A Shade of Vampire 40: A Throne of Fire(54)

I meant it.

“Oh, Ash.” She half laughed and half looked like she was about to cry. I guessed she had been as invested in that vision as I was. I couldn’t get the image of our son out of my head. And Jenney—safe, happy, part of my family. “I still don’t know where we were. I couldn’t decide!”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said simply. “You were right. It doesn’t matter where we are. If I get to wake up to you every morning, I’m sold.”

“Softie.” She nudged, poking me in the rib.

“Shortie,” I retorted, gently pulling on her damp hair.





Hazel





Tejus was pacing up and down the terrace that bordered the back of the castle. Earlier I’d tried to go to our room and get some sleep, but I was too anxious, too worried about what was to come. I’d found Tejus here, and, not knowing what else to do, had sat down, watching him walk back and forth while I tried to collect my thoughts.

His muscles were strained, each step he took seemed to have a kind of repressed aggression about it—as if he was already desperate to be on the battlefield.

“Tejus, are you okay?” I asked pointlessly. He clearly wasn’t.

He turned toward me, surprised, as if he’d only just realized I was there. With a sigh, he raked his hair back from his forehead and came to sit next to me on the stone steps that led to the gardens. His elbows came to rest on his knees.

“I keep thinking that we’re missing something,” he replied, rubbing his unshaven jaw with his thumb. “That there’s something we’re not understanding. Like the fae, Sherus, saying that he had omens about the entity…why was someone from another dimension having omens about Nevertide? It doesn’t make sense to me. Is this creature hoping that it will destroy this dimension and move onto the next?” He rubbed his forehead in irritation. “What makes it so sure that its plan will succeed? It makes me nervous that its rise has been so gradual, as if it’s an elaborate game of chess, each of us being positioned exactly where it wants till the time is right.”

I knew exactly what he meant. When GASP had told us about how they entered the portal, I recalled Benedict throwing the stone into the sea. The entity had obviously seen them there, trying to use their powers to re-open it, and, when that failed, had used the children. The same with us in the castle, before Benedict became possessed. How long had it been watching, waiting for the right kid to come along that it could use? How long had it waited for the emperor to release the stone?

“We’re doing what we can,” I mumbled eventually, knowing that my reassurance meant next to nothing. I shared Tejus’s unspoken feeling—that we were well and truly out of our depth here.

“What does Ash say?” I asked.

He smirked, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“He’s too busy being given an inquisition by Ruby’s parents.”

“Oh,” I replied sheepishly, looking down at the ground as I felt heat rise in my cheeks. I had a feeling my parents were going to be just as hard on Tejus—and the grilling my mom had given me earlier hadn’t been fun.

“Just so you know, my grandfather met my grandmother when she’d been kidnapped from Earth for his harem, and my mom met my dad after she’d been kidnapped by vampires, my father being one of them. So, if any of my family even think about giving you a hard time for that, shut them down.”

Tejus started laughing.

“I’ll remember that,” he replied, “it’s quite a record.”

“Tell me about it. The women in my family obviously do captivity well.”

“You do. You were an excellent captive—polite, subservient, amenable…”

I rolled my eyes at him and elbowed his arm sharply. I expected him to laugh, but instead he grabbed me, pulling me into his lap. His face had lost all traces of humor, and he looked down at me with dark, unreadable eyes.

“Hazel, it doesn’t matter what they say. What anyone says. Watching your family today, the supernatural fighting dynasty that is your destiny, I realized that danger would never have escaped you. I’m glad I kidnapped you. At least this way I can protect you for the rest of my life.”

“You can’t protect me from everything,” I reminded him gently. “In the same way that I can’t protect you either.”

“I can try.”

I kissed him, running my hands across his shoulder blades and up to his neck, pressing myself closer against him. Just for a moment, before the danger came again, I wanted to curl up—to let myself believe that he could protect me—that he could take away what was bad in this world, all the memories of my brother suffering under the entity’s possession, the dying face of Queen Trina that haunted me every time I closed my eyes, and the horrible, blood-curdling shadow that crept over the forests, waiting for us. If I could stay like this for just a moment, then I could imagine that we were a million miles away from here—just two people sitting on a step, looking out over a garden, nothing in the world existing except us.