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Agony burned through my core and radiated into my thighs, like someone twisted a knife deep in my gut. I huddled on the transport wagon’s bench, holding myself together with pure will. The stress of the harvest always triggered my symptoms.

The stress of joining the harvest apparently doused my symptoms with oil and then tossed a match.

The wagon went over a rough bump. It jolted through me, rattling my clenched teeth. My nausea spiked, rejoining the party to destroy me from the inside out. The roads outside Corraidin were rough and twisting, urging me to puke my meager breakfast on the older man to my left or the teenage girl to my right.

Maybe both for good measure.

I focused on the thin, moss-covered trees above the heads of the Maboni across from me. One tree. Two trees. Three trees. Counting didn’t make the pain or nausea stop, but it kept my mind busy—

The wagon buckled. I jolted, my body falling forward. My elbows dug into flesh. We must have hit a hole or something as half of the wagon’s occupants were on the floor.

“Watch it,” the man to my left snapped at me, like he hadn’t also fallen from his seat.

I grabbed the edge of the bench and crawled back to my seat, ignoring him. His words barely even registered, not when my own body was trying to kill me. The bloating in my stomach. The tremor in my bones. The stabbing in my core.

But even if I wasn’t in pain, there was no point in making friends. No one knew for sure what happened once the harvested reached the vampire’s fortress near Mabon’s south coast and boarded the ships to the mainland.

What we did know was all vampires across the Impire required blood to survive and they preferred it from humans.

“Where do you think we’ll end up?” a small voice asked.

I twisted toward the teenage girl beside me. Fuck. I had tried not to focus on her and my illness had happily obliged. But now I couldn’t help it, taking in her pale face, wide blue eyes, and dark swash of hair.

She probably wasn’t that much older than Orrin, making her... sixteen? Seventeen? Had that been her first harvest? My nausea flared again. I didn’t want to imagine my fate, much less hers.

I swallowed and tried to come up with an answer that wouldn’t terrify her. “I only know the names of two cities in the Impire. There’s Tenebra de Mar to the south, on the edge of the Thaddeian Ocean. Then they have a northern mountain stronghold, Montaurère. Or had a northern mountain stronghold. My information might be really out of date.”

She blinked blankly at me, but now that I was talking, I couldn’t stop. “I think we’re closer to Montaurère, so maybe there? But I really don’t know. In the book I read, there was only one court and one king. Now the Courts of Dusk and Dawn each have a king. Who knows what else the Imperium changed?”

She nodded. I thought that was the end of our conversation when she whispered, “Are the Imperium really named the Conqueror and the Butcher?”

“I assume they have another name.” The current kings were soulbound and had ruled the Impire for over four hundred years, ever since the regents Azaras the Beast appointed when he left for his hell realm died. I hadn’t pieced together much more than that from my readings. “They just haven’t bothered to tell us.”

“They don’t sound very nice.”

I laughed, a sudden, harsh bark I couldn’t hold back. Everyone in the wagon twisted to glare at me. I stiffened and murmured, “I doubt they are.”

The girl sunk into silence.

I didn’t pull her out of it. Crossing my arms, I curled into myself and closed my eyes. I couldn’t save her anymore than I could save myself. Neither of us would ever see our homes again.

My sister, her baby.

My shelves of books.

My grumpy cat.

The rare visits from my father, stepmother, and younger siblings, usually at Aislin’s urging.

I shook my head. It was better not to think of the life I left behind, even the few good parts. But my nausea pushed forward into the space left by my thoughts of home and brought stabbing cramps with it. My only choices were pain, emotional or physical.

Just my luck.

Deidre had called my illness a curse, a punishment from the godstars, and the word had never felt more right.

The light changed, flickering against my eyelids. Had we reached the fortress already? I knew we were one of the closest towns to the coast, but the few maps I had access to didn’t have any details on distances, that information redacted by the Impire.

I glanced toward the front of our wagon, where our two horses followed behind the one ahead. Runes flared on their rumps. Follow . The rune’s meaning wasn’t hard to infer, but my whisper of a sense had always seemed like more than that. All demonblood read Demonic instinctively. Many humans had distant demon ancestry, the blood diluted over centuries, but I had never admitted the ability aloud. I had watched Patriarch Meallán perform too many exorcisms to risk saying anything.

With a shudder, I tore my eyes from the rune and took in the sights beyond the wagons.

The forest opened onto a field of green grass stretched across a hill, the winding path leading to a fortress atop a cliff of white stone. The building rose higher than any I had ever seen, a beautiful monstrosity of soaring walls and pointed towers. Below, the shoreline curved slightly, showing an expanse of sand.

Over the edge of the cliff, blue waters stretched as far as the eye could see. Further than the eye could see, the sky and sea blending into one in the far distance.

My jaw dropped. Was that the ocean? I had read about it in textbooks and stories, but none of the descriptions or illustrations did it justice.

Three ships—galleons technically as they had four masts with square-rigged sails—were tied to the end of a long dock off the beach. Each flew the Azarasian flag, red on the top and blue on the bottom with an eight-pointed star on the horizon between them. Whether it was showing dusk or dawn was up to the eye of the beholder.

I traced my eyes across the lines of the ships, taking in every detail. I would never return home, but before I became someone’s midday meal, I’d see more than I had in my first twenty-nine years of life.

A chill tickled across my skin. I pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders but that didn’t stop the sensation.

When had the people on the opposite side of the wagon stiffened, dropping their gazes? I hadn’t noticed, too enamored with the sights around me.

I turned slowly, already knowing what I’d find. The second of our town’s surprise vampires, the imposing figure in a navy blue cloak, rode a gigantic horse in pace with my wagon. Hellsteed , I mentally corrected. A hellsteed had about as much in common with a horse as a vampire or witch did with a human. Namely, that we shared a common ancestor and were roughly the same shape.

In the last three or four hours since we left Corraidin, a dozen other vampire warriors had joined our convoy with their own collection of wagons carrying hundreds of Maboni. Only the two vampires from my town rode hellsteeds. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t stop my curiosity.

Demon blood made everything bigger and meaner. The hellsteed had to be nearly eight feet tall, with a deep black coat over rippling, strong muscle. In The Soulborne Queen , Azaras’s hellsteed had run twice the speed of a normal horse and tore through enemies in battle. Seeing this hellsteed, I could believe it.

I met its shadowy gaze. The intellect in those eyes chilled my blood.

I pulled my attention away, but the only other thing to look at was the vampire. Strong thighs, a broad chest under hardened leather with far too many clasps and buckles, a strong chin of smooth bronze skin. He hadn’t lowered his hood—none of the vampires had—but through the shadows, bright silver eyes ensnared mine.

Fuck, not again.

I dropped my gaze to his chest. I could see just enough of his face, unfocused in my peripheral. His nostrils flared. Everything within me stiffened. I had forgotten my pain at the sight of the ocean and hellsteed, but it flared within me at my spike of anxiety. It never stayed in the background for long.

I twisted back around, trying to ignore his icy gaze on the back of my head. I couldn’t check, but sometimes I spotted when my pain was this bad. Could he smell my blood?

That was a stupid question. Of course a vampire could smell blood.

I closed my eyes and breathed through the pain. I couldn’t stop myself from bleeding. I couldn’t stop my body from cramping and twisting. I couldn’t stop the Dusk vampire behind me from murdering me for meeting his gaze again .

My fate was in the godstars’ hands now.

I let myself drift until the sound of wheels on dirt softened. I sighed as the wagon’s jolting settled but kept my eyes closed, not needing to see—

A short scream cut off my thoughts. My eyes flashed open. We rolled onto the beach at the end of two rows of wagons on the soft sand. Vampire warriors instructed people to unload one wagon at a time and join the line leading to the dock. I couldn’t see what happened at the front, but the sounds told me enough.

The scream turned into a muffled wailing that chilled my blood. My heart stuttered, my fear flaring to life. I flinched as a sharp stab flashed through me.

Our wagon pulled to a stop in the second row. No one moved. There was nothing else to do. We outnumbered the Azarasians ten to one, but it wouldn’t have mattered if we outnumbered them a hundred to one. An army of humans was no match for a vampire.

“What do we do?” the girl beside me whispered, her voice somehow even lighter than it had been as we traveled through the forest.

“Wait, I guess.”

We didn’t wait long. The Dusk vampire hadn’t strayed far from our wagon. In the corner of my vision, he dismounted his hellsteed. He said something to the beast, too low for me to hear, before it turned to wander off toward the dock.

Shit, did it understand us? The book I had on hellbeasts was rather introductory and didn’t get into that.

Then the Dusk vampire turned toward our wagon, pushed back his hood, and the questions fled my mind.

I had noticed his chiseled jaw and bronzed brown skin earlier, but now I looked into a perfect, masculine face carved by an expert hand. His every feature was strong and regal, from the slash of his dark brows to the sharp edge of his cheekbones. The only feature at odds was the softness of his lips. His short, tousled black hair had an almost blue sheen to it in the light, like the color of the midnight sky. One loose curl brushed his forehead. My fingers itched with the urge to grab that silky strand and run through his hair.

I flinched at the thought. What was wrong with me? He was gorgeous, yes. Inhumanly so. But so were all vampires.

Those cold silver eyes found me instantly. My heart stopped at the sight. This time I couldn’t look away, entranced by him. His gaze stabbed into me as sharply as my illness, but it was the black rim around his irises that nearly made me faint. All demonblooded creatures had a shadow rim in their eyes, but his was pronounced and visible even at this distance.

He was a demonborn vampire. He had to be. Even if The Soulborne Queen was an entirely fictional work, what little it told me of demons, vampires, and magic seemed to match what the textbooks said. Karra had avoided vampires with thick shadow rims, knowing one of their parents or grandparents was a demon. They were the strongest and most dangerous of their kind.

I had never thought I’d see one in person.

The Dusk vampire—the Lord of Dusk, if he was demonborn and the customs from Karra’s time still applies—walked to the end of our wagon. The girl beside me shied into my side, the entire bench seeming to scoot over an inch at his approach.

I stayed still, caught in those eyes. A part of my brain screamed at me to look away, dumbass, but I couldn’t. I was caught in the predator’s trance and I did not give a shit.

“Nessa Halloran, was it?”

I shuddered as his deep, silken voice washed over me. No one else in my wagon moved, leaving me alone to face the vampire. Not that anyone here could do anything to help me.

“Yes?” My voice didn’t shake.

He waved me forward with a smooth movement. “Come with me.”