Haunted by the King of Death (3 page)

As commander of their legions, she could understand why he had to go, but as prince he had a duty in the castle too, one he often neglected in favour of the possibility of a battle. There hadn’t been a fight in the First Realm for centuries, not since they had signed a peace treaty and aligned themselves with the Second Realm and the elf kingdom.

Frey was old enough to remember the time before that treaty though, and she knew from speaking with him during long quiet nights at the castle that he longed for war. He had missed out on his chance at it, unable to attend the battle in the elf kingdom because of his duties as prince, forced to remain in the castle with Tarwyn to protect him.

Tarwyn was but a child, a toddler despite being near to a century old now. It would be another five centuries at least before he could rule under his mother’s and uncle’s supervision.

Isla couldn’t openly wish Frey war, but she did so silently as she stepped up into the corridor, tiptoed and pressed a kiss to his whiskered cheek.

“Try to find some rest.” She settled back onto her feet and clasped his thickly hewn right shoulder. “You look awful.”

He chuckled and waved her away, and she paused to watch him heading down the stairs.

With his back to her, he reminded her of Valador. Noble, kind and gentle Valador. Frey had the same qualities as his older brother, but it was balanced by a thirst for war, a hunger for violence that many demons possessed. Valador had always been happiest away from the battlefield.

Frey was happiest on it.

When he disappeared from view, she headed along the corridor, passing the white wooden door to her room and then the one just up the hallway that belonged to Frey, and then banked left at the junction. She stopped at a room on the right and knocked softly.

After a few seconds, the door opened to reveal Melia’s smiling face. Her blue eyes seemed brighter today, but they were troubled, as they always were after Frey’s visits.

Sometimes, Isla thought that he stayed away from the castle as much as he could not because he wanted to avoid his duties as a prince but because he wanted to avoid paining Melia with his presence. They both knew that Melia saw echoes of her lost love in Frey.

Just as her sister saw echoes of Valador in her son.

Isla’s gaze sought Tarwyn and found him sitting on a brown fur near the fireplace to the left of the room, his focus locked on the wooden animals in front of him. His dishevelled sandy hair fell across his brow in unruly curls and his tongue poked from between his lips as he concentrated, pale blue eyes fixed with determination on the toys. Isla had brought them to Hell for him as a present from one of her trips to the mortal realm, hoping they would be educational for him.

A moment with Frey had prompted it when he had called a bear a donkey when she had been showing him photographs of the time she had spent in the region of Canada and had then called a deer a bear. Of course, he had known a wolf when he had seen one. No surprise since werewolves made the free realm in Hell their home. She had expected the demon to know a bear though. He must have fought in at least one battle involving shifters of their kind.

So she had purchased the wooden zoo animals when she had seen them in a store.

To this day, part of her still wondered if she had done it to educate Frey too, intending for him to play with them with Tarwyn and learn the difference between a bear and a damned deer and donkey.

“He seems well today,” Melia said in a hushed tone, her voice a soft melody in the quiet white room.

Isla knew Melia wasn’t talking about the boy she watched, but the man who had just left.

“Impatient,” she said in response and Melia’s pale lips curled into a faint smile. “He wants war.”

Her sister glanced across at her and sighed softly, her shoulders shifting with it. “He has not forgiven me for making him remain in the castle while we answered the call of the elves.”

“He will in time. He’s stubborn.”

Melia looked away from her. “Like his brother.”

Isla’s heart ached for her sister as she drifted into the room, the long white skirt of her corseted dress gliding across the wooden floor in her wake, the pure colourless fabric matching her fall of hair that draped across her slender shoulders.

Isla closed the white door and stepped into the room, wishing there was something she could say to take her sister’s mind off Valador, even when she knew it was impossible. Melia saw him every day in their son.

Tarwyn lifted his head, noticing her at last. He was on his bare feet a second later, rushing across the room to hug her legs. His cerulean trousers blended with hers and matched her corset, but where hers were traditional leather, his clothes were soft cotton more suited to a child. He tipped his head back and beamed up at her, his blue eyes sparkling, and began prattling away in the demon tongue about his animals and Frey’s visit.

She listened to him for a while, aware that Melia was watching them from near the arched window. She petted his messy head of blond hair, teased the small horns that were growing in nicely now he was nearly one hundred, and looked at her sister. Melia smiled back at her, the hurt in her eyes gone, replaced with affection and warmth.

Tarwyn took hold of Isla’s hand and tried to pull her towards the fur rug.

“I will play soon. I must speak with your mother first,” she said in the demon tongue and he huffed and pouted, but released her and went back to his toys.

Isla waited for him to sit back down before she crossed the bedchamber to Melia.

Melia’s gaze was on Tarwyn again, a softness in it that made Isla want to sigh and wish for her own child.

Tarwyn was a little miracle, probably the only child of his kind in existence. Phantoms normally bred other phantoms, but the spell that gave Melia substance had allowed her to bear the offspring of her mate, bringing not a phantom but a demon into the world.

“You seem troubled today. What is wrong?” Melia said in English and Isla realised her sister had stopped looking at Tarwyn and was staring at her now.

She wasn’t sure where to begin.

She searched for a starting point, and the courage to tell Melia what she had done and what was happening to her. Her sister wasn’t going to be happy with her. Isla had kept the true reason behind why she had chosen to become corporeal hidden from her sister. Melia had a kind heart for a phantom, a quality that had made her perfect for Valador.

Isla lacked what her sister had been given by the gods. She had kindness in her, but not as Melia did. When faced with someone who had wronged her, or brought harm to her kin, she was as cruel and lethal as any other phantom. Cold. Heartless.

Melia’s sky blue gaze drifted down to her left hand and Isla stilled as she realised she was playing with the braid that hung from her temple on that side. The crystals at the end of the plait were warm beneath her fingertips. She looked down at them, the crimson stark against her pale skin.

A reminder.

She had found the crystals the night she had broken from Grave, had run headlong into the darkness and hadn’t stopped until she had been close to collapse, surrounded by an unfamiliar town and strange faces, leagues away from the comfort of his arms.

She had found a place to rest and an elderly woman at a stall in the market had tried to sell her craft to her, and Isla had seen the crystals and silver wire.

She had braided a length of her long white hair on her left temple, close to her ear, and had woven an intricate knot with the silver wire, slipped the red crystal on and then made another knot below it. On the right side, she had done the same with a blue crystal.

Red for the vampire in her heart.

Blue for the phantom she would become again.

A reminder that one day, everything she loved in this world would slip from her grasp, and it was no one’s fault but her own.

“Isla?” Melia drifted closer and her eyes slipped shut as her sister’s hand came to rest gently on her shoulder, and warmth spread from that spot despite the coolness of her sister’s skin. “Speak to me.”

Isla opened her blue eyes and clutched the red crystal in her fist.

Her vampire mate.

She still dreamed of him every night, and still used the connection between them to keep an eye on him, and still hurt when he used it to get back at her, to show her things she didn’t want to see.

Things that broke her heart.

Things that made her feel guilty.

When she had broken from him, she had convinced herself that she had done the right thing and she had felt nothing for the vampire, no real feelings anyway. She had tried to escape what she had done to him, but she had found she couldn’t, and over the decades she had started to feel guilty about what she had done.

She had seen in her dreams, and in the things he showed to her, that her actions tormented him—her betrayal and the knowledge that the clock was constantly ticking for him. He lived his life waiting for the inevitable day when he would become incorporeal—a phantom male. He wasn’t alone. It hung over her too.

Her freedom was about to be snatched from her and she was starting to feel there was nothing she could do about it. She didn’t want to go back to being a ghost.

She didn’t want that life for Grave either.

She held her hands out in front of her and stared at them.

“Isla.” Melia’s soft voice had gone dark, a thunderclap in her mind that warned her sister knew something was wrong, something terrible.

She looked up into her sister’s eyes, found love and despair in them, and forced the words out.

“My hands faded on the battlefield.”

Melia shook her head and stepped closer, seized both of her shoulders and held her so tightly that it hurt. She savoured the pain, because it made her feel whole, solid, as if she wasn’t about to disappear from this world others enjoyed without appreciating what they had been given by the gods and drift back into the cold world of the phantoms, denied the pleasures others took for granted.

Her sister’s expression turned grave.

It only worsened when Isla gave herself another push.

“I am not the only one this will be happening to,” she whispered and her sister closed her eyes, lowered her head and sighed.

“What have you done?” Melia lifted her head again, canting it to her right, and looked back into her eyes, her eyebrows furrowed and blue gaze filled with a mixture of sympathy and anger.

“Valador… I saw him fall… I saw the male who claimed his life and I-I… I took vengeance on him.” She wasn’t sure she could say any more, not when Melia’s pretty face was shifting towards horrified.

“I told you of the phantom mage who had made me corporeal because I believed that you sought substance purely so you could be with me and Tarwyn when he was born,” Melia snapped and the air in the room chilled, the light sucking from it, turning it shades of grey instead of white. “Valador would not have wanted such a thing. If I had known your plan, I would have stopped you.”

It wasn’t the response Isla had expected and she staggered back a step, slipping from her sister’s grasp and shaking as she battled the surge of guilt and shame, and the pain that always came with it. It beat fiercely in her heart.

“I saw the vampire kill your husband… I wanted to avenge him.” As any phantom would have, but the look on her sister’s face said that it hadn’t been what she had wanted.

Being corporeal had affected Melia’s mind, had softened it and destroyed her phantom nature. It had made her weak.

“
Vengeance
, Sister. I wanted vengeance and I took it. I am a phantom,” Isla barked and regretted it when Melia only sighed, the sorrow remaining in her eyes, leaving her feeling that she was trying to justify what she had done when she didn’t honestly believe she had done the right thing.

It had felt like the right thing at the time, when she had been a phantom.

But then she had fallen in love with the vampire.

“All you have done is doom yourself and now I will lose both my husband and my beloved sister.” Melia’s words were softly spoken but they fell like lead around her, striking hard and shaking her.

“I can fix it,” she said.

Melia was silent for so long that Isla’s nerves kicked up a notch, her heart pounding erratically against her chest as she struggled to find a way to undo what she had done. Was it possible?

“You will need a mage,” Melia said at last and relief swept through Isla but lasted only as long as it took for her sister to speak again. “They are rare now, and you must try to find the one who performed the spell on you. He may be able to fix it… but…”

Isla swallowed hard. “But?”

Melia looked down at her feet. “It will be best you take the vampire with you.”

“No,” Isla snapped and sliced her hand through the air between them. “No.”

It wasn’t going to happen. Grave hated her, probably wanted nothing more than to kill her. His reputation before she had tricked him into becoming a phantom had been deadly enough, should have warned her away, but now he was second to the Devil in the list of most feared males in Hell.

Going anywhere near him would be a death sentence.

“You have done more than merely trick the vampire into becoming a phantom. You are bound to him. The mage’s spell would have made it happen. To make a phantom flesh and blood requires a powerful bond… and that bond must be periodically renewed. I had thought your bond to me was enough… but now I see how wrong I have been. It is your bond to the vampire that gives you substance.” Melia drifted closer again and fixed her with soft blue eyes filled with fear laced with love, and something else.

Something that chilled Isla’s blood and sent a shiver down her spine.

“I will bond with another man,” Isla blurted and Melia shook her head, causing her long white hair to sway across her bare shoulders.

“That is not possible, and you know it. You are bound to the vampire and the vampire to you. If he does not help you, you will both fade.”

That chill grew stronger, the shiver fiercer. “I do not wish to become incorporeal again.”

Her sister’s expression turned pained, flooded with sorrow. “You will not become incorporeal, Isla… you will fade.”