Page 28 of Crown of Blood and Vengeance

I clutched at the sheets, the silken material bunching and twisting between my trembling fingers until I felt the threads straining against my grip. Summoning what little strength remained, I tried to push myself up from my prone position, but my arms betrayed me—giving way like brittle twigs. I collapsed back onto my stomach, each ragged breath searing in my lungs as I lay there, helpless and burning with both pain and rage.

Iron-scented air filled my nostrils—whether from my own blood or the palace execution grounds, I couldn’t tell. Gianna…where is she? The last thing I remembered were her sobs cutting through the crowd while I was horsewhipped at the palace. Had Enzo reached her in time? My thoughts scattered like startled birds, refusing to arrange themselves into any semblance of order.

“Angelo, you need to remain still. There’s something moving in your skin, something from the whip. Some kind of poison or possible parasite.” The words carried both command and concern, an unsettling combination that made my blood run cold.

I recognized that lethal voice—smooth as a blade against your throat—and turned my head, vision blurring at the edges. “Keir?”

“This may...” A pause, followed by that familiar hint of calculated amusement that always made my skin crawl. “What is it you humans say? Sting a little?”

I struggled to focus through the fog clouding my thoughts. The grogginess felt like thick honey in my mind, making every thought slow and sticky. Something warm began spreading across my back, deceptively gentle at first—like melted wax dripping onto bare skin. The sensation sank deeper, seeping through layers of muscle, reaching toward bone. Then withoutwarning, it transformed into something horrific—as if someone was peeling my spine from my body, vertebra by vertebra.

I screamed, my back arching involuntarily. What ripped through me wasn’t a scream but an exorcism—pure anguish given voice, the sound of something fundamental breaking inside me. The room’s starlit ceiling swam before my eyes as darkness crept at the edges of my vision.

I clawed at the sheets, shredding the silk between my fingers, my fangs elongating instinctively against the pain. My teeth ground together so hard I tasted enamel. “That fucking didn’t sting, Keir,” I snarled, each word dragged out between ragged breaths.

“You’re a vampire and the king. I thought you could endure the treatment. Apparently, I was wrong.” His aristocratic edge of disappointment made me want to tear his throat out.

Something slithered beneath my skin—not the poison now, but the cure. Elderglass essence, if I had to guess, one of the rare healing elements from his dimension that felt like liquid starlight and burned just as bright. Each drop that seeped into my wounds carried the bitter cold of the void between worlds. The parasites—or whatever hell-spawned creatures the whip had left behind—were being drawn out, their death throes sending fresh waves of agony through my nervous system.

I felt them being pulled from my flesh one by one, their microscopic hooks ripping free. They sizzled against Keir’s otherworldly remedy, tiny screams that only immortal ears could hear. The Unseelie king’s “treatment” might be saving my life, but it felt like being flayed and frozen simultaneously, my vampire healing fighting against both invasion and cure.

A fresh wave of agony crashed over me as Keir pressed his palm flat against my spine, channeling more power into the process. The starlight overhead blurred into streaks of white fire.If this was healing, I’d hate to see what Unseelie torture looked like.

“What the hell, Keir?” Trystan stood on the other side of my bed. His wide eyes said everything. It must be fucking bad. “What is coming out of his skin?”

“Shadowweavers,” Keir replied, his voice clinical despite whatever grotesque scene was playing out on my back. “Similar to what we have in the Elder Dimension, but these have been...corrupted by hell’s essence.”

Each parasite that emerged felt like a living wire being slowly pulled through my flesh. Some were whisper-thin, sending sharp, needle-like sensations as they were extracted. Others felt thicker, their removal like having serrated fishing line drawn through my muscles. They moved—God, I could feel them moving—writhing and twisting as Keir’s treatment drew them out. The sensation was maddening, like having electrified threads woven through my nervous system.

“They’re usually parasitic time-feeders in our realm,” Keir continued, his cold fingers pressing against another spot on my back. A new cluster of creatures responded to his touch, coiling beneath my skin before being pulled free. “They consume moments of a being’s existence, aging them slowly. But hell has transformed them. These are feeding on immortality itself—quite clever, actually. They would have eventually turned Angelo’s vampiric essence against him, making his immortality into a source of endless agony.”

More emerged in waves, each extraction sending fresh bolts of lightning down my spine. I could feel them extinguishing as they left my flesh—their final moments crackling under my skin like dying stars before they dissolved into nothing but phantom pain and the scent of burning ozone.

Was that what Serenity was trying to warn me about—these foul creatures? Her desperate voice echoed in my memory:They’re invisible. The whip was poisoned. Run. My stomach twisted with fresh horror. God, did Balthazar infect her as well? The thought of these things writhing under her skin, breeding, feeding on her.. I had to get to her. Had to get these damn parasites out of my system so I could rip hell apart to find her.

I clenched my jaw, refusing to cry out again. Cold realization seeped beneath the pain like frost—I wasn’t going to endure another one of Keir’s lectures about his ‘treatment.’ If Balthazar had embedded these parasites in the whip, what hellish torments was he inflicting on Serenity? The thought sent a different kind of agony through me, sharper than any physical pain.

“Keir,” I mumbled, each word a struggle as another wave of parasites writhed their way out of my flesh. “I heard...” My voice died out as Keir pressed harder, sending fresh lightning bolts of pain arcing down my spine. But Serenity’s terror-filled warning echoed in my mind, driving me to try again despite the torture. She needed me. Whatever was happening in hell, she needed?—

The thought fragmented as more shadowweavers were torn from my body, their extraction feeling like barbed wire being slowly pulled through my veins.

“Almost done.” Keir yanked more of the shadowweavers out of my flesh, each removal sending shockwaves of cold fire radiating through my nervous system. “However, you need blood.”

Blood. The word alone sent a violent tremor through me, awakening a ravenous void within that demanded to be filled, regardless of the cost. The pain had awakened something feral, something desperate. “Find me a human and I’ll suck them dry.” The words came out in a guttural growl. At this point, I didn’t care who it was—man, woman, innocent, guilty. The hunger was a rabid beast clawing at my insides, demanding satisfaction.

“I’m afraid that won’t be sufficient,” he said, his clinical tone a maddening contrast to the inferno raging through my body. “You need Dracula’s blood. Most likely the shadowweavers laid eggs that I can’t retrieve, but Dracula’s blood is powerful enough to kill them.”

My stomach lurched at the word eggs. The thought of those hell-spawned parasites breeding inside me, their offspring nesting in my flesh, sent a wave of nausea through my already tortured body. And Dracula’s blood—the most powerful and dangerous substance in our world. Getting it would be nearly impossible, but the alternative... I could almost feel those microscopic eggs pulsing beneath my skin, waiting to hatch.

Dracula would sooner stake himself than offer me help. Fresh memories of his torture sent phantom pains cascading through my already ravaged body. The sound of his laughter as he’d torn into me, the gleam in his eyes as he’d... My stomach churned. “Then I’m fucking screwed.”

“Not so much,” Trystan said, his voice cutting through my spiral of remembered pain. “Dracula’s in the next room. Not a happy camper, but he’s here.” He knelt down and met my eyes, his expression fierce with protection. “He’s restrained.”

The words sent a jolt through my system—equal parts terror and desperate need. Dracula. Here. Just rooms away. My torturer. My maker. My body betrayed me, craving his blood even as memories of his cruelty flashed through my mind. The hunger rose up like a tidal wave, drowning out even the agony of the parasites writhing beneath my skin. After all this time, after everything he’d done to me, one whiff of his blood would probably bring me to my knees. And now I had no choice but to taste it again.

“Bring me to him,” I whispered as I pushed up on my trembling arms.

Trystan grabbed one arm and Keir the other, then they dragged me off the bed. Pain wracked through me and my vision blurred, dark spots dancing at the edges. My head tilted back then flopped around like a rag doll as I tried to make my legs work, but it was as if they had turned into spaghetti. Damn Balthazar and his shadowweavers.

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