My Vampire King Husband Died on Our Wedding Night? novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Hands in the Crypt

Hester finds Imogen with the king and says nobody has ever checked him; then Duke Rooke arrives and moves the burial to the third dusk.

I held my breath and didn't move.

His fingers tightened around mine once.

Then they went slack again.

His skin was as cold as the stone step I was kneeling on, and his chest under the roses had not risen.

I had touched that hand every night for six months, and it had never moved before.

"Edmund," I said.

Nothing.

"Your Majesty is not receiving, my lady," said a dry voice behind me. "He has been quite firm about it."

I turned so fast my knee burned.

Hester Quill stood in the chapel doorway with her ring of keys at her belt and a lantern in her hand.

She was the king's chamberlain, small and straight, with white hair in a bun, and she was the only person in the keep who had been kind to me since the funeral.

She was also a hundred and sixty years old, and I had never seen her look surprised.

"He moved," I said. "His hand. It closed on mine."

Hester crossed the floor without a sound and set the lantern down on the altar step.

She did not tell me I was grieving or that I had imagined it.

She bent and studied the king's face for a long time.

"I thought so," she said quietly.

"You thought what?"

"The doctor pronounced him dead in under a minute. The dukes would not allow a second opinion."

She straightened and looked me in the eye.

"I have sat in this chapel every night since, my lady. I have never once seen his lips go grey."

My heart started to pound.

"They said he died," I said. "The court said so. You said so too."

"I said what I was ordered to say. There's a difference."

Her voice was low and fierce.

"There is an old law. It's in the king's library, in the oldest book, and Duke Rooke has had it moved to his own shelves. A vampire who feels too much can fall into dormancy. It looks exactly like death."

"Feels too much," I repeated.

"It has not happened to a king in three hundred years. No one living remembers what it looks like."

The air in front of me shivered, and pale letters formed over the coffin.

[Tell her three days.]

I swallowed.

"How long does it last?"

"It ends by itself, or when the king's chosen queen gives her blood to him." Hester shrugged one thin shoulder. "That is all the book says. It does not say when."

"Three days," I said.

Hester's eyes sharpened.

"Who told you that?"

I opened my mouth to explain the letters, and then I shut it again.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I think someone who wants him to wake."

She looked at me as if she were deciding how much she could trust a widow who talked to ghosts.

Then she nodded once.

"Then we have three days," she said.

I felt something loosen in my chest for the first time in half a year.

It lasted about a minute.

The chapel door banged open at the far end, and a gust of cold air blew every candle sideways.

Footsteps came down the aisle, a great many of them, and none in a hurry.

Duke Alistair Rooke walked at the front.

He was thin and silver-haired and wore a grey three-piece suit, and four other dukes and a line of ministers followed him in a tight V.

Hester stepped between us without seeming to move.

"Your Grace. It's past midnight. The king receives no visitors in the crypt."

"The king receives none," Rooke agreed pleasantly, and he looked straight past her at me.

"Your Majesty. I heard about your evening."

I got to my feet.

My knee was still bandaged and my hair had come loose from its pin.

"News travels fast."

"We have excellent friends," he said.

I thought of Pippa's phone buzzing in her hand.

R: Did she say yes?

"I understand you declined a perfectly good proposal in front of a restaurant full of witnesses," Rooke went on. "And struck two of your friends. The court is concerned."

"I'm concerned that the court is in my husband's crypt at midnight."

A minister at the back coughed to cover a laugh.

Rooke smiled, and he did not look like a man who was embarrassed.

"I'm afraid it's a matter of law, Your Majesty. A widow's grief is honored for six months. That has now passed, and by your own behavior tonight, you are plainly not in mourning."

"What does that mean?"

"It means the king must be laid to rest, as the law demands, and not left to rot in a chapel."

He stepped close enough that I could smell cold stone and cedar on him.

"The burial is set for the third dusk from tonight," he said. "Sealed in sunstone in the royal vault."

Behind me, in the quiet, I heard the faintest creak of the glass lid, as if something under it had shifted.

Rooke didn't hear it.

Hester did, and her hand tightened on her keys.

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