Claimed by the vampire prince

Chapter 482: Chapter 482

Circe did not know what pulled her from sleep so suddenly. There was no loud noise, nothing she could point to as a cause. One moment she was deep in a kind of dreamless sleep, and the next she was sitting upright in bed with her eyes wide open and her heart already beating fast.

She sat there for a moment and let her gaze move over the room. Nothing seemed to be out of place from what she could see. Yet the feeling that something was amiss did not leave. It sat on her skin like a hand pressing lightly at her shoulder, subtle and insistent at once. It rose the hair at the back of her neck.

She noticed then that Ragnar was gone. His side of the bed was empty, the sheets cool enough that he had been up for some time. Normally she would have registered his absence and gone back to sleep without a second thought. But her head was clear, her body alert, and her limbs were already swung over the edge of the bed before she had made any conscious decision to move.

She found one of Ragnar’s coats draped over a chair and pulled it on to ward off the chill, then crossed to the door.

The hall was quiet and lit by the wall sconces that burned through the night, casting pools of amber light. Circe paused just outside her door and listened. But she heard nothing

She started walking again a moment later, pulled forward by an invisible force that seemingly guided her path.

She moved through the manor, turning only when the force nudged her to, and she was midway down the next corridor when she heard it. A child’s voice.

Circe stopped.

She stood very still and listened carefully, and sure enough, there it was again. A child’s voice, or perhaps two of them, coming from somewhere further along the corridor.

She could not make out the words the children were saying. The sound drifted in and out like something carried on a breeze, there one moment and then gone the next.

She frowned.

There were no children in the manor, which just made the entire situation very odd.

She moved toward the sound. When she turned the corner, she saw them.

Two little girls standing at the end of the corridor, facing away from her. They were perhaps six or seven years old, dressed simply, their feet bare against the stone floor. What stopped Circe short was the faint light coming off their bodies, not bright enough to illuminate anything around them but enough to make their small forms easy to spot..

She opened her mouth to speak. But before she could get a word out, the girls turned and moved past her, so close she should have felt the air shift around them, but she felt nothing at all. They did not look at her. Their eyes passed over the space where she stood as though she were not there, and then they were behind her and already moving further away.

Circe turned and followed them.

She kept a few paces back and watched where they went, watched the way their feet moved soundlessly over the floor. They took two more turns before she recognized where they were leading her, and when she did, she felt the first real pull of unease since waking. They were heading toward her mother’s chambers.

She quickened her pace slightly, closing the distance between herself and the girls. She was just about to call out to them when they reached the closed door and walked straight through it. They passed through solid wood, as though it were nothing.

Circe stared, stunned. She was no longer sure what she was seeing.

For several seconds she did nothing but stare at the door, then at the empty corridor around her and at the place where those two small figures had been, and she felt her pulse beating hard in her throat.

Then she crossed to the door and pushed it open. But she couldn’t have predicted what waited for her inside.

At the center of the room, her mother stood beside a large ring of light that reached roughly shoulder height, wide enough for a person to walk through. The light it gave off was pale, cold and somewhat eerie.

Standing with her mother were the two girls with their backs to the door.

As Circe glanced between her mother and the children, something shifted and a piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Seeing them near Thalora made Circe sense something that she wasn’t able to earlier. Those were not normal girls that had somehow entered the manor, they were souls of long dead children.

As she watched, the two girls reached for each other’s hands. They held on tightly. Then they stepped forward together into the ring of light, and the light folded closed behind them, and both it and they were gone.

The room looked ordinary again in an instant. Just her mother standing in the center of it in the dark.

"Mother," Circe said.

Thalora turned.

The first thing Circe noticed were her eyes. They were a milky white, the grey of her irises swallowed entirely, the pupils lost. It lasted only a moment. As Circe watched, the color bled back, the grey returning until her mother’s eyes were familiar again.

Thalora looked at her daughter. She seemed unsurprised to find her there. freewebnøvel.com

She opened her mouth but Circe spoke first.

"What just happened here? Who were those children?" The questions came out in quick succession.

"I’m sorry if I frightened you," Thalora said. Her voice was sincere. "That was not my intention." She glanced briefly toward the space where the ring had been. "Those were two souls who had stayed behind on this realm past the point where they were able to leave on their own. When that happens, they lose the ability to cross over without assistance."

Circe stayed where she was near the door as she took in what her mother said. It meant the two souls had come seeking Thalora’s help.

"How did they know to come to you?" Circe asked.

"I am the center half of the liraelith," Thalora said. "The duty of liraelith is just measuring the light and darkness a soul carries. We also guide them across when they cannot go on their own. Something in them recognizes the essence of my power. It draws them to me."

"Does it hurt you when you help them cross?"

"I use my magic to open the passage," Thalora said. "But once it’s done, there’s no lasting effect on me."

Some of the unease in Circe’s chest lessened at that. She exhaled slowly and glanced once more at the empty center of the room where the large glowing right had been.

"Did this happen in Westeria?" she asked. "When we lived there?"

"It did. Many times." Thalora paused. "You never noticed because you hadn’t come into your power yet. There was nothing in you then that would have been sensitive to it."

It made a certain kind of sense when she compared it with everything else she had learned since her power had opened up to her. The world had not changed. She had only gained the ability to perceive things she had never been able to before. freeweɓnovel.cѳm

As odd as it was for her to witness, it wasn’t the most shocking thing Circe had ever experienced and at that, the thought of the dream she had a while ago came to mind, the one where dead bodies clawed their way from the ground in mass. She had had that particular dream more than once since and each time she did, it left her feeling shaken.