Page 73 of Blood Vows
“You really think he’ll show?” His voice was low, sharp with the edge of disbelief, but beneath it was fear. Fear for what he had done to his little Peach…To my little Firefly.
“He will,” I said, adding,
“He’s waited too long for this.” Tal gave a short, humorless laugh.
“You almost sound as if you admire him again.” I glanced at him through the dark.
“I don’t. But I do know him. We both do, and knowing Vas means knowing that he doesn’t let go. Not until he gets what he wants.”
“And what he wants is his revenge… and to use our Fated to get it.” Tal snapped furiously, her name hanging between us unspoken, as it didn’t need to be said. It was already there, in every breath we took, in every step that led us deeper into this place of bones and secrets.
The soft glow emitting from the city that never slept could be seen in the distance, with the pale moonlight caressing across the rows of tombs. Water pooled between the graves, reflectingthe sky like shards of broken glass. Each step echoed too loudly, and every shadow seemed to move just beyond sight.
The pull of blood was stronger here. I could feel him, Vas… somewhere on the edge of my awareness, that familiar thrum that used to mean brotherhood now warped into something darker. It beat through me like an old wound reopening, raw and throbbing.
He was close.
Too close.
“This place reeks of bad memories,” Tal murmured.
“It always did,” I grumbled because he wasn’t wrong. We stopped before the mausoleum. The air here was colder, sharper, the faint scent of iron and damp stone mixing with something else… something old and hungry.
We continued along the cracked path winding through the sea of tombs. Even now, the weight of history pressed down on us, names etched into stone from an age when death was art, and legacy a promise carved in marble. And there, among the mausoleums of New York’s long-dead elite, stood ours.
The Erebus crypt.
The resting place of our bloodline, monsters now to be born from shadow and darkness. Its facade loomed from the mist, carved with the ancient crest of our family. A serpent coiled around a sun half-consumed by darkness, the eternal struggle between night and light captured in stone. Beneath it, the name Erebus was carved deep enough to outlast time itself. In Greek, it meant the darkness before creation, the veil between chaos and dawn, and the God who fathered both day and night.
Fitting, really, for our name had always carried the curse of what we were. The children of darkness. The sons of night.
Tal kicked at the steps with the heel of his boot, muttering curses under his breath. His impatience bled through every movement.
“We should go in. Wait for him.”
“No,” I said, scanning the shadows, my own darkness now stirring in response to my long-lost kin.
Which was when I turned to the brother I could trust and told him…
“He’s already here.”
27
FATED TO THREE
As soon as I said this, Tal’s gaze snapped to mine.
“You feel him?” he asked, with a narrow gaze.
“I do.” Those two words came out rougher than I intended. Because I didn’t just feel him. I felt his hatred. His anger. His pain. It vibrated through the air like the deep hum of a storm before it breaks.
The bond between us had once been something sacred. Now it felt like a chain around my neck.
“He’s near,”I whispered. Tal’s hand went instinctively to the hilt of his blade, and mine did the same. The only difference was that the blade I held was the one Vas wanted and was the one I was willing to sacrifice if it meant getting our girl back.
“Then let him come.”Tal snarled, his own anger thundering from him like invisible waves carried by the wind. A sentiment I mirrored as visions of what he had taken from us assaulted me. Our father, our mother and now our fated.
It was too much and beyond comprehension. It had forced us both to face difficult questions these last few days, and each and every time we always came back to the simplest one to ask…
