by Joey W. Hill
She didn’t know exactly how that worked, but she wasn’t marked yet. Maybe. The words she hadn’t really thought much about came back in bold relief in her brain.
When I bit you, I gave you the first mark. It’s a locater. Don’t know why I did that, but now I’m bloody glad I did.
She clenched her hands into fists. Alistair was three hundred years old. It was unlikely that a couple days of shared memories had helped ease any of his nightmares about what they’d seen, the way they had for her. But the things he’d said, those two nights she’d known him, told her he had to feel some kind of connection to her. If she couldn’t find a way out of this through her family, maybe she could find it through him.
We’ll get through. Her words to Helen mocked her, but where they hadn’t helped Helen, they might succor Nina now. Patience, waiting to see what happened as variables changed, might present her options this seemingly hopeless moment did not.
Basic needs, hunger and thirst, finally drove her from her room the next morning. She donned slacks and a blouse, sturdy shoes. Did her hair and makeup. Though she could care less about how she looked, she recognized them as a physical and emotional armor she would need. When she came downstairs, she discovered she was too right about that.
Her mother had granted Nina the dubious kindness of attending her twin’s funeral. She hadn’t trusted her not to attempt escape. A guard detail had been posted on their house.
Davinia introduced him as a family friend, though she didn’t explain how they knew him. Nina refused to play the game and ask for details, force her mother to come up with more lies. The bodyguard was aptly named Steele. No indication of whether it was a first or last name, and it was the only name offered. A tall, formidable-looking bloke with military short hair and cool grey eyes, Steele said little or nothing. Except for her mother asking periodically if he needed tea or a sandwich, the rest of the family moved around him as if he was a necessary but somewhat hazardous piece of furniture. He had only one purpose, and nothing distracted him from it. The way his eyes tracked Nina told her what it was.
In comparison, Davinia studiously avoided direct eye contact with her daughter. “Nina, I let you sleep in late,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “Knew you could use it. Your breakfast is on the covered plate on the stove if you want it.”
Nina crossed to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of juice. Ignoring the table where her father was sitting, finishing his own meal, she retrieved the plate and moved into the living room, no matter her mother’s rule about eating only in the kitchen. Bollocks to that. She sat down in the chair that faced Steele, and pinned him with a baleful glare.
“Is this close enough to keep you from getting a crick in your neck?” she asked. “Will you need to go into the loo with me?”
Steele’s expression didn’t alter. “The windows have been nailed shut in there,” he said. His voice was deep and enthralling, like a stage player cast to fill the role of a Shakespearean king. “If you like, we could open the door and you could try running. I can show you how quickly I could catch you.” He took a sip of his tea, handling the cup with startling delicacy, for his hands were large.
She eyed him. “What if I’m screaming and kicking as you’re dragging me back?”
“Your father and mother will reassure the neighbors you’re having a hysterical episode, due to your sister’s loss and your lingering wartime trauma. I’m the doctor handling your treatment and medication.” He lifted one of the biscuits. “Your mother is an excellent baker.”
His matter-of-fact, non-empathetic answers and behavior were oddly more appealing to her right now than her parents’ incomprehensible mix of professed parental love and cruel resolve. She considered that as she buttered her toast. Belying her outward calm, she fumbled the utensil and smeared the upholstery with an oily streak. The knife tumbled into the crack between the cushions. As she retrieved it, it left more stains. Maybe they’d leave a permanent reminder for her parents of the daughter they’d forced into indentured servitude.
Steady. Her hand had clenched the knife, making it quiver. She saw Steele’s gaze on it as she eased her grip, set the toast aside. She was hungry, but had no energy for eating.
“So it bothers you not at all that you’re taking a woman against her will into a life she doesn’t want, didn’t ask to have?” she asked politely.
“We can’t always choose the path our life takes. We can only determine how to live within those boundaries. Correct?”
She stared at him. He met her attention with a frank expression that said the things she’d experienced, endured, were things he could match with his own experiences. He offered a glimpse of that with his next words.
“I’m a hundred and sixty-seven years old. I became my Mistress’s fully marked servant at twenty-five years old, when I was part of a pirate crew. Ship got caught in a storm, dashed to pieces on the rocks.”
“A pirate? That’s something the boys would love to hear about,” her father said. “They’ll be here for dinner.”
Steele’s eyes flicked toward him. “This conversation is between your daughter and me.”
While his tone was cordial, the coolness in his gaze was unmistakable. Her father cleared his throat. “Of course. My apologies. Sir.”
“It’s not sir. Just Steele.” He returned his focus to Nina. “I washed up, half drowned, on the shore of the island where my Mistress lived. She brought me into her household, took a liking to me, made me hers. I consented. It was the last choice I had the right to make without her leave. Regrettable but necessary, it’s one you’re not being given. Not exactly.”
Steele set aside his tea. In a move too swift for her to follow, he drew a knife from his coat. Wickedly sharp, the curved blade reflected her mother’s curio cabinet behind her.
Nina sensed her parents freezing in the kitchen, but Steele ignored them. She might have been the only other person in the house with him. He placed the blade between them.
“You can kill yourself,” he said. “Finish the job you’re doing on that chair with blood as well as butter. It’s the only way out. The only answer the InhServ program respects and honors, for it removes the question of your family’s loyalty.”
He wasn’t goading her. He was serious. Chillingly so, because she realized it was one of the options she was legitimately contemplating.
“I expect they could kill me themselves to do that. What percentage takes either course?” she asked, her voice absurdly steady.
“Because most are raised from the age of six to be offered to the vampire world, we rarely have an initiate that chooses that route,” he said. “They already understand the nuances, the honor, the never-ending wonder of being part of the vampire world. Of serving creatures who are of the fantastic dimension, like our imaginings of unicorns or dragons, but far darker, more demanding.”
She would have scoffed at the romanticizing, but his tone was flat, as if he’d simply told her flowers died in winter.
He leaned forward, his gaze clasping Nina’s. His breath smelled like tea and the vanilla and brown sugar from the biscuits. The man himself had an appealing aftershave scent, interspersed with another aroma she would later realize was the scent left by a woman’s frequent touch upon him.
“You will discover things about yourself, about what you want and need. Who you are, at the most primitive levels of your stripped, exposed soul. A clarity you will never find in their world.” He tipped his head toward her parents, her brother. “You think they are pushing you out of their world. But in truth, from here forward, they have no place in yours.”
She swallowed. Her hands had closed on the chair arms. Steele cocked his head. “As far as having your family take your life, I expect you wouldn’t put that on them. You seem the type who shoulders what must be done and gets on with it.”
He extended his palm. “Your right hand,” he said, in that same courteous but not-to-be-denied tone.
When she lifted hers and placed it in hi
s grasp, he picked up his napkin in his other hand and wiped her palm, lightly holding her wrist to keep her steady. His grip was heated, smooth, and though she sensed it wasn’t his intention, there was a caressing feel to his fingertips, as if he was used to every incidental touch with a woman being a sensual exchange. “The butter,” he said.
She almost smiled, but the pain of it was too much. Fortunately, he kept talking.
“It’s a clarity that admittedly, most do not desire. But you’re different. Lord Alistair met you, didn’t he?”
It was an unexpected question, one that took her off guard. “Yes.” Lord Alistair? That certainly fit.
Steele grunted. “I expect that’s what he saw, and why he still wants you, despite how little training you will have. But even your intended Master cannot interfere with this choice.”
Another move, smooth and unseen, like a flit of air across her face. Now the knife was against her throat, angled over her carotid. She heard her mother’s gasp, her father’s noise as if quieting her, though it had an uncertainty to it, as if he’d wanted to protest as well. But then they were silent.
Steele brought her other hand up, molded it over his on the knife handle. His touch was warm, strong, reminding her too much of Alistair. It was an intimate pose, their two faces inches apart. “If you tighten your grasp and start to pull, hard enough to prove your commitment to it, I’ll make sure it’s done quick and painlessly.”
He would do it. He wasn’t trying to scare her into good behavior. In their mad, mad world, suicide was an honorable and acceptable way of resolving such a conflict.
“Will my brother Jim have to become an InhServ if I do it?” Her voice vibrated against the blade. She felt no fear. She felt…nothing.
He shook his head. “Informed suicide breaks the contract with your family for all time. Your sacrifice assures the Council that they can be trusted with the secrets of the vampire world. That, and their history of service, permits them to live without the binding upon them any longer, as long as they do not reveal it to future generations.”
“No. Nina.” Now her father did speak, urgent. “It is something we gladly embraced. We have no desire to be free of it. Do not do this for us.”
“I know that,” she said, leaving her gaze on Steele. His grey eyes flickered. “The decision is mine. For me and me alone.”
“On the threshold of the training is the only time the choice is allowed,” Steele added. “An InhServ trainee who kills her or himself once the training is begun dishonors the family irrevocably. Everything is taken from them, and all debts must be repaid. In some cases, depending on the circumstances, their lives can be forfeit.”
She tightened her jaw. Human nature was to cling to and fight for life, as long as it was possible to draw breath. But she’d had more than one man in her ward with his body so broken as to be useless. Facing a lifetime of being cared for like an infant, with not even enough motor control to take his own life. During the long hours of a graveyard shift, one had begged her softly to do it. The man in the bed next to his mate had heard it, but when she looked toward him, she saw no protest in him, just a fixed, steady understanding. There was some of that in Steele’s gaze now.
Was she at that point? Did she really consider her fate as bad as a man who had no feeling below the neck?
It would make me very unhappy to hear that something bad happened to you…
It had been wartime, where emotions ran as deep as they were fast, most not surviving in a world not bathed in blood. She would not make the decision based on what Alistair might or might not feel for her. He would own her, she reminded herself. He would not be her husband, nor her lover. Not in the way she imagined.
Your sister will be my Inherited Servant, Nina. Not my wife. She’ll serve me in many ways, but she does not expect, nor would she ever demand, that my attentions belong only to her.
But he might give her a way out that no one else could, she reminded herself. It was a slim hope, but surely a slim hope was better than a decision that couldn’t be undone.
“Did you ever regret your choice?” she asked. Her voice was thick.
Steele’s gaze softened a few degrees. “Quite a few times. But not anymore. I’d rather be at The Mistress’s side…my Mistress’s side, than anywhere else. Even at the helm of my ship, plowing through the waves on a fair day, a bright sun on my face. Take your chances, lass,” he said quietly. “Death is the only certainty in life, and it leaves you no choices at all.”
Nina thought of the pose they were in. Steele leaned over her, his knee pressed into the side of the chair, one hand holding the knife, the other on the side of her neck and shoulder, steadying her. Their faces inches apart. Yet they spoke as if they were sitting at the table, having tea.
“I can never marry or have children like a normal human,” she said. What he’d said, about her parents having no place in her world, it made sense in this moment. She wasn’t even aware of them. Only him. “No home and family. And if I can’t be a nurse, I can’t be who I am.”
“We never stop being who we are,” he said. “We just discover a far different scope to the definition.”
Her fingers tightened over his, and she felt the edge of the blade. He was right; it was very sharp. When he drew it across her artery, she’d barely feel the cut. Just a sting, and her blood rushing from her. She thought of her blood, how it had fed Alistair.
In the days when the Japanese were closing in, more than one soldier had steadfastly asserted he would do the nurses the kindness of shooting them before letting the Japanese take them. For the most part, the women’s response had been, “Thanks, but if it’s the same to you, I’ll take my chances, see how it all turns out.”
Would those who suffered three years in the internment camps, died there, feel that way if they could do the choice over? Or those who’d walked into the water with her at Bangka?
That was the rub, wasn’t it? You had to take your chances and never give up on life, the thought that it might go better, in unexpected ways. If not now, or even in the next year or two, maybe a few years in the future. She’d have three hundred years to find out.
The alternative was it could be three hundred years of sheer hell, worse than anything she’d faced. And she’d thought nothing could be worse than that.
Her eyes shut tight. The motion made her fingers constrict even more, but she’d moved them to his wrist, was holding it. After a long moment, he lowered the blade, bringing their tangled hands down to her lap. He extricated the weapon and himself from her and returned to his chair. After he reclaimed his tea, she lifted her head. He lifted the cup in a silent salute.
She’d made her decision.
The funeral was held just past sunset, an odd time for it, unless one knew the deceased was honoring the vampire world to which she’d been bound. It didn’t matter. Alistair didn’t come. Though no one had told her he intended to be there, she’d expected it to the point Nina hadn’t thought to ask.
His absence offended her, deeply. Her sister had given so much to be everything he wanted her to be. She was equally angry at herself, for wanting him there for her own reasons, to see if the male who’d cared for and supported her in a war zone could ease any of her terrible loneliness in this most desolate moment.
When it started to rain, she didn’t move to stand closer to her family, though her father and brother opened umbrellas to shelter their mother. Nina shifted away, stood apart.
Only later did she realize she wasn’t drenched because Steele had moved close enough to shelter her with a large umbrella he’d brought with him. He didn’t touch her, but his big body was close enough to give her heat.
When the service was over, she moved forward and put her hand on Sher’s coffin, her forehead to it. She almost broke then, but when her mother’s hand touched her back, she snapped up straight, moved away. Walked toward the car Steele had brought, which had her one suitcase in the back.
She asked him in a wooden voice to re
trieve it, let her open it. When he did, she fished out the picture of Sher. As she walked back to the grave, she wouldn’t look at it. Couldn’t. She laid the picture on the top of Sher’s coffin, below the spray of white and yellow flowers. She hated thinking of her sister’s body in that box. She would forever remember her in those moments before the crash, the wind streaming through her beautiful hair. All her hope and joy for the life she’d embraced to the fullest.
Nina lifted her gaze to the sky, as if she might see her there, dancing and twisting through the clouds.
She comes in thru the skylight
for the door is not allowed
Her eyes are bright as little stars
Her dress is like a cloud.
“I don’t know what to do, Sher,” she whispered. “Help me."
But she was too practical to believe in that hollow thought. Sher couldn’t help her now. No one could. She had always relied on herself to find the solutions to her problems. The only one she could trust now was the person she couldn’t bear to look at in a mirror.
Pivoting, she returned to the car, let Steele shut her in away from the rain and her family, and drive her away.
Chapter Seven
It took a few hours to reach the school, and Nina stared out the window blindly through most of it, not caring to know where it was. Based on the things Sher had said, Nina had initially been surprised that a school for elite vampire servants was based in Australia. But apparently that was the point. To train them in a more isolated setting, far from the distractions that the European vampires could pose.
She thought it was more than that, but Sher hadn’t known or asked. Until now, it wouldn’t have mattered to Nina, either. She supposed she should be grateful she wasn’t being taken out of the country, but it might as well be the Antarctic, really. She couldn’t even bring herself to ask how long she would be at the school, or when she’d be given to Alistair. All she could see was the rain falling on Sher’s coffin, the drops pattering and rolling away, becoming part of the earth again.