Chapter 51: Nikolai
An explosion sounds, and everyone in the conference room is thrown from their feet. The walls surrounding the room we’re in start to crumble. Ash, Raya and Hectate managed to escape the palace before the bomb went off, teleporting at the exact same time the explosion occurred.
*’Nikolai, Mary’s been taken.’ Draq signals me through the mindlink, his voice weakened and in pain.
My vampiric side engulfs me, taking control of my body as a loud cry of anger rips through me, my aura now surrounding the entire kingdom. They do not call me the king for no reason. I am not weak, I am the strongest being to walk this earth, and I will show them all, what happens when you fuck with my mate and my kingdom.
The devastation from the explosion, is nothing compared to the devastation my aura is wrecking on the palace. I can see Ambrose through my mind’s eye trying to calm me down, but I’m too far gone now. The beast has taken over. The only way I’ll be able to regain control is by the touch of my mate, or by gaining control over my body while I sleep. Seeing as how Mary is unreachable right now, and my beast’s rage is growing every second, I doubt I’ll gain control anytime soon. He won’t waste time on sleeping. He’ll spend every moment he is in control bringing ruin to the world, until his mate is back in his arms.
Feeling the amount of uncontrollable emotion drifting through my body, I could almost understand the torment my mother went through all those years ago. I could almost understand why she refused to forgive and instead chose to have her beast always at the ready. My mate was still alive and my beast was uncontrollable. It frightened me to even consider what would happen if Mary was… no, I won’t even let myself think that way. Mary will be fine. She is a survivor.
I can just make out Ambrose approaching me cautiously, he’s trying to say something but I can’t hear him over the roaring of my own voice. I see sparks sprouting from his hand, and I tense my body up, prepared for the strike that’s about to happen. I watch in my minds eye as my beast and Ambrose battle. The Fae prince is strong, his magical abilities are comparable to my own, if not even stronger. Fae don’t like to show their hand, so their magical ability is an estimate based off of what they have decided to show us.
As sweat starts to trickle down Ambrose’s nose, I begin to worry that even the Fae prince cannot subdue my inner beast.
“Nikolai!” Ambrose yells loudly, his voice full of power and authority, “You need to calm down now. I don’t want to hurt you.”
I can see what’s about to happen before it takes place. Ambrose is raising his hand, getting ready to hit me with a powerful fae spell that will put me in a comatose state, but my vampire can sense the power radiating through Ambrose, activating my flight or fight instinct. My vampire always chose flight. I helplessly watch as my vampire rushes Ambrose, with a velocity to quick for anyone whose not a vampire to see, let alone bypass. My nails are extending to razor sharp claws, my fangs pushing past my gums, which are already secreting a venom poisonous enough to kill any living thing. Every nanosecond that passes, Ambrose’s life becomes closer to being snuffed out. I need to do something. I need to take control back from my beast. If I don’t, I’ll end up killing him.
In order to overcome my beast, I have to defeat my inner darkness. A battle that I’ve avoided since I was a young child. My beast has always been hard to control, but each time I lose control it becomes harder and harder to gain control again. When I was younger, my father told me that the only way to control your vampire, was to keep your mind pure. When he died and when I watched my mother mourn her mate, my mind became a place of nightmares. I was constantly terrified that I would lose my mom, the same way I lost my father. As I got older my fears changed, watching my mother turn into a monster, made my love for her turn into anger. I constantly feared what her next move would be. Would she take another of the palace servants lives because she needed to make an example of them, would she lock me in the dungeon again and deprive me of blood for a week because she caught me feeding one of humans whom she’d decided to almost drain of blood and then leave on the floor to die. When I finally ended her life, I thought the nightmares would end.
They didn’t end though. When I was killed with her I was tormented with the memory of my mother laying on the floor in the kitchen withering in pain, the pain wasn’t from losing her mate though. The pain came from her son, standing above her, repeatedly stabbing her over and over again with a wooden stake. I could hear her screams as she died by my hands, the question of why, evident in her eyes. Each night, I would wake up covered in sweat. Until the day I met Mary, that night and every night since, I hadn’t had a single nightmare. She was… she is my light.
Time seems to come to a stop as I close my eyes, and envision my happy place. I inhale deeply, feeling my lungs to capacity. I can see Mary in my minds eye. She wearing a beautiful emerald dress, that drapes over her heavily pregnant. A little girl is sitting beside her in a field of daisies. She has red curly hair and bright cerulean blue eyes. A perfect combo of her mother and father. Mary is smiling down at our daughter, laughing at something the spunky toddler told her.
Thinking about my life with Mary and what the future has in store has for us, gave me the strength I needed. The strength to remind myself that even in the darkest of times there’s still light. Even when it feels like there’s no point in continuing on, there’s still the future, waiting for you up ahead. My vision of the future is what gave me the strength to gain enough control of my vampire, to twist my body away from Ambrose, causing my vampire to fall forward into thin air. That slight mishap gave Ambrose enough time to release the amount of magic needed to knock me out. What was left of the conference room was destroyed by the ferocity of Ambrose’s fae magic, the full impact of his magic hitting me in the chest. The moment his magic touched me, I screamed out in pain. It felt like someone was taking a razor blade and cutting little slashes into every piece of my skin and then pouring salt water into the wounds.
I had once told Ambrose that pain was the only thing that helped wash away my inner darkness. And pain seemed to be what he planned on using to help me regain control of my beast. He hit me over and over again, enchantment after enchantment, with fae magic that caused nothing but pain, from the razor blades, to bee stings, to feeling like my body was burned inside out. I felt myself becoming weaker and weaker with each enchantment he threw my way. I could feel Ambrose’s power increasing, his inner fae making it’s appearance known. A wisp of black smoke was circling in the air, growing with each enchantment that was thrown my way. After first my vampire paid no attention to the smoke, instead he chose to turn all his attention to the enchantments Ambrose was spitting at him, trying to deflect each spell that was sent his way. It wasn’t until tendrils of smoke started wrapping around my body, did my vampire take notice of them. By then it was too late. The fae darkness was creeping into our body, causing me to fall into an almost comatose state.
“Nikolai, this enchantment won’t last long, and I won’t be able to recreate this spell again. It’s either now or never Nikolai. Become one with your vampire, become the united front you’re meant to be. Only when you have done this, will you be able to be the man and the monster. Separate you’re volatile, but melded together as one, you become a force to be reckoned with.