Authors: Cege Smith
Then he strode through the boundary. He felt the pressure of what seemed like hundreds of cold touches shrink away the instant his flesh touched them. They were here, but they were afraid of him. Good. Then the pressure was gone and he sensed that he had reached the other side of the spirits’ perimeter. It was time to stop worrying about spirits that he could not control. It was time to hunt.
Caspian had been very clear on Angeline’s dietary needs before Connor left.
“Something big and preferably predatory. Bring it back alive,” the old vampire had whispered to him in his mind. It was the first time that Caspian had communicated with him like that, and Connor was chagrined that the other vampire was aware of his talent. Or that likely that meant that Caspian had been reading his mind all along and he had been completely unaware of it. Connor disliked losing his most valuable advantage.
He stalked into the night. Caspian had also suggested to head south, and eventually angle back toward the cliff wall, which apparently extended all the way to the westernmost tip of the Solera Valley. He knew what he was looking for: a mountain lion pack.
Connor wasn’t particularly hungry himself, but Caspian had also told him that as a newly born wraith, Angeline would be hard to keep up with, and anything that distracted her or jangled her nerves would mean that Caspian would tie her right back up to that tree. The more calm and soothed they could keep her, the less likely she’d inadvertently unleash the darkness hiding within her. They didn’t have a lot of time to get her ready at all.
It didn’t take long for Connor to find the cliff wall again. He stood still for a moment and cast his mind out. Further north he could just sense that low buzz again. So they had picked up where they left off once he left them. He couldn’t hear anything beyond that barrier, which worried him. He wasn’t so far that he shouldn’t be able to feel Angeline, but the spirits appeared to be blocking him. The sooner he got this errand over the better.
He looked in the other direction, further south.
There.
About a mile away, a small group of animals were hunting, just like him. He could feel the wild and simple emotional sensory desires of hunger guided the beasts. He admired their singular focus and wished not for the first time that his own life could be boiled down to such simple details. Hunt. Eat. Mate. Sleep. But a vampire’s life held intrigue that rivaled a human’s life, especially since they never slept.
Just as he was backtracking and getting ready to move, he brushed another mind. He recoiled immediately. There was someone else out there. Much more carefully, he sent a tiny tendril out to feel for that presence again. This time, he found nothing.
Damn
. Not only was someone else out there, it was someone who was aware enough that they closed their mind after sensing Connor. He considered going back to Caspian to let him know that someone was close by, but he knew that daylight was coming soon and if he didn’t bring something back from the hunt, he would be potentially delaying Angeline’s progress.
If only he was able to mentally connect with the old vampire, but the spirits were in the way. But Caspian had lived in these woods for years without discovery, and Connor assumed he had some other tricks up his sleeve to discourage unwanted visitors. His work would have depended on it, and he had managed to avoid Monroe’s detection for years. So Connor made his decision and quickly scaled the wall to the top. He closed his mind to avoid further detection and started down the wall in the direction of the animals. If he hurried, he could be back in camp within the hour.
Caspian wanted Angeline to focus on her second sight, and decided that was the first thing that they should work on.
“There are three things that you always have to remember as a wraith: control your mind, temper your emotions, and use ruthless logic leveraging all the gifts at your disposal. If you can do these three things, then no one other than a vampire will ever know that you are anything but human,” Caspian said.
“You make it sound so easy,” Angeline grumbled, remembering the way that the other thing inside her effortlessly took over when presented with something that it wanted: food. Raw and bloody food.
“It will be once you assert your dominance as the host. You will take the best parts of your dark parasite and the rest you will lock up and throw away the key,” Caspian said.
“So you have helped other people? Other people like me?” Angeline felt like it was an impossible dream that she would be able to return home.
“In one fashion or another,” Caspian said, his tone ominous.
“What does that mean?” Angeline said.
“I told you that I cannot allow a wraith to leave until I am confident he or she is safe to return to their world. Wraiths are very uncommon and very unpredictable. Sometimes by the time that I found them, they had become much too attached to their parasite, and they had already relinquished too much of their host control to it. So they were never able to recover.”
“What happened to them?” Angeline was horrified. She had felt how strong the pull of the thing was inside her, but she had never considered that it could take control and
she’d
be the one locked inside.
“You are going to be queen someday, and I know Eric Robart would not have raised a stupid child. What do you think happened to them?” Caspian said with a note of disdain.
Angeline knew the answer but she still wanted Caspian to confirm it. “You killed them, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did,” Caspian said matter-of-factly. “Consider yourself lucky that Monroe’s whelp thought to bring you here as soon as it happened.”
“His name is Connor,” Angeline said. The old vampire was getting on her nerves. He didn’t seem to care about anything other than being obnoxious and acidic.
Caspian shrugged, “He’ll be gone again before I could even find a reason to care to call him by his name.”
Angeline felt a chill in her stomach. Connor wouldn’t leave without her. Unless…unless she was dead because Caspian killed her.
Would Connor try to save her?
“How many have you trained successfully?”
Caspian winced. “Like I said, you are lucky you are here now, before you had a chance to embrace that thing inside of you.”
“How many?” she demanded.
“I haven’t successfully transitioned one yet,” he finally said. “But as I mentioned earlier, each case is unique and there has to be a very strong desire to
want
to control what’s inside.” Angeline felt like the world was crashing down around her. “Not even one,” she said numbly. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
For the first time, Caspian looked pained. “I thought you understood that the odds of gaining the control required to return to your old life were small. But you are in the best possible place to do that. No one knows more about wraiths than I do.” He patted her arm, but it didn’t make Angeline feel any better.
“Now first things first though. You have a second sight talent. Let’s close your eyes and then I want you to tell me what you see,” Caspian said.
Angeline felt shell-shocked, but she needed to be the exception and not the rule when it came to Caspian’s training. Her kingdom depended on it. She closed her eyes obediently. If there was one thing she was really good at, it was learning new things.
She was just going to say that she didn’t see anything—
her eyes were closed!
—but then she saw a burst of light. Then another one. She could see brilliant color enclosed in each of the bursts, but they were gone before she could see what they were.
“I see, light,” she said.
“Mmm,” Caspian said. “What’s in the light?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They are gone so quickly.”
“Try,” Caspian suggested. “Use your mind to grab them before they disappear.”
Angeline furrowed her brow.
Grab them? How?
But she wasn’t going to ask any more questions. Caspian seemed to look unfavorably on too many questions.
She saw another burst shoot up from the corner of her eye and she reached her mind out toward it. Then it was gone. Another burst out from the top of her left eye. Again she reached but missed it. She hissed in frustration.
“Remember the second rule, Princess. You must keep your emotions in check,” Caspian said patiently.
She took a deep breath and stamped down the feeling of frustration that had bubbled up in her throat. Then she quieted her mind and tried again. Almost immediately the bursts lit up her eyelids again. Instead of trying to grab at each one, she watched them for a few minutes. It reminded her of the fireworks that were displayed at her father’s annual fall tournament. She had loved watching the jousting as a child, but really it was the fireworks that she looked forward to and the way they lit up the night sky. She could have watched them for hours.
The fireworks behind her eyelids grew even more spectacular, and as she relaxed it seemed like the bursts came with more frequency, as if they were trying to get her attention. They seemed to dance closer to her, and finally one seemed to be right in front of her. It was what she had been waiting for. Her mind’s eye snatched it and held it.
“I got it!” she cried out in delight.
“Good,” Caspian said.
Angeline thought that he sounded surprised.
“Now stretch it so that you can see inside it,” he said.
Angeline could feel the edges of the light and she could see the colors swirling around inside it. She held it like a letter and looked inside. She gasped. She saw her father inside. He was lying in his bed and his skin was so pale that she thought that he may be dead. She could hear crying in the background.
In her shock she let the light go and then opened her eyes. “What was that?” she asked Caspian, her heart in her throat. “Is my father dead?”
Caspian watched her carefully. Angeline saw a length of rope sitting beside him as well as a large thick stick. With a start she realized that he was expecting her to lose control, and for a sickening second she was about to. The surface of her consciousness rolled and it was like she was on a tiny boat on a lake in the middle of a torrential storm. Something wanted to capsize her little boat and smash her to bits, but she gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and screamed into her head, “
NOOOOOO!
”
Her mind settled instantly and she thought it was over when suddenly she heard a response. Laughter. Dark, gurgling, inhuman laughter. She looked at Caspian and saw her fear mirrored there. He had picked up the stick and was holding it at the ready as he watched her face.
“It…laughed at me,” she choked. “It knows I’m here.”
Caspian seemed relieved. “Of course it knows you’re there. You are the only thing that stands between it and what it wants, which is to get out and wreak havoc. And so we have a lesson in a lesson. The parasite waits for you to be distracted. It always waits and it has the patience of a saint. It will wait forever, so you can never lose focus for even a moment or it will spring.”
Angeline felt hot tears slide down her face. She felt overwhelmed, but she was keeping a tight rein on that. “Is my father dead?” she said with more calm in her voice than she felt inside.
“The sight shows the probable future. Something that you will likely find invaluable when you rule. Eric Robart is not dead yet. That kind of word would have reached even my ears in record time,” Caspian said. But he hadn’t put down the stick.
Angeline felt a wave of relief course through her. “Thank the gods,” she said and raised a hand to her throat. “We still have time.”
Caspian leaned a few inches closer to her. “So when was it?”
Angeline wrinkled her nose. “When was what?”
“If you pay attention, you can see the
when
as well as the
what
,” Caspian said.