Page 101 of Vow of the Undead
I followed his line of sight and then scoffed. “Let me guess, for the lost history you want more than a kiss?” I frowned, and when I tried to tug my hand away, he held tighter.
He stepped into my space, his face inches from mine as he looked down at me. His mouth curled into a smirk. “Clever. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Gripping my hand like a vise, he pulled me with him as he made his way to the fireplace. He finally released me and dropped to a crouch. The movement of his cloak sent a few ashes puffing out of the pile at the bottom of the fireplace. He craned his neck, twisting to look up into the darkness above where the fire vented up and out of the castle.
“What does a pile of ashes have to do with the lost history?” I asked, impatience curdling in the pit of my gut. The more I thought of Freya’s favor of wisdom, the more I wanted him to give me the damn answers.
King Drakkar’s gaze fluttered to me and he held his half smile steady. “Don’t touch the ashes,” he said as he straightened, looking down at me now. He lifted a finger to my chin and tipped it up. “And I should warn you, this is far more than an answer to a single question, so I’ll require more than a kiss.” When I narrowed my eyes, he let go of my chin andraised both hands in mock surrender. “It was your idea, my pretty little wife.”
My hand itched with the desire to rip the stake from my thigh and plunge it into his chest. But I didn’t. I didn’t so much as push his hand off my chin. Ineededthe lost history, and for some insane reason that I couldn’t comprehend, the vampire king was willing to give it to me. Perhaps if he hadn’t spoken the truth before, always willing to bring up the Gods and monsters even when Father said Vyls, as well as kings, had been beheaded for less.
And if I was as honest with myself as King Drakkar was with me, I’d acknowledge the sickness sloshing in my stomach at the very thought of destroying someone—even a monster who’d bled an innocent man dry. Perhaps it was because this violence was against everything I’d been taught, or perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to kill the one person who’d respected me enough to answer my questions.
Without another word, King Drakkar reached up into the flue. His foot balanced on a jutting stone at the back of the fireplace and his arm flexed as he pulled himself up and into the darkness. After a moment, his feet reached to the inside wall and he disappeared inside the flue where the smoke of a fireplace was meant to vent out of the room.
“Is every fireplace in this damned place fake?” I muttered, mildly annoyed that even I hadn’t noticed this little trick.
“Not fake.” His voice echoed from up inside the flue. “A fire was burning here just this morning. Now come.”
I hesitated. Willingly placing myself into another dark and tight space with the king didn’t sit right. Freya favored wisdom, and nothing about this was wise—except that I was meant to track a vampire, and here the vampire was, giving away all his secrets, even beckoning me to follow him right to the source of our history.
His hand appeared in the opening of the fireplace. “Need a little help?”
I scanned the room, my eyes falling on the empty bed. My blood simmered hot enough that I lifted cold hands to my face to cool myself off.Don’t think about his kisses. You didn’t like them.He was a true monster, and the man I was going to kill, despite how deeply I’d felt his kiss.
“Oh, and bring the torch,” he said.
After a forceful breath, I snatched a lit torch from the wall, took his hand, and kicked my foot out to the jutting stone. My skirts swished over the pile of ashes, gathering gray dust at the hem. He brought my hand to a curved stone on the other side where I gripped the edge. His other hand lifted me as I pushed off with my foot and hefted myself up into the flue, climbing the inside wall like a rocky ladder. Soot coated my fingers until the tips turned black.
It wasn’t until he pulled me onto a dark stony ledge inside the flue that my mind even registered where he’d been balancing. Behind him and high above where we sat was a square wooden hatch, charred black from years of smoke. He stood, offering a hand to help me up beside him. I swayed on the curve of the rock. Twisting, I stared down into the fireplace, hoping nobody would come with fresh firewood and strike a flame below us.
The king pulled a chain that was buried beneath his clothing. At the bottom of the bronze links hung a key the same dull shade of brown. He thrust it into the keyhole at the corner of the hatch, twisted, then pushed the hatch inward.
I never expected such a vast room hidden behind the squat hatch. King Drakkar stepped inside and then turned, holding out his hand to help me step over the edge of the hatch. Mindlessly, I took his hand and allowed him to guide me inside where I froze, my mouth agape, my heart slowing, as I tried to look at everything all at once.
Shelves nearly as tall as I’d imagined Yggdrasil were carved into the stone. Flat stones were stacked one on top of the other across each shelf. Scrolls rolled and bound withstring balanced on each other in great piles from the bottom of the shelf to the top. Records of every kind from across Vylheim were kept safe here in this hidden library, each type indicative of the age from which it came. A fur-skinned rug spanned the stretch of ground. The stone slightly sloped with a lift in the center of the room.
I floated over to the closest shelf, hardly aware that I tripped on the rug and King Drakkar had to catch me by the elbow. Vaguely, I noticed him slotting the torch in a holder on the wall and then returning to my side.
I dragged my fingers across the edge of a runestone, a flat stone on which our ancestors had carved pieces of our oral sagas.
Breathing in shallows gulps, I plucked a book—one of the more recent forms of historical records taken up by scribes—and eased it off the shelf. We had a few books in the longhouse in Skaldir that had helped me learn to read, but they were dull, records of the death of recent Vyls, village council meetings, what food had lasted through our previous Polar Nocturne and what we might need to do to prepare for the next length of darkness to avoid losing more villagers to sickness, frost, or starvation.
I ran my fingers over the spine of a book. A small tree with dozens of branches swirling like snakes at the top was etched into the side. “The Tree of Yggdrasil,” I breathed.
Heat encompassed my back. I twisted my neck, eyeing the king from the corner of my eye.
“You really should see it,” he said.
I said nothing. That was bait to get me to ask a question.
“It’s breathtaking,” he continued. “But nearly impossible to find. The only reason I’ve been there was because I went to burn it so nobody could carve a stake from it and kill me. I thought I’d be untouchable. Turns out, I’m notthatking, and anyway, I might want to die someday, feast in Valhalla and all that.”
I didn’t know what any of that meant. He couldn’t go to Valhalla or Folkvangr or anywhere, because, like the rest of the monsters, he didn’t have a soul. Once he was destroyed, he’d be nothing more than the dust that coated these stone shelves.
He reached over my shoulder, letting his body press against mine, nearly pinching me between his chest and the shelf. “You’ll find this one particularly interesting,” he said as he slid a runestone from the shelf. I shifted so that he could use both hands to lift the heavy stone, but he didn’t need it. Effortlessly, he brought the runestone down from above my head with one hand and angled it toward me.
I recognized most of the runes immediately, but I’d never heard of any saga with this title before. With a gentle touch, I glided my fingers over the ridges in the stone. “What is this first word?” I whispered.
