This vampyre was quite content as far as I could tell. Why Adano wanted so badly to escape this cushy life, I didn’t know. Then again, his situation must’ve been considerably different from this vampyre’s. If Adano had had access to a pactputer, he could have done what he wanted me to do himself.
I wanted to see, but it would take me too long to find his room. The DA wasn’t perfect, but it was helpful.
Yavadoni: Show me a live video feed from Adano Vice’s quarters.
The DA took over. Within seconds, I glimpsed Adano on the screen. He was lying on the ground, on a fluffy white rug, staring at the ceiling, hardly blinking. He had next to nothing in his quarters. That rug, a bed with too many pillows. That was all he had in this room and nothing spilled out of the other, which was likely his bathroom.
For once, he wasn’t smiling. I understood why. He didn’t have anyone to smile for, and it had to get exhausting. It was a bit… unnerving, though. Without his smile, he was listless. He didn’t move. He could have been dead with that vacant look in his pale-blue eyes; they had lost their luster.
Gods, and seeing him brought my aches to the forefront of my mind. Venom dripped onto my tongue. I clenched my teeth and reminded myself of the task at hand.
Yavadoni: Search Adano Vice in the library. Bring up any records of him marked important.
The pactputer screen sputtered, flipping through records in the digital library. I caught a glimpse of my access level: a no-restrictions-applied single star. The screen stilled with a list of records awaiting my next selection. I wouldn’t have seen any of these if I had been logged in to my account.
The typed report at the top of the list, the item the DA labeled “most important,” was made on that persistent date.
The 5th Month of Summer, Day 145. 2381.
Our technicians have been sifting through the Silver Hollow system all day with nothing to show for it.
Had I been too hasty when I gave the order “shoot to kill”? No, I don’t think so. Ivy was about to initiate something. Her finger hovered over her pactputer screen when a bullet tore through her heart. Her hand smashed into her pactputer and the device fell to the concrete below. It shut down. Permanently.
Unfortunately, I have no video proof to back up my report. Ivy was in her room, where no cameras were placed.
The Silver Hollow system appears normal, but I’m not ready to accept that or that I could have been wrong. I’m never wrong. Ivy’s behavior had been erratic since Adano’s twelfth birthday two days ago. She did something.
Forgive me. I’m frazzled.
During her years as a nurturer, Ivy taught Adano all she knew, and he absorbed it all rapidly as he does everything. Ivy understood tech better than anyone, but Adano is… harder to pin down. He understands things. He can see the connections between seemingly disparate objects. Nature, technology, it’s all the same to him. He knows fundamental rules, laws of nature, that scientists have taken years to define.
Ivy’s and Adano’s skills combined are why the current Silver Hollow system is years beyond what it was. They created SH system ver.10.0.0., and I’m reluctant to throw it away, though it would be the most cautious approach after what transpired today. But there are no signs of tampering.
Maybe I was wrong.
No. I wasn’t. I’m never wrong.
Ivy Tins planned to release Adano and wreak havoc on the Silver Hollow system. As a doctor, I know this from her psychological state. Two days ago, her mind cracked. Adano won’t speak, but I’m sure he knows what she planned and could wreak havoc himself if he’s ever allowed near a computer again. From now on he is banned from tech. As long as the technicians find nothing out of the ordinary, we will continue to use this version of the Silver Hollow system.
This is the end of my report.
- Ednis the Wise
I squinted, trying to decipher secret messages among Ednis’s words. She emotionally rushed through her report and omitted information as if she was hiding something, as if she had had second thoughts.
Glancing at the tinted-glass wall, I gauged how much more time I’d have here before Hireh disrupted me. Everyone inside was still busy, using portacomms to talk to technicians, I was sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they took all of these pactputers away for maintenance after the stunt I pulled.
It hadn’t been my best idea, but it made the Silver Hollow system appear as if it were on the fritz. I could work with that.
So, time was limited.
I needed to delete all evidence of my treachery and I needed a way to talk to Adano freely. Each session with Adano had been in performance chamber fifty-seven. That was promising. Based on what I’d seen so far, I figured the DA should be able to do something about that.
Yavadoni: Delete all recorded sessions of Lisette Cheriz and Adano Vice in performance chamber 57.
DA: All videos recorded inside performance chamber 57 with the tags “Lisette Cheriz” and “Adano Vice” have been selected. Are you sure you want to delete them?
Yavadoni: Yes. And delete recordings from all other performance chambers too. Select the recordings and the number of them at random.
DA: Deleted. Is this random selection of recordings from all performance chambers acceptable?
I scanned the screen and the labels of each video file presented.
Yavadoni: Yes. Delete them.
DA: Deleted.
Yavadoni: Can you mask audio in performance chamber 57. Stop the cameras inside from recording audio and maybe have something else in place if another user tries to listen in?
The screen changed to that green-outlined map of performance chamber fifty-seven. The DA selected the cameras.
DA: Mute microphones?
Yavadoni: Yes.
DA: I can link the microphone inputs from another performance chamber so that the cameras from performance chamber 57 appear to still have microphones active.
Yavadoni: Do that.
DA: Is linking microphones from performance chamber 56 acceptable?
Yavadoni: Yes.
This wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than what I might have come up with on my own, considering my limited capabilities when tech was involved. Besides, if the microphones from performance chamber fifty-seven appeared to be working, then I doubted anyone would find out about the shared audio too quickly—unless whoever was inside the observation tower intently listened to every audio feed. That was impossible. Silver Hollow had one observation tower and thousands of feeds. It would be fine.
But there was one more thing I needed to do. Quickly.
Yavadoni: Turn off all power in the vampyre hall for 30 minutes.
DA: Starting now?
Yavadoni: In 15 minutes from now.
DA: The timer and trigger are set.
Yavadoni: Take me back to a normal user interface.
The screen shifted to the first page I had seen when I had logged in to the MC. I sped through logging out as the almost-silent squeak of the tinted-glass door signaled Hireh’s return to the garden. I shut down the pactputer then looked up. I couldn’t see her lips through her mask and almost missed her downturned eyebrows because of the shadow cast by her large hood. She was frowning. I shed the headphones so she would know I was listening.
“I’m to take you back to your room,” she said. “They want your pactputer, too.”
“It was glitching, so I already turned it off,” I replied.
“Strange.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Hireh canted her head, and I maintained my expressionless facade. For a moment. A sharp pain made me wince. Nausea swept over me, stomach-churning cramps twisted my guts, and my core became an inferno. Heat pooled between my thighs, igniting sensitive flesh and leaving me lightheaded.
The bleeding had begun.
CHAPTER 23
ADANO
Once again, I was alone in my quarters.
I lay back-first on the floor, my favorite place to be with that
fluffy white rug as a barrier between me and cold concrete. I should move, keep my body as strong and healthy as possible under the circumstance, but I wasn’t in the mood. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Yet. I’d talk myself into it. Eventually.
Here, on this rug, my mind went quiet. I recalled how Ivy would lie next to me and how warm she was. Memories of her were everywhere, but her spicy scent had faded or been overpowered years ago. Everything smelled like me—and the Sadist Queen’s current-favorite perfume. The perfume was subtle, like decaying leaves, but when it saturated something, it stayed. Whenever I’d get too close and catch a whiff of it, I’d gag.
Too bad I couldn’t erase it from my skin. It would creep up at the most random times. Like right now. I gagged, coughed, and grinned. I refused to rub my stinging eyes.
Gods, I hated that scent.
I wanted to tear into something or hide under my bed—I had done that with Ivy before. Under the bed was our safe place, where she’d tell me her secret stories until we were banned from doing it because the microphones couldn’t pick up clear audio.
I ran my teeth along my lower lip, my fangs snagging.
During most of our time together, Ivy and I had been cooped up inside of this building, these very quarters. I hadn’t been raised like most scamps because I was male. Most scamps had to share a nurturer. I had Ivy all to myself. Though she was young by nurturer standards, she did an excellent job. Our relationship was more siblings than parent-and-child, but it worked.
I wondered if Ednis the Wise had put us together on purpose.
She may have feared our brains, but she also adored them. Ednis was smart, but she had her limits whereas Ivy and I did not. Together, I thought Ivy and I could accomplish anything.
I had been wrong.
Ivy was dead, and I had come for them.
Lisette would bleed. If she didn’t bleed this time, she’d take me again. If I couldn’t make her bleed, who knew.
I shivered.
That memory was fresh, being inside of her. It happened this morning, so it wasn’t surprising it was on my mind. I remembered it, but the feeling… I had blacked out after I came because it was all too much. When I woke up, I was numb. That remained true, discounting the ghost sensation of Lisette.
I unzipped my trousers and touched myself. It was nothing like being inside of Lisette. Nothing like when she rubbed against me either. I had no desire to get hard and so I stayed soft. But I wondered about it all. Lisette made me burn in a way I didn’t understand, in a way I didn’t think was possible. I had never been interested in sex. Not really. I had explored, touched as I was touching now, but that was it.
I was often told about this fire, this need, that I would experience when I hit a certain age and was in the presence of a vampire. I never did experience it, but sometimes I wondered if I would have under different circumstances.
If I had, I wondered if I’d have felt that way about Ivy. I never would have been paired with her, but I wondered anyway.
My chest heaved. I swore I heard something crack. My ribs. Maybe something inside of my ears. It could have been the crunch of my teeth grinding together.
Time didn’t stop this wound from bleeding, and I wondered how long it’d take before it finally killed me.
I zipped up my trousers and pillowed my head with my hands, staring up at the milky-plastic overhead. The fluorescent tube lights branded my vision with their shape, a bright blue blotch that continued to glow after I closed my eyes.
It wasn’t often Ivy and I were allowed outside. Those were some of my favorite memories, but they weren’t the only ones. Ivy told me interesting things whenever she could get away with it, whenever sex education could be pushed aside. Her stories were about all these things outside Silver Hollow that I’d never seen before. Ivy hadn’t seen most of them either, but at least she heard stories. Unburied stories.
At least she was there to tell me those same stories.
Truth or fiction, it didn’t matter to me. Ivy sought truths, but sometimes she’d relay something more fantastical, such as when she told me about lightning stones.
Silver Hollow used wind turbines to supply the kingdom with electricity. Any excess electricity produced was stored away for later, but it wasn’t perfect. There had been several times Ivy told me Silver Hollow had to conserve energy. With a lightning stone, a kingdom like Silver Hollow wouldn’t be at the mercy of the wind.
“Addy, have I ever told you about lightning stones?” Ivy had said one day, when I was five years old and she was ten. We had already settled under my bed, but she kept her voice low as if this was some great secret too big for my bed to hide.
“No,” I replied. “Tell me.”
She wrapped her arm around me then. I couldn’t see her face because the top of my head met her throat; every word she spoke vibrated against my skull. That and the steady rhythm of her heartbeat were what I fell asleep to in those days.
“They say that sometimes when lightning strikes a stone, that stone will transform,” Ivy said.
“Who’s they?” My words were muffled, spoken below her collarbone, my lips brushing against the fabric of her shirt.
“All the technicians whispering about it since that last electricity shortage. They say they can stop it from happening if they have a lightning stone. Well, some of them do. The rest of them say lightning stones are a myth.”
“A myth?”
“Yeah, because a lightning stone can create more electricity by just being a lightning stone. Once hit by lightning and transformed, the stone retains all of that electricity, then it generates more electricity relative to that amount, whatever’s inside of it. It’s like having a generator and battery all in one. The amount of electricity it can store and generate is limitless. I think they’re dangerous to touch, though. So maybe they aren’t storing all that energy but releasing it at the same rate they create it? I don’t know. I’ve heard too many variations of this story.”
She rubbed her chin against my hair. “It’s too bad we don’t have one so we can see for ourselves. We’d solve Silver Hollow’s electricity problem and beat everyone else to it because you’d look at that lightning stone and know exactly how it works.”
For as long as I could remember, I understood how things worked. Ivy did too, but it wasn’t the same. She learned through trial and error, had endless ideas whether possible or not. I hadn’t seen much of Prime, but everything I had, even for the first time, wasn’t new. It wasn’t discovery and adventure the way Ivy understood. It was coming home, as if remembering something I’d known all along. I saw, filed away diagrams exclusive to my brain as if I had taken these things apart and tested everything as a proper scientist would—and I never forgot a detail. I didn’t dream of impossibilities because I knew the limits. Ivy never believed in those limits.
I often wondered why, if my “gift” was so “profound,” was I lost?
Perhaps my senses had dulled since Ivy’s death. Sometimes, I refused to notice things. Other times, I didn’t notice things until they became pertinent to my immediate situation, after I subconsciously or actively searched for answers or solutions. But there were also things I could never explain.
I couldn’t explain feelings or why a grown-ass vampire past her prime would force a scamp to have sex with her. Creatures with free will had limits as did everything else, but their actions weren’t predictable.
The farther away something was from Prime, the more abstract it became. That was why I liked plants, insects, the things Ivy and I discovered outside of these damn buildings. Ivy wasn’t the same. She didn’t crave the outside as I did. Tech was where her heart lay. I understood tech the same way I did everything else—it had rules and limitations—but I never loved it the way she did. We agreed to disagree. She told me I liked poking grass too much, that it was weird to feel it and lie in it as if it were my bed.
“It’s itchy.” She had scratched her arms as if to prove her point.
“It’s
like being close to you,” I’d replied.
She had found that offensive.
The corners of my lips tugged at the memory of her huffing, sputtering, fuming. I let the smile take over. I showed all of my teeth, the gesture growing until my cheeks threatened to tear.
That monster, Lisette, was going to get me out of here. I wouldn’t accept an alternative. She didn’t want to go to hell. She saw how serious I was. She’d play along, and she’d get me out of here. The MC, DA, everything Ivy and I had built, would make it possible. And if tech wasn’t enough, Lisette was a slayer.
My luck is changing, I thought.
It had to, or I didn’t know what I would do. A smile only got me so far.
Honestly, I was exhausted, but my chest buzzed as if red jackets had made a hive inside. They’d burst out through my mouth, my nose, maybe even my eyes if this kept up.
A little longer. You can wait a little longer. I was familiar with waiting, but I wasn’t familiar with this anxious anticipation. Not since Ivy had died.
A click drew my eyes to the heavy metal door, and my heart rate quickened. It was the Sadist Queen. I swallowed, but my throat was dry. I rolled onto my side and considered the dark space under my bed.
Stupid.
The door stopped when it had opened a crack. I kept my smile, but I closed my eyes and strained my ears to hear.
“But, my queen, it could be serious. Now isn’t the time to—”
“Ednis, if you’re that worried about it, oversee the technicians yourself.”
“Did that light flicker?”
“Ednis.”
I didn’t think. I leapt for the door, crashed my weight into it. It slammed shut and the lock clicked back into place as the vampyre hall lost power. My infrared vision took over, and my chest rumbled. Laughter bubbled up my throat. I dropped to the rough concrete, where my hands and knees struggled to hold me.
Vampire Captives (From Blood to Ashes Book 1) Page 12