Faerie Queen: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Vampire's Bane Book 3 : Part I)

by Marian Maxwell

  The Lord of House Hyde sat at the head of the table, the giant oil painting of himself hanging high on the wall behind him. The rubies on his goblet glittered as he raised it to take a sip. The servants, which Mona had never really noticed before, stood three steps away from his seat, one on either side of his chair. Ready and waiting to follow his every command. They were pale—all of the servants were pale, Mona realized as she took them all in at a glance. Also weak, and thin, as if they haven’t had enough to eat. Surely a noble house can provide its servants with enough food? None of it was right. What had happened at the Academy?

  Zyzz! Mona bolted up from her cushioned chair, her one hand pressing down on the top of the table. I forgot all about him!

  “Mona!” Lord Hyde’s voice cracked like a whip. “I think it is time for you to retire to your room.” A pair of servants approached Mona. One of them gently took her arm and led her away from the table, like a caretaker looking after a patient in a retirement home. The other walked closely behind, ready to lend an extra set of hands. Mona let them guide her, mind spinning as she tried to fight through the haze.

  Lord Hyde’s seat at the table was near the exit. He raised a hand as Mona came close. The servants stopped. He rose and walked up to Mona. Put his hand on her throat and looked down on her with his fae eyes, towering over her by a foot. His thumb found her jugular and lightly applied pressure.

  “Ah, I see,” he mused. The smell of oil and brimstone exploded out from around him. The servants did not so much as bat an eye, and neither did Mona; she was too dazed and confused to do anything other than observe what was going on.

  All at once, the confusion melted away, replaced be a steady calm. The servant released Mona’s arm.

  “The ritual will be tomorrow night. Are you ready?”

  “Of course,” Mona replied. She balled her one hand into a fist. Why did I keep him waiting? This should have happened days ago!

  Lord Hyde smiled. “Good,” he said. “It will all be done in time for the ceremony.”

  10

  Mona

  Mona wore a black dress on the night she became a vampire. It met Yonafrew’s only instruction: that both sides of her neck should be exposed.

  She looked at herself in the full-body mirror in her five piece bathroom, freshly bathed and ready for the ritual. A servant stood behind her, holding up the strands of her short hair and fixing them so they did not hang down. Probably unnecessary, but Mona wanted to be sure that Yonafrew was happy with her appearance. She wanted her entire neck to be exposed.

  Thankfully, enough time had passed since her trials at the Academy for Mona to lose much of her muscle mass. Her neck was no longer thick from field exercises, but rather slender. Pale from lack of sun, and soft. She ran a finger down from the top of her neck to her collarbone.

  “Stop,” she ordered the servant. “I need to bathe again.”

  “But my lady,” the servant implored. “There isn’t any time. You’ve already bathed three times tonight.”

  “I’m dirty,” Mona muttered. The thought of Yonafrew’s lips touching her skin…But worse would be delaying the ritual, causing a kink in Yonafrew’s plans. And the truth was that Mona would never be clean or ready for what was about to happen. She was terribly nervous, butterflies using her stomach as a disco.

  “I feel like I’m about to get married,” said Mona, with a little laugh. She knew that she shouldn’t be speaking with the servants on such familiar terms, but she needed to release some of her nervous energy. Besides, the servants only existed to do whatever she wanted. There was no harm in it, the same way you can pet a disciplined dog.

  “It’s true, my lady,” said the servant. He was an elderly fae, with more color in his cheeks than most of the other servants. No doubt he had been employed by the Hyde family for many centuries. “The ritual is a grand thing. Mind you,” he said, pinning up a section of Mona’s hair, “I’ve never had the pleasure of witnessing it myself.”

  “What do you know about it?” Mona asked, suddenly intrigued. It had not occurred to her that a servant would know anything about the ritual where a gifted is turned into a vampire.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” said the man with a wistful sigh. “The ritual turns ungifted into ghouls and gifted into vampires. That much is common knowledge. I think it will be Lord Hyde who takes your blood, bonding you to him. You are correct that it is like a marriage. A contract is made, although in this case it cannot be broken.”

  Mona had played over the moment of the vampire biting her a thousand times in her head. Not once had she imagined the vampire as someone other than Lord Hyde. But of course it is a possibility. Who am I to have the Lord himself taste my flesh and blood? It could be Lord Julian, Augustus…anyone!

  Mona had never confirmed that it would be Yonafrew. She had wanted it so badly that it blinded her to any other possibility. Not that it truly mattered, not beyond her feelings. She would still be Lord Hyde’s apprentice, and have the power of the behelit seed.

  A knock came at the door. The servant left Mona and returned a moment later with Augustus. Their eyes met through the bathroom mirror. The heir to the Hyde family had dispensed with his glamour entirely. Mona was still getting used to his new appearance. He was much more handsome, which made Mona self-conscious, and their relationship had changed as a result. Before, when Mona thought he was about her age, it had been relaxed. Comfortable, with their shared experience as students at the Academy.

  The heir to Hyde family was no longer the Curly that Mona had known. Now he was Augustus, of high cheekbones and slick, long black hair that gave him the eery appearance of his father, which, Mona was sure, was something that Augustus would not want her to mention. As they looked at each other, the grandfather clock set against the wall by Mona’s large bed struck midnight, chiming twelve times throughout the room, sounding very loud on the tiled bathroom, where herself Augustus and the servant stood.

  “I’ll take my leave,” said the elderly servant, with a flourishing bow. Mona’s hair was finished now, and he gathered his things, turned on his heel, and with a few long strides he was out the door, closing it behind him and walking back out of the hallway, the ends of his forked tailcoat the last thing that Mona saw before he exited.

  “It’s time,” said Augustus.

  Mona turned from the full-body mirror to look at Augustus directly. He’s hardly the same person, she thought. A man, whereas before he was only a boy. Or so he seemed. Of course he had to use a glamour to enter the Academy. It was not a surprise, given how prejudiced humans and the masses could be against Augustus’s kind. They were not exactly welcomed on Earth. He would have been discriminated against, yet, she could not help but think that it was odd for him to have chosen an appearance that so starkly contrasted his true form.

  It must have been a strange experience for people to treat him as a junior, a child, and not a particularly handsome one at that, when in truth he had a chiseled jaw and dashing features, coupled with the air of a blue-blooded noble, who is very aware of his status and rank within the city proper. Not of which, of course, carried over to Earth. Yet it was not an aura or an attitude that could be shed as easily as stepping through a rift.

  One day, I will be the same.

  She went to move her arm, and a moment after the thought crossed her mind, she became very aware of her missing arm, the lack of weight at her side, the uneven balance that she felt at every waking moment. The hideous deformity that sullied her already scarred appearance. Yet she was strong enough that when these feelings invaded her soul and made her want to cower and shrink away from Augustus’s gaze, she remembered how to assert herself, and who she was, and the power she had, and the power that had yet to come, that would truly be hers with the help of Yonafrew and the others.

  Mona raised her chin, and kept her back straight, as she quenched these feelings building up from the pit of her stomach. Yes, my arm is missing. Yes, I am an ugly human somehow caught up in the affairs of g
rand fae, whose lives and history and bloodlines make mine look like a piece of dust lost in an ocean of sand. But I am here, in their company, and with a power that they say can aid them. The only way forward is the path of the will to power. The path that I must forge for myself, so that I can claim the authority and the status that I need to cement myself not only as nobility, but as someone capable of exacting revenge on the necromancer who killed my family.

  Mona sighed deeply. The ritual would be yet another large, life-changing event in a series of many that had rung through her life one after the other in quick succession over the past week. How odd that things can change so quickly, in such a short amount of time. I no longer feel like the same person at all. And that’s a good thing, Mona decided.

  Perhaps seeing that she was wrestling with inner turmoil, questions and introspection that was pulling her away from the here and now, Augustus took Mona’s hand—her only hand—and guided her out of the room, looking over his shoulder only once to smile at her, and give her a quick gaze with one of his predatory fae eyes. He was much taller than Mona now, whereas before they had been closer to the same height. She was pulled along in his wake, not resisting, moving her feet quickly to keep up with his long-legged stride. Out the door and down the hallway, through the Hyde mansion, so much of which she still had not yet seen. Grand and massive as it was, Mona had somehow been content to stay in her room, when she was otherwise busy with Lord Hyde’s lessons, training the behelit seed. It was beautiful and grand, and she felt as if she was seeing many of the rooms and hallways for the first time as she was taken by Augustus into part of the mansion that she had never walked through.

  Mansion, perhaps, is too small a word to describe the building. It was more like a series of mansions, all connected, side-by-side, into a huge estate which stood atop the Noble District, at the highest part of the Noble District, which was on the highest point of Lodum, the Hill, apart from the Royal Palace itself, where Lord Korka was to have his wedding. And where I am to be awarded a medal for my bravery during the assault on the city.

  They kept going up. Stone steps weaving high up a tower, leading to the roof of this section of the mansion on the Hyde estate. They finally got to a door which had an arched top and was overlaid with bits of gold and ivory.

  “Past this door lies the ritual room,” Augustus said. “This is where my father turned me into a vampire, and where we will make you into one too.” He let go of Mona’s hand then, and she felt a suddenly nervousness shiver through her body, suddenly aware that her human life was about to become a thing of the past. Her palm was sweaty. She touched her hair to make sure it was still in place, the way the servant had left it tied up atop her head, then quickly moved her hand back down, not wanting to carry the stink of her sweat onto her bare neck, and hoping that she wasn’t sweating in other places as well—knowing just how much stink a human could produce compared to a fae, who always seemed to smell sweet and perfumey, as if that was their natural body odor. An inversion of the stink that came from humans when they went too long without bathing.

  “It will be your father, then?” Mona asked, turning her head and looking at Augustus, eyebrows raised and furrowed in worry, concern and just a touch of innocence, of someone going into a situation far beyond their control.

  “I wanted it to be him,” she murmured, “but I suppose it would be too much to ask.”

  Augustus cupped her cheek with one of his large hands. She felt the muscled strength in them, and her skin tingled at the touch. He raised her chin to make her look into his eyes.

  “It will not be my father,” said Augustus. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it will be me. My father has already made too many gifted into vampires. He does not have room for more. The duty falls to me, and you will be my first. My only. I’ve never before turned a gifted into a vampire, or bitten anyone with an intent other than to feed.”

  Mona pulled in a sharp intake of breath as she stared into his eyes. His lips were full and red. She felt very small then, even as she knew the power of the behelit was at her disposal, waiting for her to tap into the magical well and be unleashed. It was capable of carrying great magic and spitting them across Lodum, turning her into the avatar of a goddess, if only for a brief amount of time before it burned her out. But emotionally…Emotionally, Mona was still very much a young woman, who wanted to love and to be loved. Augustus had made no such promise to her, but in her mind she saw it as a possibility. A way forward through the chaos that her life had become. A chance for her to stay in Lodum, and stay with the Hyde family as something as more than a weapon, or an apprentice. A chance at a real life. Something true.

  But first comes the ritual.

  And although it was not something that Mona knew as something that she could mess up, or that it in any way depended on what she did, that was what was in front of her. She had to move forward, chin up, and become the monster that she had to be in order to control the seed and reach her full potential. She didn’t need Augustus to convince her, or prod her forward.

  Mona turned away from him, grasped the round bronze handle of the door, turned it and stepped out of the hallway and into a room on the highest floor of the Hyde mansion.

  11

  Mona

  It looked like the room was underground. There were none of the lush carpets or tapestries, paintings on the wall that Mona had become accustomed to. Neither were there servants, tables, chairs, or any other adornments. The room was plain in the material sense. Grey stone floor, grey stone ceiling, and walls all the same. Like a subterranean chamber, deep underground. Forgotten, or rarely used.

  The sense of it was aided by the group of hooded figures standing at the points of a red pentagram that had been made in the middle of the floor. Within the pentagram were circles and runes and geometric shapes of great magic that Mona’s mind swirled to look at. It was too much for her to decipher—too deep, too far beyond her meagre education and lore of the arcane practices. She knew battle magic, fighting and slinging fireballs, and almost nothing of the subtle arts of enchantments and wards and initiating ceremonies, such as the one in which she was about to partake.

  A man, who Mona thought to be Lord Hyde but she could not be sure, because the hood was pulled low over the man’s face, approached Augustus and draped a cloak around his shoulders that was blood red and had a collar so high that it reached to the bottom of Augustus’s pointed ears. The man clasped it around the front of Augustus’s chest with a gold chain, then handed him a long slender knife. Curved, and with runes etched onto the surface of the blade.

  Mona quickly looked away and, at a gesture from the same cloaked figure, she followed him to the pentagram. He took his place at the point where he had been standing before Mona’s arrival, and she, on assumption, took her place in the middle, inside the inner circle.

  As soon as her feet touched down within the red circle that was painted in blood, and was dark and sticky on the bottoms of her shoes, all of the lines of a pentagram lit up bright, giving off a reddish hue that illuminated the room’s interior.

  Augustus walked to a shadowed corner where there was a stone dais that Mona had not seen before. She watched as he dipped a goblet that was waiting there into stone sink filled with blood. He filled it, sticking his hands and the goblet into the thick liquid until they were fully submerged, pulling them out, hands and goblet, inside and out, dripping red as he walked back to the pentagram, not caring that the blood got on his robes and the floor, leaving a dripping trail before him.

  Mona clenched one hand, and told herself not to shake. I can’t be afraid now. She sensed the beastly vampires all around her, imagining that their faces had turned monstrous inside the shadow of their hoods. She knew now what they were better than ever before—that vampires were what she had always been told in fairy tales: creatures that were enemies to humanity. Predators a link higher on the food chain, who had to look out for themselves first and others second.

  This was a new speci
es she was joining, a new band of common folk. A new bloodline. Her humanity would be something of the past, a distant shadow, in the same way that humans had evolved from monkeys, yet that primate part of the brain, scared of snakes and quick to climb trees, had somehow stayed around through the ages. So too would her humanity be after the ritual, telling her of what she once was, and the lessons of her ancestors, who she had parted from.

  Augustus approached Mona. His expression was blank, grave, the corners of his ruby red lips drawn down in a slight frown. A serious expression as he held out the goblet for Mona to drink. He did not expect her to take it, but rather to drink as he held it, and so as he tipped it up, Mona parted her lips and accepted the thick, metallic tasting blood into her mouth, and gulped it down her throat.

  She thought she would only take a sip, but Augustus kept tipping the goblet higher, until she was gulping as quickly as she could, taking in mouthfuls of the thick blood—some of it dripping out of her mouth and down her chin, drops of it touching onto her black dress. Ordinarily, Mona would be concerned at the sloppiness of it, the ruining of her attire in front of Lord Hyde himself and whoever else hid behind those black robes and hooded faces. But in this situation the pretence of impeccable nobility had been cast aside, letting go of their personas for one night and one night only, for the ritual in which they revealed a truer, baser self, of the kind that Mona was about to become. And so the spilt blood was not a thing to be reviled, rather good.

  It is life, it is wellness, Mona told herself, as she drank the last contents of the goblet and Augustus drew it away, handing it to one of the other members of the ritual who returned it to the stone dais in the corner, then took his place once again at a point on the pentagon. Upon returning, all the members began to chant.