Page 50 of A Kingdom of Death & Darkness
My lashes flutter, and her form fades in and out of focus for a few hazy moments. Her words scatter around my messy mind, but I’m in too much pain to really absorb what she’s said.
“What?” I murmur instead.
My hand lifts at my side, but the slice of agony that shoots through me is hot and torturous, so I cradle it to my chest instead. The back of my hand is a mangled form of flesh that’s eaten away to the bone near the knuckles.
“Why–” I start, but even my lips are painful to move.
“What’s that?” the woman above me asks with bright eyes that peer down on me with true attentive interest.
Delilah sleeps soundly behind her on a pallet of blankets in the dirt. Her face is pale and untouched. The Vampire Princess as perfect and beautiful as she’s always been.
Why? Why is she untouched? Why am I still alive?
“Why did you let me live?” I manage this time, but my legs curl up in the dirt with a poor attempt at seizing on the pain that throbs down my right calf.
“Well, I wasn’t going to let you die, child,” she says so freely, I can hear the charming laughter against her tongue.
I blink slowly up at her, and I can see the woman she once was. I've seen her before, in fact.
In the statue in the gardens. In the paintings in the cellar of the castle.
“You’re the Fae Queen,” I manage, and too much information threatens to flood through me. “You’re their mother.”
Her lashes are thick and frame the palest blue eyes. Her long hair is tangled and matted with blood, but I bet it once shined beneath the weight of a pristine crown. Before she was this crippled creature out here in the forgotten darkness between two warring kingdoms, she was a Queen. A beautiful light among her people
What went wrong? Did Boris grow tired of her after stealing her away from the Fae King?
Boris started all of this. With her. With them. With this entire fucking realm.
“Why? Why did you spare me?” My voice chokes, and I cough hard, but it doesn’t stop. On a painful jagged gasp, blood pools in my mouth before seeping out over my lip.
I’ve been bitten. Whatever magical bloodline cure the fae have, it won’t find me in time.
“You’re the key to this curse, Crymson Vaine,” she whispers in a demanding little voice.
And it’s then that I see it. In her pale hand, glittering rings kiss her knuckles, but there in the palm is a long twisting dagger.
I try to swallow, but it just chokes at the back of my throat instead.
I stare up at her and hope my death comes before she has the pleasure of taking my life herself.
“You just don’t understand, do you?” she asks as she kneels over my body. “He made us what we are. Boris is the enemy. Not us. Not you. And not me,” she whispers against the crippling wind and dirt. “He took me from my boys.” It’s an uttered confession in a torn voice as she glares at something just past me that I can’t see.
I blink hard against the dust and try desperately to pull away from her eerie nearness as I stare up at her. She could end me now. She could break me where I lie. And yet... she doesn’t.
“Thorn was strong. Christian was cruel,” she whispers. It’s an afterthought that she can’t hold back. “Both of them are scarred in different ways because of what their father’s done. Don’t let him take you from them too.”
My brows raise high, and my lower lip is so dry, it splits painfully with another gushing of blood from across my tongue when I part my lips to try to speak.
“What–what do you wantmeto do?”
“Dear child, don’t you know why I called you here?”
Called me here?
I shake my head slowly, and she drops to her knees in the dirt. Violent wind whips long inky hair across her sunken and bruised cheeks. The tattered dress that covers her frail limbs appears that it might have once been a crisp white gown made of thick luxurious material. It’s black and red now with patches of almost white in some places. At the high neckline, there is so much red that it covers the top portion entirely. It’s as if someone slit her throat.
Or ripped it open.
