Her gaze caught on something on the raised dais, beside the white spiked throne of the First Realm, resting there in a pool of blood.
Her blades fell from her hands, clattering on the white flagstones.
She blinked hard, sending hot tears tumbling down her cheeks as she drifted forward, drawn towards them.
Wooden zoo animals.
Isla shook her head, her eyebrows furrowing as she refused to believe what she was seeing. It was a nightmare. A nightmare. That was all.
She glided to a halt at the foot of the dais and stared down at the blood-splattered toys that were worn at the edges, the varnish rubbed away by tender small hands and too much play.
No.
Even as she refused to believe it, her numbed heart knew it was true, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the pain that cut her like a thousand blades, each of them piercing that heart.
When she opened her eyes again, they rested on a smear of blood that streaked across the white stone, leading towards her right. She followed that line, fury rising inside her again like a phoenix from the ashes, burning so fiercely yet she couldn’t feel it as she tracked the trail of blood.
She couldn’t feel anything as her eyes lit upon her sister.
Melia kneeled in the corner with her back to Isla, blood covering her, streaking her white dress and hair. Her soft voice reached to Isla, a song in the phantom tongue that she hadn’t heard since they were children.
A lullaby.
Isla’s throat tightened, her lower lip wobbling as she fought the tears, the sorrow that chilled her at the same time as it filled her with fire.
Melia turned, looking over her shoulder at Isla, all the pain in the world in her blue eyes. Agony that echoed inside Isla.
Isla stopped sharply, a gasp escaping her before a sob followed it as Melia turned more towards her and she saw Tarwyn.
“No… no… no… no!” She staggered a step forwards and her legs gave out, sending her crashing to her knees on the white flagstones, but she didn’t feel the pain as it shot through her.
The agony in her heart eclipsed it.
Tarwyn’s beautiful eyes stared heavenward, his little face and white shirt covered in blood, but it was the vicious cut across his small throat that arrested her eyes and she couldn’t pull them away from it.
So brutal. So merciless.
He was only a child.
What kind of monster would do such a thing to a child?
Isla broke down as Melia stared at her, curling forwards into her knees and sobbing against them, her entire body shuddering as she became deeply aware of what was to come.
She had lost her nephew.
Now she would lose her sister.
She lifted her head and silently implored Melia not to do it, to stay with her. She was the only light in this dark world, Isla’s only warmth and comfort. She couldn’t lose her too, not when it felt as if everything she loved in this life was being torn from her piece by piece.
The light in the room faded as anger welled up inside her and reflected in Melia’s cold blue eyes.
Those eyes lowered back to the boy she held and she drew him closer to her, clutching his lifeless form to her chest, and began singing softly again.
No.
Isla reached for her, desperate to find her voice, to find the one thing she could say to make her sister stay with her, even when she knew it was impossible.
Melia was bound to Tarwyn through his father’s blood.
With his death, she would fade.
She would disappear forever.
Isla couldn’t bear it.
The thunder of footsteps came from behind her but she didn’t tear her eyes away from her sister.
A deep male voice barked orders in the demon tongue, sending men to scout the castle, and she wanted to tell him it was pointless. Whoever had committed this atrocity was gone, and now all they could do was mourn.
Mourn and plan their revenge.
Whoever had done this, she would make them pay. She would make them suffer. They would know her wrath.
“What happened?” the male asked, his voice softer, a thickness to it that spoke to Isla of his pain.
A question she desperately wanted to ask. She needed the answer to it, so she could hunt and destroy the one responsible.
She looked up as the male paused beside her, his large hand coming down gently on her shoulder. He wobbled in her tear-filled vision and she blinked to clear it, but new tears came as she saw the ones in his pale blue eyes. His golden horns curled from behind his ears, twisted around like a ram’s to reveal his rage. His pain.
Frey.
His eyes glowed in the low light as he looked from her to Melia and his hand shook against Isla’s shoulder. She could see the fight to contain his grief written in every tight line of his handsome face, but somehow he was winning that battle when she had lost hers. He was holding himself together when she was falling apart. Gods, she envied his strength, wished she could be like him, could contain the pain ripping her apart and destroying her.
“I never should have left the castle,” he bit out. “I am sorry.”
Melia slowly shook her head and continued rocking with Tarwyn. “It is not your fault. It is mine. I should not have left him alone with his nurses. I should not have ventured down to visit the families in the town and left my own family defenceless. It is my fault.”
Melia turned her head towards Isla, her eyes as dark as midnight.
“It is all my fault… I never should have told you how to become corporeal… I should have known what you would do…” Melia looked back down at Tarwyn and brushed a strand of pale hair from his brow. “I never should have idly stood by and allowed you to bewitch the vampire…”
Isla shot to her feet, her head spinning and sending the room twirling with it as she struggled to take that in.
“Did he do this? Did Grave do this?” Her gaze jumped to Tarwyn and the gruesome slash across his throat, and her mind leaped to recall all the dead demons in the courtyard. She couldn’t believe it. Grave was vicious, bloodthirsty, but she had never seen him attack a child. Her eyes widened. The flashes of his journey. “He was not here. I know that. Grave was not here at the castle.”
She had seen him at a house of mortal fashion just seconds before she had seen the castle.
“He did not need to be,” Melia whispered and stroked her son’s forehead. “His name is fitting. Wherever he goes, death follows in his wake… in his shadow… and he brings it to those he has never even met… through others.”
Her sister raised her head and pinned cold eyes on her, and Isla swallowed hard, wanted to deny that but she couldn’t find her voice, not when Melia was looking at her that way, as if she knew something and was afraid to tell her.
“How is he responsible?” The phantom side of her was already pushing, demanding she take revenge upon him and the one he had somehow sent to destroy this most beloved part of her world.
Melia’s eyes hardened and the words that left her lips cut Isla to the bone and she couldn’t breathe through the pain.
“The vampire is not responsible… you are.”
“No.” Isla shook her head. “No!”
It couldn’t be true.
Melia gently caressed Tarwyn’s horns, her eyes back on him. “It was my fault for telling you how to gain a solid form… it was my fault for not seeing what you intended to do and stopping you from seducing the vampire… and for that I have paid the ultimate price. I have paid for allowing you to mate with a vampire. I saw the one who did this. I came upon him in the courtyard as he was leaving.”
Her sister pressed her hand to her side and Isla looked there, swallowed hard as she noticed the blood on her dress was fresh, still flowing.
“He knew what I was… but I was not what he was looking for… so he kept me alive to deliver a message.”
“A message?” Isla staggered forwards a step.
“The vampire took family from a demon princ
e and now that demon prince will take everything from him… beginning with his family.”
Ice prickled down Isla’s spine, a feeling building within her, mixed with dread.
“But Tarwyn and the demons of this realm are not Grave’s family… I do not understand, Sister. Why did he attack us?”
Melia slowly drew her eyes away from Tarwyn and Isla shuddered as her sister fixed them on her, feeling the cold in them race over her skin. “It is a tactic of war… to ensure your victory, target that which would weaken your enemy the most first.”
Her.
Isla’s knees buckled. Frey caught her in his arm, the warmth of it not a comfort as reality crashed over her and all she could feel was infinite cold. She didn’t have the strength to stand, so she hung limp in his arm, head and heart reeling from the blow.
She was responsible.
The demon prince Melia spoke of wanted to repay Grave by taking his family, and what better way of weakening the vampire was there than targeting his mate first?
The demon had come for her, in order to take her from Grave, and instead he had taken everything from her.
The ice in Melia’s eyes melted as she looked up at Isla and Isla tried to push out of Frey’s arms as her sister began to fade before her eyes. Frey held her closer and she wasn’t strong enough to break free of him, no matter how fiercely she struggled.
“Stay,” Isla husked, voice thick with the pain beating hard behind her breast as she stretched an arm out to her sister. Her hand shook in the air between them. “Hold on. I will find a phantom mage to save you.”
Melia began to shimmer, her form losing colour to turn as white as snow.
“I cannot live without you.” Isla shook her head, her pale eyebrows furrowed and tears spilling down her cheeks, hot against her cold skin.
Melia smiled softly and it only made the pain grow fiercer inside Isla, until it felt as if it would consume her.
“I cannot,” Melia whispered. “My place is now with my love and my son.”
Isla’s lower lip trembled and she kept shaking her head, silently pleading her sister to stay even when she knew all she could do was watch her fade away.
She couldn’t take it as Tarwyn’s body slipped through Melia’s to land on the bloodstained floor and her sister’s voice no longer reached Isla’s ears as her mouth moved.
She heard the words echo in her mind instead.
“I love you, Isla… dearest sister… and I forgive you. Do not fade… do not allow your foolish pride to stand between you and living… not when you love your mate. I would give anything for another day… another minute with Valador and Tarwyn. Another second.”
Melia’s voice grew quiet in her mind and her form faded from ghostly white to little more than a shimmer in the air.
And then nothing.
Isla screamed out her agony as the connection between her and her sister shattered.
Grave flashed into her mind, facing her this time, and he stopped and seemed to look right at her, and then she was falling through the air.
She reached for him, desperate to touch him, desperate to feel his arms around her, but the distance between them grew and then darkness yawned around her.
It swallowed her.
CHAPTER 10
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Grave stopped dead on the golden gravel of the driveway, a spike in adrenaline halting him in his tracks, and he felt sure someone was about to attack him. He looked around him but only his cousin was there beside him, like a wraith in the darkness.
He pressed his hand to his chest. His heart pounded against it.
What the hell was wrong with him?
He tried to shake the feeling away, putting it down to nothing more than the stress of everything that had happened over the past week, but it refused to go.
A tremendous burst of agony blasted through him and he gritted his teeth and dug his claws into his chest through his black shirt. Damn.
“What’s wrong?” Snow said beside him, concern in his deep voice.
Grave looked at his white-haired cousin and shook his head. “Nothing.”
Snow arched an eyebrow at that, but didn’t press him, and he was glad as he slowly breathed through the pain and struggled to figure out what had just happened. Was it the bond? Was he going to fade?
He shook that thought away, refusing to let it take root and seize control of him.
Nerves and fatigue were getting the better of him, making him weak. Making him want to see her.
Gods, he would rather be facing her than what awaited him.
He looked up at the huge Georgian house, the sensation of dread only deepening as he scanned the two levels of sash windows that punctuated the sandstone façade, meeting in the centre at a double-height portico, with towering Grecian columns that supported a triangular pediment with a beautiful carved frieze set into it.
Golden light shone from most of the windows and from the lamps on the walls beneath the portico too, lending it a warm glow. One that did nothing to ease the chill in Grave’s blood.
“I still can’t believe you mated with a phantom,” Snow said and Grave shot him a glare.
His cousin had spewed the same line at least two dozen times during their long journey, and each time Grave had only answered him with a scowl. It seemed Snow was intent on getting a real answer out of him, and if it would shut him up and stop him from constantly mentioning Isla, dragging Grave’s treacherous thoughts to her, he would give it to him.
Because he was finding it hard enough to keep his mind off her, his heart away from thoughts of her that didn’t belong in it after what she had done, without his cousin bringing her up every fifteen minutes.
“I did not realise she was a phantom at the time. She had substance… flesh, bone and blood.” And he couldn’t get over the taste of her.
Everyone else he bit tasted like ashes, but she tasted like Heaven.
Like everything he could ever want or need.
Grave ventured a step forwards and paused again, struggling to muster the courage to reach the dark wooden door and rouse the inhabitants.
He looked back at Snow and scowled at him when Snow gave him a soft look, one that sympathised with him and made it clear he knew Grave was having trouble overcoming his fear of this place.
His fear of the one who lived in it.
Grave cursed him in his head. If his cousin could see his weakness, then the one he had come to speak with would see it too. He schooled his features and systematically shut down his feelings, one by one, pushing them back into place and then extinguishing them, until he felt nothing.
He stepped up onto the porch and rapped his knuckles against the door.
A slender petite mortal female answered it, her caramel-coloured eyes so large that she appeared doll-like.
“I must speak with my brother,” Grave said, and it felt as if he had never spoken words more difficult to voice than those.
She bowed her head, stepped back to allow them to enter and then closed the door quietly behind them. He studied her as she hurried away, her head still bent, her dark chocolate hair brushing across the back of her short black dress in soft glossy waves.
Bastian had always had a thing for embracing the aristocrat way of life to the full, taking everything he believed was his right as a pureblood from a noble line of vampires, including mortal servants. A simple bite was enough to enslave them. While it had once been acceptable to force a mortal into servitude, it was now required by vampire law that the mortal chose to serve. Becoming a servant of a vampire offered perks that many mortals found impossible to resist. The lure of a longer life, one free of disease, was often enough to get a mortal to agree to becoming a vampire’s servant, but on top of that many of the aristocrats paid their servants well and gave them a roof over their heads.
Grave wasn’t sure Bastian paid his servants well, but he knew his older brother allowed them to live in his house, kept them fed and t
ook good care of them.
The sound of footsteps on the Italian marble floor drew his focus back to the room and a shadow emerged from the corridor to the left of the double-height grand entrance hall, taking form as the male stepped out of the darkness, dressed in a fine black tailored suit, his dark shirt opened at the collar.
Night.
Grave frowned at his younger brother. “Where is Bastian?”
“Away.” Night rubbed a hand around the back of his neck, giving away his nerves.
His younger brother never had been very good at hiding his feelings, was a sharp contrast to his own nature and that of Bastian. Sometimes Grave wondered why Night had chosen to serve in the Preux Chevaliers when only one son from an aristocrat family was required to serve at any time, and even then only for four centuries.
Night had been serving for close to six, although Grave had assigned him to duties in the mortal world to keep him away from Hell.
His brother could fight, had proven himself in battle, and Asher had questioned him when he had decided to reassign Night from the Second Legion to overseeing their covert missions in the mortal realm.
Grave had told his second in command that Night was more suited to the role of an assassin than a mercenary.
Asher had bought it, but Grave hadn’t.
In reality, it had been a moment of weakness on Grave’s part.
He had wanted his younger brother away from the constant wars of Hell.
He had wanted to protect him and he had known that Night would have refused if he had issued him an order to leave the Preux Chevaliers, but that he wouldn’t refuse the order to head a team of vampires responsible for missions of a more secret nature. So he had created a black ops type group, selecting the vampires most suited to the task from among his legions, and had placed Night in command of them.
It turned out his younger brother was terrifyingly good at it, a tactical genius and one who had been born to move in the shadows, silently eliminating his prey without leaving a trace of evidence behind.
Night glanced at the young mortal female as she re-entered the room.
Grave arched an eyebrow at the way Night’s blue eyes followed her as she walked up to them and lingered on her as she bowed.
Haunted by the King of Death Page 11