by Rye Brewer
Stark’s voice was low, flat. “This is the place where Emilie and I were born. It’s home.”
I turned to him with a soft gasp. “I thought you lived in Hallowthorn Landing.”
“I have rooms there, but it will never be home to me.”
“Are we in Romania?” I remembered him mentioning it when he told me his sister’s story.
He shook his head. “This specific place can’t be located on a human map. We made our life in the human world, yes, more out of necessity than anything else. But this was where we were born and spent our earliest years. I wonder more often than I’d like to admit how very different life would’ve turned out if we’d never left.”
He walked to the mantle and leaned his hand against one of the few bare places where wax hadn’t taken over. “I don’t come here often,” he murmured, staring into the dark hearth. “Only when I want to be close to my sister again, if only in my mind… my spirit.”
The depth of his pain took my breath away. It practically dripped from his words the way wax dripped from the candles. And it had hardened over the years, as the wax had, and formed a shell around him.
“But we’re no longer in Hallowthorn Landing,” I confirmed.
“Correct. We’re in the same dimension, however. This place, Hallowthorn, Shadowsbane. They’re all in the same dimension.”
“Shadowsbane?” I frowned. “What’s that?”
It was like he hadn’t noticed he’d said it—he was too far away to pay full attention to our conversation. My question seemed to come as a surprise.
“You’ll know more about that in due time,” he promised with a knowing chuckle.
I hated the sound of that soft laugh. He was still holding something back.
Maybe it was for my own good. Maybe it was something I didn’t want to know.
He cleared up my unspoken confusion. “Before you hear all about that, I want to tell you about me. Then, you can decide if you trust me or not.”
His words landed on me like blocks of ice. I actually shivered a little, which I tried to hide. What could there be about him that was so bad? I guessed if he were as old as he said, there could be any number of secrets in his past.
He stood up straight, hands at his side, looking resolute. “You said earlier that you’d never heard my name before.”
“That’s right.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What about the name… Starkers?”
I gasped, it wasn’t possible. “Starkers are just a myth. A band of secret humans who hunt vampires. There’s never been any proof of their existence.”
“Except for the vampires they killed,” he murmured.
“Except for that—but even so…”
“You don’t have to make excuses for what you already know to be true, so don’t bother.” He shook his head. “The group has always been secretive enough and stayed far enough undercover to avoid being caught.”
I sputtered. “They’ve been around for hundreds of years, haven’t they? Supposedly?”
“Supposedly.”
Hundreds of years. My mind spun with possibilities. It had been hundreds of years since Emilie died. But he couldn’t have. There was no way. And yet, her death had changed him. Crushed him. When a person suffered pain like that, they were capable of anything.
Even organizing a band of vampire killers and giving them his name. Did he name them? Or did they pick the name out theirselves?
“Are things beginning to make sense now?” There was a note of sympathy in his question.
“No. They’re not.” I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Not him.
“Perhaps it would help if you learned from my blood.”
“What?” My voice rang through the room. I didn’t mean to shout, but it came out that way. “One minute, you hate me for being a vampire. The next, you ask me to drink your blood.”
“I don’t hate you for being a vampire,” he reminded me in a softer tone than I’d ever heard him use before. “Have I felt conflicted because of my history and your dual nature? Yes. But I don’t hate you. I never did.” No matter how many times he’d told me that in the past, I hadn’t believed him. I believed him then.
“I—I don’t think I want to. Drink, that is.” I wrung my hands.
There was a time when the turmoil he was putting me through would start a dangerous tingle in my fingertips. A tingle which would soon turn to a crackling sound. He had taught me how to handle that.
“You should. You’ll be able to see my memories. I’ll open them for you.” He took a step toward me. Then another.
I would’ve run, if I knew where I was running to. I was that conflicted. What if I saw something that would change my feelings for him? Something so terrible, I couldn’t look at him the same way again? He meant too much to me.
“Stark, please. Don’t make me do this.” I wished I could move my feet, but they seemed glued to the floor as he closed the distance between us and placed his hands on either side of my face. My heart took off.
His eyes stared straight into mine. “Sara. I would never offer this if it wasn’t important.”
“Why is it so important?” I breathed.
He was so close. His face seemed to swim in front of me, like I was about to swoon. I willed my heart to slow down a bit before I did just that. But it was all so perfect—or it would’ve been, if I wasn’t staring down the prospect of learning things I didn’t want to know about him.
“It just is. I want you to know everything before you make up your mind about me.” His breath was warm on my face, as warm as the hands still touching me. They slid down to my shoulders before he pulled me closer.
When his lips brushed against mine, I had the sense of the inevitable finally coming to pass as I let myself sink into his arms.
29
Sara
What was I supposed to do after a kiss like that? I’d thought I was conflicted before. The entire world was upside down by the time he pulled away. My eyes opened slowly, like there was part of me that wanted to hold onto that moment forever. Because there was.
He looked down at me with new warmth, and a slight smile touched the corners of what I knew was his warm, firm, inviting mouth. I wanted him to kiss me again—forever, even—but there were more pressing issues at hand.
“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 that 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, and man and a woman with their fangs bared again
st 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 that 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 you 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 that 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 dampness of the dewy grass 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 just then. 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 like I had just 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 just then.
“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 even 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 just the 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 that 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 just that, back when I was young. The Great Fire had changed a lot of things. They may have backed away from my clan after that, gone somewhere else.
“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 just the same for him as I did before, and I almost wished I didn’t. It would’ve been so much easier if I didn’t.
“Do you know where they are now?” I asked.
“You saw where they were. They haven’t left.”
Yes, I saw. They hadn’t even gone far from the Carver mansion to kill Ferdinand. The city we’d been near was New York. It made sense that 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 that 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 that 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 that the Starkers were even real until less than an hour earlier—but I was no less sure that this was my destiny. Or at least part of it. There could be a positive side to my elemental powers, after all.