by Elena May
“And I trust you.” Vlad stood from the high chair and smoothed his cloak. “Lead the way.”
“My love, you cannot!” Armida stood up and barred his way. “Trust them as much as you want, but I don’t. Not with your life.”
He took her hand and lifted it to his lips. “There is no need to worry, my heart. I have this under control.”
Armida scoffed and pulled her hand away. “Do you? You have no idea what this man is planning. Don’t you think you have given me enough grief already?”
Ah, so this was the matter of the Prince going by himself to the Resistance and to Ila’s people, without saying a word to anyone. Myra had wondered if this had been forgiven and forgotten.
His gaze softened. “I regret any grief I might have caused you, but this is something I must do.”
Armida fisted her hands. Her eyes burned like strange green chemical fires. “You think your life is yours to give away as you please. You never think about what it would do to me if any harm came to you. You truly have no idea how much I love you, do you?”
He stepped closer to her and brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. “It cannot be any more than I love you.”
The corner of Armida’s lip twitched and a tear slid down her face. “If you think so, you clearly have no idea.”
He buried his fingers into her hair and pulled her closer, brushing her forehead with a kiss. “Worry not, my starlight. The only hurt I will suffer will be the pain of being apart from you.”
“Oh, please, stake me now,” Tristan whispered to Myra. “If I have to listen to this sugary crap for another minute, I will get diabetes.”
Myra gave him a sympathetic smile and looked back to the Prince and Armida, who were now kissing as if they were the only two people in the world. Their hair entwined, deep red against raven black. Myra was not even surprised the two vampires were intimate in front of strangers. It was the same as when Indira and Armida had talked freely in front of her. For vampires, humans were just like furniture, or stuffed animals, or pets. Or food.
Suddenly, the Prince broke the kiss and sank his teeth into Armida’s neck, drinking deep. Armida did the same, and the two vampires stood there, devouring each other’s blood. Their skin grew pale and translucent, the veins outlined, sharp and pulsing with new blood, glowing, alive. Their eyes were aflame, his blazing like dark gold, and hers like burning emeralds.
Myra watched in fascination as Zack’s jaw dropped. Lidia, Thomas, and even Sissi grew a sickly shade of green. But when Myra’s eyes returned to the scene, she realized that all the disgust she had felt in the past was gone. She remembered Tristan’s bite and all the fragments of his life she had glimpsed. What were the Prince and Armida seeing right now? For a brief, shameful moment, she was ready to give up everything to see it herself.
“Now that we are done with this nonsense,” Tristan said once Armida and the Prince had finally disentangled themselves, “we can get back to business. You.” He pointed at Zack. “How long do you think this private talk will take?”
Zack shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes, I suppose. Or half an hour.”
“Excellent,” said Tristan. He took an ancient-looking watch out of his pocket and placed it on the table. “If the Prince is not back in half an hour, in good health and spirits, Armida and I start eating humans. Understood?”
Zack looked murderous but nodded. “It won’t come to that.”
“The same applies to you,” the Prince said, looking at Thomas and Lidia. “If anything happens to my friends while I am gone, the next thing you see of your General will be a well-done steak.”
“I was unaware vampires cooked humans for food,” Thomas said.
Tristan gave him an incredulous look. “It was a metaphor, you imbecile,” the vampire cried. “My lord, why do you waste time speaking to them at all?”
“Remember what Tristan said,” Armida said, her intense gaze fixed on Zack. “The Prince must return untouched. If as much as a hair is missing from his head, your friends will pay the price.”
“Yes, I got it the first time,” Zack said through clenched teeth. “I’ll return your precious Prince in one piece. And how would you know about missing hairs, anyway?”
Tristan buried his head in his hands. “Really? None of you knows what a metaphor is, do you?” He looked at Zack. “And have you never heard that we can count very fast? I can tell you that you have eighty-seven thousand, six hundred and twenty-four hairs on your head. Now, get out of here and get this stupidity over with, before they have gotten half that number.”
Zack walked out of the room, and the Prince followed but stopped at the doorway. He turned back and gave his friends one last grin before the door closed behind him with a loud squeak.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Knowing what You Want
Tristan glared at Myra. “Do you know anything about this?”
“No,” she said. And thanks for making me look even more suspicious to my friends.
Tristan crossed his arms across his chest and raised his feet on the table. An uneasy silence fell over the group, and everyone tried to look anywhere else but at each other.
Sissi tucked a fiery curl behind her ear. “Tristan,” she said, chewing at her lip, “I’d like to show you something. Would you come with me for a moment?”
Myra stared at her. What the hell was she doing? Was it so difficult to at least try to avoid suspicion?
“I am busy,” Tristan grumbled. His perma-frown grew deeper than ever.
Armida laughed. “Yes, he is busy brooding and getting ready to start eating people.” She walked behind him, laid her hands on his shoulders, and placed a kiss on the top of his golden head. “Aw, dearie, you are so cute when you are worried about the Prince.”
“I am not worried,” Tristan barked. “That fool can go sunbathing if he so desires. I am done caring.”
“Of course you are,” Armida said with a smile. “Myra, dear, why don’t you join me for a cup of tea? Tristan told me you lived in horrid conditions, and so I brought you some nice tea to brighten your days.”
Myra wanted to bang her head against the stone wall. Was everyone determined to make her look like a vampire collaborator? And what—Armida and she were tea buddies now? Since when?
“What are you doing?” Tristan snapped at Armida. “You are supposed to—”
“To what?” Armida interrupted him. “Stay here and prepare myself to start drinking humans the very second the clock strikes? I’m sure you will do a fine job.”
Armida exited the room, and Myra hesitated. Following was bad, but letting the vampire wander around unsupervised was worse. She took a deep breath and followed. “What was that about?” Myra asked in a hushed voice once she was outside the Headquarters. “Do you need to speak to me? Is something wrong?”
“It is a long story,” Armida said. “Let’s make the tea first. We will have plenty of time to talk.”
Cold dread swept through Myra’s heart. Armida knew. She had somehow found out about Myra’s deception with the story for the Prince. But what would the vampire do to her now?
Myra’s heart hammered as she led her guest to the kitchen and put a kettle on the fire. Once the water had started to boil, she took the leaves Armida offered and left them to brew. While the leaves were releasing their flavors, she reached into the cupboard. Her eyes ran over the random collection of cups—small and large, white and colorful, and not a single matching pair. Myra chose a small glass mug for herself and a tall blue porcelain one for Armida.
“It is green tea with jasmine,” the vampire said, and Myra gulped, her palms sweating. Would Armida still be offering pleasantries if they were about to discuss her betrayal? Oh, yes—in all likelihood, that was exactly what Armida would do.
Myra let her fingers curl around the hot cup. The warmth seeped through her skin. “The tea is ready now,” she said, her throat tight. “You wished to speak to me?”
Armida stretched an elegant,
pale arm to receive the cup Myra offered. “I know you don’t trust my beloved’s motivations. He says he wants the Wizard destroyed, and you don’t understand why. I want to show you that even if you cannot trust him, you can trust me. I have my own reasons to wish the world to be as it was before.”
“And what would those reasons be?” Myra moved her cup in a circle, letting the liquid swirl and mix with the cool air. The gentle scent of jasmine caressed her nose, and, for a moment, she was back in the Palace. “You realized you’d run out of nail polish sooner or later?”
Armida narrowed her eyes. “You confuse me with Tristan.”
“Sorry,” Myra said. “Please, go on.”
Armida ran her long, thin fingers through her hair. “Do you know how we used to live? We didn’t have a castle, or servants, or a constant and effortless food supply, but we had something we now lack—safety. Most humans were unaware of our existence. And though vampires sometimes kill each other, it is very rare. We never had to be afraid.
“But then my beloved had this brilliant vision. You see, in the past vampires were disorganized nomads, traveling in small groups. He thought we could become a structured society, a society that could rule over humans, and that could be ruled in return. And, of course, he wanted to be the one to rule it all.
“And once this came to pass, once structure and hierarchy existed among us, others began to thirst for power. They wanted to rule. They wanted what my beloved had fought for and created, without ever lifting a finger to achieve it.”
Armida fell silent. She traced the rim of her cup with her finger, her blood-red nail catching the torchlight. She tore her gaze from the tea and looked up at Myra, green eyes shining. “In the past fifty years, there have been two attempts on his life. Not from your so-called Resistance, not from Ila and her herbivores, but from vampires at court. He thought nothing of it, but not I. You say you don’t trust his reasons. Then trust mine. I want things to be the same as before.”
But things can never be the same, Myra thought. Humans knew about vampires now, and many had lost friends and relatives. If this plan succeeded, most of the humans in the future free world would have grown up in farms. All of them would have plenty of reasons to hate vampires, and the Prince most of all. And if Vlad’s involvement in the Wizard’s destruction came to light, other vampires would go after him as well. The Prince’s life would not be any safer in the future world—quite the contrary. But Myra said none of that.
“I trust you,” she said instead.
Armida closed her eyes, brought the cup to her face and breathed in the scent. She opened her eyes, and a sad smile graced her lips. “I knew you would understand. Can you also persuade your friends? It shouldn’t be too hard with that red-haired girl. Sissi is her name, right?”
Myra froze. “What do you know about Sissi?”
“Oh, many things. For one, I know she wants to be turned.” Armida laughed. “No, Tristan can’t keep his pretty mouth shut about anything. Not with me.”
Myra hoped that was all Tristan had revealed. “I’m not sure she really wants it,” she said. “I think she doesn’t know what she wants.”
Armida took a slow sip from her tea and placed her cup on the table. “Oh, I think she knows exactly what she wants. You are the one who is confused. Being a vampire has so many advantages that it is not even worth debating. The biggest ones are obvious—eternal life, eternal youth, superhuman strength and reflexes. And there are so many cute little skills, such as counting insanely fast, as Tristan just demonstrated.”
Myra took a small, cautious sip of her own tea. It was cool enough for drinking, and she took another. The taste of jasmine wrapped itself around her like a blanket, keeping away the stuffy stench of mold and rats. The tea tasted of a different world. A world of beauty and elegance, of music and culture. But she had chosen the Resistance, and she stood by her choice. “I still don’t see the appeal.”
“Should I list all the benefits?” Armida leaned back in her chair, throwing her arms in the air. “Very well.” She curled one manicured finger. “You never sweat. You can run, fight, and ride and do whatever you like, and you won’t stink.” She curled a second finger. “You can stuff yourself with chocolate without gaining any weight.” Armida examined her red nails for a moment before curling a third finger. “Also, you don’t get your period. That is what sold it for me—surviving your period in the eighteenth century is no fun at all.”
“Oh, it’s not, is it?” Myra drained her cup in a single sip and slammed it against the wooden table. Her tongue grew numb with the hot liquid, but she ignored the discomfort. “Honestly, I’m sick of you and Tristan whining about hard your human lives were. Life in the Resistance is in no way easier. We have no sewers or running water—we get all our water from an underground river and have to boil it before drinking. And many among us have developed bone problems from vitamin D deficiency.”
Myra stood up and walked to the basin to wash her now-empty cup. “The older amongst us claim the climate used to be much better before you all started playing with the weather,” she continued. “Now, it’s freezing cold all the time as the earth gets no sunshine to radiate back, and the only way we can heat our living quarters is by fire. And, of course, we need to have this insane system of redirecting the smoke, so that you can’t discover us easily. Perhaps the only advantage we have to the Middle Ages is that we have a better knowledge of the way diseases spread, but that’s about it.”
Armida looked away, staring at the stone wall. “My life was hard.” She fell silent, and Myra thought she would leave it at that, but then Armida spoke again. “I had an illness. A woman’s illness; something the healers in my village scorned me for.”
She fell silent again and wrapped her fingers around her teacup. “I told you it was no fun to survive your period in the eighteenth century, but for me it was beyond hard.” Armida’s voice was low and hollow as she spoke. “I bled way too much. I grew pale and weak with blood loss. And the pain was unbearable, as if someone had stabbed my belly and twisted the knife inside. I would throw up, again and again, until I could hold no food in my stomach. Sometimes, I fainted with pain. As the years passed, it grew worse. The pain was no longer only in my belly, but spread to my legs and back, always throbbing, gnawing.”
Myra placed her cup back on the shelf. “You had cancer? And vampirism saved your life?”
Armida shook her head. “No, not cancer, though often I wished it were. Then, at least, people would have taken me seriously, and I would have died in peace.” Her fingers tightened against the cup, turning even paler against the blue porcelain. “The walls of my womb were growing outside of it. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, and neither did the healers. All I knew was the pain.
“A century later, a ridiculous Austrian psychoanalyst called my illness ‘hysteria,’ together with other conditions he could not comprehend. Doctors of later times called it ‘endometriosis.’ The healers of my village called it ‘the maiden is too fragile.’ They told me it was all in my head, that all other women were suffering the same with no complaints, and I had to pull myself together and stop whining. They told me I was mad, and I almost believed them.”
Armida released the cup and slowly folded and unfolded her fingers. “The only person who helped me was an old, wise woman. She told me this: ‘Armida, if you believe something is wrong with you, it is. You know yourself better than these so-called healers. They dare call you fragile? If they felt a fraction of your pain, they would be screaming in agony. Instead, here you are—not screaming, but strong and proud.’ She gave me herbs—fennel seeds, clary sage, chamomile. She had to do it in secret, or the village would prosecute her as a witch. Her herbs helped, but not enough. My illness grew stronger with every passing month, and I no longer wished to live like this.
“My parents told me to keep quiet about it. It was unseemly to talk of my ‘woman’s troubles,’ and it would make me undesirable. They said I was of an age to marry, and
I had the potential for a great match. They said I was exotic—a northern grandfather had given me green eyes and pale skin that turned many heads in the village. All I had to do was keep quiet. I listened to them and suffered in silence day after day.
“And then, people started disappearing. One after the other, always at night, until a body was found in the woods. Drained of all blood, with two puncture marks at the neck. ‘Vampire,’ people said. They cried in fear, but I laughed. ‘Don’t go out alone at night,’ they told each other in hushed tones. And, most often, ‘Don’t go into the woods.’” Armida’s haunted expression disappeared, replaced by a smile. “And so, one night I went into the woods.”
Myra gasped. “I always assumed it was Vlad who found you and seduced you. But it was you who went to him?”
Armida laughed. “I see. The worldly vampire and the naïve village girl. Is that what you believed? Do you know me so little? I went into the woods of my own free will, but I needed to be sure the vampire would see me and notice me. Back then I didn’t look as I do now—my hair was its natural color, dark chestnut, my nails were broken and dirty, and my hands were chafed from hard work. I took the only bright piece of clothing I had, a blue scarf, and wrapped it around my shoulders. I took a torch, left my parents’ house, and walked into the woods.
“I wondered if I should have said goodbye to my parents, and, mostly, to my little brother. But I feared if I talked to him, my resolve would break. There was no use in thinking of the past. My life as I knew it was over. Honestly, it felt as if it had never been mine to begin with.
“The darkness was so thick, you could cut through it with a knife. My torch was the only light, and I saw nothing beyond the grass I stepped on. As I walked away from the village, the sounds of the night grew. Leaves rustled as some animal ran nearby. Something cried. Something howled. My heart beat strongly against my chest, but I never looked back.
“And then, he came before me. As soon as I saw his silver-blond hair, his pretty face, and his silly frown, I somehow knew he wasn’t the one who had caused such terror in my village. He wasn’t the one I was looking for.