Semua Bab The Forbidden Claim: Three Alphas, One Luna: Bab 31 - Bab 36

The red smoke of the Vampire Prince’s explosive retreat finally settled, leaving the eastern beach eerily quiet.I stood on glass-fused sand, staring out into that opaque creeping fog of the Black Sea.The iron dreadnoughts were gone, completely swallowed by that unnatural darkness, yet the metallic, coppery stink of their blood-magic still hung around in the air, like some rotting corpse that wouldn’t leave you alone.“They’ll be back,” Jace said, under his breath, sliding into place to my right. The youngest brother was back in his human shape, stormy grey eyes doing that calculating thing, like he was running grim equations through his skull. “This was only a fraction of what they’ve got. Vampires don’t sleep, Elara. They don’t get tired, and they don’t need supply lines, not for food they just drink whatever they kill. If we try to keep this coastline forever, they’ll grind us into dust.”“Then we don’t keep it,” Caleb snapped from my left, crossing his heavily scarred arms, celes

The Phantom Armada ground to a sudden, absolute halt.We were only a hundred yards from the jagged cliffs of the Crimson Continent, yet our ghost ships just couldn’t go on any farther. Along the entire coast, lifting from the boiling surf up into storm-choked clouds, a colossal half translucent wall of pulsing red energy rose and rose. It buzzed with a deep frequency, so deep it rattled the marrow inside my bones. On the cliffs, beyond that barrier, stood a nightmare made real military perfection. Thousands of pureblood Vampires held their ground in flawless, unmoving formation, like carved statues that somehow still breathed. Yet my stare kept snagging on something else, the towering obsidian throne right at the center of their ranks. The one sitting there didn’t look like any warrior. Not really. He looked like a dark god, cut from pale marble and left to breathe. The Vampire Emperor wore a tailored suit in charcoal and crimson. His hair was raven-black, his eyes, not that brigh

The heavy mahogany doors no longer pulsed with the Emperor’s dark magic. Stripped of their terrestrial anchor, they were just wood.Caleb also didn’t even bother with the handles , he just let the middle brother do that whole thing, the one where he lunges forward fast , driving a celestial-infused boot straight into the center of the double doors.The massive slabs of mahogany kinda burst outward, like they were paper, turning into a nasty scatter of lethal splinters that speared the Crimson Guards still standing in the corridor, the ones left alive.In the crooked shadow of the wrecked doorway, Jace appeared like he’d been there already, silver daggers tucked away, chest rising and falling a little too hard."The anchor is dust," Jace said, stormy grey eyes snapping onto mine."I know," I answered, and I swear the air felt like it got sucked out in one clean gulp, all that magic rushing away.I bolted past the shattered doors and out onto the wide, open-air obsidian balcony that loo