“Leave them,” Donovan ordered me harshly. “My lips are here.”
“I can’t look away from them.”
“Oh? Is that a challenge?” His stroking intensified within me, and I cried out, instinctively seizing his wings in both hands for support.
Suddenly, the whole world seemed to be raining glitter. A brilliant radiance built up and then rippled throughout the entire room, leaving me momentarily seeing white.
When the room swam back into focus, Donovan was no longer beside me. I peered over the edge of the bed to see a tall, dashingly handsome man kneeling against the floor, one hand pressed against his heart. Two scars of red, puckered flesh twisted from his neck down to his hips where his wings should have been.
“Prince?”
“Get out.” Donovan remained hunched, one hand still clutching his heart. “Stupid girl; I told you not to touch them. Get out!”
“Your wings—”
“I still have my wings.” His vacant teal eyes locked on mine, and I felt that mesmerizing thrill creep up my shoulders. “That is what you will believe. Tell no one of what you saw here.”
I fled from the room. A last peek back caught Donovan staring desperately at himself in the mirror, as if one day he would see a reflection looking back.
It didn’t make sense. Donovan had no wings? But surely, I’d seen him flying during the opening ceremony in the palace. Could he have tricked our sight? I didn’t know what it would cost to perform such a magical feat, but for a vampyre of his stature to reveal weakness would surely be suicide.
I almost didn’t see Amrit until I ran into her. She thrust me up against the wall by the throat and sniffed at me, jealously.
“You didn’t fuck him,” she said in amazement, releasing me.
I stared determinedly at the floor, cheeks reddening.
“Why didn’t you fuck him? Just do it and get it over with. Then he’ll lose all interest in you. Trust me, I’ve seen it a million times.” Amrit tucked my disheveled hair behind my ears. “You’re not his type.”
Did she know that Donovan had lost his wings? It was a toss-up, but Donovan’s compulsion held me tongue-tied.
“I don’t think he wants to be bothered right now,” I muttered and hurried down the hallway.
“The talk’s already made its way around the court,” she called after me. “Everyone knows you chose Prince Donovan over Prince Khyber.”
Just as I go running back to the other one. My slippers slapped the wooden floor soundlessly. That should give them something to talk about. And Maya a reason to deafen, blind, and mute me.
I reached the top of the staircase and jerked to an abrupt stop. A sea of heads filled the floor below me, bathed in moonlight. All stood in unnatural silence.
Queen Maya rose from her throne and stood before the moon, spreading her cobweb-like wings wide. Moonlight peeked in through the holes. The Court of Eve watched her in absolute silence.
Her fangs clicked, like the sound of a trigger being pulled. Then she sank her teeth into the neck of a young girl draped across her lap. The girl struggled and flopped around for a bit, but Maya held her down until she stopped moving. The face of the moon slowly clotted with blood-red luminescence.
“You have been chosen,” Maya told the girl, stroking her long silvery-gold curls. “You will be my new body.” Then she snapped the girl’s head clean off.
I recoiled from the balcony. The girl’s clouded eyes were Lillian’s.
Crispin, the vampyre with wings of evergreen, stood by with arms crossed. Natalya cried out softly, and a ghost clocked her over the head for it.
“These bodies just don’t last like they used to,” Maya said conversationally, inspecting the headless torso as if she were examining a new garment. She held out one hand for Khyber to hold. “We shall retire to the Mirror Room. As for the rest of you, you are to dance until the moon sets.”
“Our Queen.” The ghosts knelt.
I watched Khyber’s black wings retreat down the passage toward the mysterious Mirror Room. No one who went in there ever came out right again. I shivered, remembering the fate of poor Olivia who’d been reassigned to stay in the Mirror Room, and had emerged a robotic, obedient version of herself. Who knew what Maya and Khyber were up to in there. It looked like I would have to capture Donovan’s soul by myself.
Except now I knew where it was.
Chapter 13: The Last Straw
I sat bolt upright in bed and seized Una’s shoulders.
“Una! We have to stop her! We have to find her NOW!”
Una’s palm slammed into my nose. I hit the pillow with a thud.
“Why do you wake me?” Una looked around our shadowed room. “No one here.”
“It’s about Raina, of course!” I leaped out of bed and began pacing the room. “She almost gave her virginity to…to…a freakin’ six-hundred-year-old man! She’s been brainwashed! She’s been compelled! I swear to GOD that’s NOT HER!”
“You and your sister both like older men,” Una commented. “How old is Rafael?”
I cast her a withering glance. “Okay, so when I was born, Rafael was learning his ABCs. But when Raina was born, this Donovan had lived through two world wars!”
“Prince Donovan? Not Prince Khyber?”
“Yes, the Frenchman. If he hadn’t been self-conscious about his body image, who knows what might have happened.” I clutched the covers to my chin in fear.
“This is painful, but it tells us nothing new.” She rolled over on her pillow again.
“Nothing new? How is watching my sister narrowly escape an undesired lover and then run headfirst into a sacrificial ritual for the Vampyre Queen’s new body not—” I stopped, mind working furiously. “UNA!” I grabbed her shoulders again.
She groaned. “What now?”
“The body! The body!” I was so frantic in my efforts to get dressed that I couldn’t tell shirts from underwear. “Maya has a new body now! She took one of the girls’!”
Una watched me, eyebrow raised quizzically. “And?”
“Hyeon Bin told us he only saw the ghosts bring food by way of Seorak San, where the living would still have a need for it. You told me the girls’ bodies must be close to their spirit selves or else the connection will snap. Maya just took the body of a kidnapped girl. Don’t you see? Maya’s body isn’t in the DMZ anymore. It’s in Seorak San…near the Vampyre Court…which I will soon know the location of…” I dragged my fingers through my hair. “That has to be enough proof. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Una looked up at me. A broad smile flickered beneath the pale moonlight.
“Yes!” I hugged her. “I have to tell the pack! This was the last obstacle preventing them from infiltrating Seorak San. We’ll know where she’ll be!”
“But will Khyber’s body be there as well?”
“He’d better make sure it is. If he really intends to die.”
“So? How will you know?”
My eyes narrowed. “I’ll know. When I enter the Vampyre Court.”
***
I’d been halfway through explaining my findings to Jaehoon, when the goshawk leader of the Were Alliance, Xiang, threw his book to the ground.
“Excuse me,” he demanded. “How does this little girl know these things?”
Then he and Jaehoon lapsed off into a heated exchange in Korean and Mandarin. I did catch the towering Xiang, whose intense bird-of-prey gaze had me searching for a bed to cower under, repeat the word, “Kkum? KKUM?” multiple times, with an increasingly high-pitched note of disbelief. Kkum. Dream. Ah, so the source of my intelligence was under fire.
“Excuse me, but people routinely changing into a whole circus of animals is believable, but dream-walking isn’t?” I’ll be honest, I only chanced it because Xiang’s English wasn’t so good.
“Citlalli, you must go.” Jaehoon didn’t break eye contact with Xiang. A staring contest between a wolf and a goshawk. I would have liked to see the outcome, but there were other
s I needed to subvert to my cause.
“What are they saying?” I asked Moon, who joined me outside the room.
She listened, ears quivering to attention. “Leader Xiang is demanding why a rogue wolf, who the juin-nim is supposed to be punishing, is allowed voice in the pack. He think the juin-nim is weak.”
“Why doesn’t he go back to preening his feathers and generally nothing like before?” I muttered. “Where’s Rafael? A-and the others?”
Moon shot me a cool, almost accusatory look. “Downstairs.”
“Is everything okay?” I swayed unconsciously on the top step.
“I think…everything will be okay. For you.”
Puzzled, I watched her retreating back. What was going on?
I bounded off the last step to see Young Soo curled up outside a closed door.
“No,” he told me, and then made a Do-Not-Enter motion.
“It’s okay.” I was surprised when Young Soo suddenly threw his arms around me. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
He stared up at me, eyes quivering, as if he could will me to understand.
“Just do it.” I jumped as Yu Li’s voice, high-pitched and icy, drifted through the closed door.
A chair rustling. Then, Rafael’s low reply: “I can’t.”
“Why is it hard? This is a direct request from your juin-nim. From your creator.”
“I can’t do it, Yu Li-a!” Then, softer: “I won’t.”
“Why?” I hated when she was like this, like a merciless wind intent on scraping the tiniest bit of paint off the wall. “You care for her. Why don’t you admit it?”
“Oh, that’s rich,” Rafael responded, composure slowly starting to unfurl. “Coming from the woman who can’t let go of her dead husband! You’re still obsessed with him! God, it’s like he was going to be the next president of South Korea!”
“He was a great man and Young Soo’s father,” Yu Li said. “Why shouldn’t I bring him up?”
Young Soo rustled anxiously in my arms at his name.
“You don’t bring him up for Young Soo,” Rafael growled. “You bring him up to critique me. Every time I teach Young Soo a few notes on the guitar, get him ready for school, hell, read him a damn book, you always interject how he used to do it. Every fuckin’ time, Yu Li! I can’t do anything right with your son!”
“You are not his father!” she snapped. I winced, covering Young Soo’s ears. This was going to end badly. Two Weres straining at the edge of their leashes at one another— This was going to blow up.
And then it did
“I don’t want to be!” Rafael’s chair slammed back against the wall with a sharp CLACK! Young Soo and I were left gazing stupidly at him when the door slammed open.
Rafael’s eyes darted quickly from me to Young Soo, and he collected the boy in his arms, bringing his lips to his forehead in a quick kiss. Then he brushed by up the stairs.
Young Soo started to cry. Yu Li was there in an instant to dab away his frustrated tears. She drew him close. In the dim light, I could see rivers of wrinkles sagging beneath her weary eyes. I hesitantly reached out a hand, and her guard snapped back up in an instant.
“Don’t look at us,” she spat, dragging Young Soo back like a lioness protecting her cub. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be celebrating? You got what you wanted, didn’t you? Why I saved your life from the vampyres, I don’t know.”
“Yu Li, I didn’t want this—”
The slamming door nearly chopped my nose off.
Chapter 14: The Birthday Dinner
The clock struck midnight. My new, eighteen-year-old self, sat staring at Raina’s side of the bed, as if she would magically appear. Raina, who’d mischievously put trick candles on my chocolate-frosted cakes three years in a row. And the birthday presents she’d prepare—duct-taped boxes wrapped within smaller duct-taped boxes, until I was practically slavering at the mouth to uncover my present: the stuffed animal Chihuahua from Taco Bell.
I remembered getting so mad at her the last year she’d pulled that stunt, because the prettiest boy in class had shown up to my party. I’d felt like such an idiot in front of him, struggling through bandages of duct tape for half an hour, that I’d yelled at her afterwards. She’d stopped smiling then. I hadn’t cared; it had been supposed to be my day.
She still hadn’t appeared, and I realized Una would probably be creeped out to wake up and find me staring at her. So I turned over and dreamed about tearing through hundreds of duct-taped boxes.
“I’m heading out to the restaurant,” Mami said the next day, pausing to plant a kiss on my forehead.
“The restaurant?” I tossed my magazine aside to look at her. “Will you be back by seven?”
“What’s at seven?”
“My family birthday dinner.” I felt my cheeks reddening. I’d thought she hadn’t mentioned it until now because she was going to surprise me. I’d been looking forward to it. What with the pack still bickering about Maya’s mysterious invitation, I needed something to take my mind off things.
I didn’t want to worry about what they’d do when they found out I’d already accepted.
“Is it that late in December already?” she exclaimed with false shock. “Jesus, I’m sorry, mija. Why don’t you make it during the week? You know how busy I am on the weekend. I have a head chef who’s retiring, and Lord knows how I’m going to find another Mexican in Korea who can make corn tamales.”
“I am having something next week, but just my friends are coming to that,” I lied. Of course I still kept in touch with some of my classmates from school…but after switching to Jaehoon’s homeschool…and fretting about Raina for months… Okay, yeah, I had no friends.
Mami clapped her hands. “Why don’t you have your birthday dinner at the restaurant?”
“Why the hell would I want to have my eighteenth birthday in a place where I live, breathe, and sweat enchiladas?” I snapped and huffed from the room. Yep, still hadn’t matured.
Daniella called from America to wish me a happy birthday. She was taking her winter vacation back at home to visit Papi. Or rather, to nurse him back to health. It wasn’t just the alcohol that was killing him. It was the guilt. The longer Raina stayed missing, the further Papi pulled back from the world of the living, as if to punish himself.
Neither of us really knew what to say to each other, so Daniella chatted on about how well Hosuk and Papi were getting along. Fuckin’ pair of saints. But they were good people. They deserved it.
“Now, I know you’ll probably be out drinking, but don’t do anything crazy,” she lectured, switching back into teacher mode. “If I come back and find another finger missing, I’ll take over your homeschooling.”
I managed a smile. “That’d be nice. I’d like that.”
“I love you, Citlalli.”
“I love you, too, sis.”
***
Una was tied up with her Korea reunification group and wouldn’t be able to meet us until later. So it was just Miguel and I freezing our asses off on the subway out to Children’s Grand Park. And to my surprise, as we arrived at the subway exit—Rafael.
“Got your text.” He slouched, hands in his pockets, somehow looking colder than the chilly drafts circling around the subway exit. “Happy Birthday.”
He handed me a bag with a bright yellow hoodie inside. “It’s a zip-up track suit. You can easily slip out of it when you need to shift,” he explained.
“Thanks.” I buried my head in the bag so no one could see how much I was glowing inside. “I’ll look like a bumblebee.”
Rafael gave the smallest of smiles. “Then I’ll be able to keep track of you.”
“How do you know her size?” Miguel demanded.
“Miguel…”
“A prosthetic finger would have been a better gift.”
“They were all out.” Rafael tried a grin, but Miguel wasn’t buying it. “You don’t mind if I…tag along, do you? My break-up with Yu Li…really sucks. Youn
g Soo got ahold of her phone last night. Left this fumbling message in English asking where I am. Breaks my heart every time I listen to it, but I just can’t seem to make myself…delete it.”
“Of course,” I said immediately.
Miguel shook his head in disbelief, stalking ahead of us. “This is a family birthday dinner,” he muttered. “Not a get-over-your-girlfriend pity party.” He shot me a warning look.
What? I mouthed. Obviously, I wasn’t going to go down the rebound road. I’d never forgive myself for—my face burned crimson—just being that to him.
I’d always loved the lively seafood restaurants with their porch side tables of clinking glasses and pleasant chatter, and the bubbling of fish tanks with eels and cuttlefish pressed up against the glass. I was only recently brave enough to eat at such places because I was finally confident enough of my Korean—and if I needed back-up, I had Rafael.
The waiter came by our table. I took one look at the stiff-backed posture of my two party pals, and immediately ordered a round of soju.
“Jeo-ui saeng-il immnida,” I told the waiter, and his face lit up.
“Saeng-il? Birthday?” He snapped his fingers. “Soju I give you! Service!”
Ah, service. The national term for “free.” I grinned at Miguel and Rafael, but they seemed more interested in sizing each other up.
“So, Raf.” I winced. Miguel was on dangerous ground there. “What do you do when you’re not running around as a wild animal?”
“I’m a delivery man for Chicken Town.”
Chicken Town was the equivalent of a Korean KFC. Miguel raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? How long have you been living here again? Did your girlfriend foot the bills for you, too?”
I braced myself for a lean brown wolf to suddenly explode across the table, but Rafael only responded very cheerfully: “What do you do, Miguel?”
“I’m a manager at our family-owned restaurant in Itaewon.” Miguel put an arm protectively around my shoulder. “Family. You see, we look out for each other here. Got to. The world’s full of shitty people. You know what I mean?”
“No.” Rafael looked at me and winked. “No, most of the people I’ve met are actually very nice. It’s just that most people allow themselves to be treated like shit.”
Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters) Page 8