Page 198 of Blood Curse

He folded the three fingers gripping me. I tore my arm free before the others locked, turned him past my body and pushed him towards an empty chair. Elias caught its back instead of falling. The Crown tried to spin him towards me again.

He locked both elbows and held himself there.

“Stay,” I said.

His eyes lifted to mine, furious and clear. “Working on it.”

I moved before the Crown could use my voice as something else for him to resist.

Mara was six feet away.

The leg of a broken chair filled her right hand. Pale light bound her wrist and ran to the Crown. Her body drew the wood back for a strike aimed at my temple.

She brought it down.

At the last instant, her wrist turned.

The chair leg smashed into the table beside my head. Wood split. The impact sent a jagged piece across my cheek, opening the skin from my ear to the corner of my mouth.

Mara’s arm shook with the effort of holding the weapon where it landed.

“Move,” she ground out.

I moved.

The Crown tore the chair leg from the table and forced her after me.

Blood ran warm over my jaw.

The scent reached every vampire in the room.

Hunger changed the attack.

Hands still reached for me, but mouths opened too. Pupils widened. The court had fed, yet the Crown pressed on every appetite and turned my blood into the only thing that mattered.

It pressed on mine as well.

The man I had put on the floor had cut his palm on glass. Mara’s knuckles were bleeding. Bryony’s blood soaked the dagger wrapping and dripped steadily beside the silver chair.

Her blood found me through all of it.

My fangs dropped.

The Crown wanted hunger to make my choices smaller. Bite, kill or let the court pin me down. It had spent a hundred and twelve years learning how to make cruelty look inevitable.

My body offered quicker answers. Tear out the nearest throat. Break the arm reaching for me. Feed until the hunger stopped shouting and trust healing to repair whatever remained.

Those answers would be easy.

Easy wasn’t the same as necessary.

I knew these people. The young vampire limping towards me had spent the morning carrying blood bottles for anyone afraid to enter the cellar alone. The woman fighting her own hands had stood at the open gate in the rain and helped strangers cross it. Elias had patched every injury this curse had caused without once pretending pain made any of us weak.

The Crown could move their bodies. It didn’t get to turn them into enemies for my convenience.

I clamped my mouth shut and caught the next vampire around the waist.

He snarled against my shoulder. I carried him two steps and set him hard against a pillar, using my forearm across his chest to keep his teeth away from both of us.