by Rye Brewer
“You didn’t do this,” she agreed, but she sounded like someone speaking more out of duty than anything else. She was conveying what she knew she had to, nothing more.
“You’re only saying that.” I held her gaze—it wasn’t often she looked anybody in the eye, and I wanted to take advantage of the chance. “Besides, I’m sure everyone in this room has blamed me at least once. You don’t have to lie to spare my feelings.” I glanced at Gage. “Not even you.”
“Cari—”
“Hush,” I whispered. “It’s okay. I might not be the one chaining us up and doing these things, and it might not be my fault that the guy in charge happens to be my father, but I’m the one who was determined to find him. If I could’ve moved on and let it go, none of us would be here.”
He opened his mouth to respond.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear it. I tipped my head back against the rough rock wall. It was cold, just like always. “I should’ve known better. I mean, all of a sudden, he just pops up out of the blue and wants to know how my life is going. Anybody with half a brain would’ve questioned that, seeing as how he was practically a ghost for so long. I walked right into his trap. I guess we can blame daddy issues if we don’t wanna blame me.”
I hadn’t seen him since we arrived. He had not stepped foot inside our room. Either he was too much of a coward to face me, or he really didn’t care how I suffered.
Gage’s chuckle took me by surprise. “Sorry,” he said when I looked at him. “I’m laughing at myself.”
“Why?” Raze asked.
“Because I know all about daddy issues. In my own way,” he added with as much of a shrug as he could manage with both wrists attached to the wall. “My father died—or, rather, left us to believe he did. It was all his way of trying to protect us from things going on in our world.”
“Dommik Bourke,” Raze murmured. “Yes, I remember. He’s been gone for ages.”
“Yes, well, he hasn’t—not entirely. It’s a long story. Suffice to say, my family missed his presence quite a lot, especially when I decided to challenge my brother for the right to lead our clan. It seems like a lifetime ago. I can hardly recognize that version of myself. I’m ashamed when I look back on those days, and it hasn’t been that long. I’ve… been through a lot since then. You know how everything you once felt was important tends to fall away in times of trial.”
“Gosh, no.” Raze’s deadpan response actually made all of us laugh. Even Naomi, who looked a little more like herself and a little less like a zombie. Amazing how the presence of a little color in a person’s cheeks made all the difference, the tiniest bit of sparkle in the eyes.
“There are times when I feel like I’m losing it,” I admitted. It was better for us to talk about it than to hold it all inside—that was how it felt, anyway, now that we were going back and forth and sharing. We were together again, like a unit, instead of being four desolate, broken people who happened to be chained in the same space.
“That’s why you have to hold on tight,” Gage reminded me. “You have to. You can’t let go.”
“It’s so hard.”
A grunt of agreement from Naomi told me I wasn’t alone in this—not that I thought I would be.
“The alternative is to give in and let everything I love about you slip away, isn’t it?” he asked, and he didn’t wait for an answer before charging ahead. “How is that any better than staying strong, standing up to them, letting them see they haven’t broken you? If you give in, Cari, he wins. They win. Let them see how strong we are, all of us. They can’t break us. We cannot allow it.”
He looked around at all of us before homing in on me again. “You brought me back from the brink, in Paris. Remember that? I thought I was gone. Starving, desperate, ready to start draining rats if it meant the starvation would end. Hallucinating. I was as far away from myself in that old cell than I’ve ever been, but you brought me back. You rescued me. And I swear, if rescuing you right now in this very minute means reminding you of who you are, and who you are to me, and that all of us are strong enough to get through this, that’s what I’m going to do.”
I was pretty sure I couldn’t have loved him more than I did right at that minute.
A quick look at the others showed Raze nodding, and Naomi’s eyes narrowing in a resolute sort of way.
“Okay,” I agreed, and I sat up a little straighter. “Okay.”
4
Stark
Hallowthorn Landing was beautiful, as it nearly always was when there wasn’t a storm raging. It went from one extreme to the other. Nothing in between.
I took deep, bracing breaths as I walked down the impossibly long stairs which wound their way down the side of the mountain into which they’d been carved. The need for a moment’s peace had pressed on me until there was nothing left to do but get out of there.
I loved my niece and my sister. I enjoyed Anissa’s presence. I had never exactly seen myself becoming friendly with a vampire—considering the fact that I’d founded a group dedicated to their destruction, it had seemed downright impossible.
That former version of myself would have missed out on quite a lot by focusing on murdering her, to say nothing of my hybrid niece. How wrong I had been. Spending time with Elena—little Lena, as we sometimes called her—watching her grow and learn and discover the world, was the sweetest part of my life.
Branwen, however? Could her presence have been any more unfortunate? When I spent half of my time avoiding her and the other half avoiding a wailing child, who could blame me for wanting to escape?
Not permanently. They were with me not for a mere holiday, after all. I was tasked with keeping them safe as best I could, which meant providing blood for Elena and making certain none of the enemies Anissa and Sirene had earned over time paid a visit.
And if they did, it was my job to fight those enemies off. Enemies who might not take well to the presence or even the existence of a half-breed such as my adorable, rapidly growing niece. The child was only several weeks old, yet she might as well have been nearing her first birthday.
“How long do you think this will last?” I’d asked Anissa at one point, when the two of us were alone for once. “The growing, I mean. When will it slow down?”
She’d shrugged, chewing on her bottom lip. “I wish I knew. I wish we knew someone who knew. Every day, I see her, and she’s bigger than she was the day before. We’re going to run out of clothes.” As it was, the baby wore robes which Sirene had cut short and hemmed, and diapers fashioned out of the leftover fabric. Purchasing clothing was pointless, as Elena would simply grow out of it in a few days.
Would anyone know whether she’d stop growing, or where? How could anyone explain the presence of a child who aged weeks in a day? We couldn’t possibly hide her from those who feared and detested half-breeds.
I felt no better than I had before my walk when I reached the boardwalk running the length of the shoreline. The docks were full of boats preparing to set out for the day, and I waved to a few of the men as they climbed aboard and untied.
Part of me wished I could go with them, even though I knew well there was no leaving this realm on a boat. There was a very definite barrier—invisible, but present—between Hallowthorn Landing and everywhere else.
I could have left if I wished to. I didn’t need a boat. Even so, there was no way of doing so.
If only I could speak openly with Branwen. She would help—she always had. More than once had I come close to confiding in her. It was natural, as if we were two forces unsurprisingly drawn to each other.
Or, closer to the truth, she was someone to whom I was drawn. For her part, she avoided me as though I carried a contagious disease. Who could blame her?
A flash of silver in the distance caught my eye, glimmering in the bright sunlight. No, not silver. White. So blonde, it was nearly white.
Sara. Who had once been a brunette. But there was no mistaking her eyes, eyes which had haunted me ever si
nce our parting.
Why did my heart sink when I recognized her? She’d been on my mind ever since I left her behind in Shadowsbane. I’d fretted over her, hoped that Elewyn would do the right thing by her. That she wouldn’t abuse the hold she had over Sara.
Especially since it was virtually the two of them on that island and no one else. No one to step in when Elewyn went too far with her training.
Why wasn’t I elated upon recognizing her? Why, when she was all I’d been able to think about since we met?
She noticed me, as well—yet she was in no greater a rush to reach me, than I was to reach her. This did not bode well. Yet there was no denying we’d seen each other, no pretending not to know the other was standing there.
“Hello,” I called out once she was within earshot. “What a surprise.”
“Yes. I suspect it would be.” She held herself with the grace and bearing of one supremely confident, supremely in control of themselves. Her chin high, her shoulders back, she even appeared taller than I remembered. And her hair, which had turned nearly white at some point during her training. What might have occurred to turn it that color?
“What brings you here?” I could not help but ask. I could no more help glancing up at the fortress, where Anissa would be playing with Elena.
Where Branwen was, as well. What would she think if she found me with yet another woman? Especially this woman. Any small bit of progress I had made would be erased.
“I wanted to see Anissa. I…” She turned away, moving her entire body rather than only her head, gazing out over the sparkling water. “I have something I need to do, and I wanted to see her before I went to do it.”
I waited, wondering if she had any intention of sharing this plan with me. “It isn’t like you to hold out on me,” I attempted to tease, trying to draw her into telling me more. “We normally shared everything with each other.”
“Did we? Do we?” She cut her eyes over to me, but there was no accusation in them. Only detached curiosity. “I wonder about that.”
“What do you wonder?” And what had Elewyn been teaching her? I shuddered to think, though I knew this had to be her doing. She’d turned Sara against me, as I had known she would. It seemed she and I needed to have a meeting of the minds, and soon.
For the time being, I concentrated on Sara.
“For one, I wish you had told me about the Starkers sooner.”
That was a surprise, though I supposed it should not have come as one. I’d known she was disappointed when she found out what I’d done. I’d even known she seemed to become stuck on that single part of my history.
Probably because it was not only my history. I’d started something that became larger than anything I could’ve done on my own, something which grew like a snowball rolling downhill for centuries.
There had been quite a lot of time for the snowball to grow.
“Perhaps I should have, but I saw no reason to at first.”
Was it my imagination, or did the wind kick up just as I said it? There was certainly a build-up of wind which washed over us, causing her hair to fan out and the white robe she wore to flutter.
“You saw no reason to confess that you’d created a group whose sole purpose was to murder vampires? Knowing I lived my entire life up until just before we met each other as a vampire?”
“What good would it have done?” Another gust of wind, this time accompanied by a distant rumble of thunder. She remained as she’d been, facing the water, and I looked out in that direction to find storm clouds building and spreading and moving closer with every moment. Blocking out the sun. There were flashes between the clouds as lightning leaped from one to the other.
She was doing this. This was all her doing. And if she could bring about a storm such as the one currently growing without so much as a tremble, without even raising her hands to call about the energy necessary…
“Sara, why are you doing this? Stop this, please. The men just went out onto the water, please, calm it.” I watched in growing concern as the boats fresh from the docks bobbed up and down with the growing violence of the waves.
“What good would it have done?” She asked this with through gritted teeth, staring at the water and at the boats. “To start, I would have known not to… I would have known better than to align myself with you. I understand you had no control over what the Starkers did once you’d turned your back on them, but you started it.”
Lightning touched the surface of the water again and again, like crooked fingers extending from the dark grey, billowing clouds. Violent, angry clouds to go with a violent, angry storm.
“I’m going to end it,” she announced, firm now. Utterly calm, as she’d been all along. “I will end it all.”
“The storm? Yes, end this.” The water was now all but tossing the boats about, and a thick curtain of rain began to move in. Soon it would cover the boats, obscuring them from view. I had to all but shout to be heard over the wind.
“I don’t mean the storm, Stark.” She spoke my name as though it were a curse, turning slowly to face me once again. “Not the storm I’ve created. The storm which you created.”
And like that, in the blink of an eye, everything calmed. The wind went from all but knocking me off my feet to barely stirring. The water went still. The clouds parted, the sun emerged. As if I had imagined the entire thing.
“You’re going to end the Starkers?” I asked, if only to be certain I’d heard her correctly. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. It is.”
“How do you intend to do that? Do you even know where they are?”
“I know where they are,” she informed me, then smiled for the first time since our encounter began.
“How?”
“What does it matter?”
Elewyn must have told her. How else would she know, if she hadn’t left Shadowsbane? Elewyn would have her ways, her methods of learning such information. “What did you give Elewyn in exchange for telling you where to find them?”
For the first time since I noticed her on the boardwalk, she smiled. The smile of someone ultimately certain of herself and her choices. So certain that they could never be convinced otherwise, no matter how hard a person tried. Or how long.
That was the most chilling part of all. Knowing I could never convince her otherwise. No one could speak reason to one who refused to hear.
“I did what had to be done,” she informed me, her tone imperious. “And now, I wish to see my sister so that she’ll know.”
“Know what? That you intend to—to what? To make things right?”
“Precisely. That’s precisely what I intend to do. I’m going to rid the world of the evil you created. I’m going to make it safer for vampires to exist.” Her eyes widened, frightening me a little.
I’d seen zealots in the past—many, many times. It was nearly impossible for one who’d lived as long as I had to avoid crossing paths with countless types of people. And Sara’s eyes held that zealot’s gleam. It was nearly enough to break my heart.
For I had made her this way. Elewyn and I. How I longed to wring her neck, to watch the life drain from her eyes over what she’d done to Sara. An innocent. I would never be able to think of her as being anything but innocent. Nothing more than a pawn in Elewyn’s game.
“I’m sorry.” It came out without my knowing I was about to say it, but the words felt true. She deserved to hear that and much more.
“I’m not the one to whom you should apologize,” she whispered in a voice like ice. It was useless. We could never connect again as two individuals. We would always be on opposite sides of a great divide, the way Hallowthorn Landing and Shadowsbane Island were separated by the enchanted water between them.
“Understood.” I clasped my hands behind my back, all business, while my heart cut ties with her. A silent, invisible cutting, but nonetheless poignant. I couldn’t help but wonder as I stared at her just what I’d ever seen in her, to begin with. She had changed that m
uch.
“Is my sister inside?” she asked, also detached in tone and body language.
It was over.
Had it ever began?
I watched her progress as she climbed the many stairs, standing out like a sparkling diamond against the dark stone of the mountain and its carved fortresses. I watched until she disappeared inside and silently wished her well.
For the Starkers were a blight on the world, no question about it, and I would perform penance every day for the rest of my life. No matter how many times I told myself it was another life, another version of myself, the words rang hollow. Like the pitiful excuse they were.
It mattered not that I had changed, that I came to see the error of my ways. I had done great harm, and that harm had carried on without me. I could never apologize to everyone I’d hurt.
Including the beautiful, solemn witch who stepped out onto the balcony that she might overlook the water.
Branwen.
I could never make it up to Branwen, not if I struggled for a century to do so.
5
Anissa
“Elena. Come here, sweetheart.” I waved a stuffed animal in front of the baby, pulling it back little by little, barely containing my excitement as she crawled to me.
The wide, innocent grin on her angelic face was like the sun shining after a long darkness. I never knew I could love anybody or anything this much, and she wasn’t even mine.
I guessed in my heart she was, at least a little. I had helped bring her into the world, and Branwen and I were like her second and third mothers. No mother ever had it better than Sirene, at least in terms of backup care.
Granted, that was just about the only way in which she had it easy.
When Elena reached me, cooing away the entire time as she crawled across the blanket I’d thrown over the stone floor, I let her have the toy as a reward. She squealed when I tossed her into the air—only inches above my outstretched hands, but enough that her sapphire-blue eyes widened just a little whenever she left my grip.
