Haunted by the King of Death

by Felicity Heaton

  She couldn’t do it.

  “If I break the bond to the vampire, he will be free of you.”

  Free of her?

  “He will no longer be affected by our bond?” She couldn’t believe that, but gods, she wanted to and she needed to hear him tell her that she had heard him right.

  He nodded.

  Her heart tore her in two directions and she wavered between them, fighting to find the right path to take. If she left now, Grave would still be in danger of turning incorporeal when he fought the demon prince, or might fade before he could even slay the bastard to protect his family, leaving them in danger.

  If she took the mage’s offer, she would no longer be bound to Grave and would instead be bound to the wretch in front of her, a slimy excuse for a male, but once she was bound to him and Grave was safe, she could take another path.

  She could kill the mage.

  It would kill her too, but she would gladly pay that price for Grave’s freedom.

  Isla stared at the mage, dread pooling in her stomach, weighing her down. Gods, he repulsed her, and the thought of being bound to him was too much for her to bear. She couldn’t do it. She would find another way, another mage, one who would ask less of her in return for his services.

  There had to be one somewhere in Hell or in the mortal realm.

  But it would take too long, and Grave needed his strength now, needed the power to fight the demon prince, protecting his family and avenging hers.

  Her heart leaped into her throat as the mage was suddenly right in front of her, filling her field of vision, and she didn’t have time to react before his hand was against her forehead. Fogginess streamed through every inch of her, gathering heaviest in her mind, and she blinked slowly as she wavered on her feet.

  “I fear I must take the decision out of your hands, my sweet.” Those words wobbled in her mind, slippery elusive things that she struggled to grasp as darkness encroached.

  Decision?

  She slumped but strong arms caught her, lifted and cradled her.

  She slipped into the black abyss.

  Green light shimmered around her, whispered words chanted in a foreign tongue, and a strange sense of lightness ran through her body, as if she was floating.

  Floating.

  In the darkness of her mind, she saw ghostly transparent hands stretched outwards from her and lowered her gaze to find a flowing white dress dancing gently in a breeze she couldn’t feel.

  “Isla,” a male voice whispered softly into her ear and tears stung her eyes but she wasn’t sure why she wanted to cry.

  Cold swirled around her and she sighed as it caressed her skin, a comforting embrace that she had missed.

  “Isla,” another male said and she frowned this time, a sense of danger and sickness running through her. Disgust. Hatred.

  She flicked her eyes open and the owner of that voice loomed above her, his tousled long dark hair falling down around his cheeks and green eyes bright with desire.

  “You are awake.” He smiled but she felt only cold, shards of ice that cut away at her insides, cleaving open the empty space behind her chest. “Good.”

  He eased back. A wise move. Hunger rose inside her, fierce and demanding, and she wasn’t above using the mage to sate it. Mage.

  She frowned and fought to remember what had been happening and where she was. Her eyes shifted from him and slowly took in the room, and as they ran over the tall rectangular windows that lined the curving black wall, revealing a strange fantasy world of sunshine and snow-capped mountains, the cold that had been spreading through her dropped ten degrees.

  Mage. Tower. It was all coming back to her now.

  Isla shot up into a sitting position and the mage practically leaped from the bed. Afraid of her?

  The answer to that question became apparent when she looked down at herself. White dress. Pale limbs. She could see the green silk bedclothes through her body.

  A phantom again.

  Grave.

  A sharp rush of tingles shot through her limbs and she reached for the connection to him, fearing her current phantom state would be affecting him too.

  Nothing.

  Those tingles became a thousand shards of ice that pricked her skin.

  She looked to the mage on her right for the answer. He stood abruptly and moved back a step, distancing himself from her. He feared her now. With good reason. In this form, she was more powerful than he was, able to battle and overcome the damned spells and enchantments he had used on her before, even with the green crystals that grew from the walls between the windows and threaded through the black floor enhancing his powers.

  Sickness brewed in her stomach. What had she done?

  She tried the connection again, reaching for the mark on her back, but nothing happened.

  Isla glared at the mage as he dared to move a step closer to her again and reached for her. She ducked away from his touch and drifted to the other side of the bed, keeping enough distance between them that he couldn’t touch her.

  He sighed. “We had a deal… but I will give you some time to grow accustomed to it. There is no rush now you are no longer bound to the vampire.”

  Hope sparked in her chest again and another path opened to her.

  The mage had broken her bond to Grave, but hadn’t forced her into one with him while she had been unconscious and at his mercy. He had waited, no doubt wanting her awake so she could participate in whatever twisted ritual he had devised as their mating ceremony, but it had been a bad move on his part.

  If she could escape now, she would escape a bond with him and she could go after the demon prince, could unleash Hell on the bastard without fear of affecting Grave.

  Relief beat through her, so strong she felt giddy. Everything had fallen into place so perfectly. She was stronger as a phantom, and Grave would be stronger without his bond to her affecting him. Together they could fight the demon prince and defeat him.

  “Of course,” the mage drawled and rocked on his heels, and she didn’t like the look on his face, the smug one that rankled her and made her feel she had missed something. Something terrible. Something he was going to take pleasure in revealing. He smiled slowly. “The vampire being free of your bond means that right about now he should be turning incorporeal.”

  Her stomach dropped and cold swept through her. “No.”

  It wasn’t possible. He had said that Grave would be free of her and no longer affected by their bond.

  Her stomach dropped faster, plummeting deep into the core of the Earth, and numbness spread along her limbs and settled in her chest and her mind. Gods, she had been a fool again.

  The mage had only said that Grave would be free of her, and that he would no longer be affected by their bond. It wasn’t their bond that had cursed him to a phantom life. She had done that with a single kiss long before she had bound herself to him, tying their lives together. He was free of their bond, free of her, but he wasn’t free of the phantom world.

  The mage clucked his tongue. “You know what you did to him is irreversible. Once a phantom, always a phantom.”

  “He cannot die,” she whispered, nurturing the tiny shred of hope in her heart, cradling it gently inside her so it would live and grow.

  Grave was free of her, of their bond, and perhaps that meant he was also free of the danger of fading. He might be a phantom now, but her beautiful, savage and clever vampire would find a way to use that to his advantage, just as he had learned to harness his bloodlust.

  He would find a way.

  He would survive.

  And she would find him.

  What if they were still in danger though? If she made a new bond with him, would that be enough to save them from fading? Would it make Grave corporeal again?

  A problem presented itself as she looked down at herself, watching the green silk sheets shimmer beneath her, distorted by her ghostly appearance. She didn’t have a solid form, which meant even if she bound herself to Grave, they
wouldn’t become corporeal. They would remain phantoms.

  She edged her eyes up to meet the mage’s.

  “How do you expect me to bind myself to you when I am incorporeal?”

  He smiled and slowly walked around the circular bed, and she didn’t move away from him this time. She waited for him and managed not to flinch when he stopped behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. She could feel him even though she wasn’t solid, and she could feel the insects as they burrowed and crawled through her.

  He lowered his head, bringing his mouth to her ear.

  “I will use the same spell my father did to give you a solid form.”

  And she would kill him the moment he had finished uttering the words. There had been a gap between the completion of the spell and her becoming corporeal when his father had helped her, a space in which she would have enough time to battle the mage and destroy him.

  Once she had a solid form again, she would find Grave.

  She would keep with the plan he had set in motion, taking the next step for him.

  They would do everything over and get it right this time.

  They would have forever.

  CHAPTER 20

  Grave had tried, and failed, close to one hundred times to put into words how phenomenally pissed he was that Isla had run away from him, no doubt to do something both noble, and stupid.

  The last time had been a tirade of curse words loosely strung together with ones about how very annoyed he was that he had rather abruptly turned into a damned ghost.

  That tirade ran on repeat in his head as he mentally trudged across the black lands of Hell. Mentally, because now he floated everywhere. Floated. How the fuck was he meant to intimidate anyone when his patented permanently angry clip to his stride was now a sort of wispy drift?

  He huffed.

  Snow smirked.

  “I do not see how this is funny.” Those words left his head more than his lips, and Snow shuddered as he received them directly in his mind. “For all I know this is a very temporary step between life and death and I will fade at any moment.”

  Although he didn’t feel as if he was fading. This felt different to how it had before whenever his hands had turned translucent, and when he had gone completely ghostly back at the mansion after Isla had lost it when killing and feeding from two demons.

  He didn’t feel tingly. He felt weirdly solid considering he could see through himself, was little more than a white echo of the male he had once been.

  Although Snow had reassured him that his eyes were still blue.

  A phantom blue.

  Snow’s smile slowly returned as Grave launched into another rant to himself, one that was supposed to be private and stay in his head, but apparently his cousin could hear. He wasn’t sure how Isla had lived all those years as a phantom, with everyone being able to hear whatever she thought.

  Maybe there was a trick to it, one he needed to learn, something that would allow him to turn the broadcast of his thoughts on and off.

  Snow was taking his new form rather well. He had expected his cousin to lose it when he had gone incorporeal, becoming a phantom, but Snow had remained quietly confident that everything would be well and nothing bad was happening.

  That confidence kept Grave’s ticking over too, kept him believing that he was a phantom now, and not about to fade, and maybe that was the only reason his cousin had kept his head. Snow wanted him to keep his.

  At least Night and Bastian hadn’t witnessed him turning into a phantom. Much to his relief, Bastian had called in from a safe house in the far north of Norway, and Payne had returned from gathering medical supplies at the theatre with word that Night had arrived there and was safe. The demon prince’s attempts to take out his brothers had failed, but Grave doubted they had seen the last of the bastard.

  Payne had returned to the theatre to get everyone moving on evacuating it.

  Snow had looked as if he wanted to go with him until Grave had announced his intention to stop Isla from doing something stupid, something they would both regret. His cousin had insisted on going with him, and Grave was glad of his company now that he was a damned phantom.

  He had the feeling Isla had already done something very foolish, and he could only hope that he found her in time to stop her from making things worse.

  His back felt cold, his chest empty without the connection he couldn’t open between them for some godsforsaken reason. Because he had gone fully phantom?

  He wanted that connection back.

  He wanted her back.

  The thought of the mage touching her made his blood boil. If he still had blood. He wasn’t sure. Whatever life force ran through him now, it boiled. He was going to rip the mage to shreds when he reached the tower.

  Although, that did mean figuring out how to attack anyone while in a phantom form.

  He knew phantoms could turn solid long enough to lure men to their doom with a kiss, and then everything the female did with him afterwards was done in their ghostly forms. Could he make himself solid long enough to kill a mage?

  If it was a matter of willpower, then it wouldn’t be a problem. Willpower was something he had in spades and used to control his bloodlust. He was sure he could use it to control his phantom form.

  As he drifted down the sloping side of the black valley, his eyes fixed on the tower that rose high in the centre of it, he focused on his body, on being solid. Mind over matter. His fingers tingled and his toes followed them, and then he suddenly dropped the distance between his boots and the ground, and stumbled forwards a few steps before he was floating again.

  “Did you see that?” Grave snapped his head towards Snow, a surge of excitement blasting through him.

  Snow nodded, something glimmering in his blue eyes that looked a lot like relief to Grave. Relief and hope. Those two emotions pounded inside him too, lifted his spirits and put a new swagger in his drift.

  He would kill the mage.

  His claws and fangs extended at the thought, both aching to sink into him and rip him to shreds, making him pay for taking Isla from him.

  His left hand shifted to the hilt of the blade strapped to his waist, a weapon that had come with him into the phantom realm. He wasn’t sure whether it could harm anyone not on the same plane of existence as him, but he was going to find out. He was going to sink it to the hilt in the bastard’s black heart.

  It would either kill him or it wouldn’t, but gods, it would go a long way towards appeasing the black hunger to destroy the mage that had been building inside him from the moment he had set eyes on him. No one looked at Isla the way he had and lived.

  Grave swept down the side of the mountain, picking up speed as the need to find the mage rolled towards a crescendo inside him, becoming an urge that was impossible to deny, one that pained him, sank claws deep into him and began to burn away his control.

  He growled through his clenched fangs and Snow glanced across at him as he broke into a run, the black look in his crimson-to-blue eyes echoing the rising hunger inside him, the need for violence and bloodshed.

  Snow’s lips peeled back off his fangs as the crimson won against the blue in his eyes, transforming them. They blazed in the dim light of Hell, and Grave felt his eyes do the same, burning with the bloodlust that demanded an offering to assuage it.

  One he would gladly give to it.

  He would paint the black walls of the tower scarlet with the blood of the mage. He would slowly break him apart, would devour his cries for mercy and then his bellows of pain. He would make the bastard intimately acquainted with the reason he bore the title of King of Death.

  He would uphold the motto of the Preux Chevaliers.

  Nulla Misericordia.

  No Mercy.

  They reached the defensive wall of the tower and Snow growled as the gate ahead of them remained closed. Grave tipped his head back, eyes scanning up the height of the tower, until they stopped on the very top where black spikes speared the sky. Green
light shone from the windows below, a beacon that called to him.

  Made his skin crawl.

  Gods, was this how Isla felt around the mage?

  He scrubbed his right hand down his left arm.

  Was this how she was feeling right now, up there with the mage? He could sense her presence, was drawn to it as fiercely as he was drawn to the mage’s power. Did it affect her too, leaving her feeling hazy and as if control was slipping through her fingers, stolen from her by the mage?

  He had to reach her.

  He rushed forwards, raised his fist and brought it down hard on the black gate. It went straight through it. He looked back at Snow, caught the shock as it rippled across his face, and then the slow smile that curled his lips.

  A smile of victory.

  The mage could keep out the corporeal with his defences, but he couldn’t keep out death himself.

  Grave grinned as he pushed forwards, ignoring the unsettling cold that went through him wherever he was in the solid black rock. He kept drifting forwards, forcing himself through the wall as he met with resistance, willing his body to become nothing more than air and focusing on the room at the base of the tower on the other side.

  On where he needed to be.

  His head emerged from the wall and then green light burst to life around him, driving the darkness back, and he frowned and turned in a fast circle, heart drumming quicker as he found himself in the lowest level of the tower.

  Could he teleport?

  He willed himself to appear in the bedroom at the top of the tower and nothing happened.

  A huff escaped him. It turned to a gasp when he looked at the top of the twisted staircase and was suddenly standing there. His smile returned and he looked upwards, to the next level, and the world rushed past him in a white blur. When it settled, he was standing at the top of the steps. He could teleport, in a manner of speaking, one good enough for him because he needed all the speed he could muster. He needed to reach Isla.

  He made the leap from one floor to the next, but each one had his head spinning a little quicker, his limbs feeling a little weaker. He stopped at the floor below the top level and rested against the wall in the curving corridor there, catching his breath and waiting for his body to stop trembling. It appeared there was a toll for using such power, but it had gotten him to his destination faster, and his body was already feeling stronger again, the energy he had consumed to leap each floor swift to return.