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I tried not to take that personally, but after learning that all the males in my bloodline had been turned, I felt like I should.
I’d met my uncle, or a version of him, anyway.
My thoughts strayed as I ran my nail over the edge of the dark bracelet he’d given me. It had burrowed spokes into my skin and the blood crusted over in nasty scabs.
It was feeding me some sort of power through my veins. Something that allowed me to access my goddess power that had been slipping through my fingers.
Only, now I couldn’t heal. The constant ache of a broken rib that wouldn’t heal forced me to take shallow breaths.
And neither could Killian.
Selfishly, I hoped that a vampire could tell me where my uncle was. He was the one who had given me the bracelet. Perhaps he knew how to take it off.
But that wasn’t the only reason we needed to talk to a vampire.
It was my visions that had brought us here. Another Lost Dragon Queen was about to be born and this one was fighting the corruption that ate away at her shell.
And based on my visions, this egg wasn’t in a realm at all. It was in a place that was between reality and imagination.
Some called it Purgatory.
Others called it the Realm of Nightmares.
Vern, though, recognized my description immediately.
The next Lost Dragon Queen was in the Shadow Realm, a place only vampires could go.
That explained why the corruption had latched onto my Uncle. It wanted to use him to reach the egg.
And since my uncle was a part of my bloodline, it was able to impact me, too.
I noticed the dark lines a few days ago. I traced my fingers over the ridges that had begun to spread from the bracelet and tried to quell the spike of adrenaline that followed.
Killian’s gaze found mine. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Vivi, he assured me in my mind.
I nodded, but I wasn’t entirely convinced.
What if we didn’t figure it out this time?
What if corruption won?
The Dean’s words came back to me, seeding doubt in my mind.
“You won... yes. It doesn’t mean you’ll win again. Some call it beginner’s luck. My people call that the fate of the gods. Whatever you want to call it, you can’t count on it to hold you up the next battle you face, or it may allow you to fail for being the fool you are.”
She’d said those words to me when I’d been eager to jump into the Malice Realm and respond to the call of a Lost Dragon Queen.
She told me I needed to take my time and assess the situation before diving in head-first.
I needed to prepare.
But as we waited in a dark cemetery for a vampire to appear and hopefully talk to us—and not eat us—I wasn’t sure how in all the realms I was supposed to prepare for what came next.
Because once we learned how to cross into the Shadow Realm, we’d be the first beings alive to do so.
And I feared there might be no coming back.
CHAPTER 2
