Angol
She volunteers for the Blood Tax to save her friend. She doesn't expect to survive it.
The Triumvirate collects blood from each human village every twenty years on a rotating basis. The official reason is the seals. The vampires. The ancient darkness kept at bay by sacrifice and order and a system that has run the same way for a thousand years.
Wren Ashgrove knows the system takes people and doesn't always give them back. She knows because it took her sister twenty years ago. So when it comes for Elara, Wren steps forward.
She doesn't expect a vampire commander to pull her out of the processing line and take her to the capital instead. She doesn't expect to find an archive full of records that contradict everything she's been taught. She doesn't expect a werewolf elder with a thousand-year-old drawing in his coat pocket, or a fae documentation officer who has been waiting four hundred years to show someone what she keeps in the restricted section.
And she definitely doesn't expect Roman Valdris, who has run the Blood Tax for sixty years without a single deviation, to break protocol in four seconds and spend the next seven weeks helping her unravel the institution he built his career on.
The throne of the Blood Crown has waited seven hundred years for an heir.
Tonight, it called her name.
The Blood Tax: Book One of The Aeralis Trilogy by Aimee Neyra.
