A Shade of Vampire 80 A Veil of Dark - Bella Forrest Page 0,92

a better game. Chances were it would end badly for me, at least on an emotional level.

He lied to me.

Two could play that game.

Kelara

“What the hell?” I croaked, as soon as my feet hit the ground.

I couldn’t believe it. Out of all the places in the world, this was where the Morning Star had brought us. Soul, Phantom, and Widow didn’t seem as shocked by any of this. Then again, they didn’t know as much as I did about the living, particularly about the Shadians.

“This is where my brother is,” Morning said, slightly confused. “I can feel him here.”

“If anyone can find the Night Bringer, it’s her,” Phantom said. She frowned, as if trying to understand why my jaw was so close to hitting the floor. “I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I mumbled.

I’d never been here before, but I remembered the stories that Seeley had told me about this place—stories he’d heard from Derek and his people. I recognized the hazy sky with reddish streaks dancing across it. Mountains rose everywhere, titans who’d seen too much and could tell no one. There was nothing else, though.

Only dead trees, rotting away. Dried dirt. Desolation. Emptiness. Silence.

From the moment Morning had told us where we were going, I’d been on a constant buzz, trying to reconcile what I knew and what she had recently revealed about her brother.

“Kelara, seriously, what is the matter with you?” Phantom asked, somewhat exasperated. I hadn’t made my thoughts clear. I’d merely been gasping at the sight of it all. Out of the Thieron trio, Soul was the only one who knew the significance of this place, and he hadn’t shared it with Phantom or with Widow.

“I’ll tell you one thing. Cruor is as nasty as I thought it would be,” I said.

“My brother is here,” Morning said. “Just like Spirit said. That right there, that’s the Star of Lussian.” She pointed to the sky, where a faint light could be observed with the naked eye. It was formless, blurred by whatever strangeness covered this world. “Like I told you.”

Soul snickered, enjoying this moment as a joke of sorts. Phantom wasn’t amused. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Is this what you meant when you told Kelara that she was going to love it?”

“I have a feeling Soul and Kelara know more about Cruor than we do,” Widow grumbled, stretching his arms as if he’d just spent the last few hours crammed in the middle seat of a plane.

“Cruor is the birthplace of vampires, in a way,” I said. “The so-called original vampires, known as the Elders, came from here. There aren’t any left anymore, but Cruor is known to be imbued with their essence. Pure evil. Toxicity.”

“Oh, yeah, I can feel it,” Morning murmured, looking around with a worried expression. “I can feel the poison… the anger… the pain.” She sucked in a breath, close to breaking down into tears. “It’s the Night Bringer. He’s suffering.”

“Whoa,” Phantom said, her eyes as big as saucers.

“It’s him! He’s what fuels this toxicity you speak of. He’s the reason the sky is so… dirty. He’s responsible for this barren wasteland,” Morning insisted.

Widow placed a hand on the top of his head, while resting the other on his hip. In that gimp suit of his, he looked like a mannequin in a Red-Light District shop. It was hard to take him seriously sometimes. “You mean to tell me that this is what the Spirit Bender did to the Night Bringer? He locked him into Cruor, much like he did with you and Vetruvia?”

Morning nodded, motioning around us. “Yes. It’s the same thing! My brother is stuck here. His suffering translates into misery, into all that is awful in the world. Nothing is right on Cruor. Nothing has been right on Cruor since the Night Bringer was bound to it.”

“If it’s the same seal, where are the Beta elements?” Soul asked. “We’d just have to break them, right?”

Morning dropped to her knees, placing both palms on the ground. “It’s not going to be that easy,” she said. “There is nothing living here. Not even a bug. Cruor is dead, and my brother lingers in it. I can’t… I can’t even reach him.”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Going over the little bits of history I’d collected about the vampires and the Elders, the Night Bringer’s presence on Cruor made the pieces fit better together. The picture was clearer now, for I had a more accurate point of origin for vampirism.

“Could the Elders have been a result of the Night Bringer’s presence?” I asked, looking to Soul for answers.

He shrugged. “It’s possible. The five of us are dead already, so it wouldn’t affect us. But if you bring a human here, for example, they’ll turn. Or am I remembering wrong?”

“No, no, you’re onto something. Of course, there were some witches involved with this place at some point. The Hawks and the Aviary… Anyway, ancient history,” I said.

“I find that interesting. Intriguing, even,” Phantom chimed in. “I’d like to hear Night’s opinion about it. How do we get him out?”

Tears rolled down Morning’s cheeks as she looked up at us. “I… I don’t know. If the Beta elements are objects… I don’t know how long it’s going to take for us to find them.”

There were a lot of things wrong with our universe. Many of its issues had been caused by the Spirit Bender. This whole Cruor business was merely the latest development. I had never thought I would ever set foot in a place like this. It made me anxious. Uneasy. It made my soul weigh a ton. I could only imagine what it would have done to the living, but there was no one left here to tell us about it.

We were by ourselves, with only more questions, no answers, and no feasible way of freeing the Night Bringer. It all came back to Spirit, and the lengths he’d been willing to go to in order to keep the First Tenners from interfering with what he’d had planned for Death. It seemed reasonable to ask… if this was what he’d done to the Night Bringer, what else had he left behind?

Had he found the Unending, too? Had he found a way to keep her down, as well?

Shivers ran through me as I gave Morning a quick glance. She looked hopeless, more affected by her brother’s pain than the rest of us. We had to find a way to save him. Death needed him and the rest of his siblings. And we needed Death.

Cruor pulsated with the Night Bringer’s pain. It was so strong, so rancid and poisonous, that it had once infected living creatures, likely turning them into the Elders who later created vampires.

My only question at this point was rather simple and woefully unrelated to Morning’s current plight: Who had the Elders been before the Night Bringer came?

ASOV 81: A Bringer of Night