Chosen

by Kiersten White

  “Have you ever met a chaos demon?” I ask.

  “One, in Brazil. He didn’t speak English, but I think he had a crush on my mom.” Leo smiles, but his smile fades as quickly as it appeared, the weight of his mother’s memory too heavy.

  Must change the subject. “Did I tell you we almost let a Roehrig demon into Sanctuary? We thought he was a half-Brachen demon. Turns out he was just wearing a half-Brachen’s skin. That was messy.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Did you—”

  “No, Jade and Rhys were the ones who met with him. Honestly, I probably would have brought him home. But Rhys knows his demons and realized something was off. Plus, Rhys isn’t as trusting as I am.” I scowl, thinking about how Rhys is anti-Leo.

  “He’s not wrong.” Leo’s voice is soft. “His first duty is to protect all of you. Listen, I don’t want to make things complicated. I never did. That’s why I—”

  “Doug and Jade are dating,” I blurt, not wanting to give Leo the chance to tell me why he shouldn’t be at the castle. I’m keeping him. I’m not letting anyone else go.

  “That’s … something.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s complicated. He’s worried she’s using him for his skin secretions.”

  Leo makes an appropriately horrified face and I laugh.

  “I know. I never thought interspecies relationship counseling would be part of the deal when I decided to make Sanctuary. But here we are. Although if Imogen starts dating one or all of the tiny purple demons, I’m out. She can handle that on her own.”

  “I can’t imagine Imogen dating anyone.”

  “Me neither, actually.” Imogen is so self-contained. She doesn’t really seem to need anyone at all. It would be weird to see her connect with someone on that level. I almost wonder why she stays. The rest of us are anchored—I have my mother, Rhys, and Cillian, not to mention being a Slayer. Rhys has Cillian and his grandmother Ruth and the library he would never give up. My mother could never be anything but a Watcher. Jade is staying for Doug, doubtless. The demons have nowhere else to go. But Imogen is in a similar position as Honora. The Watchers were never good to her. I wonder if she stays because she has nowhere else to go? She’s a bit of a mystery. But I hope she doesn’t leave, because I really like her cooking.

  “What about you?” Leo says, deliberately not looking at me. “Any demon love interests?”

  “Just the one.”

  He glances at me and I can’t handle the hope and sadness in his dark eyes. If it were one or the other, I would know what to do or how to feel. My heart squeezes and my throat burns, warning me I might cry. So I deflect again. “I mean, hopefully just the one if things work out next week. I’m really into chaos demons. Love a good slime antler. Mmm.”

  “Athena, I—”

  “Nope. Whatever you’re going to say, I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. You’re back home. That’s what’s important. We’re gonna get you better, and once you’re healthy then I’m going to rip your head off for letting me think you were dead.”

  “I want—”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t care what you want. I let Artemis have what she wanted, and now she …” My fists clench. “No. Nope. No. You might have thought you were being noble staying away, but you weren’t. It hurt. It hurt me so bad, and I’ve had to live with the guilt of killing you every single day since then, so no. I don’t care what you want. I don’t care about your feelings, or whether you think you’re doing the right thing. I’m a Watcher and a Slayer and you’re a half demon, so I’m doubly pulling rank on you. You’ll stay right here in the car while I go get our book from my sister and talk some sense into her. Then when I get back, we’ll drive to the castle, where you’re not going to stay in a stupid pantry anymore, you’re going to take a real room because you’re part of the castle and you’re not going anywhere. We still have a lot we need to talk about.”

  He doesn’t look at me. “It’s the best thing if I don’t fight this. For everyone.”

  “Wow. You’re being a selfish prick.”

  He turns, shocked. “What?”

  “You think you’re protecting us by giving up? Protecting me? I was devastated when I lost you. You were the only person who ever saw me for me. When no one else noticed me, or when they saw me as the lesser Jamison-Smythe twin, or when they only saw me as a disappointing Slayer. You’ve always seen me. I see you too. And yeah, you made bad choices. Really so super bad, and it’s okay for you to feel guilty about that. But you made them out of love. She was your mom. And she was kind of evil. But she was still your mom.”

  I think about Artemis and how I’ve been lying to everyone to protect her. If I were a good Watcher, a good Slayer, if I were only those things, I could have and would have stopped her at the conference, or even in the library. But she’s my sister. And it’s so much more complicated than a vampire or a demon or anything else in the world.

  Like my relationship with Leo. I think it might never be simple between us. But I don’t care. It’s worth fighting for, and so is he. “So reconcile what you did however you need to. Figure out how to come to peace with it. But you dying is not the right way. That wouldn’t fix what your mom did, or make the world a better place. It would just make it emptier, and with everyone and everything we’ve lost, isn’t it already empty enough?” The darkness inside me—the darkness I tried to channel, to feed, to ignore, all to no avail—seems like emptiness to me now. A gaping void that I can’t fill with violence and I can’t fill with happiness, and I’m so scared it’s going to devour me one of these days. “If I can figure out how to live with what’s inside me, can’t you do the same?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is. And I refuse to let you die again.” I open the door and climb out, slamming it behind me. I love so many people, and they’re all so stupid. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of them hurting me and hurting themselves and hurting each other. I stomp into the cemetery, my cute purple Docs squelching through mud. I’m wearing Artemis’s nicest leather trench coat and an emerald-green sweater underneath, but I can still feel the bite of the evening. There’s a mausoleum with an overhang, and I make straight for it, standing out of the drizzle and surveying the night. A few stubborn lamps burn overhead, giving dim illumination to the landscape of sleeping dead.

  I still need to ask Leo about my power. About the ways it’s changed. The Artemis situation felt more pressing, and then Leo being an idiot took over the conversation. He’s not allowed to die. We have a lot more fights we need to get through.

  I pull out my phone and turn it on, not opening all the unread texts from the castle. Nothing new from Artemis. I text her. Here.

  A dark figure swoops toward me, ducking into the shelter before turning and staring at me in shock. It’s not Artemis. She’s wearing an elegant dress, long and flowing and black, with a high neck. Her hair is pinned up in elaborate swirls, and her lips are painted very red. There’s something classic about her face and the way she stares at me, like a portrait of her could be hanging in the national gallery.

  “Vampire?” I ask. Less because of how she looks and more because of the instant KILL KILL KILL buzzing through me, so I really hope she’s a vampire and not human, otherwise I’m in trouble.

  She nods slightly, and I’m more than a little relieved. “Slayer?” she asks. I nod in imitation of her. Neither of us moves. “Patrolling?”

  “I don’t really do that. Hunting?”

  “Not tonight.” She pulls out a cigarette and then one of those long black cigarette holders like I’ve only seen in movies. “Do you mind?”

  “Nah.” I used to. Smoke was very triggering for me. But I’ve stopped having nightmares about almost burning to death in my old house in Phoenix. I still visit that room, but it’s different ever since I found out my mother left me behind because she knew I would survive when Artemis wouldn’t.

  The vampire smiles as she ligh
ts her cigarette. “Smoking forces me to breathe. I find it deeply nostalgic.”

  “And bonus, none of that pesky lung cancer to kill you.”

  “Perks of the undead.” She blows out a long, slow stream of smoke.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve seen me wandering around this cemetery tonight?”

  She looks puzzled but intrigued. “No?”

  “Twin sister. Meeting her here.”

  “Ah.”

  I should probably stake her, but I don’t want to be midfight when Artemis gets here. Or maybe I do. Is it creepy if I hold off fighting this vampire until Artemis can see? Her witheringly dismissive look at the convention tugs on my pride. I’d look really cool in her leather coat fighting and dusting a vampire before turning to her and calmly asking for the book and some answers.

  “I love that coat. Interested in selling it?”

  “It’s my sister’s.” I brought the coat as a peace offering, but Artemis is late. She’s making me stand here in the rain. It would serve her right if she showed up and a vampire was wearing her favorite coat.

  “Think she’ll sell it to me?” She reaches into the lace-lined bag where she keeps her cigarettes.

  “No! I gave it to her. As a gift.”

  A smile seeps across the vampire’s face. “And yet she left it with you, apparently. I bet she’d sell it to me.” She takes another drag of her cigarette.

  I shouldn’t be talking to her. I’ll stake her. Talking to her now is going to make it weird. Vampires are so good at being human … until they’re not. And performing a slaying for Artemis is gross of me. What is this vampire doing here, anyway? “Did you rise tonight or something?”

  “I’m here to visit a very old friend.” She puts her hand on the plaque on the side of the mausoleum. It has several names, but her fingers trail along the one that reads SARAH MCCABE 1801–1823.

  “Is she a vampire too?”

  “No. I was the lucky one. She’s in there, and I’m out here, and somehow it’s been nearly two hundred years, but I can still hear her laughter. Neither of us changed after that day. Well. I suppose there is the decay to take into account. And this.” Her face briefly shifts into the monstrous, fanged vampire visage before shifting back. She smiles wryly. “Sarah would have found that hilarious. I was always so worried about getting wrinkles. Vain Jane, she called me.” She holds out the cigarette.

  “Not a fan of smoke.” Even with my progress about the fire, the scent has me on edge.

  She shrugs, then removes the cigarette from the holder and puts it out on the wet stone. It hisses softly.

  I check my phone. Nothing from Artemis. Maybe I got the cemetery wrong, or Artemis is in a different section. But if I go look, I’m leaving a vampire behind. And if I fight her, I might have to range through the cemetery and miss Artemis that way. Ugh.

  “Hey,” I ask, remembering the conference and my thoughts about my responsibility to kill any vampire I’m aware of. “Do you know a vampire named Harmony? She has a reality show?”

  Jane hisses. “That idiot child. There’s a reason we live in the night, in the dark. The more people know about us, the more likely they are to kill us. Anonymity is a vampire’s best friend. How many famous vampires can you name?”

  “A lot, actually. The Master, Kakistos, Angelus, Dracula, but that one’s obvious, William the Bloody, Drusilla, and are we counting cults, because if we are—”

  She rolls her eyes. “Right, I forgot about your line of work. But for most people, up until now, it was Dracula.”

  “And Edward.”

  “Personally, I prefer Lestat.” She laughs, the sound low and throaty. “But that bastard Dracula, telling his story for fame. And now Harmony. She has no idea what the weight of centuries is. No concept of eternity. Give her a few decades and she’ll come to know and accept the absolute burden and boredom of immortality. We survive not so that we can bask in adulation and glory. We survive and feed and hide so that we can survive and feed and hide. There is no thriving for vampires. Especially now that we are denied even the power of siring new vampires.”

  “Oh, right, the whole zompire thing.” With magic dead, new vampires don’t have the connection to the ancient demon that infected the very first vampire. They turn into mindless hivelike zombie vamps. I check the time. Artemis is definitely late.

  “That is a disgusting term, and I refuse to use it.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “Abominations, all of them.”

  I sigh, putting my phone away. “So you sire so you aren’t alone?”

  “We are always alone.” She folds her arms, looking out into the darkness. “Friendship requires love, and love requires a soul. We sire so for a few moments we can pretend we have power over life and death. So for a few moments we can savor that moment between dead and undead and remember our own change. And because it’s funny.” Her lips twist in amusement. “Cemeteries used to be so amusing. I’d wait after a burial to see the new vampire emerge, covered in dirt and baffled. Like a baby deer learning to walk.”

  “Baby deer don’t kill people.”

  She shrugs. “Well. It is a pleasure I no longer have and never will again. It’s all hollow anyway. The only person I should have sired, the only one I would have liked to spend an eternity with, is beyond my reach and forever will be.” She puts her hand over Sarah’s name again.

  And, weirdly, I get it. I get her. Because if I thought I had a way to bind the people I love to me, to keep them forever, safe and mine? I think I would. I know it’s wrong. Is it wrong, though? It would be if I were making them vampires. But that impulse—to change someone so they can’t be hurt, so they can’t grow old or grow away from you, or die, or seem to be dead but really be hiding because they’re absolute idiots—that, I understand.

  “Who’s in the car?” she asks, nodding toward my car. “You keep looking in that direction.”

  “Old friend. Sort of.” Where the hells is Artemis?

  “Sort of?”

  “We were kind of a thing? Or going to be a thing. I’m not really sure. And now it’s all messed up and complicated and he’s sick and I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “Oh, I used to love couples like you. The sick lover! Modern medicine is a plague. Back in the day, I had but to wander through a park a few evenings before I’d find some lad doting on his ailing sweetheart, or some sweet pretty lass placing a blanket on the lap of her wasting beau. I’d offer to save them. The hope and desperation in their eyes! My own Faustian play, over and over, knowing as soon as I turned the dying lover, they’d kill the human one! Such sweet tragedy.”

  “Are all vampires this chatty?”

  She purses her red lips. “You try living in the shadows of the night for decades; tell me how you entertain yourself then. Besides which, Artemis isn’t here yet. What else do you have to do?”

  I half nod in agreement, then I freeze. “I never said her name.”

  She freezes, a half smile on her lips. “Didn’t you?” Then she lunges.

  22

  I TWIST, USING JANE’S OWN momentum to throw her against the side of the mausoleum. Her head cracks against her dead friend’s name. “What did you do to my sister?” I scream. If she took Artemis—if she hurt her—

  “Oh, you sweet thing.” She stands.

  “Did you hurt her?” Artemis can’t be dead. She can’t be. “Where is she?”

  Jane leans in close, licking her lips. “The devastation is going to taste so sweet on you.” I grab her and throw her against the mausoleum again. She laughs. “Don’t you want to know the truth? Don’t you want to know why I’m here? Why you’re here? And why Artemis isn’t?”

  I pause, and she uses that moment to slam her fist into my stomach. I stumble backward.

  “We have our orders. No killing the Slayer,” a male voice in the darkness calls out.

  “But what if she trips and her throat accidentally falls on my teeth?” She prowls, catlike, angling around me.

  “Where is my sister?”
I ask, not wanting any answer this vampire could possibly provide and increasingly terrified it’s not Artemis who is hurt. It’s me. I just don’t know it yet.

  Jane jumps, and my stake is out and in hand by the time she lands on me. She poofs out of existence.

  “Look, we don’t want to hurt you.” The male voice steps into the light. It’s another vampire, tall and broad-shouldered, face already vamped out in contradiction to his statement. Next to him is a shorter vampire whose spiky Mohawk has gone limp in the rain.

  “Why are you here, then? Who said not to hurt me?”

  He shrugs. “I was all for making you sit quietly in the rain waiting alone for a few hours, but Jane likes—liked—to chat.”

  Every alarm bell in my body is going off. No no no no no. There was only one person who knew where I’d be tonight. “Whose instructions?”

  He reaches into his jacket and pulls out one of those shock sticks the cloakers used. He hasn’t touched me with it, but it jolts me to my soul nonetheless. “We need another hour. So we all wait calmly, and then everyone leaves. No one gets hurt. We get paid, you go home with all your blood safe and warm on the inside, where you want it.”

  The only reason I can think that Artemis—oh gods, Artemis—would want me stuck in a cemetery in Dublin was so that I wasn’t at the castle. The castle filled with people I love and demons I swore to protect. That crawling black thing in me roars to life, darker than the night, soaking me from the inside out. The vampire doesn’t have time to dodge before my foot connects with his head.

  The second vamp lunges for me. I duck under his arms, twisting free and lashing out with a vicious kick that sends him flying. I see a moment—one perfect, clear moment—when I can stake him and be done with one of them.

  But the growling thing inside me doesn’t want this to be done. I turn and kick the first vampire in the head again. He stumbles backward, and I jump, switch-kicking the Mohawk vampire. I throw him into the lamp, the bone-on-metal sound ringing through the night. The tall vampire, shock stick lost, grabs me around the waist. He lifts me off the ground. I slam my head back into his face, hearing bones crunch.