Page 42 of Vow of the Undead (The Bloodrune Saga #1)

I ripped my gaze from Kayn, and busied myself, dipping a spoon into the sweet soup and filling my mouth with the brew before I screamed at him.

You’re my last connection to my mother, tell me why you sought her out.

Tell me everything she told you. Mostly, tell me why the fuck she trusted you of all creatures.

The soup warmed my throat and trickled down my chest. Sweetness lingered on my tongue, but not as satisfying as the cinnamon sweet buns, so I picked up the cloth of honey and let more drain into the pot.

After what felt like the entire Polar Nocturne, Kayn sucked in a breath and leaned forward, his elbows on his splayed legs.

“I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a very long time.

” I hummed my acknowledgement, just enough to encourage him to keep talking but not so demanding that he shied away from me.

“I’d almost lost hope when Ingrid vanished.

” I looked up at him now, unable to tamper my interest. “She was a witch too, chosen for this task of destroying us vampires. She’d connected with Odin and Freya, but it did not last, and I was left alone again to wander the graves. ”

“Wander the graves? Do you walk out here every night?”

Did he miss this woman? Or was she just another target of the Gods that he shadowed? Had he grown impatient with her and insisted she kill vampires too? Kayn never spoke of others but I couldn’t help wondering if he’d cared for someone once, a mother, a friend, or perhaps a child, even a lover…

“I don’t have a choice.” He blinked away from me, his gaze lost on something vague in the shadows. “Have you ever made a mistake that consumes you even years later?”

Breath caught in my throat. Every muscle in my body stiffened as my lips dropped open and I drew a sharp gasp.

Did he know? Astrid and her partner were dead, gone, thanks to the Gods’ help, and the king had only known about their deaths because they’d never returned to resume life in the castle with the other royals.

Of course, I’d done worse than hurt Astrid and Sten.

I gave myself a little shake as if to rattle the creeping memory out of my mind. It was so long ago, and I’d only been a child.

I dragged my eyes back to Kayn. Focusing on him and whatever he was clearly wrestling with helped pull my mind out of an impending spiral.

He clenched and unclenched his right fist, seemingly unbothered by my reaction. Though I didn’t find comfort in forming a fist, the movement was familiar; the repetitive action of calming oneself.

I, too, repeated the same phrases over and over in my mind to ward off thoughts of the horrible act I’d committed.

“What is it?” I prodde d

“I persist,” he continued. “Hating myself more with every Polar Nocturne that passes, and I’ve had many years, hundreds, for this to build upon itself. I turned too many innocent humans into monsters.”

He’d made more vampires. No wonder guilt plagued him.

The twist of his mouth and sadness in his dark eyes sent my heart skipping and feeling every word he said as my own shame coursed through my veins.

I hated what I’d done, but I’d only been haunted by it for twenty years.

I couldn’t imagine living as long as he had knowing this and while keeping the secret to myself.

I wanted to forget it, but I knew I never would.

I tried to catch his gaze, but his eyes were fixed at my feet. “Is that why you filed down your fangs? So that you wouldn’t turn anyone else?”

He only offered me a grim smile. With a slow breath his dark eyes finally met mine.

His throat rippled with a rough swallow.

“After the only person I cared for died, I was entirely alone.” He thumbed the pad of his finger against the flat surface of his broken fang.

“It consumed me, drove me mad until I could no longer face loneliness. I found myself in a village of men and women and…” he swallowed again.

“Children too. After I drained the first woman I found, I turned the rest. Every single one of them.” Pain wracked every word he forced out.

I stopped eating and sat forward, clutching the bowl in my fingers as I absorbed his story.

“A child of the woman I drained followed me. He was a vampire then, too, of course. I’d turned him.

I couldn’t be rid of him. He thanked me because he said that as a human he was always starving and in pain.

As this creature, he was only starving.”

“You don’t feel pain?” I couldn’t help my curiosity. I cut through his story with the hot knife of my need for knowledge. I swallowed each piece easily, bites of truth I’d been dying to uncover.

“That’s not entirely true,” he said. “Vampires feel plenty of pain, just as we do pleasure. But the boy was newly turned, he felt strong at the time compared to his weak human body. He soon learned vampires starve more often than humans.”

Kayn dropped his head in his hands. After a moment, he sucked in a tight breath and looked at me.

“Even after all that, I didn’t snap my fangs off.

Not until the boy had hunger pangs and the vessel I’d captured didn’t have enough blood for us both.

It’s hard enough to resist human blood, so I took a stone and broke them off so that I’d have to rely on hunting and consuming animal blood so that he would have enough to drink from the humans we captured. .”

“Where is he now? The boy?”

“With Hel,” he said.

The underworld. Hel was the goddess of the place our souls descended if we were not granted passage into Valhalla or chosen by Freya for Folkvangr—both places of varying honor for life after death.

“He died dishonorably,” I whispered my understanding.

Kayn only frowned, not offering more details on the boy’s passing.

I wasn’t about to ask. The twisted grimace revealed he was in enough agony already, but there was one question I couldn’t tame back from my tongue.

“Isn’t it true that vampires no longer have souls?

What part of him could Hel have claimed? ”

He raked his teeth over his bottom lip. With a shuddering inhale, he forced the air out quickly. “Vampires age slower than humans, so by the time he stumbled upon Hel in Midgard, he was a young man.”

“In Midgard?” I shook my head. Monsters dripped into our realm from the others, but Hel was a goddess, not even Odin and Freya came to Midgard. How could Hel? It was impossible.

“I don’t know the details of her summoning, but she was here.

I witnessed it with my own eyes. Once a human turns into a vampire, their soul is ash, but she didn’t need to find the flakes of his soul, she took his body instead.

I don’t claim to understand why the gods, including Hel, do what they do. ”

“And you feel responsible for his death, too?” I guessed.

“Guilt ravages me for all of it.” He nodded.

His hand shook as he scraped his fingers through his hair.

“The only relief I find is to act as though I am still the human that Freya and Odin draw sacrifices from. I know you’re curious about why I’d want you to take up a Call that’d require you to eventually destroy me, but destruction will be my final relief from this guilt.

” He swallowed hard, the muscles in his throat tightening.

I didn’t know if Draugr could cry, but in the firelight, his brown eyes shimmered with an emotion I’d suppressed for too long; pure, all-consuming guilt.

I stood and walked over to him with the bowl still in my hands. Perching on the rock beside him, I offered him a sip of the soup. “I don’t know if you enjoy human food.”

He sat up and accepted the offer, taking the spoon and tipping the liquid into his mouth. “It’s very sweet,” he said, swallowing and squinting with displeasure.

I smiled. “You don’t like sweetness?”

“I haven’t tasted it in years.”

“Not even sweet wine? King Drakkar nearly swam in it.” When he wasn’t downing his vessel’s blood.

He shook his head. “No, but thank you for sharing. I’ve deprived myself of simple pleasures for so long. This guilt doesn’t allow me to enjoy…anything.”

I nodded, dropping my gaze to the wringing hands in my lap, because I knew he was describing my own fate. What he’d suffered all these years was coming for me next. I cleared my throat.

“I understand what it feels like to be unforgivable,” I said. He dragged his gaze up from my hands and over my torso, searching every inch of my face as if he were looking into a mirror, understanding himself as much as he was getting to know me. “Thank you for stopping King Drakkar. ”

“You know if you accept Odin’s trial too, you’ll be free of him.”

“I’ll also have to cut down hundreds of people, and weren’t we just talking of guilt and shame?” My teeth chattered as the wind shifted and carried the fire’s warmth away from us.

He set the spoon on the rock and took my hand. He was surprisingly warm, like a living being, and I could almost trick myself into thinking he wasn’t one of the undead creatures who crawled through the sagas. “There is no shame in destroying monsters for the safety of your own realm.”

With his gentle hold, his thumb brushing over my fingers, I almost believed him.

My heart didn’t skitter at his touch. When I first met him, I’d felt the flutters of blossoming attraction, but everything I was feeling for him now was akin to quiet comfort because we understood each other.

In that understanding, there was a strange sense of safety that made me want to sink into him.

Instead, I blew out a slow breath, tempering the nerves that crawled up my insides as my thoughts shifted.

Staring at the flames beneath the pot, I could no longer think of anything but my mother.

The witch who’d dedicated her life to looking into the future for the protection of others.

If only I had half the skill of a seerborn that she did, I wouldn’t have been chosen to kill.

When Kayn gave my hand a quick squeeze, I looked up at him. He released my hand and gazed at the fire. “You should start preparing for what Odin has asked of you. I can train you.”

I cursed under my breath, but it was cut short as an idea came to me. Perhaps we could both get what we wanted.

“First, we heal my mother,” I said. His brows lifted as I continued.

Flames danced in his dark eyes as they sliced back to me.

“I’ll unbury a vampire and then compel them to pull the toxins from her blood.

” My gaze drifted to the graves. Light rain fell in scattered drops, dotting the headstones with dark gray spots.

A different shade of shame twisted my gut. Even if I wanted to become a killer, I didn’t know how. I was chosen by the Gods, a seerborn, and yet I still didn’t understand what they wanted from me. I’d misunderstood Freya’s trial, and no doubt would Loki’s be trickier.

Choosing me had to be a mistake.

Or maybe that was just the selfish side of me rearing like an angry horse again. I didn’t want any of this. I was meant to be a seer like my mother, a protector of witches.

This was…different, darker. Dark enough to match the wickedness I’d locked away, the pieces of me that kept others at a distance from me. Not Silver— me. The person only my mother would acknowledge, and since she was taken from me ten years ago, I’d been alone in this.

“Okay,” Kayn said. “Now you just need to learn how.”

Learn how? How was I supposed to learn to wake a creature I’d only just discovered existed?

I knew of vampires from the sagas, but I’d thought they were realms away, or relics of the past, not rulers of Vylheim.

And now, I was being asked, by both Kayn and the Gods, to learn how to compel them, to wake them, and to destroy them.

My tongue became heavy in my dry mouth as I worked up to a confession. I shook my head and swallowed through the thickness. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

My heart skipped.

I’m here , my mother’s last words before the Grimward dragged her away.

She’d placed her hands over my eyes, reminding me her magic covered me and that my sight as a seer might give me a glimpse of her whenever I needed to see her again.

It rarely worked, but I was grateful for the glimpses I’d had, and the spreading blackness in my eyes to keep tabs on her life.

Kayn stood and offered me his hand. “I’ll piece it together with you.”

Though the rain extinguished the last of the fire, warmth coated me. I accepted his hand and he pulled me to my feet, before leading me through the steady rain to the graves.

Kayn was nothing like the other monsters. He’d stopped King Drakker. He’d admitted the horrible act he’d committed—something I wasn’t even willing to do to myself.

He may have had his own goal at the end of my Calling, but something about his willingness to help me understand it and learn it with him comforted me.

Nobody had been willing to slow down and hear me out since my mother.

He not only heard the plea behind my confession, he offered to work through the lack of knowledge and training with me.

With my hand in his, I wasn’t doing this alone.