by Rye Brewer
“I doubt it would go that far.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She sighed, stretching before unfolding her body into a standing position. “Listen to me. You are a shade and a vampire, both at once. You know how it is better than anyone. How insulated the shades are. They prefer it this way. They’d rather I not be here at all.”
“They’ll become accustomed to you.”
“I’m sure they will—in this position, as your quiet and willing partner who offers no opinions and holds her tongue while out and about.”
I grumbled.
She continued, “You know it’s true. It’s one thing to accept the fact of my existence, but another to accept my playing a larger part in your reign.”
“They’ve spent too long looking down on others not of their kind,” I muttered as she reached me, her hands light yet firm upon my shoulders.
“I agree,” she admitted with a sigh. “But there is only so much you can do at once. I admire you, you know I do. I see the ruler you wish to be, and I know your heart is good and true. You have nothing but the best intentions.” Her hands tightened, squeezing slightly as if to make her point. “What good are good intentions if your people are too angry or bitter to listen?”
I bit back a groan of frustration, but barely. They had treated me as nothing more than a pitiful creature—at best. At worst, I’d been a shameful secret. Someone they barely tolerated, the way they barely tolerated Felicity.
I’d seen enough in my years to recognize the expressions, the tones of voice, even the body language. I saw right through them, as I always had when they treated me as they treated my queen. “They will adjust,” I assured her.
“You cannot force them to do it on your timeline,” she murmured, her voice low and soothing. When she bent to brush her lips against my ear, she whispered, “I can stand it if you can.”
This both touched and angered me. She ought not to have to stand anything. They should have fallen to their knees in her presence and begged for her favor. They should have been writing songs of her beauty, her wisdom, her kindness, and clever mind.
Instead, she spent all of her time in our chambers when she was not venturing into the forest to collect herbs and barks for her tonics. It would be beneficial to have a mage-trained individual in our midst. If anyone dared go to her for assistance.
“What would you say to a short trip to Avellane?” I ventured.
Her hands dropped from my shoulders. To my stunned surprise, hers was the face of a woman prepared to wreak havoc.
“You think you can send me away?” she spat, fists clenched. “You think I can’t handle this? That perhaps you made the wrong decision?”
“Felicity! No! I would never—”
“Why would you suggest I go to Avellane, then? And do not tell me this is all for Gregor’s sake, because while I owe him a great deal, I am your queen.” She lifted her head, regal and imperious. Even when murderously enraged, her beauty was a wonder to behold. Perhaps even more so because of her heightened emotions, the color in her cheeks and fire in her eyes.
When I was reasonably sure it was safe to speak again, I explained. “Never did I say you would go alone. I had intended for us both to pay a diplomatic visit.”
She deflated instantly. “Oh. I see.”
“I wish to present to him the jewels and riches which were once in Garan’s possession, and to broker the terms of a treaty between us. While Garan never had the chance to declare war, I cannot leave this thread hanging loose. Gregor deserves a proper visit—and a proper apology.”
Her face softened, her eyes now glistening when they had only just blazed seconds ago. “I know he will appreciate it, and so will I. I do wish to see him and nag him a little if need be.”
“That’s more along the lines of what I’d expected you to say.” I chuckled in relief.
9
Cari
“Where is my father?”
I asked the same question to every one of the men and women who visited our dingy cell. Every time they came in to draw blood, take notes on the status of the burns they had inflicted on my friends or—the worst—to inflict new burns, I asked.
Not that I expected an answer. Good thing, too, since I never received one.
“Why won’t you speak to me?” I demanded, glaring at the side of the woman’s head.
A woman—older, too, more than old enough to be my mother. She had a clinical look to her, with her hair in a smooth bun and her glasses on a chain around her neck.
Weren’t women supposed to be kinder than men? Gentler? I guessed it didn’t matter if she looked at this like a scientist would. She was probably half-crazy or even more than half, just like anybody would have to be to even think about being involved in something like this.
“Is my father even on the premises?” I demanded. “Did he tell you not to speak to me, not to speak of him? Is he too cowardly to face me? Not man enough to look me in the eye and see what he’s doing to his own daughter?” I could barely breathe, my throat was so tight. My heart felt like it might explode from my chest.
I might as well have been talking to myself, because the woman never so much as flinched. Tears of rage and pointless frustration filled my eyes. What did I have to do to get through to her? To any of them?
“I guess he told them not to speak to you,” Naomi offered once we were alone.
This had been a short visit, with just a single vial of blood drawn from each of the three. She looked better—they all did, thanks to the blood we were allowed to drink.
No good starving us to death, even though the amount we were given did little to quench my thirst. I could sense the same for the rest of them. There was a hungry, desperate look around their eyes, not to mention the way they licked their lips from time to time, like they were struggling to catch the last drops of blood which might be clinging there.
Just enough to keep us from shrieking and screeching and losing our minds. They couldn’t test on us if we lost our minds.
On them, rather. I reminded myself that my friends were the ones truly suffering. Not me. They hadn’t tested on me, and I doubted they would, until my father felt confident that a cure had been developed.
A cure. As if.
I stared up at the walls, all around me, especially in the corners where they met the ceiling. There had to be cameras somewhere, hidden in the rocks, nestled in crevices. Watching us, monitoring our actions. Drawing blood and examining burns once or twice a day wouldn’t have been enough. Not for him.
If there was one thing I remembered about my father, it was his thoroughness.
“What do you think you’re going to accomplish?” I asked, looking around. “Huh? What’s this really all about? If you’re looking to cure me, why lock me up with them? Are you trying to torture me in a different way? Making me watch the effect this has on them?”
“What are you doing?” Raze hissed.
“Who are you talking to?” Naomi asked, eyes flitting around.
Only Gage was silent. He knew what I meant, who I was talking to. The only person who had ever understood me without needing to say a word.
“Well?” I challenged, my voice growing louder all the time. “Are you too much of a coward to face me? You’d rather watch me from some comfortable room while I suffer here. While I watch my friends suffer. You can’t bear to look me in the eye and see what you’re doing. It’s too much. You wouldn’t want to get your hands dirty, Dad.”
“Ohhh…” Naomi whispered, closing her eyes. She finally got it. Took her long enough.
“You’re pathetic,” I snarled. “You weren’t much of a father, but I could chalk that up to you being a dick. Now I know you’re a sick, sadistic dick who gets off on the needless suffering of those who mean you no harm. As if any of us had a choice but to be who we are now! You would sink so low as to lure me to you, knowing how much I would want to see you. How stupid I am. You took advantage of me, you piece of—”
The lock on the other
side of the door clicked as someone opened it, and moments later the door swung out to reveal a pair of men I recognized as having visited us more than once before. Burly guys, both of them with a swarthy look about the eyes. Dark hair, olive skin.
Both of them came for me without so much as a glance at any of the others.
“Wait! Wait, what are you doing?” Gage shouted, straining against his chains as Naomi and Raze gaped in horror. “You can’t just—”
“It’s okay,” I mouthed, nodding. This was what I wanted. I let them manhandle me as roughly as they wanted—which was pretty rough—and stood on shaky legs before they dragged me out of the room. The last thing I saw before they pulled me into the corridor was Gage’s face. Still gorgeous, even after all we had been through. I carried it in my heart as they took me to another room further down the brightly-lit hall.
Compared to the almost medieval cell we’d been in, this was downright fancy. Somebody had put down hardwood flooring and had covered the stone walls in drywall, which they’d then painted a soothing taupe. I might have been in an office complex. Part of me expected to hear canned elevator music playing.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t get an answer. It was worth asking, though, at least because it made me feel like I still had a voice. They couldn’t take that away.
We ended up in another cell, only this was the Ritz compared to what I had just left. It brought to mind a hospital room. Clinical, but with an effort toward making it seem homey. The same wood flooring and taupe paint. Soft lighting. There were even beds. Beds! Four of them. After days spent sitting on a stone floor, it looked like heaven.
They sat me on one of them and attached me to it using chains clamped to the bedframe. There went the illusion, popping like a bubble. This might have been a fancy prison, but it was still a prison.
The door opened moments after I was secure, and into the room stepped my father.
My heart hitched at the sight of him, and I hated myself for it. He didn’t deserve for me to be glad to see him. He didn’t deserve my memories, the few happy ones I could still bring to mind.
He thought he was fighting monsters, ridding the world of evil, when he was the true evil.
“Is that what a girl has to do to see her daddy?” I asked.
He only smiled, waving a hand to dismiss his thugs. When we were alone, he glanced up toward one of the corners of the room and gave the tiniest shake of his head.
“Turning the camera off?” I guessed.
His eyebrows drew together. A wince. I was right.
“A very clever girl. Always clever,” he mused.
“Not clever enough. I ended up here, didn’t I?” I shook my arms, making my chains rattle.
“You have no idea how it pains me, the fact that things ended up this way.”
“Spare me your pain,” I sighed. This was already boring me. “If all you wanted was to get me alone so you could explain how sorry you are, you’re wasting your time. This is a choice you’re making every minute of the day. Keeping us locked away, torturing us, nearly starving us. We’re in rags. We stink. My body aches from the cold and the damp, from sitting on a stone floor day and night. I can only imagine the others feel the same. It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s on you.”
He ran a hand over his golden hair, silver streaking the temples. Always perfect, though, completely in place. “One day, you’ll understand.”
“Bull. I will never understand.”
“I’m trying to find a cure!” The edge of desperation in his voice caught my attention. “Don’t you at least understand that? I want to cure you—all of you, if possible. I’m not interested in murdering your little friends.”
“You might try not sounding so nasty when you say it,” I murmured.
“I want to cure them, if possible. To cure you, most assuredly.” He took a few tentative steps my way, as if he was afraid I’d lunge for his throat. “You’re still my daughter, Carissa, no matter what any bloodsucker has done to you. If it means curing them, too, so be it. I would rather keep them alive than kill them if it’s possible for them to be returned to their normal, human state.”
“I would be dead now, if it wasn’t for being turned. I would’ve died a horrible death.”
His face remained motionless as he replied, “I would rather it that way.”
I glanced away. “Oh, Dad. I’m so disappointed in you.”
“You think I’m not disappointed? Finding my daughter consorting with a bloodsucker? To find you’ve become one? The very thing I’ve dedicated my life to eradicating!”
“Maybe you’ve wasted your time, then,” I snarled, looking at him again. “Maybe your entire life has been a waste. So sorry, but it’s looking like that’s the case. Rather than trying to build something, like I always thought you did, you would rather tear something down.”
“I am building something!” His hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I’m building a world free from the pestilence these creatures spread! Look what it did to you! Instead of affording you death, your eternal rest, you will never be at peace. Forced to walk the world for eternity while the natural, normal progression of life goes on around you. You’ll watch as the people you cared about grow old and die, and then as their children do the same. The world will tear itself apart and rebuild itself while you bear witness. Man was never meant to exist for so long a time. It’s torture, and I won’t allow you to be part of it.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” I sighed. “To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled when I first learned what happened. Who would be? It was terrifying. But look at me. Really look!”
I stared at him until he finally had the nerve to meet my eyes.
“See? I’m still me, Dad. I still remember everything from my life, and I remember how good things were back when we were together. I remember all of it. And I feel things, still, and I’m tired and aching and afraid of who you’ve become and what will become of me. I’m exactly the same.”
“Except for the fact that you now survive on blood,” he whispered, cold and unfeeling.
“What about it? I’m not proud,” I admitted, and that brought to mind the things I had done in Paris. The people I killed. Their deaths were heavy on my conscience—it was like I was somebody else back then, somebody willing to forget they ever had a soul. “I exist on blood, but synthetic blood like what you’ve been feeding us is what Gage’s family drinks. I’ve learned to be like them. Civilized.”
He laughed like I just told a joke. “As if such a thing existed. A civilized vampire.”
“It’s possible, and you must know it by now if you’ve really dedicated your life to this—unless you refuse to see it, since that would make it easier for you to destroy us. Is that what it is?”
“Us. Do not use that word,” he warned, spitting the words through clenched teeth.
“It bothers you that much to think of me as one of them? Guess what. I am one. And I’ll tell you something else. Everything I feel, they feel, too. Every single vampire you and your cronies have murdered? They still felt and thought and reasoned. All of them. They were once human, just like I was.”
“Enough.”
“Just like you are,” I insisted. “They had families who loved them, people who loved them. People they watched grow old and die, like you just pointed out. They were once human. They had memories and emotions, and you destroyed them over something they couldn’t control.”
By now, tears had overflowed onto my cheeks. Amazing that I could still cry, as dehydrated as I was. “I can cry, Dad,” I whispered in a thick voice. “This is real.”
His jaw worked, the color rising in his cheeks. His fists loosened. He lowered his shoulders. Was it my imagination, or were his eyes brighter than they normally looked? Had I finally gotten to him? Could he see, finally, what I was trying to tell him? That we were nothing to fear and nothing to hunt and destroy? Would the slightest pink tinge that I knew tinted my tears make him think twice
? Would it make him doubt me and the message I was trying to get through to him?
“Dad, please,” I ventured.
He was breaking, I knew he was, and I had to make the most of it while he was still vulnerable.
“At least get us out of that dungeon. We don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it. If we’re more comfortable, it might be easier to get us to play along with the testing. I can talk to them, get them to play nice. We won’t take advantage of it, I swear. So long as we can be just a little more comfortable, and a little warmer.” The temperature in the room was still slightly on the chill side, but it was worlds better than the freezing dampness in the stone room which must have been dug way underground.
His mouth opened just a little, just enough to tell me there was something he wanted to say—but before he could, it snapped shut.
He turned and strode across the room, flinging the door open and marching down the hall. The soles of his shoes clicked smartly against the wood. Never one to walk slowly or quietly, my father.
The two swarthy thugs were back inside in a heartbeat, freeing me from my restraints only to drag me back to where Gage and the others waited.
Well, it was worth a shot, I thought with a sinking heart.
10
Genevieve
“Put me down,” I hissed.
I didn’t like what I was hearing, not one bit. It seemed to me Isolde was on the verge of shifting—I’d seen and heard Anton do it enough to know what to listen for. There was suddenly a wild animal in the cabin with us.
He needed to protect himself, and he couldn’t do it with me in his arms.
He set me on my feet, and I worked the burlap over my head—ridiculous, really, being covered as I was. My head was free just in time to see Isolde lunge at him, still in her human form.