Page 10 of Cruel Vampire King (Honeyblood Vampires #1)

The central area of the forest had a gradual downward slope. The new map showed no sign of a lake at the bottom of the valley, but after the kelpie, I wasn’t going to make assumptions. The vegetation around us slowly shifted day by day. Whereas before, we had much more of the evergreens dropping their acidic needles onto the forest floor, the lower we got, the more of the deciduous trees there were. Oaks replaced pines, then elms started to dot throughout the forest. Ash trees, with their brilliant red berries, birches, and aspen, dominated the forest soon enough.

Unfortunately, as we got into the brighter greens and fruit-bearing trees, the undergrowth came in much thicker. Our progress slowed significantly, though we were able to snatch handfuls of berries more often. They helped to sate our hunger and thirst a little.

We hadn’t heard the dying screams of the other teams in a couple days when Kael suddenly called for us to stop. He gripped his axe in both hands, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air. His eyes widened as we watched him. I cocked my head, searching the forest, but none of my senses indicated danger. The only thing I smelled was the sunbaked forest, with the sweet scent of honeysuckles lingering in the air.

“There’s a manticore nearby,” Kael murmured. “I can smell it.”

My grip tightened in my staff. Manticore. What was that again?

“Are they aggressive?” Thessa whispered.

“Very.” Kael glanced at my staff doubtfully. “Listen carefully. If you hear what sounds like a cat’s meow, that’s it.”

We were all quiet. The distant noises of birds and squirrels seemed terribly loud in the stillness surrounding us. Then I heard it, a soft meowing. I started to turn, but Ysara grabbed my arm. Her yellow eyes were focused just behind me.

“They swallow their victims whole and spit out the bones,” she murmured. “But they only attack once you’ve made eye contact. It’s behind us, waiting. If we’re going to kill it, we need to split up. Lure it into an ambush. Nobody look back.”

My lips pulled back slightly. The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. Thessa’s brown eyes were huge, her breathing rapid. I wanted to reach over and reassure her, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. But I didn’t dare move. The meowing crept closer, and a shiver raced down my spine.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Kael rumbled. “Greyson and Ysara, you break off to the left and work your way behind the manticore. Thessa and I will go to the right. Elara, you’re our bait. Don’t turn around. Keep moving forward, drawing it after you. When you get to a clearing, stop. Lift your staff to be a T over your head. It can only expand its mouth so far. So long as you keep the staff in place, it won’t be able to swallow you.”

“Very reassuring,” I said, a little sarcastically.

I didn’t like being bait. How did I know this wasn’t Kael’s attempts at getting me killed? But I was also the only one with a staff. I sucked in a breath through my nose—the honeysuckle scent was even stronger—and nodded once.

The others peel off from me and I headed forward, walking as bravely as I could. I held my staff above my head, laying it crosswise on my head with my arms looped over it. I heard nothing following me, except that little meow every now and then.

The brush was so thick it was a struggle to get through. Sweat itched under my clothes as I battled through the branches. I must look like a pretty helpless piece of prey. And not in the way I wanted to be when I signed up.

I stumbled out of a particularly thorny bush into a clearing. Hawthorns ringed the space, which was a wide meadow with blue, white, and pink flowers scattered through it. A boulder sat in the middle of the clearing. Perfect! I hurried toward it. It would give me something against my back when I did this. I hesitated a moment before turning, my staff still held above my head.

The manticore flew at me at once. It let out the roar of a tiger as it came at me, claws outstretched. Its head was human enough, but as it opened its mouth, three rows of teeth stretched in a hideous maw. I dropped, pressing my back against the rock as I held the staff fast, one end on the ground, the other against the rock. The manticore slammed face-first into it. The wood groaned but held as the manticore snapped its jaws shut. It nearly took off my fingers. I had to drop the staff.

Before it could open its mouth again, there were four loud shouts, followed by the sinking of blades into flesh. An axe whistled through the air, and Kael took off the monster’s head with a single blow. He pulled the axe back before it could touch my staff or the ground.

Heart hammering, I scrambled to my feet and looked down. The manticore had the tawny, lithe body of a lion. Its tail, which was shaped like a scorpion’s, had been taken off, too. A thick green ooze flowed from the body.

“That’s that,” Ysara said, wiping her sword off on the ground, “Let’s keep moving.”

“You don’t give us much time to recover,” Thessa muttered.

“None of us were hurt. What do we have to recover from?” Ysara snapped. She glared at Thessa, but just before she turned away, I thought I had caught something in her eyes. Guilt, maybe?

We left the body where it was, eager to make up for lost time. We took turned blazing the path, cutting through the bushes. When it was Thessa’s turn, she found us a deer path that let us move more quickly for a few miles. We set camp near a river. Ysara, Kael, and Greyson all stripped off their clothes and bathed.

“Care to join us, ladies?” Greyson asked, waist-deep in the water. It was a calm river, moving swiftly enough but not causing a lot of noise.

“I don’t want to be on porn sites, either,” Thessa said rather stiffly. “And can’t you be downriver? We need to fill our waterskins. Wish we had a pot. Then we could boil it up for safety.”

I dunked my waterskin into the water as Thessa muttered about parasites and germs. Dehydration was the greater danger. We’d emptied our waterskins early in the morning, and now was the only time we could refill them. I dipped my face into the water, sighing as it wet my parched throat. My scars felt especially tight, and the moisture helped relieve some of that discomfort.

If I was alone, I would shed my clothes and lay in the river, letting it cool off my body. Well… if I was alone and wasn’t being magically spied on, that was.

“You know, that manticore earlier made me realize just how few dangerous encounters we’ve had,” Thessa said, setting aside her waterskin to kill Ysara’s. “Even the other teams that attacked us. They weren’t really that good. It’s just odd, isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Greyson beat me to it. “I’ve noticed that, too. It’s almost as though someone is clearing our way for us.”

My mouth snapped shut. Clearing our way? Luken just might be doing that. I hadn’t seen him again since the night when he grabbed me, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. And where the vampire king was, there were certain to be other vampires as well. He could be clearing their way for them, so he could get me on the end of his fangs, where he wanted me to be.

The confusion that swept through me was familiar. What was his plan? What did he really want? Why put me through this if all he wanted was my blood in his mouth?

I shook my head, retreating from the river. We had nothing to cook, and the night promised to be warm enough we didn’t need a fire tonight.

“I’ll take night watch,” I volunteered.

Only Thessa acknowledged me. This was our normal routine. I’d sleep before night fell, so I could be up and watch the camp later in the night. I lay down, focusing on the discomfort of my scars. It was the only thing that could bolster enough rage to block out the questions about the vampire king.

Except one.

I wonder what he’d do if I stabbed him through the heart.

I smiled as I let myself drift off to sleep. Yes, that was a pleasant dream. Bodies pressed together, blood flowing…

***

“Where is my pack?” I demanded.

It was dawn. We were all getting up to start the day, but when I went to where I’d left my pack, it was gone. I turned, thumping my staff into the ground near my feet. I glared at the others.

Thessa rubbed her eyes. “What?”

“My pack is missing. Which one of you took it?” I demanded. I strode forward, though I wasn’t sure who I would suspect most. Maybe Thessa—because my first reaction was that she couldn’t have taken it. Which was why I had to consider her first. She did a good job of putting on that innocent air, but she was still here!

“My pack’s gone, too,” Kael said.

I turned. He was near a bush that he shoved this way and that, as though the pack had snuck off and was giggling in the leaves. Ysara, Greyson, and Thessa soon took up their own cries. All of our packs were missing. A feeling of dread settled in my stomach. Oh, no. Luken was watching. Whether in person or through the magical cameras, it didn’t matter. When we were talking about how it was suspiciously easy yesterday, he must have decided to make it more difficult.

So now we had no food. I touched my waist, relieved when my waterskin was still in place.

“Do you all have your water?” I asked.

Greyson did, still on his waist. Kael, Ysara, and Thessa had all let theirs in their packs. I’d seen nothing move in the moonlight while I was on watch last night, and neither did Greyson, on first watch, or Ysara on second watch. However, after a few minutes of searching, Thessa pointed out some strange footprints on the riverbank.

They looked like bird tracks, but with four toes instead of three. There was a slight webbed indention between these long digits. A little further down, I found the image of a perfect hand in the mud. The fingers were twice as long as a human’s, tipped with slight claws. As I studied the mark, a memory from a lifetime ago bubbled in my mind.

“Grindylows have moved into the pond,” Dad said grimly. “Little Peter Johnson was nearly snatched today.” He looked down at me and shook his head. “You stay in the house today, Elara. The water’s dangerous right now. Stay with your mom. And be good!”

I must have been six, maybe seven.

“Grindylows,” I said aloud, turning to the others. “They like to snatch children and small animals. Guess they took the packs.”

“And how come none of us saw anything?” Greyson narrowed his eyes at me.

Kael cleared his throat. “The little devils are well camouflaged. Pretend to be rocks most times. And in the dark…” He let out a heavy sigh and shook his head.

Ysara fingered her sword. “Are they good eating?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I answered.

She grunted. “Right. Grindylows stay in the water, right? So even if we get our packs, the food will be waterlogged. So much for stretching our stores.”

A thought occurred to me, and my heart jumped to my throat. “The map! Thessa, you had the artifact. Did you—”

She pulled it out from under her shirt and I breathed a sigh of relief. At least we hadn’t lost it along with everything else. My shoulders slumped forward as I sank to the ground. Based on the progress we’d been making, we were still a few days out from the center of the forest. Food, we could get by, I was sure.

Water, however? Could all five of us subsist with two waterskins? No. Especially since we didn’t know when we’d get the chance to get more water.

“We need to get our packs back,” I said, drawing myself back up. “Grindylows live in more marshy areas. We’ll have to search around the river for bullrushes. They’ll have stashed the packs in them.”

Ysara turned her face toward the sky.

“Can’t we just push on through? We’re not that far,” Thessa said. There was a note of exhaustion in her voice I didn’t like. That’s how it started, the end. Being so tired that you started to make reckless decisions. It always seemed like the end was just around the corner.

As I turned to try to explain, though, Greyson sat next to her. “I know, it’s hard. You just want this over. The waiting, the struggle. The fear. Oh, so much fear,” he murmured, his voice low and soothing. He squeezed her shoulder lightly, and Thessa shuddered delicately. The tension eased from her face. Her shadowed eyes brightened slightly. “It’s not easy to keep going when we’re so afraid. But we have to keep going. And we have to be smart about it. The vampires don’t care if we live or die. So we have to care. For ourselves.”

What did the people watching our channels think about that? For a moment, I imagined Luken, glowering at the screen as I watched Greyson and Thessa. For his sake, I allowed a soft smile onto my face, and I crouched near them. I put my hand over Greyson’s. His skin was soft and warm.

“We should get moving quickly, if we’re going to get those packs back before noon,” I said. “We shouldn’t search alone. Grindylows might specialize in children, but they’ll take an adult if they can get them alone. Thessa and I will search downstream.”

Greyson met my gaze. I thought he was going to offer to come with us, but he only nodded. He turned his hand, pressing his palm into mine. A slight tingle shivered up my arm. I let my fingers move down his wrist slightly. The reaction to him was so slight in comparison to what I knew my body could do.

Ugh. I didn’t want to think about that again. I pulled away.

Thessa and I headed downstream while the other three went upstream. I was glad that neither Kael or Ysara had decided to come with us. I wanted a chance to talk with Thessa alone.

“When we’re out of this forest, I’m going to have such a long, hot bath that I turn into a prune,” Thessa said as we walked along the rocky shore. “I’ve never done such hard work in my life!”

I’d meant to ask her more about her life before the Blood Trials, but her words brought me up short. She was looking forward with such hope. Didn’t she remember that we weren’t finished yet? There was still the colosseum. It was something I hadn’t forgotten, even when I put it from my mind.

Cruelty. It was the only explanation I could think of for why we’d been forced to rely so heavily on each other through Wickham Forest, only to turn on each other once we reached the end. Luken was a cruel, cruel man.

All at once, I knew that he was laughing behind his screen. He didn’t care about the little games I played, touching Greyson, or any of it. This was more punishment. I stumbled over my feet, and Thessa caught my elbow.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Slippery there,” I lied.

Why hadn’t I thought of it before? He was still punishing me! He didn’t care if I died in the attack on my family. And that night when he took me to the palace, that was to see if I would bow to his wishes. He sent me back to punish me for turning him down. It was all just the same thing. Of course, he was going to leave me in the Trials, because how else was he going to make me suffer for telling him no?

“Thessa,” I said, drawing to a stop. “Before… now, you asked me something. About when we entered the colosseum.”

Thessa’s brown eyes darkened. She looked away quickly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I didn’t either. But I had to. I took a deep breath, reaching for her hand. “Thessa, please. It’s too important. None of us are going to hesitate once we’re in the colosseum. You can’t, either.”

“I’m not meant for this. And even if I was to survive…” Her hands clenched into fists as she looked up at me, her eyes fiery. “I don’t want him to drink from me. I don’t want any man drinking from me. I’d rather die.”

The intensity of her words caught me off guard. I almost asked why but stopped myself. It didn’t matter why. It just meant that she wasn’t planning on surviving the colosseum. Maybe I should have suspected her of lying, but there was too much conviction in her voice. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to survive to move to the next Trial.

Would she let herself be killed, then? Would she pick one of us to fight alongside? Or would she turn herself into the sacrificial lamb?

And when she died, would anyone care? Was there anyone out there, wanting to save her the way I wanted to save Darcie?