Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection: 1/6 (209 page)

If that was true, if Lissa had a half-brother or half-sister . . . it would change everything. She would get a vote on the Council. She would no longer be alone.
If
it was true.
If
this was from Tatiana. Anyone could sign her name to a piece of paper. It didn’t make it real. Still, I shivered, troubled at the thought of getting a letter from a dead woman. If I allowed myself to see the ghosts around us, would Tatiana be there, restless and vengeful? I couldn’t bring myself to let down my walls and look. Not yet. There had to be other answers. Ambrose had given me the note. I needed to ask him . . . except we were moving down the aisle again. A guardian nudged me along.

“What’s that?” asked Abe, always alert and suspicious.

I hastily folded the note back up. “Nothing.”

The look he gave me told me he didn’t believe that at all. I wondered if I should tell him.
It is a secret you must share with as few as possible.
If he was one of the few, this wasn’t the place. I tried to distract him from it and shake the dumbstruck look that must have been on my face. This note was a big problem—but not quite as big as the one immediately facing me.

“You told me I wouldn’t go to trial,” I said to Abe. My earlier annoyance returned. “I took a big chance with you!”

“It wasn’t a big chance. Tarus couldn’t have got you out of this either.”

Abe’s easy attitude about all this infuriated me further. “Are you saying you knew this hearing was a lost cause from the beginning?” It was what Mikhail had said too. How nice to have such faith from everyone.

“This hearing wasn’t important,” Abe said evasively. “What happens next is.”

“And what is that exactly?”

He gave me that dark, sly gaze again. “Nothing you need to worry about yet.”

One of the guardians put his hand on my arm, telling me I needed to move. I resisted his pull and leaned toward Abe.

“The hell I don’t! This is my life we’re talking about,” I exclaimed. I knew what would come next. Imprisonment until the trial. And then more imprisonment if I was convicted. “This is serious! I don’t want to go to trial! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a place like Tarasov.”

The guard tugged harder, pushing us forward, and Abe fixed me with a piercing gaze that made my blood run cold.

“You will
not
go to trial. You will
not
go to prison,” he hissed, out of the guards’ hearing. “I won’t allow it. Do you understand?”

I shook my head, confused over so much and not knowing what to do about any of it. “Even you have your limits, old man.”

His smile returned. “You’d be surprised. Besides, they don’t even send royal traitors to prison, Rose. Everyone knows that.”

I scoffed. “Are you insane? Of course they do. What else do you think they do with traitors? Set them free and tell them not to do it again?”

“No,” said Abe, just before he turned away. “They execute traitors.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

 

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Last Sacrifice

 

RAZORBILL

 

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I
DON'T LIKE CAGES.

I don't even like going to zoos. The first time I went to one, I almost had a claustrophobic attack looking at those poor animals. I couldn't imagine any creature living that way. Sometimes I even felt a little bad for criminals, condemned to life in a cell. I'd certainly never expected to spend
my
life in one.

But lately, life seemed to be throwing me a lot of things I'd never expected, because here I was, locked away.

"Hey!" I yelled, gripping the steel bars that isolated me from the world. "How long am I going to be here? When's my trial? You can't keep me in this dungeon forever!"

Okay, it wasn't exactly a dungeon, not in the dark, rusty-chain sense. I was inside a small cell with plain walls, a plain floor, and well . . . plain everything. Spotless. Sterile. Cold. It was actually more depressing than any musty dungeon could have managed. The bars in the doorway felt cool against my skin, hard and unyielding. Fluorescent lighting made the metal gleam in a way that felt harsh and irritating to my eyes. I could see the shoulder of a man standing rigidly to the side of the cell's entrance and knew there were probably four more guardians in the hallway out of my sight. I also knew none of them were going to answer me back, but that hadn't stopped me from constantly demanding answers from them for the last two days.

When the usual silence came, I sighed and slumped back on the cot in the cell's corner. Like everything else in my new home, the cot was colorless and stark. Yeah. I really was starting to wish I had a real dungeon. Rats and cobwebs would have at least given me something to watch. I stared upward and immediately had the disorienting feeling I always did in here: that the ceiling and walls were closing in around me. Like I couldn't breathe. Like the sides of the cell would keep coming toward me until no space remained, pushing out all the air . . .

I sat up abruptly, gasping.
Don't stare at the walls and ceiling, Rose
, I chastised myself. Instead, I looked down at my clasped hands and tried to figure out how I'd gotten into this mess.

The initial answer was obvious: someone had framed me for a crime I didn't commit. And it wasn't petty crime either. It was murder. They'd had the audacity to accuse me of the highest crime a Moroi or dhampir could commit. Now, that isn't to say I haven't killed before. I have. I've also done my fair share of rule (and even law) breaking. Cold-blooded murder, however, was not in my repertoire. Especially not the murder of a queen.

It was true Queen Tatiana hadn't been a friend of mine. She'd been the coolly calculating ruler of the Moroi—a race of living, magic-using vampires who didn't kill their victims for blood. Tatiana and I had had a rocky relationship for a number of reasons. One was me dating her great-nephew, Adrian. The other was my disapproval of her policies on how to fight off Strigoi—the evil, undead vampires who stalked us all. Tatiana had tricked me a number of times, but I'd never wanted her dead. Someone apparently had, however, and they'd left a trail of evidence leading right to me, the worst of which were my fingerprints all over the silver stake that had killed Tatiana. Of course, it was
my
stake, so naturally it'd have my fingerprints. No one seemed to think that was relevant.

I sighed again and pulled out a tiny crumpled piece of paper from my pocket. My only reading material. I squeezed it in my hand, having no need to look at the words. I'd long since memorized them. The note's contents made me question what I'd known about Tatiana. It had made me question a lot of things.

Frustrated with my own surroundings, I slipped out of them and into someone else's: my best friend Lissa's. Lissa was a Moroi, and we shared a psychic link, one that let me go to her mind and see the world through her eyes. All Moroi wielded some type of elemental magic. Lissa's was spirit, an element tied to psychic and healing powers. It was rare among Moroi, who usually used more physical elements, and we barely understood its abilities—which were incredible. She'd used spirit to bring me back from the dead a few years ago, and that's what had forged our bond.

Being in her mind freed me from my cage but offered little help for my problem. Lissa had been working hard to prove my innocence, ever since the hearing that had laid out all the evidence against me. My stake being used in the murder had only been the beginning. My opponents had been quick to remind everyone about my antagonism toward the queen and had also found a witness to testify about my whereabouts during the murder. That testimony had left me without an alibi. The Council had decided there was enough evidence to send me to a full-fledged trial—where I would receive my verdict.