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1
SHARA
I’m going to need bigger Blood.
Sitting behind me in our favorite chair, Rik didn’t move so much as swell around me, muscles pumping up with blood so fast that his pants split open over his massive thighs. “Excuse me?”
I licked my bite in Mehen’s throat and lifted my head. The king of the depths sagged against my knees and then slowly slipped to the floor with a sleepy draconic grumble. One of the oldest and most powerful living Aima kings—drained into a stupor.
“I don’t mean a singular Blood but a larger group of Blood. Besides, no one’s bigger than you, my alpha.”
“Finally.” Guillaume rolled Mehen aside so he could drop to his knees before me. “I didn’t know how much longer I should wait before bringing the matter to your attention. My queen tends to ignore and suppress messages her own body sends.”
With a wry smile, I reached out and took his hand in mine, stroking my fingers over his knuckles. When the last Templar knight had first come to my side in Kansas City, every single finger had been warped and twisted, broken countless times during the long torture he’d endured. Now well fed on my blood, his fingers were straight and strong, though his palm still bore the calluses from his sword. “You should always bring concerns to my attention. I kept telling myself that I only needed to rest.”
I blew out a sigh. Ever since I came home nearly a month ago from helping Helayna save her nest, I hadn’t felt… right. Thin and hollowed out—no matter how long and well I fed from each of my Blood.
My dragon wasn’t the only Blood passed out around me. Ezra snored like a buzz saw on the couch. Curled around Rik’s thick calf, Daire had his head on my right foot, sleeping so soundly that he didn’t purr or budge, even though Mehen now lay on his long hair. Itztli and Tlacel slept back-to-back in front of the fireplace, and Nevarre used Itztli’s thigh for a pillow.
Blood rarely slept. They didn’t need that down time for their bodies to recover when well fed by their queen.
Unless she was draining them to the brink.
I didn’t regret answering Helayna’s request for assistance, but it’d been a close call. Closer than I cared to admit. By the time we traveled to her nest, everything except a few trees and her cabin had been destroyed by a massive hurricane of sunfires, driven by a Sepdet, one of Ra’s descendants. I’d held them off until Karmen Sunna had returned with her own Blood and called the sunfires to her side. A difficult task for sure, but certainly not more than a Triune-level queen could handle. At least that’s what I told myself, confident in the sheer raw power I’d gained by resurrecting the Triskeles Triune after hundreds of years. If Karmen could control the sunfires, then surely I could hold them off until she arrived. Right?
Wrong. I might as well have tried to hold a supermassive black hole in the palm of my hand. I wasn’t called to handle solar magic. My greatest magic was accomplished in complete darkness, not the burning light of day. That mistake had almost cost House Ironheart their nest and might have irreparably damaged my own power.
It’d shaken me. For the first time since I stepped into my power as a vampire queen, I’d drawn hard on my own gifts, expecting power to flood me like a bottomless ocean. Instead, I’d barely managed to pull a trickle more beyond my normal power.
My arrogance made me fucking sick. I stood against the queen of Rome and played her games without bowing to her will. Yet a bunch of sunfires nearly burned me out. How could I even begin to hold my seat at the Triune?
Vivian’s sunfire, Smoak, blazed in her bond. :Even the god of light struggled to contain them, my queen, and he was the one who imprisoned them in the first place.:
Guillaume lifted my hand to his mouth and rubbed his lips across my knuckles. “You know the answer to that question, Your Majesty.”
He wasn’t one to use formality lightly, not after everything we’d been through. Power flowed through me like a midnight ocean. Rippling rivers wrapped around each of my Blood, pulling them to me. Binding us together. Forever. They were still bound to me, as I was bound to them. But now I knew that seemingly infinite ocean had limits that I’d never encountered before.
His head cocked to the side, blue eyes surprisingly light and teasing. “Does it, though? Or do you simply need more Blood?”
“I pulled on my power until I strained, and there was nothing left,” I whispered, inwardly cringing with shame. “It felt like an empty, bone-dry well. If Karmen hadn’t come when she did, I might have ended up killing one of you.”
Rik shrugged. “So be it. You would have resurrected us anyway.”
I scrambled around in his lap so I could see his face, though I didn’t let go of Guillaume’s hand. “No. I would never forgive myself. And what if I’d burned myself out and destroyed my gift? Then I wouldn’t have been able to bring you back. You would have been gone.”
My voice cracked, my throat aching. I’d done it once already. Sometimes the guilt still bubbled up inside me like a giant vat of acid that I would never forgive. “I’ve made so many fucking mistakes.”
“You haven’t made a single mistake.” Rik didn’t raise his voice, but his tone deepened to an earth-rumbling quake. “Our queen is always right.”
No. That wasn’t true. Though I didn’t have the heart to argue with him. Not with words.
Instead, I allowed scenes to play out in my mind. All the things I regretted. Like accepting Coatlicue’s red snake to make the mighty god of light mortal—even when the goddess required one of my loved one’s death. Chopping off my beloved Templar knight’s head in Heliopolis to buy myself time to get closer to Ra. Yes, Guillaume was known as the headless knight for a reason. But that didn’t mean I wanted to see his head severed from his body by my own hand.
Sure, we could argue until the end of time that I had no choice. I’d done what needed to be done to win—to protect us all. I didn’t feel any better.
Even more frustrating were the “wins” that didn’t feel like wins at all. The times my hands were tied behind my back by Triune law and custom.
Like having to sit across from Marne Ceresa and sip tea and pretend we weren’t trapped like fat flies in her web. Or playing her against the Dauphine instead of razing the New Orleans queen’s house to the ground myself. Settling for subtle, polite, legal jabs rather than all-out war for justice left a bitter taste in my mouth not even the taste of my beloved Blood could wipe away.
