by Rye Brewer
“About what? I’m what you made me, Gage. Don’t you remember? This is who I am now. I’m only trying to be who I am around those who understand me.”
“But there’s so much more to you than what the clan expects from you.” Again, she flinched away from my touch. My heart sank. “We were happy a few minutes ago. That was good. It was us, being us. That doesn’t change who we are or what we are. It only means that we have a dual nature. I don’t want you to forget that other side of yourself. I love that girl.”
“But you don’t love who you turned me into. That’s what you’re trying to say.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is, Gage.” She glared over her shoulder at me. “And it’s a shame because it’s all your fault.”
I couldn’t believe how ravaged I felt over that. My fault. She saw it as my fault. She would never be able to get over what I had done. What was the purpose of turning her into a vampire if she would only ever be unhappy?
“Fancy meeting you two here.”
My skin crawled at the sound of a familiar—and unwelcome—voice.
It came from a man dressed in black. A man who drew the attention of every woman on the observation deck.
Including Cari, who visibly relaxed when she turned and realized he was standing beside us.
“Micah.”
She hadn’t sounded that happy to see me in far too long.
25
Anissa
I was about to burst. It was enough to make me forget how I wanted to hit Scott, and, instead, I took his arm. I dug my fingers in a little harder than I needed to, but it was better than my claws.
“Well? Aren’t you going to answer me?” Scott demanded, lunging toward Elazar before I could stop him.
Not that Elazar considered him much of a threat, considering the way he openly laughed.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked, turning himself into a brick wall in the face of Scott’s rash behavior.
There was no going past him.
I managed to get a stronger grip on Scott and hold him back before he did anything even more stupid.
The necromancer chuckled.
“What did happen in there?” Stark asked. Sara clung to him the way I clung to Scott, but for a far different reason.
“Many things,” Elazar teased with a twinkle in his eye. “Things you couldn’t begin to understand.”
“I wasn’t asking for specifics, and you know it,” Stark growled. “Did Fane survive? Why are you torturing the people who care about him?”
“Because I’ve been locked away for far too long, Stark. You ought to know what it’s like when you’ve been locked up. You have to find your entertainment wherever and whenever possible.”
“Please,” I breathed.
He inclined his head slightly, as though nodding in acknowledgment. “As you wish. He lives.”
The four of us let out a massive sigh of relief. I’d been afraid for a moment Scott would slump against me and take me down with him. Then, it hit me: only three of us were relieved. Stark, on the other hand, hadn’t lessened the intensity of his gaze as he stared at Elazar.
“Alive and what?” he finally asked. “Alive how? What’s the catch in this?”
“You have no faith in me.” Elazar smiled.
“It isn’t a matter of having faith. It’s a matter of understanding the way you think. I’ll ask you again: what’s the catch?”
“See for yourself.” Elazar took two long strides away from the door, leaving room for Fane to exit.
I tensed, holding my breath.
Scott reacted first when he saw who came out of that room, letting out a gust of air that made him sound as though he’d been punched in the stomach.
Meanwhile, I blinked hard. Over and over. I had to be imagining things. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.
“Fane?” Sara whispered. “Is it you?”
It wasn’t… and yet it was. And yet it wasn’t. It seemed as though every move he made changed the way he looked to the point where I wasn’t sure of anything.
One moment he was Fane.
The next, he could’ve been Fane’s brother—similar, but not exactly the same. His nose was a bit thicker, his brows a bit heavier. But only slightly, enough to throw me off.
And then there was his aura. His green aura—something he hadn’t possessed when he was Fane.
This wasn’t Fane.
This was something like Fane, the next best thing. But not the vampire who had almost died in front of me. That vampire had died, I realized then, and my heart sank at the thought.
He was gone. And this was all we had to replace him.
“This isn’t my father. It’s not you!” Scott shouted.
“I assure you, it is. You can examine the room if you like,” Elazar offered with a sweep of his arm. “You’ll find no other body in there. His is all there was.”
“But he isn’t the same!”
“It isn’t possible for a creature to touch death and go through the process of maintaining the hold on their mortal shell without experiencing a change,” the necromancer explained. “In Fane’s case, the loss was almost complete. He was in the midst of breathing his final breath when the spell took hold, and I was able to pull him back from the brink.”
“Why is his aura so changed?” And why won’t he say a word to any of us? That bothered me more than almost anything else, that muteness. He stared straight ahead, his eyes focused on the wall behind Sara and Stark. He hadn’t yet looked at his son.
Elazar shrugged slightly. “That was an unforeseen turn of events, I grant you.”
“What was?” Stark asked.
“You see, in order to truly pull him back from the edge between life and death, I had no choice but to alter his healing abilities. Vampires heal quickly, I grant you, but not quickly enough. Not as quickly as those with enchanted witch blood.”
Silence fell over us as the truth sank in. I didn’t want to believe it, but all signs pointed to it being true. I wasn’t accustomed to being able to see auras—typically, only witches could see them, but those who’d only newly been turned had stronger auras than others which were visible for all magical beings to see. And the only time I’d ever seen a green-tinged aura like his was while in the presence of a witch or warlock.
“You changed him.” It wasn’t a question from Stark. It was a statement, a fact delivered with perhaps the slightest bit of amazement. As though he’d been imagining the most dramatic act Elazar could perform and, even then, hadn’t come close to reality.
“I did. I had no choice. The only alternative was to let him perish, and the request was that I save his life. I did what was asked of me.”
I sensed Elazar fighting the urge to burst out laughing. He was enjoying himself, all right. Enjoying the way he’d managed to fool a vampire into thinking he would ever play fair. There was no sense of fairness in Elazar—if there was, it only extended as far as what he felt was best for himself.
“This isn’t what you were supposed to do!” Scott shook with rage. “This is no longer my father!”
Fane, who still had yet to speak or even move, visibly flinched.
I gaped at Scott. “Are you really that heartless?” I let go of him then. I didn’t want to touch him.
“Heartless?” he scoffed. “What do you know about it? You didn’t even know you were a half-breed until not long ago. You don’t know what it’s like to be pureblooded and proud of who and where you came from.”
“You must be the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever met!” I raged.
The concept of Fane being a warlock wasn’t exactly a comfortable one for me, either. I was deeply unsettled by that green aura and his air of stoic silence. But my heart went out to him, all the same. He was a victim in all of this, doing the best he could to be brave. And all his son could do was belittle him, when it was he who’d begged for Fane’s life.
“How am I a hypocrite?” Scott growled.
“You weren�
��t born a vampire, for one. Let’s start there. You were human, turned to a vampire. Yet you call yourself pureblood. Just because both of your parents became vampires after you were born doesn’t make you anything special, Scott.”
“That’s enough,” Stark announced, trying to slide between us.
Scott was too involved in snarling at me to notice the proximity to his enemy.
“And another thing. You begged for him to live.” I closed in, pushing myself against Stark’s extended arm so I could get a little closer to Scott. Close enough to take a swipe at him, maybe—I hadn’t gotten my confiscated weapons back yet, or else he might have really been in danger. “You begged for your father to live through this, and he has. And all you can do is practically spit on him and deny he’s really your father. Well, I’ll tell you this” —I dropped my voice to a low whisper— “whatever he is now is all on your head. You’re the one who entered into this deal.”
Instead of waking up to the truth, as I thought he would, he lunged for me.
Stark easily stopped him.
Scott shoved him away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t any of you try to tell me I should accept this, either. I don’t accept it. This isn’t what I asked for, and you know it,” he accused, pointing a finger at Elazar, who had been watching the scene play out with a detached expression, not unlike boredom.
“I would watch where I was pointing that finger, if I were you,” he warned in a deadly tone.
It wasn’t enough for Scott to back down, however. “Fine. But if you think I’m paying anything for what you did, you’re crazy. You took my words and twisted them around to suit yourself. You played a game with me, with my family. I don’t want anything to do with you or the abomination you’ve created,” he spat, his lip curling up when he referenced Fane.
“Scott, don’t do this,” I warned, glancing at the necromancer out of the corner of my eye.
Not that I had a wide understanding of necromancers, but something told me it wasn’t recommended for one to renege on payment for services rendered.
Elazar might not have given Scott what he thought he wanted—not strictly, anyway—but he clearly had the sort of powers one didn’t toy with.
“It doesn’t matter,” Elazar assured me with a thin smile.
“It doesn’t?” Sara asked, standing by my side. “Why not?”
“Because it isn’t the vampire boy who shall repay me for the work I’ve done here—work which has been most seriously maligned, I might add.”
“Who will? I know you don’t work for free,” Stark wryly observed.
“Correct,” Elazar replied. “The vampire boy will not repay me. Fane shall balance the scales.”
“Fane?” I felt queasy.
Yes, Fane.
The new warlock.
And all the while, he stared straight ahead.
If it weren’t for the jumping muscles in his jaw, I might have thought he was a statue.
26
Philippa
“Where the hell is everybody?” I muttered to an empty penthouse as I walked in after checking on the vault and its contents.
I was down there an hour or two, sitting with Valerius and talking to him—even though he didn’t respond—couldn’t, really, I suppose. I would’ve gone through the ceiling if he had. By then I figured somebody would’ve returned to the penthouse.
I hated being alone. One of the characteristics of my human life I had never managed to shake once I turned. It might have stemmed from all the time I’d spent alone in the house when I was young, with the boys out in the fields with our father and our mother always busy doing something around the farm.
I was a girl. I was supposed to learn to sew and embroider and sit prettily all day long—my mother might have been the sort who didn’t mind getting her hands dirty, but I’d been groomed to be a lady, and ladies didn’t do things like ride horses or get thrown the way Gage always used to. He’d come home after riding hard, his clothes filthy and a grin on his face, and envy would burn in my heart.
All those days spent staring out the window were still fresh in my mind as the only sound in these rooms in the penthouse was that of my breathing.
As usual, the boys were out doing interesting things in the world while I sat at home. At least they didn’t expect me to embroider anything.
I decided to try calling Gage again. I remembered the last time I’d seen him. It was when we had the fight about the girl he’d turned. If the league—what was left of it—had found out, I hadn’t heard about it.
There was still hope he was alive and well, and hiding. He couldn’t stay silent forever. There had to come a time when he’d at least answer his phone and let his sister know he wasn’t dead or imprisoned.
“Damn it!” I hissed when I realized I’d left my phone in the vault.
I’d pulled it out of my pocket to avoid sitting on it.
A lot of good it would do the immobile Valerius.
I’d have to go all the way back down to get it, though I didn’t like taking the risk of somebody noticing me going down twice in one day. I slid into the shoes I had kicked off when I entered the penthouse and opened the door.
I shrieked when I came face-to-face with the person on the other side.
His fist was raised as though he were about to knock.
The first sight of him stirred my emotions, and I didn’t want anything more than to throw myself into his arms.
But I was wary.
I held myself back instead of flinging myself at him and only whispered. “Vance? Is that really you?”
He peered down at himself, one eyebrow cocked. “Looks like me, doesn’t it? Though I know I’ve looked better.”
He was right about that. Time in the dungeon cells hadn’t done him any good. He was pale, with circles under his eyes and dirt under his nails. His clothes were streaked with grime, and his hair needed a good washing.
“But is it you?” I pressed. “You know what I mean.”
He sighed, nodding. “It’s me, Philippa. It’s me again.”
Dirt or no dirt, I walked into his outstretched arms and let him enfold me.
It was Vance. I could feel it.
Valerius was so cold and calculated. He never would’ve held me the way Vance was.
Nevertheless, I had to take a step back with my nose wrinkled. “I’m sorry, but you’ve smelled a lot better.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. I’m not exactly proud of myself right now.”
“Come on in. I’m sure I can find you something to wear. How did you get up here without the front desk alerting me?”
“I came through the side door, off the alley. I didn’t want to run the risk of your brother giving anybody the heads up.”
“My brother?”
Jonah’s unhappy face filled my mind and reminded me of why Vance had been imprisoned to begin with.
“How did you get out?”
“In due time. I would kill for a shower.” His smile slowly became a frown. “Poor choice of words.”
I touched his cheek, letting my fingertips linger over his firm jaw. I was so sure I’d never touch him again. “I’m so sorry for what happened.”
“That makes two of us.” He winced, shaking his head. “I keep seeing his face when I did it. Not I.” He looked down at his hands. “These hands. But I didn’t do it.”
“I know it wasn’t really you.”
“I don’t know what I would do if you didn’t believe me. I honestly don’t know.”
“I do believe you. Remember, I was with you at the mansion. I knew you were still in there, but you weren’t in control.” I pressed my palm against his chest. “You were here. But you couldn’t help what he made you do.”
“I did love my father, you know. He was impossible to love sometimes. Maybe most of the time. But I loved him, anyway.”
“I know you did.”
I showed him to Gage’s bathroom since the two of them were the closest in size, and I wanted to raid his clo
set.
The sound of the shower was music to my ears. I couldn’t stop smiling. I had him back. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I made in the past. All of that was behind us. I only wanted to be with him, to make up for lost time. Maybe what happened was for the best, after all. It had forced me into clearer perspective. I knew what really mattered, and it was him. Us.
“I’ll leave your clothes on the bed,” I called out, leaving a sweater and jeans there before going out to the living room.
I barely knew what to do with myself, I was so excited. He was back. Exactly what I had wanted so badly.
What would Jonah think? It didn’t matter because Vance wasn’t to blame for what he’d done. He didn’t deserve to be locked up if Valerius was gone.
But where had Valerius gone, exactly?
That nagging question wouldn’t leave me alone. It lingered in the recesses of my mind as I waited for Vance, pacing in front of the windows and absentmindedly wringing my hands. What if there was an even worse alternative to Valerius possessing Vance?
What if he had taken Jonah, instead? Jonah had to be at the league’s headquarters at some point, which was where I knew Vance had been locked up. By the time Vance came out, looking much more like his old self, I nearly pounced on him.
“What happened? How is this possible? Where’s Valerius?”
He held up his hands, palms out. “One thing at a time, please. I’m exhausted. The dungeons aren’t exactly a vacation.” When he sank into the sofa and put his feet up on the ottoman, he nearly groaned with pleasure. “It’s been so long since I’ve felt this comfortable.”
I sat next to him with my feet drawn up beneath me, eyes glued to his face. “All right. Tell me. You’ve got to know this is torture.”
“Is it? I’m sorry.” He took my hands. “I wasn’t thinking. You’re right, I should’ve explained right away. It’s all been such a blur, and I’m so tired.” He let his head drop against the cushions. “To be honest with you, I have no idea what happened. I mean, how he was gone all of a sudden. Things were always kind of… murky when he was in control. I knew what was happening, but it was like being on the other side of an almost-transparent curtain. Things were blurred, out of focus, and even the sound was sometimes muffled or garbled. You mentioned torture —I can’t imagine anything worse. Seeing the world turning around me and knowing there were acts being committed with the use of my body. Terrible, awful acts. And there was nothing I could do about it.”