Faerie Queen: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Vampire's Bane Book 3 : Part I) by Marian Maxwell

Author:Marian Maxwell [Maxwell, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackwater Press
Published: 2016-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

11

Mona

It looked like the room was underground. There were none of the lush carpets or tapestries, paintings on the wall that Mona had become accustomed to. Neither were there servants, tables, chairs, or any other adornments. The room was plain in the material sense. Grey stone floor, grey stone ceiling, and walls all the same. Like a subterranean chamber, deep underground. Forgotten, or rarely used.

The sense of it was aided by the group of hooded figures standing at the points of a red pentagram that had been made in the middle of the floor. Within the pentagram were circles and runes and geometric shapes of great magic that Mona’s mind swirled to look at. It was too much for her to decipher—too deep, too far beyond her meagre education and lore of the arcane practices. She knew battle magic, fighting and slinging fireballs, and almost nothing of the subtle arts of enchantments and wards and initiating ceremonies, such as the one in which she was about to partake.

A man, who Mona thought to be Lord Hyde but she could not be sure, because the hood was pulled low over the man’s face, approached Augustus and draped a cloak around his shoulders that was blood red and had a collar so high that it reached to the bottom of Augustus’s pointed ears. The man clasped it around the front of Augustus’s chest with a gold chain, then handed him a long slender knife. Curved, and with runes etched onto the surface of the blade.

Mona quickly looked away and, at a gesture from the same cloaked figure, she followed him to the pentagram. He took his place at the point where he had been standing before Mona’s arrival, and she, on assumption, took her place in the middle, inside the inner circle.

As soon as her feet touched down within the red circle that was painted in blood, and was dark and sticky on the bottoms of her shoes, all of the lines of a pentagram lit up bright, giving off a reddish hue that illuminated the room’s interior.

Augustus walked to a shadowed corner where there was a stone dais that Mona had not seen before. She watched as he dipped a goblet that was waiting there into stone sink filled with blood. He filled it, sticking his hands and the goblet into the thick liquid until they were fully submerged, pulling them out, hands and goblet, inside and out, dripping red as he walked back to the pentagram, not caring that the blood got on his robes and the floor, leaving a dripping trail before him.

Mona clenched one hand, and told herself not to shake. I can’t be afraid now. She sensed the beastly vampires all around her, imagining that their faces had turned monstrous inside the shadow of their hoods. She knew now what they were better than ever before—that vampires were what she had always been told in fairy tales: creatures that were enemies to humanity. Predators a link higher on the food chain, who had to look out for themselves first and others second.

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