The Phoenix Prince

by Kristen Gupton

  His stomach growled occasionally, reminding him that he’d not eaten since the king’s death. Peirte had a habit of getting so absorbed in what he was doing that the need to eat often went by the wayside. This was the reason he was so thin. This time, however, being distracted on any level by hunger might be a fatal mistake. What he was going to do soon would require him to have as much strength as possible. It would be easier to disconnect himself from his body and carry out his magic if he wasn’t thinking about his stomach.

  Back in the cabinet, the bottle containing the demon rattled quietly on the shelf, the entity inside eager to escape. Peirte looked over at the cabinet as he heard the sounds from within. He set down his charcoal, dusting his aching hands together. It was time for a break.

  He rose to his feet, joints and back snapping loudly as he righted himself. Though he wasn’t sure of the exact time, he knew it was getting very late. Emerging into the hallway, his eyes scanned the blackened corridor to see if there was still activity. Other than the distant voices of a pair of sentries on their rounds, he didn’t pick up anything. That suited him just fine, and he started walking down toward the kitchen, intent on retrieving food.

  For as demanding and bossy as Peirte was, he never let any of the staff prepare his food. He’d made a habit for several years now to only go into the kitchen when it was empty and feed himself. It wasn’t that he enjoyed cooking or going to the trouble to do so, but he had a phobia that any member of the staff would gladly poison him. Since he was guilty of more than one poisoning over the years, he knew how easy it really was. Despite how incompetent he figured most of the servants to be, they were still capable. One incorrect mushroom or leaf in a dish and that’s all it took. Not difficult at all, though not as sophisticated as the poisons that the councillor liked to employ.

  Since it was known that he went into the kitchen alone at night much of the time, no one really thought anything about it. This made it very easy for him to contaminate or alter the food and drink within. People tended not to be suspicious of it, writing it up to Peirte just having odd eating habits. This worked to his advantage when he wanted to carry out little experiments.

  One such experiment had taken place just a few months before when he had, yet again, poisoned Keiran’s blood-wine. The toxin that he’d slipped into the bottle would have been potent enough to have killed any other man, but Keiran’s unique condition staved off death. The prince had been very lethargic for a few days, but that was the extent of it. Human blood drinking or not, the vampirism did make the prince a little more resilient to such things. Peirte had made his notes about the results, figuring that if nothing else, he now had a litmus test for vampirism. If the subject wasn’t a vampire, when given the poison they would die, but he’d know they were clean. This sort of cruel, illogical thinking was typical of the councillor. The thought of it brought a dark grin to his lips as he moved through the kitchen doors.

  While he stood in the middle of the vacated kitchen drinking some leftover soup, he heard a crash in the dining hall next door. The councillor jumped for a moment, having figured that everyone in the castle was asleep. When he heard something again, followed by muttered, drunken cursing, he moved to the door that connected the two rooms and peered inside.

  A candle was burning on the long dining table, and Jerris was sitting at the head of it, several bottles sitting before him. He was clearly intoxicated and ranting to himself, spinning a bottle idly on its side. Soon enough, it got away from him and rolled off the edge, crashing to the floor where another already had landed and shattered. The guard was emotional about something, though Peirte couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

  The councillor huffed to himself and continued to watch for a few minutes, growing angry. This man-child was what the prince thought of as friend material. From having seen the two of them interact in the past, he figured Keiran really wasn’t any better. They all acted like commoners, without any dignity. The damned prince would probably make this drunken idiot the next grand councillor, he suspected. Utterly unqualified, the guard coasted through life leeching off the fact that he and the prince were friends. It was insulting enough that he tensed his jaw until his teeth hurt.

  The councillor believed that both Jerris and Keiran were alcoholics, too. That surely would do the country a ton of favors. Without anyone able to tell the prince otherwise, what would stop him from becoming completely overtaken with drinking and goofing off with Jerris? Peirte found it hard to imagine that Keiran would find the strength and discipline to control himself enough to get things done like he should.

  Disgusted, he turned away from the door and moved through the kitchen. Halfway back to the corridor, Peirte halted and felt his heart skip a beat. Where had Jerris and Keiran gone earlier that evening? Thanks to his past spying, he knew that it wasn’t uncommon for the two men to slip off to the tavern that Marcus owned. He wondered if that was where they’d been earlier. If so, had the tavern owner let onto them? Marcus wasn’t aware that Jerris’ companion was the prince, last time Peirte had watched on via one of his demons. Paranoia seeped through his unstable mind. Would Marcus dare to tell the guard there was a plot forming? Peirte’s thoughts raced until he reassured himself that if Marcus had said anything, he’d already be in chains.

  His anger returned. The prince’s constant desire to play outside of the rules was frustrating. Orchestrating Keiran’s assassination was troublesome enough, without the prince doing things to potentially complicate the matter further.

  Very inconsiderate, really, Peirte thought. He liked to think he was only looking out for the country.

  Since there was little point in debating it with himself alone in the kitchen, Peirte finally shook it off and started back to his room. He rounded a corner at the top of the stairs and ran right into the prince himself. Keiran had been standing in the corridor, leaning heavily against the wall. His pallor was ghastly, sweat rolling down his face as he continued to fight the sickness from the alcohol. Keiran’s eyes were dim in the passage’s candle light, ringed with black.

  Peirte startled and jumped back, not having expected to run into anyone, much less the man who’d been pressing so badly on his thoughts. To see Keiran looking so terrible and sick actually twisted up a knot of momentary fear in the councillor. What would a blood-thirsty vampire out on the prowl look like? Was this it?

  The councillor’s eyes flashed with contempt, as he realized Keiran hardly looked like he was in any shape to overtake him. He curled his lip and sneered, smelling the alcohol diffusing in the prince’s sweat and the wretched hint of the man’s previous bouts of vomiting. “Do you think this is how you should conduct yourself in a time of mourning for your father?”

  Keiran straightened up from the wall, his misery making him much shorter tempered than he would otherwise have been. Corina had left him a while before, presuming that he’d simply sleep. He’d gotten up, however, feeling too miserable to stay in bed. The prince had thought that going down and grabbing some bread to take to his room might help his stomach. He’d gotten as far as the stairs before having to stop, feeling light headed. Now, here was Peirte snarking at him.

  The prince’s jaw set, eyes narrowing to dark slits. He looked down on the councillor and growled. “I’m not hurting anyone, and what I choose to do is really none of your concern, Peirte. What are you doing spooking around the castle at this hour?”

  Peirte balked at being questioned and he seethed. “I was hungry, so I went down for something to eat. Am I not allowed to do so? Do you now have some royal decree that I’m to starve to death for your amusement?”

  A brow slowly quirked upward, and Keiran’s head cocked to the side. He glanced past the councillor, into the void of the stairwell behind him, trying to keep control over his temper. “Who in the hell do you think you are?”

  Instantly, Peirte felt a pang of fear as he knew what Keiran was looking at. Afraid that the prince would shove him backward and down the stairs, he sidestepped
around him to get safely out of reach. He honestly thought the prince wouldn’t be above such an act. If the roles had been reversed, it was exactly what he would have done. His self-importance and contempt for Keiran returned once he was feeling a little more secure in his location. “I am the Grand Councillor Peirte Methaius, of the House of Sipesh, and until your coronation in a few days, still technically a part of the government!”

  Keiran hung his head and looked at Peirte as he turned, following the councillor’s movements. He bore his teeth, taking in a shaking breath. It was only a few more days, but given his current state, the prince wasn’t sure he could handle anymore of Peirte’s antics. “Don’t push your luck, Peirte.”

  “You’re a worthless drunk, Keiran. That’s the long and the short of it. Look at yourself!” Peirte waved a hand at the prince, wondering how hard it would be to push him backward and down the stairs. Would such a fall kill Keiran? He didn’t look like he was in such good shape, anyway. Maybe it would be enough. Surely, if he did so and got back to his quarters, people would just assume that Keiran had fallen down the stairs due to his intoxication when he was eventually found.

  “And you’re a sociopath,” Keiran retorted, taking an unsteady step toward the councillor. There was a pained dryness in his throat as his anger toward Peirte wormed through his mind. Feeling an ache above his canines, Keiran’s left hand came up and pressed against his mouth momentarily. Something was stirring inside of him that he wasn’t familiar with.

  Peirte was giving serious consideration to rushing forward and pushing him when he heard someone running up the stairs behind the prince. He leaned to the side to look around Keiran, seeing Jerris appear at the top of the stairway. How the guard had managed to get up the stairs so quickly when drunk was a little perplexing, but there he was. What a fine pair they made.

  Jerris moved forward, putting himself between Keiran and Peirte. He gave his friend a quick look up and down, before fixing his sights on the councillor. “I heard you two all the way downstairs. What’s going on?”

  “You need to take Prince Keiran to his room and keep him confined, Jerris. He shouldn’t be wandering the halls in his condition,” Peirte ordered, crossing his arms over his chest. He worked to get his emotions under control, though he felt there was a good chance neither man would remember much of this confrontation in the morning.

  Jerris raised his brows and gave the councillor a critical look. Though Peirte did technically outrank him, he’d be damned if he was going to take directions from the councillor. He opted to blow him off for the moment. He turned to face Keiran, setting a hand on his shoulder. “Keir, what are you doing out of bed? You look like death.”

  Keiran refused to pull his gaze away from Peirte for several more moments. “I wanted to go get some bread or something to have in my room. Ran into him on the way and he started in.”

  The guard nodded and looked back at Peirte. He thought the councillor was incredibly lucky Keiran was drunk. Physical decline or not, the prince still would have been able to easily best the councillor if the altercation had gone to blows. Jerris knew that no one in the castle would have held it against Keiran, either, if it had happened. “Councillor, please return to your quarters immediately.”

  “How dare you order me around!” Peirte chirped back, putting his hands on his hips. The very idea that this lowly guard would give him a command made his temper flare again.

  “Do it, Peirte,” Keiran growled, taking a step forward. The adrenaline coursing through his veins cleared up a bit of his uncoordination, his fists clenching at his sides. “Do it or I’ll have you imprisoned, and don’t think I won’t.”

  The councillor studied Keiran’s body language for a moment, thinking that the prince was emboldened thanks to his lapdog arriving on the scene. He scoffed and decided that returning to his quarters was fine, anyway. He had work to do, and that’s where it needed to be done, after all. It would be awfully difficult to finish what he was up to from the dungeon. “Fine, I will retire for the evening. You’d do well, Prince, to start acting less like a child.”

  Jerris snapped and started to rush forward, his own drinking earlier cutting through his better judgement. He decided to beat Peirte to a pulp himself. He was stopped short, however, when Keiran’s left hand moved out and gripped the back of his shirt.

  Peirte simply rolled his eyes and spun, storming off toward his room. The two would be dealt with soon enough. He pulled in control of his emotions, needing to clear his mind for the work still to be done. They would regret their actions or at the very least, they would both be dead within a week and no longer thorns in his side.

  Keiran watched Peirte go, letting his hand untangle from the back of his guard’s shirt. He looked down, seeing that his hand was shaking badly. The compulsion to go after Peirte and tear him to ribbons cut like a knife through his other thoughts. Despite his alcohol sickness, his bloodlust was worse than it ever had been in his life. Control over his actions and thoughts seemed to be in terrible danger of slipping away. He knotted his hands together before his stomach to stop their trembling. “Jerris, please get me to my room before I do something horrible.”

  Jerris turned to face him, the conflict having cleared the ale from his mind. He could feel the tension emanating from Keiran, and it wasn’t a welcome feeling. Seeing him truly angry was a rare thing, and there was something downright frightening in the prince’s expression he’d never seen before. Everything about Keiran seemed off. There was a danger there. Something so close to breaking that it was nearly tangible.

  He gave a quick nod to the prince and put his arm around his waist, starting him back down the corridor toward his room. “It’s all right. Peirte’s just pissed he’s losing his footing and power. Don’t worry on it.”

  Keiran gave a long, wavering sigh and moved along at Jerris’ side toward his door. As they moved, he gave a leering glare down the side corridor Peirte had eventually disappeared into. Somewhere, the councillor’s door slammed heavily, and Keiran closed his eyes, forcing himself onward. The image of Peirte lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood filled his mind, and he didn’t like the feeling it gave him.

  When they got to the prince’s room, Jerris locked the door behind them. Keiran pulled away and went over to sit in one of the chairs before the fire, no longer feeling like he needed to be confined to bed. A corner of his mouth pulled downward and he brought his left hand up, rubbing at the back of his neck. He tried to ignore the increasing burn in his throat, and the dark void in his stomach.

  Jerris came over and sat in the other chair, looking at him with concern. “You all right?”

  Words were about to cross Keiran’s lips that he’d never hoped to speak. He sank down a little further into the chair, moving to grip the arms of it with his hands tightly. “You and Corina are right. I need blood—human blood. Getting mad at Peirte like that just now… I was ready to kill him, Jerris. I honest to God was ready to kill him when you showed up.”

  The guard looked over at Keiran, as the light from the fireplace highlighted his face in moving shadows. The effect was to make the prince look more stereotypically vampiric than he actually did. To hear Keiran break down and admit his need was disquieting, and it let Jerris know exactly how bad off Keiran was. “I’m sure we could find a way, Keir. It’s not like some of us haven’t been quietly anticipating this day. Corina and I can get you some, somehow. Human.”

  The prince couldn’t bring himself to keep looking at Jerris and turned his eyes to the fire, feeling a damnable lump form in his throat. “It’s not that I want to do it, I don’t. My body is tangled up in some kind of mutiny against my brain. I just don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to override the need with my self-control. Maybe I can hold out a little longer, the stress of all this and dealing with Peirte is just temporarily making it worse. I know continuing to deny myself is killing me, but after all these years of convincing myself I didn’t need it… Jerris, what should I do?”


  “Again, Keir, we can get you some, it’s really not that big of an issue. You’d feel better, I know you would.”

  Keiran’s eyes closed, a faint burn in them. He ran his hands down his face and whimpered. The inner struggle he was fighting was making everything harder than it had to be. “Damn it all. No. Don’t even tell Corina I said that. Forget it. I know I can hold out a little longer. Let’s wait until I’m at least crowned. God, I don’t know.”

  Jerris leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, hating the sight of Keiran coming undone. “I won’t tell her anything you don’t want me to, Keir. But know that we have the ability to provide for you. Even if we got it to you in private and she or I were the only ones to know.”

  “No, please,” he begged quietly, the offer so painfully tempting that he felt on the verge of tears. Taking human blood would be a point of no return, and he knew it. All he had read over the years had hammered that point into his brain well enough. “I take it back, I don’t want it. And that’s not the sort of secret that can be kept for long. I hate it all, Jerris. I don’t want this anymore, I never did.”

  Jerris gave an inward groan and was suddenly very glad they were behind closed doors. He couldn’t stand it. This wasn’t the Keiran he knew at all. He pulled himself up from the chair he’d been in and went over, kneeling down before Keiran and pulling the prince forward and into an embrace. The guard buried his face against the other’s neck, holding on tight for a few moments. “It’s going to be all right, Keir. Whatever happens or whatever you need, I’m here and so are Corina and my father. We’d do anything for you. You know that, don’t you?”