Haunted by the King of Death (7 page)

Guilt.

The man before her was so different to the one she had tricked into kissing her, so much darker, and it was her fault. She was responsible for the changes that had taken place, turning a passionate and attentive vampire into a powerful, dark and deadly monster.

And now she had to ask the monster she had made for a sliver of compassion, for his help.

She didn’t deserve it, but she still dared to hope that he would give her the help she needed because he would fade too if they didn’t do something about their bond.

His eyes narrowed on her and glittered with ice as he lowered the goblet to rest on the arm of his throne.

“Come to finish the job, Isla?” His voice darkened as he eyed the handles of the two blades strapped to her lower back. “I can see no other reason you would crawl back to me.”

The phantom instincts she tried so hard to contain got the better of her and she took a hard step towards him. “You deserved what you got.”

“Did I?” He chuckled mirthlessly, a bitter hollow sound that she didn’t like, not when she had heard him truly laugh with joy. “I seem to always get what I deserve.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but the distant look in his eyes and the feelings she could sense in him said it wasn’t directed at her. Something was troubling him. She glanced at his chest, at the fresh healing scars on it, and the ones on his handsome face too. He had been in a battle again. Had something happened there?

He idly swung the goblet back and forth, his pale eyes locked on it as the blood sloshed side to side.

“It is nice to still be able to hold things.” His gaze slid towards her and darkened, his voice little more than a snarl as he glared at her. “Would you not agree?”

She fought the urge but her eyes still dropped to her blue boots.

“We have a problem,” she whispered.

“No, I have a problem. More than one but let us focus on the one that stems from you.” Grave’s grim tone had her lifting her head again, pinning him with a look she knew conveyed every ounce of curiosity running through her blood because he scowled at her in the way he always did when daring her to say something when he wanted her silent. He stood sharply and the goblet in his hand came flying at her so fast she barely had time to dodge it. It exploded against the wall behind her and she flinched. Grave growled. “You get to go back to being the phantom you are. I fail to see how that is a problem for you, Isla. You can lure more men to their doom with that pretty smile and those wicked curves. You must have grown bored of being stuck in this world, bound to one male… unable to get your fill of—”

“We will not become phantoms,” Isla interjected, unable to bear any more of his barbs.

He fell silent, stood there before his throne staring at her again, staring right through her in that way he had perfected, reducing her back to the meek female she hated with all of her heart but couldn’t seem to stop becoming in his presence.

She looked down at her boots.

“If we do not become phantoms… what do we become?” His calm and collected tone sent a shiver through her, a warning that she was treading on thin ice. “What will this do to us?”

This male was at his most dangerous when he was like this, outwardly unaffected by anything, but inwardly churning with anger, with darkness that ruled him and began to show in his eyes as the scarlet gained ground against the pale blue.

Fire and ice.

Grave was made of them. A beautiful contradiction. Two elements that shouldn’t be able to live together but somehow he made it work, harnessed both to his advantage.

Savage bloodlust.

Ironclad calm.

Isla tipped her chin up and faced her fears head on, because all he could do to her was exactly what was going to happen to her anyway if he refused to help. “It will kill us.”

His handsome face turned sombre, lips flattening for a moment, before his expression darkened and eyes narrowed on her.

“And I am meant to believe this?”

Isla frowned back at him. “Believe what you want. It is the truth, Grave.”

“Do not speak my name,” he barked, so loud that it echoed around the room and she tensed, instinctively took a step back towards the door as his rage poured over her and shone in his scarlet eyes. “You do not have the right to speak it. Not anymore.”

Isla lowered her eyes and they caught on his chest, on a chain around it and a pendant she could see now that he had stood, causing it to fall from beneath the sides of his black shirt.

The delicate silver Celtic knot nestled in the valley between his pectorals.

The ancient symbol was one of protection, designed for a loved one.

A phantom symbol.

A gift that she had given him.

A spark of hope ignited in her chest.

Grave lifted his hand, slipped his fingers beneath the pendant and raised it, drawing her eyes up with it. They jumped back to his face when the pendant reached his chin and she searched his eyes, aching for a sign that whatever feelings he’d had for her still existed somewhere inside him and that he would help her.

“I wear this,” he said in a low voice, soft and almost tender as he gazed at the symbol of her affection. “I wear this to remind me of your lies… a reminder of what you did to me, in case I am ever foolish enough to forget it… to relinquish my mission to make you suffer.”

The spark of hope inside her stuttered and died.

His face blackened and he curled his fingers around the pendant as he scowled at her, the red bleeding from his eyes, leaving them icy cold blue again.

“If death is the price you must pay for what you have done, so be it, Isla.” He turned away from her, stepped off the platform and walked towards the open door in the back right corner of the room.

Isla took swift steps towards him, panic rising to swallow her as he stepped through the doorway.

Her entire body tensed when he slammed the dark wooden door in her face.

Her knees wobbled but she refused to collapse, forced herself to stand tall.

She had been a fool to hope Grave would help her. She never should have listened to her sister. Melia didn’t know him like she did. Now she had wasted another day in which she could have been hunting for a phantom mage.

But worse than that, she ached more than ever for Grave.

Isla pressed her right hand to her chest and closed her eyes, focused on the mark on her back between her shoulder blades, near her heart. It warmed, tingling on her skin, but then the connection that had been opening slammed shut in her face just as the door had.

She turned away from it, lifted her chin and let her hand fall away from her heart.

If Grave wouldn’t help her, then she would track down a phantom mage alone. She would do all in her power to stop what was happening to her, and to Grave.

She would save him somehow.

She owed him that much.

She couldn’t undo what she had done...

Isla stilled.

Or could she?

G
rave stood at a window in the huge library on the top floor of the palace, staring down into the courtyard, watching the slender female as she appeared from the building and stormed across the sandstone flags.

Her steps slowed as she neared the fountain and she looked back at the palace, an expression on her face that called to him.

There had been hope in her stunning blue eyes when she had spoken with him, but now there was nothing but despair and pain, and he enjoyed it, but gods, he hated it at the same time.

He cursed her in his mind and tried to tear his eyes away from her, tried to force himself to turn his back on the window and stop watching her, but he couldn’t stop looking at her and couldn’t walk away.

He had barely kept his cool and refrained from standing as she had swept into his grand hall, had barely leashed the hot bolt of lust that had burned through him on seeing her again.

She was as beautiful as he remembered.

Even with their apparently joint problem diminishing her slightly, she was still radiant. Ethereal. Breathtaking.

Dangerous to him because of it.

He had thought he was over her, that during their time apart the things she had done had destroyed any and all feelings he’d had for her, leaving his heart free of her. Leaving him cold and immune to her.

He had thought wrong.

One single glimpse of her. One single breath of her sweet scent. One single word falling from her lips.

It was all it had taken to pull him back under her spell.

He despised her for that, and hated himself too.

He turned on a snarl as she disappeared from view beyond the main gate of the fortress and began pacing along the bank of windows. Fury rolled through him with each hard step, anger at her for daring to walk back into his life and at himself for turning her away, and being foolish enough to hope she might fight harder, might have come back when she had stopped at the fountain rather than walking away.

Gods, had he really wanted her to come back?

He squeezed his eyes shut, growled through his clenched teeth and shook his head. No. He hadn’t. He really hadn’t.

A quiet voice whispered that he had.

Grave crushed it out of existence.

He paced harder, trying to work off some steam and purge her from his life again.

But her scent lingered in his lungs, her beauty still branded on his mind.

He grabbed the nearest wooden chair and roared as he sent it flying across the library. It smashed into the bookcase lining the far wall, shattering into pieces and knocking several books to the floor with it.

Grave grabbed another, and then another, and when chairs weren’t enough to satisfy the need to destroy everything because he couldn’t destroy what he really wanted—his feelings for Isla—he tipped one of the ebony desks over and unleashed his fury on it, attacking it with claws, fists and booted feet until it was little more than a scattered pile of tinder on the wooden floor.

His chest heaved as he breathed hard, head bent and heart pounding, anger still thundering in his blood.

He stilled when someone halted outside the double doors of the library.

Waited.

Asher wisely moved on, and Grave waited for him to pass beyond the sphere of his acute senses before he staggered backwards to the window and slumped onto the seat there, the back of his head smacking against the glass panes. He grimaced as his healing right shoulder ached under the pressure of his weight and shifted into a more comfortable position.

He stared at the destruction he had wrought, feeling nothing, not a single care about what he had done.

Not when his heart still beat for Isla.

He had thought he was free of her. He had thought he was stronger and able to see her without her affecting him, without feeling anything for her. He had thought that whatever he had once held in his heart had died when she had shattered that organ, but the sight of her had robbed him of his breath and her scent had made him hard as steel in his trousers, aching for her.

He was never going to be free of her, not so long as they were bound.

She would always affect him, no matter how much he hated it.

Grave tipped his head back, pressing it into the glass, and closed his eyes, breathing out a deep sigh as resignation filled him.

“Damn her,” he muttered, raised both hands and ran them over his dark hair, clawing it back.

He couldn’t think about her right now, not when he had more important things on his mind, things he had almost foolishly revealed to her with his careless words. He had caught the look in her eyes, the intense curiosity.

He lowered his right hand to his chest and rubbed his thumb across the pendant around his neck.

Just as he had witnessed the spark of hope she had felt on seeing he still owned the trinket she had given him.

And he had done all in his power to crush that hope.

Grave looked down at the intricate knot, recalling what he had said to her—he wore it as a reminder of what she had done to him in case he was ever foolish enough to forget it and relinquish his mission to make her suffer.

The reality was so much worse than that.

He couldn’t bring himself to part with it.

Gods, he had tried.

He had cast it into a valley in the Sixth Realm once and turned his back on it, only to end up scouring the black lands for it, desperate to find it again and have it back in his possession. It had taken him five days of searching, five days without sleep or blood.

When he had finally found it, he had experienced such a powerful surge of relief that his knees had given out and he had sat in the middle of the valley, clutching it tightly in his fist, close to tears.

He curled his lip.

There might have been one or two tears.

The metal warmed as he traced the knot, following the lines of it, the weight of it soothing in his fingers.

He hadn’t taken it off since that day.

He should have known from that alone that seeing Isla again had been a bad idea, that he wasn’t over her at all. If he didn’t have the strength to part with a stupid trinket, how the hell had he expected to have the strength to see her and feel nothing?

Imbecile.

He huffed and released the pendant.

Was it possible she had spoken the truth though? She was fading too, and rather than becoming phantoms, they were dancing with death?

A few days ago, he would have leaped at the chance to hear what she had to say, to bleed her for any information she had that might help him or even use her just to save himself, but now all he could think about was the pressing need he felt to save someone else.

The mark between his shoulder blades warmed and this time he didn’t close the connection to her, but he did hold things back from her, only allowing her to feel his negative emotions, the anger and frustration he felt.

Not anger and frustration born of her and her visit.

These emotions were born of the demon prince and his threat.

Grave turned his head to his left, looked into the courtyard below and then beyond it to the wall and the grand gate, and the dark stone buildings of the town outside. Was she still out there or had she already moved on, using one of the portals to teleport somewhere else in Hell?