“Open your mouth please,” he said.
She parted her lips slightly in response. He popped it in and clutched her jaw, holding it closed until he was sure she’d swallowed it. He turned her head to the side to better examine the bite area. The inflamed crescent mark, identical to Charlotte’s, was raised at the side of her throat. What was more interesting was how the scar began to thread out, as if some odd creature had embedded itself into her skin and now its tendrils were growing deep into her veins. The infection was spreading. The ruby vines twined up from her neck, growing along her jaw and the lower half of her face, and all the way down to the top of her shoulder. Valek swallowed the hard lump in his throat as he watched the perspiration form on her brow. The yellowing color of her skin. He pressed his fingers to the artery that lived just under her jaw, feeling her pulse slowing further. She was truly dying.
“Please, do it,” she finally whimpered.
Valek withdrew his hand and frowned at her. She turned back to look at him. Her eyes swelled with fresh, new tears. He tuned into her mind, hearing how much pain she was in.
“What?” He winced. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. His mind flashed instantly to the memory of Charlotte, begging him to feed on her. He’d never felt more evil.
Her lower lip started to tremble as she turned her head back toward the ceiling. He could see then just how beet red the scar was turning, as though it were swallowing the rest of her. Burning her from the inside. Was this what Charlotte was going through? This really was a weighted affliction. And this person’s disease was much more developed than Charlotte’s—much further along. Valek and Sarah had figured out the exact way to speed the process along more quickly.
The night he’d started the experiment, the bites had been closer together. More concentrated. There was a direct correlation with the addiction and how often each feeding came, and how often the human was healed again by Sarah’s magic. It was a certain way the human body reacted to the biology of Valek’s infection. This woman had been the perfect subject. She was about the same height as Charlotte—the same weight. She was even close in age.
“I n-need you to d-do it.” Her silver tears streamed down the side of her deathly face. “I-I can’t be this way anymore.”
Valek could see just how much her cheekbones had hollowed out—how sunken her eyes were. There was very little light left within them. He could sense how close she was to death—almost as though he could smell it.
“Please,” she begged again.
Valek pressed his lips into a hard line, folding his hands together in front of his face. He closed his eyes and slowly inhaled through his nose. “Tell me your name.”
She looked to him again, a line forming in between her eyebrows as she frowned weakly. “Eva,” she barely whispered.
“Eva,” he returned softly, “I am so sorry.”
Charlotte appeared in the doorway, though he didn’t bother to turn around and acknowledge her. The girl was far too crafty to be kept at bay by any locked door. He needed to remember that. He heard the familiar sound of her rapid little pulse, heard her stammered breathing. He inhaled her familiar tea rose scent.
“I’m so sorry for the things I’ve done to you,” he whispered, his eyes washing in red that streamed down his face and stained the collar of his shirt. “I’m so sorry for the pain I’ve caused.” Valek worked to free one of Eva’s small hands, and gripped it in both of his, pressing it hard, enveloping it. “I’m so sorry to tell you that, yes, you are dying,”
He heard Charlotte gasp from behind him. Though he was unable to say the truth to her face, she’d figured out to whom he was really speaking.
Suddenly, Eva cried out and threw a hard punch across Valek’s face with her free hand, though the crack he heard was not from his jaw, but from the bones splintering in her knuckles. It was a desperate attempt to escape. She arched her spine and cried out louder. She shrieked in both fury and pain as her gaze turned wild toward Valek’s face. Saliva flew from between her teeth as she struggled to get the rest of herself free.
“Kill me, then!” she cried. “Kill me or let me go, you devil! You demon!” She spat at him, like she had the other day.
Calmly, Valek placed his cool hand on her hot face again as she continued to pant and seethe like a person possessed. He looked down upon her face as he imagined the angel of death might look down upon mortals. “I cannot release you, darling. You’ve already seen too much.” He struck her at the same speed lightning would have struck her down—if her luck had been to meet that fate instead.
“Valek, stop!” He heard Charlotte howl from somewhere behind him. Her voice cracked on her words. The sound of it nearly made him choke on the blood gushing into the back of his throat. He needed to drink it. All of it.
But he heard Charlotte race up on him then, her mind flicking to something that glinted on his office table. What was it? He filtered through her garbled, desperate thoughts. A letter opener? His dead heart gave one lurch in his chest. What did she plan on doing with that?
She ran up beside him near the gurney, holding the blade high above her head as he heard her clear, mental plan to strike it down in the center of the woman’s chest. Immediately, he released Eva’s throat, catching Charlotte’s wrist with his firm grasp, just in time, stopping the plummeting knife mid-flight.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he roared, the blood spewing out and around his mouth. Eva arched and twisted against her restraints on the operating table, her life still ejecting from her open wound. She gasped and choked as some of it started to ooze from the side of her mouth as well. Unadulterated fury rolled through his chest and launched itself toward Charlotte. He’d never been interrupted mid-feeding like that. “Now she is going to die slowly and painfully and all because of you! What has gotten into your head?”
Charlotte continued to grip the letter opener as she stared at him, the many questions zipping past her clouded gaze. “I-I don’t know,” she stammered and Valek sighed and rolled his eyes. Exasperated, he ran a claw through his hair. “I’m tired of it!” The words broke from her and he looked at her again. “I’m tired of all the killing! I told you, I just wanted you to let this one go! Why did you have to do this to her? I can’t take it anymore.” She clutched her stomach as if she was going to be sick. “I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t want to watch her suffer.”
Valek narrowed his eyes at her, watching the pain contort her softness as she continued to watch the mortal die. He peered into her mind again, seeing that Charlotte was comparing herself to this unfortunate person—recalling that she went through the same agony in the past. Valek fell miserable with himself again.
The woman went silent, her rigorous struggle gradually faltering under the weight of death. The faintness of her pulse in his ears dimmed to the lulling sound of Charlotte’s quiet crying.
“Lottie,” he began again, breathing deeply to calm his frustration. “Do you know what would have happened if you succeeded in killing her—if that blade had pierced her heart?”
Charlotte’s whimpering response suggested she did not.
“You would have killed me in the process.”
She frowned and shook her head, both of her hands clasped under her chin. She looked to him in that moment like the little girl he knew so well—the one he used to comfort in the event of a Fairy attack or the occasional thunderstorm outside.
“I cannot drink from a dead or dying heartbeat, Charlotte. It is part of the curse of what I am. If I do, I will die.” He tried to make his words come a bit more gently now.
“But what about me?” She grimaced at him. “You drink from me. I’m dying, aren’t I? That’s what you said.”
“Yes, but that’s a bit different. What you suffer from is an ailment from
my
bite. I don’t taste any toxicity in your blood when I drink from it. You are suffering, but I, as well as the others, are unable to sense death on you because it is a product of my own venom.” He turned back to the dead woman. “But if you were dying of, say, a direct stab to the heart…well, that would be a completely different situation. Do you understand now?” He frowned at her.
Charlotte could barely hold herself with the weight of what she’d just heard. Her broken sobs crushed him as she wrapped her arms around herself, squeezing tightly for support.
“I
am
dying.” Her words broke. She struggled to catch her breath as she looked up at him. “I do not want to talk to you.” With that, she spun on her heels and dashed out of the room and down the hallway.
Valek’s dead heart finally severed into two pieces as he heard her footsteps clamor all the way up the staircase, her continued crying reverberating all the way down to him.
There was nothing left to do. He needed to figure this out, and fast. He didn’t have time to calm Charlotte down and also devise his next step. But her wailing pulled at him, like a gravitational force tugging at the ends of shoes, begging him to her. He gave in to it, traveling inhumanly fast up the staircase.
Charlotte hadn’t bothered to close the doors to their bedroom. Valek found them wide open, as if they’d slammed back against the wall as she threw them apart. Charlotte lay sobbing, face down in the center of the bed. He couldn’t imagine what he could say to console her. There was nothing. He just needed to fix it. He could. He knew he could. And he could do it without making her what he was.
“Lottie,” he begged softly.
She sniffled, sitting up in the bed, whipping away at the tears on her face. A small crease formed in between her brows as she glared at him, clearly still furious.
Sadness weighed down his words as he leaned his emotionally exhausted head against the doorframe. “So you see, I was right,” he murmured. “I am the monster everyone says I am.”
“You
killed
that poor girl! You tortured her for
days
. Why did you do it?” she cried, whipping at her face with the back of her hand.
He slowly moved deeper into the room. “Would you believe me if I told you I did it for you?”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t justify your gruesome actions, Valek! I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”
Valek smiled darkly once, dropping his gaze. “Nor I you.”
“What do you mean? I’m still the Charlotte I have always been. Nothing has changed!” She fought, exasperated.
“You couldn’t be more wrong. I am sorry for the suffering I’ve inflicted, but do not forget so quickly you are also a killer. You are my ward, so I should know that better than anyone else. It’s God’s honest fact.”
“You cannot speak about God after what you’ve done,” she said darkly.
The glare she cast him could not have been more deeply sunken in hatred. It was enough to burn him worse than the morning sun. So he was right. She
did
hate him. “Charlotte, you could break me to pieces. Do you know that?”
“I still do not understand. What were you trying to accomplish by torturing another human being? Killing to survive is one thing, but why did you put her through all of that?”
Valek cleared his throat and crossed his arms over his chest. “It was an experiment. I used her as my subject and sped up the process of my feeding habits to see in a shorter amount of time…what will eventually happen to you. I wanted to find out what the eventuality would be. If it would be death…or change.”
“So you think you are so powerful and so above us that you can use us simply as your lab rats? Your tests for experimentation?”
“You say
us
like you identify more with the mortals now than you do with me. I don’t ever remember that being the case as you were growing up. To me, you were never one of
them
, Charlotte.”
“But I
am
one of them! You can’t see that? That’s why I’m breaking so easily now. Unlike you, I have a limit!” She got up from the bed. “You’ve pushed me to it!”
Valek narrowed his eyes at her, dropping his hands from his chest and folding them modestly in front of himself. “Once again, I’m sorry. I am going to fix this. You won’t end up like her, Lottie. You’re stronger than that. I made you into what you are.”
“You haven’t made me into anything! You refuse!”
“Charlotte, it’s because I
love
you. It’s because I would give anything to be warm, living flesh again, like you.” Valek sighed. “Aside from being with you, that is my biggest wish.”
Charlotte’s temper quieted on that last note. Valek could see her whole chest collapse, her face fall.
“Why did you ever take me in, Valek?” she cried quietly. “Why would you put your own life at so much risk for a mere lab rat?”
“Because I needed to redeem myself. It was a selfish reason, I know.” Valek struggled. “I’d taken so many human lives over the years, I needed to feel like I was redeeming my soul for being responsible for protecting and preserving at least one. That’s why I took you in, Charlotte. For my own selfish reasons.”
Charlotte’s sad stare touched the floor. Tuning in to her mind, he could see she didn’t know what to say to him next. She loved him just as well. Perhaps more, if that was even possible, though her emotions in that moment were so conflicted.
“I am going to solve this,” he declared and spun on his heel. There was nothing left to say now. He just needed to prove it to her.
He plummeted back down the stairs and into the library. They were all in there, huddled together in one room like a pack of savage wolves—a custom learned after so much time confined to Francis’ cramped basement.
“There is an entire rest of the house for you to inhabit, I hope you’re aware,” he mumbled bitterly to the lot of them.
Jorge, the only one of the coven Valek considered to be anything of a friend at all, was sipping a cup of one of Valek’s emergency blood packs warmed up by the fire. He read a thick volume from one of the library shelves, and did not acknowledge anyone in the room. Ana and Aneta scrimmaged over the other blood pack like a pair of vultures. Sasha was a statue at the other end of the room, watching something incessantly as it moved just outside the west window. Dusana was curled up on Lusian’s lap, who was sprawled out in Valek’s large, leather armchair.