A Rip of Realms (A Shade of Vampire #39)(17)

“Do you mourn it that much?” she asked coyly. “Were you ever happy at Hellswan, Tejus? Did you ever believe it to be truly your home—did you ever even consider Nevertide to be your home?”

“That is irrelevant,” I replied, keeping my smile in place.

“Is it?”

“Trina, enough. Tell me what you know.”

She burst into peals of laughter.

“Tejus, really, don’t you know how to get information out of me yet? Let me tell you how I prefer to divulge my secrets…I like to operate on information exchange. You tell me something, and I shall repay the favor.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to bargain.”

“Don’t you?” she replied softly, and I heard the threat beneath her words. She had a plan. I started to feel uneasy.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, testing the waters.

“The human—I want to know if you’ve fallen in love with her.”

What?

This time my laughter was genuine. We were in a life-or-death situation, and all Queen Trina was concerned about was petty jealousies and slights. She was insane.

“Yes,” I replied simply.

A look passed over Queen Trina’s face, so quickly I couldn’t catch what it was, but when she looked back up at me, her smile was once again fixed and her eyes shone brightly.

“So you decided to be selfish and put yourself first – before the needs of your kingdom?”

I frowned, wondering what she was getting at.

“I did.”

“Shame on you, Tejus of Hellswan. And what a pitiful fool you are. It’s futile—she will die. She will die in Nevertide, and it will be all your fault.”

I kept my hands at my sides, but my body was starting to shake with the effort of keeping my emotions in check.

“I doubt that will be the case,” I replied quietly.

“My master is rising,” she spat. “There is nothing that you can do—there is nowhere that you can hide. A new dawn will be brought to Nevertide, a future beyond your imagining, and that human soul will be torn to shreds—returning to ashes and dust, gone.” She clicked her fingers, her eyes boring into mine. “What will your world be like without her, Tejus?”

“Are you so sure of this?” I snapped. “Because I don’t see the entity here. I see a half-completed job, and a wretched queen sitting in a grain shed, trying to bargain with me.”

“He is coming,” she repeated again, her smile returning.

“Tell me about the Acolytes,” I said, trying a different tactic. “I know you lead them—what are you doing for the entity?”

“You know all you need to about us.” She dismissed the subject with a wave of her hand. “We are his faithful servants, and I will benefit greatly from the new world order. If you’re lucky”—she smirked—“I will keep you on as a personal slave, a position you are perhaps better fit for than you were king.”

If Queen Trina believed that she would benefit so greatly, I wondered why she bothered to involve herself with the trials at all. What was the point?

“So why did you put yourself in the running for the imperial trials?” I asked through gritted teeth.

She shrugged. “It always helps to eliminate the competition. I honestly thought it would be quite fun.”

“Fun? Ash says you almost died during the last trial.”

Trina pursed her lips.

“That’s enough questions for today,” she purred. “Just know that I never wanted you to be hurt in all this, which is incidentally why I was such a huge fan of Ashbik winning the trials…but, alas, you persevered, and you have interfered. And now it is too late.”

“Too late for what?”

Her eyes rested on the door behind me, and I spun around. The door was how I’d left it, still closed, without a sound coming from outside. I turned back to face her, confused. The moment our eyes met, I heard the loud bang of wooden planks falling backward onto the earth. The door was ripped open—along with the rest of the shed wall. I spun around to see a group of hooded figures who could only be Acolytes standing, silent, in front of the exposed shed.

Before I could move, an agonizing pain ripped through my skull. Stunned at the immediacy of the effect, I stumbled forward. Through fast-graying vision, I watched as Queen Trina rose from the floor, her eyes alight with victory.

“You should have chosen me, Tejus,” she murmured as she walked past.

“If you touch her—if you EVER touch her, I will end you,” I hissed as my knees collapsed beneath me, sending me sprawling to the floor. The pain only intensified, and I grunted in pain, writhing on the ground as the group of black-hooded Acolytes slowly backed away with their leader. The motionless bodies of the guards lay in the grass, as helpless as I was to stop them.

Queen Trina walked free.





Hazel





Abelle had somehow managed to cart what looked like an entire apothecary with her to the palace. She was sitting in the middle of hundreds of glass bottles, each filled with dried herbs, petals, unassuming-looking sticks, and some liquids that I wasn’t too eager to look closely at.

“Come and sit, Hazel.” She patted a cushion next to her. “Don’t worry about the hunger—we’ll soon get that fixed.”