Claimed by the Undead by C.L. Carhart

Author:C.L. Carhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: castles, coming of age fantasy romance, dark fantasy, demons, elemental magic, fantasy adventure, forbidden love, friendship, good versus evil, gothic romance, historical fantasy, new adult, opposites attract, romantasy, romantic fantasy, series starter, slow burn romance, strong female lead, strong male lead, suspense, witch fantasy
ISBN: 9781954807372
Publisher: C.L. Carhart
Published: 2025-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen:

Konstantin

Rage consumed me halfway up the mountain, my efforts to contain it failing as the death inside me cast its lethal net over the snowy forest. Every beating heart within a five hundred meter radius of my body stilled, including mammals denned for the winter. A menace. A menace to society, a menace to the entire earth. How could I imagine myself creating bliss beside the innocent Helena, when I destroyed every living thing in my path?

I gripped the leather folder to my chest as I reached the stone bridge leading to the Black Castle, my fortress of doom. The only place I could indulge the violent sentiments seething within me at my defeat . . . as long as I barred the living from my home. If I ended my friendship with Helena, allowing my love for her to decay into despair.

Christoph Nungesser deserved hell for this. The absolute worst tortures any human or demon could produce. He had transformed me into a frenzied beast, a raving monster just like him. If only God had made me another man’s son, one who treated his children with respect, like Emil Braun.

But that was not the fate given to me. Instead I must taste the sweetness of life, love, and belonging for an ephemeral moment, only to have it all pulled away from me. To learn one of my predecessors had sought to repair Ubel’s vampirical habits of blood slavery by sealing a bargain with a man named Hartwig von Kelsch. The mayor of Preiselhof in the year 1682.

I had read the single-page record the folder contained while Mayor Druhm pronounced a state of exile over Helena and me. Now as I collapsed on the couch in my chamber lined with mostly-empty bookshelves, I read it through again, my brain imprinting its words in unbreakable stone. My fury subsided, I envisioned a scene that took place two hundred sixteen years ago in this very fortress.

Ubel had seized thirty-eight Teuton maidens from Preiselhof from 1640 to 1682, depleting the enclave’s ability to maintain its numbers. Thirty-eight blood slaves in forty-two years implied Ubel did not even try to control his deadly anger, or he drained the witches beyond the point where blood from Wuotan’s river could preserve them. That terrible fiend must have had no sense of honor whatsoever, to plow through Teuton females so carelessly. Perhaps Ubel had been born a psychopath—or worse, maybe Wuotan had driven him to it. To regard his fellow human beings as inferior, as disposable, as insects.

Konrad succeeded Ubel as master of the Black Castle in early 1682, and the mayor negotiated the deal laid out before me that July. No Teutons, as defined by the General Conference of Teuton Priests in 1494, were permitted to reside in Preiselhof; and its citizens were not to intrude upon the Black Castle in any way. In return, no Black Priest would move against the citizens of Preiselhof in any way, magical or non-magical. The tiny village closest

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