Page 58 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

I smiled a little, relieved by my small victory. “Drink some blood and come to bed. The Valkhars are coming tomorrow. You can’t face them looking like this.”

But Hector slid away, agile as the wind. In a blink he was by the door.

A dark feeling spread inside my chest. “Where are you going?”

“I need to get some air,” he rasped, half of him gone already.

The night did not last forever after all. Morning came. The sun drove high, then higher still. He did not return. I did not know why I waited. Perhaps I could not find rest in the same world he was suffering. Perhaps it was the same old wounds we’d given each other that kept me awake, the ones we had yet to heal.

Either way, the sky arched with a fresh sheet of darkness by the time I was able to close my eyes again.

22

Thea

Iwas awakened by a scream. A woman’s sickening wail of agony that spiraled on and on into the night like a herald of death.

I sprang off the bed, kicking back the covers, and did not bother with shoes or even with throwing a robe over my nightgown before I flung the bedroom door open and lunged into the corridor.

All the windows were shuttered, the only light the anxious flicker of the tapers on the candelabras as I stumbled past them in my shaky, disoriented state. My panic deepened as I watched the golden band of light, leaking out of a half-opened door at the end of the hallway, grow closer. I found myself slowing down, my feet refusing to take me any further no matter how hard I pushed them.

Again I had the crawling sense of being watched, being haunted by something much greater than my comprehension. The familiar prickle of my magic crept over the back of my neck, my skin breaking out in gooseflesh. No premonition accompanied it this time, only a terrible, boundless sense of dread that made me freeze by the door.

The cries grew louder, more hysteric. There was shouting and grunting too, vague noises of struggle.

Then I heard him. Hector.“Get your fucking hands off me,”he was growling, and my fear for him grew greater than my fear for myself. With a choked gasp, I pushed the door fully open and staggered into the room.

It was almost identical to Hector’s. Dark wood. A wide window hung with heavy draperies. A massive fireplace crackling tirelessly in a corner. And a large, four-poster bed. A bed with crisp white sheets drenched almost entirely in blood.

There was bloodeverywhere. Splattered across the canopy, the headboard, dribbling down the edges of the mattress, and shining along the wooden bedposts. It had spread over the carpet too, thick and red like spilled wine.

The smell was unbearable. Rust and iron and decay.

Camilla’s dead body lay in the middle of the crimson puddle with her head pressed against the matted-down pillow, the fabric so soaked it looked lacquered. Her skin was the color of ash, her eyes white as snow, her mouth hanging open in an eternal howl of rage.

A scream I didn’t let out scraped the back of my throat. I took another step. The firelight caught the viscid pulp of her shredded neck. No, not shredded. Severed. The cut was precise, straight, done by a blade.

A vampire hunter’s blade,I realized, my stomach clenching in terror.Like the one from my visions.

I tasted bile and had to clamp a hand over my mouth as I gazed around inanely, unable to grasp the full horror of what was happening.

Tieran was kneeling on the floor next to the bed, wailing and tearing through his hair. His hands were smeared up to the elbows with blood, and Roan was fighting tooth and nail to wrench him from the pool of gore. Dahlia, whose scream I must have heard earlier, was sobbing inconsolably in a corner with an ashen-faced Arawn running his hands up and down her shakingarms. Next to them, Alexandria had her face buried in Lance’s heaving chest, and Espen… Espen was holding Hector by the throat.

When Hector’s gaze connected with mine, a fuse lit up in my brain. “What are you doing? Get away from him!” I howled, lunging toward them only for a fist to curl into my hair and pull me back violently.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Collette’s full height unfurling, rising behind me like a wraith. Her serpent’s hiss reverberated against my ear, and sheer, death-cold fright swept through me, forcing me still.

“Don’t you fucking touch her!” Hector roared, and the room crumbled.

The walls shuddered, and the floor erupted, making us all stumble in different directions. Paintings fell off their hinges, entire shelves collapsed, vases flew in the air, and crystals exploded into a dazzle of fractured color.

It was only a second before Hector managed to escape Espen’s hold and come to shield me from the shower of glass, his arms forming an impenetrable halo over my head.

“What—” I panted, desperately trying to remember how to speak through the magnitude of my astonishment.

Camilla was dead.

Someone within these walls had killed her, and the Castle had done nothing to stop it.

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