A Shade of Vampire 82 A Circle of Nine - Bella Forrest Page 0,80
the palace to reason with her, but I’d been captured instead. Danika had no intention of discussing this any further. It was either her way or nothing. My ears were ringing.
I eased my way up, trying to use Telluris to reach out to Sofia. My earpiece was gone. The gold guards must’ve found it. A sharp pain throbbed through my skull. There was something wrong here. Awfully wrong. My knees were stiff, and I held on to the bars to stop myself from falling over. I wasn’t in full control of my body, and that wasn’t normal. They’d done something to me.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” Corbin’s voice cut through the silence.
He walked in from a side door, its hinges creaking and scratching my brain. Clad in his military tunic, with war medals decorating his chest, Corbin had an official look about him—not at all like the Aeternae I’d met before. He’d… changed.
“Master Commander, this is insane,” I said, my voice raspy, my throat dry. “You can’t keep me imprisoned like this.”
“You didn’t give us much of a choice.”
“Are you serious? The Lady Supreme wanted to have us and your daughter arrested!”
“All you had to do was surrender, right then and there, and everything would’ve been over,” he said. “I admit my own weakness. It took me a long time to accept what a menace my daughter truly is. I’ve spent millennia watching other parents burying their children as sacrifices against the Black Fever. I never thought I’d be one of them.”
“Valaine is innocent,” I replied. “She’s too young to be the cause of the Black Fever. Dammit, you know that! How did you end up turning against your own daughter?”
Danika’s heels clicked as she walked in to join Corbin outside my cell. “Because he saw her at the courtroom. The way she looked when she killed the Nalorean nanny—that’s no ordinary dark side. No Aeternae has that appearance in a fit of rage,” she said.
“I can’t believe you’re on board with this madness now,” I muttered, glowering at Corbin. I’d hoped to see some kind of emotion in his brown eyes, but there was nothing. Just emptiness, as though his very soul had left his body. “How can you even live with yourself?”
“The right thing must be done, no matter what,” Corbin said. “My daughter will gladly sacrifice herself once she understands the truth.”
“How long have you thought of her as the cause of the Black Fever?” I asked, tightly gripping the steel bars in front of me. Anger burned through my veins, making it increasingly difficult for me to keep it together.
Danika scoffed. “He refused to believe it the first time I told him. And the second. And the third. Let’s just say the master commander took months to come to terms with this harsh reality.”
“Wait, I’m confused… months?” Something didn’t make sense here. I was missing crucial information. Looking at Corbin and Danika, I realized I was out of the loop. “What do you mean months?”
Danika sighed deeply. “Perhaps I will come across as a liar, Derek, but it’s time for you to know the truth. We’ve tried to keep you out of this for as long as we could, but you’re all so… persistent.”
“What are you talking about?” I replied.
“The Black Fever returns every ten thousand years,” Petra said as she joined us. My heart stopped and shot right up my throat when I saw her. I froze on the spot, my joints locked as I tried to understand what was going on. “Well, this time around it has come back much sooner than anticipated. Nevertheless, it is always the same. A curse, as your Faulty girls so accurately identified it.”
“Telluris, Sofia!” I inwardly reached out to Sofia, desperate to tell her about what was happening. “Telluris, Sofia!”
For a moment, I felt our souls connect, then Petra seemed to catch on and snapped her fingers. Something invisible struck my forehead, generating a monstrous headache. It spread like wildfire, and I felt something snap inside me. I could no longer feel Sofia…
“Like Esme, you are irredeemably foolish,” Petra said. “Always looking to snitch, to cry out for help. I saw this coming from a mile away. It’s pathetic.”
“What did you do?” I snarled.
She flashed her fangs. “I cut you off. The Lady Supreme here doesn’t have my knowledge, and it took me a while to figure out how to break that Telluris spell of yours.”
Corbin didn’t seem at all surprised to see her here, and that worried