“You think our kings kept this secret for convenience?” I had a considerable amount of faith in the scholar, but that was pushing the limits of reality.
“I think it’s very hard to ascertain exactly who has supernatural blood in them.” He shrugged. “We haven’t always had DNA tests. It’s safer to say no, then think maybe, and just because we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”
The monitor’s beat shifted, and Lyric inhaled deeply.
I jolted to my feet, leaning over her. “Lyric?”
Her eyes fought off sleep, opening quickly only to shut again before she could keep those emerald orbs focused on me. “Alek?”
“Hey, love.” I grinned, relief stealing almost all my energy in one push. “How are you feeling?”
“Not—” Her face scrunched and she hugged her midsection. “Sick. I’m going to be sick.”
Gabriel lunged across the room with a pail just in time for Lyric to wretch up every ounce of human sustenance she’d taken in. She heaved over and over until I was certain she had to have thrown up a kidney in there as well.
My eyes jumped to Julian, whose face had gone tight.
“It’s beginning,” he said softly. “She’s transitioning.”
If the sickness had been the worst of it, it would have been an easy day…or night…whatever it was. But then I heard the unmistakable sound of bones cracking—similar to when a vampire came into their powers, leaving behind the fragile shell that made childhood so dangerous for our younglings, and Lyric’s body convulsed on the table.
“Oh, God,” I whispered, my eyes pricking with the pain she must have felt at being remade. “Please let her live.”
Lyric started screaming…and didn’t stop for hours.
14
Lyric
Thick, gray fog clung to the edges of the pillared room. It crept in through cracks in the stone and lingered, dusting along the marble floor.
Five chairs rested in the center of the room.
Empty.
Blood dripped from four of the seats, crimson liquid splattering upon the floor beneath.
One chair remained pristine, clean.
My heart raced against my chest, my head splitting with blinding pain.
I moved through the room, my limbs heavy and aching. Each step stung like a thousand syringes pierced my flesh, but I had to walk toward the chairs. Something deep inside me compelled me to go forward, to push through the fog that zapped my skin, and look.
See.
Ice replaced the searing fire in my blood.
The fog wafted backward in rolling waves, revealing the bloody floor beneath the chairs.
Bodies—four of them.
A female with beautiful white hair, a muscular man with silver eyes that stared upward, lifeless. An exquisite male, long and lithe, his perfect face contorted in rage, defiant even with his throat slashed open.
The fourth body—
My heart stopped.
I sank to my knees beside him, cradling his head in my hands. My fingers were instantly soaked in his blood.
“Alek,” I tried to scream, to get my mate to open his eyes, but I was so weak. So heavy. As if invisible hands clawed at my shoulders, my ankles, yanking me back with a force I had to fight with every breath against. “Alek, no,” I sobbed, pressing my forehead to his. Tears streamed down my cheeks, splashing upon his white shirt. Blood seeped from his chest, pooling and growing with each second.
He didn’t stir.
Those beautiful blue-gray eyes didn’t open.
And when I reached inside me, the bond between us…it wasn’t there.
My soul, hollow. Empty.
I screamed, but only a wisp of air escaped my lips.
I clung to him, clutching his lifeless body against my chest.
Pain ebbed from my soul as if it had been ripped from my body by force.
Fire so hot it seared and writhed and cracked.
The weight of Alek’s body lessened in my arms, and I snapped my eyes open. Slowly, he dissolved into ash, slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.
Hissing erupted around me as the others disintegrated, leaving me kneeling in piles of dusted bodies.
My body shook, my hands trembling.
“You need to look, Seer,” a masculine voice echoed from directly behind me.
I whirled around. Landed on my feet before I’d even blinked.
The fog curled away from the man, one I’d seen seconds ago on the floor. I glanced over my shoulder, my mind jolting as the room was now empty. No chairs. No blood. No dusted bodies.
“Look!” he screamed, and I snapped my attention back to him. He was tall, devastatingly beautiful, and a darkness caressed the edges of his skin as if the night itself adorned him. He tilted his head, a predator’s gaze as he waved an arm between us. “If you don’t open your eyes, this will all come to pass.”
I jolted back a step, the bodies that had disintegrated before my eyes appeared in a pile between us. Even his.
He gazed down at the horrid pile and sucked his teeth.
“Tragic,” he cooed, staring at his own corpse. “That our destinies lay with your past.”
“What do you mean? What do you want?” My mind spun, questions and pain and blistering doubt.
“I want you to wake up!” he screamed, charging toward me with the speed of a shooting star.
A surge of lightning struck me, my body going rigid with the pain. My knees cracked against the floor, and I convulsed against the onslaught of the white-hot blaze.
I reached for Alek’s lifeless hand, wanting to touch him even in death.
The man’s laughter, dark and cold, filled the room, swallowed my agonized screams—
The floor disappeared.
I free fell, swinging my arms to try and stop my fall.
But the pit of black was endless, the room disappearing. The man, the bodies. All of it. Gone.
Empty.
Like my soul.
Nothing but the black.
Nothing but the fall.
The pain coursed through my blood like acid.
I gnashed my teeth as I toppled over and over, the pain ratcheting, searing my skull. The very marrow in my bones groaned in protest, screaming, gnawing, threatening to crack against the pressure.
I fell for so long I begged for the end.
A quick snap of my neck on whatever bottom laid at the end of this pit.
Anything to stop the pain. Stop the splintering of my heart, my soul.
“Alek,” I sobbed, spinning head over feet as I fell and fell and fell—
“Lyric,” Alek’s voice called to me from the dark.
A cool, soothing tingle washed over my body like the first rain after a fire.
My mind pulsed behind the darkness of my closed lids, but I felt something soft beneath me.
Not a hard marble floor covered in blood and ash.
No taunting echoes of a man I’d never seen before.
Nothing but the sweet, comforting silence, and the smell of—
Acid licked up my throat, and I hissed as I bolted straight up, my eyes snapping open.
“Lyric,” Alek breathed my name, and instantly I was on my feet.
In our room.
I tilted my head, feeling like I’d missed something. Lost something. But what?
I swallowed hard. My throat was raw, aching like I’d screamed all night.