“It matters none,” Jason said. “He committed a crime by keeping you from us; a crime punishable by death; a death now possible by your hand.”
“Death? But…”
“Yes. You were told once, weren’t you, that only an original Lilithian can kill a vampire?”
“No.” I shook my head, eyes wide. “I’ll never do it.”
“Yes, you will.”
“No.” I shook my head again, reaching for my lost locket.
“When we’re finished with you”—he looked down at me, his lip lifting over his teeth—“you won’t even know who he is. You will kill him, and then I will dispose of you.”
“Jason, please don’t.”
“I am sorry that it had to be you, Ara. I did love you—once.” He bent down and picked up the box. “But my hate for him and my desire to see him dead far outweighs any affections I have for a filthy Lilithian.”
“Are they really going to kill me?” I asked as he turned away. “Jason. Please.”
“It is the fate for all your kind to die.”
“No,” I called, sending my voice out into the darkness with the light of hope. “Please don’t let them do it.”
He stopped walking, and as my eyes adjusted to the shadows I could see his shoulders roll forward, his spine arching as he placed the box on the step. “I didn’t say they would kill you right away.”
My fingers tightened on the bars. “What else will they do?”
He came up out of nowhere, pinning my hands to the bars with his own. “We’ve not had one of your kind for a great many centuries. We must examine you, test your strength, endurance, powers, and at the end of it all,” he said, his face almost touching mine, “we’ll extract your venom and store it for our own purposes.”
“Venom?”
“Yes, Ara.” He rubbed his brow. “You have venom. You didn’t know?”
“No.” I touched my tooth with a salty, bloodied thumb.
“Hm. Well, it’s a shame you didn’t accidentally bite my brother and kill him.”
“I—” I held my tongue, blanketing my thoughts.
The vampire studied me intensely. Iron bars stood between us, but I could feel him inside my head, prodding around. I imagined the rug covering my memories and protecting them from him. I needed to figure this out. The fact that David didn’t die when I bit him, did that mean I wasn’t Lilithian, or that my venom didn’t really kill?
On the other hand, if I wasn’t Lilithian, then what was I?
“You’re tired. You need to sleep.” Jason stood back. “I will return within the hour, then submit you to the World Council.”
“Jason. Please?” I reached for him through the bars.
“Don’t beg, Ara,” he said, backing away, “it’s incredibly unattractive.”
“Jason?” I called again, but a long-stretched shadow appeared from the top of the staircase, fading under the spread of darkness that followed, the loud bang of a closing door echoing through the empty space. “Jase?”
The emptiness surrounded me then, giving rise to all the thoughts and fears I wanted to keep at bay: David, his capture. Mike. Emily. And the scary things that may be lurking beside me in these dark, ancient cells. How did it come to this—how was I stupid enough to trust Jason?
I moved over and sat on the bed, my face in my hands, trying to cry or feel anything other than a numb lump in my chest. But I was consumed by the possibility of what he said I might be: a Pure Blood. Immortal. Which means I was born not made.
But how could no one else know? Not my dad, David, no one. All this time. All this time I was immortal—after everything David and I lost because of it; after all the tears, the worry, I was like him all along.
And I bit him. I could’ve killed him.
I covered my mouth with a shaky hand, watching the memory of that night in my mind as if it were happening in front of me: my teeth popped his flesh, opened it. My venom would have run through his veins. Why wasn’t he dead?
And a niggling thought reared its ugly head then that maybe, since the Lilithians had him now, he might have been better off if I had killed him. What would they do to him? What tortures would they inflict on him after they locked his limbs down with their venom?
I folded over and covered my own hellish cries, shutting my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to imagine all the things he was feeling while I sat here with no more pain than a terrible urge to go to the bathroom, and a stubborn determination not to use that bucket in the corner.
If only we’d known. If only we’d run. If only David hadn’t hopped out of the car.
But we couldn’t go back.
I sat taller, trying to stop the sobs.
Our wedding was ruined, my dress was bloodied and torn—something I’d counted on happening after the wedding, but not from this—our life was ruined, if not completely gone. I’d never see my dad again, or Vicki, or Mike. And worse, Mike and Emily would think we were in Paris. They wouldn’t know what happened.
David would die. I would die, and they’d think we just gave up on them—fled by ourselves—and left them behind. I never even got to say goodbye to Mike.
I rolled down onto the stiff bed and tried not to cry.
* * *
Time passed. I wasn’t sure how long. Everything was so quiet—an empty kind of silence—not like a quiet night at home, with distant traffic or the wind or the song of a cricket, but dead quiet, like being buried in the ground. I fell asleep, I don’t know how many times, and now my throat was so dry and my stomach so tight with hunger it felt like days had passed. All I had to keep me sane here were the yellow memories of Jason and me on the grass in my dreams, mixed with the gray reality of the future I’d never get to have with my David.
From time to time, a quiet quiver of rage heated my blood, making my teeth pulse and my mouth water, and I knew the feeling so well; knew it wasn’t just frustration laced with fear. It was blood hunger.
I lifted my wrist to my lips and parted my teeth, my tongue trembling on the edge of my skin. Bite. If I was really a vampire, I should be able to bite my own arm, should be able to drink my own blood. But the need subsided again, falling away like water on a window, leaving me exhausted enough to lay on the filthy bed. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my gown over my toes, holding onto them to make myself smaller.
Beyond the safety of the cage, strange sounds wandered the halls, like creatures howling and moaning for the sadness of it all. The cries were far away though, and I only heard them intermittently, but my skin crawled each time as though I was caged by weak glass, and whatever creature might be lingering down the depths of these medieval cells would come to find me—alone, waiting to die.
Jason had said he’d be back within the hour, but it had definitely been longer than that.
I moved around the room, from sitting to standing to attempting sleep, until, at last, the exhaustion consumed me enough to experience a sense of boredom. I laid on the bed, humming a tune, the vibrations traveling through my chin, down my arm and into my fingertip as I traced a sun in the air. Its warm beams lit the space, spilling greenish gold light down the walls, flooding everything around me. When I looked to the bed beside my shoulder, thin blades of grass rose up around an imaginary Jason’s brow, tickling his lashes and making him blink a few extra times.
“Jase?”
He held my hand gently, stroking my face with the other. “Shh.”
“What are you doing here, Jase?”
“Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep. I can’t make sense of it all.” I sat up on my elbows. “How can you have hated me all along—been plotting to turn me in?”
And before he answered, the day vanished, leaving the murky dark of the cell more severe than before. But unlike our night-time meetings in the past, I didn’t wake on my back, feeling rested. I woke sitting up on my elbows, as I had been in the dream. And the memory of his smile, of the way he loved me then remained—too
clear to have been anything but a mind-link.
No. I slumped back. That was just a dream. A normal dream that normal people have. But surely at some point in all his pretending, he must have felt something for me. He did say he loved me once. Maybe I could reach out—appeal to that side of him—convince him to help me.
A loud, echoing creak shot through the silence then, dragging a trail of voices down the tunnel of stairs with it. I sat up and hugged my knees. Neither of those voices sounded like Jason. These were more like the raucous bellowing you might hear at an old tavern in Sussex during the sixteen-hundreds. But, jolly as they may have been, something in my bones said they were coming for me.
“Time ter go then, luv.” A face appeared between the bars.
“Where’s Jason?”
“Lieutenant Knight has business to attend.” Keys clinked heavily against the iron bars, and the metal groaned as the door parted for what sounded like the first time in hundreds of years. “Mr. Jobs, if you will,” he said to a dirty-looking man who stepped up to me, his coarse hair dangling from his brow in thin tendrils, and yanked me from the bed by my arm.
“Ow,” I cried out, grabbing at his hand. “You nearly took my arm off.”
“Shut up,” the other said. “Yur whinin’ e’ll do yur no good ere, lassie.”
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded.
“Just get a move on.”
“Please?” I struggled to walk as he dragged me along, grasping for the bars on the way out of the cell. “Just let me go. I’m not what he says.”
“We’ll be lettin’ the Council decide that.”
I glanced backward to the safety of my cage.
“Move it!” The man threw me forward, making me land hard on my hands and knees. “I said move it.”
“I am,” I screeched, my feet tangling in my dress as I climbed the first stone step.
“Faster.” He gave me a hard shove between the shoulder blades.
“I can’t. These steps are really steep.”
“Just drag ’er weak ass,” the other man said from a few steps ahead, his swinging lantern casting shadows down the walls behind us.
“No. I can do it.” I stood up, dusting my hands on my dress. But my body was weak, bone-deep, from lack of food and blood. By the time I reached the top, I couldn’t breathe. I folded over the last step, my legs still two behind, and coughed my lungs back to life as pressed my cheek flat to the cold, dirty ground.
“Get ’er up,” the man ordered, and my chest left the ground, my hands falling like ribbons behind it. He shoved me through the doors at the end of a short tunnel and a sharp blast of daylight hit my eyes, blinding me. I covered my face.
“Not what ’e says y’are, ehy?” the man asked. “Then ’ow come a week wi’ no food gets yer all shy’n away from ’er sun?”
A week? Had it been a week? I straightened my spine. “I’m human—we all do after a week with no light.”
The man groaned, guiding me out of the light to a long, drafty corridor—its once rich red carpet worn down in the middle, making it cold, as though the stone floor was coming through under it.
“No time fer admirin’ tha scenery,” the man said, driving me forward by my arm. “Keep movin’.”
I walked along, turning at the shoulders as we passed each door in this dark corridor. Dad took me to a castle like this once on a History tour, but it had been clean, maybe only slightly musty, with old books and dusty carpet. Here, the reaching walls of this fortress were oddly terrifying, seeming to tower over and watch as we passed, like the ceiling was made of eyes and the walls crafted with long tendrils of evil, waiting to grab me.
“What’s that horrid smell?” I asked, peeling my wrist away from my nose in an attempt to distinguish it. It reeked like the men’s bathroom at a truck stop.
“Death,” said the Englishman.
“What is this place?”
“Some call it Le Chateau de la Mort. For others, it’s just home.”
“But its true name dates back to ninete—”
“Shut up, you id’ot. She don’t need no ’istory less’n.”
It all became clear to me then: home. No wonder David was always such a gloomy character. This castle would be enough to make a Carebear gloomy. I mean, the openness and decor wasn’t much different to the cell. Even the same gel-like slime on the cell walls seemed to have spread like a snotty cold to the stones out here, and the once beautiful old paintings between each doorway were all torn, discolored with long streaks of what looked like blood. The faces of the men, immortalized in paint, peered out at us as these men dragged me toward my fate unknown.
“Here.” The man stopped in front of a large wooden door, its iron hinges seeming to hug it, or maybe imprison it. He rapped twice with the heavy ring at the center, and the door opened almost immediately.
“Jason?” I cried, so automatically happy to see his beautiful face.
He smiled to himself. “I’ll take her from here, boys.”
“As you wish.” The men both bowed and turned on their heels, leaving Jason and me alone.
I only had to see his face to know how terrible I looked: my dress brown and red on one side, the sleeve torn and tatty, my face dirty and my cheeks sunken from hunger and exhaustion. Appealing to his love for me would be nearly impossible when all I felt was shame.
Jason closed his eyes for a second, his brow pulling in the center.
“Jason,” I whispered, reaching up to touch his fingertips where they held my arm. “Please?”
His grip tightened and his mad eyes opened, brimmed to the edges with a dark fury I’d never seen before. “Let’s go,” he demanded.
“Wait. Please. Don’t take me in there.”
He turned away as if I’d not spoken, and hauled me through the doorway, where the presence of life became immediately apparent. I could smell them, feel their energy, their eyes on me: Vampires.
Keeping hidden under the curtain of my hair, I peered out through the strands of brown and studied the room. It was open, almost rounded, with a roaring fire to the right of seven men, all sitting down one side of a long table.
“Lords of the World Council.” Jason stopped in the middle of the room and bowed. “I bring you the accused.”
“Let us see her then.” The voice was firm, maybe even loud, as if spoken through a microphone.
Jason thrust me forward with a soft shove, sending me to the floor beside his feet, the heels of my palms hitting the stone with a jolt before my knees buckled down heavily after them.
“Of what crime do we accuse?” a man with an austere voice asked.
Please don’t say it, Jason? Please don’t.
Jason stepped in front of me, blocking my view. “She is a Lilithian Pure Blood.”
“And,” another asked; I didn’t want to look up, I knew what was up there, but the voice of that man had the most unusual theatrical ring to it: soft, kind, yet somehow laced with a cynical undertone that scared me. “How do we know this? She looks merely human to me.”
“My Lords,” Jason started. “Humans do not bleed to death and endure. They do not sever their spines then walk again”—he laughed humorlessly, presenting me with his palm—“and they do not survive vampire bites without the genetic capability.”
A humble muttering spread through the men. I braved a glance through Jason’s legs. He pressed his feet together and stepped closer to me.
“And what does the child have to say for herself?” the theatrical voice asked.
Jason moved aside, and I turned my face to hide behind my hair.
“Well, speak up, girl.”
My mouth opened in the shape of a vowel, but nothing came out, until a man appeared beside me, the flow of his dark cloak brushing the ground around him like a parachute, turning that small sound to a gasp.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked, his curled finger lifting my chin.
I shook my head.
“I am Drake.” He reached down and sh
ifted my hair to one side, gentle enough to show he knew kindness. “Do you know of me?”
“Are you the king?” I asked, trying to mask the quiver in my voice.
“You’ve heard of me then?”
I nodded, stealing a quick glance at his face; he was young, maybe only thirty, with jet-black stubble lining his jaw. His features were inhumanly proportionate, making him oddly attractive in that vampire way, while his build was gracefully slight, despite him being taller than Jason.
“You know, Amara, if you prove to be a Lilithian Pure Blood, that makes us relatives, being that my sister was the first of your kind.”
I nodded again, as if I’d made that connection already.
“Then you know you must endure the same fate as she.” He rose and stood above me.
“Why?” I cried, nearly choking on my own dry tongue. “Why do you have to kill me?”
“Do you not know?” Drake squatted beside me again, cupping my face with his bony fingers. “You are a weapon, Amara—built only to destroy. We must rid the world of your kind of evil.”
“I’m not evil.” I tore my face from his touch. “I’m just a girl. You’re evil.”
Drake’s smile turned to stone and he drew back slowly, his hand rising to strike me as Jason’s shot to the nape of my neck, hoisting me off the ground.
“You will show some respect, creature,” Jason yelled into my face.
“It’s quite all right, young Warrior.” Drake stood. I kept my eyes on his cloak. “She will learn her place soon enough.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Jason bowed, forcing my head down too.
When the king took his stance behind the councilmen again, Jason’s grip eased from my hair with a soft shove, sending me to the stony ground in heap, my hipbone wearing the sharp impact. I pushed up on my hand and looked right into his soulless eyes.
You nearly ripped my hair out, Jason. I touched my fingers to the back of my neck, expecting to find a bald patch. Why are you doing this?
“Because you are an act of sin, and you must die,” he said, looking away from me.
He didn’t look anything like my Jason—not even like the Jason who kidnapped me at the masquerade. This man was a soldier, stood tall, feet apart, hands behind his back, watching the council before him as they quietly discussed my fate among themselves. I was not the girl he loved anymore. I was a ‘creature’—left on the floor at his feet like a scorned pet.
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 116