Page 127 of Vow of the Undead
No! This isn’t losing.Not for the humans who’d been under the lies of monsters for too many years. This was our victory. I shook my head, resisting the urge to squeeze my eyes shut. I kept them peeled for any sign of movement from Astrid while the king still lurked in my mind.
Kill me.He’d said it. He’d told me to destroy him.
I seethed. I should have done it.
My fingers ached around the base of the stake. When was she going to give in and attack me? Rage boiled from my gut,leaving my throat raw and fire spreading through my limbs. Itching to lunge, I stepped from the darkness. I’d become the one lurking in the darkness.Iwas the one who’d inspire fear now, the shadow come to destroy her.
I’d exposed myself to the light and triggered her attack. Astrid lunged from beneath the cover of brush and slammed into me. A flash of her gleaming white fangs reflected the moonlight. My ear smacked against a rock and though it immediately went hot with a heavy ache, I ignored the pain. I smashed my elbow against her throat, throwing her to the side. In the span of a single breath she returned to her place on top of me. The heel of her palm bore down on my cheek as she pressed my head against the jagged rock.
Just like the first time I’d met her, she had no weapon, only the sharp teeth jutting from her mouth. But she couldn’t touch my blood, much less consume it. Bolstered, I twisted my neck and swung the base of the stake toward her head. It cracked against her skull and she hissed as she stumbled off of me once again.
I flipped to my knees and raised the stake. The crows screeched again as if screaming for me to begin—begin my destiny as the huntress and end this vampire’s immortal life.
Another sound, echoing, evil, radiated from her. I blinked down at the monster beneath me to see her chin tilted up, her eyes wide. She was laughing. Each huff of breath that came from her sent shivers through me. I wanted nothing more than to silence the disturbing sound but when I struck with the stake, her hand shot out and blocked me.
She wrenched my arm toward her, dragging the stake closer and closer to her though the tip was now angled out. With her long fangs exposed, she drew my wrist to her mouth.
Shock trapped me in place. Only my lips were able to move as I stared at her, willingly ushering in her own painful death. “You can’t drink from me,” I said weakly.
“When the tree burns, you’ll be nothing,” she said. “You’llbe the lifeless human husk I swore you’d become. I can die knowing I won.”
I broke through the shock, and yanked my arm from her hold. I raised the stake, but before I brought it down, she spoke again, baring her fangs and fixing her hungry eyes on my skin.
“Long live Silver,” she said, her tongue flicking out from between her fangs. Moments before sinking her teeth into my fragile flesh, she made sure I met her gaze. “Love live the queen.”
When her fangs dipped into my skin like a hot blade through wax, I screamed and the ravens took flight, the beat of their wings matching the rush of blood pulsing through my ears. This wasn’t bait for her to attack me alone in the woods. This was a sacrifice.
For my sister’s sake.
I yanked my arm from her mouth and grabbed the stake with both hands. I lifted my body and threw my entire will combined with Odin’s strength into the strike. Arcing from overhead, I swung the tip of the stake down and buried it between her ribcage where her heart should have been. Astrid grunted but managed a sickly-looking smile as blood pooled at her lips and spilled from her mouth.
She wasn’t human but she bled just like one—until she didn’t. Where her own blood touched the surface of her skin, the flesh turned gray then crumbled like ash.
I pulled the stake back and stood, my eyes transfixed one the horrifying beauty of a vampire’s death. Red bubbled from the center of her chest where the open wound spread, slowly stretching across her body where she was already turning to ash from the inside out. Her skeleton held the shape of her body as every piece of her, flesh, organs, turned to ash. Finally, her bones followed and a gust of wind swept pieces of her away with dead leaves that skipped along the forest floor.
Like my blood, hers had destroyed every piece of her soulless body.
My chest heaved, but not from the effort. A hundred thoughts bore down on me, the pressure greater than when she’d pinned my temple against a rock.
Astrid had known she was going to die, for Silver, which meant…had my sister wanted me to become the huntress? It didn’t make sense. I was stronger now, able to pick off her army one-by-one, unafraid of the monsters she gathered to place her on the throne.
Or was it a message? For me to give in, to finally expose the darkness within me that’d damned her to a life with the undead?
Revengeandfreedom, perhaps we all wanted it. Perhaps we all wanted to expose the truth in different ways. Perhaps she wanted me to admit I was a monster.
A scream rang out, slicing through the silence that had fallen with the end of our combat and Astrid’s final moments. The high-pitched shriek echoed from where I’d left Kayn and my mother by the fire, but it sounded like Stasia’s voice.
I bolted through the trees, racing the crows that screeched above me with every step. Bursting through the trees, I found the fire was doused. Not even a single ember still glowed in the ashes.
Stasia no longer lay among the leaves. No evidence of Kayn or my mother remained. They were gone, all of them, disappeared.
“Kayn?” I breathed as I stepped up to the fire. At the center of the soaking ashes was an odd shape. I blinked, adjusting my eyes to this dimmer, denser part of the forest.
A limp doll, her eyes black as the sky at the beginning of the Polar Nocturne lay in the middle of where the fire had burned. She was unscathed. In a trance, I dipped my fingers into the ashes and scooped the little doll into my hands.
“It was a message.” My voice was foreign to my ears. Thewound at one of my ears throbbed but I didn’t feel the pain of it, only the erratic thumping with every beat of my heart.
Silver had taken the only people left who meant anything to me. Whether she’d already killed them, I didn’t know. But I wouldn’t stop until I took them back.
