Page 51 of Vow of the Undead (The Bloodrune Saga #1)

The draft sucked my breath away. Beneath the fur-skin, beneath the blood, was a hatch door, not unlike the one in my childhood room. I frowned and dropped my ear to the wood.

“Battle and blood,” a woman’s voice said on the other side.

“Ragna?” I whispered. The king had insisted she wasn’t exiled, which meant she could be hidden somewhere in Mara’s Keep. But why?

“Blood and tears, tears and sacrifice,” the woman’s voice pitched higher, more strained, and louder with each word, building and building as my heart sped up with it. “Sacrifice and pain, pain, carve the pain! Carve it out!”

I knocked against the hatch. The woman fell silent. “Ragna?” I said again. “It's Silver.”

“Silver,” she echoed. “Silver and gold. Gold and curses. Cursed for sacrifice.”

I tried to pull on the hatch’s handle but it wouldn’t budge. Trying again, I determined it was locked on the inside which made little sense. Why would the king put a prisoner in a room that only locked on the inside?

“Can you open the door?” I asked, causing the woman to pause again.

“Silver?”

Her nonsense wasn’t unlike my overwhelming thoughts when they became repetitive, and after weeks trapped beneath a vampire king, listening to him kill and drain other humans…

I held my breath to stave off the sickness that was rising from my belly.

“I can help you climb out, if you can open the door. The king is gone. He won’t hurt you. ”

Something shifted on the other side of the hatch and the door suddenly fell inward with me on top of it.

In a flash of skirts and tangled braids, I smashed against the stone floor with the torch knocked from my hand and clattering beside me.

I gasped for the breath the impact stole from me.

Coughing and dragging raspy breaths into my lungs, I blinked and focused on my surroundings.

Candles flickered from a table beside a bed, casting a weak glow over the room.

A single bed was pushed against the far wall.

Heaps of blankets were piled on top. A harp with horsehair strings was laid across a tapestry on the floor at the end of the bed.

Two bedside tables flanked the charcoal bed frame.

A mirror sat above a dressing table to the left and behind me was a wardrobe.

The vast space was exactly what I could have hoped for Ragna’s living quarters, but the woman hovering over me with salted streaks of white across her dirty blond hair wasn’t my friend.

Age gently wrinkled the backs of the hands she held covering her mouth.

When she slowly dropped her arms, lines pulled at her lips where years of frowning dragged her face down.

She wasn’t much older than my mother, based on the brightness still blooming in her hair, but it seemed time had not been kind to this woman.

I stared up at her like a child with my mouth hanging open.

“Silver and gold?” she asked.

“I—” I cleared my throat and found my voice. “I don’t have any. I thought you were—” I shook my head. “Who are you?”

“Mother,” she said, placing her splayed hand over her chest.

“Mother?”

She held her flattened hand halfway up her legs. “Little Drak.”

I slapped my hand to my mouth, mumbling, “Drak? You're the—the king’s mother?” He had his own mother trapped beneath his room?

Narrowing my eyes, I noted the subtle features that matched the king.

A strong brow, thick hair, the curve of prominent cheekbones, and an icy, blood-chilling stare the color of rushing water beneath a melted fjord.

As I examined her, she did the same. Her blue eyes squinted and the crease between her furrowed brows grew deeper and deeper as her lips parted. She nearly leaned into me, eyes darting back and forth as if trying to look at both of my eyes at once.

With a sharp gasp she threw herself away from me. Shaking her head, she backed up further and further until her back bumped into the wooden leg of her four poster bed. She slapped her palms to her heaving chest.

“They’re in you. They’re there. They’re inside.” Her voice was frantic and her eyes flung wide as though she could see the darkness within me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, carefully climbing to my feet. My ass throbbed, radiating with an ache that started at the hump just above my tailbone. I winced, and straightened as best I could.

“Evil. Inside.”

Evil? I stilled, my heart stalling with me. I coughed to jumpstart it and it beat too quickly, sending black spots in my vision. Steadying myself with a single breath, I found my voice again. “Me?”

“Inside.” She hit her chest. “They’re clawing out. Torture. Battle and tears, tears and sacrifice?—”

“They?”

“They called, they called, they called and…” Her voice faded, she raised her index finger to me.

I finally took a good look at her beyond King Drakkar’s resemblance.

Cuts and bruises covered her arms. Long scars were dragged down her neck like stripes.

One of her ears was mangled, as if smashed. “You must not answer.”

“What?”

Her eyes darkened as her chin dropped to her throat.

Staring at me with unblinking eyes, she gulped rasping breaths.

“Gods are evil. You will be too, their chosen, their vessel. They hurt and hurt and hurt and we all hurt.” Her words built to a sob and she suddenly spluttered, tears dripping over her eyes as she sank to the floor with them, her back following the length of the bed frame.

I closed my gaping mouth and steeled my face.

This poor woman didn’t know what she was saying.

How long had she been held captive here, fed this filth about the Gods from her son?

She was human, which meant she may have witnessed him turn into the monster he was today.

Now that he was severed from the Gods, he must have wanted her to hate them.

But why the…the hurt? She said it as if the Gods themselves had come down and caused the scratches across her arms.

Who else had access to her but the king? Her own son had trapped and tortured his mother .

Acid churned in the depths of my gut, but it was the rage between my breasts that burned. If he could do this to his own mother, what had he done to Ragna?

Determination set my jaw. My entire being quivered with an all-consuming need to cut the king down.

I peeled my dry lips apart and spoke in the most gentle pitch I could muster even with the fire blazing in my chest. “Do you know of any others here besides you?”

With a shaking hand, she wiped at her cheeks to sweep the tears away.

“My boy before he was like a terrible ghost. My boy and the others. The others follow him. They follow him above. So sick and cruel and bloody. They feed, always at the coldest hour.” She shook to emphasize this.

“Now. Servants bleed and it drips here.” She pointed to the ground where dark spots mottled the floor.

I glared down my nose at them. “Drip. Drip.”

“I’ll be back for you?—”

“No!” She suddenly flung forward, closing the distance between us with her hands thrown out. She shoved me back “Not with that evil. Never come back.”

I ducked away from the woman.

She followed me to the wall beneath the hatch where the stones were curved.

Repeating her demand, she yelled louder and louder until I was out of the hidden room and into the king’s bedchambers.

She scaled the wall twice as fast as I had and slammed the hatch closed, nearly catching my fingers between the door and the floor.

After a moment of shock, I scooted back. Now I understood exactly how easy it was for King Drakkar to rip mothers away from their children. He trapped and tormented his own mother, likely no longer caring for their relationship since he’d become a vampire.

King Drakkar deserved the scars and bruises that riddled his mother’s body, but when I destroyed him, there’d be nothing left.

Climbing to my feet, I was more resolved than ever to hunt him down.