by Rye Brewer
“Will you?” he whispered, stroking my arms.
“You’re sure you want this?”
“Yes.” He held out his wrist. “I do.”
If he was ready to trust me with whatever I was about to find, I had to trust him, too. “All right. Quick, before I lose my nerve. Let’s do this.”
In a way, it was the most intimate act we could share. I was about to look into his memories and drink the blood which gave him life. The weight of what I was about to do wasn’t lost on me as I took his wrist in both hands and pushed back the sleeve. I could easily make out the blue veins running just under his skin, and my thirst stirred. I didn’t want to think of him as a meal—I wasn’t drinking because I was hungry—but every knee-jerk instinct rushed to the forefront of my thoughts and urged me to drink deep.
My fangs descended, and I pierced his skin with them. He hissed softly, but that didn’t matter when the first drops of blood touched my tongue.
Instantly, images flashed behind my closed eyelids. The more I drank, the clearer they were.
Dozens of humans in deep-burgundy robes, hoods pulled over their heads, marching out of the woods and into a clearing. In the distance, a full moon rose over the roof of a castle, lighting the turrets and casting long shadows over the tops of bare, lifeless trees. I could just make out the shapes of their faces, those hooded figures, the places where their eyes should be, but there was nothing definable. I was struck by the sudden knowledge they wanted it that way. Less of a chance of being described and tracked down for what they were about to do.
I followed as they circled around a pair of wide-eyed, trembling vampires, a man and a woman with their fangs bared against the advancing threat. But they were outnumbered, and they knew it. They wouldn’t go down without a fight. Their clothing was old-fashioned, the sort I would expect to see in a painting from centuries earlier—short pants and knee-high stockings, buckled shoes, the woman’s shirt brushing the ground as she pressed her back to that of the man with her. Their eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for an opening in the circle of robed bodies. The torches those hooded figures carried lit the circle, but only enough to make shadows dance along their robes and add to their threatening appearance.
The male vampire lunged, hoping to throw a few of his would-be attackers off-balance. It didn’t work—instead, high-pitched laughter filled the night air, followed by jeers—both male and female voices, I realized. I couldn’t have explained why this surprised me. A few of them thrust their torches into the center of the circle, taunting the frightened pair, and I gasped in horror as the female vampire’s skirt caught fire. She screamed, beating at the flames with both hands, and was fast enough to smother them.
What I saw next made me wish she hadn’t been successful.
The hooded figures descended on them, pulling the pair apart and holding them separate from each other. He called out to her, trying to comfort her while she wept and thrashed and snarled curses in a language foreign to my ears. Still, I could tell from the way he spoke and the look of love on his face he was trying in vain to make her final moments easier.
My stomach turned when one of the hooded figures kicked him behind the knees, making him drop to the ground, then touched the lit torch to his clothing.
The sounds of his mate’s tortured shrieks as they held her in place and forced her to watch him burn to death seared my brain along with the smell of roasting flesh. Her knees went out, and she sagged in the arms of those who held her up, wailing and screaming long after her mate stopped flailing on the ground. Only when a flash of silver shone against her throat in the form of a blade wielded by one of her torturers did she go silent forever.
The scene changed before I had the chance to catch my breath. Another group of robbed figures—those same burgundy robes, the same hoods, but different bodies in them. I knew this because of the change in scenery. We were on a hill outside a major city, and electric lights glowed in the distance. A train whistle floated along on the warm night air. Hundreds of years had passed.
“You thought you could get away!” one of the menacing, hooded men called out, waving a long, silver knife in the face of a bound-and-gagged vampire.
The male vampire, a man—no, a boy, though he was probably much older than his youthful face allowed—glared in open rage.
“You thought we’d leave you alone to conduct your filthy business. You’re an abomination. You don’t deserve to walk the earth.” He pressed the side of the knife against the vampire’s cheek, and the screams from behind the gag were gut-wrenching. I heard his flesh sizzling under the toxic metal, and when the torturer lifted the blade away, the sight of the burn made me close my eyes. But there was no escaping the moans of pain coming from the vampire.
“Give him another one!” a woman cried out. Her voice was frenzied with a lust for killing.
A young, male voice called out. “Yeah! One to match on the other cheek!”
The torturer complied—this time, the sound of satisfied laughter drowned out the agonized screaming.
“We’ve already killed your so-called family,” the torturer announced. “You’re the only one left, and you know it. We’re doing you a favor, you filthy, soulless thing. You should be thanking me for putting an end to your miserable existence.” Another few touches of the blade to the vampire’s throat—a hissing, sizzling sound accompanied each point of contact, along with those triumphant cheers.
I looked around wildly, sure I had to be imagining all of this. It was a terrible dream, or a joke. There was no way this could’ve happened.
And yet the night air was fresh on my face, and the dewy grass was damp under my feet. I could smell smoke drifting our way from the distance, the smoke from coal fires burning all throughout the city below us. And the smell, once again, of burning skin and muscle. It was all too vivid to be a dream.
This had happened. This was a vivid memory in Stark’s mind, and I was in Stark’s mind, watching it all.
The vampire threw his head back and screamed behind his gag, and moonlight illuminated his full face. I hadn’t been able to see all of it until now. Horror washed over me.
I knew him. I knew him.
The torturer raised his arm, and the moonlight glinted off that terrible blade before it descended, and a roar of celebration rose up over the group. I couldn’t take any more.
I pulled back from Stark’s wrist, sicker than I’d ever felt in my life. I staggered backward, hands raised in front of my eyes, as if that would help erase what I had just seen. I could barely breathe, like something was sitting on my chest. I fell into the chair by the hearth, gasping as though I had run a marathon.
“Now, you know,” he said, sounding defeated.
“Why?” I gasped.
“Why what? Why did we do it?”
I nodded hard, unable to look at him. How could he?
“I already told you the entire story behind my hatred for vampires.”
“So, you organized this group to kill them for you?” I spat. I didn’t know how to feel about him at that moment.
“I was only with them in the first couple centuries,” he explained. “I witnessed that last murder—the last in my presence, at any rate, but I had nothing to do with organizing it or the killings of the vampire’s family. The Starkers” —he flinched as he said it— “had already been operating without me for a long time. It was accidental that I stumbled upon their activities that night.”
“I knew that man,” I whispered, holding my head in my hands. I could still see him, terrified and ravaged by pain, probably wishing it would all be over. Ferdinand. He was a friend of my father’s. I used to play with his children when I was a little girl. And then, they went away. Nobody ever told me why or where they’d gone. I hadn’t thought about any of them—him, his wife, their three daughters and two sons—in decades. It all came screaming back at me after watching his murder.
And they had already killed his family. The man with the blade said so.
My stomach churned. I wanted to weep, to scream, to claw at him and ask how he’d dared decide who got to live and who had to die. How he had put that sort of power into the hands of humans, stupid humans who couldn’t hope to understand that vampires thought and felt and loved the same way they did.
I did everything I could to keep the roiling emotions inside, rather than letting Stark see how deeply conflicted he’d left me. Oh, how I wished he had never made me watch his memories. I still had deep, crazy, improbable feelings for him, but they were tainted by the knowledge he had enabled the killing of so many.
I had to stop the Starkers. They would kill me if they had the chance, wouldn’t they? And my family. For all I knew, they had come close to doing so, back when I was young. The Great Fire had changed a lot of things. They may have backed away from my clan afterward, gone somewhere else. I’d never heard of them and I wasn’t sure anyone in our clan had. They clearly lived outside the treaties between humans and vampires.
“You have to understand, Sara. I have nothing to do with them anymore. They still use my name, but I’m not part of them.”
I looked at him and could see the truth written clearly on his face. And the anxiety. The desperation. He needed me to believe him.
“I know.”
It was all I could say. I didn’t trust myself with anything else. I felt the same for him as I did before, and I almost wished I didn’t. It would’ve been so much easier.
“Do you know where they are now?” I asked.
“You saw where they were. They haven’t left.”
Yes, I saw. They hadn’t gone far from the Carver mansion to kill Ferdinand. The city we’d been near was New York. It made sense they’d want to stay there, seeing as how two powerful clans called it home.
“What took you away from the group?” I wanted him to say he’d had a change of heart, but I knew that wasn’t it. If he still hated vampires, that wasn’t it.
“My imprisonment on Shadowsbane Island,” he replied instead.
“I’ve never heard of it,” I admitted, though the dead tone of his voice when he spoke of it told me what I needed to know.
“Consider yourself lucky,” he replied with a grim smile. “It’s a prison for witches. The Witches’ Senate knew I had started the Starkers—perhaps the name gave it away?” His smile was self-deprecating. “At any rate, even though there’s never been any love lost between the species, once the vampires knew the Starkers were started by a witch, they used it as an excuse to kill any witch they found. They demanded my punishment to stop the killings. Therefore, I couldn’t be allowed my freedom. I’d inadvertently led to the death of untold numbers of creatures like myself.” He tried to mask it, but I heard the pain in his voice. The guilt. He carried not only Emilie’s death on his conscience but the deaths of the other witches.
“When they sent me to the prison, I was a wanted man,” he continued. “The vampires wanted me dead. They still do, I’m sure. Obviously, I had to end my relationship with the Starkers—as I said, I only stumbled upon that last scene—that last killing—you witnessed. And I realized something that night: while I didn’t experience a change of heart on Shadowsbane, I did lose my taste for the hunt. And when I saw what my original intent had devolved into over the passage of time—the torture, the taunting, the violence of it—I could no longer stomach it. I couldn’t align myself with them.”
That much was a relief. He didn’t want to be part of them anymore. A good thing, since I was determined to bring them down. Everything had happened so quickly—I hadn’t known for sure the Starkers were real until less than an hour earlier—but I was no less sure this was my destiny. Or at least part of it. There could be a positive side to my elemental powers, after all.
I went to him, full of new confidence. So much so I kissed him, harder than we’d kissed earlier. I still wasn’t sure what it meant, kissing a man who’d brought about so much death, but it felt right to my heart. The feelings between us ran too deep to dissolve in the face of his past.
We were both breathless by the time the kiss ended, and Stark curled his hand around the back of my neck as he touched his forehead to mine.
I closed my eyes, content to be in the moment.
But the moment couldn’t last forever.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“I know.” I paused, the memory of Ferdinand’s pain still fresh. “I have to become as powerful an elemental witch as possible.”
“I know,” he replied. “And I’ll help you.”
30
Anissa
It was all so different on the roof of the Bourke high-rise. The sensation of wind whipping through my hair and past my ears was a familiar one, and completely foreign in comparison to the tranquility in Hallowthorn Landing. But it would always feel more like home than anywhere else, even Avellane.
“I’ll go in to get him,” I said, motioning for Fane to wait.
He nodded as though he understood and had, in fact, been expecting me to offer just that—after all, there was no telling who I’d find inside. He couldn’t simply walk in the way I could.
I made my way down the stairs from the roof to the penthouse level and in through the front door. It was cracked, I noticed. Something must have happened while I was gone.
“Jonah?” I called out, almost afraid of what I’d find.
“You’re finally back.” He came running from his room, scooping me up in a big hug. “Please, don’t go running off on me like that. Please.” There was desperation in his voice. “I looked for you and couldn’t find you anywhere, and I was so afraid I’d lost you. Don’t run off when there’s so much happening around us. I can’t lose you.”
“I’m sorry.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face there for a sweet, too-short moment. “I didn’t plan on being so long. Believe me, I wouldn’t have left you for that long without telling you so. Which is actually why I’m back right now.”
He pulled back, putting me on my feet. “You’re going somewhere? Already?”
I traced the sharp curve of his jaw with my fingertips and wondered if there would ever be a time when it would be just us. “I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important… and not just to me.”
He kissed my forehead, his lips lingering there. “Where are you going, then?”
“Come with me. You’ll understand.”
I took his hand, but he didn’t budge. Like he was rooted to the floor.
“Wait. There’s something I want to talk to you about, and I can’t wait until the next issue or the next emergency. Right now. I want to settle something.”
“All right.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret his intensity.
He seemed ready to jump out of his skin. I waited with my heart in my throat.
His sternness gave way to a tender smile as he lowered himself to one knee. My brain could hardly keep up with what was happening as he pulled a small box from his pocket and held it up to me.
“I wanted to make it official.”
“Oh, wow.” I didn’t know what else to say. I was too busy trying not to faint to come up with anything more eloquent than that.
His eyes shone as he smiled up at me. “Anissa, I want you to know, no matter where we are—no matter how many miles separate us, no matter where life takes us—I am always on your side. I’m always going to fight for you, no matter what that means. No matter what it takes. You come first, forever. And I will always love you the way I love you right this minute.”
“I love you, too,” I choked out over the tears clogging my throat.
“Will you marry me?” He opened the box to reveal a beautiful, antique sapphire-and-diamond ring. The craftsmanship of the white gold band was exquisite, just like the sparkling center sapphire and the diamonds surrounding it. I could tell it was an heirloom, and one which undoubtedly meant a lot to him.
And he was giving it to me. More than that—he was giving me his heart, his protection, his love.
There was o
nly one thing I could say. “Yes.”
The metal was cool as he slid it over my finger, and then I was in his arms again. The sensation of everything being right with the world was a sweet one as he kissed me, and my tears dampened his cheeks.
He was smiling when the kiss ended. “I couldn’t wait.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. No matter where I go, I’ll have this, and I’ll feel stronger.” I grinned. “And now, you can’t go back on it.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t for anything.”
“I’m glad you’re saying that because there’s still something I want to show you.”
I hated to bring an end to what was a perfect moment, probably the most perfect I’d ever known, but there was still someone waiting for us on the roof. There would always be something else we had to face together.
He didn’t protest as I took his hand and led him out of the penthouse and up the stairs to the roof. But he did drop my hand when he saw who was waiting up there for us.
“Jonah.” Fane stood with hands clasped behind his back, nearly melting into the darkness around him. He was good at that, blending into the shadows.
“Fane. What are you doing here?” He looked down at me, frowning. “You brought him? You’re with him for... some reason?”
“We can explain.” I fought to keep the edge of strain out of my voice. I wanted so much for the two of them to get along, and a lot of that would have to do with how Jonah treated his father. If he saw me as consorting with the enemy, it would drive a wedge between us. I couldn’t have that.
He held my gaze for a beat before nodding. “Not up here, though. Let’s go inside. I don’t feel like shouting over the wind.”
I took that as a small win. He was willing to invite Fane into the penthouse.
Only when the three of us were there did Fane notice my hand.