Darkest Whispers (Eternal Shadows Book 2)

by Kate Martin

  I noticed that he didn’t say anything about Rhys.

  “They already set the date.” Madge again, angry as ever. “We have less than three days. How are we supposed to fix anything in that little time, with no evidence to prove Rhys innocent, and no way of knowing what Rhys said last night?”

  “I am going to see Rhys tonight,” the General said. “I will find out what happened. I will learn the truth. The date was only set to appease Tyrus’s rage.”

  “It won’t matter,” Madge said.

  My vision had blurred all around the edges. What I could see had turned into some strange swirling kaleidoscope. Could vampires faint?

  Millie moved through that swirling mass towards me. “Kass? Kass, are you all right?”

  “Yeah, uh, yeah. Sure. I’m good.” The icy feeling on my neck grew hard and constricting, like someone had my spine in a tight grip, intending to snap it. My heart strained, as though trying to beat, as though I needed it to live. I couldn’t breathe.

  Gently, Millie took my elbow in hand. “We’ll fix this,” she said. The new scar on her face only reminded me of just how far we had all fallen in such a short amount of time.

  “How? What do we do?” Rhys couldn’t watch me die. He couldn’t. It would destroy him. A fate worse than death. I really had to learn to stop questioning the universe.

  Cade entered my vision. Millie looked panicked. I moved my gaze from her face to his. That was what I needed. Cade’s steady calm. Only there seemed to be a crack in that calm right then, a fracture that threatened to shatter everything. I waited for him to answer me, to fill me in on the grand plan that wouldn’t end in my death and Rhys’s complete destruction.

  He said nothing.

  I pulled away from both of them. “I uh, I just need a moment. Alone.” Stumbling over the rug I made for the door. Was it me, or was the room tilting? I thought the General begin to say something to me, but when I spun around he just looked at me blankly. They all did. Even Aurelia.

  I ran for my room and slammed the door. It wouldn’t keep the world out, no matter how much I wished it. Pressing my forehead against the wood, I squeezed my eyes shut, and for the first time in weeks, let myself cry.

  So this was desperation.

  I woke to nothing but darkness and moonlight. The familiar smells all around told me I had somehow gotten into bed, but I didn’t bother to wonder about it. I remembered everything. And that was enough to keep my mind busy for eternity.

  Or the next three days. Whichever came first.

  I took a deep breath, stretched and turned to face Millie where she sat by my bed, watching patiently. “Tell me I dreamed it,” I said.

  “I wish I could.” She pulled my desk chair closer and reached out to take my hand, her own mottled with burns. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know.” I sat up, moving slowly, afraid of what might happen if I didn’t, and leaned back against the headboard. “Have you been here the whole time?” The clock read eleven at night.

  “Mostly. Brody kept me company. I didn’t want you to be alone when you woke.”

  “Thanks.” She really meant it. Anyone else would have stayed to make sure I didn’t take off, but Millie was different. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Sorry for panicking when told someone wants you dead? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Not like Tyrus is the first. Really, he’s cutting the line.”

  Millie sighed, not seeing the humor of my statement. “Cade wanted to speak with you when you woke,” she said. “Should I go get him? Or would you like more time?”

  I didn’t really have more time. “Now’s fine. Thanks.”

  She squeezed my hand and gave me a hardly comforting smile that strained her marred face before leaving. I had all of five seconds to myself before Cade came through my door, closing it tight behind him. Something about seeing him made all my fears well up.

  “Are they really going to kill me?”

  He passed by the chair and sat instead on the edge of the bed in front of me. “It won’t come to that.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “We’ll find something. Do something.”

  “We’ve had weeks. Now we’re down to days. I appreciate the sentiment, but don’t tell me lies.” I put my face in my hands and pressed until sparks flew behind my eyelids. I would not cry.

  “You don’t have to be afraid.”

  I dropped my hands. “Yes, I do. I have everything to be afraid of. If they kill me—You know what it will do to him. It will destroy him. And if they make him watch . . . I don’t think he can take it again.”

  Cade studied me for a moment. “It’s not your own death you’re afraid of. It’s what your death will do to Rhys.”

  “If it would save him, I would die a thousand times over. But my death won’t save him. It will do just the opposite. Rhys wouldn’t even have the hope of my rebirth. Tyrus picked his revenge perfectly. Executing Rhys would be mercy compared to this. I have to stay alive.”

  “There is still a chance that we can convince Tyrus to rescind this new punishment. He was angry, Rhys is not himself. Julius left to talk to them both. He will find out the truth. But in the meantime, I have a backup plan.”

  “A backup plan?” I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, Cade always had plans. “What plan?”

  “I made a promise to take care of you. I keep my promises. If by tomorrow there is no change, you will disappear.”

  “Disappear? Meaning, what? You’re going to hide me? Won’t that get you in trouble? Huge trouble?”

  “I won’t be implicated.” He said it so assuredly, without hesitation, that it already seemed the truth.

  “But what then? I live on my own, without Rhys?”

  “Until it becomes possible for you to resurface, yes. It is better than the alternative.”

  I just nodded. Rhys knowing I was alive was better than him knowing I was dead. I could live with that. He had lived like that once before, with Jacqueline. He could do it again.

  But he didn’t have to.

  Not if I was willing to act on my own.

  “Until then,” Cade said, tilting my head up with a finger under my chin, making me look at him, “don’t do anything stupid.”

  Lies and omission were becoming my thing. “Of course not.”

  He nodded, and stood. “Good. I’ll leave you then. I’m sure you could use some time alone to gather your thoughts. I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

  Good god, had I just experienced what I thought I did? I’d seen so many of his silent conversations with Rhys, but had never dreamed I would be involved in one. Did someone in this house actually trust me? Or, at least, was as desperate as I was? Cade left me, leaving my door ajar. Downstairs, he called for Aurelia, asked her to speak with him outside.

  I didn’t have much time.

  The study was empty, and I took that as a sign. Cade had been there the night Sara was attacked. He had watched me dispatch of the vampire on my own. Which meant he must have heard everything. Including the mention of the map. And he hadn’t said anything.

  I had to act fast, Cade would only be able to keep Aurelia away for so long, and I couldn’t be sure no one else would come by, but I didn’t even know what I was actually looking for. A map. A map that wasn’t actually even a map, according to my mysterious, smoking VFO contact. Could my instructions be any more vague?

  I shut the door, took a deep breath, and tried to reason through this.

  Something hidden. Something carefully guarded by the General and most likely Aurelia as well. Well, that covered about half the things in the room. He had papers everywhere, books, and boxes, and trinkets, and regular old maps that were clearly of nothing more interesting than the basic human world. I glanced through the papers that had been left out, casually moving a few aside, then back into place when I determined they were not what I wanted. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the empty study hadn’t been a sign. Maybe Cade hadn’t
been signaling anything to me at all. Maybe tomorrow I would run away, never to see Rhys again—or worse, be caught and face my death.

  The boxes that had once carried the mummified pieces of the General’s friends, and even one of Eva’s bones, sat piled up in the corner. I opened each one, just to be sure. Nothing lay within. All empty. The tightness in my chest loosened at that. Seeing those things had been hard enough the first time. But my hands had started shaking. I had already been here too long. What did Cade think I could do in a matter of minutes?

  The bookshelves were impeccable, as always. Most of the books had been there since my childhood, but some were new. Some had bindings that flaked away, or gleamed in well-oiled care. One had papers sticking out from in between its tattered and ancient pages.

  The Generation book.

  It couldn’t be that simple. Could it?

  Rhys had told me the book was guarded closely, that the information inside could be used against them, to bring down vampire society. But, now that I thought about it, that made no sense. Not if he had been talking about the family tree. Generations were common knowledge, obvious to sense, and worn like a badge of honor among the eldest vampires. No one needed to protect those few pages filled with names.

  What did the other pages hold?

  I held my breath and listened carefully for the others. Millie and Madge were upstairs, along with Brody and Isaac. Warren was with Olivia. Again. Ugh. I couldn’t hear Cade and Aurelia. I pulled the book down from the shelf, and flipped it open.

  The first pages were written in a language I couldn’t read. Further in, the text turned to English and I recognized the clean and precise story-telling style of the General, his name signed at the bottom. These told of his time in Spain, when he had spent time with Cordoba, building the first levels of the Alliance. I assumed all the preceding pages had been similar; journaling his life in dozens of languages, making the whole picture difficult to piece together.

  Then the family tree passed by as I flipped through the pages. It went on further than just what Rhys had shown me, cataloguing the bloodlines of the other Council members down through at least thirty generations. The General had been keeping track.

  Here and there loose papers had been folded into the pages. These were random things. News articles from centuries ago, flyers and pamphlets that advertised for remedies and talismans that would keep away creatures of the dark. Some contained gold. One headline read in bold letters: MAN EATS GOLD TO WARD AWAY THE PLAGUE. I couldn’t read the whole article, I didn’t have time, but I made a mental note to look this sort of thing up on the internet later.

  More pages. These had sketches of different people from all through the ages. I recognized a few as Aurelia. She truly hadn’t changed. There were others of Cade, and then pencilings of a face I knew so well, and had recently been so without. Rhys looked somehow younger in these drawings, hat pulled over his eyes, staring off into the distant nothing of the page, thinking perhaps. At the bottom of the page a date had been scribbled. 1634. He’d been less than a century old then.

  I had to keep paging through. If I didn’t, his face would never look that peaceful again. More journal entries. Pages filled with numbers and symbols that meant nothing to me.

  Then another loose page. Folded four times over. So old it looked like it would crumble if I touched it.

  I picked it up, and carefully undid each fold, all the while pleading with it silently to show me what I wanted.

  Numbers lined the top of the page. Coordinates, maybe? Then a series of lines scribbled in a careless hand in a language I didn’t know. A circle took up most of the rest of the page, with odd squares and lines drawn within. At the bottom, in the right hand corner, it read simply: left, left, right, left, right, right, down.

  Seemed like a map to me.

  I folded it carefully once again and slipped it under the back of my shirt, securing it in the waistband of my pants until I could get it safely out of the room. The book slid back into its place on the shelve with my gentle, but hastened push, and I got the hell out of there. I ran up to my room, placed the fragile paper in one of my many paperbacks and pulled out the card I had been hiding in my shoes under the bed.

  The phone rang twice before he picked up, and I heard that smooth voice deliver a standard greeting.

  I told myself I was doing the right thing.

  “I have what you want.”

  Chapter Twenty-four: Desperate Measures

  I snuck out of the house about two hours later. Just long enough to reassure Millie that I was okay, that I could sleep and I didn’t need her to stay with me, though I appreciated the gesture. I felt a little bad about lying to her, but it was for the best. She would understand. Someday. Aurelia had left the house. I didn’t know why, but it was now or never.

  Dodging patrolling police cars, I went to the park, and sat on a bench by the playground. They had added more lights to the park in recent weeks, creating shadows everywhere. I had dressed rather vampirey, or at least I thought so. Dark jeans and a black tank top. To top it all off, I had worn a long dark coat. It had pockets deep enough for the book I had the map in, and hid the dagger I had strapped to my thigh. My plan may have been idiotic, but I sure as hell wasn’t. No way would I come to a meeting like this unarmed. The VFO wanted me to trust them, but I didn’t. This was simply my only option. The only way out of this increasingly impossible situation. I had no way of knowing the truth. No one did. I had come to grips with that. I had considered the possibility of accusing Tyrus of something in return; I could make it up, it wouldn’t matter, an accusation was an accusation. Or so they said. Something told me that if I accused Tyrus of a crime it would garner me no further result than being laughed at like a stupid child. Tabitha, in all her insanity, had been able to provide details of Rhys’s supposed crime and Lydia’s death. I had no such things, and didn’t have the resources to find anything.

  Life sucked. Being a vampire sucked. I had to keep reminding myself that nothing was more important than Rhys. Nothing. Sure Millie and the others could be pretty great, but they still lived in a world where dismemberment was a common punishment, where killing human beings, or cultivating them like wine was socially acceptable. They kept secrets, and bent innocent minds to their will.

  I could be underhanded too. I could—if it meant I got Rhys out of that godforsaken cell. I could be a vampire. I had all the skills. Including the heightened senses.

  I smelled the lightning before it struck.

  “Go away.”

  He sighed, exasperated, behind me. “Can I please have a chance to talk to you?”

  “No. You had your chance the other night. It didn’t go well, if you remember. Now please leave.” He couldn’t be here when my contact arrived. It would look bad.

  “I want to apologize, and I want to explain.”

  An apology from Solo probably had waffling side effects. However, the promise of some elucidation did tug at me. I wanted those long explanations I hadn’t gotten at the party. But now really wasn’t the time. I checked my watch. My redheaded messenger actually wasn’t due to show up for another fifteen minutes. Could I risk it? “Fine. But your presence here is probationary, and if I tell you to leave, you leave. You have five minutes.”

  “Fair enough. Can I sit?”

  “On the other end of the bench.”

  He walked around, smiling tentatively at me as he took the appointed seat. Despite the cool night air, he had pushed the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, exposing leather wrist band that covered the tattoo that marked him as a traitor to either his species, or his heritage. Finding out which would be the most difficult task. “You don’t look so good,” he said.

  Wow. “Not off to a good start here.”

  “Sorry. Not what I meant. I mean, you look like something is bothering you.”

  “No shit. What would have given you that idea? It’s not like I wasn’t assaulted at my grandmother’s party—”

  “I think
you more assaulted me.”

  I continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Or that a group of strangers told me all sorts of fairy tales about my own family, or that I was asked to betray a group of people who really, despite what it sometimes looks like, have done nothing but take care of me. And it’s certainly not the case that the love of my life, of all my lives, is about to be broken in pieces.”

  “Not all your lives.”

  “Don’t even start.” I stood and started walking along the running path, too worked up and stressed to sit still. Solo followed like a dog that wasn’t sure if you would feed it, or beat it.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and ask here, even though it might get me killed. Why is Rhys going to be broken in pieces?”

  Crap. I suddenly realized Solo didn’t know anything about that. I’d never mentioned it. “I’m not sure what I’m allowed to tell you. Since you’re a double agent and all.”

  “I’m not a double agent. It’s not like that. And I can keep a secret.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.” He made the appropriate motions for the oath.

  “Stake your heart and bleed you dry, is more likely.”

  “Whatever works for you.” He offered me his pinkie finger.

  I rolled my eyes, not accepting. “Do you really not know? Or are you just trying to see how much I trust you?”

  “If I answer that question, I’ll either be lying, or you’ll know how much the Society really knows about what goes on in the Otherside.”

  “Other side?”

  “Otherside. One word. It’s what we call the vampire community and everything that goes with it.”

  “Of course. But based on your careful phrasing of that statement, I can safely assume that you do know already and I don’t have to tell you.”

  “Touché. You’re good, Kass.”

  “Don’t play games with me. I’m not up for it, and I am fairly sure I could kill you.”

  “Fine. I know Rhys was arrested. I know he’s been accused of murder.”