He looked at Emily’s shocked face then back at me. “Do you know what these men did?”

“Did?”

“Yeah.” He sat up, placing the grass on the table. “Do you know what they did to their victim?”

“No.”

“They didn’t just break human law, Majesty. They broke our laws by killing in cold blood. They didn’t even eat the man. They stabbed him several times in the chest and left him in an alley to die.”

“Then, isn’t imprisonment enough, maybe twenty-five years?”

“For a human, yes, given that they lead such short lives,” Ryder piped up. “But not for our kind, My Queen. It’s laughable.”

Mike stood. “I agree, Ara. You need to use scare tactics right now. Once you’ve established your monarchy and shown your strength, you can ease up a bit, but right now, people are looking for signs of weakness.”

“So these men have to suffer so I can make a point?”

“There are many casualties on the road to freedom, Majesty.” Morgaine bowed her head. “Their sacrifice is given for the greater good.”

“Fine then,” I challenged, looking at my king. “I’ll do it, but you’re going to walk those men down to the crypt and close their coffins yourself.”

“A good councilman always does.”

“Yes, but you're not a councilman anymore, David.” I stood up. “You're the king.”

“Which means I’m extending a courtesy to you by arguing this, Ara. That courtesy ends now.”

“This isn’t—”

“Sit down,” he said firmly, and the room fell to flat silence.

“No. I don’t agree with this. I don’t agree that burying men alive is going to solve anything.”

“You don’t have to agree. I am the king, and I have final say.”

My mouth opened to protest, but I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and the whole room seemed to stand still, as if no one had the courage to speak up against their king, even though he was wrong.

“In this monarchy,” I said firmly, my voice not even shaking, “the queen holds the power.”

“Not the way I run things.” He stood up slowly, placing his hands on the table, and I finally saw what it was the people saw in this king—the reason they feared him. “Now. Sit. Down.”

“No.”

“Ara. I'm not kidding. There are ways things need to be done. You have a king because you don't have the gut to handle this stuff. Now sit and let us do our job.”

“I won't allow torture.”

David’s stone face broke; he laughed, waving a hand in my direction. “Take your idealism somewhere else, Ara. I don't have time for it.”

I swallowed, digging deeper for a little inner strength, and looked at Mike, whose mouth hung open. This was clearly the councilman we hadn’t met yet—the David everyone warned me about. But I wasn’t surprised, not like Mike. I’d seen this David before.

“Mate, why not let her try it her way? If you’re right, the best way to show Ara is to let her learn from her own experiences. She’ll never learn from being told.”

David stared Mike down for a second, then turned to me, his eyes softening when he looked into mine. “Okay. Go ahead, but you’ll be taking us back to the Stone Age, Ara, and when more vampires go ramped because there’s nothing to fear, we’ll be doing it my way, and I don't want any arguments from you.”

“Okay,” I whispered, nodding.

“Right. Now. Missing venom stores.” He looked around the room. “What do we know?”

“Nothing yet, Your Majesty.” Blade sat back, linking both hands behind his head. “The dawn guard noticed the lock on the weapons vault was broken at about four in the morning, and seventy per cent of the venom was gone—no fingerprints, no fibres or hairs. Nothing.”

“Do we think it was inside job?” He looked at Mike.

“I’m looking in to that,” Mike said. “And we’ve got forensics on it, too. They’re combing that place as we speak. If anything’s to be found, they’ll find it.”

“There’s one thing they can’t find,” Quaid said, and we all looked at him; he grinned. “A motive.”

“Well, I have a pretty good idea what the motive is,” David said flatly. “And I’m damn sure we’ll be seeing those venom stores again—on the battlefield.”

“For real?” I said, not really meaning to say it out loud.

David looked over at me, offering a small smile. “Drake has threatened us once before. I’m pretty sure he’s preparing for war, Ara. And I’m certain he will attack without warning.”

“Should we evacuate the town? The Lilithians have human children there.”

David shook his head. “Not yet. I’m sending spies out to Elysium tomorrow to keep an eye on things.”

“But, last we heard, Drake still hadn’t returned there,” Mike said. “So, if he’s planning an attack, it’ll be from somewhere unknown.”

“Perhaps. But we don’t have those kinds of resources elsewhere, Mike,” David said, meaning ‘we’ as the Set he used to belong to. “Drake needs the armoury at Elysium if he’s going to attack. And when he returns to set things in motion, my spies will alert us.”

“Fine but, in the meantime, we need to find those venom stores. Without those, all he can do is injure our troops.”

“Or kidnap one to extract venom,” Blade said, sending Mike and I stiff. If Drake came after anyone for their venom, it could only be either myself, Mike, or one of my private guards—all people I cared about immensely.

“Yes, so, with that in mind,” David said, pointing at Mike and my Guard. “I want you five to be extra vigilant.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“You don’t need vigilance. You have me.”

I sat back, rolling my eyes. If he kept up this high-and-mighty behaviour, he’d be the one needing vigilance.

I no longer feared the Enchanted Forest. All those tales I’d been told about the trees imprisoning anyone who dared walk below their bows at the hour of dawn must have been lies. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. But the rumour did afford me a kind of privacy at this hour I couldn’t get anywhere else, which gave me a chance to think about things I couldn’t dare think of at the manor.

A bright orange orb glowed through the trunks up ahead at a distance, the dawn rising around the forest like a warm greeting. I reached out and touched the base of each tree I passed, a kind of unspoken good morning, and each one responded with a gentle tingle against my fingertips. The ground beneath my bare feet was covered in dry, summer leaves, cushioning my steps while the energy of the forest rose up from the platform of nature, electrifying every nerve within me. I felt alive out here. More alive than anywhere else I’d ever been. There was no loneliness in this forest—not like when I visited the Garden of Lilith. No, out here I had the company of something not found within the border of the manor. It was as if Nature had given up on that place—given up on the grounds, the people, even my garden. But ever since the day I swore in my own blood to protect the Stone and everything under its rule, the need to feel the buzz of life around me had become like my need for oxygen. If a day went by where I didn’t come here, didn’t strip down to nakedness, or at least leave my shoes behind out of respect for those things living under my feet, it almost felt like I was trapped in a coffin. And with all the pain I’d suffered these passing years, the last thing I needed was to feel buried as well.

I walked on toward the openness up ahead, in search of the space and breath I knew I’d find above the valley. I could breathe out here, but I could not escape the emptiness I brought with me. Something was missing. Some vital part of my mind or maybe soul had disconnected somehow, and no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find the time or place in my memory that it first occurred. But I knew something wasn’t right, and I knew that the bad dreams, the memory loss and this hollowness inside me was connected and that, somehow, it had something to do with Jase. Maybe it was as simple as my denied heart wanting him as a friend, or maybe it went deeper. I wasn’t sure. But I had to figure it out, whatever it was, for David’s sake and mine.

As I reached the clearing at the Stone of Truth, the energy in the forest surged and raced toward me along veins under the ground, gathering and collecting in this one place, rising up through my feet to wake my sleeping cells, then trickling away again and returning to the Stone.

I closed my eyes and held my arms out, angling my face to the sky, while the whispers of Nature filled the silence, making all the tiny hairs on my body stand on end. I could hear the wind kiss the thin edges of every leaf, could feel the small droplets of sunlight sneaking through the canopy, dancing intermittently on the bark around my toes, could hear the smallest insects crawling beneath the soil, and hear even the brush of a bird’s wing on the sky. This was my song. This was where I could plug myself in to all that I was, and just exist, for no other reason than to be a part of something greater. Here, I could think clearly.

Here, I could focus on something other than the suffocating dread I had that something was missing.

Here, I could quieten my mind long enough to see the answers beneath all the questions.

“Auress?” a child called.

I slowly opened my eyes and lowered my arms, but as my gaze went to the Stone, a flash of gold hair caught my eye. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

A child’s face showed around a tree trunk; her cheeky smile challenging.

“What are you doing?” I called, but she ducked out of sight again—her high giggles echoing off everything around me. “Eve, is that you?”

She ran to the next tree, her hair trailing behind her like gold ribbons, but when I came upon her, she was gone again.

“Eve?” I called. “Please come out.”

I waited.

“Eve?”

She giggled again, this time appearing further away. I ran after her, my limbs opening up as I broke into a fast, human sprint, feeling the air expand my lungs like a breath I’d forgotten to take. I followed her all the way out to the clearing by the lighthouse, glad I’d decided not to walk naked today, and stopped dead.

“What the—?”

Trees had grown up overnight like blossoming buds in a time-lapse film, their luscious leaves casting shadows over the long grass, where the scent of apples and rotting cider wafted on the early fog, making sweet perfume in the air. I walked cautiously between the columns of trees, pinching the leaves on a few branches as I went to see if they were real. And as I came to a stop at the giant oak tree, centre to the orchard, I knew then that the child I saw must have been Evangeline.