A Gate of Night (A Shade of Vampire #6)(26)
Author: Bella Forrest

Relax while everything I love and live for is slipping away from me. Relax while I lose all control of my life. Relax, while I sit here trying to avoid a conversation with this red-eyed monster, who just confessed to craving my blood more and more every day.

Relax, Sofia. I repeated the words to myself over and over again. The only thing that got me through each day at The Blood Keep was the conviction: Derek is coming.

If not, I will find a way to get to him.

To my delight, when I opened my eyes after a long night’s sleep, I found a familiar man sitting on a chair near my bed, waiting for me to wake up.

“Hello, my queen. I was told you requested my presence.”

Eli Lazaroff.

Chapter 18: Derek

Five months. I’d been at The Sanctuary for five months. I knew nothing about what was happening back home at The Shade. Even worse, I knew nothing about what had happened to my wife at The Blood Keep.

During my time at The Sanctuary, I was given spacious living quarters on the top floor of what seemed like the tallest building in the city, where servants sought after my needs. I tried to converse with some of them, but none of them ever spoke to me. I didn’t even know their names. Whenever I addressed them, they ignored me. They seemed to hate me, though I wasn’t sure why.

The only people who talked to me were the Ageless and Ibrahim, the warlock assigned to mentor me. And I wasn’t allowed to leave my quarters, except for when I was training.

Five months had revealed things about myself that I never thought possible. I had my strength back—probably more than I’d had when I was a vampire.

My ability to heal was back. Though it didn’t happen as quickly as when I was a vampire, whenever I healed, I was stronger than before I was wounded.

My agility was also back. Again, not the same speed as I’d had when I was a vampire, but definitely far quicker than a human was supposed to be. My heightened senses had also returned.

But what the vampire curse had suppressed all these years was something beyond my imagining—fire. I had the ability to conjure fire. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why, but I did. What I didn’t have was the ability to control it and since the witches had introduced me to this ability, ever since the first time fire came out of my fingers, harnessing the power had proven to be difficult.

Whenever I asked where all these powers came from, I was given a cryptic answer about Cora investing much of her power in me. It was no secret that during my four-hundred-year slumber, Cora had placed some sort of spell on me that made me more powerful. Maybe she’d been channeling power from The Sanctuary to me all along.

I’d never understood why the Ageless allowed it if she knew that Cora was doing this, or how she couldn’t have known considering how powerful she seemed to be.

All I knew was that once a witch’s power took over a human being, it did things to that person, and since I was a vampire when it happened… it had placed those powers in a state of preservation so that when it came out, it came out in uncontrollable bursts.

The witch and warlock tried to help me take control of the power, making me spend most of my time in their realm trying to do something that even they didn’t seem to fully understand.

I was standing in the midst of a wide open field surrounded by small lakes, staring at a round target—one I wanted to destroy simply because I was tired of being held captive in the witch’s realm.

“Relax, Derek,” Ibrahim said in his deep, soothing voice. “You won’t be able to harness your power unless you learn to calm down.”

“Calm down?” I uttered through gritted teeth, sensing heat creep from the blades of my shoulders down to the tips of my fingers. “I want to see my wife!” A ray of fire burst out of my palms, burning not only the target, but everything else in its path.

I tried to control it, but I couldn’t.

“You have to control your rage!” Ibrahim screamed through the chaos, standing behind me, making sure that he was out of the fire’s way.

“The vampire’s curse kept you cold,” was the Ageless’ simple explanation and nothing else was said after.

That morning, under the blazing heat of the sun, I was half-wishing that I was a vampire again, because nothing I knew to do could make me calm down. The fire was beyond my control.

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Sofia. Five months was far too long to be away from my bride. I was afraid I would forget her face. I was afraid that… I couldn’t even think about it. Tears began to brim my eyes as visions of her smile, her laughter, her warmth came to me. Her soft kisses back at the dungeon haunted me—the memory, just like the kisses themselves, was both sweet and painful at the same time.

So wrapped up in cherished memories of my beloved, I lost track of what was happening around me and I found myself kneeling on the ground, sobbing.

“That’s it. That’s how you do it.” Ibrahim sounded beyond relieved. He’d probably been afraid that I would burn The Sanctuary down. “You need to learn control.” He snapped his fingers and a strong, cool wind blew the fire away before it could spread.

Just then, the familiar form of the Ageless appeared from the horizon, walking toward us in a slow, steady stride. Sympathy flashed in her eyes when she saw me but that quickly disappeared when she addressed Ibrahim in a curt tone. “How is he doing?”

During my stay at The Sanctuary, it had become increasingly clear that the Ageless was their leader, that she was a mother of sorts to their kind. Beyond that, she was perhaps the most powerful among them. It had become commonplace to see Ibrahim speak to her with reverence.

“It’s proving a little challenging, but there’s improvement.”

“Why must I stay here? Why can’t I train elsewhere?” I snapped at her.

“And have you burn down half the human realm in the process?” Ibrahim laughed wryly, in an attempt to break the ice.

He failed.

The Ageless and I were both glaring at each other. “You know why, Derek.” That infuriating tone made me feel like an idiot. “You need to learn to harness your power. You’re useless to all of us until you learn to control and manage your strength.”

“Do you know where my wife is? What has happened to her?”

“We have time. You need not worry.”

“Time? Time for what? Where is she? Do you know?” I was feeling the rage building up again. I breathed a couple of sighs to keep my temper in check. As a vampire, I’d usually let my temper run amok, but this time, I couldn’t afford to let that happen. “You’ve kept me from Sofia for five months. She’s my wife. How can I not worry?”