Page 113 of Crave Me

She stared up at me, her anger vibrating across her features. “He used an obedience spell on me,” she bit out. “One that forced me toworshiphim.”

Nowthatmade a lot more sense to me. “Does that mean you’ll help me stop him now?”

She growled. “I’ll do you one better.”

I arched a brow, waiting.

“I’ll help you kill the bastard.” She pushed herself off the ground, her limbs a little shaky, but that could have been from her residual rage.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Somewhere in the village. But I know how to draw him out.”

I absorbed more of my stardust, needing it to bolster my spirit, and tried to push it to Vesperus through our bond. “I’m listening,” I told her. “What do you suggest?”

“I suggest that I do this.” She held her palms over the ground and blasted it with a wave of power that had me phasing again to keep from falling.

Then she screamed as she shattered the spell lingering in the air, releasing everything from death’s touch all at once.

I could feel it leaving like a foreboding fog drifting into the distance, the power dissipating almost immediately.

She sent another blast into the ground, one I assumed was meant to stop whatever he’d been trying to do in the cemetery.

And then she looked at me. “Now we wait.”

“For what?” I wondered.

“For him to come to us.”

CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX

VESPERUS

“I toldyou not to underestimate her,” a voice hissed nearby, luring me to awareness. “She’s not of this earth.”

“That’s why we have our plan B,” a male replied. “I learned long ago never to rely on a woman, let alone amate.” The venom in that word seemed to chill the air.

Except no, that wasn’t what had caused the chill. It was something else. Something I felt deep in my bones, to my very soul.Ice. Cold. Death.

It reminded me of my first craving. While I’d been born a vampire, I hadn’t been immortal until my mid to late twenties. Which was when the bloodlust had hit me for the first time.

The world had been a very different place then.

And I’d killed without remorse, aware that blood was all I needed to survive.

But it had left me feeling so cold afterward, the tastes of their deaths a lingering flavor on my tongue. Similar to now, only this hadn’t been caused by a bloodlust episode or a feeding frenzy. This lethal sensation was the result of a spell.

Nyx?I whispered, searching for her mind as I listened to the intruders in my room.

They were approaching my bed.

My limbs were too numb for me to react, my mind the only part of me that seemed to be alert.Nyx?I tried again.

Vesperus,she breathed.You’re awake.

Not quite,I replied.I’m… well, I’m not quite sure what I am.

It’s a necromancy spell, she told me.Fallon has death magic. And her mate—Klas—imbibed it from her blood.