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Smirking, the vampires turned back to Alaric, ignoring the monsters as they died in the dirt behind them.
Alaric tilted his head in a small nod. “Take the winged ones with you. They’ll travel fastest.”
“Of course.” The maid’s unnaturally pink gaze suddenly slid from Alaric to land on me. “Mistress.”
She chuckled and turned to smoke, flowing away.
I didn’t move as the other three followed her. “What have you done to me?”
Alaric gave me a pitying look. “You still haven’t figured it out?”
I refused to tremble. Refused to show fear. This was another one of his games. Another ploy to taunt and destabilize me, and I would not succumb to it.
“You’re so proud, my pet. So determined.” He gave me a condescending smile. “So delusional.”
I rewarded his asinine words with a scathing look.
His pity only deepened. “You didn’t survive the empty realms, pet. Not in the way you’ve made yourself believe. But your mind could not handle that, so you concocted this fantasy that your mind, your body, your entire being was still your own.”
Never taking his eyes from me, he drew the ludicrous sword he’d taken from that young soldier we killed at the Warden Wall outpost days before. “See the truth. Your mind won’t hold out much longer against these games you’ve made it play anyhow.”
He turned the sword in his grip until the flat of the blade lay across the palm of his hand. Idly, he glanced down, and though I did not move, my vision somehow turned as if I was peering downward too.
My reflection stared back at me from the glistening surface of the blade.
Quivers shook me, radiating from deep inside, but I curled my lip in disdain all the same. “I see an illusion of a reflection that you must have created, for I cannot?—”
“The truth, pet.” His words echoed in my ears. “Your pretty fiction is at its end.”
My head shook. I wouldn’t believe his lies and twisted words. I refused. I was Queen Melisandre. I was the most powerful witch and vampire in the?—
A stronger shudder coursed through me and suddenly, my reflection in the blade changed. It was still my face. Still my blond hair and flawless skin untouched by age for decades.
But sickening gold light glowed from my eyes.
19
GWYNEIRA
Acity under siege was eerily silent.
One where the enemy could be anyone was even more so.
I shifted position uncomfortably on the bed. Even after bathing and changing into the nightclothes the servants had provided, I hadn’t been able to stay lying down for long. The room was too cavernous, too empty. So now I sat with my legs crossed and my back to my pillows on this massive bed in the room Lord Thomas had given me, unable to sleep and silently hating everything around me.
Because none of my men were here. There’d been no way to ask if any of them could stay. Not without causing a scandal that would be certain to make every socially proper eyebrow in a hundred miles rise.
My eyes darted to the door as the whisper of footsteps came and went yet again, the guards passing by on their rotations. Thank the gods thus far none of them had tried to check on me. Without Casimir’s help, I didn’t want to think what would happen if they brought those garlic bulbs anywhere nearby.
But the truth was, it wasn’t merely the threat of failing an inspection that worried me. I hadn’t realized it until the door shut, sealing me in here, but this was the first time I’d been alone at night since I was turned into a vampire.
And I loathed it.
The absence of the men’s warmth. The silence devoid of the soft sounds they made as they slept. The sheer emptiness of not having them with me. Every second felt like a chasm opening wider and wider all around, swallowing me in nothingness where my tiny breaths and quiet heartbeat were nearly the only sounds.
If I returned to Lumilia, would this be every night for me?
The thought was terrible. It was also likely correct. My father and stepmother had not shared a room, after all—though I wondered on some level if Melisandre had purposefully taken steps to make sure of that. I no longer had any illusions that she’d actually loved my father.
