by Rye Brewer
He approached from behind me. I could sense him drawing closer.
Fury made me whirl around with my fangs extended. “Go away!”
He didn’t.
“You’re a vampire,” he said in that same condescending tone of voice. “I didn’t realize I was babysitting a vampire.”
“You’re not because I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You sure need something,” he replied, cocking one eyebrow.
“You know what I need? I need someone who’ll help me cope with this!” I flung my hands out to either side and let the charge pass through them, harmlessly burning up in the air. “I’ll ask Sirene to find someone else to help me. I don’t need you. Go back to whatever is more important than being here with me.”
I tried to move past him in an attempt to return to Sirene, or to Mom, but I couldn’t get around him.
He looked me up and down in that funny way he had—his eyes moved, but his face didn’t.
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, which was more unnerving than anything else about him.
“Just wait,” he finally said.
17
Stark
All Sirene had told me about her was somebody had given her elemental skills. Funny how she hadn’t told me I would be dealing with a vampire. But Sirene was always smart, wasn’t she? She knew I would have refused flat-out if I’d known it was a vampire she wanted me to work with.
I studied the small, brown-haired girl up and down. She resembled a drowned rat with her hair matted down by salt spray. A drowned rat with red, swollen eyes and little bolts of electricity shooting from her fingers.
The T-shirt and long skirt she wore were wet, too, and they looked like she had been wearing them for a while.
Had she been in hiding? If she was smart, yes. But she didn’t seem too smart. No surprise—vampires weren’t known for their intelligence.
Damn that Sirene. Half-sister or not, sometimes I wanted to throw her into the sea. Especially when she thought she could outsmart me. Especially when she did outsmart me.
I had assumed she was bringing me a witch who’d somehow picked up elemental skills, or recently discovered she possessed elemental skills. I should’ve known there was no assuming anything when Sirene was involved.
Meanwhile, Vampire Girl tucked her hands under her armpits like that would control the flashes of electricity shooting from her.
Great.
Of all the elemental powers for her to end up with, she had electric elemental skills. The most powerful. Meanwhile, she was full of raging emotion.
What a wonderful combination. PMS would be a serious bitch with this one.
I grimaced at the idea.
I reflected on how lucky we both were I wasn’t a novice ice elemental. Whatever she threw at me—literally—I could deflect it.
Hundreds of years of experience made me a natural match for her. I could see why Sirene had thought of me when she was trying to find someone to help the pint-size vampire.
Her dark eyes swam with pink-tinged tears. I almost couldn’t stop watching as one of them rolled down her cheek. Her long, brown hair was wet and appeared darker than before, but when she went on her little tantrum, it had lightened to ash blonde.
She was interesting, for sure.
I should’ve hated her.
I wanted to.
I hated all vampires as a rule and made it a point to stay away from them. I hadn’t seen one in… I didn’t want to think of how long, though I could’ve pinpointed it to the very minute if hard-pressed. Vampires were a scourge. They were worthless.
I could’ve happily lived the rest of my life without seeing one again. It wasn’t my fault this pathetic, weak, crying tiny thing had gotten herself into trouble.
This vulnerable petite thing with her pink-tinged tears and hair that changed color when she lost control of her powers.
But she called out to me. Something about her, maybe the way she trembled with fear and disgust with herself.
I could feel it, the way she hated herself for the way she was. That was probably it, and the knowledge she couldn’t help it.
I told myself I should want to encase her in ice and end her miserable, blood-sucking life. Part of me still did. The rest of me couldn’t help but want to know her.
I couldn’t understand the attraction. I couldn’t understand myself.
“What’s your name?” I asked when I finished assessing her.
She frowned and hesitated like she didn’t want to tell me. I couldn’t blame her—she had enough to deal with without my picking at her.
“Sara,” she mumbled.
“I’m Stark. Come in out of the rain.” I took a step back from the doorway to give her room to pass.
She could still have gone straight to the door and run away—but she didn’t. Instead, she sat in one of the chairs by the wall.
I gave her space, but watched her closely in case she wanted to try to outwit me.
“How did you come by your skills?” I asked.
“I must have fed from contaminated blood,” she confessed. “It’s the only way it could’ve happened. I’m pureblood, otherwise.”
“Contaminated blood? You mean you fed on someone who’s an elemental?”
She cocked her head, watched me. “Nobody feeds on anybody else anymore. It’s against the law.”
At least she didn’t look like she was going to cry anymore, though I didn’t appreciate her smugness.
“What law?”
“You really don’t know how things go, do you? We only drink synthetic blood now. We’re not allowed to feed on other creatures since the treaty was signed after the War.”
The way she said it, it sounded like she’d used a capital letter. This war was important, obviously.
“I don’t know anything about a war or a treaty,” I admitted.
“Do you have the slightest clue what happens in the vampire world?”
Why should I have?
I wanted to let her know exactly what I thought about vampires and exactly how much of a damn I gave about her world, but I only said, “No. I don’t.”
“I’ll keep it simple.” She didn’t bother asking if I wanted to know. “There was a Great War between the vampire clans, and it spilled over into the human world. The humans knew about us, of course—we were allowed to feed on them back then, even if we had to be careful about it—but they grew paranoid when our activities affected their world. It was one thing to know about us but another thing to be caught in the middle of our drama. The war ended, and a treaty between the vampire leaders was signed. Maybe there were other supernatural creatures involved, too, but I don’t know. Some of the human leaders demanded we add clauses having to do with them, so they’d be protected from then on out. I guess all those years of war was enough for our leaders to agree—otherwise, the humans could wipe us out.”
“What else did this treaty say?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. I haven’t read it.”
“You haven’t?”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s an important document. It’s kept under lock and key. I don’t know anybody who has.”
I folded my arms, knowing I shouldn’t antagonize her, but unable to stop myself. “Let me get this straight. Your kind follows a treaty you’ve never read?”
She bristled as her jaw clenched and her nostrils flared.
It didn’t take much to set her off.
All of her emotion was right at the surface. “No. We don’t follow the treaty. We follow our clan leaders. They’re the ones in charge of knowing what the treaty says and how to best follow it.”
“Oh, I see,” I nodded slowly. “So, what else resulted from the treaty? You can only drink fake blood. What else is there?”
She eyed me up and down, squinting a little. “You really want to know? Why?”
“Yes, I really want to know. It’s a serious question.”
She didn’t look convinced, but continue
d. “We’re not allowed to consort with other species. Creating hybrids or turning humans is forbidden. You get the idea.”
“You can’t date other types, you mean?”
She nodded, and I thought she might have blushed a little. “I mean, not all clans are so strict about that rule…”
“So not all of your clans are racist, in other words?”
I expected her to explode, but, instead, she smiled. “Hardly. I mean, take me for instance. My older sister is half-vampire, half-fae. I just found out I have a younger brother who’s half-shade. Out of the three of us, I’m the only one who has pure blood.”
“Had.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You had pure blood.”
Understanding touched her eyes, and she bit her lip when she considered my words. She wasn’t pureblood anymore, not one bit.
Out of the three of them, she was the rarest—and the most dangerous.
“Where did the contaminated blood come from?” I asked to change the subject before she grew all emotional on me again.
She shook her head, and her chin trembled. “I don’t know yet.”
“You realize if the blood is synthetic, it was probably a deliberate contamination.”
She nodded and wrapped her arms around herself.
I noticed the way she shivered and wondered whether it was the dampness or she was plain old overwhelmed.
“My sister is looking into it as we speak—at least, I hope she is. She’s supposed to be.”
“Is she searching for a cure, too?”
Another nod. “Of course.”
“It’s probably pointless.”
Her mouth fell open. “Screw you, you jerk! How can you say that? Do you enjoy messing with my head?”
“Hang on!” I held up both hands to quiet her before she lost control again—as it was, I could almost taste the electric charge in the air. “I wasn’t trying to mess with your head. I might have been a little blunt, yes, but I didn’t want to upset you.”
“So, what was the point of that little remark?”
I sighed. “I’m trying to help you come to grips with this. I’m sorry if I don’t treat it like a tragedy that you have elemental skills, since I have them, too—in case you missed it. But you have two half-blood siblings, right? What’s so bad about you no longer being pureblood?”
Her shoulders dropped, and a frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. “It’s different for me. There are… degrees, I guess you could say.” She trailed off, searching for the right words. “My kind only barely tolerates half-bloods as it is. Some more than others. My sister, for instance. We never knew why the rest of our clan sort of ostracized us until we found out she was half-blood. Suddenly, it all made sense. The way they ignored us, pretended we weren’t there. Even when we needed help, when our parents die— went away… nobody stepped up. We had to take care of ourselves. It makes sense now, of course. We were the children of a vampire who’d consorted with one of the fae. Even if I was pureblood, it didn’t matter. I was still tainted.”
“That’s very cruel,” I observed. I had much stronger opinions but swallowed them back to keep from upsetting her again.
“And that’s not the half of it,” she continued. “That’s considered tolerant. A vampire-witch hybrid would be banished. Maybe even put to death, if the league decided to do so.”
They would kill her? My blood ran cold. “Why is there so much hatred among your kind?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, her voice soft. “So many things happened before I was born. I don’t know where it all came from.”
I nodded slowly. “So, you came here to…”
“To learn how to hide this. To control it. I can’t let any of them know what’s happened to me, or I could be killed.”
My heart softened even further than it already had.
It was life-or-death for her. No wonder she wanted a cure. But she wouldn’t find one. There was no such thing, not really. Her only hope, as she said, was learning to conceal her skills.
Something stirred deep inside me, something that hadn’t stirred in a long time. The need to protect.
To protect her.
I hated myself for it.
No matter how much I wanted to hold her, I had to push my confusion aside and do what I’d told Sirene I would do.
“All right. Let’s start your training.”
18
Sara
The rain had stopped. I was glad, since it gave me something else to talk about.
There was a weird feeling between us—I didn’t hate him the way I had before we started talking. Probably because he seemed sympathetic.
It was nice to meet someone who got what it was like to have elemental skills.
I stood and went to the doors.
The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and if I hadn’t seen and felt the rain earlier, I would never have believed a storm like that could’ve rolled through. I realized the sun’s rays were shining through the door and on me, and I jumped away with a gasp of surprise.
“What is it?” he asked, still standing by the chairs along the wall.
“The sun! It touched me!”
“And?”
“And…” I looked at my arms and legs, felt my face. They were just fine. “And it didn’t burn me.”
“Because this isn’t the human world,” he said. “We’re in another dimension with different rules. I suppose that’s one of them.”
“Aww, that’s a shame.”
“A shame?” he asked with a laugh in his voice.
“I mean, I thought I might be immune to the sun now. That would’ve been nice.” I held up my left hand so he could see my pinkie finger. “This little piece of my finger was exposed to direct sunlight for maybe a nanosecond, and I’ve never been able to bend it all the way since that day. The skin healed, but the tissue underneath never did.” I tried to bend it to show him what I meant.
“No wonder you were so eager to get out of the sunlight.” He smiled. “Do you want to see more of Hallowthorn Landing?”
“I would love to!” I didn’t mean to jump at the chance, but the dark, bleak fortress was already starting to get to me.
Fresh air would be nice, not to mention the chance to feel the warmth of the sun without fear of dying.
We walked down the hall side-by-side, talking the entire way.
“How long have you lived here? You never did tell me earlier, when I asked. You were too busy being rude.”
“I wasn’t being rude.” He snorted.
“What were you doing, then?”
“I was testing you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks so much.”
“How long have I lived here… hmm…” He thought it over. “Longer than I can remember. I know that seems like a dishonest answer, but it’s the truth. Sometimes, when you’ve lived as long as I have, it’s difficult to keep track of such things.”
“And exactly how long have you lived?”
He seemed to be around my physical age, maybe a little older. If he were human, I would’ve put him somewhere around the age of twenty-five.
“Hundreds of years,” he said with a wry smile.
“Back when this style of decoration was in vogue?” I teased, and I couldn’t believe I was ribbing him when I had been so afraid and angry minutes earlier.
For the first time since I started showing my new skills, I wasn’t afraid.
“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Have you ever heard that expression?”
I nodded with a grin, and he said, “I might not have fed you, but I’m helping protect you. You shouldn’t be sarcastic.” But he was smiling, and his voice was light.
I knew he wasn’t offended.
We walked down the stone stairs, and I realized I felt better than I had in ages. I almost bounced from one step to the next.
“All right, here’s another question. How did a place such as this ever come to be? I mean, who could’ve carved all of
this?” Building it from stone blocks would’ve been enough of a feat, but carving it from solid rock?
“It’s a long story, so I’ll pare it down for you. It was a mixture of magic and hard work. I’m sure it would’ve been more difficult without the magic, of course. These fortresses protect the town and its inhabitants.”
“Protect them from whom?”
“Or from what,” he corrected. “Things were much different back then, of course.”
“I noticed from the tapestries.” I pointed to one of them as we walked past on our way to the huge front door.
“You’re very observant. Yes, there’s an entire saga behind Hallowthorn Landing—beasts and monsters and the witches and wizards who defeated them. Even I’m not old enough to remember any of it, but there are some who do to this day.”
I pointed to the spikes on the door. “I guess these spikes were a sort of security system back then?”
He laughed—and looked as surprised as I felt.
He needed to laugh more. He had a nice laugh. But his face hardened as soon as the sound died, and his eyes went even darker.
“You’re very smart,” he said, then increased to a brisker pace than before.
I hurried to keep up.
We walked down the many, many stone stairs—easier to do when the sun had dried them—to the docks where Sirene and Mom and I had first ported.
“Are there many fish out here?” I asked, since I felt like I had to say something to break up the sudden tension.
He nodded. “Yes, these are all fishing boats. They were docked earlier because of the storm, of course, though I doubt the fishermen will go out now, this late in the day. Tomorrow there will be plenty out there to catch.”
I stood with my hands on my hips, taking big gulps of fresh air. It was so sweet, bringing to mind the sensation of sunlight on my skin. It didn’t burn. It only warmed me. I could’ve stood there forever, watching the fishing boats bobbing gently up and down.
Birds circled out over the water, probably where fish were swimming around. I wondered what kind of fish were out there, if they were the same kinds as the ones in the human world. The birds were larger, more feathery, with longer beaks. I was glad to not be a fish.