“They tried that, actually. I have no idea how they got their hands on it, but the blood… I don’t know. They think that might be the blood she’s vomiting.”
“Like her body is rejecting it?” I ask. “How quickly did she vomit the blood after they gave it to her?”
“Maybe a few minutes after she drank it.”
“Did they give her blood from a turned vampire or a living one?” I demand.
“I don’t know. Why? Do you think that will matter?”
“I gave her some of Romelia’s blood,” I say in a rush. I don’t think she vomited that. Maybe I can try to get you some more and—”
“Hold on.”
I can just faintly overhear Bermon talk to someone. I can’t make out the person’s response, though.
“Doria here,” says a familiar voice. “Julian, I know you want to help, but—”
“Did she have blood from a living vampire? That might be more compatible. She might be able to tolerate it—”
Doria sighs. She’s the healer I was supposed to intern for, but the lockdown prevented conflicts between werewolves and vampires, so there wasn’t much of an opportunity for me to learn much of anything.
"Yes, of course, the blood we administered was from a living vampire," she murmurs. "I promise you we are doing everything we can—"
“What about magic?” I blurt out. “A witch. I know you said that the magical panacea is just a fraud, but witches can heal more than a werewolf can, right? Maybe there’s some other potion or spell, something, anything!”
“I have to get back to Mercy. Please, Julian, think about something else.” She hesitates. “Maybe if you can do some community service, maybe you can convince the headmaster to allow you to attend—”
“No. There’s no going back there.” I shake my head. “No. That ship has sailed. The moon has set. That door is shut to me forever.”
“You don’t know that,” she protests. “You’re a good student—”
“Who needed to repeat courses for both years so far. Some student.”
“I will talk to the headmaster myself. Once Mercy…”
She trails off, but we’re both thinking the same thing.
Once Mercy dies.
“I’ll talk to him,” she repeats to try to cover the silence.
I nod, say nothing, and end the call.
Frustration has me wanting to throw my phone across the room, but all I do is calmly shut the front door.
Soft footsteps pad across the floor, and Romelia approaches.
“Julian.”
Desperation has me pacing again, faster than before. “I don’t want to leave you alone in case someone finds us here, finds you here, but I don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” she says slowly. “Let me go with you. Let me help!”
“No. You stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because.” I halt my pacing and march over to her. My hands find hers, our fingers interlocking. “If I’m found, if I’m discovered, if there’s a fight, I would be able to fight that much harder if I know you’re safe. If we don’t have to worry about protecting each other’s backs.”
“But then you’ll have no one to watch your back at all!” she protests.
“I know, but please, trust me. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Julian, no. Don’t go.”
“I have to.” I lift my chin.
She lifts hers too, the perfect picture of furious indignation and defiance with her flashing red eyes. “Then I have to go with you.”
“Romelia, you aren’t listening.”
“You aren’t either.”
“She’s my friend.”
“Just because I haven’t met her yet doesn’t mean I want her to die. She’s suffering because of me. Because I couldn’t contain my happiness. Tyra knew you were the source of my happiness, and she went after you. It’s my fault that she’s dying. Why won’t you let me help you? Help her?”
I step closer to Romelia, pulling her close enough that I can touch my forehead to hers.
“I adore you. Your heart is so very big, and I appreciate that you want to help, but I have to do this.”
“Then you can understand that I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing and wait for you to come home. You know me better than that.”
My eyes close briefly.
“It’s not fair or right for you to ask that of me,” she says, a slight current of hurt lacing through her words.
"I'm not trying to stop you from helping me. I'm not expecting you to do nothing." I stare at her, and I feel so epically lost that I don't know what to do. My body physically feels like it's going to start to fall apart to match the inner turmoil I'm experiencing.
“I know you want to try to find some way to help Mercy. I do too,” Romelia says.
“Maybe… Maybe we should both try,” I muse.
“Separately?” she asks, the bright smile on her face giving way to a frown.
“Yes, I think that would be best. We need to do what we can to help her, and we can cover more ground separately than we can together. I don’t know if it’s even feasible for us to find a way to help her. She might...” I exhale a deep breath and force myself to say it. “She might die before we can save her. I hope that’s not the case. There’s nothing I want more than to race up a mountain, beating her to the top. I don’t know if we can help her any.”
“Just because we might fail doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” Romelia says softly. “Before we split up, do you want to talk about what you want to try?”
"A witch, maybe."
“I just don’t understand it,” Romelia mumbles. “Why didn’t my blood heal her?”
“Vampire blood is making her sick. They tried to give her more, and she vomited it.”
“Did she vomit mine? Not as far as I know, but maybe she did, and I just don’t know it. Why the blood is being rejected, I can’t say, but she’s also having convulsions.”
“She’s having seizures? That doesn’t make any sense either. Why? An attack from a vampire shouldn’t be causing such issues.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe she’s been cursed. Maybe someone else attacked her somehow. I can’t say. There are too many unknowns, but the one thing I do know is that I can’t sit around here, waiting for her to die. Waiting for that phone call. Mercy won’t die because of me.”
“Because of our love.” Romelia squeezes her eyes shut.
I grip her shoulders. “Look at me,” I urge.
I have to repeat myself three more times before she’ll listen.
“Romelia, our love didn’t do this. Hatred did. We can’t change people’s minds. All we can control is our actions, and we’re going to do what we can to help Mercy. We might not be able to, but trying is better than sitting around.”
“You’re right.”
I press my lips to her forehead. “Be careful,” I urge.
And before she can protest or say anything else, I'm out the door.
Chapter 3
Romelia
Julian just ups and leaves, and he can do that. That’s fine, but I prefer to come up with a plan. I already ran about trying to figure stuff out on the fly, and I ended up seeing my father. That ended up so well that I’m now disowned.
Maybe it bothers me some that he tossed me aside as if I’m a used rag. I can’t stop thinking about the fire in his eyes as he told me I was disowned. I’m no longer his daughter. It shouldn’t bother me. When he rejected giving me his tear to make the magical panacea, I already thought he was no longer my father, but I feel betrayed. He hurt me, and all because I won’t obey his will. I won’t bow to him, and I won’t be his puppet, his pawn. Even if Julian and I hadn’t married yet, I wouldn’t marry Constantine. Never. That will never happen.
I’m sure the healers at Moonstone Academy have plenty of research, but they might not have time to look at it right now. My tablet is back at Blood Haven Academy,
and as much as I don’t want to return there—somehow it feels tainted—I do. I retrieve the tablet, but then I race right back to Blackhope Manor.
Blackhope Manor.
Blackhope.
Black hope.
Yes, my hope is very black indeed. There might not be a chance for Mercy, and it’s so very hard to not give into anger and hatred and despair.
But I do my best to ignore my emotions entirely, and I go onto the home page of Moonstone Academy. It’s not easy, but I manage to break into the code, and from there, I locate not just the student directory but also all of their files. Hmm. Maybe hacking can be a possible career option for me.
I draw up Mercy’s health chart. It seems that my blood isn’t special after all. She had vomited blood before she was administered additional vampire blood that she also vomited. That shouldn’t be the case. Julian drank my blood before, and he was fine. It healed him completely and totally. If not for my blood, he would have died.
Is it possible that Julian’s theory is true? Can two people share a soul? We did connect from the very start, as if a part of us know each other before we first met. Can that be why my blood healed him? Is it possible that the occasion had been the first time that a vampire’s blood healed a werewolf?
Hmm. It’s a tangent that maybe I shouldn’t explore right now, but I am curious, so I open a new window to do some research. Maybe I can try to figure out another means for healing a werewolf with my digging.
Let’s see… supes.com is a massive resource with all kinds of dark corners, and I—
“There you are.”
I almost drop my tablet. As soon as I arrived at the manor, I started to hack immediately, so I’m just standing in the foyer. I hadn’t shut the door, and I turn around to see Tyra standing there.
The sun has risen almost to its zenith, casting a golden halo on Tyra’s already golden brown hair. She tilts her head to the side, appraising me.
I hug my tablet to my chest, not wanting her to see what I was researching but also wanting to form a barricade between us.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“It wasn’t easy.” She smiles broadly, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Can I come in?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here.”
“Why? Is Julian here?” Tyra comes inside despite my words, and I bristle.
“You should go.”
“No, Romelia, you need to. Why are you here? You have your class—”
“Who cares about that right now?”
“You’re mad at me because I ran off and challenged Julian. I know that what I did was rash, but you have to understand—”
“I don’t have to anything,” I say bitterly. “Even Julian knows better than to try to tell me what I have to do. He wanted me to stay here while he tries to save Mercy, his friend, the one you basically killed, but he doesn’t force me to do anything. We talked things out like adults, like reasonable people, and I’m going to try to save Mercy too.”
“Why?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I counter. “Tyra, how can you have fallen so far?”
She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, I see my friend again. There are doubt and fear in her eyes, and she pulls on her fingers.
"Romelia, you don't understand. You haven't experienced it yet. When you do…" She shakes her head, her hair falling forward to shield her face. "When the demon side takes over, it's so hard to stop. Your emotions become so very heightened, especially the dark ones—anger, hatred, rage. Your emotions just take over. They overwhelm you to the point of suffocating you, and right and wrong don't matter. Just how you're feeling, and you almost want to feel the hatred, the anger. It's… I don't know how to control it, how to stop it, and… and…"
Tyra’s shoulders slump, and I feel torn. I honestly don’t know what she’s going through, and if it’s something I’m going to experience too, that terrifies me.
"I haven't talked to my father about the changes I'm going through because I don't know if he'll understand, if he'll be able to help me," she continues. "We've never really connected, just like you didn't with your father, but I think… I think we both need to talk to them. Not together. You with your father and me with mine. We need help to get through this. We all have certain aspects of ourselves, you know, between being a woman and being a vampire, but we're also demons too."
“For whatever reason, it hasn’t happened to me yet, and I have more than enough on my plate as it is that I’m not going to start worrying about that now,” I say firmly. “I know you’ve been dealing with this all alone, and I’m sorry. I don’t know how to help you, but I do want you to find help. If you think your father can, that’s wonderful. Or maybe you can talk to one of the professors who’s a living vampire too. That might be a better, safer bet because they actually went through this.”
“Come with me,” Tyra pleads. “I don’t think I can handle this by myself.”
I gape at her, confused. “You just said that we should talk to our fathers separately. You don’t need me then.”
“You have to come back,” Tyra murmurs. “Your parents—”
“Is that why you’re here?” I cut in, my words biting. “Are you here for them? Did they send you? Ask you to track me down? Are you their rat?”
“What? No.” Tyra laughs and waves her hands. “No, nothing like that. I just… I found some intel on Constantine, and I think you need to talk to your father about him. I know you don’t want to date him, and I completely understand—”
“You didn’t forget the fact that I’m married, did you?” I growl. My hands curl into tight fists inside my glove, and I can feel the pressure from my rings.
“Of course not, but your parents don’t know that.”
I narrow my eyes at her.
“And they won’t know that. Not from me. I swear to you, Romelia. Do you want me to make a blood oath? Because I will.”
I soften some. A vampire has no choice but to fulfill a blood oath.
"Tyra, I don't want to talk to you or anyone else about Constantine," I say. "I don't… I'm trying to forgive you. I really am, but you challenged Julian. You challenged my husband to fight to the death. I know you said it's because your emotions are out of control, that you aren't yourself, and I'm trying to accept that."
“It’s bad. It looks bad, and, Romelia, it’s worse. It actually feels so much worse than it sounds. I’m trying so hard to not fall apart. I can’t… I don’t know if you noticed, but lately, I’ve been drinking from goblets and not from the vein because I don’t trust myself. I never once killed a human from drinking too much, but I’m worried I will. I… My emotions are heightened, but so is my thirst, and I’ve been having other strange cravings too.”
"What kind of cravings?" I ask, even though I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
Tyra shakes her head emphatically. “Please don’t ask me. You don’t want to know.”
“You’re the one who is convinced that I’ll feel it myself one day. Why don’t you give me a bit of a warning?”
She closes her eyes, and dark bloodied tears stream down her porcelain cheeks. “I haven’t tried it, but I think… I think I want to taste it.”
“Taste what?”
“Flesh.”
My heart skips a beat and then pounds so furiously that I worry my heart will bruise my ribs. “You want to eat flesh.”
“I-I think I do. I mean, I don’t want to, but I think my body does. I can’t tell you enough how much I don’t trust my body.”
“Do you even trust the words coming out of your mouth?” I ask.
Tyra flinches. She lifts her head, her hair falling back, and she wipes a hand on her right cheek, leaving a smear of blood. “I know you’re mad at me. I can accept that. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t thinking rationally. My actions, my choice, my body, my hand, my claws, my fangs… I could have killed Julian. He could be the one clinging to life right now instead of Mercy.”
“Did you do anything to her?” I blurt out. “Did you poison her in some way?”
“No.”
"Are you sure?" I press. "Have you experienced any blackouts? How do you know that you aren't like a werewolf? Maybe instead of having a wolf inside of you, maybe you have a demon. Maybe that demon is starting to gain control and come out. You're just a vessel for a demon. Is that possible?"
“What? No. No! I haven’t had one blackout. I might not be able to control my emotions, but it’s still me doing the actions. I attacked Mercy, and then I attacked Julian once he… We fought. I did it. No one else. There’s no demon inside of me. Just me. I’m the demon and the vampire.”
Tyra sounds so utterly miserable, but I want to rip out my hair.
“You didn’t poison her. You didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“Then what is going on with her? Why is she vomiting? Why won’t vampire blood heal her? What did you do to her?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Tyra protests. “I mean, yes, I slashed her. Yes, I tried to kill her. I don’t—”
“She’s vomiting blood, and she’s having seizures. She’s fighting something off, something you did. Are you certain no one told you to do something, that you didn’t have any poison—”
“Will you stop with the poison already?” Tyra snaps. “I’m not like those filthy werewolves. I didn’t have poison on my claws or my fangs. Nothing like that.”
I hold up my hands, the tablet in one hand, the screen long since turned dark. "You can't blame me for wondering."
“I do feel bad,” Tyra mumbles. “I wasn’t… I shouldn’t have challenged Julian, and when he refused, I should have dropped it at that. The challenge had been given to him. Mercy shouldn’t have fought me. Then, none of this would’ve happened.”
She looks at me, and it’s beyond clear that she wants absolution, and I want to ease her suffering. I want to ease her conscience.
Blood Haven: Year Three: A Mayhem of Magic World Story Page 2