Captive of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 2) Read online

  Captive of the Vampire King

  Blood Fire Saga Book 2

  Bella Klaus

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Also by Bella Klaus

  Night of the Vampire King

  Night of the Vampire King

  Copyright © 2020 by Bella Klaus.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

  www.BellaKlaus.com

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter One

  I had to blink several times to make sure this wasn’t a nightmare brought on by being kept unconscious for too long by the Council’s enforcers.

  Cold seeped into my shins and knees from where I knelt on the marble floor, staring up into Valentine’s red eyes. Correction. This wasn’t the man I loved. The man I loved had copper skin with bronze highlights, he was beautiful and vibrant, and alive.

  What stared back at me was his reanimated corpse, a gray abomination with eyes as sunken as his cheeks. The only thing that made him different from a zombie were the fangs protruding from his shrunken lips.

  Those fangs were longer than any I’d seen on a vampire, and I was the only source of nourishment within the mausoleum.

  Every drop of blood in my veins turned to ice. He had probably been awakened by the smell of my blood. The smell of my cursed-to-smell-irresistible-to-all-vampires blood. I fell forward, my palms landing on the debris and tried to propel myself backward, but Valentine wrapped a cool hand around my bicep and pulled me to my feet.

  “Bloody hell.” Ferdinand ran his fingers through blood-red hair. “I told you we should have cremated him.”

  Lazarus pointed at me with a shaking hand. “She’s just like Kresnik.”

  I was too shaken by having my dead fiancé rise from the dead to take offense at the insult.

  Sylvester stepped forward, seeming to want to place himself between Valentine and the other three. He was the oldest of Valentine’s younger brothers and the one whose facial features resembled Valentine the most. The only difference between the two vampires was their coloring. While Valentine had bronze skin and black hair, Sylvester was pale with silver locks that made him look more like a faerie than a vampire. Right now, he stared at us through gray eyes wide with horror.

  “We did everything the lore said. Removed his heart and kept it in an orb of clear quartz and secured his body to the stone with iron. He should not have arisen.”

  Lazarus, the brown-haired brother, turned to me and hissed. “Didn’t any of you hear what I said? This is her doing. It’s just as the Council said. She’s a fire mage.”

  “Valentine,” Constantine said through ragged breaths. A cut on his head had already healed but left a trail of blood down his temple and soaking into his blond hair. “Release the girl and let us help you.”

  Valentine let out a roar that sent every fine hair on the back of my neck standing on end. My knees trembled, and I tried to pull out of his grip, but it was as absolute as death. I glanced around the mausoleum, at the raised stone plinths that had once been the resting places of their vampire ancestors and now only held broken pieces of plaster from where Valentine had thrown his brothers against the ceiling.

  Unmoving bodies lay strewn across the floor, and I cringed at Valentine’s side, wondering if the commotion of his rising from the dead would summon any of the ancestors back from the other realms.

  “Get him,” Sylvester snarled.

  In the blink of an eye, all four brothers surrounded us, each holding weapons. Lazarus stood at our front, holding what appeared to be a scythe, except its handle was much shorter and magical symbols decorated its blade. The angelic power radiating from the weapon made my nerve endings tingle.

  I gulped. Lazarus had probably borrowed it from one of the soul reapers who worked for the Angel King.

  The scent of brimstone filled my nostrils, and demonic heat prickled against my skin. I glanced to the left. Ferdinand pointed a sword at Valentine’s neck with a cutting edge that burned redder than his hair.

  My heart clattered against my ribcage, and all the blood drained from my face. Even Valentine might not survive a strike from something like that.

  Cringing, I turned to the right, only to find Constantine holding a net with ends that crackled with lightning, sending out a spray of silver sparks. I jerked toward Valentine, wanting to warn him of the danger—this was the kind of weapon the enforcers used against much larger shifters in their animal forms. One touch of that net, and it would wrap around the target, encasing it until the captive reached the Supernatural Council headquarters to be released by a lightning mage.

  I didn’t need to glance over my shoulder to know that Sylvester would be standing behind us, although I wasn’t sure what kind of anti-preternatural weapon he would choose to attack Valentine with.

  Valentine pulled me into his hard chest, and the cold of his body seeped into my back, making me shudder with a mix of terror and disgust. Nothing about the vampire was alive—no breath, no heartbeat, no warmth, no yielding of the flesh. His large fingers threaded into my hair, making the skin of my neck and shoulders tighten with the sensation of crawling spiders.

  A whimper reverberated in the back of my throat. This was where the tips of his fangs would pierce my jugular, and he would drink his fill before throwing my corpse aside to confront his brothers.

  The tip of Valentine’s nose brushed against my neck, and a scream tore from my throat.

  Lazarus rushed forward, holding the reaping scythe aloft. Valentine shoved me behind him and lurched toward his brother. I stared at Sylvester, who held a trident with edges pointed like arrows. Ignoring me, the silver-haired vampire sped past, aiming his weapon at Valentine’s back.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth and spun around to where the three vampires fought. Lazarus swiped the scythe at Valentine’s neck, who pivoted backward and swept a foot out to kick at Sylvester’s gut. The silver-haired brother leapt onto a plinth, while Constantine rushed forward with his net. Only the tip of it caught Valentine’s foot, and bolts of lightning travelled up his leg.

  I placed a hand over my mouth and tried to move my feet, but they remained rooted to the floor. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to take advantage of the opening Valentine had created for me and run, but I couldn’t. Not while Valentine’s soul was trapped and tortured and tormented within a desecrated corpse.

  As Valentine tore at the net, Sylvester drove his trident into Valentine’s back.

  With a roar that made debris fall from the trembling ceiling, Valentine stumbled to the side, his right leg still encased by the lightning net. He reached behind his back for the weapon, but Ferdinand swiped at his neck with the demon sword.

  The scent of burning flesh pierced the air. My heart lurched, and a tight band of anguish squeezed my chest. From the way he flinched and cried out whenever struck, Valentine could feel pain.

  I jerked backward, the sight of Valentine’s pain finally
knocking me out of my stupor. What if he was staying here to fight because of me? Suppressing the urge to scream at Valentine to run, I backed toward the exit and tried not to make a sound.

  We needed to keep him trapped in the mausoleum so he wouldn’t venture out into the world and go on a rampage of killing. Valentine disappeared to the far side of the large space and stood within an alcove, where he reached for the trident and tried to pull it out of his back.

  “Don’t make this difficult.” Lazarus sped toward him with the scythe.

  Valentine stood on a plinth in the far corner of the mausoleum, twisting from side to side to dislodge the trident from his back. Lazarus raised the reaping scythe, but Valentine flicked a hand, and a gust of wind blew the brown-haired brother across the vast space.

  Lazarus landed in a column that crumbled into two, sending giant pieces of plaster onto his fallen body.

  In an unnatural, double-jointed movement, Valentine pulled the trident from his back and hurled it across the room at the fallen Lazarus. Constantine rushed ahead and snatched the trident out of the air.

  Ferdinand pointed his demon sword at Valentine. “Some part of you must still be in there, watching your body attack your own brothers.” His voice shook with the force of his sorrow. “Valentine, you’re dead. You must let your soul move to one of the afterlife realms.”

  Valentine shook his head from side to side. I couldn’t tell if this was a denial or if he was just trying to clear his head. The information on preternatural vampires was sketchy and no one really knew much about how they were created. It looked like the fire in my blood was reanimating his corpse, but wouldn’t that require me to have ordered him to rise? Maybe his rising had nothing to do with me but the curse that had wrapped around my leg and made my blood irresistible.

  Sylvester, who had lost his trident, raised his palms. Plaster dust from the ceiling now coated his silver hair, and he’d lost the right arm of his jacket. “Calm yourself, brother. We just want to put you to rest.”

  Valentine’s eyes flashed, and he raised both arms, sending gusts of wind through the mausoleum.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and stumbled back through the doorway. It was as though Valentine wanted to shove me away from what would possibly be the most brutal supernatural fight since all the magical races united under the Council. As soon as my feet crossed the threshold, the door slid shut, locking me out of the mausoleum.

  Shouts and snarls and the smashing of stones echoed from beyond the door. I turned to take in my surroundings. This was some sort of vestibule with painted walls that depicted a woman with skin as dark as the midnight sky. She sat on a throne made of wood, wearing a crown of silver and robes of gold leaf. Standing along the walls on either side of her throne were a succession of vampire kings who resembled each of the Sargon brothers.

  A loud clang echoed through the vestibule. I backed away from the door and stole another glance at the wall-painting. That dark-skinned woman must have been the vampires’ oldest ancestor.

  On the other side of the space, daylight shone through a twelve-foot-tall wall of stained glass fashioned to depict the same woman from the throne, wearing a gown of varying shades of red. She stood among the trees with her arms raised toward a crimson sun set within a pale blue sky. The window display cast colorful patterns across the vestibule’s stone floor, but as I turned around in a circle to look for a way out, all I found was more walls and the door that led back to the mausoleum.

  “Where on earth is the exit?” I muttered to myself. Valentine wouldn’t have blown me out here if there wasn’t a door that led to the outside… Unless he was keeping me here as a snack to be devoured after he’d dealt with his brothers.

  A shudder travelled down my spine, and I suppressed a surge of guilt. If I had trusted Valentine the moment he had told me my life was in danger, I might have gone into hiding sooner, would have gained control of my magic, and I wouldn’t have gotten cursed.

  I shook off those thoughts. Admonishing myself for not believing what sounded like an outlandish tale was as futile as kicking myself for not winning the lottery. The problem started when someone tampered with my mind, making me think that the scene where Valentine dumped me on the steps of his palace had been real.

  This was our true enemy, and I expect this was also the person who had cursed my blood. Before, I thought that I was their target and they wanted to use Valentine as a means of my destruction. Now I wondered if they had been using me all this time to make me become Valentine’s downfall.

  A tiny twitch of power called me to the stained glass window. It was about twenty feet wide, spanning the entire width of the vestibule. Someone had instilled magic within its structure, but it was faint and spread across the curved lead panels holding together the smaller pieces. A door was here somewhere. Istabelle, my boss at the crystal shop, might be able to detect it with her superior ability to sense magic, but I was spent. After two attempted prison breaks and the shock of nearly being killed by four vampire princes and seeing Valentine rise from the dead, my energy reserves felt dangerously low.

  I narrowed my eyes, examining each shape depicted on the wall. One of the trees surrounding the woman had a thicker trunk than the others and seemed too rectangular to fit into the image. I ran my hands along its seam, feeling a faint hum of magic along the pads of my fingers. It was some sort of ward, which meant that this was a disguised exit.

  Valentine’s roar echoed across the vestibule, followed by the clang of metal hitting stone. My heart leaped into the back of my throat. When Kresnik had turned Valentine's father into a preternatural, it had taken Valentine’s two elder brothers and a pair of uncles from New Mesopotamia to put the former vampire king to rest, but in doing so, each of them had lost their lives.

  My throat thickened. If Valentine’s brothers died in this battle, I would have to restore them all with my phoenix flames—but that would mean getting rid of the firestone in my blood that was absorbing my magic.

  Closing my eyes, I pushed my power into my fingertips, making them glow in my mind. Then I ran my hands along the seam of the door, letting it open with a click. A cool wind swirled through the doorway, accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves.

  I opened my eyes and stepped out into a clearing of gnarled oaks, their trunks and thick branches twisting like tortured souls. The late afternoon sun shone through leaves of oranges and yellows and bright greens, and hundreds of feet beyond their canopies stood the tall spires of a castle. This was a corner of Valentine’s palace grounds where I’d never before ventured, and I couldn’t afford to stay here for long.

  Heading away from the main building, I continued through the trees, trying to find my way back to the human world. There was nothing left for me here except a brutal execution.

  Birds tweeted, squirrels hopped from branch to branch, upsetting loose leaves, and twigs crunched underfoot. Most parts of Logris were above ground and located in a part of south-west London the humans knew as Richmond Park.

  To the humans, it looked like an expanse of parkland, and people could venture inside and feel like they were walking its entire length, but the magic protecting Logris would take them no further than the footpaths. After that, anyone not born in Logris or without clearance from the Council to enter fell into an illusion and could spend an entire day frolicking with red deer in the woodland or paddling through its ponds. At least that’s how they said the magic worked at the academy.

  My breathing calmed, and I continued at a steady pace. Logris was a cluster of small villages separated by stretches of forest. In the center the supernatural city was a shopping and leisure district and built around the Supernatural Council, a sprawling, white structure that contained everything from our government, our hospital and our educational institutions.

  We lived in Striga, a village mostly inhabited by witches. On its east side was the Vampire palace, and on its west, the palace of the Witch Queen. That’s where I was headed because running behind our village was
Queen’s Road, which would lead me straight out into the human world.

  That’s if I could make a gap in the magical barrier without being detected by the enforcers.

  My foot caught on a root, and I stumbled forward with both arms flailing for balance. In this part of the palace gardens, lifelike marble statues stood among the trees on podiums, including one that was the exact likeness of Valentine, who stared down at me through solemn eyes. A sob caught in the back of my throat, and I pressed a hand against my chest. Despite seeing him rise, he was still dead, and I hadn’t mustered enough magic to save him.

  A little voice in the back of my head whispered at me to keep running. I had just escaped being consumed by four vampires. By now, the enforcers would have sent out search parties, and if they caught me, I’d be worse than dead.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” a harsh voice whispered in my ear.

  I stumbled into the arms of a grinning Lazarus, who stared down at me through reddened eyes, flashing his extended fangs.

  A gasp slipped from my lips. “How did you—”

  “Your scent disappeared from the mausoleum.” He wrapped his arms around my waist and hoisted me onto his shoulder. “No one’s going to fight when there’s no prize.”

  Lazarus sped through the woods, turning them into a blur of greens and browns. I pounded on his back, screaming at him to let me go, but he ignored me and continued until we were back behind the stained glass wall of the mausoleum’s vestibule.

  As he set me on my feet, I took in the extent of his injuries. A burn marred the front of his chest, which probably came from Ferdinand’s demon sword, and a deep gash ran down his right arm.