A Shade of Vampire 79: A Game of Death

by Forrest, Bella

  Maritza shook her head again. “No. Milady, believe me. I had no idea this was going on. I would’ve talked to him about it. I would’ve notified the master commander himself, if necessary. We are the empire, and the empire is a part of us. I would never have anyone in my family associated with the Darklings.”

  “Do you know anything about this faction? Has Egan ever talked about them?” I asked, analyzing her expression carefully. Her heartbeat was rapid and irregular. It did not exude grief, but rather… anger. Red-hot anger.

  Valaine glanced at me for a moment, and I could see it in her eyes. She had a hard time believing what Maritza was telling us. But we had to go easy on her, nonetheless. She was probably simply trying to defend her family honor, but surely she must’ve seen the signs. Egan couldn’t have led such a perfect double life—not without his spouse noticing.

  “No. Egan did his job, he came home and put blood on the table. He never gave me any reason to doubt him,” Maritza insisted.

  “You don’t think he kept any secrets?” I replied, raising an eyebrow.

  For the third time, she shook her head, this time more vehemently. “Never! Egan was a good soulmate… and now he’s gone.” She was about to cry again, when Valaine offered her a handkerchief.

  “I need you to focus, Maritza,” she said, watching as the Aeternae wiped her tears with delicate patting motions. “Maybe Egan didn’t tell you anything specifically, but he must have let something slip without even realizing it. Or maybe you noticed something shifting in his behavior, something that didn’t quite fit the Egan you know and love.”

  Maritza stilled, her head low. She started trembling, then looked up at us—she was laughing. It wasn’t healthy-looking laughter. It sounded more like a maniacal cackle. And it made my blood run cold.

  “You silly cow!” Maritza spat. “First you kill my husband, and then you expect me to participate in your garbage attempt at psychology?”

  Valaine froze, her eyes blank with confusion. “Maritza.”

  “Maybe I’ll be the one to kill you. Maybe I’ll be the one to end the cycle this time around,” she hissed. The glint of a silver dagger caught my eye as she produced it from a hidden pocket in her skirt.

  Maritza lunged forward, going straight for Valaine’s head.

  I intercepted her, and we tumbled across the floor, taking down the coffee table with its pitcher and glasses in the process. Glass shattered and blood splattered. I struggled to get the knife out of Maritza’s hand, but she was vicious and remarkably strong.

  “Tristan!” I heard Valaine scream, followed by the familiar thudding and jingling of gold armor soldiers. The two we’d had with us had already stormed into the house, but no one could do much, as I was too close to Maritza.

  She clawed at my neck and managed to cut deep. I hissed from the pain and slapped her hard, enough to momentarily daze her. I grabbed the knife and threw it to the side, but Maritza quickly came to and kicked me away with such strength that I was projected backward like a rag doll. I rammed into the bookcase, the wood shelves splintering against my shoulder blades and knocking the air from my lungs.

  I saw Maritza darting toward Valaine with her claws out. She was going for the kill, and my heart stopped for a moment.

  Valaine ripped her throat out in a fit of rage, and Maritza fell to the floor, her head almost fully severed—much like I’d done to one of the Darklings back in the orphanage. Looking at it now, I realized how feral I must’ve seemed to her, for she looked like a beast now, breathing heavily, her hands glazed with blood.

  “Milady!” one of the guards said, his claws out. “Are you all right?”

  “So to speak,” Valaine answered. She looked at me, concern twinkling in her eyes as she rushed across the room and knelt by my side. “Are you okay, Tristan?”

  I nodded slowly. “I’ll live. Maritza packed quite the punch. She took me by surprise.”

  “I’m sorry. I had to kill her. She wouldn’t have stopped until one of us was dead,” she whispered. “I saw you get hurt, and… I lost it.”

  Despite the savagery we’d both survived throughout the day, culminating in this equally startling incident, I was stunned by Valaine’s quick reaction and apparent affection toward me. At least I wasn’t the only one feeling it all as it shifted around us—our realities, our emotions changing, adjusting, then readjusting until we were brought closer to one another, often without even realizing it.

  “Thank you,” I said to her. “You took her down. That’s all that matters.”

  “She would’ve been useful to interrogate.” Valaine sighed while I got up and dusted some of the wood splinters off me. The guards checked Maritza’s pockets, her blood spreading and seeping into the handwoven carpet. “Anything?” she asked them.

  They produced a black-and-white braid—hers, as Egan’s was on the floor, soaked in Maritza’s blood. “She was a Darkling, too,” the second guard observed. “Are all the Makios Darklings?!”

  Valaine shook her head. “I doubt it. Maritza and Egan shared a common goal, clearly… pretending to be upstanding citizens while plotting with the Darklings. I know the Makios dynasty well. They’re good people.”

  “Maritza struck me as someone else, entirely,” I said, genuinely baffled. “I… I didn’t see this coming.”

  “None of us did,” Valaine replied, her brow furrowed. “But it happened. It’s done. And we’re nowhere closer to the truth. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know the Makios dynasty all that well, either. I mean, I thought I knew Egan. Obviously, that’s not true.”

  The first guard straightened his back. “What do you want us to do, Lady Crimson?”

  She exhaled sharply, glancing around the room. She picked up another handkerchief from the floor, where the blood hadn’t reached. It had fallen along with the coffee table and several other rolled-up handkerchiefs. Wiping the blood from her hands, Valaine looked at the gold guards again.

  “Their children are upstairs, sleeping. Have one of their next of kin come over and take them away. Then, when the house is clear, turn it upside down,” she said firmly. “There must be something in here linking Egan and Maritza to the Darklings. If it had been just Egan, I would’ve been inclined to assume he had a secret hideaway somewhere else…”

  “But with the two of them, chances are said hideaway is in here,” I finished her sentence, nodding in agreement. Sadness engulfed me like the coldest, most peculiar fire. “The children… they’re orphans now.”

  Valaine was trying hard to keep a straight face, but I knew this was affecting her on a deeper level. Her body language frequently betrayed her. “It’s not something I’m proud of. But I had no other choice.” She looked at the guard again. “Also notify my father that all the members of the Makios dynasty must be brought in for questioning. Just so we’re on the safe side.”

  The soldier nodded briefly, backing away.

  “No one is blaming you, Valaine,” I said. Suddenly, Maritza’s words came back to me. “What cycle was she trying to end, exactly?”

  Valaine shrugged, equally confused. “I have no idea. She wanted me dead to… end the cycle? Did I hear her right?”

  “Yes. She mentioned the cycle,” I replied, then glanced at the gold guards. “Do any of you know anything about a cycle? Any kind of cycle?”

  The two stared at each other and back at me. “The solar cycle. The moon cycle. The season cycle,” one of them said. “None have anything to do with… well, with this,” he added, motioning around.

  “This is not making much sense,” Valaine groaned, sinking into an armchair.

  Why had Maritza been so adamant about killing Valaine? Why were all the Darklings so hell-bent on taking her out? What was it about Valaine that drew their ire and bloodthirst?

  Once more, we had more questions than answers. This time, however, we also got confirmation regarding the black-and-white braid as an identifier for the Darklings, and the undeniable certainty that Valaine was their target. They we
ren’t going to stop until she was dead.

  The Darklings had a problem now, too. Because I wasn’t going to let them kill her.

  Nethissis

  Knowing that the Reapers were due to meet with Seeley in the palace library, I made my way back through the damp and dark corridors of the basement and passed through several locked doors, until I reached the ground level again.

  There was a stark contrast between the above and the below. They were two different worlds, seemingly unaware of one another, separated by a thick layer of limestone foundations, dozens of circular stairs, and heavy wood and iron doors.

  The gold guards did their rounds through the palace, and I followed some of them around for a while. Not once did they mention the black guards from the underworld. It was strange, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Were they all in the dark? Had Zoltan managed to build all of that without the Lord and Lady Supreme even knowing about it? At first sight, it seemed that way.

  But still, I wasn’t convinced. Zoltan had people on his payroll. He went down in the basement labyrinth on a daily basis, and the black guards worked there in prescheduled shifts. They brought prisoners down there—such as the Rimians I’d seen last night—and fed them to the ghouls, which they kept in fortified cells. The entire operation was insanely complex, enabled by the use of death magic.

  So how had Zoltan gotten away with this, and for how long had he been doing it? These were questions I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer myself, which was why finding Rudolph and his Reaper crew was so important.

  For a while, I moved through the palace hallways, trying to listen to as many people as possible. I felt cold and alone, already eager to go back down to Seeley, even though a bunch of perpetually starving ghouls kept him company. I heard whispers about my death—the servants were particularly disturbed, worried there might’ve been more to my demise than a poisonous fox.

  I stayed close as they cleaned one of the rooms on the ground floor, unable to stop myself. Curiosity had gotten me killed before. What the hell could it do to me now?

  “One of the gardeners said they’re investigating,” a Rimian maid told a valet as they made the bed. The silky blue fabric spread across the mattress, the wind blowing in as the sun descended, visible through the large window.

  “Who? The outsiders?” the valet replied, plumping a pair of pillows next, while the maid patted down a silk cover.

  “Yes. Apparently, they don’t believe it was the fox,” the maid said.

  The two stretched and spread the cover over the soft duvet, then dusted the bedposts and every other surface in the room with feathered dusters. My gaze was temporarily distracted by the twisting and dancing crude yellow and bold blue feathers. Their black tips resembled shoes that waltzed across the lacquered wood.

  “Her neck was broken. That was no fox,” the valet grumbled.

  “Who do you think did it?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s none of my business. It’s bad enough we’ve got Darklings in the palace. Now they’re probably killing the guests, too. As if working here wasn’t an adventure all on its own!”

  The maid giggled, but there was bitterness in her voice. I was missing something here. “You know, Lord Renfrey asked that I be the one to serve him tomorrow night.”

  “You can’t.” The valet gasped. “You… You can’t.”

  “I have no choice!” the maid retorted. “I can’t afford to lose this job. My mother will die if I don’t pay for her treatment.”

  “Soni, please. Tell them you’re sick. You know what Renfrey likes to get from his servants. You don’t want to do this.”

  The maid shook her head. “I don’t. But I’ll do it anyway. Just leave it, Baz.”

  “I’ll replace you,” he said, frowning.

  “And he will send you away and ask for another young Rimian girl to take my place. If it doesn’t happen to me, it will happen to another girl,” Soni said. “For what it’s worth, he doesn’t drink us dry.”

  My stomach churned once I realized what they were talking about. I would’ve loved to know more about this Lord Renfrey, but I had no time left to investigate what was clearly one hell of a misdemeanor. An Aeternae was feeding on living Rimians, and that had to be a problem. Soni clearly wasn’t happy about it, but she was compliant, being threatened with losing her job if she didn’t oblige. To me, that meant compulsion.

  An Aeternae forcing someone to give their blood was as awful as a vampire or a Mara doing the same thing. I knew Derek and Sofia would want to hear about this. Alas, I had a Reaper to greet, and I wasn’t going to get any basement-related information from these two. All I could do was wish Soni the best as I left them behind and made my way toward the library.

  More than once, the back of my neck tingled, and I stopped to look around. More than once, I felt as though someone was following me, though I couldn’t see anyone… or anything. Occasionally, I slipped through walls and hid behind large pieces of furniture, hoping to draw out whoever was following me, but I got nothing.

  With a doubtful heart and fears I simply couldn’t shake off, I kept moving until the library opened up before me, with its solid wood bookshelves and wide study tables and leather sofas. The afternoon sun poured through the enormous windows, while several Nalorean servants climbed up on ladders to light the candles in each of the chandeliers, in preparation for the evening.

  Maybe I’d just been paranoid about being followed earlier. The nagging sensation had vanished, and nothing but silence and tranquility surrounded me now. Perhaps the paranoia came with the territory of being dead and having narrowly escaped consumption by ghoul…

  Several emotions tested me, taking turns making their presence felt. The anger about my passing had not subsided, but it persisted, dully, as I tried to focus on what I could still do, even in spirit form. The heartache was permanent, giving me ghostly chest pains that I often failed to ignore. There was confusion… anxiety… the constant wondering about what I had done to have ended up in a situation like this.

  But the most persistent feeling was not a feeling at all, but rather a mindset. I was determined to get to the truth hiding beneath the veils of Visio. The death magic. The ghouls. The entrapment of Seeley. Whatever the Aeternae—if only a handful of them—were doing here, it was not natural, and it couldn’t have been sanctioned by Death or other Reapers.

  There were no other Reapers to speak of, anyway.

  Except the eight standing now in the middle of the library, curiously looking around and talking to one another. I slipped past several servants and hid behind a bookcase, trying to get closer to the agents of Death. They were the first, besides Seeley, that I’d seen here. Probably the first to set foot on Visio in a very long time.

  And there were no ghosts, either… though I could easily chalk that up to the ghouls eating them. Shaking my head slowly, I moved closer, trying to eavesdrop before I came out and introduced myself.

  “Rudolph, we’ve been waiting for hours,” one of the four female Reapers said to one of the males.

  Their uniforms were all black and white, but the styles differed. Rudolph and two other males wore suits like Seeley’s, likely from the Earthly Dimension. The others had tunics and asymmetrical dresses, all in the same color scheme—the colors of life and death. Rudolph tapped his foot on the marble floor. None of them were visible to the servants, who went about their business as if they were the only ones here.

  “And we’ll keep waiting until Seeley shows up,” Rudolph replied, clearly irritated.

  “He’s not answering our telepathic calls. What if something happened to him?” another Reaper said. “He’d be here if everything was okay.”

  “I’m waiting for an answer from the Time Master, as you all know,” Rudolph said. “Death will advise us through him.”

  One of the Earthly Reapers scoffed. “She sure is taking her sweet time—”

  “Enough, Bert.” Rudolph cut him off. “You know exactly what her conditio
n is. We can’t just go around willy-nilly, looking for Seeley.”

  “And there you go with the rhymes again.” Bert chuckled, drawing more of Rudolph’s ire.

  “Seeley said to meet him here. This is a huge friggin’ planet. Do you have anything of his, even a sliver of his energy, to track him down?” Rudolph asked. He got no answer. Only silence and crickets. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So, we wait for Death to advise us on the matter. It’s not like we can comb this whole world. There’s only eight of us.”

  “Then let’s get more Reapers in,” a female Reaper said.

  “Dina, you heard Kelara. Death wants discretion and small numbers. She didn’t even like the eight of us coming down here,” Rudolph shot back.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.” Bert sighed, shaking his head with dismay.

  “Maybe Seeley will be able to straighten things out for us when we find him,” Dina said.

  My spirit throbbed as I braced myself for contact. Breathing a sigh of relief, thankful that they were all still here and not wandering around this dangerous place, I straightened my back and took several deep breaths.

  Moments later, I stepped out into the afternoon light and smiled at them. “Hi.”

  Rudolph spun around, his eyes widening when he saw me. “What the…”

  “I’m Nethissis. I don’t think—”

  “Yeah, I know you. You were on the Death Crew with Seeley and the others. What are you doing here?” Rudolph’s voice trailed off as he put two and two together. “You can see us.”

  “I thought you knew about our Visio mission,” I murmured, chills running through me.

  “I didn’t know you were dead,” Rudolph replied, his gaze darkening. “I am sorry.”

  Bert frowned. “Who’s this again?”

  “Nethissis. Lamia and swamp witch,” Dina said. “She’s part of the group that retrieved Thieron. How’d you die?” she asked me.

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about,” I replied.

  “We should reap her,” another Reaper said.