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

I’d missed out in this assessment, but Valentine and I could work through them as soon as I reunited his heart and body. I turned back toward the ballroom with my hands curled into fists. Hades needed to learn that I wasn’t his plaything. The only way I could convey that was by letting him know we didn’t need him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“New demand,” I said. “No more sexual harassment. Verbal, physical, or gestural.”

“You’d let the realms collapse into each other over a few jokes?” he asked.

“Don’t gaslight me,” I said. “You’re the one who’s making our work together unbearable.”

Hades didn’t speak for several moments. Perhaps he was wondering if I was serious about calling off our association. I held my features in a mask of calm, my heart thrumming with trepidation. Everything I had said to myself earlier about being able to save Valentine had been true, but having the help of a being with immense knowledge, power, and the ability to slip in and out of spaces undetected could shorten the time it took to defeat Kresnik.

“Miss Griffin?” he asked.

“What?” I placed my hand on the door, ready to push it open.

“I agree to your terms.” His sullen tone implied that I was spoiling his fun.

“Then direct me to the ring.”

For someone with the weight of a faction of Hell on his shoulders, he seemed remarkably relaxed about his current state of helplessness. Maybe Hades was sick of ruling his part of Hell and missed the days of the Greek underworld, when there couldn’t have been more than a million souls.

I continued around the house, past the group of men burning wood on their pyre. “Am I going the right way?”

“Yes,” he replied in a monotone.

We headed toward a corner, where a line of trees formed a barrier between the mansion and its vast garden. “How far is it?”

“A few hundred feet.”

Up ahead, a side door opened, and Brother David stumbled out, heading toward us and staring out through unseeing eyes. He wore the same denim donkey jacket as usual, but food stains marred his white sweater. A thick rope of drool ran down one side of his face, catching on days’ old stubble.

I stepped back, placing a hand over my mouth. “Are you alright?”

Brother David walked past without sparing me a glance.

“Never mind that soulless thing,” said Hades. “What you need to concern yourself with are all the souls that will soon be trapped within corpses.”

“Did his spirit move onto the afterlife?” I continued around the mansion, glancing over my shoulder to find Brother David hurrying toward the fire.

“If he didn’t, the reapers would have caught up with him by now,” Hades muttered.

I turned a corner and stepped onto a paved walkway. Wooden benches sat between tall oak trees that had shed their foliage, leaving piles of leaves on the ground.

“A few more feet, and it’s on the right,” he said.

“Can you see it?”

“The ring calls to its master.” Hades directed me to stick my hands in a pile of damp leaves.

My fingers brushed against something metallic. I snatched it off the ground and rose to my feet.

There was nothing ring-like about the object, and it looked extremely uncomfortable with black stones around its band. A skull protruding from its front, grinning through diamond eyes and a set of sharp gemstone teeth. It wore a silver crown decorated with diamonds and more of those black stones, but even that looked gruesome.

“You had to wear that?”

“Hideous, isn’t it?” he said. “Put it in your pocket before someone snatches it from you and declares themself monarch of the Fifth Faction of Hell.”

I put the ring away, trembling at the implication that I might be its temporary monarch.

“Satisfied?” he asked. “Now you may dangle that ring over me like a carrot to make me obey your every whim.”

“Alright,” I said, although something in his tone told me he considered this time away from Hell a vacation. I turned back toward the house, ready to get started on our quest. “Show me the first jar.”

“You’ve been sleeping above it for days,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I continued down the walkway.

“King Valentine dumped it on the bedside table. When you threw yourself off the bed, it fell on the floor and rolled beneath the bed, leaving a hairline crack for yours truly to slither out.”

“Oh.”

“So I have you to thank for my freedom,” he said, his voice smug.

I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth. Hades was a dick, but now that I had his ring as leverage, it decreased the chances that he would betray us at the last minute. As we rounded the corner, I turned toward the lawn, where the men standing around the fire burst into raucous cheers.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” I asked.

“Burning the failures,” he said. “I overheard Healer Calla tell one of those oafs that not all the people she’d injected with vampire blood rose after she’d shown them mercy.”

My steps faltered. “She killed them?”

“You are aware of the phrase ‘mercy killing’?”

“Yes, but…” I rubbed the back of my neck.

Regular vampire blood had healing qualities. I wasn’t sure how far they extended, but part of me had hoped that the people who had been injected might recover from their illnesses. It was one thing to inject dying people with preternatural vampire blood but another to kill them afterward.

I shook the confusion out of my head and continued down the walkway. “Never mind.”

“Surprised?” he asked with a hint of amusement.

Hades probably thought I was being naive for thinking Healer Calla wouldn’t have murdered all those people. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to stave off a headache. “Not really. I suppose you can’t make a vampire without killing the host.”

“I much prefer the traditional method,” he said with a chuckle.

My lips pressed into a thin line. Was he talking about vampires using Neutrals as surrogates to produce offspring or something else?

A pained roar filled the air, and I spun toward