Authors: Cege Smith
Suddenly she was hit squarely in the back. She stumbled and went down. Whatever had hit her was hard and she could feel pain flash up through her spine. She felt her arms twisted behind her and she cried out. Her wrists were bound together in seconds and then she was flipped over. Caspian stood over her and looked at her through narrowed eyes.
“You haven’t even finished the hybridization process yet. Where do you think you are going?”
“I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to be here. I just want to go home,” Angeline said. She tested the strength of the bonds around her wrists. They were tight. It would take her hours to work them loose, but the look on Caspian’s face said he wasn’t one to be trifled with.
Then she saw Connor’s emerald eyes appear over Caspian’s head.
“She’s a wild one,” Caspian said as Connor drew up beside him.
“Can you help her?” Connor asked.
“Given a few decades, perhaps,” Caspian replied.
Angeline moaned. Where moments before there had been white hot anger, now she was filled with grief. She knew the swing of emotions was illogical, but she didn’t feel like she was in control at all.
“We don’t have decades, Caspian. At most we have days.”
Caspian snorted. “Impossible.”
“I’ve been told that you have developed the right methods to tame any wraith encountered,” Connor argued.
“Perhaps, given enough time to experiment. Wraiths, as I’m sure you know, are in short supply. Plus, there is the matter of uncovering the most important thing that makes such a thing possible.”
“What’s that?” Angeline asked sullenly. She didn’t like that these two men were deciding her fate. She wiggled around to her side and managed to get her feet under her so that she was carefully able to stand.
Caspian was eye level with her now. “You have to have a very good reason for wanting to be human. The siren song of the vampire darkness is very strong. It can overwhelm any paltry intentions.”
“She has such cause,” Connor said in a low voice.
Caspian glowered. “And what’s that?”
Connor sighed, “She’s going to be queen.”
Caspian turned to her and said, “What is your name, girl?”
Angeline drew herself up to her full height. “Angeline Mary Ellen Robart.”
Caspian squealed in delight and clapped his hands again. “Oh yes. This is going to be fun.”
Connor had hoped to enlist Caspian’s help without revealing Angeline’s identity, but he recognized quickly that the old vampire seemed more interested in reveling in his own deviations from the Master’s will. So in that regard, Monroe had been right. Caspian would be more inclined to help if he knew that the work would be a guaranteed spit in the Master’s eye.
He had to stay close now. Caspian’s free tongue had already revealed too much, and it wouldn’t do to train Angeline on how to control her inner demon and then send her home with too much intelligence on the Master’s plans. That would have disastrous consequences, and he feared that if and when his involvement came out, he would face a fate far worse than banishment.
Everything had happened so fast that Connor hadn’t had time to start to work on what his story was going to be when it came time to return to the coven. He felt a bit sick that the spider had forever taken away his opportunity to win the game; the game that if he had been victorious, would have set him free. But he couldn’t focus on that right now. It wouldn’t do him any good to dwell on something that was a foregone conclusion.
They were moving deeper into the forest at a good pace, unable to run because the further they traveled, the closer the trees grew together. Caspian had declined to remove Angeline’s bindings. Even without reading her mind, Connor could tell that she was embarrassed and angry. She had two spots of color high on her cheekbones and she was staring straight ahead. But it was nothing like the waves of rage that he had felt rush out of her just before she made the mad dash away from them. He could tell that she was struggling still with the newness of everything that she was experiencing, and he felt bad to know that it wasn’t over yet.
As if she read his mind, Angeline asked, “What’s hybridization?”
Connor shifted uncomfortably. “It’s the final stage of your transformation.”
She looked over at him coolly. “I understood that part. But what is it? What happens? What should I be expecting?”
Connor cleared his throat, stalling for time, and then Caspian’s voice traveled back to them.
“Your old skin sloughs off just like a snake’s, exposing your new pretty hybrid skin underneath. It’s really quite remarkable, albeit painful for the one going through the process.”
Angeline stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes flashing wildly. “What? That’s not possible. I don’t understand how this could be happening. I must be dreaming. I don’t want to be a hybrid, or wraith, or be anything but who I already was. Please, Connor. Help me stop this.”
“There’s nothing to do to stop it, Princess.” Shaking his head, he slowly reached across the few feet between them. He knew that she thought he was going to try to comfort her, but that wasn’t the reason for his touch. His fingertips grazed her cheek and he let his nails bite into the delicate skin there.
Angeline cried out and whipped her head away. He held up his hand for her inspection. A thick piece of rosy pink skin lay in the palm of his hand. Looking at her face, he could see that she was mortified, and her grief was palpable. But what she didn’t see that he did was the lovely white new skin underneath. It was translucent and shimmering, and he knew that once she was fully changed, she was going to be a sight to behold.
“What’s going on back there?” Caspian had stopped to turn and look at them. “We want to be there before the sun comes up for sure.” He pointed at Angeline. “And once that one starts progressing further into her hybridization it’s going to be a long day. If we are working under such a tight timeline, I’d like to start her training before that happens.”
“How much further is it, Caspian?” Connor asked. “Can’t you unbind her? I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”
Caspian snorted. “If it was just her trying to run we had to worry about I wouldn’t bother with her bindings. But there’s much darker urges lurking there underneath that pretty face and I, for one, have no desire to meet that little demon without warning.”
Connor knew that wraiths could be dangerous, but Caspian’s safeguards seemed ridiculous. “There are two of us and one of her. I don’t think it would be a problem.”
Caspian shook his head. “You are naive if that is what you think, dear boy. Luckily for both of us, I have more experience in this area and I will make sure that neither one of us regrets the decision to not kill her while we had the chance. Not until she’s trained. Forget it.” He turned to walk away and Connor and Angeline had no choice but to follow.
They continued on for several hours, and the forest seemed to be closing in around them. Angeline had cried softly for a while, and then fallen into a sullen stupor. She hadn’t spoken a word since Connor had exposed that tiny spot of her new skin.
Just when it seemed like they were never going to get there, a small clearing opened up in front of them.
“Ah yes,” Caspian said with a satisfied smile. “It’s so nice to be home.”
Connor and Angeline entered the clearing and Connor’s mouth fell open. In a forest full of massive trees, they were looking at a huge wall of rock that stretched out into the forest in either direction and rose several hundred feet into the air. In front of them, the wall seemed to take on the shape of a face. A large opening shaped like a gaping mouth rose out of the ground. A large outcropping about midway up the rock face jutted out and formed a beak nose. What looked like two cave openings parallel to each other near the top formed the eyes.
Angeline giggled. “He’s an ugly one, isn’t he?”
Connor looked sharply at her. She stepped forward, stumbled, and fell heavily to her knees. As he went to help her up, her head whipped around and Connor took a step back. Her mouth was curled in a snarl and her eyes were full of hatred. The tiniest bit of red encircled her pupils.
“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me. This is all your fault! Your fault!” Then she let out a banshee screech that made Connor wince.
Caspian sighed. “Damn. Too late. Hurry now, Connor! We need to bind her before the hybridization takes complete hold of her.”
Caspian grabbed one of her arms and Connor took the other. As Caspian guided them back toward a tree that stood at the edge of the clearing, Connor could see a heavy leather harness encircling the massive base. Angeline started to kick, and Connor almost lost his hold on her.
He looked at Caspian over Angeline’s head.
“Oh yes, very soon she will be coming into her full strength, and once that happens we won’t be able to hold her if she doesn’t want to be held. Quickly now.”
As Angeline struggled and shrieked, Connor and Caspian pushed her into the harness. Caspian quickly wrapped each of her legs and then went around the other side of the tree to pull them tight so that Angeline wasn’t able to move.
Connor was pushing her shoulders against the tree with all of his might even as she pushed back. His breath was coming in short gasps. He winced as he read the black hatred in her thoughts.
Caspian wound another binding around her waist. Connor heard him grunting, trying to pull it as tight as possible on the other side. He couldn’t believe it, but he could see the binds bulging as Angeline pushed with all of her night. The final binding was a head cap that enclosed the tops of her shoulders, neck, and the top portion of her head. As soon as Connor felt the slight give as Caspian pulled her head back, he pulled away. Although the bindings appeared to be holding her, there was nothing stopping her from screaming. And scream she did.
Caspian came back around the tree and clasped Connor on the shoulder. “Well done, boy. Subduing a wraith is no easy task, even for our kind. Don’t worry about this one. She’ll be shiny and new in no time. She’ll wiggle and writhe around on that rough bark and it will scrub that old skin right off of her. Nothing to do now but wait. C’mon. Let’s go have a sip of something spicy.”
Connor stood and looked at the quaking woman in front of him. He could see that Caspian was right. Even as she struggled, small flakes of skin were falling in rapid succession and gathering at her feet. But it was her eyes that shook him. He saw murder there, and he knew that at that moment, the person she wanted to murder was him.
The pain was excruciating. Angeline floated on the edges of consciousness and tried to hold onto some semblance of herself. But it was difficult. She felt the other presence there. It lurked in the darkness, enjoying her pain. Feeding on her pain even. She felt hot and then cold, and her skin felt like there were a million little spiders crawling just beneath the surface. The sensation was driving her mad and she just wanted to scratch her skin until it was bloody and raw.
Occasionally she knew that she was screaming, and soon she tasted blood in the back of her throat. She was equally repulsed and attracted by it. She knew it was her own blood but it didn’t matter. The simple taste of it awakened a hunger that felt like it was going to consume her whole. She was alive but wished to be dead. And just when she was sure she couldn’t take it anymore, her eyes opened and it was as though she was seeing the world for the first time.
She remembered the crispness in her vision that she had noticed earlier, but now things looked sharper and even more real. She could see all the way across the clearing and she would swear that in some places she could see
through
the trees themselves. She saw the shapes of things crawling and creeping through the woods. Her heart started to race as she saw that these shapes were vaguely human, and seemed to be floating in an angry swarm in her general direction.