystal Cavern and survive. The Crystal Cavern w
as deadly to all supernaturals and humans on Earth… but Nephilim weren’t from Earth. Their human part was, but Nephilim had angel blood in them—and angel blood was from Heaven.
But I couldn’t just pace around thinking about the past. I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my future.
With Laila gone, I was free. I could go anywhere I wanted and use my magic for me—not because a vampire monarch was forcing my hand.
I looked around my quarters—lavishly designed, holding everything I owned in the world—and realized that I had no idea where I would go. I’d been born here, and had never lived anywhere else. My family was dead, and everyone I knew and cared about was here.
The Vale was my home.
And right now, the wolves that lived in the surrounding land were preparing to attack.
If I left the Vale now, the boundary would come down and the wolves would slaughter everyone who lived here. I couldn’t do that. But I also couldn’t continue using my magic as much as I’d been. If I did, it would eventually kill me.
I would have to get help from the other witches of the Vale. None of them were close to as strong as I was, but with their help, we could maintain the boundary together. That was how all the other vampire kingdoms maintained their boundaries. But Laila had always been against that—she’d thought it was safer to have one extremely well guarded witch maintaining the boundary than multiple. According to her, multiple witches made the Vale more vulnerable to attack.
But Laila wasn’t here anymore—I was. And now, for the first time ever, I had a long, full life ahead of me.
All I needed was for the other witches of the Vale to help me maintain the boundary. I knew them—I was friends with them and they respected me—so I had no doubt that they would rise to the task.
I would go to them soon. First, I needed to wait for the potion to finish brewing and drink it. Because I couldn’t risk getting pregnant with Prince Devyn’s child.
After the deal I’d made with him, I could never get pregnant at all.
Because my first-born child was promised to the fae.
I hadn’t had time to think about the repercussions of that deal yet. After all, when I’d made the deal, I’d assumed I was going to become a vampire princess. I’d thought that living a full life as a witch would be impossible.
With Laila dead, everything had changed.
I glanced at my watch, impatient to drink the potion and get it over with. There were still fifteen minutes to go.
Suddenly, someone knocked on my door, flinging it open without giving me a chance to say a word.
My guard Marc stood in the frame, as commanding and intense as ever. “You need to come with me now,” he said before I could rip into him for bursting into my quarters without permission. “Princess Stephenie has returned.”
Jacen
I’d just found the concealment charms in Laila quarters—with the help of the other vampire princes of the Vale, Scott and Alexander—when a guard came in and told us that we needed to come to the dungeons at once.
We arrived there around the same time as Camelia.
Princess Stephenie was behind the bars of a prison cell, cuffed to the wall. She looked like a disaster and smelled even worse.
“Why is my sister being kept in a prison cell?” Scott’s angry voice filled the room.
Technically, the other vampire princes and princesses of the Vale were my brothers and sisters, but I never referred to them as such. After all, I barely knew them. I especially barely knew Stephenie, since she rarely spent any time in the Vale at all.
I think Stephenie and I had had two or three conversations, at the most. But when I’d seen her, she’d always been decked out like she was preparing to walk the red carpet. She was beautiful, of course. In her human life, she’d been a movie star—she’d been considered the most beautiful woman in the world.
Then Laila had turned her and staged her death. The public believed Stephenie had died in a horrible car accident in the height of her fame.
Now, my glamorous, ex-movie star “sister” wore rags that were covered in her own waste, her skin was caked with dirt, and blood was smeared on her face. Fresh blood—the scent of it was as strong as Stephenie’s rotten stench.
“Princess Stephenie was found at the start of the human village, where she’d drained two humans and was starting on her third,” a guard said. He wasn’t someone I recognized, and he definitely wasn’t one of the guards who had been present in the throne room this morning. “My partner and I were able to stop her and bring her in.”
“You didn’t compel the guards away?” I asked Stephenie in shock. The princess wasn’t a warrior, but she knew how to use her compulsion.
“I lost control of my bloodlust.” She shrugged. “I know what happens to me next. But if you’ll give me the chance, I can explain. Where’s Queen Laila?” She looked around, clearly expecting the queen to appear at any moment.
“The queen is away on business,” Scott said smoothly.
If I didn’t know any better, I would have believed him.
He and Alexander had been informed about what had happened in the throne room immediately afterward. Even though they weren’t present at the time, as princes of the Vale, they needed to know.
At first they’d been shocked, but they’d agreed with the decision to keep Laila’s death under wraps until we established a new chain of command.
They’d also agreed that if any of us could gain Annika’s trust to get her to leave the Haven, it would be me.
Scott turned to face the guard, and continued. “Thank you for your service. My brothers, Camelia, and I will see this through from here.”
The guard bowed and left us alone.
“Erect a sound barrier around us,” Scott instructed Camelia once the guard was gone.
Camelia muttered a few words in Latin and gave a flick of her hand. “Done,” she said.
Scott nodded at her in thanks, and turned to Stephenie. “You haven’t lost control of your bloodlust since you were first turned,” he said. “What happened? Where have you been?”
“I was drugged and kidnapped,” she spat. “A witch brought me to a cell to rot. It was some sort of abandoned supernatural prison. She brought me a squirrel each day—she made me live off squirrel blood.” She shuddered, as if recalling the disgusting taste. “It was just enough to keep me alive, but barely. Most of the time she kept me drugged up on wormwood. And while I was knocked out, she took my blood.”
“How do you know she took your blood if you were knocked out?” I asked.
“There were two others—humans—in the cells across from me,” she said. “They told me.”
“Did this witch happen to have chin length dark hair, bangs, and ice blue eyes?” I asked.
Stephenie’s head shot up, and she glared at me. “You know her.”
“I’ve seen her,” I said. “Once. This morning, when she transported Annika to the Haven.”
“You think the witch who kidnapped Stephenie is Geneva?” Alexander asked.
“Geneva?” Stephenie gasped. “You mean the witch that Laila—”
“Yes.” Scott held his hand up, stopping her from continuing. “The one and only. But more importantly, the two humans in the prison with you—what did they look like?”
“One of them was a middle aged woman—she was nothing special,” Stephenie said. “The other was in her early-twenties. She was pretty, I suppose. Maybe even pretty enough to be an actress.”
I tried to imagine the witch and the humans Stephenie described, realization dawning on me. “The younger human’s hair,” I started. “What color was it?”
“Red,” Stephenie answered. “At least, that’s what it was before all the dirt caked onto it.”
“Princess Ana,” I said, and when I looked at Scott and Alexander, they nodded in affirmation.
“What?” Stephenie looked at me, my brothers, and then back at me again. “Who’s Princess Ana? And why didn’t Queen Lail
a send anyone to rescue me?”
“You go off to places all the time, never checking in for weeks,” Scott said. “We had no idea this time was anything different.”
“But if no one rescued you, then how did you get here?” Alexander asked.
“The witch transported me here.” Stephanie shrugged. “She popped into my cell, dropped me off in the center of the human village, and disappeared before I could go after her. That was when I was hit with the scent of all the blood…” Her eyes went dark, and I had a feeling she was remembering the moment the bloodlust had taken hold.
I’d experienced the same thing myself, back when I was first turned.
“Given your predicament, your reaction to the human blood was understandable,” Scott said. “You’re not going to be held responsible for their deaths.”
“Isn’t that Queen Laila’s call to make?” Stephenie asked, glancing around. “Where is she, anyway? She needs to be informed about what happened to me.”
“Much has happened in the Vale while you’ve been gone,” Scott said. “We’ll get you out of here so you can go to your quarters and clean up. Once you’re ready, we’ll be waiting for you in my room. There’s much to discuss, and no time to lose.”
Jacen
“You can’t be serious,” Stephenie said. “The queen can’t be gone.”
After getting Stephenie out of her cell, she’d hurried to clean up—it had taken her an hour, tops. For her, that was fast. We’d met in Scott’s quarters and had told her everything that had happened in the time she’d been gone.
“We wouldn’t lie about such a thing,” Scott said. “Laila’s gone and the Nephilim have returned. Other than the guards who were there this morning—who have been compelled to tell no one about what happened—we’re the only ones who know.”
“That’s not true,” Stephenie said. “Annika and Geneva know, too. Who knows how many others they’ve told in the Haven.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We can’t keep this secret for long. If the citizens of the Vale find out before we have a chance to tell them, they’ll have less trust in us than they already do.”
The Vampire Fate (Dark World: The Vampire Wish Book 4) Page 4