Only Nola stayed behind. She was close to them, but had not been with them long enough to be considered family. After they’d already gone, Tristan realized he’d forgotten to kiss her goodbye. He hoped he didn’t hear about it the next time they met.
They took two cars. Jared drove Branek and Loftus in his Corvette, while Tristan had Fallon and Augusta. Nobody spoke.
He remembered the way exactly. It was burned in his memory, even though he’d tried to forget the single night he’d been there. He took the obscure roads mapping the dry, mountainous landscape, unpaved roads he barely knew existed. They dipped and rose sharply beneath the Nova, rocking the silent passengers uncomfortably. When they reached the flat expanse of the dry lake bed outside the caverns, Tristan’s skin hummed in memory of the rough ride.
There were so few defining features in the vast desert night. Dark mountains hulked in the near distance. The vague smolder of light pollution bled into the sky above them. The glowing white moon was bright, emitting too much light for many stars to be visible.
One by one, they entered the yawning break in the mountain. It was almost too dark for even a vampire to see anything. The passages were so narrow in some places that Tristan had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The ground was smooth but uneven, angled slightly downward. Every now and then a draft of cold air shot through the tunnels.
That is where Loftus keeps his secrets. That is where he keeps my mother.
After several minutes of walking, the uneven sheared rock walls widened into an echo-y space with an unseeable ceiling. Dark tunnel openings led off from the room.
“Some legends say the vampire must return to his grave by day to regain the strength he spends at night,” Loftus intoned. “I don’t have a grave—and neither do any of you—but I believe there must be some truth to this particular bit of folklore, some significance.”
As he spoke, Fallon murmured softly and executed a subtle dance with his hands. The cavern began to glow with an eerie alchemical light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The rock walls were becoming faintly green with some otherworldly quintessence.
“That is why I chose this as her resting place,” Loftus continued. “The earth would heal her, and hold her in time, and her own son would bring her back to me with the magic I taught to him.”
Loftus stood inside a small circle—for protection? Tristan couldn’t remember having seen anyone draw it on the ground. He, Branek, Jared, and Augusta stood in a loose line beside Loftus. None of them knew what he was talking about.
“What is this?” Augusta demanded.
“Earth magic,” Fallon said quietly. “Blood magic.”
“That makes no fucking sense.”
What did you see in there?
Tristan, disturbed by his own obscure glimpse of the future in the darkness of the caverns, had asked the question of Augusta and Jared. He knew they’d seen something the night Loftus had shoved each of them down the passage, the night Tristan had run away and found the canyon. Even Branek must have, at some point. But they wouldn’t speak of it, and neither did he. He imagined they’d all seen a variation of the same violent things.
To say he’d seen something wasn’t really accurate. The cavern had not shown him an actual vision, but flooded him with knowledge somehow, pure and presumably changeable. Secretly he knew there’d never been a choice, really, between bloodthirstiness and abstinence, between violence and peace. What he’d done, what they’d all done, had always been inevitable. Loftus had finely molded their natures until nothing good remained.
In that moment, standing there in the glowing cavern, Tristan could not summon any hatred for his adoptive father, though there’d been plenty over the years. Tristan was wreathed in power and he understood, for a moment, all the secrets of the universe. He had tasted blood, and so he knew what it was to hold dominion. In this moment he was lord and defender. He was part of the foundation of their family, a unifying element, an intensifier. And Loftus, their creator, their master, wielded the greatest power of all.
Fallon murmured in undulating tones, in a language that made no sense to Tristan’s ears. The pale-haired young man was the only one in the cavern ever to have prayed at an altar. But God couldn’t help him here. Here, they were all forsaken.
“Your blood is more powerful than human blood,” Loftus said softly. “Combined, it forms a single, powerful substance. It was the only way she would come back to me.” It seemed he addressed his four children, though he didn’t look at them. He stared with wide eyes down into a dark opening on the far side of the cavern, an expectant smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
In the tunnel, where Loftus stared, was nothing but darkness that even the alchemical light couldn’t penetrate. The day-to-day beat of Tristan’s heart was so slow as to seem nonexistent, but now he could almost feel it pounding. There was a sour, singed quality to the air.
Loftus made a quick, excited sound. For a second it seemed like Tristan’s eyes were playing tricks on him, but no, there was movement far in the back of the tunnel, where the dark was thickest. Something long and white was worming its way forward from an underground lair. A pale moon of a face dipped down toward the ground with each wormy shuffle. Stringy black hair trailed behind the thing, along with the tatters of a white dress.
“Delphine,” Loftus exhaled.
Tristan looked again, and it was a woman, not a worm with hands that clawed at the ground in order to move forward. Her eyes were large dark holes, like the empty sockets of a skull. In them he could see a river. A field. At the edge, trees beginning to bare themselves to the fall. Big blue mountains in the distance. A bigger, bluer sky. There should have been sound—the river rushing, birds singing, maybe the wind—but there was nothing. Just silence. So much silence, so complete it felt like pressure on his eardrums.
He was at the orphanage. He’d played by this river. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so much grass. Yes. It was so beautiful.
And then he thought, No.
The second he stopped believing in the scene before his eyes, he stopped seeing it. Blood pooled at his feet, spreading so fast and far he couldn’t step out of it. It overflowed from the river. He could feel the blood leaking thickly from his own sharp grin. A wave of fear rolled through him and rushed out of his mouth in a silent scream.
Suddenly he was back in the cavern. “Gus,” he choked out.
Augusta had collapsed to the floor beside him, her blue hair fanning prettily. Jared lay on his other side. And there was Branek, his aggressive features startlingly peaceful and childlike. Tristan lay on his back, stunned. His mouth was sticky. Somehow they were all bleeding from the mouth, the four trails of their blood forming a single narrow river that the worm lapped up along its slow progress.
Anger, white and righteous, flared inside Tristan. It was for Loftus ruining the lives of four children. It was for him killing those children after letting them grow, for changing them into vampires. It was for him doing all this to reach this selfish, sinister moment. It was for reducing Tristan to this weakened state when he, not Loftus, was meant for immeasurable power. Loftus did not have the right to such power, and he was going to pay for the wrong he’d done.
Fallon was still chanting whatever ceremonial words he’d learned for this night. He appeared to be in a trance. The same words sounded from his lips over and over. Evocations. The names of demons.
Tristan rolled over onto his stomach, not knowing why he was the only one able to move. Weakened from the inexplicable blood loss, he pulled himself toward Loftus, who awaited the worm in nearly frantic excitement.
The worm writhed forward and made a barely audible moaning sound that made Tristan’s neck prickle. He wasn’t afraid. Or if he was, the fear was buried deep beneath this hot blazing anger. This hatred. He wasn’t going to let Loftus throw their fucking prima materia blood away so easily. They’d lived through too much to die so stupidly, and on someone else’s terms. For all he’d
done, there was still so much in Tristan’s life left undone.
When he was close enough, Tristan threw his arms around Loftus’ knees and pulled him off balance. He grabbed a handful of Loftus’s clothes and dragged him back. Tristan maneuvered himself into the right position and snagged his teeth in Loftus’s skin, releasing small spurts of blood. He’d only swallowed a little when Loftus reared up and flipped him. Tristan was on his back once more, silver eyes flashing before him.
He stared to rise up, but Loftus brought one foot down on his forearm, snapping it against the cavern floor. Tristan cried out and rolled over in time to see Loftus scoop the worm into his arms. It coiled around him, snakelike, and shrieked an inhuman sound that echoed off the cavern walls. Loftus ran into one of the tunnels. The tattered white dress was the last thing to disappear from view.
What the fuck had just happened.
At some point Fallon had stopped chanting. With his good arm, Tristan grabbed his ankle as he tried to run past and Fallon fell. It was the only move Tristan could perform at that moment, but it seemed effective enough.
“I’m going to take some blood from you,” he growled through his teeth. “And when you wake up you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on, you stupid, stupid boy.”
Breathing and grunting like a beast, Tristan filled his mouth with Fallon’s blood. He swallowed voraciously. His whole body tingled. There wasn’t enough blood in Fallon’s body for him, and there certainly wasn’t enough for the others. He had to stop. He didn’t want to.
He lifted his head from Fallon’s stained neck. A formless shout of rage and frustration escaped his throat. Fallon, unconscious but not dead, didn’t move. Tristan shoved him away and staggered to his feet. He did his best to set his broken arm, gritting his teeth against the burning pain.
“Shit,” he muttered.
It would have been so much easier to leave the others lying there. No one would ever find their bodies. He couldn’t say for sure whether any of them would bother saving him were the situation reversed.
Well. Maybe he did have a heart after all.
Getting them out was hell. He thought it would never end. He thought about quitting every damn second. The passage was so fucking narrow and difficult to navigate even when he wasn’t weak and trying to drag deadweight through it with a broken but healing arm. He cried out at the seeming futility of it so many times, unleashing demented curses into the darkness just because it made him feel better. Loftus was going to pay so hard just for this ignominious bullshit.
Clouds, turned slightly red by light pollution, coated the near-morning sky. The air smelled like dust. It had taken hours, but Tristan was done. The inert bodies of Augusta, Branek, and Jared were laid out on the cracked ground in a staggered row. He was sure they must be healing, but they’d lost a lot of blood.
“You better not be dead,” Tristan muttered. The stillness of the air swallowed up his voice.
Slicing his teeth across his ulnar artery, he sank into a crouch beside Branek. Blood dripped into Branek’s mouth for several long seconds. The little wound closed over and Branek stirred, looking as if it hurt him to move. He sat up slowly, fixing Tristan with a long, untrusting glare. He wiped a hand vigorously across his mouth, clearing flakes of blood.
“Loftus … sacrificed us,” he said uncertainly.
“Are you surprised?”
“Only a little. I always knew she meant more to him than we did.”
“I didn’t know about her at all. But he always shared his secrets with you.”
“Not all of them.”
They locked wrists and Tristan helped Branek unsteadily to his feet. Branek’s eyes fell to the others, and his expression was briefly wounded before it hardened into an unreadable mask.
“Fallon’s still in there,” Tristan said. “I drank his blood.”
“Leave him there.”
“I need to find out what he knows about this. Did you just want to let it rest and go back to our lives? We were betrayed.”
“Betrayal is in our nature,” Branek said, but he went back in for Fallon while Tristan revived Augusta and Jared. They were all weak, but at least none of them were dead. The joke was on Loftus in that regard. He’d made them too strong to kill them with a bit of esoteric magic.
“How could he do that?” Augusta sobbed.
“Easily, it seems,” Tristan muttered. He rubbed at the dry crackle of blood on his chin. “Did you ever think he really cared about us?”
“He was our father.”
“No. He just raised us. Badly.”
Augusta nodded, obviously disappointed. “He destroyed us, didn’t he?” she said. “He disempowered us.”
“Is that today’s vocabulary word?” Branek asked, sauntering up with Fallon tossed over one shoulder. He dropped the boy to the ground without ceremony.
“Think about it,” she went on. “Power. Empower. Disempower. It means we started off with wills of our own. It means he fostered and encouraged a sense of independence. And then he took it away, so we’d be utterly dependent on him.”
“Well, we aren’t anymore,” Tristan said.
“Are we getting out of here or what?” Jared demanded testily. “The sun’s coming up.”
“We all have to get blood. Then we’ll meet up.”
“Who’s taking this asshole?” Branek gave Fallon’s ribs a nudge.
They argued, but Branek finally agreed to take him after much posturing on how much trouble it would be. Typical. He and Jared shoved Fallon into the Corvette and sped off in a cloud of dust. Tristan and Augusta took the Nova. For now, it didn’t even matter what Loftus had done. They needed blood, so much of it. Just to feel strong again. Just to feel right.
They didn’t speak. Tristan was a shell. Sand blew across the road as they drove and cool wind snapped at the open windows. The merciless rising sun speared through the clouds, blinding him, and oh, how it burned.
Twelve
They avoided the house and met in a bar, a shitty one where everyone looked suspicious and no one stared at anyone else. The few windows were tinted inside and out, rendering time ambiguous. Video poker machines lined the walls. Dim lights overhead tinged the smoky air a nervous, jittery color, a miasmic mustardy hue that seemed to permeate everything.
“So,” Tristan said. “That was your mom. Tell us about her.”
Fallon glanced at the vampires surrounding him, having no trouble meeting their eyes. “She met Loftus when I was thirteen. That was six years ago. He went to see her a lot, but she always turned him away. But he kept coming, and one day he tried turning her into a vampire. It didn’t work. She would have died, but he took her to the cavern and kept her in some half-alive state with human blood, delivered on full moons.”
“Where our toys go to die,” Branek mused.
“I didn’t think it was possible for Loftus to love,” Jared said.
Fallon blinked. “I’m sure it wasn’t. He was obsessed.”
“You’d think we would have remembered this happening,” Tristan muttered. Then again, he’d been pretty busy embracing his violent urges and hadn’t cared about much else. A lot must have happened without him noticing.
“I remember,” said Branek. “I was there the night he met her. She worked as a cocktail waitress. He didn’t like to speak of it, even to me, but he went to see her every night. Although I didn’t know about her connection with Fallon.”
Tristan looked at Fallon. “Okay, so he chased her and killed her. How did he convince you to help him?”
“He forced me,” Fallon said. “He threatened to kill this girl I liked if I didn’t learn the magic. So I agreed. I was only thirteen. He needed me because my blood is the same as my mother’s. Every year since then he’s made me fear for my life. There was nothing I could do but what he asked. Better I do this to my own mother’s body, I thought, than someone else do it.”
“Didn’t you want to help him?” Augusta asked. “Didn’t you want to see your own mot
her again? I would.”
“She’s not my mother anymore,” Fallon said darkly. “She’s an abomination.”
“But—”
“My mother would still be alive, as a human, if it hadn’t been for Loftus,” Fallon said sharply. “She’d have raised me. But Loftus killed her and it made him sorry. Not everyone can be immortal. That’s what he doesn’t understand.” He made a derisive sound. “He thinks, because of his little book collection, that he’s some sort of expert. But I’ve read more of the material than he has, and I’m the one with the talent, and he’s nothing more than some medieval hack who doesn’t care how many lives he’s ruined.”
“Well, you ruined some lives yourself,” Branek pointed out. “You tried to kill us just a few hours ago.”
“How can you blame me? I was only doing what the four of you ever did. You’ve been such perfect little minions to him. I know his influence over you is deep. I would never be surprised to find one of you has turned on the others. Or on me.”
“That’s a flattering assessment,” Branek said without a hint of irony.
“What do you think Loftus will do if he finds us?” Augusta wondered. “As far as we know, he thinks we’re dead. He must have wanted us to stay that way.”
“He’ll bleed us,” Tristan said without thinking. “He’s done it to me before.”
“But he couldn’t do it to all of us. We’d outnumber him.”
“You must underestimate his powers of influence.”
“No, I just …” Augusta fell silent for a moment. “What do you mean, he’s bled you before?”
“Tristan was a bad boy,” Branek said in a mischievous singsong.
“I disobeyed him once,” Tristan explained. “More than once, actually, but he was testing me this time and didn’t like it. He found a girl for me and told me to make her into a vampire, and I didn’t want to. She was nothing to me, just a random girl off the streets. I told him I’d never do anything he said ever again. I was in a rebellious phase, I guess.”
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