The Relic Read online

  The Relic

  Cradle of Darkness, Book Three

  Addison Cain

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  SWALLOW IT DOWN

  FREE BOOK: BORN TO BE BOUND

  Addison Cain

  Also by Addison Cain

  ©2020 by Addison Cain

  All rights reserved.

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  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  Cover art by Elysium Book Covers

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  “Unapologetically raw and deliciously filthy!”

  - NYT Bestselling author Anna Zaires

  For Maya and Sharleen.

  1

  Vladislov

  All thrones, all palaces, all places in this world where creatures of the night lingered—every corner of every continent where hunting grounds might exist—all of it bored me. I couldn’t even recall what state the world had been in, the borders of countries, the wars fought, when I last sat as king. Others were placed to carry out that work in my stead. To lord over the night’s denizens and keep our kind in line.

  Keep my children thriving, learning, adapting, bringing pride to our race.

  Darius had been my favorite son, hand-plucked from the Persian court. So much potential… and the ultimate disappointment. Thousands of years were no excuse to forget one’s duty and where one came from. Namely from me, who’d chosen him, raised him, taught him, granted him power far beyond what others of our kind possessed.

  Power that was abused.

  How soon they forget.

  So there I sat, on my dismembered son’s throne, aghast to be reorganizing a disrupted hive full of Darius’ more evil creations. Their minds were… fascinating. Their inability to answer my questions, clever. My son truly believed his gifts set him on equal footing with his creator. Yet all he did was make a mess. What I was seeing was little more than extreme selfishness, even for our kind.

  There were secrets buried here, in tunnels that spanned the entirety of this city. Thousands of humans trafficked and kenneled, disposed of with none the wiser.

  That, I would give my boy, was clever.

  Vampires weren’t even a myth in the new world. They were fodder for television shows and movies. Yet thousands lived in this city, hunting, breeding, bickering, and surviving right under the noses of millions of humans.

  The evolution of my kind had been curious to observe. From vicious predators who’d ransack entire towns in one moonlit night, to subtle and stealthy, wiser, monsters.

  Yet, still a bother. Even with all their new rules and new technology and endless opportunities, some just didn’t deserve the gifts they were given. And some were not given enough.

  Such as my descendent, Jade. Daughter of my dismembered son Darius with so many remarkable talents for our kind, all stripped from her by dear old dad until she was weaker than the lowliest servant. Until her mind was broken, scarred, and required more blood from my veins than—in my long, long history—I had ever given another.

  A soft spot I had for my grandchild, though I imagined in ten thousand years, I’d be dismembering her too.

  The beautiful imp looked every bit her father’s daughter, no denying the resemblance. But only the fates could say what time and power would make of her. Darius was not the first of my creations I’d been forced to handle.

  He would not be the last.

  A flutter. A single unusual heartbeat at that thought.

  I’d rather not see Jade fragmented physically. Not after she’d already been so fragmented mentally. I’d see her rise.

  Yet now she played house with her strict lover. Now she recovered, her people recovered, the throne recovered, because I sat the throne for the first time since humans traveled over oceans.

  Listening to petty squabbles, culling an overripe herd. Being gracious to my grandchild while simultaneously contemplating war—a mass extinction across all vampire civilizations. The rapture.

  Kings and queens all over the world were failing in their rule, chasing pleasure and forgetting to parent. Tithes became poorer, greed on the rise.

  Which could be partially blamed on modern times and the infection of selfishness that reigned in all society, human and vampire.

  Perhaps a World War was just the thing? Set back this mania, remind all life that death hovered and whispered in their ear.

  Without great loss and suffering, what was there to remember to treasure?

  Shiny objects? Bitcoin? Art?

  The only art I admired these days was the portrait of my granddaughter. Painted myself, and perfect. Life-size, dominating the throne room. A testament of millennia of practice with a brush and the old style of mixing oil paints.

  A reminder to the few I had let live of just where their allegiance best rest. The first who had scoffed at it, I ripped in half. Careful that none of their blood might mark the canvas. Purposefully drenching all in the room with bits of dead vampire juice.

  Baptized in the blood of a fool. Their one and only warning that she was held in my esteem.

  I would have preferred to start fresh with this entire court. Donate some of my own dear flock, augment it with new blood. Find young prodigies with modern tendencies and acumen. But darling Jade had been given the option to choose the fate of this collection of errant idiots. So, I left her a few hundred. Though, to be true, in a year or two, I might return and kill them all if I found myself displeased with how things progressed. Once I deemed her recovery sufficient and forced her to take the throne, that is.

  And I would come back. I always came back to this Cathedral, and had every year for near a century. I thought it was my son who drew me, that his inevitable end whispered in my ear. But now he was gone from this place in all the ways that mattered.

  Yet still I heard the call.

  Which made sitting a throne a bit more bearable.

  “My lord.”

  Ah yes, the one who loved my grandchild. Shining head bowed, manners impeccable, I found I liked Malcom… a very little. “What has she done now?”

  These tales were always amusing, his weekly reports while she slept something I looked forward to in this endless slog on the chair.

  “She is… perfect.” Rushing through his speech on her recent accomplishments, shaking his head, the man changed topics. Clearly nervous. “I didn’t come here to discuss Jade. There is something… I remembered.”

  It was unlike this one to trip on his words. Which widened my eyes in anticipation and left me
leaning forward, fingers steepled, a smirk on my mouth.

  “Something”—glowing eyes met mine, concern, a touch of fear as if he might not leave this conversation with the borrowed heart in his chest—“that I must show you.”

  I smiled broadly, standing from the throne, amused by something different. Anything different. “By all means. Lead the way.”

  Long ago blocked off and forgotten, this area of the Cathedral should not have existed. Not on any schematics, not in the memories of those left alive here or stumbled upon in their excavations. But there it was, hidden behind so many layers of random, unused rooms, barred doors, spiraling ancient stairways so tight one had to bend in half just to navigate the descent.

  Any recollection of this place had been ripped as violently as Darius might from every last mind who had ever known of it. There weren’t even rats, so tightly it had been sealed. Only damp, and cobwebs, and an utter lack of light.

  Even eyes like mine could hardly see in this type of dark.

  And I found I loved it. The vibration of the walls, the desolation.

  It was a prison, once the burial chambers of the clergy this ground had been stolen from. Cells with iron bars where the dead inside had long ago gone to bone, or desiccated to the point a strong wind would blow them apart like paper.

  Other cells had been fully bricked over, whoever was left inside trapped for eternity. And I had a strong suspicion I might’ve known a few missing vampires of a certain age who, by chance, might grace a cell or two.

  And had no interest in relieving them from their box.

  Not when I heard something I might only describe as singing, not when I felt drawn forward through that nightmare. Following the siren song, I became impatient of the debris, crushing what I might, tossing it haphazardly behind me for Malcom to dodge.

  I moved without his direction straight to a wall where the bricks didn’t match and the mortar was sloppy and thick.

  And knocked three times for good measure.

  At my back, Malcom confessed, “I put her in here. Ordered the masons to brick it shut… and forgot that very night I’d ever laid eyes on the waif. Everyone forgot. This whole area just… disappeared.”

  Ah. Perhaps dear Malcom was worthy of my granddaughter after all.

  As if to soften what he thought to be a disappointing blow, the male muttered, “There is no guarantee she’s still inside. He could have taken her anywhere.”

  Oh, but Darius had not. Not if he’d gone to such trouble to have something so unusual right under my nose. “I can hear her, singing an old tune. Not asleep and not awake.”

  And ready to be uncovered. Brick… something as inconsequential as brick was all he’d needed to cage a true daywalker. Breaking through the mortar with black extended claws, pulling apart a wall that whined with the removal of each stone, the whole slab having settled and grown accustomed to its missing support, I found a door like any other prison door. Unremarkable and built to make the prisoner know they were there to suffer.

  Moments later, that wood was dust, fragments crumbling with little more than a swipe of my hand. And on the other side? The back of a massive gilded, gaudy, ornate, and hideous mirror. A huge monstrosity of a mirror that completely covered where the door had been.

  Tempted to break it, so eager was I to enter, I held back the urge and slid it gently to the side.

  To feast my eyes upon a prison cell transformed.

  Darius… so predictable. So petty.

  To keep this from me! Here.

  Underground with the rot. To know what he had wasn’t his. To have dared lie about the origin of his child!

  He and I would have words about this. Most especially to think that all his golden candelabras and expensive furnishings were good enough for what had been trapped inside. The crypt still stank of blood and sex and tears and longing. Priceless paintings gone to mold in the dank, Persian rug half eaten by fungus and mildew.

  Four poster bed, dressed in tatters. Red rags splattered black from old dried blood that still smelled of sunlight, even down here.

  Jewels, treasures, secrets.

  A room for pleasure derived from pain.

  This was a place in which Malcom was entirely unwelcome, and I cast him back before he might set his eyes to the lovely corpse on the bed. “Leave us. Return to your bride, for her time of rest is almost at an end.”

  “My lord.” Retreating into the dark, he moved with superhuman speed, as if aware how utterly possessive I was of this uncovered treasure. And how tempted I was to kill him just for standing too near.

  Pity I had not chosen finer garments for this moment. That I had not brought gifts. My beloved had always loved flowers. Beautiful horses. The scent of pine.

  “Here you are, as gorgeous as I remember,” I murmured to her withered skull, gently placing my hip to the bed so her remains might not be disturbed. “How long I’ve waited. Countless centuries searching.”

  Smoothing back hair that fell from her skull, I leaned over my darling one. “What it means to me to know you kept your promise…” Overfull with a sensation I’d almost completely forgotten, my voice shook. “You swore to me you’d be reborn. And here you are. Sleeping, waiting for me to find you.”

  Under my nose for a century. Here where she could have been crushed and lost again while I’d let Jade wreak havoc on the building.

  My own displeasure was shaking the foundations as it was. Setting a rainfall of dust motes to cloud the room. Leaning over to kiss her mouth—or where her lips would have been had they not shriveled back over her teeth, I tried so very hard to be gentle. “Tell me you knew I’d come?”

  The corpse, eyes long ago withered, said nothing. Failed to move. Failed to do anything but lie on a bed stained with her blood. My poor beloved had been alone since Darius had been dismembered, and from the state of the room, alone and suffering. Perhaps I would go into the garden later and have more than a talk with the head on a pike.

  Perhaps if the smells under the rot of this place were any sign of what he’d done to her, I’d crush that skull to jelly and eat it.

  Blind, my love was blind. Her hearing, the eardrums, I suspected might be intact enough that she at least heard the cadence of my song to her. That she knew I was here, would never allow her from my sight again.

  The nubs of her fangs far too short for the work of slicing through my flesh were inconsequential. My true worry was that any attempt to part her jaw might break it, desiccated as it was.

  Problem easily solved. I kissed her mouth again then sliced my wrist with a quick flick of a black claw. “Drink and wake. Come back to me.”

  My blood was poison, laced with nature’s contempt for our kind. Yet it contained eternal, monotonous, never-changing life. Pouring it down a throat that could not swallow, I sat with her for the endless hours it took to reinvigorate her, cell by cell.

  Nothing was more glorious than seeing my gifts reconstitute lovely blue eyes.

  They had been blue in her last life too.

  Her daughter’s had been that very shade before I changed her into something more. A clue I should have recognized had I paid more attention to the fact that Darius kept my grandchild from my sight.

  She took a breath that rattled her half-reformed ribcage. There was pain in those sky-blue eyes.

  A flush to cheeks that were fair and high. Dark hair, long and luxurious.

  She drank every drop I might squeeze from my veins, swallowed as I gathered her close.

  And was so very afraid of me.

  That wouldn’t do. So, ever the charmer, I spun our tale. Starting at the beginning—this new beginning. “Your name in this life is Pearl. Mine these days is Vladislov. And I have been waiting for you for an eternity.”

  2

  Vladislov

  Brittle in my arms—half corpse, half goddess—I carried my soul’s new form from dust-laden catacombs. As I was in a bit of a mood, any who happened upon me during our jaunt had the unfortunate luck of findi
ng out what they too might one day become should they truly embrace what they were… what human nightmares were born from.

  Leathery wings dragged upon the floor at my back, arched over my shoulders, protectively encasing what blindly fought to be free of my care.

  It was not just the potency of my blood that had driven her mad. A great deal had been done to my bride. Horrors that were creative—that might have impressed me—had they been unleashed on another.

  The lack of effort required to see just how mangled the mind, how traumatized the body, how wrecked the spirit… it was difficult to control my anger.

  My gift of blood had left me with a thirst that had not burned the back of my throat in centuries. My veins were bone-dry, and still she was broken.

  But I sought no meal. Such irrelevant urges could wait an eternity.

  Those curious vampires peeking from their rooms saw what should not exist, and then they saw no more. It took less than a thought to pop their little skulls and leave a mess for another to clean once my path was happened upon. For my darling was too fragile—hundreds if not thousands of years away from learning how to mist through space. More fragile even than the rags on her body flaking away with every writhe as Pearl fought my hold.

  She might as well have tried to fight a titan.

  There would be explanations and apologies later. I would tend every wound that marked the flesh of her new body, be gentler with her than I had been with any creature since before time. Or at least time by history’s reckoning.