His Bloody Bride

Chapter 20: Forever

Please note that this is unedited and not the final draft for the last chapter, I wanted to finish this for the sake of finishing and the real construction and editing will begin after this chapter so I can perfect this book before beginning the second one in the series. Read the author's note below for more info about the sequel.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The neighing of horses are all that fills my ears, as I walk closer to the horse stables I see the horse keeper feeding some of the horses. “Hello.” I greet the older looking gentleman as soon as I’m standing a few feet away from him.

He turns to look at me. “Hello there, miss.” He then turns back to finish feeding a carrot to the current horse.

It’s then that the scent hits me. That strong almost human scent. “You’re not a vampire?” I ask as he’s petting a beautiful white horse.

He chuckles not looking away from the happy horse. “Of course not, where would you get that idea from miss?”

“But you’re living in a castle full of vampires, right?”

He stops petting the horse now and turns to look at me fully. He furrows his brows and fixes his lowered glasses to examine me. “They’re not monsters miss but if you must know, I live in the lower part of the castle, closer to the human prisoners, I care for the horses as well as feed them, the humans I mean, occasionally. There are others like me but I take it you are one of the women from the blood moon party?”

He doesn’t know who I am. It’s nice to know someone who doesn’t, I don’t really feel like being given attention right now. “I am, actually.” I lie.

He smiles, “You aren’t sleepy, I see or it must mean you’re newly turned.” He says.

“Can’t really sleep, nightmares and all.”

“Ahh, would you like to pet some of the horses?” He offers kindly.

Before I am able to accept his offer, a loud neighing can be heard from a separate stables a few feet away from the one we’re both standing in. “Dear lord.” I hear him mutter. “I’m sorry, could you give me a few minutes? I need to go calm the other horse in the separate stables.” As soon as he says this, he rushes to the other stables.

I decide to follow him to see what’s happening. As we’re in the stables, I see a familiar looking black horse alone in the large stable. The horse looks terrified and is using his body to break the door containing him in the stable. “What’s wrong, why is he doing that?”

“He must have seen a mouse, Midnight is terrified of mice.”

“Midnight?”

“Yes, that’s his name, his owner is—”

“Niles. His owner is Niles.”

“Why yes, the king’s brother. How did you know?”

“I saw Midnight with Niles when they arrived. They made quite a scene.” I say quickly.

“Really? Wasn’t there so I wouldn’t know.”

Midnight trashes around and uses his large muscular body to hit the door of his stable again. “What do we do?”

The old man walks closer to Midnight. “We let him go.” He says this and opens the door to Midnight stable which causes Midnight to speed past us and into the large land of lush greenery. “He’ll come back soon, don’t worry about him, now I need to remove the mouse before Midnight returns else he’ll go crazy again.”

“Okay.”

“Would you mind watching Midnight? I don’t want him to go running around and into the castle, the king may be kind but I don’t know if he’ll pardon my blunder of letting his brother’s horse in the castle to trash it.”