Chapter 65 Chapter 65

Chapter 65 Chapter 65
“Envoy of the Night Council?”

Raven repeated the guard’s words in a tone that was far too calm, yet his eyes narrowed sharply. The fingers of his hand, adorned with a silver ring engraved with the emblem of an ancient clan, slowly curled into a fist. “Who has come?”

“Vane,” the guard whispered, still breathless. “He did not come alone. Two armored guards from the northern fortress are with him.”

The moment the name was spoken, tension spread through the small room like a cold poison. Leon, who had been sitting weakly on the edge of the iron bed with a thin wound on his neck, suddenly tensed. His face, already as pale as paper, seemed to lose whatever color of life remained.

“Vane…” Leon murmured hoarsely, clutching the thin blanket beneath his fingers until the fabric nearly tore. “If the life-taker from the Night Council has descended from their fortress… this is no longer about hunting territories.”

I stood frozen beside the medicine cabinet. My chest thundered softly. As a daughter of Crimsonveil who had spent her childhood amid ancient literature and stacks of animal-skin scrolls, I knew exactly who the Night Council were. They were not merely elders—they were the iron-fisted rulers of the law who stood above the feuds of both Bloodfang and Crimsonveil. They never concerned themselves with trivial matters. They appeared only when the very existence of our kind was threatened with total annihilation.

And the most dangerous thing, I thought, swallowing bitter saliva, is that they possess the ability to recognize pure bloodlines.

“Elena,” Raven’s voice cut through my thoughts. It was low, almost a warning hiss. “Go into the back storage room. Do not come out, do not make a sound, and do not set foot on the main floor until I tell you to.”

“Raven, I—”

“This is not a request,” Raven cut in quickly, his soot-black eyes locking onto mine. “Vane has a sense of smell that can detect lies from hundreds of meters away. If you are caught here…” He did not finish the sentence, but his gaze spoke of a danger that was all too real.

I pressed my lips tightly together. A faint fear began to creep up the back of my neck. If the Night Council recognized my scent as Elysian—not Elena, an ordinary university student—then my flight would end tonight. This place would no longer be merely a nightclub, but a deadly trap.

I nodded slowly, absorbing his instructions. Without wasting time, I turned and slipped behind the thick velvet curtain that separated the treatment room from the beverage storage area. The space was narrow, smelling of rotting wood and the dense, sharp aroma of high-proof alcohol that stung the nose. There, I stood behind the gap of a large wooden cabinet, holding my breath, allowing my vampire instincts to sharpen my hearing to its absolute limit.

Outside, the heavy door of the treatment room creaked open once more. The sound of heavy footsteps weighted by armor and unassailable authority echoed across the concrete floor.

“Raven.”

The voice sounded like the scrape of two sharp stones in the heart of an ice storm. Cold, devoid of emotion, and saturated with ancient magic that made the air pressure in the room plummet drastically.

“Vane,” Raven answered. His tone was carefully modulated to sound polite without any hint of submission. “It is an extraordinary honor to see the Night Council deign to set foot in a place such as Raven’s. What wind has brought the exalted envoy all the way from the northern fortress?”

“Do not waste my time with false courtesy, Raven,” Vane cut in without hesitation. The rustle of his thick mantle sweeping through the air was audible. “This human city is beginning to rot with the scent of vampire blood vanishing without a trace.”

My heart pounded hard in my chest. Vanishing vampires?

“You mean the human corpses found in the back alley two days ago?” Raven asked calmly. “I already cleaned up the traces. The human police are treating it as an animal attack.”

“Not humans, you fool!” Vane’s voice rose, trembling with restrained fury. “Those humans were nothing more than seasoning trash. I am speaking of our own kind.”

Silence blanketed the room. I could sense Leon holding his breath at the edge of the bed.

“What do you mean?” Raven’s voice had now lost its casual tone.

“In the past two weeks,” Vane said, his voice softening again yet carrying a dense weight of darkness, “seven vampires have vanished from this city. Two from the Bloodfang clan, three underground rogue vampires, and the remaining two… mid-ranking nobles from the western territories.”

“Vanished?” Leon finally dared to speak, his voice hoarse. “Not… dead?”

“If they had died, we would have found the remnants of their ashes,” Vane replied coldly. “But there are no ashes. No discarded clothing. No blood-bond signals that were severed in a natural way. They simply vanished, as if swallowed by a darkness older than our race itself.”

Behind my hiding place, my fingers brushed the rough edge of the wooden cabinet. Seven vampires in two weeks. No ashes. No traces. This defied the fundamental biological law of vampires—when we die, our bodies crumble into dust. If no ashes remained, it meant… their bodies had not been destroyed.

Their bodies had been absorbed.

“And that is not the most terrifying part,” Vane continued. His footsteps approached Leon’s position. “I can smell the drained essence within you, Leon. You are fortunate to still be breathing. The perpetrator moves too quickly, using a space-folding technique mastered only by those who hold the keys to forbidden blood magic.”

“Forbidden magic…” Raven murmured. “Does the Night Council know what that monster is truly seeking?”

Vane stopped walking. The silence that followed felt so dense, as if the words he was about to speak next were a curse capable of bringing down the walls of this building.

“We seized a fragment of a ritual seal at the site of the last execution near the harbor,” Vane said slowly. “The seal was carved using crystallized black blood. And the elders of the Night Council have matched its energy pattern.”

My chest tightened violently. The ominous premonition that had been settling at the bottom of my soul suddenly surged, burning through my bloodstream with an unbearable panic.

“What energy pattern?” Raven asked.

Vane drew a short breath, then released it along with a terrifying truth.

“The perpetrator is not hunting to conquer this city. Nor is he interested in Bloodfang’s power,” Vane said in a cold tone that pierced to the bone. “He is draining the essence of these vampires solely to gather energy… because he is tracking the existence of one specific type of blood.”

“What blood?”

Vane answered, his voice echoing softly in the small room:

“The perpetrator is searching for the remaining pure blood of the Crimsonveil line.”

Thud.

The blood in my body seemed to stop flowing at once.

The world around me spun. Vane’s words struck me like a perfectly aimed sledgehammer to the chest. So hard that I had to lean against the wooden cabinet to keep from collapsing to the floor.