A Gate of Night (A Shade of Vampire #6)(31)

“We’ve had our eye on you ever since you left The Shade for your honeymoon. Your children… they’re important to us.”

“Children?”

“Twins. A boy and a girl.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s one of the things I learned from Emilia. How to tell if a woman is pregnant, what the child is going to be. It’s always useful to know.”

“Why?” The smirk on his face told me that I wasn’t going to like the answer to that question.

“Let’s just say that a pregnant woman is quite a scrumptious delicacy to our kind. I’m surprised the Elder hasn’t tried to take your blood.”

I’m surprised you haven’t recently. I’d seen countless times the way he would lick his lips as he stared at the nook of my neck as if he was a man starving for months.

As if he could read my mind, he chuckled. “Don’t think I haven’t been tempted to drink from you, Sofia. The further along your pregnancy is, the more tempting it is to drink, but I can’t give in, because I won’t be able to restrain myself from bleeding you dry.”

It’s so strange how hearing that has become so commonplace to me. I thought back to the time when life had been simple and I was a teenager trying to cope with everyday normal things. Ben’s face—his smile—came to mind. I hadn’t seen Abby since Clara took her from the dungeon. I kept asking where she was but I wasn’t given an answer.

Instead, I was told to relax and take care of myself. Relax. The idea sickened me. Relax while I’m constantly afraid that you might have killed my husband. Relax, while Abby, who is practically my little sister, is in the hands of one of the most capricious and cruel vampires I’ve ever met. Relax while I bear two children who are in danger the moment I give birth to them.

Relax while everything I love and live for is slipping away from me. Relax while I lose all control of my life. Relax, while I sit here trying to avoid a conversation with this red-eyed monster, who just confessed to craving my blood more and more every day.

Relax, Sofia. I repeated the words to myself over and over again. The only thing that got me through each day at The Blood Keep was the conviction: Derek is coming.

If not, I will find a way to get to him.

To my delight, when I opened my eyes after a long night’s sleep, I found a familiar man sitting on a chair near my bed, waiting for me to wake up.

“Hello, my queen. I was told you requested my presence.”

Eli Lazaroff.

Chapter 18: Derek

Five months. I’d been at The Sanctuary for five months. I knew nothing about what was happening back home at The Shade. Even worse, I knew nothing about what had happened to my wife at The Blood Keep.

During my time at The Sanctuary, I was given spacious living quarters on the top floor of what seemed like the tallest building in the city, where servants sought after my needs. I tried to converse with some of them, but none of them ever spoke to me. I didn’t even know their names. Whenever I addressed them, they ignored me. They seemed to hate me, though I wasn’t sure why.

The only people who talked to me were the Ageless and Ibrahim, the warlock assigned to mentor me. And I wasn’t allowed to leave my quarters, except for when I was training.

Five months had revealed things about myself that I never thought possible. I had my strength back—probably more than I’d had when I was a vampire.

My ability to heal was back. Though it didn’t happen as quickly as when I was a vampire, whenever I healed, I was stronger than before I was wounded.

My agility was also back. Again, not the same speed as I’d had when I was a vampire, but definitely far quicker than a human was supposed to be. My heightened senses had also returned.

But what the vampire curse had suppressed all these years was something beyond my imagining—fire. I had the ability to conjure fire. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why, but I did. What I didn’t have was the ability to control it and since the witches had introduced me to this ability, ever since the first time fire came out of my fingers, harnessing the power had proven to be difficult.

Whenever I asked where all these powers came from, I was given a cryptic answer about Cora investing much of her power in me. It was no secret that during my four-hundred-year slumber, Cora had placed some sort of spell on me that made me more powerful. Maybe she’d been channeling power from The Sanctuary to me all along.

I’d never understood why the Ageless allowed it if she knew that Cora was doing this, or how she couldn’t have known considering how powerful she seemed to be.

All I knew was that once a witch’s power took over a human being, it did things to that person, and since I was a vampire when it happened… it had placed those powers in a state of preservation so that when it came out, it came out in uncontrollable bursts.

The witch and warlock tried to help me take control of the power, making me spend most of my time in their realm trying to do something that even they didn’t seem to fully understand.

I was standing in the midst of a wide open field surrounded by small lakes, staring at a round target—one I wanted to destroy simply because I was tired of being held captive in the witch’s realm.

“Relax, Derek,” Ibrahim said in his deep, soothing voice. “You won’t be able to harness your power unless you learn to calm down.”