Almost Everything

by Tate Hallaway

  “Repeat after me,” he said. As he stepped, Dad intoned syllables very carefully. I stammered through them as best I could. As I spoke, I began to feel lighter, and off balance. When I stumbled a bit, I smelled the dusty scent of sun on hay bales, and suddenly the spell that protected me swelled. It was as though arms slipped under mine, lifted me back upright, and held me close. I snuggled into the magical embrace. Even though I was standing up, I could easily drift asleep.

  All my residual fear floated away with the light-headedness, spiraling away from me with each word. Hence, when I noticed the eyes reflecting in the treetops, I barely registered an emotion beyond surprise.

  Dad and Elias seemed aware of the presence of the vampires. Dad stopped speaking and stepped out of the way. Pale, naked bodies dropped down from the trees. They crouched like predators at the edge of the circle of light. Their mirrorlike eyes glinted dangerously. I should have been terrified by the hunger evident in their faces. Instead, I slurred as if I were drunk, “Oh, lookie—they’re here!”

  If my arms hadn’t felt so heavy, I would have waved a greeting.

  When the first of them slid into the light, Mom noticed their approach. A hiss of breath escaped her lips, and, briefly, the protective restraints tightened around me. However, she let them go before I could even muster a sense of panic. Dad caught my eye and gave me a look that seemed half-reassuring, half-pitying. Then he made a regal sort of “come hither” gesture, and they lunged.

  More vampires than I’d ever seen before leaped forward with inhuman speed. Several fell instantly on the bags of blood like a pack of wolves on a slab of meat. Even in my happy place, the sight terrified me. I would have run, but Mom’s spell rooted my feet to the spot. Like dogs, they snarled with teeth bared.

  A few sniffed at me, their noses wrinkled. One followed his nose to where the bags were taped to my chest, and a slow, evil smile spread across his face. Teeth bared and sank. Even though I didn’t feel a thing, I screamed.

  Unfortunately, that attracted everyone’s attention. There wasn’t enough room at my front for all the vampires to attach themselves to the bag, even though it was clear that some were content to lick the spilled blood off the ground or one another’s faces. The frenzy pushed forward. Despite the repellent, I felt a few nibbles here and there on my exposed arms and back.

  Nibbles became bites. Even though none of them could withstand the spell long enough to latch on, I felt my blood begin to spill.

  Even the distance my dad’s magical words created couldn’t keep out the intensity of the pain. A scream tore from my throat.

  Somewhere far away I heard my mother shouting, but I couldn’t decipher the words through the haze of anguish. The protection spell constricted, and I heard the snarl of angry vampires.

  I was almost angry at the interruption, because I wanted the pain to stop and I knew it would end only when they’d had their feast. My eyes were unfocused with tears and agony, but they tracked the blur of something brilliantly silver.

  The slash of the knife in the air shattered something inside me. My consciousness fractured like a mirror cracking. A fissure began at the edges and began to crackle. Pieces began to drop out, and darkness took their places. The dark, a gaping emptiness, scared me. No, I tried to shout, this isn’t right! I’m losing something important!

  If I’d even been able to form the words, I doubted anyone would have heard me over the din of the vampires’ feeding frenzy.

  I tried to free myself from the protective spell with a tug, but the multiple bodies and magic held me tightly. The crack inside my mind seemed to be growing larger. I had the dizzying illusion of standing on a cliff looking over a crashing seascape, or maybe it was the turret of a tower I stood upon. An invisible force seemed desperate to push me over the edge, like a gale force wind. But I clung stubbornly to the ledge. In the distance, something rose out of the sea. I imagined it as a monster from a dream or a nightmare, a kraken of some sort, with dozens of octopuslike tentacles. But I knew it was a woman, a witch, fighting the air with her slashing limbs that cut like knives. She was the Queen of Swords. She was me—my witch soul, and she was fighting to stay. All the magic I had never been able to tap poured out of her like a beacon. She was much, much stronger than I ever imagined. She was like a queen, like a goddess.

  Giant tentacle arms reached for me, but instead of swallowing me in inky darkness, they held me more firmly. Suddenly, I knew the sea and the cliff were the source of my power. The wind was the enemy.

  The familiar churning sensation of my two souls pushing against each other roiled through my consciousness. Push, pull, push, pull—it began to build. Now the tower felt more like a tilt-a-whirl, spinning faster and faster.

  I stood calm in the eye of the storm. In the tornado, swirls dancing around me flashed shards of mirror, like tiny flashes of light in the dark clouds of death. Tentacle arms reached out—no, it was my own arms reaching, in the Goddess position, open, palm up into the gale force winds. A mirrored splinter imbedded itself into my flesh. The pain was sharp, like a bite. But I didn’t bleed. Another piece struck, followed by another. Soon my body was riddled with the broken mirror, my skin a quicksilver patchwork of countless reflections.

  My souls were too entwined to separate. I would have to give up both, or none.

  I would not die.

  But something had to.

  An explosion tore the air.

  The shock wave knocked bodies everywhere. Vampires who had been clinging to me with teeth and nails suddenly flew backward as if pushed by an invisible hand. Simultaneously, the protection spell was shredded. Nikolai and Mom were thrown off balance.

  Only my dad had withstood the onslaught. He held the silver knife in his hand and was making frantic gestures in the air.

  Completely free of the protection spell, I found I had no strength to support myself. My knees buckled, and I dropped to the dew-and-blood-spattered grass. I tried to tell my dad how sorry I was that I’d messed up the whole thing, but, before I could move my lips, the world closed up and went dark.

  The last thing I felt was a thunderclap, like the rush of air into a vacuum, and I had the impression of my father falling to the ground beside me, still as death.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Everything was so black when I next opened my eyes that I thought maybe I had died, after all.

  Then my eyes began to adjust, and the ugly little room at the covenstead materialized out of the shadows. I was lying on my back on a lumpy mattress, my head turned toward the scratched, cheap wooden chest of drawers. A giant Mickey Mouse alarm clock stared down at me from the top, its white-gloved hands pointing at a quarter past three.

  I blinked and held up my aching arms. I was covered in white bandages, like a mummy.

  “Hello?” I called out to the darkness. If this wasn’t some kind of weird purgatory, then someone must have carried me to this room. Ergo, I couldn’t be the only one left alive.

  I had to find out what had happened. Was everyone okay? Had my dad’s last desperate magic, if that was what he was doing just before I passed out, worked? And what the hell had he been trying to do, anyway?

  The door creaked open; electric light painfully slashing the darkened space. I raised my arms to cover my face.

  “Ana?” It was Elias. He slipped into the room without switching on the light, apparently aware of my sudden sensitivity to it. Quickly, he closed the door behind him. “How are you feeling?”

  I didn’t really know. My entire body felt as if it had been chewed and spat out by a horde of angry pit bulls, which wasn’t actually that far from the truth. However, the wellspring of power that had manifested during the ceremony remained, humming just under the surface, filling me with a reserve of energy and strength. It churned constantly, as if my souls rubbed against each other like stones in a tumbler. I felt I could run a marathon. “Okay, I guess,” I said finally. “What happened?”

  Elias set himself down so gently at the edge of t
he bed that the ancient rusted springs barely protested. “We’re still trying to figure that out, honestly.”

  I remember the impression of my father collapsing. “Is Dad okay?”

  My heart sank when Elias took in a long breath before answering. “He …”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  To my surprise, Elias shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “We neglected to consider what would happen to your witch soul if we separated it from the vampire one. The magic it contained … well, for lack of a better word, blew up.”

  I’d certainly felt the monster in the sea and the explosion. What about the image of the imbedded mirror? I wished I could look at my skin. I felt certain it would be studded with reflective glass, even though that was impossible. “But I still have both animuses, don’t I? Does that mean it didn’t work? Is the hunt over?”

  Elias’s eyebrows jerked up, as if I’d said something funny. “Oh yes. Very over. Over forever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The blood covenant between vampire and witch blew up when you did.”

  Was he implying there would never be a need for another sacred hunt? I searched his eyes for the answer. He gazed back steadily, and, as if in answer to my unasked question, he nodded.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said again. “The vampires need never hunt to kill again. We’ll need blood, but not the hunt. I suspect some will continue to hunt to kill for perverse pleasure, but the last link in the chains of our slavery has been forever broken. We need nothing more from witches. Nothing.”

  He smiled, and his face, which was often ever so slightly contorted by control, relaxed.

  “Can you imagine? We’re completely free.”

  His mood was infectious and I grinned back at him, but I was still very confused. “That’s totally awesome. But … how?”

  “That’s the part we’re all still trying to figure out, Your Majesty.”

  When I considered his words, the thrum of power along my nerves did feel oddly … communal. It was as though I could reach out and tap a whole reservoir of strength anytime.

  “There’s a reason dhampyrs go through the rite of passage at an early age. We chose sixteen because that’s when the witches insist on their Initiation. But normally it wouldn’t matter. You could have done it today, or in ten years. Except, you’re not like all the others, are you, Ana?”

  He smiled at me then and seemed to expect an answer, so I said feebly, “I guess not.”

  “No, you’ve found a way to use the power of both souls. No other dhampyr has ever thought to do that. In fact, most choose one path or the other. You chose to go your own way, and, on top of that, have used the souls to conjure something greater than either. We all should have remembered. You’ve demonstrated it often enough.”

  He meant those times I’d used blood and magic to freeze time or blow up the talisman—my super-duper power. “But I still don’t get it. What difference does that make?”

  “The more your souls work together, the more commingled they become. You don’t have two souls anymore, Ana. You have two halves of one.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The shards—the image of something shattered into a thousand pieces—returned sharply to my mind.

  “But something broke,” I said. “The rite broke something.”

  “Yes, it did. A piece of your soul shattered.”

  I touched my heart as if I could feel a hole there. All I felt were bandages and the sticky remains of the duct tape someone must have pried off my skin. “But I’m all still here.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Yes, more miracles. Perhaps because it was merged from two, you had a bigger soul than most.”

  “Huh,” I said, not knowing what else to say to that. “How did that little extra bit break the hunt, then?”

  “The First Witch bound her soul to the First Vampire when she brought him over to serve at her command. To control him, she had to curse her descendants with forever paying a blood price. But the magic began with two souls, combined and bound together in a single fate. You released a soul that was two-in-one in payment for the hunt. The curse was broken.”

  Wow.

  By accident, I’d reversed the hex. “What happened to Dad?”

  “We didn’t know you’d broken the curse. The prince thought a death was still required. He tried to abdicate.”

  Dad tried to abdicate in my place. My head spun. “But—but, you said he wasn’t dead.”

  Elias laid his hand gently on my leg.

  “The hunt rejected his offering. It rebounded on him. You see, you’d already broken the curse; but even if you hadn’t, it would never have worked. He’s a vampire. We can’t devour our own during a hunt. But we can absorb a vampire’s soul during abdication … so his powers were dispersed. Even into you.”

  Elias shook his head sadly. I could tell he had more to say, so I waited for him to compose himself.

  He cleared his throat of its roughness and said, “The prince hangs on to a shred of his soul. He doesn’t seem able to hold on to it, though. It’s leaking from him slowly. He’s dying.”

  I sat up. “I want to see him.”

  “As Your Majesty wishes, of course—but, Ana, he’s dying.”

  The worst part was, I could tell. It must have been that part of him he’d passed on to me. I could feel Dad’s presence in the other room, almost as if I were the one wrapped in a blanket and huddled weakly next to the fireplace.

  I struggled to swing my feet over the edge of the bed. Elias was at my side in a second, helping me stand, his shoulder under my arm. There was something more deferential than usual in the way he kept his eyes averted. I was afraid I knew the answer to this, but I had to ask anyway. “Why do you keep calling me ‘Majesty’?”

  His gaze flicked briefly to my face, but he dipped his head again like a bow. “Because you are my queen.”

  “Queen?” I repeated stupidly, grabbing for the bedpost as my knees threatened to wobble with this new revelation. “But Dad’s title was prince. Even if he’s … That is, even if I have his throne, shouldn’t I still just be princess?”

  Elias’s strength held me steady. “Ana,” he said gently, “the covenant you broke wasn’t just between the kingdom and the First Witch; it was between all vampires and the First Witch.”

  Swirling clouds of countless mirrors flashed through my mind.

  “Wait,” I said, finding my feet enough to push him away slightly. “Are you telling me I’m the queen of all the vampires, like, not just our region, but everywhere?”

  He clasped his hands in front of his body and kept his head slightly bowed as he spoke. “You will be the first vampire queen.”

  “What if I don’t want the job?”

  Looking up, Elias laughed lightly. “Then you’re perfect for it, of course.”

  “I’m being serious,” I said.

  He dipped his head again, as if to apologize. “As am I,” he said quietly. “Only you can decide what you do with the title, but it is yours, like it or not.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Just great.”

  Deciding I could sort out all this queen stuff later, I made my way into the great room with Elias’s help. The light stabbed at my eyes, and it took a full two minutes before I could see properly. Elias explained that my new light sensitivity was probably a by-product of the failed abdication ceremony.

  He helped me over to where Dad sat on the floor next to the fire, looking small and broken. His body shivered, and mine did the same in sympathy. I knelt down beside him. He glanced at me and smiled that same relieved grin Elias had. “We’re free, my child. Completely free!”

  “I know, Dad,” I said, patting his shoulder awkwardly. My bandages didn’t extend to my fingers, so I gave him a light squeeze.

  I glanced up at where my mom leaned against the stone fireplace. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, and her dark expression was hard to read. She stared hard at Dad and was either really a
nnoyed or deeply worried, or both.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, even though I could sense the deep hollowness inside him that was slowly draining away his life.

  “I’m mortal and dying,” he said, “but not today.”

  I nodded, feeling it to be true. I didn’t know how long he had, but it was probably months rather than moments. “You’re hungry.” I realized the sensation rumbling through my guts actually belonged to him. “You’ll feel stronger if you eat.”

  He looked shocked. “But the hunt is over. …”

  “Mortal food,” I explained, cutting him off. “You haven’t had anything real in that atrophied mortal stomach of yours for a zillion years, Dad. Have a bagel or something. It’ll do wonders.”

  I started to stand up to fetch him something from the pantry, but Mom was already on it with an irritated, “Oh, I’ll get it.”

  I sat back on my heels. Wait, was she actually upset because Dad was hurt? WTF? I thought that fire had cooled sixteen years ago. I shook my head. I could cope with my dad finally acting like a decent person, but Mom too? No, that was too much.

  Dad caught my expression and said, “Fussed over by two queens. I feel pretty special.”

  “Don’t get too used to it.” I laughed. Mom might be acting cool now, but I couldn’t imagine it lasting once he regained some strength. “But I don’t want your job, Dad. Or this piece of your soul. Can’t I give it back?”

  He gripped my arm and shook his head vehemently.

  “I wish you could,” he said. “But what’s done is done. I made a mistake, and now I have to pay for it.”

  It was so unfair. My dad had tried to do the right thing. I felt deeply sad for him, and I wanted to take care of him. I rubbed my eyes. I wanted to go home and crawl under the covers. I looked at Dad quivering piteously under a blanket. “Where are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  It was weird, but I couldn’t stand the idea of him just wandering off and dying somewhere alone. “You should come live with us,” I offered suddenly. “We’ve even got a place completely cut off from the sun because Elias needed it.”