Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 111353 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 445(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111353 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 445(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
That first night, we holed up in my room together with half-eaten plates of dinner on the coffee table while we had a long talk. To be honest, I braced myself to hear him rant and rave and curse Ronin Belphe to earth, just so he could curse him back to hell. But instead, the mention of him brought a sad, wry smile to his lips.
“That dead fucker,” he gruffed, shaking his head. “He really... loves you.”
My muscles locked up, leaving my mouth hanging there.
“It’s because of him,” Tristan whispered, “that I now know what love is.”
It took me a full ten minutes to recover enough to speak, and when I did, I slapped that statement out of the room. I went off on him—shouting that Ronin’s sick, twisted obsession wasn’t love! He forced me to kill my own sister. He put the blade in my hand and ordered me through a slave bond to take the last of my family out of this world.
That wasn’t love by anyone’s definition, and it never would be.
Tristan didn’t argue with me after that, and he didn’t bring Ronin up again.
I wound through the hallways—twisting and turning corners until I reached the staircase to the tower.
“Nik will have found Erlik and delivered the message by now,” I murmured to myself as I climbed the steps. “Which means the headmistress can’t claim I didn’t honor her demand that I give her and the demons a head-start on the Hallow Hunt.” Glancing down, I typed the last word on my DeadDrop message and hit send.
Me: The dragon is the hallow of the flame. The siren is the hallow of the sea. The elf is the hallow of the wood. The angel is the hallow of the air.
Although it may have seemed like I put a target on the backs of all those creatures, all of those creatures already had targets on their backs. For hundreds of years, they’ve been hiding from the persecution of demons, and now they’ll go further underground... and out of Lucifer’s reach.
His element of surprise was lost. His advantage of being the only one in the race was gone. His army of devoted pledges and followers were gone too, because if the last few weeks had shown me anything, it was that the Hallow Hunt was every man and woman for himself. Anyone he sent to retrieve the hallows could easily betray him and keep it for themselves.
Lucifer was going to spend another thousand years chasing down his prizes—
“And let’s hope he’s got his hands on another living Avos witch by the time he does, because now that he’s got everything he wants in his reach...”
I stepped out into the blistering, scorching wind whipping across the tower. Gazing across the barren plains, everything looked the same as it did the day Iarla chased me out here, tricking me with the imp’s illusions.
“Now that you’re so close to everything you want,” I whispered as I climbed onto the ledge. “I’m ripping it from you.” I dropped a grim smile on the deadly plunge below. “How’s that for feeling my wrath?”
Lifting my foot, I jumped.
Chapter Fifteen
Ronin
“Would you mind taking your notes to Erlik for me? So he can deliver them to the headmistress? I’ve never met the woman, but I’ve got a feeling her threats are promises.”
I stood in the corner of the room, watching events unfold. Despite my promise to protect her and not interfere, I wanted to break through my invisibility glamour and strangle that rat with my bare hands.
Despite his promise to Charlotte that he’d deliver his mothers’ message to her first, I knew for a fact that the reason it took him three and a half weeks to make a three-day journey was because he stopped off and gave the information to any and everyone who paid his price for a head start in the Hallow Hunt.
I knew from the second I saw the bitch. This rat was a snake.
Done with him, Charlotte left the room and I followed behind her—never more than three feet away as I’d been for the last four weeks.
And what an interesting four weeks it had been.
Charlotte was right that announcing the Hallow Hunt to all of hell gave her added protection. Almost immediately, all the vampire elders of all the covens declared to their people that Charlotte wasn’t to be touched. There were a billion food sources in the mortal world. And any vampire who threw that away to feed on one would die in the most brutal way the elders could imagine.
An even more effective threat than expulsion, because not a single vampire tried it. More than that, a few of them even foiled other murder attempts against Charlotte.
The vampires were done starving. They were done chasing after food that bit back. They wanted out of hell, and they wanted out now.