“I made a vow, and Elyon help me, I’ll keep it or die with Billos!”

“What can you hope to achieve by this?”

A crooked grin split her face. “You know what I hope to gain. These larvae need a female to complete their transformation into lovely black butterflies with fangs. The worms in this hall are female. Once they’ve been fertilized, there’s no turning back.”

“We begin!” Alucard snarled. He walked toward the table, and with each step his claws clacked on the stone floor.

“Please, Darsal.” Johnis could beg all he liked—she didn’t look interested in bending her decision to betray Elyon, Silvie thought. Embittered by her loss of the one man she was willing to die for, Darsal had sworn to wage war on the books and whoever stood in her path to do so.

“We begin!” Alucard growled again.

Darsal’s fierce glare drilled Johnis for another long beat. She turned her back to them and walked to the table under Alucard’s watchful gaze.

Why was the beast so attentive to her? Clearly there was some bad blood between them.

“Why him?” Karas whispered in a voice so faint that Silvie could barely hear her words. “Why is she cooperating?”

Karas’s eyes were wide, and her face glistened with sweat. The thin white blouse she’d worn was now badly smudged and wet. She looked at Silvie.

“If she’s waging war . . .”

“Don’t, Darsal,” Johnis pleaded. “You can’t open the gate! They’ll only destroy you.”

No reaction this time.

Alucard stood over the seven books like a hawk over a nest of chicks. Saliva dribbled from pink lips and pooled on the table. Darsal stood to one side, eyes on the beast, jaw firm.

Alucard reached for a long knife, held his paw over the silver bowl with water, and slashed himself.

Blood dripped into the water.

Johnis put his free hand in Silvie’s and held tight, perhaps to still the tremble in his own fingers. “He’s defiling the water with blood,” he whispered, citing the taboo they all knew. Silvie didn’t know if the rite Alucard was performing was necessary to open the gate, but she suspected it was more a matter of mood setting for the beast after two thousand years of dreaming.

He flung the knife to one side, letting it clatter off the table and fall noisily to the floor. Facing him, Darsal picked up the black book and set it on the table directly in front of him.

The beast squeezed blood from his wound onto the cover, then pulled his claw back.

Darsal set the brown book squarely on top of the bloody black book. Now there were two books, one atop the other, joined with blood.

Again, Alucard dribbled blood onto the cover.

This was the vision that they’d seen beneath the waters at the desert oasis. All seven books aligning to create a gateway.