Curse of Dracula - Kathryn Ann Kingsley Page 0,108

as she kissed him back. In that moment, she reached deep into his soul. She thrust herself deep into the center of his very being.

He gasped, and suddenly she was on her back. But he was not trying to escape. No. He drove himself deeper inside her, leaning his weight against her hips. She wrapped her legs around his waist and met his force, if not his strength.

She dug deeper into his soul. Into the center of that unknowable mass she had sensed each time she had touched him. There, at its center…was a poison. Tearing his soul free would leave some of it within her. This curse. But she would happily pay the price for her actions.

It would likely destroy her.

Good.

He broke her kiss but did not sever their link. “Maxine…I love you.”

Her reach rested at the center of the poison. At the beating vein of corruption that drove him. It was as though she held veins in her hand, if each were made from delicate spun glass. It was so fragile there at its core. She could break it. “I…I love you. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He smiled against her lips. “I’m not.” He kissed her.

She shattered him.

It was as though something rent in half.

Something that was never meant to come apart.

She could not say exactly what it was.

26

Alfonzo screamed. Hoarse and almost soundless, but he tried. It was a sound that was familiar now. He thought he could no longer feel the pain of what they were doing to him, but he was very wrong.

The tourniquets had done a good job at dulling the pain of the creatures eating his limbs. But now three of the four were gone. His right hand was gone. His arm that ended in the stump of a wrist was all he had left, stitched shut effectively but painfully.

A ghoul was lying flat on the ground, tonguing the stitches, sucking blood from the wound without fully opening it. He was being defiled. Just as he defiled Bella. More than anything they had done to him so far, now he was being taken apart from the inside.

He wanted to die.

He wanted it to end.

But death was no longer the way it ended for him. This would continue. It would go on for weeks or longer if the mad Vampire King had his way.

His scream broke off in a hopeless, empty sob. “I give up,” he whispered. “I give up. Make it stop.”

The Chainmaster—Alfonzo’s new Master—dragged the ghoul away from him with the yank of a leash. “Good boy. Good.” He soothed the ghoul, not Alfonzo. He sent the creature out of the room. “We have one more thing to do before I fetch Master Dracula and give him the wonderful news.”

The demon left the room and returned with a silver tray. On it…was a roasted hand. The Chainmaster placed it on the ground beside him, dug deep into his shoulder, and wrenched Alfonzo over so his face hovered over it.

“Eat.”

And he did.

There was a temple. A temple in the sand. It was built from stones carefully cut and stacked atop each other, covered in white limestone and polished to a perfect shine.

The structure would last for a thousand years and maybe more. Maxine stood there in the center of the enormous room, columns of painted plaster and limestone reaching up overhead. It reminded her of somewhere she had seen before. A throne room designed to inspire horror and dread.

She was in another vision.

This place was designed to make its visitors feel as small and as meaningless and trivial as Vlad’s throne room. It was meant to compel its guests to kneel in worship. Although this one was built in dedication to a very different god than the vampire she had known.

Perhaps this was the last dream she would have before she died. She gazed up at a statue of a bird-headed deity. A large, flat disk of polished copper sat atop the head of the falcon. She knew his name. She was not raised among the Roma and did not read the tarot without knowing from where they drew their history.

Ra. The sun god of Egypt in times long past. No one remained to worship him. No one remained who lit candles to him. And if they did, they were few in number. But it was not the now in which she stood. This was not her dream.

This was his.

She had torn Vlad’s soul from his body, and something had ripped in two. And