Authors: Cege Smith
Connor was at her side a moment later. “What did you do?”
Caspian looked at the bone in his hands with a satisfied smile on his face. “Never give away the element of surprise. Just a little potion I concocted when I first started working with wraiths. I hate bludgeoning them into submission as they do take so much longer than we do to heal, what with their frail human innards. This is much more effective.”
Connor took Angeline into his arms. “She was in control. What happened?”
“You let her fall asleep,” Caspian scolded.
“This was my fault?” Connor said.
“She is most susceptible to the demon when she is on the edges of consciousness, when she is waking or falling asleep. I haven’t taught her yet how to set the proper safeguards to keep the demon at bay, so yes, at the moment we can expect to see that parasite a lot more often. C’mon. Help me tie her back up.”
“Do we have to?” Connor said. “She’s going to wake up hungrier than before and she’ll be even less likely to be able to fight it off.”
“Let me worry about that,” the old vampire said. “Now then, the potion doesn’t work for long against newborns. For some reason I haven’t been able to figure out yet, they burn it off much faster than more mature wraiths.”
Connor reluctantly helped Caspian bind Angeline to the tree. Then Caspian returned to the first mountain lion’s corpse. “You’ll want to go into the cave and get the bindings you find there for the other one. You can tie it to the tree on the other side of the clearing.”
As Connor did as he was told, he watched Caspian quickly skin the other one and throw several chunks of meat onto the fire. He also gathered a small amount of blood into a cone-shaped bone and, holding the smaller end, he approached Angeline. He put the small end into her mouth and raised the other end high.
“Neither one of them is home right now,” Caspian said. “The potion perfectly relaxes all the muscles so the blood is traveling right down her throat into her gullet. This little bit should give her just enough satiety that when she wakes up, Angeline can take control again.”
“So much for civility,” Connor muttered.
“She needs to be reminded what will be expected of her in normal human society. Her desires are going to be much darker, but as long as she can maintain the proper etiquette in front of the people that is what matters,” Caspian said.
“And when she’s not in front of people?” Connor questioned.
“Royals always have their intrigue and their secrets. Why would she be any different? She will quickly be able to determine who she can trust and who she can’t. That’s the third part of her training.”
Connor finished tying the cat to the tree and tested the bindings. The cat may be strong, but it wasn’t going to get away. This close to the boundary, he could hear that the buzz there had gotten louder.
“I hope you have an idea of how I’m supposed to get her out of here,” he said, looking out into the night. “There are more out there all the time.”
“Yes, I know,” Caspian said. “You are lucky that I found you when I did for many reasons, not the least of which those spirits would have torn her limb from limb.”
“That’s quite reassuring,” Connor said, turning to him.
“It’s not my fault that Alair Robart decided to annex half his kingdom in exchange for peace, or that you decided to create a wraith out of his last descendent,” Caspian said. “I’d be pretty upset myself if I was one of them. They were left like lambs outside the butcher’s door.”
“He did what?” The hiss was clear all the way across the clearing.
Connor looked over. Angeline was awake. And she was furious.
She tasted rust and a slight tanginess in the back of her throat, and her stomach didn’t feel so empty anymore. But as she had come to, she felt the clench of a strong grip trying to push her down and pull up over her consciousness.
Angeline heard what Caspian said about her great-great-great-grandfather and the surprise cost her as the demon took advantage of her distraction to almost wholly shove her aside. She clawed at it and wanted to yell again. She was angry that it thought that she was so weak that she’d go down without a fight.
She dug mental fingertips into it and slowly pulled it back. If she didn’t, she knew that Caspian would knock her out again and she’d already lost too much precious time. She couldn’t let it gain the upper hand.
This is MY mind and MY body. You WILL obey me!
She heard the dark laughter again, but it relented. She pushed fully to the surface and felt it slip back away into a dark recess of her mind. The demon seemingly under control for the moment, she turned her attention back to Caspian.
“I am tired of your insults and untruths that you are saying about my family. There is no way my great-great-great-grandfather would leave anyone to a fate at the hands of the vampires. His legacy was secured because of his defeat of the vampires. Why would the people have allowed him to stay on the throne if he had done such a horrible thing?”
“Why indeed?” Caspian said with a twisted grin. “Are you in control, girl?”
“Obviously,” Angeline said.
Caspian pulled out the book in his pocket again and started making notes and nodding to himself. Angeline locked eyes with Connor, who had the same pained expression again that she realized he wore whenever the topic of her family history came up. She thought about him burying himself in books in some dusty library searching for a cure to a disease that had no cure, and she felt her heart soften toward him just a bit.
“Can you let me go now?” she asked. “I’m still feeling hungry, although it isn’t nearly as bad as it was before.”
Caspian went around the other side of the tree, and she felt the bindings around her arms loosen and then slip away. Now she could move her arms, but she was still secured to the tree. Then he re-emerged and went to the fire. The meat cooking there smelled wonderful. She watched as he pulled the chunks of meat onto a small plate that he carried over to her.
“It’s going to be a little bit awkward to eat like this,” she complained.
“I’ll feel better once your hunger is completely satiated, as I’m sure you will as well,” Caspian said as he held the plate out to her.
She took it gingerly, and then the meat seemed to disappear in her eagerness to get it into her mouth. The chunks were dripping in their juices and they hadn’t been on the fire long enough to be more than lightly seared through. They were really just a step above raw.
“It will work in your favor that you have been outside the castle for the last several years. You can advise your cooks that your tastes have changed and that you prefer your meat cooked rare,” Caspian said.
Angeline nodded, but she was only half listening. She could only think about eating as quickly as possible and then asking for more. She didn’t care if it had been cooked or not.
“No matter how much you eat, you are going to find that you still have an urge for something that you aren’t going to find on any table that is set before you. You are going to crave blood.”
This idea shouldn’t have shocked her, but it did. She became aware of the thoughts that had been running through her mind just moments before. They were images of sinking her teeth into the soft belly of the cat and digging into its soft innards and sucking all the red juices that she could find from the body.
“What do I do about that?” she asked in a shaky voice.
“There is nothing that you can do about that. Half of you belongs to the night. That parasite inside you will demand blood. And if you deny it that wish it craves for too long, you will not be able to control it. You can calm it with rare meat, but that will not do forever,” Caspian said. He had his book in his hands again and he appeared to be noting her reaction to this information.
“I can’t be drinking blood with dinner. I can’t be drinking blood ever!” Angeline said. “How am I supposed to feed it blood without anyone discovering my secret?”
“There are always those that will protect you and be loyal no matter what terrible secrets you carry, Princess,” Caspian said. “That is why we must work on honing your special abilities the best that we can as quickly as we can. You need to be able to tell if someone intends you ill will.”
There was no more meat on the plate. Angeline still felt twinges of hunger. She was starting to see what Caspian was talking about. Connor was at her side and slid the plate out of her hands. “How about I cook up a little bit more meat for you while you and Caspian have another lesson?”
“Excellent idea!” Caspian said, clapping his hands together. The book had disappeared again. He motioned for Connor to continue and then turned to Angeline. “Do you remember the three things you must do to return home?”
“Control my mind, temper my emotions, and learn to use my special abilities,” Angeline said.
“That’s right.” Caspian nodded, beaming. “I am sure you are starting to see that all of these work in tandem with each other depending on the situation you are in. If you are keeping your emotions in check, you will be able to do the other two without terrible difficulty. And as long as you are keeping your blood thirst at bay, you should be able to keep a tight rein on your emotions. Which is expected of a ruler in any case.”
The old vampire lectured more than her father. Angeline wanted him to get to the point.
“What’s next?” she asked.
“So we’ve determined that you have a rather advanced second sight skill. You are not able to read minds, otherwise you would have done that already. That is a rather latent skill in vampires in any case. Very few, even purebloods, are as fortunate as your companion to develop it.”
Angeline raised her eyebrows. So Connor
could
read minds. That explained a few things.
“The other more common talent is that of persuasion and influence,” Caspian said, checking it off on his fingers.
That made sense to Angeline. In the vampire myths that she had studied, the vampires often lured the young and innocent away from other people and then attacked them. Plus, she had experienced that firsthand in her initial encounters with Connor.
“Since we don’t have a human available for you to practice on, we’ll use a poor but adequate substitute,” Caspian said.
Angeline wasn’t sure what he was talking about. And then she felt an awakening consciousness on her internal radar. It was close by and it was alive. That was when she saw the other cat slowly getting to its feet across the clearing and heard the low growl travel to her ears. She felt immediate interest from the dark thing inside her, but she found that Caspian was right. Given that she had just eaten and felt relatively calm, it felt easier to shove that thing back down.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Let’s start with something easy. Make it back down.”
Angeline had no idea how to do this, but everything seemed to start with letting her mind reach out, so that’s what she did. She felt that tendril reach out across the clearing and softly touch the big cat’s aura. It felt hot and she could see in its eyes that it was frightened. Not knowing what else to do, she stroked its aura and tried to send soothing thoughts across the bridge that connected them.
She was shocked when less than a minute later the cat stopped growling and sat down. A moment after that it started to clean itself, seemingly unconcerned that it was tied up in close quarters with three predators more dangerous than itself.
“Well done!” Caspian said with his nose buried in his book again.