Page 10 of Blood Curse

The Crown heated against her scalp.

Something answered.

The sensation came from beyond the room, beyond Harrowmere and beyond every ward around the estate. It touched my blood like the distant echo of a bell.

I stood so quickly the chair scraped the floor.

Bryony kept hold of me. “Another command?”

“No.” I listened to the strange pull. “Someone heard the summons.”

Another answer followed. Then three more, scattered across distances I couldn’t measure.

Old court oaths woke one after another. I hadn’t felt them since Adrian drove my people from Harrowmere and buried the roads home under his wards.

For years after Cecily died, I waited for those traces to return. Adrian told me the court had abandoned me. When I stopped believing him, he found crueller ways to make me stop asking.

Now one vampire answered from the north, the old oath sharp with suspicion. Another stirred across the sea. A cluster woke near enough that their recognition arrived almost together.

The answers didn’t carry obedience. None of the vampires were being dragged towards us. The summons had simply turned Harrowmere into a light they could see again.

“How many?” Bryony asked.

“More every second.”

Lenora returned with a wooden case under one arm. “Why are you standing?”

“The court is answering.”

She stopped. “Your court?”

“What remains of it.”

The title settled differently with witnesses in the room. King had become a private fact, then an insult Adrian used when he wanted to remind me how far I had fallen. The answering blood turned it into a responsibility again.

I didn’t know how many of them survived. I didn’t know who would still want the man they once followed or what they would make of the human woman wearing the Blood Crown. I knew only that they had heard us, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t keep them from the gate.

Bryony rose before either of us could object. Her free hand gripped the chair until her legs steadied. “Are they coming here?”

“Some will. Some will stay away until they know whether the summons is real.”

“And do they?” Lenora asked.

I felt the blood signatures gathering at the edge of my awareness. Suspicion. Hope. Fury. One old oath flared so brightly I would know it after another century in the dark.

It wasn’t far away.

It was moving along Harrowmere’s boundary.

Then it stopped at the outer gate.

“One of them is already here,” I said.

Bryony’s grip tightened. “Who?”

I hadn’t spoken the name since the night Adrian scattered us.

“Mara Voss.”