“I did not have a fair choice when I brought her to Francis! You
know
what the consequence was. Let them use her, lest she die!” he fought back.
“Yes, but now it’s
you
that’s using her. Francis is no longer here. You take it from her now! I heard Lusian talking outside the library doors. He’d rather be on his own anyway, so why don’t you just let him? Let his consequences be his own! You, Charlotte, and I can stay here. Things will finally be peaceful!”
“Lusian is a fool! The more times I let them hunt out in the open, the larger the chances are of
Charlotte
being found.
They
are looking for her. With Vladislov’s brothers still out there,
nothing
is safe yet! I don’t care what happens to the coven, but don’t you see how they might lead one of them back here?” Valek raged on. “Do you honestly think I babysit them for their well-being? I’d rather have them starve than have her perish because of their recklessness. So, on either count, I am selfish and evil—”
“I know what you mean to do, but this has gotten to be too much, Valek. Have you looked at her recently? She is
dying
. Can’t you see it?”
“Of course I have! But what are my choices at this point?”
Charlotte’s mouth fell open. Her heart pounded as though it just might stop. She covered her mouth to stifle her gasp.
“With every bite you take, she fades a little more. I’ve been watching her. Just a few moments ago when she was trying on that dress, I had a chance to finally be alone with her for a moment—to really see what she is becoming. Her skin is sallow. Her cheeks are completely drawn. I can count every one of her ribs. Her eyes are sunken so deep behind those massive, dark circles, I can barely see the light in them anymore!”
Charlotte could tell Sarah was crying by this point, her words were so broken.
Am I really dying?
“We
have
to do something!
Don’t you understand?
”
“What in God’s name do I
do
, Sarah?” Valek bellowed.
Charlotte peered just a bit around the threshold to see him throw his hands up. Sarah recoiled from him, used to being smacked around by her previous master, no doubt.
This would have been where Charlotte intervened. This would have been where she calmed the tension in the room by carefully helping Valek to cool down while deducing several solutions to their problem. But she wasn’t the same Lottie anymore. So many things were changing too fast for her to keep track of. Her mind spun as her mark burned. And…was she really
dying
? She looked down at herself.
“You even
promised
her things would change after we escaped the Regime!”
“Congratulations,” Valek growled. “You’ve found my dilemma. And what do you propose I do about it? How was I to anticipate
this
?” He jabbed a talon in Charlotte’s direction. She jumped and scooted back around the door. Clearly, he was aware of her presence, as she should have expected.
“I told you weeks ago, the only way to cure her and solve everything is to change her! She’s human, Valek! They grow weak and then they die. What do you expect will happen to her in about seventy years, anyway? Of course it is her fate to
die!
She is only mortal! For you to expect anything more is unfair and irrational.”
Charlotte’s stomach turned as they continued arguing. She hugged herself tightly, unable to bear the sound of either of their voices any longer, and slid her back down the wall until she collapsed to the floor. Finally, fate had caught up with her. They were right. Destined to die. Fate had had it out for her ever since birth. There were so many other times when death had come to claim her, yet somehow she’d managed to outrun it. It was the only rational explanation for her being found and kept by something as deadly as Valek. She glanced down at the fate line in her palm, the one that linked her eternally to Valek, remembering how it diminished in her dream.
“Here, take these,” she heard Sarah whisper.
“Why are you giving these to
me
?” Valek asked. He sounded spent.
“In case you ever go too far. Just have them on hand, or you’ll regret it.”
It abruptly got too quiet. Charlotte wondered exactly what it was that Sarah had given him. She sat there in her place on the floor, listening to her own heart beat, counting each pulsation. Wondering which one was going to be her last one.
Valek appeared in the hallway, gazing down at her.
A single, cool tear rolled down Charlotte’s face as she returned his stare.
With a remorseful glance toward Sarah, Valek fluidly swept Charlotte up in his arms, his face hard and filled with disdain.
Charlotte peered over Valek’s broad shoulder at her. The corners of Sarah’s pretty little mouth pulled down in an accusing grimace.
“You’re enabling her, you know. There
must
be a solution.”
Valek turned and looked at Sarah once more as well. Red welled under the lower lids of his eyes. Vampire tears. “Tell me, then, if you have all of the answers. Tell the doctor,” he began, the sadness weighing down his words. “How do I cure her
without
killing her?”
Sarah remained silent as they regarded each other for a final moment.
Valek carried Charlotte toward their bedroom without another word from the Witch. He pushed open one of the carved double doors at the end of the long, shadowed hallway.
He led Charlotte to the bed she used to fantasize about curling up with him in. She marveled at the beauty of the room that he used to keep concealed from her. The walls were of a rich mahogany. Thick drapes that matched the black bedclothes were successful in letting absolutely no amount of light in whatsoever during the daytime. The canopy stretched dramatically up the back wall and over the length of the bed. Upon moving in, Sarah had lovingly placed one of her famous bewitchments just against the top of it. The makeshift star constellations twinkled down over them whenever Charlotte slept. They were her night light—her solace in the depth of the dark.
Valek delicately placed Charlotte on the edge of the bed. She shifted backward so that her legs were stretched out in front of her. She curled forward and hugged her center as a new wave of nausea rolled through her gut.
“That’s a pretty dress,” Valek muttered with a forced smile, though the lines that crinkled his brow revealed the true sadness that lived behind it.
“Sarah gave it to me.”
“Do you not wish to sleep?”
The vision of him standing before her was blurry though eerie and still, as though he had frozen into slate. He did this often, this unnatural stillness a part of the whole package of what he was. It made her uneasy, because whenever he did this, it meant he was upset.
She shook her head.
No. It’s not that. I’m tired
. She racked her mind with all she had just heard. Dying. Her world was still ebbing back to her. Thanks to Sarah’s tea, colors and details slowly became more vivid. She placed her hands on either side of herself, balling up in fists in the comforter, trying to clutch on to something physical to keep herself from fading away. Her mouth went dry, as though it had been stuffed with cotton. Her gaze moved up to Valek’s face and she blinked hard, forcing his features to come into focus. But that only made her dizzier and so she shut her eyes. The mattress dipped slightly as he sat next to her, though the springs stayed ghostly silent under his weight. It was as if he wasn’t even there.
She sensed Valek longed for the advice of his creator and mentor. Nights when Charlotte was only pretending to sleep, she could hear him by the window, talking—or perhaps—praying quietly to Francis, knowing not if Francis existed in the physical world any longer, or if the “Dark City” existed elsewhere. Charlotte knew Valek was unsure of how to care for her in this condition
and
lead an entire coven through their society in ruin. Everything had happened so fast. And Valek was so sharp. Of course he would naturally find himself in a leadership position. That was to be expected.
“Am I really dying?” she finally asked.
Valek sighed. “You should have gone to bed. You were not supposed to hear any of that.”
She knew he meant his words to come out scolding, but they were soft and lamenting. He sounded tired.
The scar called for him again, that familiar burning seeming to disintegrate her flesh every time he was close to her. She clenched her teeth. “Well, if it was not something I was supposed to hear, then it must be true.”
“Charlotte—”
“I think you need to do it again,” she cried out desperately, eyes still closed. She suppressed a whimper. All of her muscles tightened.
Valek hesitated for a moment. “I cannot.”
“So, I
am
dying. It’s true!”
“
No!
”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He had never denied her before. “I am in so much pain.”
“I said no.” Valek leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, rubbed at the bridge of his nose, and sighed. “I cannot do this anymore.”
Her scar flared angrily as if it understood what Valek said. Sarah succeeded in making Valek feel guilty. Charlotte could see that. She moved forward on the bed, wrapping her arms around him and rested her cheek against his large shoulder blade. She knew he could detect her pulse beating against his spine as she pressed herself tightly against his back, silently pleading for him to go against his own conscience.
Valek stood up and whirled himself around to face her. “I said
no
,” he snapped, but weakened almost instantly when his gaze locked with hers. She could see that his eyes had already made their aroused and thirsty transition again.
Addicted to each other. Perhaps she had the same effect on him that he had on her. Perhaps now she understood him just a little bit better. The details of his perfect face began to blur a bit in the darkness again. With the impossible beauty of him standing before her, Charlotte bit her lip hard to keep from making any sort of pained noise. It was unfair. The addiction was becoming worse than it had been even a few days ago. What was happening to her?
“I must figure out my own way to solve this,” he said in a frenzied whisper.
Someone burst through Valek’s bedroom doors, the wood slamming against the wall behind. From where they were on the bed, both Charlotte and Valek snapped their attention to the threshold. The coven, at long last, was home.
Chapter Eight
Predator
The night had only just begun to fade, the swirling blacks and indigoes fleeting over the mountains of Bohemia. It would only be a couple of hours now, thought Aiden. His bare feet padded silently against the cold topsoil as he ran. He had possessed so much power in his lifetime—possessed so many abilities and attributes that allowed him to do the impossible. He had known the feeling of all that magic coursing through his veins and what it was to be indestructible. But never in all of his years of knowing this familiar power, this birthright, had he experienced ability like
this
.
This new, stealthy body had overcome him the minute he’d been resurrected and figured out it was his. At sunset, he had awakened to his mother weeping over his seemingly dead body on a stone slab in the bowels of the Regime basilica, where all of the other Regime rulers lay recently buried. He was the one who’d buried them. She’d stood there, not used to seeing her son that way, clutching his cold hand in both of her warm ones.
“They feed on light-dwellers to sustain themselves during the daytime. I’ve seen it,” she told him with tears running down from her sparkling, blue eyes. She held out her wrist. “Here, son,” she said. “You’ve got to have time on your side. You need to have the upper hand—”
“Never!” he howled, shoving her hand away, sitting up on the slab and gripping the sides with his fists. He was so furious with the notion, he swore he could tear through the stone with his bare hands. Feeding from a living thing, like the demonic beasts themselves. He wouldn’t even think of it. Catching the grim glimpse of himself in an ancient mirror on the far end of the tomb, he asked, “What the hell am I now?” He leapt off the slab, whirling around at his mother when she did not answer. “Well?” He blanched, causing her to jump back. “What
am
I?”
He’d spent weeks alone, deep in the mountains where no one would ever find him, where his mother had hidden him away so no one of their kind would figure out just what he was. He’d valued the time alone, however, just testing himself; taking out huge chunks of mountainside, over-turning aisles and aisles of trees with one push, destroying entire packs of wolves in the blink of a human eye. This was what happened when you combined the light with the dark. He grinned.
There needs to be a balance
. He heard Charlotte’s idiotic voice in his mind.
An intense smell of incense, musk, and unearthed graves carried on the wind as he careened too quickly through the dark forest, feeling nothing but soft earth against his bare feet. Pine cones and bushes that would have jabbed any normal person crunched in his wake. He followed the trail of this scent with lightning speed as the world blurred past, though he saw it now in intricate detail as if he had only just opened his eyes for the first time in his life. Every vein in every dead leaf was so apparent in this new, dark world. The snow was no longer snow, but zillions of twinkling sculptures—each one with a unique face. And the greatest part about it was all the powers he’d possessed before the transformation, he still possessed.
He wound his fist around the leather strap of the satchel slung across his shoulder as he continued to run. Illuminated blue frost trailed from the new claws of his free hand, painting the space around him as he raced through the air. Valek had made this too easy, too much fun. Aiden smirked as the forest faded into the familiar, empty country road and he stopped.