Read Online Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night by Kresley Cole - Free Book Online

won!”
    “This is so,” the vampire answered easily.
    “How?” Bowe spat the word. “How did you raise that blade?”
    “It was blessed never to miss its mark,” Wroth explained. “I had only to picture a target.” The vampire wouldn’t be calm like this if he’d lost Kaderin for good.
    “You brought the Valkyrie back from the dead?”
    “I did.”
    The key had worked! Bowe felt a flare of hope and swallowed before he asked, “Did you use it... both times?”
    “Yes.”
    Bowe lowered his head. He couldn’t hear this—that his enemy had managed to do what Bowe himself could not. The shame of his failure ate at him.
    “We retrieved Kaderin’s two blood sisters, who’d died long ago,” Wroth said.
    “Talk of this later,” Lachlain said, eyeing the fire. “I see no reason to be here any longer.” Bowe understood Lachlain’s uneasiness.
    For over a hundred years, the Vampire Horde had tortured Lachlain in a never-ending fire. Each day he’d been burned alive but could never quite die. He’d only escaped recently, and merely being here must be excruciating for him.
    That reminded Bowe... “Lachlain, how can you, of all people, trust this vampire?”
    “He’s no’ of the Horde. And his brother did save Emma’s life.” Emma, Lachlain’s beloved mate and queen, was a half-vampire, half-Valkyrie waif.
    “Aye, he helped Emma—for a price. So why’d this one bring you here? What did he demand?”
    “For Emma to meet with Kristoff, the king of the rebel vampires,” Lachlain admitted. “Kristoff’s her first cousin.”
    Bowe shook his head. “Too dangerous. I will no’ have Emma take that step for me.”
    “She wants to meet him. Besides, we dinna have a lot of choice. Just as you are the only one who knows how to locate that tomb in Central America, Wroth and Kaderin are the only ones who knew how to find this place.”
    Bowe was suffering from blood loss and two weeks of food and water deprivation, and he grew confused by Lachlain ’s words.
    Why had he mentioned that tomb?
    “If you want to leave this place, you have to accept his help,” Lachlain said, then added to Wroth, “Get one arm.”
    Wroth gave a short nod and stepped forward.
    “Doona touch me, vampire,” Bowe snapped. “I’ll bloody stand on my own.” As he struggled to rise, he gritted out, “Why would anyone want to find that tomb?”
    Wroth answered, “Because the players you trapped there, Lykae, never returned.”
    “ What? ” Bowe rasped as he indeed made it to his feet by himself. Just before he lost consciousness.
    8
    “What the hell are you doing?” Lachlain snapped when he saw Bowe struggling to sit up in bed. It’d been a mere day since he’d been delivered back to the Lykae compound in Louisiana.
    “Got somewhere I need to be,” Bowe answered. His tone was weary, and yet there seemed to be some kind of underlying excitement in his demeanor.
    “You’re no’ ready to go anywhere yet.” Yesterday, before Bowe had come to, Lachlain had seen to it that all his injuries were debrided and dressed as best as was possible. The amount of damage done to Bowe had been staggering. Besides missing a hand and an eye, his torso had been pierced with some kind of rusted metal, tearing the bottom of his lung. “You’re in no shape to be moving around so soon.”
    “Does no’ matter.”
    “You’ll reopen your wounds.” The idea that Bowe had been able to keep fighting on in this condition was astonishing—if one didn’t know what he’d fought for. But after such trials and then such a loss, Lachlain couldn’t understand why Bowe hadn’t stepped into that pit. If Lachlain had lost his mate, Emma, not once but, in essence, twice, he ’d have dived in within a heartbeat’s time. Why hadn’t Bowe? What drove him? The subject was one of great conjecture among the clan.
    “Stop analyzing me, cousin.”
    Lachlain exhaled. “I doona understand you sometimes.”
    Bowe eased his legs over the side of the bed,