Chapter 11 The Blood Legacy

Jameson stumbled backward so fast his heel caught against a loose stone, and he barely managed to keep his balance. His eyes never left the mural.

The carved king was still seated on the ancient throne, but there was no mistaking what he'd just seen. The eyes had opened. They were no longer lifeless pieces of stone. They were watching him.

His throat tightened. "What are you?" The question slipped out before he could stop himself.

No answer came. The chamber fell silent again.

Jameson stood frozen for several seconds before forcing himself to look one more time. The king hadn't moved. His hands still rested on the arms of the throne, his posture as calm and dignified as it had been carved centuries ago. Only the eyes were different now. They seemed alive.

Jameson took another cautious step back. "I must be imagining this," he muttered, though the words sounded unconvincing even to him. He had survived a ritual that should have killed him, woken up beneath an ancient mountain, and found murals that contradicted everything he'd been taught about vampire history. Maybe seeing living eyes inside a stone carving wasn't the strangest thing to happen to him today after all.

A deep vibration spread beneath his feet, and he steadied himself against the wall. The sound came again. A slow, heavy thump, like the heartbeat of something enormous sleeping deep beneath the earth. Another followed it. The crimson crystals embedded throughout the chamber pulsed at exactly the same rhythm.

Jameson frowned. "They're connected."

He looked around the hall and noticed thin grooves carved into the floor, stretching out from the mural like veins. He'd mistaken them for cracks at first, but now a faint crimson light was flowing through them, and the heartbeat kept growing stronger.

He glanced down at his own hand and found a small cut had opened across one finger when he touched the mural. A single drop of blood escaped the wound, and instead of falling to the floor, it drifted downward as though something invisible were pulling it. He watched in disbelief as the droplet landed inside one of the grooves. The moment it touched down, the crimson light spread further through the chamber, and another heartbeat echoed beneath the mountain. The entire mural trembled.

Every instinct told him to leave. He turned toward the corridor, but before he could take more than two steps, the entrance sealed itself shut. A slab of black stone rose from the floor, blocking the only path he'd used to get in.

Jameson rushed toward it and pushed with both hands. It didn't move. He searched the edges for any gap, any weakness, and found nothing. He was trapped.

His breathing turned uneven again. "No," he said, striking the stone with his fist. The impact echoed through the chamber, but the wall stayed exactly as it was.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to think. Panicking had never once helped him survive Blackstone Manor, and it wasn't going to help him now. If the passage had sealed because of his blood, then maybe this place wasn't trying to kill him. Maybe it was reacting to him instead.

He turned slowly back toward the mural. The king's eyes still followed him. For the first time since waking beneath the mountain, Jameson stopped seeing the chamber as a prison. It looked more like a place that had been waiting for someone.

Waiting for him.

The thought unsettled him enough that he shook his head. "That's impossible." He was Thrall Number Seven Hundred and Forty-One. A servant... More like a sacrifice. Nothing more than that. He refused to believe some ancient place had spent centuries waiting for someone like him to show up.

The heartbeat sounded again, and this time another sound joined it, stone grinding slowly against stone. He looked toward the throne and saw a section of the floor before it beginning to move. Dust fell away as a circular platform slowly descended, revealing a staircase beneath it. Cold air drifted upward out of the darkness below.

Jameson hesitated. Every sensible part of him said to stay exactly where he was. But staying here offered no answers, and he glanced once more at the sealed entrance behind him. There was still no way back that direction.

He drew a slow breath and approached the staircase. The crimson crystals brightened the instant his foot touched the first stair, lighting the path downward one by one as he descended.

"They're responding to me," he murmured, and kept going.

The staircase spiraled deep beneath the chamber before opening into another hall. Unlike the murals above, this room held no carvings at all. Instead, rows of stone pedestals stood in careful order, each one holding a dark crystal no bigger than a human head. Most had cracked long ago. Others had gone completely black, dead and empty. Only one crystal still glowed with a faint crimson light.

Jameson approached it slowly. Inside the crystal floated a single drop of blood, and it hadn't dried or decayed at all. It hung there suspended, as though time itself had simply forgotten about it.

He stopped an arm's length away. Something about it felt familiar, though he couldn't have explained why. His own heartbeat unconsciously fell into rhythm with it. Thump. Thump.

Then the drop of blood moved.

Jameson's eyes widened as it drifted toward the surface of the crystal, almost as if it had sensed him standing there. Fine cracks spread across the crystal's surface, one, then another, then dozens all at once, branching out faster than he could track.

He stepped back instinctively. "I didn't touch it."

The cracks kept spreading, faster now, until the crystal could no longer hold whatever rested inside it. With a sharp crack that echoed through the whole underground sanctuary, the crystal shattered completely.

The suspended drop of blood floated free into the air above the broken shards, hanging there for one still moment.

Then it rushed straight toward Jameson.