Haunted by the King of Death (8 page)

The part of him that refused to give up and die, the piece that clung to his feelings for her, hoped she found the solution she was looking for and managed to save herself.

He ignored it, pretending it hadn’t said a damn thing, but it was impossible when the same voice whispered poisonous words in his heart, words that rekindled fear in his veins and had him coming to his feet.

The demon prince wanted her as his prize.

And wanted his entire family dead.

A family that wished the same thing for him, but one he was bound to in blood, obliged to warn despite their feelings for him.

He turned towards the window and studied the darkening horizon with a growing sense of dread. He had given himself a day to recuperate, a day in which he had locked himself in this library with three of his men and uncovered the record of the attack on the demon castle in the archives, arming himself with all the information he could muster because he knew he would need it if he was going to convince some members of his family to listen to him.

Now, he couldn’t delay any longer.

He focused on the mark on his back, felt it warm against his skin and start to tingle, and pictured Isla standing before him as she had in his grand hall.

Beautiful, enchanting Isla.

She had spoken about him getting what he deserved, and he wasn’t sure what she had meant by that, but there was a chance it was about to happen, and he couldn’t dispute that he probably did deserve it after what he had done to this person.

The one he intended to warn first.

Would she feel it when his eldest cousin, Snow, killed him in a fit of bloodlust?

G
rave stood beneath the columned portico of an elegant sandstone building in London, staring at a pair of darkened glass sliding doors that seemed so out of place on the old theatre and waging war with himself for a change as he debated whether or not to knock. He glanced over his shoulder, turning his ice blue gaze skywards, and cursed the faint pink tinge on the clouds that signalled what his body was already telling him.

Dawn was coming.

He had delayed long enough, dragging his feet during his preparations and his journey to the nearest portal, putting off entering it by thinking up ridiculous excuses about leaving his legion without their commander when Asher was perfectly capable of leading them in his stead, and then finally accidentally missing several vacant taxis when he had exited the portal in London.

Now, he could delay no longer.

It was either knock on the door and face his cousins, or leave now to find somewhere to wait out the day.

He blew out his breath.

He had faced enemies far more powerful than himself, had battled legions of shifters, demons and even dragons, but facing his family felt like an insurmountable task, one he dreaded, one that left him feeling death had finally caught up with him and was firmly on his heels, a shadow looming at his back waiting to strike him down.

Grave slowly raised his right hand and rapped his knuckles against the glass. Hard. When no one showed up within two minutes, he knocked again.

The doors slid open.

“You are late. Aurora is—” The immense white-haired male cut himself off and scowled at Grave, his pale blue eyes glittering with ice as his eyebrows dipped low above them. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Red seeped into the edges of his cousin’s irises and his pupils began to narrow, starting to turn elliptical. Fangs flashed between Snow’s lips as he snarled low in his throat and advanced on Grave, the sheer size of him and the threat he had issued enough to have Grave backing off a step.

Snow hadn’t courted his bloodlust.

It had been born in the fires of Hell, and wasn’t something Grave wanted for himself or wanted aimed at him. He had danced with his, had stoked it and somehow mastered it, controlled it when normally the affliction controlled its victim.

As it controlled Snow.

Images flashed across Grave’s mind, disjointed and dim memories of a night he would never forget, one that haunted him despite his best attempts to push it forever from his mind.

Blood coated everything. Splashed up walls. Ran down broken furniture.

Bathed battered bodies.

The corpses of his kin.

His aunt. His uncle.

His parents.

Snow had killed them all in a fit of bloodlust, turning their peaceful lakeside chateau into a scene straight out of a hellish nightmare.

War erupted in Snow’s eyes, the ice fighting the fire as he fought with himself, his powerful body visibly shaking. His cousin’s muscles strained against his black t-shirt, trembling beneath the tight material as he curled his fingers into fists at his sides.

“Go away,” Snow bit out, voice a deep pained growl, and staggered back a step. “You are not welcome here.”

The glass doors slid shut.

Grave pulled down a deep breath and tried to silence the voice in his mind that told him to leave. He would, but not yet. He needed to warn his cousins, even when his presence only pained one of them.

He knocked again.

“Fucking hell, what are you doing here?” A light female voice cut through the quiet morning air and he whirled to face the owner, his right hand reaching for a sword that wasn’t there.

The black-haired mortal standing on the steps below him arched an eyebrow at him, her golden eyes eerily bright in the low light.

He should have come armed, but he had feared tipping his cousin over the edge.

Beside the female, a bare-chested demon brute towered, his dusky horns curling around the curve of his pointed ears and beginning to flare forward as he glared at Grave, seven foot of pure muscle and menace. There were other reasons not to attack the mortal female. She was mated to the demon king who was looking at him as if he was searching for a reason to tear out his entrails.

Charming considering that Grave had gone to war on this demon’s behalf, risking his life and those of his men to assist him in his fight against the Fifth Realm of demons only a few months ago.

The door behind him opened again and he spun on his heel, heart leaping into his throat as his claws extended and he prepared for a fight.

That same heart plummeted into his stomach when he found himself facing a slender female with dark hair that tumbled in gentle waves around pale shoulders and green-to-blue eyes that felt as if they were peering down into his soul, pulling out all the darkest memories it held.

All of his sins.

Behind her, Snow loomed in the shadows, his all-black clothing a stark contrast to her fair skin and white dress. His right hand gently rested on her left shoulder, a possessive and protective gesture that warned Grave this was the female Snow had chosen as his mate, the one he had heard about.

Aurora.

An angel.

Or former angel.

Though she hadn’t chosen to turn into a fallen angel, she had chosen to fall from grace for his cousin.

Grave eyed the male, seeing only the brutal vampire he had witnessed on the battlefield countless times and the one who had slaughtered almost all of their family, destroying their bloodline.

He closed his eyes when a sharper image of his mother flashed across his eyes and gritted his teeth as he looked down at her where she lay in his arms, broken and dead, ripped from him.

On the heels of that soul-destroying memory, another more brutal and devastating one followed, hitting him hard now that his defences were down.

His sister.

His little sister.

He stood on the paved drive of another remote chateau, his back to the building and eyes on the snow-white dress that fluttered in the night breeze on the grass, near a pair of black heeled ankle boots and a delicate black-and-red lace choker.

Gods, he relived her terror and her pain, the fear that she too had bloodlust because of their family’s insistence on keeping their bloodline pure, that they had bred into her the same terrible disease that had caused Snow to take most of their family from them. She had been inconsolable, convinced that she would one day lose control and harm her family.

She had been the gentlest creature the world had ever seen, pure of heart and kind of soul, unable to hurt anyone even to feed from them.

She had done the unthinkable.

Unbearable.

She had walked out into the morning and disappeared.

Bastian and Night believed her dead, because her young body wouldn’t have been able to withstand even weak pre-dawn light. Grave couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was gone. He didn’t feel any sense of loss, not as he had when he had held his mother.

He stared at the clothes, studied them closely. Even a full day in sunlight wouldn’t have been enough to disintegrate her body, and there was no evidence that she had burned to death, nothing but her clothes.

She wasn’t dead.

Was she?

The same terrible darkness he had experienced in that moment welled up in him again, his eyes shifting to reflect the blackness pumping through his veins, an undeniable thirst to maim and kill, to spill blood in order to unleash his rage and his pain.

“Aurora, take Sable and Thorne inside,” Snow said, his deep voice swimming in Grave’s ears as memories swamped him, pushing at his control and giving his bloodlust a stronger hold over him.

Gods, he needed the pain and the high of victory, needed to fight something to make those two things happen.

He flicked his near-black eyes open, pinning them on his cousin, and breathed hard, his heart thundering against his chest as he fought with himself rather than surrendering to his need to battle his own flesh and blood.

He had sworn he wouldn’t, never again, not after the night he had confronted Snow about what he had done and had come dangerously close to killing him.

A slave to the very disease that had caused his cousin to murder their family.

Bloodlust.

It rode him hard now, at the helm, controlling him when he was used to controlling it. Oily darkness rushed through his veins, drowned out any good thoughts, any glimmer of light, replacing them with a crushing need to kill.

“Leave,” Snow bit out again and Grave forced himself to shake his head.

“Cannot,” he gritted and dug his emerging claws into his palms, grimaced at the hot sting of them cutting into his flesh, and snarled through his fangs. “I must speak with you.”

Snow folded his arms across his broad chest.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Another familiar male voice shattered the tense silence and Grave slid his black-to-red gaze towards the newcomer, a male with short dark brown hair and ice blue eyes that matched Snow’s and his own.

Antoine. His younger cousin and keeper of Snow, despite what Snow had done to him.

How was it Antoine and Snow could forgive each other, but neither would forgive him?

“I must speak with you both,” Grave ground out and advanced a step, his fury rising to stoke his bloodlust to startling new heights as he faced his cousins.

Both males blamed him for the things Snow had done during his service with the Preux Chevaliers, but Snow’s memories of his time in Hell were muddled, twisted by his bloodlust.

Grave hadn’t had the heart to tell him as much when they had last met and Snow had turned on him, thrown vicious barbs detailing everything he had apparently done while they had served together, essentially making out that he had been the one to awaken Snow’s bloodlust. The male was so desperate to weaken the hold his guilt had on him that he had fabricated events in order to lessen some of the weight on his heart.

He wasn’t sure what would happen if Snow realised what he had done, and he didn’t want to find out.

So he had taken the blame.

All to stop his cousin from slipping deeper into the hold of his bloodlust.

Grave looked over his shoulder at the lightening sky and then back at his cousins where they stood side by side in the dark entrance hall of the theatre, Snow standing at least two inches taller than his younger brother. If it wasn’t for their eyes, many wouldn’t believe they were siblings.

Snow’s white hair was wild, brushing the nape of his neck and his jaw, and his black t-shirt and jeans, and heavy soled black leather boots, made him look more like a biker or a goth than a respectable owner of a vampire theatre.

Antoine matched that image perfectly. Neatly clipped brown hair, clean shaven square jaw, and expensive dove grey tailored shirt tucked into an equally expensive pair of crisp black slacks, topped off with polished Italian leather shoes.

They couldn’t have looked more opposite to each other if they had tried.

The back of Grave’s neck prickled in warning.

“Let me in,” he said in a calm tone despite his desire to snap at his cousins as his nerves began to get the better of him again, entwining with his bloodlust to make him more dangerous than ever.

The sun was perilously close to rising now and he wasn’t sure whether the buildings around them would give him much cover. There were alleys between them all, and the road at his back was wide enough that the sun could easily hit him if it rose at either end of it. He looked around again, trying to chart the position of it.

“I would not be here if it was not important,” he barked and advanced another step. Antoine flashed fangs at him and Snow scowled and moved a step towards him, coming to block his path into the building. He flicked another glance at the sky. He was almost out of time. Time he might not have to find shelter if he didn’t convince his cousins to allow him inside right now. “It concerns all the family.”

Snow’s face shifted, softening as he frowned at him.

“Twelve-eighty-nine. A demon stronghold on the borders of the Devil’s domain and a mission to eradicate the threat contained in it,” Grave said and Snow’s arms fell to his sides, his frown melting away and his expression turning curious.

The crimson in his cousin’s eyes faded as conflicting emotions flickered in them, and he knew Snow was remembering the mission.

“I am listening.” Snow eased back a step, but didn’t clear the doorway.

It was a start, but Grave was damned if he was going to have this conversation on their doorstep when the sun had just broken the horizon and he was in danger of being exposed to it. He was old enough to withstand it for a short time, but he didn’t want to test how much immunity to it his two thousand years would give him.