Blood Prophecy

CHAPTER 41



Solange


I couldn’t find my brothers.

There were too many bodies and too many battles and too much blood. I couldn’t even hear Quinn’s mad battle laugh over the noise. The Hel-Blar had finally found us. And though we’d been right about them forcing the hunters and the vampires to split their focus, the results were chaotic.

Somehow Mom spotted Kieran and me the moment we stepped off the ladders leading down from the platforms. There was a gash on her arm where something sharp had sliced through her sleeve and then her skin. Her eyes flared so pale, they were like frozen water. I didn’t know where the rest of my family was, except for Aunt Ruby, who was hunched over one of the dead hunters, collecting treasures from his pockets. She considered anything shiny a treasure; coin, knife, safety pin. She moved on to rifle through the discarded clothing of a dusted vampire.

Mom kissed my forehead and then pivoted, dragging her dagger across the throat of a Hel-Blar. He gurgled as she finished him off with the stake in her other hand. “Take cover,” she ordered me, spinning away again, her braid lifting behind her.

She left a trail of ashes ending in an unconscious Huntsman. He’d tried to stake her and she’d backhanded him into a tree. The Huntsmen had figured out that we were trying not to kill them. They had no such qualms.

And then the Host caught sight of my mother and me fighting together and they went as mad with bloodlust as any Hel-Blar I’d ever seen.

The sight of so many familiar brown tunics, all painted with Montmartre’s crest, made me freeze for a moment.

A moment too long.

I knew better. I’d trained for hours the way most girls spent hours reading books or shopping at the mall or learning to play the piano. I knew how to riposte and parry with a fencing foil, how to throw daggers and axes, how to execute a proper roundhouse kick. But in that second, all I could see was Montmartre as he’d grabbed me and the feel of the tiara as I’d shoved it through his chest.

The rest of his warriors, still loyal to his memory and the torch of blood vengeance, closed around us like a fist. They moved with military precision.

Luckily, so did Kieran.





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