Bonds of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 7), Bella Klaus [best classic books .TXT] 📗

“What do you still want with me, then?” I accompanied that thought with a squawk of outrage.

“You’re the only creature who can fly me to the Realm of the Gods.” The halo of crackling magic surrounding my crown looped over my head and settled over my neck.

“Good luck getting me to do anything.” I twisted my head to the right, tried to spit out a fireball at Kresnik, but he ducked to my left.

A guttural roar sounded from below. I glanced down to find an armor-clad figure emerging from one of the burning manholes, causing a double-decker bus to swerve to the other side and crash into a black cab.

My chest inflated with hope. Valentine had survived.

Kresnik slammed a fist into the space between my wing bones, making me lurch forward. “Valentine is annoyingly tenacious.”

“It’s called loyalty.” I glanced over my shoulder to find Valentine hurtling up toward us. “Something a psycho like you could never understand.”

“There’s a reason why the gods made beasts of burden mute.” Kresnik pulled on the halo, making me splutter and gag. “It was so their masters didn’t kill them outright for their insolence.”

Without meaning to, my wings sliced through the air, propelling us forward. I cried out, tried to tell Kresnik to stop, but he’d taken control of my body and was now flying me toward Hyde Park.

We glided over the rooftops of Notting Hill, over the embassies that bordered the Kensington Palace Gardens, and over the palace.

“Release my mate.” Valentine’s snarl was loud enough to shake my feathers.

Every muscle in my body strained to turn away, to fly toward Valentine and get close enough so he could stick a firestone sword through Kresnik’s eyes. No matter how much I tried to resist, the halo encasing my neck had taken control of my motor functions, and none of my screams to be set free reached Kresnik.

“Are you a preternatural, or not?” Kresnik laughed.

From his jerky motion on my back, I guessed he was throwing fireballs at Valentine, who was dodging if I was right about the slicing sound of his movements.

The whump, whump, whump of rotor blades sounded from above. I raised my eyes and stared into the telephoto lens of an oversized camera. A man wearing a red puffer jacket and matching ear muffs sat in the open door of a helicopter, securing the recording device with both arms.

His right leg dangled over the edge of the chopper, while he tucked his right beneath a metal bar. The cameraman moved his head from behind his eyepiece attachment and gaped as though he couldn’t believe what he was recording.

I sucked in a ragged breath. For all my fretting about complying with the Supernatural World secrecy laws, my magic would be the first to be exposed to the humans.

Shit. If I ever got out of this alive, I was in serious trouble.

“Bugger off.” Kresnik tossed a fireball at the camera, making its operator fall backward into the helicopter.

With a high-pitched scream, the man’s arms thrashed to put out the flames engulfing his jacket, and the camera fell loose from his fingers. Kresnik threw a fireball and another and another until the aircraft swooped away.

“Stop,” I cawed out loud.

As bad as I felt for the man who got burned, I really wanted the filming to stop. Kresnik failed to understand that the camera was either broadcasting its footage live or recording it onto a card that would likely survive even a helicopter crash.

I rolled my eyes. What was I talking about? Kresnik didn’t give a damn about protecting the Supernatural World.

He flew us past the Round Pound that backed onto Kensington Palace and beside the Serpentine, our fiery bodies reflecting on the winding lake that formed the border of Hyde Park.

Up ahead stood the Wellington Arch, a five-story-tall stone monument to the Napoleonic Wars that supported a winged woman riding a four-horse chariot. The light of our combined flames glinted on the laurel wreath she held aloft.

My throat dried as I figured out what lay ahead. Green Park. Buckingham Palace on our left, Saint Jame’s Palace… and Trafalgar Square.

Trafalgar Square was where Captain Theodore had hidden Kresnik’s immortal body. Kresnik now knew its location, wanted to discard Father Jude’s form that Valentine and his guards had damaged, and intended to upgrade before flying me to the Realm of the Gods.

I focused my power, trying to burn him into ash, but how could I burn an ifrit who had taken control of my magic?

Silence stretched out as we continued along our path, without so much as a helicopter hovering in the distance. Even the traffic below halted. I couldn’t hear Valentine anymore. Whether that was because one of Kresnik’s fireballs had landed or because Valentine had also worked out Kresnik’s destination, I wasn’t sure.

“Everything’s going to plan,” said Kresnik. “You’ll get to see the very mountain where I spent thirty-thousand years of suffering. Maybe I’ll secure you to that stone so you can get a taste of what it feels like to be punished.”

A whimper reverberated in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to get torn apart even once by Kresnik’s eagle, let alone for an eternity. If I didn't do something before we reached Trafalgar Square, no one would save me from that fate.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I focused on the flames coursing through my meridians and eased them back toward my chakras. The beat of my wings slowed, and we lost altitude.

“What are you doing?” Kresnik yanked on the halo around my neck, choking off my air.

I gagged, and yellow sparks appeared in my vision. His magic continued to force me to flap my wings, but they soon became shorter, more sparse and solid instead of hollow—just like human arms.

“Oh, no you don’t.” A hot surge of power rushed through the base of my neck, filling me down to my tailbone.

Kresnik’s magic stretched across my shoulder blades, making my arms lengthen once