A Shade of Vampire 80 A Veil of Dark - Bella Forrest Page 0,62

but things are going to change now.”

With the cat out of the bag like this, I doubted they had another choice. Danika was definitely annoyed. She’d previously mentioned righteousness and teaching her son about doing the right thing during one of our many conversations, but when it came to actually doing something about it, she didn’t seem that excited. In my book, that made her dangerous and untrustworthy, and I now wondered whether she’d really been in the dark about the blood slave trade, or she’d just pretended.

“It will be fine, dear wife,” Acheron continued, pressing the wax stamp onto the document, thus making it official. “They’ll be angry for a while. They’ll object. They’ll try to go behind the empire’s back, of course. One or two heads will fall, and then everybody will get in line. Our son is right: there is no shortage of blood on Visio. The Rimians and the Naloreans give it willingly, without any form of blood slavery. We can’t keep encouraging the Darklings, dammit.”

“I trust your judgment, dear husband,” Danika replied, though she didn’t sound like she’d actually meant it. Her tone was flat. Her gaze was empty as she stared at the full glass in front of her.

We’d accomplished something incredible, mainly thanks to Thayen. The Lord and Lady Supreme of Visio had approved a law that banned the blood slave trade. If that didn’t put a dent in the Darklings’ operations, I wasn’t sure what else would. It wasn’t enough to destroy them, of course, but the loss of funds was bound to affect their operations.

Stealing glances at Danika, I wondered how she would discuss this issue with the aforementioned elites. Her problem, not ours, I thought. What truly mattered was that significant progress had been made. Those villages and remote settlements were now better protected. It spoke to Thayen’s character more than it did to his parents’.

Nethissis

As the morning washed over Astoria with mild sunshine through a thinly veiled haze, I stayed close to Rudolph near the ghouls’ pen. It was time to speed things along and get us a Reaper scythe for me to help set Seeley free. I had a feeling his safety net was crumbling, and that Zoltan might decide to turn him into a ghoul—that was a process I didn’t even want to see, as intriguing as it might’ve sounded.

Ghouls were made from Reapers who ate the souls of the dead. I had no idea how Zoltan was speeding up that process, nor how he made the Reapers eat souls, to begin with. Frankly, I did not have a shred of interest in finding out.

Veliko came to the ghoul pen early, unfastening Rudolph’s rune chain from the central stem which Zoltan had mounted on a massive, immovable boulder. “Rise and shine, you translucent beast,” he said.

Rudolph let a low growl leave his throat.

“Obey him,” I advised the former Reaper. “It’s our only shot. You’re already on his good side with… you know, with what you did yesterday.”

Whimpering, Rudolph looked at me, and I felt awful.

“I know. I’m sorry you have to go through all this,” I added. “But you don’t want to spend an eternity serving these bastards.”

Relenting, Rudolph put on a friendly demeanor for Veliko, who pulled him away from the other, half-sleeping ghouls. I had noticed that most were more active during the night, reserving the days for lounging about and napping for hours on end. Not because they needed the sleep, but likely because they preferred darkness to light.

“That’s a good boy,” Veliko muttered, taking Rudolph on a perimeter check around Astoria.

I caught glimpses of Darklings along the way, many clustered in small groups and whispering among themselves. They all went quiet when Veliko passed them by. Some nodded at him, and he smiled back in return. I had a feeling they were planning something, and that Veliko was in the loop. Based on his sharp rhetoric against Zoltan, it didn’t seem like such a leap to assume that they were planning to overthrow him as the Scholar of this group.

Veliko struck me as ambitious and ruthless. The kind who would not settle for being an underling much longer.

On the other side of the encampment, we saw Zoltan performing spells to strengthen the protections around this place. He drew symbols into the hard ground with the tip of his scythe, whispering ancient words that I didn’t understand. He didn’t even pay attention to Veliko as we circled around and moved on to the north