Book Review: Tormented

Title: Tormented
Author: Elayna R. Gallea
Genre: Romance, Romantasy, Fiction, Fantasy

What It’s About: When Luna wakes up, Sebastian shows her the decision he had made—he had Made her. He teaches her how to feed and get comfortable with not wanting to drink blood from other individuals. Sebastian also takes her to a town in which vampires live by living off of animal blood rather than off of humans, to show Luna that she does have a choice in the matter if she doesn’t want to drink human blood. This happened after Luna nearly got lost to bloodlust when Sebastian’s housekeeper came by to clean the cabin that they were staying in.

Eventually, they return to Castle Sanguis, and Luna continues her search for the plant to cure Marius. In the meantime, news arrives that Luna’s family had all been gathered together and the building in which they had gathered was burnt down, killing all of them. Phyrra reports on this and the fact that she went looking for Marius but he had been stolen away by a group of people. Sebastian tells Phyrra to go looking for Marius, and then tells Luna the truth about what happened to her family. She wallows for a couple of days, but then she decides to pull herself together.

They show up in front of Queen Marguerite, and she is mad that Sebastian Made Luna; telling him that he needed her approval to Make Luna. Sebastian explains what had happened, and the Queen lets it go, but over time she starts to make it obvious that she dislikes Luna a lot—including having her drink Fairy Wine, while Sebastian is held back, which causes Luna to speak the truth on how she feels about the Queen. When Luna asks her why she hates humans, the Queen does not respond.

During another meeting, Sebastian and Luna find out that they will be partaking in a game that the Queen had devised to ‘celebrate’ her birthday, though she never had done this before. It’s clear that she has done this in order to drive a wedge between the two of them, and Sebastian suspects that she has done it because she wants to kill Luna, something that he will not allow to happen. They also find out that there is a prophecy—the Fortune Elf in the Library tells them that the Queen has to be killed on the Red Moon, or else all is lost—but Luna feels like the plant that the Witch had mentioned, Marius’s disappearance and her life all are connected but she doesn’t know how.

Sebastian takes Luna to learn how to fly, because she has received wings as a result of her change, and later they have sex for the first time. Before long, as the Queen only had given them two days, they have to show up back at Castle Sanguis in order to do the first trial, which is a hunt. There are humans that are released into the forrest, and their trial is to go after them and find them. Luna does not want to hurt any of the humans, and when Sebastian and her come across a group of kids, they convince them to trust them. They want to get the kids to safety, and take them back to the castle because there is nothing in the rules about killing them, though most of the other vampires prefer to kill the humans. Sebastian and Luna come across another set of vampires who had killed their humans right before the two came upon them, and Sebastian makes the decision to kill the vampires and make the killings their own. He tells the children to run far away as possible and never reveal themselves, which they kids end up doing. They do pass the trial, but unbeknownst to Sebastian and Luna, the Queen later finds the kids, and she reveals that to them at an event where she forces one of the kids to serve her as her pets.

Their second trial is all about riddles, and Luna gets them all correct, though many couples do not, which whittles them down even further. When it comes to Luna’s and Sebastian’s turn, the Queen asks them a riddle, to which Luna takes a long time to answer as she felt like she didn’t know the answer. When the queen was about to ask them to submit for defeat, Luna answers the question and the Queen looked shocked as well as upset, before telling them that Death is always the answer. It looked like she was going to hurt Luna, but Sebastian had stepped in and the Queen had to stay back. By this point, Sebastian and Luna had moved into the Cabin for security purposes as there was an attempt on Luna’s life—she almost got kidnapped before Sebastian showed up and saved her from the kidnappers. They had also learned about a different prophecy regarding a Vampire who could be in the Sun, and with that will come the harbinger of change. The vampires had called Luna the Sunwalker, and they found out that Marius was the harbinger based on the fact that he was kidnapped.

Luna wakes up feeling the sun on her skin, and realizes that she indeed cannot be hurt by the sun. She also has a dream later on in which Isvana, the Goddess of the Moon, gives her a seed for a plant and tells her to plant it. Luna gets into an argument with Sebastian as she wants to go outside in the day to plant it and Sebastian does not believe she can safely go out in the Sun. She does it anyway, and Sebastian heads out after her in the sun, getting burnt. Luna is horrified to find out what the sun does to Sebastian and normal vampires, but helps him heal by giving him her blood. He’s surprised to learn that she does not get harmed by the sun and they agree that they will try to do better when it comes to the hypothesis that Luna might come up with while they’re researching to find out more information for anything.

The third trial was trying plants that either do nothing or they kill them. Luna makes many of the choices, and they manage to make it to some of the last rounds of the trial, but then they get stumped on one of the flowers, and Sebastian isn’t able to help decide which flowers to choose, until he notices that one of the twins that are running the trial gives him a subtle shake, which helps him decide which plant to take. As a result, they survive the third trial. The Queen holds a banquet to show the end of the trials and she brings out one of the human children that Sebastian and Luna let go, telling them that she knows what they did, and tells Sebastian that he will have to fight for her; that he is not meant to feel anything as he is supposed to be a weapon doing her bidding, specifically he shouldn’t feel anything for humans because they are nothing.

They return to the cabin after the third trial, and Phyrra shows up to report information on Marius’s whereabouts. She tells them that things on the Broken Mountain was weird, and that darkness has overtaken things, but she was able to rescue Marius though he is very very ill. She took him to the Second Order of Isvana’s Chosen, who should be able to help him, but Phyrra tells Luna that even though Marius is alive, he hasn’t been awake, basically being in a coma. When Luna goes back into the room, realizing that Marius might not make it, Sebastian asks for more information and Phyrra tells him that the Queen had been behind the murder of Luna’s family, as well as the destruction of the village that he took Luna to show her there’s a different way as a vampire. Phyrra tells him that the Queen fears that he has grown too powerful and that he is using the powers through the Tether, which Sebastian dismisses as myth.

The next evening they go for Sebastian’s fight—he has to fight for the Queen—and while they visit the Queen before the fight, she gives them faerie wine, with Luna’s drink being laced with prohiberis—a chemical that stops the Vampire’s strengths and powers—in order to ensure that neither of them can share their power through the Tether. Luna then wakes up in a cage above an arena, where Sebastian also wakes up. The queen decides on a champion, and Sebastian has to fight him—the contender is strong, though at first Sebastian is able to keep him at bay. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go well after some point, and just as the champion is about to kill Sebastian, out of desperation, Luna is able to push her power through the Tether despite the prohiberis, to Sebastian. As a result, Sebastian manages to stake the queen’s champion, and when he comes out victorious, the Queen looks positively murderous. She forces them to come with her to her room, and she reveals that she blames Luna for Sebastian not following orders. She also reveals that she killed the people of Rivin, the town that Luna had visited with Sebastian as an alternative lifestyle to drinking human blood. The Queen starts claiming that Luna is lying, that she is trying to save Sebastian from Luna’s lies, that Luna has manipulated Sebastian into Making her—all because she knows that they were reading in the library trying to figure out a way to get out of the Tether.

The Queen attacks Luna, and Luna uses her magic to push her back, with the help of the sharing of the magic from Sebastian. They then transport themselves to the Cabin, and talk briefly, recognizing the fact that they are not able to stay and be here, safely. Luna remembers the seed she planted from Isvana, and rushes out to check it out, and sure enough, it’s the plant that the Witch had told her about. They talk further, and they agree to kill the queen. At the same time, Luna realizes that the prophecy that they had heard about the Sunwalker, which refers to her, the Harbinger, which refers to Marius, also referred to a Wielder of Shadows, which she is pretty sure refers to Sebastian.

My Thoughts: I liked the progression of this story, and the pacing. It still feels a bit fast, and I think that there’s a lot more detail that we could discover if we just slowed down a tad instead of jumping from action to action in a 400 page book. But I did enjoy seeing Sebastian’s and Luna’s relationship grow in these pages and become a lot stronger, especially when they were alone in their cabin together, and how they worked through issues together as a couple. Looking forward to see how their story ends in the next book.