Adrenaline coursed through my body and I gasped as Arthan opened his mouth, revealing his sharp, white fangs. I had seen those fangs before, at least a dozen times, but still, the sight of them shocked me every time—they weren’t natural.
Then again, nothing about him was natural. Not the way his eyes, already almost red, now turned bright red and brighter than the sun. Or the way he had no heartbeat, which was suiting for me rather than alarming.
Arthan closed the distance between us, as swiftly as a tiger jumping its prey. He pushed me against the tree, and I could feel the cold tree bark against my back, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except him, and me, and this moment. It meant everything, and perhaps that was the greatest sin of all.
His one hand circled around my waist, while his other hand removed the choker I wore around my neck. Luckily, chokers were good fashion statements nowadays, but they also worked well to hide the two tiny bitemarks decorating the skin of my neck.
A shiver went through my spine when he took the choker off, as if I was finally set free from an invisible chain holding me back.
He pulled my head to the side—softly, always so softly—and his fangs pierced the skin of my neck. It hurt, but only for a second. Then, he drank my blood, and all the pain was forgotten; none of it mattered anymore.
There was no noise, not a thousand heartbeats trying all at once to get my attention. That constant humming in my head, the always-present sound of blood rushing through veins, was gone. His kind, vampires, had no heartbeats, had no streaming blood.
He squeezed my shoulders, and I could almost feel his own hunger, his own desire.
Our union was unholy by all standards, his kind’s, and my kind’s, but for something so unholy, it certainly felt… perfect.
A moan escaped from my lips. I felt alive, all my senses on edge, my heart just about jumping out of my chest. I clutched on to Arthan’s back, my fingers digging into his skin.
It was wrong on so many levels. Wrong because he was what he was, a vampire, and I was what I was, and we were supposed to be enemies.
Not just because our kind and his kind were at war, not just because of the ancient history of bloodshed between us, but also because everything about us, probably even down to our DNA, was hardwired to hate each other, to destroy each other.
But in that moment, while he drank my blood, deeper and deeper, and my fingernails scraped his skin and I had to struggle not to moan out loud again, none of that mattered. Not the ancient blood feud. Not how my family would hate me and probably disown me, if they ever found out.
It didn’t even matter that much anymore why I—we—started this in the first place. Nothing mattered except the here and now, except the feeling that washed over me while he drained me of my blood, the feeling—
He stopped, letting go of me, and the moment vanished as swiftly as it had started, and the world had somehow become a little bleaker, a little more tainted.
I didn’t move. Trying to catch my breath, as if I had run a marathon, I just stood there and stared at him, taking him in. We were still so close that if he had been a living, breathing human being, I would’ve no doubt felt his breath on my skin.
A small trail of blood traveled down from his lips. My blood.
Blood that was as black as the starless night above us.
Chapter 2
Camille was obviously angry at me, judging from the way she’d just texted ‘whatever’, when I had texted to let her know I was heading home.
I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t being a very good friend toward her, and I knew it.
But I would make it up to her, somehow.
After my rendezvous with Arthan, he had offered to drop me off at home, but I had refused—I wondered when he had started doing that, offering to take me home, like what we were doing were some kind of messed-up make-out sessions rather than what they really were.
Wrong. Evil. Vile. Unholy.
I felt dirty, tainted, and I needed the walk home to get rid of his smell, which was lingering all around me. Thankfully, it started raining when I was still three blocks away from home, and I was soaking wet and smelling more like wet dog than vampire by the time I reached my street.
If my father knew the truth, he’d kick me out, I realized as I turned the corner to our house. If my mother knew, it would break her heart. My family would consider me a traitor.
But I had started all this with the best intentions. A deal, that was all it was. A deal with the devil. And now I was drowning in a swamp of trouble of my own making.
The house was bathing in darkness, so hopefully I would be lucky, and both my parents would already be asleep. If they were still up, they might start wondering why I was back so soon, since it was barely past midnight and curfew was only at one thirty—a ‘victory’ Camille was responsible for.
Our house was an eighteenth-century townhouse that had belonged to my family for many generations. It stood out like a sore thumb compared to the more contemporary seventies’ and eighties’ residences in our street. Camille always commented how weird it was that my grandparents, their parents, and several generations of Silvermanes back, had all lived and grown up in the same house. It was quaint, she said, like something the Addams family would do, while ‘normal people’ moved out and bought their own houses to start their own families.
Once upon a time, the house had been one of the few houses on this street, but as time went by and more and more people had come to populate our town, the empty lots were conquered one by one. Now, my house looked like a fairytale dropped in the real world.
Stepping through the gate of the front garden was like stepping back in time, and I could easily imagine another Silvermane, living decades, centuries, before me, stepping through these very same iron-wrought gates and walking down the cobblestone path up to our home.
I turned my key in the front door, and it screeched open. My footsteps were loud in the quiet hallway. Closing the door behind me, I inhaled deeply and focused.
Two heartbeats upstairs, in the master bedroom. I recognized them right away: the calm, steady beat of my father’s heart, and the slightly faster beat of my mother’s heart. Another level up, the heartbeat of my aunt, Aileen, in her tower room, also asleep.
A faster, more hurried heartbeat in the kitchen; our cat Snookie trying to catch a mouse again. The mouse was running for its life, its tiny heartbeat going impossibly fast.
Lastly, in the room adjacent to mine, another heartbeat. Slow. Too slow. And so very faint I had to strain to hear it.
Disappointment weighed me down while I climbed the stairs, each step creaking under my weight but luckily not loud enough to wake my parents up. For all I’d done, for how badly I’d gotten myself into trouble, it hadn’t really helped. Not enough.
The last room to my right was Samantha’s room.
I softly pushed the door open, letting a ray of light enter the otherwise pitch-black room.
Samantha was in bed—as if she’d be anywhere else—a frail phantom of a girl with alabaster skin and dry, cracked lips. She looked like a broken, porcelain doll, too fragile for this world that was slowly killing her from the inside out.
She hadn’t always been like this, and maybe that was the worst part.
As I tiptoed toward her, trying my best to be as quiet as possible as not to wake my parents up, I remembered her how she had been before this all happened. Before a supposedly routine job for our coven had ended up killing my grandmother and nearly killing my sister.
She had been vibrant with life, my sister, a bright star in a dark world, a shining, shimmering jewel. She had been the strongest of us, no doubt. Even when we were young children, her powers already far outshone mine.
“The heir of the Silvermanes,” my grandma had always said about her, while shaking her head in awe. “Powers like hers I haven’t seen anymore since the legendary Selena Silvermane.”
Selena Silvermane was a bit of a legend in our extended family – our an
cestor and matriarch, she was the one who had written the Grimoire we still adhered to every day. Or well, I had adhered to, until I had started breaking practically every rule the Grimoire prescribed.
My grandma had passed away during the same attack that had left my sister like this, and I missed her every day. The sound of her voice. The wrinkles that appeared next to her eyes when she laughed.
I sat down on the edge of Samantha’s bed and looked at her sleeping form. When we were growing up, I was so jealous of her that sometimes I imagined what life would be like without her. Never, not even in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined it would be like this. With Dad a shell of his former self, with Mom floating through the house like a phantom, barely even present.
Samantha was asleep, her eyelids fluttering wildly, and I could only imagine her dreams, or nightmares. Was she reliving the day, the attack, that turned her from our most promising witch into a comatose sleeping beauty?
I caressed her hair, wiping a loose strand of golden blonde away, and tucking it behind her ear. “I’m sorry.”
The words vanished in the silence of the room. I wondered how much she would hate me for what I had done to her, if she ever found out. If she would hate me more for every time I had given her the blood that both saved and condemned her.
I pushed Samantha’s head to the side. Her heartbeat, even though soft, was still audible enough that I could follow the pattern of her arteries, the places where her blood pumped the fastest and most often, and I could pinpoint, without even having to search for a vein, where her major arteries were exactly. Without any effort, I tracked down a vein leading straight to her heart and plunged the needle into it.
She gasped for a second, her body convulsing as the strange liquid seeped into her veins.
Then, as I pulled the needle away, she seemed to relax again, and her eyelids stopped fluttering around. She calmed down, relaxed. And her heartbeat, miraculously, was a little stronger than it had been before, pumping blood from one organ to another, pumping the blood to her brain where I hoped that some of the damage that had been done, was starting to be undone.
I put the needle back into my purse, removing all the evidence. Then, I took Samantha’s hand and held it in mine. It was warmer than before, I was sure of it—not much, but a little.
Or was I kidding myself? Sometimes I thought that all the improvements I could see, however small, were all in my mind, figments of my imagination because I couldn’t live with the guilt of what I had done, what I was forcing upon my own sister, if this path didn’t lead to her recovery. If she recovered, by some miracle, then all this would’ve been worth it.
It would’ve been worth it that I risked everything, time and time again, that I gave into these dark desires and let a vampire drink my blood—because it would mean my sister’s salvation. If she didn’t recover… Then I had done the most unholy of deeds simply because I wanted to do it. Not for a greater purpose, not for anything other than a wicked, shameful desire I was too weak to resist.
“I love you.” My voice sounded so loud in the tomb-like room, echoing off the walls. “I miss you. I know we weren’t always that close and I…” I sighed, taking a deep breath. “I’d like a chance to get to know you better. To get as close to you as we were when we were kids.” I squeezed her hand softly. “Forgive me, sister.”
Every time I came to give Samantha blood, and her cheeks turned a little rosier for a second, and her blood pumped harder through her veins for a few hours, I always imagined this time would be the one: the one time she would wake up. Even though I tried hard not to get my hopes up, every time when she stayed motionless, when she remained stuck in that tomb of a body, I felt a pang of disappointment.
I patted her hand one last time and got up. A strange melancholy took hold of me, as if part of me was locked in there, in her tomb, with her, and I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and fall into a dreamless sleep.
As I opened the door, lost in thought, for a second I swore I could hear a small moan from behind me. Turning, I stared at Samantha, still covered under the blankets.
Had she just… had she moved, if only just an inch?
Had she made a noise, or was it all in my mind?
I stared at her unmoving shape for what seemed like an eternity, but nothing happened, except for the steady rise and fall of her chest. A princess forever cursed to stay asleep.
Yet, when I finally closed the door behind me so I could head to bed and get some sleep, I was still wondering about that sound I heard, that moan, and although I shouldn’t, I still hoped against all odds that it had been real.
Chapter 3
“How was your night out, dear?” The question came from my aunt Aileen, who was sipping from her tea while peering at me over the edge of her newspaper. With brown hair tied back in a loose bun, oversized glasses always tumbling down her nose, and grey eyes sparkling with intelligence, she seemed like an odd mix of an owl and a mouse.
“It was fine.” I slumped down on the chair at the breakfast table, and quickly checked my cell phone. Camille still hadn’t replied. Great. That meant that, if I didn’t find a way to make it up to her today, she would be nagging me about it all day tomorrow at school.
“Fine?” Aileen pushed the rim of her glasses back up her nose and put the newspaper down. “It’s been a while since I was a teenager, but ‘fine’ doesn’t really sound like ‘fine’, you know? At least not when you say it like that.”
I shrugged. “It was just okay, nothing out of the ordinary.”
Mother dropped a fried egg on my plate without saying anything, and then hovered back to the kitchen. She had become our resident ghost, a phantom wandering from room to room without speaking except when directly spoken to, in a way as locked up in a prison of her own making as Samantha was in the prison of a body that would no longer cooperate.
I watched Mom as she went about, grabbing supplies for our breakfast table like an invisible servant girl from the nineteenth century, trying hard not to be noticed. Father and aunt Aileen were good at playing a long, but I watched her like a hawk. She had been beautiful once, my mother, a radiant beam of sunlight, but her golden hair had lost its shine, her once sun-kissed skin was deadly pale.
We all had our scars since what happened to Samantha. Without realizing it, I touched the choker on my neck.
“Come on, indulge me for a bit here,” Aileen said. “Did you meet anyone new? Did you ‘shake those hips’, or what do they call it nowadays?”
I frowned at her. Aunt Aileen tried to act ‘cool’, but she failed so miserably at it that sometimes it was downright hilarious. “Dance. We call it ‘dancing’. And me not that much, but Camille danced a lot.”
Aileen shoved a mouthful of omelet in her mouth. “Every time you go out, it seems like Camille is always having fun and you’re not.” She shrugged. “Why do it if it’s not your scene?”
“Aileen, stop bugging her,” Dad said. He was calmly cutting up his sandwich in four equal parts, as he did each morning, no matter the size of the sandwich—always four equal parts, which he cut up very calmly, eerily resembling Hannibal Lecter prior to devouring a steak of human meat.
“I’m not bugging her.” Aileen rolled her eyes. “I’m trying to be involved. You should try it for once.”
The look Father shot her was downright murderous, but Aileen ignored him, as she usually did. “Now, come on, spill the beans.”
“I don’t… not like it.” I took a bite from my eggs—they were already cold, but I knew better than to complain about it. The last time I had any comment about my mother’s cooking, which was due to her mixing salt with pepper and conjuring up a dish that was downright gag-inducing, Father had given me a five-minute-long lecture after Mom had burst out crying hysterically. I swallowed down the cold eggs, ignoring the horrible taste. “It’s just that there’s other things I like doing more.”
“Then why not do those things? Why force yourself to go somewhere you don’t want t
o?” Aileen tilted her head, not understanding.
“Because if I want to have friends—” and ‘any semblance of a normal life’, which I didn’t add – “I have to do things sometimes that are not my favorite thing in the world, but that they love doing. Like going out and dancing. I’d much rather stay home and read a book, but Cam loves it, so…”
Aileen scratched her head. “And what about your other friend, Dean?”
“He likes going out too. Everyone likes it. I’m just the oddball.” I shrugged.
“Well, can’t he go with Cam then? And you can stay at home and do what you actually like doing?”
“It’s not that easy.” I swallowed another bite of the cold eggs and tried to suppress the urge to shiver at the terrible taste.
“Nothing ever seems to be.” Aileen wasn’t talking to me anymore; instead, her gaze was focused on my father who, judging by how intently he was staring at his food, was probably dissecting the sandwich to its very core.
“Anyway.” Aileen turned back to me. “What are the plans for today? If you’re not too busy, I’m heading to Hexagon this afternoon, and I could use some help.”
Mother came back into the room, her long, white robe gliding over the floor. She brought a new basket filled with bread, which she dropped down in the middle of the table. Without even looking at me, without even seeing me, she floated back to the kitchen, occupying herself with whatever other meaningless task she could come up with that would distract her from life and its terrible consequences.
“Okay, I’m in.” I enjoyed going to Hexagon, the local market where witches and other magical folk haggled for their services, handing out hexes and curses to everyone with enough cash to pay for it. Father was not very fond of it, claiming it was only for witches who had no other means to support themselves, and certainly not for witches who belonged to the once highly esteemed Silvermane family.
One look at the peeling wallpaper, dating back to the eighteenth century, or at the wobbling chair I was sitting on, or at the chandelier over our heads of which seven of the thirteen light bulbs had extinguished months ago, and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that esteem did not always translate to money, and in so far as it had back in the golden days of Selena Silvermane, those eras were gone. We were broke, or close to it: running an estate like this cost tons of money and barely anyone came by to ask for my father’s services anymore. Blood Magic wasn’t all that popular nowadays, not unsurprising considering the severe cost one had to pay.
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