Page 63 of Vow of the Undead (The Bloodrune Saga #1)

I frowned. Sten toyed with his hideous bronze ring, the ruby at the center looking like a drop of blood on his thin fingers.

Astrid looked as cruel as ever with the hard line of her mouth peaked into a sneer.

She must have believed we would end up killing each other once I saw my sister, me as the huntress and him the most powerful vampire, and since that hadn’t happened yet, she was fuming that her plan did not work to eliminate us both.

After the appropriate amount of time, I rose up to my full height again. Lifting my head, I saw King Drakkar had stood and stretched his hand out to beckon me to him, but I didn’t move.

Bind yourself to a monster.

I frowned and marched to the throne. Laying my hand in King Drakkar’s, it seemed I’d taken a dose of poison because my tongue tasted bitter and the sickness at the pit of my gut roiled .

I locked eyes with him and searched for answers, but they were flat, unreadable. They’d never been as expressive as his mouth, but his lips revealed nothing either.

“She better be safe,” I breathed.

He stayed silent but his mouth still gave me a response. A grim smile, hollow and cold curved at the corners of his lips.

A figure stepped out from behind the tall throne.

“Silver,” I whispered.

She was alive and safe. The needle piercings around her mouth were dozens of empty holes now. The thread binding her mouth shut was gone and her arms were free of ropes. Hope lifted my heavy bones.

She wasn’t even near any other vampires, other than King Drakkar. He may have stood between us, but he didn’t know I had the stake with me, and Kayn close by.

Could she control him? Together, we might have a chance to get out alive even with me exposing the Blood Council. Before I could conjure another thought, he tugged me closer to him and, just like the first time we stood before his throne together, he whispered into my ear.

This time, he didn’t tell me to kiss him.

“Lux, you have to run.” His voice was low, rough, as if he could barely speak. My pulse rushed through my ears and I barely heard him repeat the warning. “Run. I cannot stop her.”

Movement caught my eye and I snapped my gaze to my sister. The room was flooded with candles and torches along the walls and in the candle holders hanging above our heads. The flames caught the shine of something in Silver’s hand as she raised it.

“Lux, please.” Desperation laced his words. This had to be a trick. All he’d wanted was to marry me, and now he told me to leave?

“Silver?” I said.

Her lips spread into a grin and her knuckles went white around the blade in her hand. She kept it low and her body in King Drakkar’s shadow.

Perhaps this was all a trick that I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I’d learned so much truth, the vampires, pieces of the lost history, that the Gods I’d always believed in were real and active, and yet I was still left in the dark. Seeking truth and understanding was an endless quest.

Silver angled the blade with the tip up. It wouldn’t kill King Drakkar so why…?

“Lux!” Drak begged. “I can’t move, but you can.”

My mind caught up with his words and my heart, skipping and dancing, pushed cold blood through my veins. As Silver stepped forward, I knew based on the bloodthirsty look flashing in her eyes that she wasn’t focusing on Drak, she had her gaze fixed on me.

Silver wanted to kill me.

I didn’t stop to dwell on the reason, or how we’d come to this moment.

Before she could thrust the blade into my gut, I dropped back and fell into a crouch.

I yanked the fabric of my skirts out of the way and, breaking the chain, pulled the stake free.

In one fist, I held the pendant, and wrapped my other hand around the stake.

In the moments that followed, chaos erupted. The vampires must have seen the blade and understood my sister’s intentions because Astrid was upon us and shouts rang out.

Silver bent forward and brought the dagger down in an arc. I swung the stake to intercept her arm as it dropped toward me. The force of the impact knocked the dagger from her hold and she shrieked.

Someone grabbed my veil and yanked me back, having gathered it and pulled it tightly against my throat. I fell back on my tailbone and Astrid pinned me to the floor, her knees on my shoulders.

“Do it!” Astrid screamed.

My sister scrambled for the blade but Ylva and Darius and a blur of a dozen other faces filled in the space around the throne. The distraction must have broken her control over the king because he swung a fist at Darius who barreled into him.

Ylva kicked the blade from my sister’s reach as Silver shouted. “I have to kill her!” The first words I’d heard my sister utter in twenty years were about my death. “I am queen.”

“That wasn’t the bargain we made with you, witch,” Ylva said as she gripped my sister’s throat. I didn’t know why she didn’t control her, or if she even could right now, but Silver only continued screaming about being queen.

“I will lead the vampires to victory! Astrid, tell them—” Her voice cut off. Ylva must have squeezed harder.

Astrid was too distracted with ripping the stake from my fingers and launching it away from me.

It slammed into the throne and clattered to the ground where Silver had stood.

Astrid’s fangs were exposed and her eyes red as she grabbed my now empty hand and brought my wrist to her mouth.

The sharp ends sliced through the thin skin over the veins in my arm.

With the pendant still in my fist, I twisted the tip to face out and smashed it against her cheek.

Suddenly, her weight lifted off of me and I scrambled to my feet.

King Drakkar, having knocked Darius unconscious, threw Astrid away from me as easily as she’d thrown the stake.

She fell face down against the stone floor.

None of the other vampires dared approach the king now that he wasn’t under Silver’s compulsion.

Free now, I dashed to the stake and swept it off the ground. It was a weak reassurance in my aching grip.

“You can’t kill Lux,” Ylva hissed as she released Silver. The vampire woman went rigid, having been rendered immovable the same way my sister had controlled the king. “If you kill her, the first witch will use her body to resurrect. Even you can’t match the power of the first witch. Silver!”

Silver didn’t listen and she slunk toward me, her shoulder smashing into Ylva as she passed her. Her gleaming eyes fixed on me and she didn’t so much as blink when Ylva shrieked at her.

“Stop her!”

“You’ll thank me later,” Silver retorted.

Astrid lunged at the king again, and with his attention fixed on me, she caught him off guard. He stumbled, shouting for me as he righted himself and turned to face her.

“Lux, run!” King Drakkar’s voice was muffled from the pulse thudding in my ears and the haze of fixation I had on my sister. She wanted to kill me, and could I blame her after what I’d done to her?

Saving her was never going to free me from the darkness.

I adjusted my grasp around the stake, my fingers suddenly tingling.

I gripped it tighter, keeping it angled out in case any vampires approached me.

I’d been ready to destroy King Drakkar once I knew my sister was alive, but it wasn’t until now, when I recognized the truth within me that Odin granted me this gift; strength.

A shriek jolted me from the stupor and I snapped my attention to it.

Astrid attacked the king but he tossed her away, and I saw my opening.

The crowd was slowly parting as if to create another aisle for the bride to walk down.

From the chaos where some of the guests stood and gaped while others ran, Kayn emerged.

But not the Kayn, I knew. Not Kayn with his hood up, sneaking through the shadows.

He wasn’t wearing his cape at all.

Instead, his tunic was untied, open and baring his chest. Though he wasn’t as broad or built like a warrior like the king, his lean muscles were shaped from his survival of hunting animals, and before that, hunting humans.

At the center, glowed the same shape etched in ink across King Drakkar’s chest, the tree of Yggdrasil, the mark of our connection to the Gods, a witch’s symbol, on the body of a vampire .

For some reason, the other vampires backed away from him.

Kayn walked through them like he was parting water. Every monster’s eyes nearly glowed with whatever power ebbed and flowed beneath that mark. The same way the king’s tattoo brightened as if moving beneath his skin.

Every vampire froze, except for King Drakkar, who glared at him with eyes so full of vitriol, I thought he might charge him. Almost as if he knew what had happened between Kayn and I the night before.

And perhaps he did, we weren’t exactly quiet.

Even so, King Drakkar made no move to attack Kayn. Likely because it’d be a stalemate.

Kayn couldn’t kill the king back at the Hall of the Gods and the king couldn’t kill Kayn. At least as I understood it and it had to have something to do with this single matching mark—the only piece of these two that connected them.

Suddenly, their equally matched strength made sense to me.

This mark…it had to be the one from the first witch mentioned in the runestones, which meant she would have made them both. I’d forgotten about it, my mind having been crowded with thoughts of my soul, of the trials, of the king’s touches and demands.

But how could King Drakkar have the same mark? He wasn’t alive all those years ago when Kayn was made.

I didn’t have time to dwell on it now.

Kayn stepped forward, his mouth forming around my name when Astrid flung herself at him again.

I ran to Kayn, my pendant and the stake still in my grasp while my sister’s shrieks rang in my ears.

“I will kill her!”