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EIRA
The Tower goes dark.
For one impossible second, I think I’ve gone blind.
Then the room shudders beneath me. Black glass, ancient stone and steel bones vibrate around the sound dragged out of Valentin Moretti’s chest.
That howl carves a jagged and savage path through my body, running through my ribs, my teeth, the wet, torn place at my throat where his fangs broke skin and my blood became something neither of us was ready for.
‘Valentin?’ My voice comes out thin. Small. Not mine.
His weight is half over me, one arm locked around my waist, the other hand still at my jaw, claws pricking my skin with an intimacy that would be obscene if terror wasn’t already crawling cold through my bloodstream.
The vivid mark on his chest and throat – a visual representation of the centuries-old time-bombed curse placed within him by his Creator, Morrighan, as payback for imprisoning her – pulses black, then red. It takes hold of the vampire mafia don, the ruler of New York City, and burns beneath my palm.
Not metaphorical burning but actual burning. Like… on fucking fire.
I can feel it through his skin, through the whole brutal architecture of his body. A living brand, pulsing crimson-black in the dark, bright enough to throw jagged flashes over his face, throat, and the ruined sheets tangled around us.
His eyes are open. That’s the worst part. Wide open and burning with red-black fire.
‘Valentin,’ I say again, louder this time, and shove at his shoulder.
I expect an arrogant command. Or some velvet-dark threat wrapped in old-world manners and barely restrained hunger.
Instead I get nothing.
His body is rigid around me, his mouth inches from my throat. Blood slicks his lips. My blood. His breath scrapes out once, harsh and broken, then stops.
Panic punches through me.
‘No,’ I snap, because apparently my response to Gods, monsters and the sudden collapse of overpowered vampire kings is instant denial and verbal aggression. ‘No, no, no. Whatever the fuck you’re doing, stop it now. Valentin? Wake up.’ I screech the last words.
Just as the Heartshard Glass, a powerful relic that grants far too much fucking insight if you ask me, gives another scream.
The sound is high, metallic, almost alive. Across the room, the fractured relic pulses with the same veins of red-black light, cracks branching from centre to edge like lightning trapped under ice. Each pulse answers the mark on Valentin’s chest.
Or the mark answers it.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more.
The Tower groans, and beyond the bedroom door, somewhere in the suddenly dead-black corridor, voices erupt.
No.
Not voices.
Minds.
I have no earthly clue why I can suddenly hear Valentin’s guards in my mind.
The Black Twelve, Valentin’s special sired guards. Their panic is a storm with fangs, the impact of them slamming into me hard enough to tear a gasp from my throat. It’s not speech in any ordinary sense, but command, shock, fury, fear. A dozen presences colliding with the sealed room, all of them trying to reach the vampire lying frozen above me.
Sire.
My lord?
