Thrall of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 4) by Bella Klaus (elon musk reading list .txt) 📕

“Now that Aurora’s busy doing some task in another realm, Martika’s been at Kresnik’s side. She’s like his obedient little lapdog. Come to think of it, that describes everyone except us lot.”

I grabbed her arm, slowing down my steps. “Hey, are you alright?”

She raised a brow and lowered her head toward my ear. “You mean, am I still sane after seeing a man refuse medical treatment to a bunch of people he got injured because he extracted their magic? And how do I feel after witnessing said man order them injected with vampire blood?”

“When you put it like that, my question sounds really dumb,” I said.

“Shit,” Coral muttered. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into? This situation is dire enough to make me want to sell six months of my life for some faerie-synthesized thrall.”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I placed a hand over my pounding head. A heartbeat later, I stumbled into Racon, who had stopped to lower himself into a bow.

“Sorry.” I placed my hands on his broad back and turned to where everyone else in the room was now bowing low.

Kresnik stood in the doorway, flanked by a pair of men in enforcers’ uniforms. He stepped into the center of the room, and his enforcers stood by the entrance, letting in another ten similarly dressed men and women.

I inhaled a sharp breath through my nostrils. These were the people he’d attacked with his fire the night he’d returned victorious from the battle. They were also the same group of victims he’d raised and ordered killed.

He clapped his hands together. “How wonderful it is to see you safely returned from your missions.”

My gaze darted to Racon, who stood beside Gail with his muscles tensed. His hands had curled into fists, and I turned away, hoping he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Coral remained at my side, breathing hard. I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask her, but I was sure she missed out on yesterday's disastrous mission because Aurora ordered her to take me to the infirmary.

Kresnik continued to the center of the room and placed a hand on Brother David’s shoulder. “Thank you for stepping in during Aurora’s absence.” His fingers curled into his denim jacket, and his muscles rippled as he dragged the soulless man to his feet. “You may leave.”

One of the preternatural enforcers grabbed Brother David’s arm and marched him out into the hallway. I glanced around the room to check everyone else’s reactions. Some of the people standing around were pale and looking shaken from seeing their teammates injured, and others gazed at Kresnik through eyes that shone with hope.

“I’m setting up a team of young elites, and I’d like to test your power to see who qualifies.” Kresnik reached into the pocket of his white cloak and extracted the kind of device enforcers used to measure magic. “Everybody, form two lines behind Coral and Hemera.”

A pulse of panic squeezed my heart, and Valentine’s peculiar insistence that I drink the citrus liquid suddenly made sense. Kresnik had finally acted on the meaningful glower he’d shot me from across the infirmary.

Smoothing my features into an even mask, I strode up to the tyrant and hoped that I still had enough thrall or quell in my body to suppress my magic. My entire body trembled in sync with the rapid beat of my heart. This was the moment Hades had warned me about but there wasn’t a thing I could do to hide my magic apart from holding it deep within my chakras.

I inhaled, drawing my power from the tips of my fingers, up my meridians and into my heart chakra. Then I pushed it down into my solar plexus, letting it pass my sacral and then my root. While I could see Kresnik stabbing me in the heart to get a reading, he probably wouldn’t suspect I would keep that magic at the base of my spine.

The device he held was about the size of five smartphones stacked one atop the other with an LCD screen that took up a third of its surface area, displaying a row of four zeros. Beneath it was an indentation large enough to fit a thumb.

My mind rifled through Istabelle’s teachings and through posters she hung in the crystal shop. A device like that worked by sucking the energy from the meridians and analyzing it for its elemental composition. Which meridians passed or even ran close to the root chakra? Kidney, bladder, stomach, spleen.

Palpitations reverberated through my chest. Small intestine? No—that one started at the little finger and ended by the ear. The heart meridian went from armpit to little finger. Which digit would I offer up? My thumb? It was the end of the lung meridian, which ended beneath the collarbone. My breath quickened. Bloody hell… I needed to stay calm.

“Place your finger on the counter,” Kresnik said, his pale eyes glowing bright.

“Yes, Father.” I offered up my thumb.

“Finger.” Kresnik’s smile widened.

My stomach flipped like a crepe. He knew. He knew I had the phoenix and he knew that I knew that he knew I had the phoenix. My mind twisted into tangles tighter than the knots in my stomach.

With a silent prayer to anyone who was listening, I slipped my little finger into the device’s metallic grove. “Here.”

Something sharp and metallic pierced my finger, and the machine made a low beep. 0.55 flashed on the display and Kresnik’s shoulders sagged.

“Coral?” He turned from me and thrust the device at her.

I held my breath. If he had called her up, that meant he didn’t completely possess her immense magic. When she placed her index finger on the machine, it also made the same low beep.

“Next,” he said through clenched teeth.

Two of the undead enforcers stepped forward. Kresnik handed one the reader, while the other extracted one from his pocket. He gestured for us to stand at the other end of the room, while