Page 16 of Cruel Vampire King

He said something, but I was too deep in the well of pain and darkness to hear him. Cold crept over my body and I welcomed the bliss of unconsciousness.

***

“Elara! Elara, please!” Darcie’s hands were on me, shaking me. She sobbed. “Come back, please!”

Pain burned through me, followed by panic. No! No, I had already lived through this. I couldn’t go through that again. The months of recovery, my body stitching itself back together after the fire had burned away parts of me that could never be replaced. I’d already grieved my family and moved on.

I can’t go through that again.

“Elara?” Darcie asked hopefully.

I forced my eyes open. A pair of brown eyes stared back at me. But they weren’t my sister’s eyes. Thessa. I blinked in surprise and opened my mouth, but only a groan came out.

“You’re bleeding,” she told me. “Your leg. The kelpie…”

Kelpie? I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, relaxing my body. Pain ached through me, but not as strong as after the fire. The sharp sting on my legs and the roughness of my lungs told me that I hadn’t hallucinated the kelpie attack. But afterward? With Luken? It was hazy and indistinct. Had I imagined it all?

I tested myself, moving slowly. He’d fed me his blood. It should have healed up all my injuries, but I was still in rough shape here. I managed to sit upright, and my head swirled. Thessa grabbed my shoulders, holding me steady.

“Don’t try to move. I think your ribs are bruised,” she said worriedly.

Luken was a vampire, not a wizard. The lights I’d seen—thought I’d seen—had looked like spells. Maybe the kelpie had brought in someone from another team, from another part of the lake? It couldn’t have been Luken. He had no reason to save me.

Right?

“Where are the others?” I asked, my voice rasping.

“Cooking the kelpie,” Thessa answered. “They said you’d drowned, but I couldn’t give up. We’re quite a ways from camp.”

I rubbed my eyes. “The kelpie is dead?”

Thessa nodded. “It floated to the surface with its throat torn out. We thought you must have done something somehow.”

I shivered but refused to think about the implications of this turn. Instead, I smoothed my hand down my shirt. The bulge of the skull I’d pulled from the kelpie lair sat at my hip. I pulled it from under my shirt and held it up in the air.

“Let’s get back to the others,” I said, ignoring Thessa’s questioning look. “It won’t be long before the other teams are told we have the artifact.”

Chapter 7

By the time we returned to the camp the others had set, they’d retreated from the water’s edge. Kael was on guard duty as Thessa helped me through the forest. With a shout, he strode forward and picked me up. I stiffened, hissing at me, but he ignored my protests.

“Thought you were a goner for sure,” he said, grinning broadly.

My heart pricked. He hadn’t wanted to be part of this. He’d been forced to participate in the Blood Trials. And now, it was clear he was happy to see me alive. Doubts slithered into my gut. I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to kill Thessa, Ysara, or Greyson. I didn’t have any attachment to any of them, except Thessa. But I didn’t want to kill them, either.

This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to get to know them.

“Thought you drowned,” Ysara said from the fire. She was roasting the flank of the kelpie over a low-burning fire.

“Would have, if I didn’t have selkie heritage,” I said, forcing myself to sound cheerful. Kael set me down and handed me a waterskin. I took it and sipped on the tepid water, sighing as I did so. “The kelpie sure did its best. Thanks for looking for me,” I added sarcastically.

Ysara shrugged, her gaze not moving from my face. “Honestly? I hoped you died. One less person for me to kill when the time comes. There’s been an announcement. The artifact was found. So now we’ve got to find the bastards that found it and take it from them.”

A smug smile came onto my face. The morbid moment had passed, and I was focused again. They were still useful to me, but I had to start shifting my view of them. It was clear Ysara had already done so. I still didn’t know why Thessa had been branded a criminal in the first place, so I couldn’t see her as some soft innocent.

She wasn’t Darcie.

“Careful,” I drawled as I hefted the skull in my hand. “There’s some of us that will take umbrage to being called bastards.”

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