*Maeve*
Winter Forest, One and a Half Years Later
Troy ca into our room like a battering ram, his shoulders and hair dusted with a thick layer of snow. He gave a boyish grin as he shook himself off and began to unwind the scarf from his neck.
“What have you been up to?” I asked as I eyed him from the foot of the bed where I was pulling on a pair of thick socks over my wool pants.
It was another frigid day in Winter Forest. Outside our bedroom window, the stars were dense, the moon casting long icy shadows over the castle grounds below.
“I walked Luke to school,” he gruffed, hanging up his damp sweater near the fireplace.
I couldn’t help but arch my brows and chuckle to myself as I eyed Troy’s snow-coated pants and the damp spots around his knees and elbows.
He caught my gaze and rolled his eyes before continuing to undress. “He fought the whole way.”
“It almost looks like he won,” I mused, bending down to fetch my warst boots.
We’d been living in Winter Forest for a year now, and Lucas was worse than ever. He’d been ho-schooled by a private tutor when we lived in Avondale, but we thought Winter Forest would be a great place for him to broaden his horizons and make so new friends. He was attending the sa school where Rowan and I had once been students, and at first, it had gone well.
But recently Luke had been acting out, even sneaking out of class or not showing up altogether. He was running with a group of boys his age, having sword fights with icicles and throwing snowballs at unsuspecting passersby while hiding behind snow berms on the way to the market square.
One of his friends was nad Brady, and he was a vampire. That wouldn’t have mattered much to us at all, had it not been for Brady’s mother coming to the castle, dragging Brady by the ear, to complain about Luke’s “bad influence.”
I didn’t bla her in the slightest. It hadn’t been the smoothest of transitions for the vampires who settled in Winter Forest. Aside from Crimson Creek, Winter Forest was now ho to the largest population of vampires, all of them refugees from the Realm of Night. Most were families or won and children who had lost their fathers and husbands during the war. Brady was one of the lucky few to have both parents still living.
His father worked closely with Troy training young warriors. His mother was a seamstress and one of the matriarchs in the community of vampires who now lived amongst us. She worried about fitting in, about her safety as well as the safety of her family.
Winter Forest had been more welcoming than most packs, but there were still a few people who feared the vampires. Having little vampires running around being naces wasn’t a good look, but neither were the prince’s antics. And Luke was, I was sure, the ringleader in his little gang.
Luke had been acting out, and any attempts to help him assimilate to our new life in Winter Forest seed to push him further into his devious behavior. He wasn’t used to being an only child. He missed having his brothers around. We missed having his brothers around, too.
“Brady and Luke are starting warrior training today after school,” Troy said as he pulled a fresh sweater over his shoulders, smoothing it over his chest. I blinked up at him, cocking my brow. He shrugged, striding over to and kissing on the forehead. “I have to wear him out sohow. Both of them. Brady’s father is one of the trainers, and it was actually his idea.”
“Aren’t they a little young?”
“Brady took on four sixteen-year-olds,” he breathed, sitting down next to on the bed. “And Luke finished them off. I spent yesterday afternoon talking to their parents. Sothing has to be done.”
I blew out my breath, my eyes clouding with tears of frustration. Troy ran his hand down my back, then put his arm around my shoulder, pulling close. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
“It feels like my fault. I uprooted his life–”
“He was up to the sa stuff in Avondale, Maeve. He’s a scrapper, always has been, and always will be. He needs an outlet for his energy, and if he wants to fight like the big dogs, he needs to train like them too.”
I snorted with mirth, wiping a rogue tear from my cheek. Troy squeezed to him for a mont, then reluctantly released , a glimr of longing behind his eyes. “What are you getting all dressed up for?”
I smirked, glancing down at my wool pants and clunky boots. “I have an errand to run with Clare today,” I answered, rising from the foot of the bed and striding toward our closet. I opened the door, looking over my shoulder at him. “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’re going on a... walk.”
“You’re finally going to the old temple to return the book, aren’t you?” He rose from the bed as I tossed him a pair of socks, his mouth twitching into a smile that ward from the inside out. I hoped to carry so of that warmth with today while I trekked into the unforgiving chill with Clare, lugging that Goddess-forsaken spell book over ice and knee-deep snow to where I hoped would be its final resting place.
“I am,” I replied, taking a shaky breath as I turned back to the closet to finish getting dressed. “It’ll be quick.”
At least, I hoped it would be quick. The spellbook had been sitting at the bottom of a seldom used closet on the upper floors of the castle for months now, out of sight and out of mind. It was Clare who ca to yesterday, telling with a firmness that made want to bend the knee to her that it was ti, that we’d put this off for far too long.
That kind of magic didn’t belong in our world. We had no use for it. We prayed we didn’t need to use it again.
“Are you donating blood today, too?” Troy asked, his voice wavering a bit.
I turned to him, clutching my favorite purple turtleneck sweater to my chest as I huffed a long, shallow breath. “I did yesterday. I’m taking a break for a few days,” I replied, but he narrowed his eyes at . “Troy, it’s for the children–”
“You’ve been doing too much,” he said, running his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “After you get back from your errand, you should take a break for the rest of the day. Eat sothing. Take a nap.”
“You know that’s not going to happen–”
“You’re burning yourself out.”
I gave him a tight-lipped smile in response. Troy was right. The past year had been the busiest year of my life, and then so.
But I was the White Queen now. This was my pack, my territory.
And I was the only person who could give the vampires what they needed to survive in our world.
***
“The pill form seems to be working,” Clare said softly as we made a path through the snow toward the mouth of the river. The river that looped around Winter Forest t the inlet not far from where we were now, and crossing the frozen mouth of the river was the only way to reach the sunken, ice covered island where the ancient temple stood in decay and disrepair.
“I heard as much. It requires far less blood that way,” I replied with a sigh, shifting the weight of my heavy backpack. The book weighed as much as a small child, and my thighs were beginning to ache as we broke through the ice crusted snow. “The blood is mixed with blood root, and so other vitamins and minerals.”
“Well, a weekly dose is all the mature vampires need at this point. The children who are taking the supplent are able to handle the sun–”
“Really?” I stopped walking so I could face Clare, who was walking a few paces behind . She raised her eyebrows, nodding.
“It’s been tested in Crimson Creek, and successfully. One pill, once a week, and the kids can play outside. The adults can even handle the sun in small doses now.”
“Then it’s working–”
“It’s working,” she said with a soft, fleeting smile. Her shoulders relaxed a bit as we caught our breath, our faces lifted to the first inklings of late winter sunshine that had just begun to peak over the mountains in the distance.
I’d been donating blood for the past year and half, sotis multiple tis a week. There were other people willing to donate the life-giving nutrients the vampires needed to survive, of course, but there was sothing different about my blood, even that of my mother and my niece.
We noticed it last year, the first spring I’d spent as the White Queen. After a dose of my blood, so of the vampires were able to handle an hour or so of sunlight without their skin reddening and blistering. Plus, just a taste of my blood was enough to sustain them for days.
We knew a lot more about these so-called “lower vampires” now that we’d been living in close quarters with them for a while. They could eat the sa kinds of foods we did. They had a similar culture and lived in family groups like we did. They matured fully around the age of twenty and aged slowly from then on. Not immortal, so to speak, but so of the vampires I’d t who looked elderly were several hundred years old, and even so of the young looking one were two hundred years old, or more.
Children were far and few between, but there were enough to fill classrooms in the school in Winter Forest. Two vampire babies had been born in the past year, both of them delivered by Clare, who had spent her ti in Winter Forest training to be a midwife.
There had even been a few weddings between vampires and shifters, and a few of those unions had produced pregnancies. One of those won was due to deliver in a few weeks.
The only hybrid shifter vampire I knew was Bethany, whose mother had been a vampire, and her father, Henry, was a shifter. She had shifter powers but didn’t need blood to survive. Whether she’d inherit the vampire lifespan was yet to be seen.
These magic pills Clare spoke of, however... well, they were changing everything. A single pill a week made it possible for the vampires to live like we did, walking in the sun and not needing drops of blood in their coffees, wine, and soup to fuel their bodies. It also ant I wasn’t constantly light headed and drained, my arms no longer yellow and purple with bruises from constant needling.
“Sasha made friends with one of the vampire children. Her na is Vanessa. I honestly wouldn’t have known she was a vampire had it not been for her mother telling as much. She’s been taking the pill for three months now.”
Success–that’s what this was. My chest felt a little lighter as we continued to make our way through the snow.
The deep snow gave way to ice as we reached the frozen mouth of the river. I took a ginger step onto the ice, finding it still thick and firm. I nodded over my shoulder at Clare, bidding her to follow.
“We won’t get sucked into a portal, right?” she asked, half joking.
I swallowed back my own apprehension but couldn’t answer.
Hanna had co here, sothing pulling her to this long forgotten place. We’d found it years ago, so it was known to us, but we hadn’t paid it any mind until that fateful night Hanna wasn’t able to sleep for whatever reason and took off in a cloak of darkness.
Inside, she’d found Oliver, Lena, and Xander, and we’d heard their harrowing tale. Sohow, the temple was used as a bridge between our realm, and the realm of what Lena had called the witches.
But the realm of the witches had been tethered to the vampire realm from what I understood. The Realm of Night was gone now. I didn’t know what that ant for the realm of those who had given us–given –this book of magic.
We reached the temple as the sun drifted over the tallest peaks of the far flung mountains. I crossed through the doorless threshold, my feet crunching on the snow that piled along the windblown and toppled stone pews. The ceiling was barely intact, but it was enough to cover the altar from the elents.
“Are you just going to leave it on the altar?” Clare asked behind , her voice trembling a bit as she looked around. It was her first ti here.
“Yes,” I breathed, unzipping my backpack and wrapping my gloved fingers around the book, holding it up to look at it one last ti.
It had shown my death once, and I had been angry. But what I hadn’t realized then is that it had given the gift of knowing I would live a long, fulfilled life. I’d die in the arms of my mate, tucked into the sa bed we shared now at the castle, our hair gray and our skin withered with lives long lived.
It showed that I was ant to be here, in Winter Forest.
Most of all, it showed that I wouldn’t die with white hair. I wouldn’t need to call upon the Goddess and exchange my life for a glimpse of her power. There would be peace until my dying day.
At least, I hoped so.
I set the book down on the altar and turned my back to it.
“Thank you,” I said in a whisper, and then the hair on the back of my neck rose, a chill running down the length of my spine as a soft gust of wind rustled through the temple. I turned back around.
“Are you coming?” Clare said from the doorway, her eyes wide and face flushed. She wanted to get out of here as much as I did.
“Yeah,” I breathed, blinking at the altar.
The book was gone, just like that.
#
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