by S. W. Clarke
I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to know what would happen next.
Here it was, the source of my shame.
Whatever came after this moment would change everything.
“Thelma,” I whispered. She couldn’t hear me, but I couldn’t stop myself, either. “Thelma, I—”
“Patience!” she cried out again, drowning me beneath her child’s high-pitched voice. And she, too, was drowned beneath the other screams.
Behind her, our mother was dying. Behind her, our father was fighting on, protecting his wife. Around us, the vampires slaughtered and fed. And somewhere, Valdis sought out Mariana’s vessel.
Thelma’s hands came up, reaching out toward the entrance to the tent. She took one step forward, then another. She was jostled by someone running, and she fell to one knee.
I turned, glimpsing myself standing by the flaps. GoneGodDamn it, there were too many people in the way to see her properly. She’s back here, I thought to my fourteen-year-old self. Just come a little closer. Look a little harder.
But it was impossible to change what had happened. I remembered: I had searched for her and not been able to find her. And then I had been forced out …
My thoughts came to a dead halt.
Like some miracle, the crowds had parted for just one moment.
A direct line of sight opened up between Patience and Thelma, and the two of them met eyes.
I stared between Thelma and fourteen-year-old me.
This time, my heart really did stop.
I took a step back, then another.
“No,” I breathed, afraid to let too much air out. If I did, I might snap my own vocal cords with the noises I made. I might gnash my teeth until they broke against one another.
This couldn’t be right. This wasn’t how it happened.
I hadn’t ever found her. She had been lost in the crowd.
I dropped to my knees, my hand still held over my chest. The pain was too much, the nail too tight. This was a trap, an illusion, a trick of the mind. Valdis was trying to drive me out, to give Mariana full control over our body.
This wasn’t it. This couldn’t be the truth.
But even as I thought it, I knew it was.
Thelma climbed to her feet. She called again for Patience to help her, that girlish voice reaching a note of pure, unmitigated fear.
I couldn’t take it. This was too hard, too painful.
But it was the only way to defeat the demon. It was the only way to survive, to ever see Percy again. I had promised him I would always be there to take care of him.
I had promised I wouldn’t ever leave him. I wouldn’t ever fail him.
I rubbed the heel of my hand over my eyes as they drifted over to Patience. GoneGods, I was so young. I was so afraid.
But there I stood, staring at Thelma.
I had a chance. I had one chance.
Fourteen-year-old me stood there, halfway between the realms of life and death. Inside, the fury of death and the promise of an awful end. Outside, the dark, moonlit night and the possibility of life.
Patience Schweinsteinger, presented with the most difficult choice of her short life.
Run forward, or run back.
Toward Thelma, or away.
This was what the demon sought to protect. This was the truth that was eating me from the inside.
Here was the bare fact of that night:
I saw my sister. I heard her calling out for me. I had a chance to run in and take her hand, but I didn’t.
I turned, and I disappeared into the night.
Chapter 12
I dropped to my knees, letting both whips fall to the ground. Then I dropped to my hands, and then my elbows. My forehead touched the dirt, and I cradled it with both hands.
I hadn’t lost Thelma.
I had let her go.
All these years, I’d thought it was my hatred of Valdis that had fueled my bloodlust. I’d thought it was the death of my parents and my sister that embedded the Latin phrase in my mind—
Numquam obliviscar. Numquam propitius eris. Never forget. Never forgive.
I hadn’t forgotten what happened with Thelma … I simply couldn’t process it. And I couldn’t forgive myself for it, either.
You were fourteen. You were afraid.
No. It wasn’t enough.
No excuse would ever be enough. I should have fought for her. I should have run back to her.
My parents had taught me to be braver. To be stronger. To be fearless and fearsome.
I realized I was sobbing beneath the sounds of the screams, my entire body heaving with the truth until my throat went raw and my breath came hard and shuddering in and out of my lungs.
I had done this. I had turned away from my little sister.
And the demon? It was my shame incarnate.
When I finally sat up on my knees, I gazed down at my hands. They were wreathed in black flames. I watched as, with agonizing slowness, they licked up my wrists to my forearms, then to my elbows.
I was the darkness. Mariana was the light.
I finally got it. My shame was encompassing me, and soon I would become the demon.
Seleema had called my resistance a form of suicide, and now I understood why. Shame eats you from the inside out, hollows your organs and your bones and muscles, and still it’s not enough.
Nothing is ever enough for it.
I’d spent five years searching for the one creature I’d pinned all my troubles on, all my spite and vengefulness. All the while, a black hole had grown inside me. And I’d fed it.
But the person I’d hated most of all was myself.
I lifted my eyes, seeing and not seeing the people running and dying all around me. I’d thought I was the hero in this story: the girl who had lived through the vampire attack, who became a dragon rider and hunted down the Scarred.
I wasn’t the hero. I was just a coward who ran.
Thelma’s voice sounded nearby, and my gaze darted left. There she stood, bawling in the midst of everyone and everything. She’d known I had abandoned her.
“Thelma!” my father yelled, still standing over our mother.
She turned, her face tomato-red and shiny. “Daddy.”
I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t.
But I had to. The very least I could do to honor her was acknowledge the outcome of my choices—to see what had happened as a consequence.
She ran to him, dodging and strafing amidst the wreckage of people and lives. When she reached him, she clutched his waist.
I pushed myself to my feet, my whole body nothing but heavy sand. I forced myself to acknowledge her.
I’m so sorry, Thelma. I’m so sorry, I thought as my father handed her the throwing knives from his belt.
“I’m afraid,” she said, clutching the little blades.
“Then be afraid,” he said to her. “But fight anyway.”
The black fire had reached my biceps. Soon it would encompass my shoulders, and then my chest. And then, not long after, I would become the demon itself.
What a strange thing, I thought. That you could feel such incredible shame for so long and not even know it.
That was the body’s way of protecting itself. Of surviving.
But in the end, here I was.
As the vampires closed in on my sister and father, I resigned myself to this fate. I would be consumed by the demon while I watched my family’s true death, and maybe if there was any afterlife, they would forgive me.
Maybe I could someday forgive myself.
A force jerked at my neck. I glanced down and found my whistle tugged out from under my shirt.
Percy’s whistle.
With another jerk, the necklace detached and the whistle fell to the ground, rolling away. I dropped to a crouch, my fingers chasing after it.
I couldn’t lose that whistle. Not now, not ever.
As I fished for it amidst the carnage, a voice screamed through the tent.
“Per
cy!”
My heart caught, then gave an overlarge beat. My ears were pricked, and I searched for the source of it.
Something was wrong. Something had happened to Percy.
I needed to find the whistle and call him.
I pressed aside a bale of hay, scrabbling in amongst the straw for the little piece of metal. When my fingers closed over it and I lifted it up, I found the flames falling away from the metal as though repelled.
I could see my hand.
I cradled the whistle in both palms as I lifted my eyes up to my family. The vampires were coming for them, though my sister was throwing knife after knife as she cried.
She was afraid, but she fought anyway.
And then they were gone. It happened in a second.
At least it was quick. That didn’t absolve me of a GoneGodDamn thing, but at least Thelma and my father hadn’t suffered like they could have. At least they’d been together.
I crushed my eyes shut against the wave of emotion, gripping the whistle hard.
I hadn’t forgiven myself, but that didn’t change one fact.
I was Percy’s mother.
He needed me. Someone was shouting his name—someone out there, beyond this awful world of memory.
With shaking fingers, I raised the whistle to my lips. When I set it between them, I blew out the soundless note that would call him to me.
But this time, it wasn’t calling him to me.
The whistle had called me back to him.
↔
I opened my eyes. Valdis’s hands still rested on my shoulders.
Seleema still sat next to me, staring at me with wide eyes. “Tara?”
I blinked hard, reaching up and gripping the whistle under my shirt. It was still there, and no one had been shouting for Percy.
But I’d had a premonition. I understood Percy better than anyone, and I knew what he would do when Lust called to him. I knew how convincing she could be.
She would promise him things. She would offer him a world a twelve-year-old could not resist.
“You and Tara can be together forever,” she would say to him. “You won’t have to fear for her life ever again. No more hunting. No more running. Just endless flights where you two can see the world together in peace.”
I thrust the chair back, knocking into Valdis. “Percy,” I stuttered out. “Where is he?”
Seleema gazed up at me as I rose, staring in the direction of the office. “Why, he is …”
I remained still for a second, listening. I didn’t hear any snoring.
He was awake.
“Has anyone checked on him?” I asked the room, pushing my way out from the assemblage of chairs and people. GoneGodDamn, why did it feel like I was wading through molasses just to get twenty feet from where I stood now?
Just as I cleared the dining room table, the French doors to the office burst open. Claws scrabbled across the tiles of the foyer, and Percy’s blue snout appeared.
He was going for the front door.
I fell into a run toward him, screaming his name. Maybe I could stop him before he got all the locks undone. Maybe I could talk him down from Lust’s promises.
I had to protect him. He was my life’s purpose now.
But before I even got through the doorway between the dining room and the foyer, he had opened his mouth. The air rippled with the heat emanating from it, and as his wings extended he knocked over a small table with a vase.
The vase clattered to the ground, shattering into a thousand tiny pieces. And Percy poured out the biggest ball of fire I’d ever seen him make.
It was enormous. It was devastating.
He blasted the front door, and it melted and flamed into oblivion as I ran at what felt like half-pace. No matter how fast I moved, I couldn’t seem to get close enough to change the outcome of this moment.
“Percy!” I yelled.
He hadn’t heard me calling him. Not over Lust’s purring, and not over his own desire.
Before the flames had even tapered, he rushed through the door and out into the night. And out there, wreathed in the doorway’s flames, stood Lust.
And she was smiling at me.
Chapter 13
Ever stood face to face with a mortal sin? Me either … before tonight.
It was in that moment, staring at Lust through Percy’s flames, I knew she was the sin I needed to face.
The sin I had always been destined to face.
Not avarice or envy or sloth or pride—
No. Lust was my nemesis.
My whole body sang with the lust of life, craved the thrill of it. I’d cultivated it inside me ever since I was a little girl getting up on stages to perform. And then, five years ago, my lust had turned dark. Vengeful.
It became bloodlust.
My parents were dead. My sister was dead. And all I wanted—needed—was the vampire responsible dead.
I’d always believed spilling Valdis’s blood would be the end of my vendetta, that he was my true enemy. But only now, standing in front of the mortal sin called Lust, did I understand the deep truth.
The bloodlust I felt hadn’t been for Valdis—not at the deep, vicious core of it. It had been for me. I hated myself for abandoning my sister on the night of the GrandExodus. It was because of me she’d died, and I couldn’t forgive myself for that fact. Hell, I couldn’t even look at it straight on until forced to.
And now that I understood the pain at the center of me, I knew how difficult this battle would be.
Deep down, my bloodlust wasn’t for Valdis. It was for myself. That was why Seleema had once called avoiding my memories a form of suicide.
And yet, now that I was acknowledging the truth, I was just as screwed as ever. Lust had Percy, and because she had him, she had a vise grip around my neck.
As the flames burned, Lust smiled at me. Her beautiful head tilted a few degrees left as Percy came to stand by her side, gazing up at her. And another sin—jealousy—surged past my horror; had he ever looked at me so lovingly?
Lust stared at me as though she could piece together exactly how to treat Percy if we looked at one another long enough. When her fingertips lifted and reached out toward his nose, I knew she’d understood what I hadn’t said. It was obvious in my body language, in the longing on my face.
I thought of him as my child. I adored him.
“No!” I cried, rushing to the door. She would never have him—not while I still had my feet under me and my whips at my waist. Hell, not while I still had knuckles to pummel her with.
Hands wrapped around my waist, and Erik yanked me back. “No, Tara.”
“Let go of me,” I screamed, clawing through the air. My feet kicked without real aim as Erik lifted me up and pulled me back. “She’s got Percy. She’s got my dragon.”
Now that she had Percy, my desire to join Lust disappeared, swept away by the tidal wave of my fury. She had no power over me for as long as she held my Percy captive.
Lust’s fingertips still hovered in the air, and she blinked once at me. She didn’t have to hurry now; she took her time, relishing this moment. A soft smile still graced her lips, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the most gorgeous, tempting thing I’d ever witnessed.
“I know,” Erik said. “I know. But this isn’t the way to get him back.”
I kept thrashing, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the meeting of mortal sin and dragon through the flaming doorway. It felt wrong. Percy was too good for her.
“Perce,” I yelled through the doorway, “it’s Tara. Come back to me, little egg.”
If he’d heard me, he didn’t show it.
“Little egg,” Lust murmured down to him. “You like to be called that, don’t you? Even when you pretend you don’t.”
Percy’s face lifted toward Lust’s fingers, his scales limned with ivory under the moonlight. Finally, her delicate forefinger came down to the blue nose. Her fingertip touched his scales, and the dragon’s eyes lidded, his wings shivering wit
h pleasure.
I’d lost my chance. He was under her sway.
“But then there is your given name—Percival,” Lust murmured, affixing him with her gaze. “What power resides in a name.”
She knew exactly how to talk to him, how to appeal to his ego.
“Close your eyes, Tara,” Erik said.
“Are yours closed?” I asked.
“Just close them, damn it.”
“I don’t want to join her,” I said. “I just want to flatten her.”
“GoneGodDamn it, Tara.” Erik’s fingers dug in as he gripped me harder against my thrashing. “She’ll kill you.”
Lust’s fingers came to cradle Percy’s chin, and she leaned down toward him until their faces were separated by less than a foot. Her lips came together, plump and soft, and she kissed him on the spot between his nostrils.
That was where I used to kiss him.
I saw her lips move as she whispered to the dragon. Whatever she said, it was inaudible beneath the crackling flames. But Percy could hear, and he listened with absolute stillness.
When she straightened, she turned back to us.
“Seleema,” she said, stepping forward on the front porch. The moment she did, I finally noticed the two angels standing at either side of Lust. They were seven feet tall, gilded with ethereal white light. One blond, and one raven-hared. “I’ve waited to meet you, courtesan. You are a remarkable creature, full of desire and latent possibility.”
I dragged my eyes off Lust and found that Seleema had stepped up to my side, her chest moving quickly. Her eyes were wide, the lashes fluttering. “It is her. By Jannah, she is what miracles are composed of.”
Frank gripped her arm on her other side, keeping his eyes on the houri. “Close your eyes, babe. Don’t even look at her.”
This seemed to be enough to keep Seleema in place, though her breathing didn’t slow. After what she’d said about being a courtesan of heaven, I knew it was only Frank who could stay her. Only the man she loved could keep her from going straight to the sin.
Even then, it took a herculean will.
“Franklin Stubemeyer,” Lust called out. “So you are the human a houri has chosen. How many of her pleasures have you experienced?”