by Rye Brewer
When they started to stir, I was glad and apprehensive at the same time. It meant they would want to know what happened while they were out.
“Wow.” Raze shook his head, as though trying to clear the cobwebs. “Whatever’s in that stuff packs a punch.”
“I have a headache,” Naomi groaned, rolling her head on her shoulders. “Among other aches.”
Gage was already thinking logically. Of course, he would be. “This sedative, whatever it is, must have been designed especially for vampires. We would never succumb to any basic human-strength concoction.” He sounded tired, at a loss.
And to think, I was the one who had led them all to this. If I hadn’t been so dead set on seeing my father again… and then, set on exploring the estate…
I closed my eyes and wished I were dead. Just dead and gone.
“Did they give you anything, Cari?” Gage asked.
I opened one eye halfway and saw the three of them looking at me. I shook my head. “No,” I whispered. “They didn’t. My father… Gil wanted to talk to me.” I hardly wanted to refer to him as my father anymore. A father wouldn’t turn his back on his daughter this way.
“What did he say?” Naomi asked. “Why is he doing this?”
“Do you think he would just come out and tell her?” Gage asked.
“Why don’t you give Cari a chance to tell us?” Raze muttered.
“I only want everyone to give her some space.” Gage glared at him.
“He’s in charge of an order—or something—called the Starkers,” I said, raising my voice over the rest.
They went silent.
A pin could’ve dropped a mile away and I would’ve heard it. For a second, I was sure they had all stopped breathing.
Then. “He’s what?” Naomi shrieked, eyes wide. “You’re serious? And you didn’t know anything about this? How could you not have known?”
“I didn’t! I swear!”
“They’ve been hunting us for centuries—and we’ve been hunting them,” she added in a hissing whisper. “All these years, none of us were able to find their base. And here we are, completely by accident.” She threw her head back and laughed—hysterically, like she was losing her mind.
“Naomi…” Raze tried to move closer to her. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Do what?” She laughed. “I find it funny. Don’t you? Here they’ve been all this time, hiding in plain sight, and I’m here. And powerless. Nothing I can do about it, when what I want to do is kill them all and burn this place to the ground!”
“No more than any of us do,” Raze murmured, obviously working to calm her down.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She had never been anything but sweet with him before—now, she snarled. “The Starkers killed one of my best friends. Perhaps if you knew what that was like, you would understand the need to end them, once and for all. You’ve lived a comfortable life thus far. I know it was lived under a horrible leader, yes, but you were still secure and comfortable. That was not the case for too many of us.”
Raze nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t understand.”
She turned to me, and the heat from her gaze all but burned through me. “All this time, I’ve done everything I could not to get myself entangled with them—to hunt them, but never to allow myself to become their prey. And you led me straight into their nest. Thoughtless, careless—”
“It’s not her fault,” Raze reminded her, while Gage remained ominously silent. His expression told me that silence was out of fear of what he might say to her, not because he agreed. “We all agreed to come. You even told me not to come because you knew how dangerous it could be. No one forced you.”
His words seemed to deflate her anger. Her shoulders fell, she bowed her head. Dark hair hung in clumps around her face. “That’s true,” she whispered.
She might as well have stomped all over me, pummeled me with her fists, tore me apart with her claws. Her words had roughly the same effect. I ached all over, especially in my chest. She was right about all of it.
“Do you think I haven’t already blamed myself?” I asked. “Not that I would rob you of the chance to spit at me and call me names for what I led us into—you’re entitled—but I already understand what I’ve done. You don’t have to worry about that.”
I only hoped my father had nothing to do with her friend’s death. That would’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Who was your friend?” Raze asked, his voice soft and gentle like he was calming a tired toddler. “What happened to her? Can you talk about it?”
She was quiet for a long time, the only sound that of her heavy breathing. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to tell the story or not. I was afraid of what she had to say.
“We were in Madrid,” she whispered. “It was a crazy time. The Glorious Revolution. Queen Isabella was on almost everyone’s hit list at that point—conservatives, progressives. She was not a good leader. I’d only been in Spain a few years by then, but the unrest had been building all the while. There was so much anger, so much tension. And so many people willing to take advantage of it.”
The only sound in the room was that of Naomi’s haunted voice. The rest of us were so quiet, I couldn’t even hear them breathing.
She lifted her head. “I won’t lie. We were among the ones taking advantage. I fell in with a group of Spanish vampires, including Esmerelda.” A slow smile spread over her face as she remembered. “Esmerelda was the daughter of a farmer who’d been turned by a traveling peddler. Not that her life would’ve been lived better on a farm; her talents would have been wasted. She was special. She had a way about her. The men might have officially led the group, but she was the real leader. We revolved around her. She sang, she danced, she told stories so vivid a person would swear afterward they’d witnessed the events of the story in person. As the only two women in the group, we gravitated to each other.”
I wondered what life must have been like in those days. Whether a vampire or a human, it must have been amazing.
Naomi scoffed, her smile turning wry. “All of them were in love with her. It was clear. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn she was truly a witch, weaving a spell around them. Around me, even, in a different way. She intrigued me. She was free, always laughing, always feisty and passionate. I’d never known a girl like her before, not living as I had in the palace. I was always the outlier then, the one who would beg the others to join me in my little adventures. Esmerelda proved to me I wasn’t so strange, after all.”
Gage cleared his throat. “You said you took advantage of the unrest at the time. How did you do that?”
She shrugged. “There were protests in the streets, meetings in the marketplaces and taverns, always plenty of fresh, hot blood for the taking. One or two men go missing from a meeting or speech? Who’s to say how it happened in the midst of so much excitement?”
She snickered, then shook her head. “That’s to say nothing of what it was like when the tension finally exploded, and protestors began fighting amongst themselves. It was like picking low-hanging fruit. Always a new victim, no matter where one looked. They were obsessed with fighting the government, with overthrowing the Queen, and, in the end, they wound up fighting amongst themselves. They never thought to keep an eye out for the vampires dodging in and out of their groups, always on the edge of a fight but never participating. Merely waiting to pick off the weak, the wounded.
“And we, meanwhile, never thought to look out for the Starkers. They, too, knew the value of taking advantage in a special situation. Someone must have tipped them off as to our activities; we weren’t exactly being secretive or even very careful, assuming our victims would be written off as casualties of drunken brawls. And so, they found us. They tracked us to our hideout, where we stayed during the day.”
She stared at the floor. “Only Esmerelda and I were there at the time. The rest of the group had stayed elsewhere—they were searching
for a new location, someplace we’d be safer, as word of the Starkers’ movement had reached us. It’s ironic, really. We were told to stay behind because it would be safer than moving about with so many Starkers in the area.”
“What did they do?” Raze whispered. “When they found you.”
“Very simple,” she replied, barely audible by now. “They dragged her outside into the sun. The area was all but deserted, an old mine which hadn’t been used in years, surrounded by barren land too overworked to be tenable. There was little chance of anyone noticing a vampire burning to death in the sun.”
Gage made a choked retching sound.
Raze grimaced, turning his face away.
“They made me watch,” Naomi wept. “They didn’t kill me; they wanted me to tell the others what they had done, to spread the word of what happened to vampires who became careless. They held me fast, deeper inside the mine where the sun didn’t reach. They even pried my eyes open when I slammed them shut, and held a knife to my throat, threatening to drain me if I closed them again. The horror of it—I’ve seen movies,” she said, looking around at us through her tear-filled eyes. “I’ve deliberately gone to terrible, horrible films in the hopes of seeing something more horrible than that. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help hoping that something worse might push the memory of her from my mind and take its place.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks.
She peered down at her arms, her hands. “Her smooth skin bubbled and blistered. The blisters popped and oozed blood and pus, dripping onto the ground, splattering on her skirt and shirtwaist. Her beautiful face went black, charred like burnt wood. Her thick, black hair fell out in clumps and turned to dust, and her scalp blistered and popped and split open. She screamed all the while. Shrieked, blubbered, sounds I sometimes hear when I’m alone. When it’s quiet. Her screams. They only stopped when she was dead, and the men who had dragged her from the mine let her body fall to the ground. It soon turned to ash and blew away. As though she had never existed.”
I felt sick. I was fairly sure we all did by the end of the story.
“Did you wait for the others to return?” Gage’s voice was tired, strained, lifeless.
“No, something told me they would be back. If they knew we’d been staying there, the chances of the others coming back were good. Why would the Starkers not wait for their return, then? The perfect chance to wipe out a dozen vampires in one fell swoop.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t know what became of them. My friends. Perhaps they escaped, perhaps they met the fate Esmerelda had. I wished I could warn them, but it was a matter of self-preservation by then. I waited until the sun went down and ran. I didn’t stop running until I reached Paris.”
I glanced at Gage. His face mirrored my horror.
She chuckled. “Ironic, since that happens to be where Queen Isabella was exiled after the revolution. For a time, I felt as though I was in exile, too.”
Her gaze fell on all of us in turn. “They took Esmerelda, that beautiful, exquisite creature, and reduced her to nothing more than a screaming animal begging to be spared a horrific death. It wasn’t her fault she’d become who she was. Someone had taken advantage of her—a young, beautiful girl, innocent of the world’s evils. She had only fought to survive since then. But did the Starkers care? Did they ask why she did what she did, how she had turned to vampirism? No. They didn’t even kill her swiftly, which would have been a mercy. So I want them dead. It’s as simple as that.”
Raze looked at me. “Ironic that the daughter of a vampire killer happens to be a vampire.”
I gasped. “You think it’s funny? You think you’re clever, making a little quip like that? One of Raze’s quips? You wouldn’t think it was quip-worthy if you knew what they have in mind.”
I burst into sobs. There it was. I had blurted it out and there was no taking it back. I had to tell them, as much as it hurt to do it.
“What they have in mind?” Gage asked. “What?”
I looked at him, his face blurry thanks to my tears. How could I break his heart this way? And I wasn’t even able to reach for him, to beg him to forgive me for something I couldn’t control. To beg him to hold me.
“He wants to create a so-called cure for vampirism,” I announced. “He wants to use the three of you in experiments, and to give the cure to me. So he can turn me back into a human.”
36
Anton
Genevieve had to be somewhere. She just had to be.
No matter what they’d done to her, they couldn’t have made her disappear. They must have stashed her somewhere, hidden her from my view.
I spent the night and the entire morning looking for Genevieve, sniffing around, listening as hard as my wolf ears would allow. Desperate for any sign of her, any hint of her location.
Any hint that she was still alive.
Whoever had taken her was smart. They knew how to hide her scent. Skilled at throwing off the efforts of someone trying to track her. Or any of them, for that matter—I couldn’t smell the other shifters anymore, either. There was nothing.
I’d never known such agonizing frustration, such helplessness. She needed me, and there was nothing I could do.
It wasn’t until the sun had already moved well past its overhead position that I remembered the meeting with my father and anyone else he’d seen fit to invite. I ran back to the castle, making short work of returning through the tunnels and dungeons, in spite of every instinct telling me to continue the search for Genevieve.
I didn’t want anyone to so much as notice my return. Instinct told me to guard myself carefully.
My office connected with the suite of rooms I used for my personal use. My bedroom, a personal library, a sitting room. I took the stairs from the dungeon and returned to my office, then went straight through to the shower before dressing for the meeting.
No matter what, my father had always taught me, it was key to dress well for meetings of importance.
Genevieve sat in the center of my thoughts all the while—as I shaved, as I buttoned a shirt and slid into a jacket. As I left the castle, again using the tunnels, this time I moved north, away from the cottages and toward the place where our clan’s land bordered that of two other clans, the Vermeulens and the Bertrands.
At the place where all three met was the Shifter Spire. A caretaker’s cottage sat not far from there, almost at the edge of the De Clerq estate, and that was where I surfaced. The Spire, surrounded by trees as it was and so far from the castle, was all but impossible to see even from the castle’s highest point.
And it was invisible to anyone not of our kind. Long ago, a spellcaster had placed a complicated incantation on it which rendered it so. Only shifters were aware of its presence. Because it was secluded, it was the perfect place to hold important clan meetings.
Such as this one.
The Spire had once been part of a gothic church built at the same time and in the same style as our castle, with the nave and a second spire once attached. All but our Spire had fallen long since, the ruins now covered in moss and flowers, grass and leaves. Nature had taken over, as it so unfailingly did when left to its own devices.
The Spire’s stones were still stacked neatly, the gothic-style structure as sturdy as ever—this was likely thanks to the spell of the caster. It rose hundreds of feet into the air until arched stained-glass windows and a spiked steeple marked the top, where meetings were held.
Where they would be waiting for me.
I climbed the stairs without hesitation, eager to see what was in store for me. And equally eager to get back to the business of finding Genevieve.
Unless…
Perhaps they could help me.
Of course!
The revelation stopped me in my tracks, three-quarters of the way to the top. Of course, it was no coincidence Genevieve had disappeared, and the scent of other shifters hung heavy in the air just before a meeting called by my father. Of course, this meeting was in all likeliho
od meant to close the door on this part of my life, to put an end to my affair with Genevieve.
At least, that was what my parents were likely to believe.
They had no idea.
I bounded up the rest of the stairs and into the meeting room, where my parents were indeed already waiting at the head of the rectangular table.
But they were not alone.
On one side sat Stefan Vermeulen with one of his advisors. On the other, Todor Bertrand and a young woman I recognized instantly as his daughter.
So that was what this was about. A uniting of the clans. What the Vermeulen had to do with it was anybody’s guess—perhaps to ease any worries they might have as to the increased size of our clan and land holdings when compared to theirs once a wedding took place between Isolda and myself.
As if that would ever happen.
Though she was beautiful, as beautiful as ever. Almost the opposite of Genevieve, with her white-blonde hair and emerald eyes, her ample curves. An icy, lush goddess as opposed to Genevieve’s superiority, her dark, smoldering looks and wicked edge.
So this was who Margaux had chosen for me.
“Please. Sit.” Margaux gestured to the empty chair at the end of the table opposite her. She could have burst with pleasure I was sure, at the pinnacle of her clever machinations. She believed she had me cornered, that I would never refuse a marriage pact when the woman in question and her powerful, brutish father were before me.
“I don’t think I will.” I glanced around the room, at the faces staring back at me.
Isolda made no pretense of hiding her interest, all but licking her full lips as she looked me up and down. I’d always known she was attracted to me, though I’d chalked any attention up to the desire for my money and power. It didn’t appear money was on her mind just then.
“Sit,” Mother ordered, barely moving her lips. Her eyes blazed with fury in spite of the smile plastered on her face.