The Vampire Prince by Lissie (online e book reading .TXT) 📖

side. And when a vampire goes to that side of things, they very rarely come back from it” he told her, gently putting pressure on her hand in his.
Elara gazed up at him, a curiously perplexed expression on her face.
“What is it?” Jayce asked her, feeling all of a sudden nervous for an unexplained reason.
“Do you know of any vampires who returned from that bad place?” Elara asked him.
She sounded childlike in her questioning, the tone of her voice was so light and pale.
Jayce took a deep breath.
“Yes, I do” he replied, ever so quietly.
Elara stopped walking and turned to face him, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
“Who was it, Jayce? My Prince, tell me” she ordered, staring into his face.
“Me” Jayce said simply, turning away from her and walking into the castle by himself.
“Yes, it was him. Did you not know that, little Elara?”
They both stiffened, hearing and immediately knowing the voice at the same time. Jayce turned back around and hurried to Elara’s side once more. Once he reached her, he realised why she was staring dumbly at Talor.
The boy was carrying a slumping Cleo in his arms, her head snug against his chest. Her bobbed blonde hair fell in her closed eyes and her wrists were visibly bound together with silvery tape. Elara recovered her senses and glared at Talor, her mood changed completely. She shuffled Jayce’s unclear answer into the recesses of her mind, ready to bring out again later when there was time to go into the gory details.
“What did you do to my sister?” she demanded of him, taking a few steps forward, Jayce moving protectively along after her straight away.
He kept one hand on her back, ready to act at the slightest violent provocation from his younger brother.
“She’s in a trance, Elara” he muttered in her ear, lightly stroking between her shoulder blades to calm her down.
She shuddered at the notion of her sister being awake, but not aware of what was going on around her.
“What are you going to do with Cleo?” Jayce asked then, his dark eyes fixated on Talor’s equally black orbs.
Talor shrugged calmly, his gaze cool and controlled.
“Lock her up until I feel like playing with her a bit. Might feed off of her a few times until I throw up” he said casually, jostling Cleo in his arms.
Her head snapped back and then forward again and she was suddenly awake. She breathed in sharply and looked at her sister.
“Ellie, I’m so sorry” she whispered, stretching a hand out towards her.
Elara shook her head and smiled faintly back at her.
“It’s fine, Cleopatra. I don’t mind so much anymore” she said in reply.
Cleo nodded and her head fell back once more.
Elara sobbed and stumbled back onto Jayce, her eyes filling up with unbidden tears. They stung harshly and she turned her face into his chest, comforting herself in the slight warmth she felt from his unbeating heart.

Chapter 14
Five months later
Cleo looked up towards the entranceway of the cellar and found that she could still muster the necessary facial muscle strength to smile. Elara shut the prison door behind her with a bang and came down the steps to stand in front of her sister’s cell. Cleo gazed in surprise and awe at her sister’s growing stomach. She was five months pregnant by then, and getting bigger by the day. Elara folded her arms across her baby bump and stared in at Cleo.
“How are you doing?” she asked bluntly, masking her emotion, grateful to the black shadows for hiding her expressive eyes.
Cleo lifted and dropped her shoulders in a limp shrug. She pushed her raggedy hair away from her eyes and came closer to the cell bars to get a better look at her twin.
“How are you doing?” she retorted, her voice calmer and slightly kinder.
She was aware of the story behind Elara’s mystery pregnancy and often found herself fingering the locket she still had in her pocket. No matter what, Elliott…
Elara sighed and released her arms to hang at her sides. She reached out for her sister’s hands and pulled them through the thick bars to place them on her stomach.
“He kicks a lot” she said quietly, lowering her gaze to the floor under her feet. “Jayce says it’s a boy. He can hear him.”
Cleo raised her eyebrows, feeling the tiny baby gently kicking out at her palms.
“Does Talor, too?” she inquired coolly.
Elara’s head jerked up and she stared hard at Cleo, her brown eyes gone cold.
“Jayce doesn’t let him near me, sister. Not after what he did last time” she murmured, taking a few steps back from the bars.
“What did he do to you last time?” Cleo asked, confused.
Elara laughed without a trace of her usual humour.
“He ripped Jayce’s baby out of me. I never knew whether it would have been a boy or a girl. But then again, I asked Talor to help me get rid of it. I just didn’t know how he was going to do it until he sank his fangs into my tummy” she replied dryly.
Cleo recoiled from the bars, disgust filling her mouth like bitter bile.
“Yeah, I didn’t like it either” Elara mumbled, playing with a strand of her long blonde hair.
“Don’t you hate him?” Cleo wondered aloud, gazing at her sister with trepidation in her eyes.
Elara glanced up at her and shook her head slowly.
“Who, Talor? Or Jayce?”
“Either” Cleo muttered.
“I could never hate Jayce, Cleo. You should know that if you know nought else. And I used to think that I hated his brother, but not now. Not really, anyway. He is messed up, yes, but whose fault is that? It can’t entirely be his own. My Prince will be crowned king in four and a half months time and Talor won’t be king until Jayce ages to be thirty. And that will not be for at least another forty or fifty years. Perhaps even longer than that. They age differently here. And I will, too, once I am initiated into the vampire realm once and for all” Elara told her, gently tracing circles over her swollen abdomen.
Cleo frowned at her, almost grimacing. The thought that Elara, little, fragile Elara Alise Montford could be brave and turn into a vampire, was absolutely absurd. She would never have imagined it could or would happen.
“Why wasn’t it me?” she whispered, mostly to herself.
But Elara heard anyway. She fixed her dark gaze on Cleo, her head tilted to one side.
“What did you say?” she demanded, her voice getting steadily louder.
Cleo walked back closer to the bars again and looked her sister right in the eyes.
“Why wasn’t it me? Why didn’t your Prince pick me? I’m the strong one, the pretty one, the one every boy always wanted to date. I was always better than you! Why wasn’t I chosen to be the queen?” she screamed, trying to shake the bars from their sturdy foundations.
Elara stared back at her, her lips flattened in a thin line.
“Because he chose the right one. The one who wouldn’t despise him for what he is. Because he values character over beauty, no matter that he is beautiful. And not every boy was in love with you, or fancied themselves to be in love with you” she said softly.
Her words struck Cleo like a whip across the face.
“What do you mean?” she replied, her voice deadly smooth.
“Elliott didn’t love you, Cleopatra. He never did, no matter what Kimmy told you. He always loved me instead. And you couldn’t bear that, so you stepped in and tried to force him to want you. But he didn’t, sister. He didn’t” Elara murmured calmly, her voice pitched very low.
If Jayce or Talor were listening in somewhere above them or even outside the door, there was only a slim chance they would be able to hear her. Still, there was a chance nonetheless.
“Elliott attacked you, Elle. If you don’t recall, that’s why your in your situation right now. You think he loved you?” Cleo spat back at her, words venomous and slick with hatred.
Elara took a small step away from her, her mind on the outside world once again. She nodded slowly towards her twin sister, friends from birth and enemies since the womb.
“Yes. He loved me. He loved me enough to give me this son inside me. He loved me enough to give me what he thought I wanted. It wasn’t his fault, sister mine. Talor is the vampire trickster and Elliott’s mind was no match for his intellect and deviant behaviour. But he did love me. And that is why I killed him” she said briefly, before heading back to the doorway.
“Wait!”
She was stopped by the voice, the tremulous desperation in the word.
“What?” she said sadly.
She turned to see Cleo had pressed her pale face up against the narrowly set prison cell bars. The eyes were wide in the unusually ghostlike face, the mouth half open in an unuttered, soundless plea.
“You killed him?” Cleo whispered faintly, just loud enough for Elara to hear her.
She nodded once more, her hands again pressed to her tummy.
Cleo’s eyes went dark and her eyebrows drew together, furrowing her forehead angrily.
“You murderer!” she shouted, the echoes reverberating in the shadowy cellar. “How could you have killed him? How did you do it?”
Elara turned her back on the other girl, making her slow way up the short staircase.
“I killed him because otherwise, if I had not done it, Talor would have and it would have been a much less pleasant, well meant experience. Never believe a word that snake says to you, Cleo. And, as for how I killed Elliott Turner? I drank his blood until he was dry. Is that dramatic enough for you, twin sister?”
She knew Cleo’s mouth was hanging wide open as she watched her leave her in the dark yet again.
Jayce was waiting for her in the upper corridor, just a few metres from the entrance to the cellar. He held his hand out to her and she walked over to him, sliding her small, cold hand inside his.
“That was dreadful” she told him, closing her tired eyes and leaning her head on his shoulder.
Jayce sighed and nodded, resting his head against hers. The contrast between their hair was almost striking, the dark blonde and black.
“Ah, don’t the two of you make a lovely picture” a wry voice assaulted their ears.
Elara’s eyes snapped open and she looked up, meeting Talor’s haunting black gaze locked onto her own. She shook her head at him and tightened her grip on her young husband’s hand.
“Don’t worry” Jayce muttered to her. “He can’t hurt you when he’s under the bind.”
Talor heard the words and scowled at his older brother. He came running at Elara, a manic expression on his ethereally handsome face. She screamed and he vanished just before he reached her.

Chapter 15
Vancouver, Canada
Harmony stared out the classroom window, her chin resting in her hand. Life was boring so far, part way through her first year at high school. The friends she had were ones she’d had since she was tiny, the enemies she’d had for just as long. As an only child, she was given nearly everything she wanted. It was no secret that the Devereaux family was rich. That’s part of the reason why her life felt so dull; she never had to fight for anything she wanted; she was practically given it on a silver platter.
She sighed and turned her head to glance briefly up at the