by Iris Walker
“Lucidia,” Landon warned, standing abruptly. “Do not walk away from this opportunity.”
She turned to him, shoulders squared, a dark look crossing her face. “You have grand visions, Landon Prior, but you lack one crucial thing: loyalty. You will never lead your people into a better life until you learn to value them. You can sit here, in your tall tower, and feign inclusion and equality while your people are getting attacked on the streets, but none of it will matter, because sooner or later, they’ll catch on that you’re willing to turn your back on systematic genocide if it suits your ambitions.”
Landon’s red eyes burned with indignance. “You talk to me of loyalty? After you betrayed your own master not once, but three separate times? You declared yourself free of all ties to the vampire race. Explain how that loyalty works.”
The corner of her mouth turned up in a wicked smile. “I’m loyal to myself, Landon. Not Darian, not you, and not any other sorry sack that comes along grubbing for power at the expense of others. I do what I know is right, and I make those decisions for myself, no matter who they align with. This decision, right here, is being made because of seeds that you shoved into the ground, the second you decided to abandon your own people, along with countless innocent humans and strongbloods. Master Darian and I may have disagreed on a lot, but he always prioritized the safety and wellbeing of his subjects, and I do the same.”
She turned on her heel and stormed out of the office, heartbeat thudding in her ears as she contemplated the extent of Fausta and Cain’s treachery.
Reykon
Halfway down the corridor, some golden boy in security finally grew enough brain cells to pull the alarm.
Flashing red lights and a fire siren didn’t exactly make the hallway less sinister. Reykon tore through, tightening the pack and racing to the last door. He’d taken a keycard from Spire’s vampire reject, and he swiped it quickly, every muscle tense as he barreled through the door.
“Remember me?” he said with a determined smile.
Noomi’s eyes widened, and Reykon unshouldered the pack, digging through until he found the ornate-looking perfume bottle.
“What are you-” Noomi gasped, her eyes falling on the glass vial. “No!”
“Oh, yes,” Reykon said, casting a glance behind his shoulder. “You don’t get much of a say in this.”
“I’ll go with you!” she cried. “Just don’t use that!”
“No can do. I don’t have another way to get you out of those shackles. Don’t worry, I’ll pack you in with bubble wrap.”
Reykon took his dagger and walked over to Noomi, who was fighting against the thick chains. Luckily, those chains wouldn’t be a problem for much longer.
Steps thudded, and a buzzer went off somewhere down the hallway. In a moment, he sliced Noomi’s arm, and collected a few drops of blood, before pricking his own finger and smearing the blood along the rim of the vial. She began to dematerialize, fading into thick smoke, sucked into the vial in one long draught. Reykon put the lid on and gingerly packed it into his gear.
Back before the caster’s guild locked the genies up, they created a synthetic lamp design that could transport anybody to another plane, though Reykon wasn’t sure which one had been designated as the indefinite, incorporeal purgatory. The use of genie lamps was highly illegal, and a little volatile, but Reykon wasn’t looking to do Noomi any favors. He had bigger problems.
He slung the pack on his shoulder and sprinted to the door, listening for only a second before he tore it open and ducked out. Bullets whistled past him like hail. Why are the vampires using bullets? he thought.
The corridor turned, cutting through to the side. Reykon called the blueprints up in his mind, tracking his progress to the loading bay, where he’d prepped a vehicle. Another glance confirmed that it wasn’t vampires, but strongbloods, chasing him. Mistake number two on Landon’s part.
Reykon actually smiled, legs pumping against the rough concrete, finally feeling the thrill of a mission after so long.
Until he heard a vicious growl from around the corner, not five feet in front of him.
Robin
“What is this place?” Robin asked, eyes widening as they stepped into the tropical paradise. It was a massive mansion, on a private, gated property, palm trees and exotic flowers lining the entire landscape. The inside was made of swirling orange and brown stone, with open air arches and tall, domed ceilings. Lavish furniture with tropical designs decorated the massive space beautifully.
Darian glanced around, eyeing it with simple satisfaction, as though it were a hotel room of sufficient luxury. “I bought it from a human celebrity, in case a situation arose.”
“Which celebrity?” Robin asked, running her fingers along the beautiful couch that Harley plopped down on. Charlemagne sunk into the red leather armchair, and Darian stood, perfectly content with his rigid posture.
It creeped Robin out that they didn’t need to move, but she was getting more and more used to the strange, skin-crawling idiosyncrasies that vampires embodied.
“I don’t know,” Darian admitted. “They all blend together after so many years, though a few do stick out in my memory. Shakespeare and Anne Boleyn, they hit it big in their time. I suppose she was the Kardashian of the sixteenth century.”
“I’m sure,” Robin muttered, suppressing a smile.
Screams echoed down the hallway, until a door slammed, and the noise was cut off entirely. Robin couldn’t help but look, studying the corridor, and finding it empty. “Will Ezra be okay with him?”
Harley laughed, shaking her head and wiping more blood from her nose. A small smile touched Darian’s lips too, as he swept across the room with all the grace of a ballroom dancer and sat next to Harley. “Ezra is a very fierce vampire, both on the battlefield, and in the interrogation room.”
Robin scowled slightly. “He seems so…”
“Polite?” Harley asked with another laugh. “Give him five minutes and a butter knife, and he could make a mute person sing.”
“Oh.”
The smell of eggs and bacon wafted through the air, and Robin looked to the kitchen, hearing the scuffle of footsteps.
“Do people live here?” she asked.
Darian was inspecting Harley’s shoulder, which was turned at a sickening angle and looked longer than it should have. “Yes,” he murmured. “Those I charged with the care of this place, in my stead.”
“Are they…” she began, not wanting to throw out the V-word.
“Humans,” Darian said with an amused smile. He gave Harley’s arm a yank and it jerked back into place with a sickening pop.
“Jesus,” Harley breathed, twisting her head against the pain for a brief moment before nodding. “Better.”
Robin concealed her grimace of repulsion at the supernatural triage system, looking away and studying an expensive vase.
Darian sat back, looking around the room once more. “I do not prefer coming home to an empty house. It’s nice to have someone to leave the lights on.”
“Yeah, that’s why my grandma says to always have a cat,” Robin mumbled. “But I guess this works too.”
Her comment seemed to amuse Darian. A moment later, someone walked in and brought steaming platters of food to her, Harley, and Charlemagne. Robin looked up and thanked the young woman, trying not to stare. She had burns, snaking up half of her body, visible from the waving sundress she wore. The woman moved like a dancer, tiptoeing across the room and bending gracefully over the back of the couch to hug Darian.
Robin watched the strange encounter, giving no regard to the courtesy of not staring.
Darian smiled and turned his head, looking her up and down with a sparkle in his eye. “My dear, the last time I saw you, you were hardly tall enough to stand. Look at you now.”
She grinned, beautiful, even with the burns that marred her face. “It is so good to see you, Darian Xander.”
Not master? Robin observed, feeling her brow pull together.
>
The more time she spent around Darian, the more layers she found, the more hats he seemed to wear. It was almost as though he was a chameleon, putting on different faces for different occasions.
He was damn good at it, and damn convincing.
An old man hobbled into the room from the kitchen, leaning on a hand carved cane. “Everything is to your liking?” he asked the room.
Robin nodded, a polite smile on her face.
“Yes, thank you,” Harley said.
Charlemagne just nodded, still deep in his plate.
Darian rose now, walking over to the man and giving him a big hug. “My goodness, time has done well for you,” he said, leading both of them into the kitchen to discuss something in private. Robin craned her neck, watching them disappear behind the adobe arch.
They finished their food in silence, Harley gaining more strength with each moment. The bruises that had sprouted black and purple along her face and arms had faded to yellow, and now were barely noticeable at all.
“You gonna stare at me all day?” Harley asked with an arched brow.
“Maybe,” Robin threw back.
This made the strongblood laugh. “Your wrist alright?” Harley asked, glancing over and jerking her chin towards it.
Robin remembered the crack, the feeling of her bones snapping from the impact of the vampire, and she drew a sharp breath in, looking down to it.
No trace of the gruesome injury stood out on her skin.
“What?” Robin murmured, flexing her fingers.
Charlemagne let out a long sigh and set his plate on the ornate coffee table. “It likely healed during the energy draw.”
“Energy what?” Robin asked with a scowl.
“I’ve been observing the mechanics of your new abilities… it seems that you have the unique ability to transfer the energy bound to vampires. You can siphon that energy and transfer it to yourself, through the markings on your skin. They provide both pathways and structure to your biological makeup.”
Robin raised her eyebrows, looking at both of her hands and the vibrant red lightning strikes running up and down her whole body. “Huh.”
“My guess is that when you, well, humanized that vampire, the energy healed your injury before any excess ran into your system.”
“Is it dangerous?” Robin asked, her thoughts flying back to the visions of Calliope that nobody else knew about. “How much of that energy stuff can I do, before it could, well, hurt me?”
Charlemagne frowned. “Couldn’t say yet. We would need to run more tests.”
Robin chewed it over, listening to the birds chirp outside. The sitting area was open to the air, covered and set behind large arches that gave way to the rolling landscape. In the distance, waves crashed against the shore, and the sun had reached higher into the sky, bringing a bright yellow dawn with it.
It was only a few more moments before Ezra staggered into the living area, covered in blood, his red eyes burning with a mixture of emotions. “It appears the problem is worse than we originally anticipated,” he said gravely.
Lucidia
She met Pax and Anna Lucia in their hotel room, a luxurious penthouse.
Pax looked out of place, rigid and stiff among the ornate drapes and plush furniture.
Frankly, Lucidia was too.
Anna Lucia couldn’t have been more at home, sprawled out on the bed with her arms propped behind her head and a satisfied smile on her lips. Pax pulled the curtains back with a single finger, his face set in a permanent grimace. “Fill me in, would you?” he said gruffly.
Where to start?
Lucidia raised an eyebrow and collected her thoughts. “I was on the road with Reykon Thraxos-”
“Wait, you were with Demonte’s boy?”
She nodded, standing closer to the window, studying the flashing lights and bustling city. “We got tied up in the whole Robin thing.”
“Still can’t believe you did that,” Pax said with a breathy laugh. “Everyone in training just about shit a brick when we heard that Lucidia the Fearless confessed to treason. We thought it was a joke.”
“No joke,” she muttered, crossing her arms.
“Why the hell?” Pax asked, turning to her with a genuine expression.
“It was magic. The witches imbued Robin with some sort of pull that makes us drawn to her. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t kill her.”
Pax studied her face for a moment before giving a single nod. “Okay.”
“What?”
“Just saying, it’d be hard for me to kill my own blood. It was hard.”
Lucidia remembered the incident vaguely, when one of his Strexos brethren defected and he was charged with hunting the traitor down. Yiselle, if she recalled correctly. A troublemaker through and through, but not deserving of what had come to her.
“I didn’t have tea parties with Robin,” Lucidia said in a short voice. “I hadn’t even seen her until halfway through the mission I botched to hell, so it was a short reunion and an even shorter goodbye. Now, we have no clue where she is. Reykon’s out looking for her, but he’ll probably get himself killed in the process. He’s too deep in it to keep a clear mind.”
“He’s formidable?” Pax asked.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise you.”
“Let’s hope,” she grumbled. “Robin was supposed to be a weapon for the vampires, but as far as I’m concerned, Fausta and Cain are a hundred times more dangerous.”
“They’ve decimated house after house,” Pax said. “We tried to hop, but every stronghold we approached was either empty or still smoldering, crawling with their agents.”
“How did they amass troops so quickly?” Lucidia asked, letting out a breath of frustration. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“My guess is that Cain sensed Magnus’s weakness and conspired early on. Fausta’s always had a penchant for intel, so she probably picked up on it and made a deal under the table to act. It’s not like they don’t have the following, either. After the Demonte attack, relations got so tense that people were foaming at the mouth for caster blood. Fausta and Cain just turned all that anger on the other masters and supplied them with weapons.”
“How many of us made it out?” she asked, turning her fierce eyes to his.
“Us? Thought you abandoned us.”
“I left because I had to, not because I wished genocide on the only family I’ve ever had.”
Pax gave a slight shrug and let out a long breath. “I was there when whispers of foul play at the smaller houses began. Fausta ambushed in an instant, and nobody had a chance to do anything until it was already done. But the bigger houses had a little time. People were shuffled out, through tunnels. I think master Darian’s defected elementalists helped, even though they were watched with a million eyes. First, the humans were evacuated, then groups of strongbloods with some of the royal vampires, and then whoever was left. But by then, they’d arrived. I heard that from a Hyxos kid, running from House Tremont. We met briefly in one of Darian’s safehouses.”
“You knew where the safehouses were?”
“I didn’t, until a freaking angel whispered in my ear.”
Lucidia frowned. “Come again?”
“Remember that magical message system that got banned and everything?”
“Yes, I remember why we banned casters being able to implant thoughts in our heads,” she said with growing anger. “Especially now, it seems like a good decision.”
“Well, evidently someone didn’t care for the rules. They sent a message out to most of the Xander members that there was a website you could go to. Whoever’s running it verifies your identity through the webcam and then sends you to the location of one of Darian’s secret holdings. It’s all random, and completely untraceable. They’re calling the genius our Guardian Angel. There was an all-call to spread the word to any Xander agents you ran into.”
“How many people have they moved?” Lucidia asked.
“D
on’t know. But the last safehouse we went to was packed. At least two hundred.”
“I want to talk to this ‘angel’, or whoever,” Lucidia said.
“Why?”
“To plan for next steps. Defense is great, but sooner or later, we need to come up with a solution for long term.”
“Woah, woah,” Pax said. “What do you mean? That’s not our job.”
“Our job?” Lucidia asked sharply.
“It’s the vampires’ fight,” he threw back. “They’re ripping each other apart, not us. This is the first unanticipated war where strongbloods weren’t poured into the front lines like candy. We just need to stay out of the way.”
“How can you say that? They’re slaughtering everybody they see. Someone has to do something.”
“It’s Master Darian’s job,” he said. “I’m protecting Anna Lucia, which is my duty.”
“Master Darian isn’t here!” Lucidia snapped.
“You seriously think he abandoned us?”
She narrowed her eyes. “No. I never said he wasn’t doing anything, I just said he wasn’t here. The snake’s somewhere, planning something, but in the meantime, our people are holed up in crowded halfway houses, and that will attract attention. Every day that passes is another day that Fausta and Cain gain power.”
“Lucie, we’re two strongbloods in a world full of vampires,” he growled. “What do you expect to do?”
She felt the anger boil over inside of her. “I walked head first into a werewolf war so bloody that it threatened to expose all of us to the humans. A hundred thousand wolves on either side of the conflict, and it took ten strongbloods executing twenty-three people to end it. Ten. Do you understand those odds? It’s not a blunt force attack, it’s a surgical operation.”
“You’ll never get close!” Pax scoffed, throwing his arms up in a gesture of disbelief.
“Then I’m putting you in charge of my eulogy,” she grumbled. “I need to get in touch with the Guardian Angel, ASAP. You stay here and protect the princess, but I’m going to go slay the dragon, if you don’t mind.”