Page 73 of Vow of the Undead
“Perfect. I’ll wield them like a sharp sword.”
“Just say it.” He stepped closer, filling the open doorway.
“Say what?”
“Come,” a weak voice said from below. My blood went cold as I realized my mother had just beckoned the king inside.
In one smooth blurring movement, King Drakkar rushed into the temple. I half expected him to spark into flames since his state as a vampire was severed from the Gods. This place of worship was no longer active, but I still hoped it would destroy him, I hoped the Gods could reach out and strike him down.
He dropped to my mother’s other side, opposite me, where he hovered over her. My jaw went slack and breath left my lungs as his mouth closed against her neck.
I tried to scream but I had no air. When I tried to move, my stomach retched. Instead of vomiting, I swallowed the bileback down and it was the dregs of energy I’d been clinging to after hiking here that seemed to spew out of me.
My legs shook beneath me.
Horror filled my every nerve with stinging, fiery pain. His fangs sunk into her papery skin and her eyes rolled back into her head.
Was this his plan? Kill the person I cared for the most to flex his power over me and drag me to the altar where he’d torture me for our entire marraige?
I would have taken life in the wasteland.
In a blur of images sweeping through my mind, I imagined King Drakkar at his knees with my harvesting scythe buried into his throat the same way his fangs were buried in my mother’s neck.
The Gods knew I’d seen too many beheadings. It was too easy to picture the king’s head severed from his body after he’d bitten my mother.
But I blinked the vicious thoughts away and suddenly shame coursed through me, hot and sickening where it pooled in the pit of my gut.
If I attacked the king, I’d be giving in to the darkest side of me again. I’d become what I’d locked away. Everyone would know the wickedness lurking deep within me.
But my mother wouldn’t live to see the next minute if I didn’t act, and that was enough to push me into action, even if I barely had the strength to take one step.
It took me entirely too long to move, to rip the pendant from my pocket and aim to plunge it into the king’s arm so that he might suffer the horrific pain that he was inflicting on my mother. He was stooped over her, fangs deep in thesoft flesh of her throat, kneeling in the middle of the Hall of the Gods where his kind was unwelcome.
Why had she called him to her?
The moment I forced my foot forward, time blurred. I threw myself at King Drakkar, ready to hurt him. To stop him from bleeding her dry in her most vulnerable state.
I lifted the Y tree gripped tightly in my fist and arced my entire arm down to land on his hand so that he'd let go and lose his grip. He held the edge of the bench where she lay so that he could hover over her, his other hand cupping beneath her head so that her neck angled open toward him.
Before the sharp tip sliced through his skin, his form flickered in a blur my eyes couldn’t comprehend. In one breath, he dropped her back to the bench and shot to his feet with his fingers wrapped firmly around my wrist. With little effort, he held my arm steady, the pendant safely away from where it could touch his flesh.
“I need you to wait,” he said, voice low, infuriatingly calm. “I only speak the truth, but I know you won’t believe me. So wait.” His icy gaze shifted to my mother and then back to me. “You’ll get what you want, and then…” his wicked mouth curled in a sickening grin. He released a faint laugh, the force of the air puffing through his nose. “Then I’ll get what I want.”
When I glanced down at her limp, helpless body, thinking of the mere seconds we had together before he bit her, my eyes burned.
Tears stung at the edges until my vision swam and hatred laced my choking voice. “How am I getting what I want when you’ve killed the only person I care for?”
Fuck his claim to speak the truth,shewas the only one with enough guts to say our history was tainted and incomplete.Shewas strong and brave and if only I could have been like her, I could have stopped him.
“Silver!” A harsh voice shouted from somewhere behindme, the sound vague and clawing at the edges of my focus. “Call me to you.”
King Drakkar’s brow twitched as he used his hold on my wrist, pulling me closer where we stood over my mother’s body. His face was a mere breath from mine and I resisted the urge to spit in it, not wanting to disrespect the most admirable person I’d ever known in case the spit dripped onto her. The red-stained gold in his eyes was receding, returning them to the color of water in the fjords.
He no longer smirked, but held his mouth in a steady, emotionless line. “She’s not dead?—”
“Turned into a monster then?” I cried, my voice squeaking and desperate like a young child who’d slipped through a crack in the ice. I sucked in a shuddering breath. “I know the sagas better than anyone else. She taught me every single one. Draugr can make more from the shell of our bodies.”
Now he smiled, but for once, there was no arrogance, no amusement, just a hollow, lifeless lift of his blood-stained lips. Stained with her blood. My throat tightened, another well of sadness swelling within me. “Not every single one.”
