Page 11 of Blood Court (Cursed Darkness #2)
CHAPTER NINE
EVREN
“Are we killing her?” Verik asks as we join Lysithea at her table.
I sit next to her before Dathan can slide into the seat. He glares at me, but I ignore him. I need to be near her.
“No,” Lysithea says, her voice flat, answering Verik’s question. “We’re not killing her. Yet.”
The final word hangs in the air, a promise of future violence.
Dathan slides into the seat opposite, his gaze never leaving Lysithea’s face. “What did she say?”
“Her father is part of the opposition. They want to keep the book from being completed. She says they think I’m a puppet.”
“Are you?” Verik asks, his tone a challenge.
Lysithea meets his gaze, and for a second, the air crackles with a power that has nothing to do with her voice. “What do you think?”
Verik smirks. “I think the opposition just made a very big mistake.”
Dathan leans forward, his eyes glittering with violent approval. “They underestimated you. Good. Let them.”
I watch her. The spirits that drift through the dining hall, drawn to the echoes of old deaths, recoil from the force of her will.
She is not a puppet. She is the hand that pulls the strings, even if she doesn’t know it yet.
The memory of my cock inside her, of the forced intimacy, is a shard of ice in my chest. But seeing her like this, a queen claiming her power, thaws something I thought was long dead.
“Her father,” I say, my voice still feeling foreign in my throat. “He’s powerful?”
Lysithea turns to me, her eyes wide. She takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. It portrays everything I need to know. “Reena didn’t say. But she called him boring.”
“Boring people are predictable,” Dathan points out. “And predictable people are easy to kill.”
“Yes, but Reena wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something ‘extra’ about her,” Verik says. “We need to do some digging on her family. She is a vampire who was born to two vampire parents. That’s all I really know about her.”
Lysithea’s gaze bores into his, eyes narrowed.
He catches it and smirks. “Jealous, hellcat?”
“Fuck off,” she mutters.
“Okay, so two things. First off, if we aren’t killing Reena, then we need to focus back on the impending trials, and two, her dad isn’t even here anyway.
The thing under the trap door is unlikely to be a vampire,” Dathan says.
“If we waste time trying to find out who or what Reena's father is, we are losing sight of the bigger picture.”
“True,” Lysithea says. “I’m not overly worried about Reena. She seems to thrive on chaos, not order. She is telling the truth about not being involved with the opposing forces, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful around her.”
I nod. I’m in agreement that Reena isn’t a threat.
“We should get to class, act like everything is normal. For DarkHallow anyway,” she says, looking at me with those violet eyes that make my heart ache.
“Go,” I rasp.
“We’ll know if the trials come calling,” Dathan adds.
She nods and gets up, letting go of my hand before she wanders off to her first class.
We watch her disappear into the throng of students. A queen moving through a kingdom that doesn’t know it’s already hers.
“Right,” Verik says, pushing his chair back with a scrape of stone. “Library. I’m going to deconstruct this fucking volcano spell until I can build it in my sleep.”
“And we do what?” Dathan asks, leaning back, all restless energy. “Sit on our hands and wait for the world to end?”
“You could try reading a book,” Verik suggests without a trace of humour.
Dathan grimaces at him.
I stand. The need to move, to do something other than sit in the memory of her pain, is a physical ache. “The crypts,” I say.
They both look at me.
“The opposition. The dead know it.” I can feel the pull of old spirits, of forgotten histories buried beneath the academy. They’ve been whispering since we returned from the Blood Court, their voices more urgent now. They know a war is coming. They always do.
“Good,” Dathan says. “You go talk to your spooky friends. I’m going to find out everything I can about Reena’s boring, powerful daddy.”
He stands and stalks off, a nightmare looking for a new dream to haunt.
It leaves just me and Verik.
He meets my gaze, his hellfire eyes burning with grim purpose, then he turns and walks away, leaving me alone in the echoing hall. My own path is clear. Down. Into the cold, silent history of this place. The truth isn’t just in the book. It’s in the bones.
The stone steps leading down are worn smooth by centuries of grief.
I descend into the cold, my natural element.
The air here is thick with finality, a comforting blanket of decay.
The dead know I’m here. Their whispers are a rustle of dry leaves in the back of my mind, a language of memory and regret I understand better than the spoken word.
I move past rows of stone sarcophagi, their occupants long turned to dust and echoes. My magic reaches out, a tendril of cold seeking answers in the stillness.
The opposition. Who are they?
The whispers grow, and freezing hands reach for me. I let them surround me, closing my eyes, letting them enter my thoughts.
The Warden. He guards the old laws.
The Warden. The creature under the trap door?
Yes.
We have to get past it to get to what, exactly?
The Midnight Spire. The Sovereign Forge.
What is that?
A place where what you seek, you will find.
What do I seek?
The spirits pull back instantaneously as the ground rumbles under my feet. The stone floor shudders.
Dust rains from the vaulted ceiling. The spirits are gone, scattered like ash in a hurricane. They fear what comes. The air in the crypt thickens, heavy with a purpose older than the academy. A deep, resonant groan echoes from the living rock of this place, a sound of immense pressure building.
A spike of icy fire lances through my connection to the brand.
The rumbling intensifies, the vibrations travelling up from my feet to rattle my teeth.
I leave the crypt, taking the stairs two at a time. The dead gave me a name. The Warden. The grimoire gave Verik a weapon. Now, the board itself is starting to shake.
Whatever the Midnight Spire and Sovereign Forge are, I need to find out.
Whatever it is I am seeking, I need to find it.
I aim straight for the library, pushing open the doors and striding in.
Several students look up and then hastily look away as the shuddering stops as abruptly as it started.
I walk down the aisle where the alcoves are, slowly pausing outside each of them.
They showed me the way before; they will again.
I just have to trust them. Let them know my intent.
A chill gathers in the air before me, a familiar caress of the spectral.
It coalesces in front of a towering bookshelf laden with forgotten lore, books bound in cracked leather and dust. The cold deepens, focusing on a single, unmarked spine.
I reach out, my fingers brushing against the frigid leather.
The book practically leaps into my hand.
It falls open to a diagram of DarkHallow’s foundations, but it shows something more, something deeper.
A spire of obsidian rock plunges the wrong way into the realm’s core.
The Midnight Spire . The text is ancient, describing a forge at its heart, a place of creation that predates the academy’s foundations.
The Sovereign Forge. The place where what I seek, I will find.
“So what is it that I seek?” I whisper to the book.
The book’s pages remain blank for a long moment. Then, new script bleeds into the ancient parchment, an answer written in a language of endings that only I can read.
What was stolen.
“What was stolen?” I ask, getting a bit tired of the cryptic.
But be careful around ancient tomes. They have ways of making you regret your thoughts.
The omen slams into me. A crown made from onyx and thorns, dripping with blood.
Lysithea’s white blond hair is streaked with red as it sits on top of her head, her violet eyes filled with hellfire.
The vision shatters, leaving a phantom image of a blood-soaked queen burned behind my eyes.
The Infernal Crown. What was stolen. From her?
From her lineage? Her birthright? The hellfire in her eyes is a glimpse of what the grimoire means by their combined potential.
A future where she wields all their powers.
The brand on my arm ignites. A searing, white-hot agony that drives the air from my lungs.
The library screams. Books launch themselves from shelves like projectiles.
Stone groans under a pressure that isn’t natural.
The academy twists, preparing the battlefield.
I slam the ancient tome shut and grip it tightly. I have the map. I know the destination.
I run. Students scatter before me, their faces masks of panic. Alarms shriek, a familiar, grating sound. But this is different. This isn’t a drill. This is the board being set.
The pull of the brand is an iron hook in my soul, dragging me toward the Ossuary Tower. I have no idea what I’ll find when I get there, but I know I have to hurry.