Page 71 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

The stars were perfect, just like the future I’d built in my mind. The one full of great love, chosen family, art and music and literature, perilous quests and a home to return to after the dragons had been slayed. A place free of lingering ghosts and cruel words. Warm, bright colors, impeccably designed living spaces.

Rune’s taste fit inside this home, though he’d never know it.

He’d given me pieces of this future. The intrigue and the mystery, the tickets to the opera, grand costumes and jewelry, and the furniture that made my apartment feel full of life rather than cold and drab.

The knowledge that he’d likely rip these men’s heads off for what they did to me was a small concession for my life cut far too short. I wasn’t sure how he’d find them, but something told me he would. Even if he had to tear through all the borns’ territory to do it.

I still didn’t know how he truly felt about me, and that was okay. I did know he was insane, and certainly as obsessed with me as I was with him. He’d avenge me.

Was I dead?

I couldn’t feel anything anymore. The stars had faded into splotches of darkness and light, and the visions of my life had long disappeared too. Which was for the best, because it depressed me to see just how little I’d experienced. It looked like all of that trauma was for nothing, after all.

Maybe in the next life.

Then, it was as though I was being pulled in two different directions—between the constellations of brightness and color and the dark depths of the void.

In the void, I saw Lillian’s ruthless, flawless face, her pale skin and flowing black hair, her crown of bones and onyx.

She smiled at me.

Not yet, she said, her voice like wind chimes ringing against strong gusts of storm-summoned wind.

I rushed back toward Helia’s blinding sunlight, and when I broke the surface, I heard Rune’s voice.

“Don’t you dare give up, Little Flame. Or I swear I will fight Helia herself to drag you right back down here to live in hell with me.”

34

RUNE

“The witch is taking the transfusion just fine,” the healer said, trembling as she faced me in one of the castle’s grand living rooms. A fire roared to our left, and a few other witches and human healers were rushing around frantically. “But the human girl won’t take the universal blood type. As soon as we tried, she had a reaction that would’ve left her dead if we proceeded. We cannot figure out why. All we could do was soothe the immune response, but we can’t replenish her blood supply.”

My eyes were back on Scarlett’s limp, pale, and unconscious body again as she lay on a cot beside her friend. I watched the blood flow freely into her friend’s body from a translucent tube, and I grew angrier by the minute.

Actually, the emotions I was truly embodying were something more like helplessness and fear, but those weren’t safe emotions to show or admit, even in my own castle. They weren’t emotions I’d thought I was even capable of anymore.

Mason and Uriah were nearby, watching me closely.

“What could that mean?” Mason asked, and it made me want to strangle her.

Because she wasn’t asking in order to be helpful. No, she was still trying to prove that Scarlett was a threat.

“Could she be a glamoured witch of some kind?” she asked.

The healer shook her head slowly, raising a brow. “Um, no. She’s not a witch. She’s definitely human.”

“What can be done?” I snarled, making the healer jump.

“A blood witch could help. I don’t even know of any who?—”

“Then go find a fucking blood witch,” I said loudly, looking around the room of bewildered healers and turned subordinates. “Now.”

I’d torn Scarlett’s assailants limb from limb. I’d reduced them to nothing but mangled, scorched flesh and ash, and yet it hadn’t been nearly enough of an outlet for my wrath. Because when I’d entered that alley, they weren’t only feeding on her, draining her life force away until she was as close to death as a mortal could be without dying.

They were also touching her. Just like those men had my last night in Crescent Haven.

Envisioning the scene right before I’d ripped the three vampires off her had my shadows crawling out in all directions.

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