It didn’t matter. I would walk in there and I would walk back out with Christopher and Robert. Or at the very least, I would see Roland’s blood on my new sword before he crushed me.
Maybe I should just stop thinking altogether.
The bridges ended. I wasn’t ready.
Curran paused and examined the swan. “What the hell . . .”
“Just go with it,” I told him.
A wide arched door waited for me in the swan’s side, right where the legs would’ve been tucked under the body. A stairway of white marble stairs led to the door.
He’d killed my mother. He was going to claim the city I called home. He’d stopped a horde of undead vampires in Mishmar.
This was happening.
Every nerve in my body tensed. My breathing deepened. My muscles became loose and pliant, like I had spent half an hour warming up before a big fight. It felt like my blood was boiling. Next to me Curran rolled his head, stretching his neck and loosening his shoulders.
The stairs ended. The arched door swung open. I walked through the open doors into my father’s palace.
• • •
I HAD EXPECTED a sterile monochromatic space. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Warm, sand-colored tiles lined the floor. An indoor garden, lush with green plants, spread on both sides of me in curved, raised beds, bordered by a gently winding pond, where fat lazy koi floated under the lily pads. The air smelled of lotus and roses. Tiny insects, blue and green and ruby-red, floated between the flowers, like a scattering of weightless jewels carelessly flung by the handful into the air.
In the center of the garden, a round mechanism of golden and silver gears rotated, balanced on a thin spike. Hair-thin wire rings wrapped around the mass of gears. The rings spun and turned, hypnotic in their beauty. Magic emanated around it. Was this an atomic model of some sort?
I made my mouth move. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know,” Landon said. “He built it one afternoon on a whim.”
A giant door waited at the other end of the room.
I reached forward with my senses. Vampires.
My hands were trembling. Hell no. I’d had twenty-seven years to prepare. I wouldn’t lose it now. I inhaled the air, letting it out slowly. My hands steadied. My pulse slowed.
“You can’t go any farther than that door,” Landon said to Curran.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll wait in the doorway.”
We passed between the flowers, circled the mechanism, and stopped before the door. I touched it and it swung open. A long room stretched before me, its white marble walls soaring up. I stood on a raised walkway. Twenty feet wide, it spanned the length of the room, running from the door all the way to the opposite wall. A trench bordered both sides of the walkway, filled with vampires. Past the trenches, on the sides, men and women waited, standing quietly. My father’s court.
The walkway ended in a raised dais. In the very center of it, on a throne formed by the bodies of serpents carved from glossy white stone, sat my father. He wore white.
I looked at his face.
He looked back at me.
The instant I saw his eyes, I knew why my mother loved him. His skin was a deep even bronze, saturated with the sun’s warmth. His nose was straight with a sloping tip, his cheekbones carved with careful attention, his jawline strong and masculine. A length of white cloth tossed over his head covered most of his hair. A short beard with a touch of silver traced his jaw, but the eyebrows above it were black, and his eyes were young and full of life. He could’ve been Arabic or Jewish, Hindu or Hispanic. Had he been twenty years younger, he could silence a room full of women simply by walking in. But he chose to appear older. When orphans dreamed of being adopted, this was the kind of father they pictured. His eyes radiated wisdom and kindness, intelligence, and calm surety, born of age and confidence in his own power. He could’ve been an ancient king, a great prophet, or a revered teacher. He had killed my mother. I hated him. Yet when he looked on me now, I wanted to stand taller. It was like being in the light of the morning sun. When the power of those eyes shone on my mother, she had no chance.
What little doubts I had evaporated. He really had meant to kill me in the womb, because nothing short of complete desperation would’ve torn my mother from his side.
Next to me Curran paused, ready, like a lion before a strike. His face iced over. Muscles bulged on his legs, stretching the jeans. His eyes had turned completely gold. He lost all expression and slid into that perfect calm of a predator focused on his prey. He was treating my dad to an alpha stare.
For some dumb reason, nervous laughter bubbled up inside me. My father and Curran were glaring at each other. Maybe if I whistled and waited long enough, a tumbleweed would roll by.
The stone serpents slid against each other. Their heads rose above my father’s shoulders and they looked at me with crimson eyes. Here he was inside a swan palace, a marvel of delicate beauty, sitting upon a throne of massive stone snakes. My father knew he was a bastard. He was the venomous serpent in a bed of roses. Apparently, he didn’t just acknowledge that fact, he beat people over the head with it. All that was missing was a neon sign that read EVIL AND CONFLICTED ABOUT IT with a flashing arrow pointing at his head.
Hugh d’Ambray stood to the right of the throne and a couple of steps below it. His face looked like he had to be physically restrained from losing his shit and slaughtering everything he saw. His gaze snagged on something over my right shoulder. Landon. A muscle jerked in Hugh’s face. Oh noes, someone didn’t like being upstaged.
Our gazes met. I winked at him. Your turn to be in the cage. It has no bars, but it’s still a cage.
On the other side of the throne, on a small bench, Robert and Christopher sat in identical poses, their spines rigid, their knees together. They stared straight at me with glazed-over eyes. They probably couldn’t even see me.
“It’s stasis,” Landon whispered behind me. “It will wear off with distance and time.”
The vampires and Roland’s court stared at me.
“You can do this, baby,” Curran said quietly, his gaze fixed on Roland. “Go in, get them, kill anything that gets in the way. You are coming out alive. I promise you that.”
I raised my head. My voice rang through the room, too loud. “I’ve come for my people.”
Roland leaned forward slightly and the snakes slid, adjusting themselves to the change in his posture. His voice resonated through the room, deep and saturated with power. “If they are yours, come and claim them.”