by Nathan Spain
The four of them stood side-by-side at the foot of the steps with the subdued Gregario before them. Brone had regrouped with his men, who stood facing them on the other side of the room. Most of the overwhelmed Wineblood guards had been slain, and while a few of the Blackwings had gone down with them, they were still outnumbered.
“Disappointing, Gregario,” Brone called out. He was still smiling, but it was a hollow smile and there was anger in his eye.
“Give it up, Brone,” Rosanna said. “You’ll have no victory today. Fly back to Thanatos and tell him we will not be so easily cowed.”
Brone sneered. “You’re outnumbered two to one and you think you can make demands of me?”
“We can and we will,” said Callidora. “Did you really think you could walk into my house with a couple dozen men and take control, just because you had a man on the inside? You underestimate the Winebloods, Lord Brone.”
He gestured at the corpses that lay on the floor around him and his men. “Which Winebloods? These ones? Color me unimpressed.”
Callidora’s voice quivered with anger. “You’ll pay for the blood you spilled here. You haven’t just kicked the hornets’ nest, Brone, you’ve stuck your head in it. We’re just getting started.”
As if on cue, a flood of vampires rushed into the room, holding weapons. They hesitated for a moment, taking in the strange scene – Brone and his unfamiliar men before them, fallen bodies littering the floor, and Callidora and the other three at the far end of the room, holding Gregario hostage at sword point.
“Madam Callidora,” a Wineblood at the front of the group called out. “We heard the sounds of battle.”
“The Blackwings have invaded our home, and Gregario has betrayed us. Strike, noble Winebloods, and defend your clan!”
The Winebloods by the door gripped their weapons tighter as the Blackwings faced them. They rushed forward to meet their foes, and the clanging of steel once more echoed through the chamber.
But Draven saw doubt clouding Brone’s expression, for now it was the Blackwings who were outnumbered. And while his men were busy with the crowd that blocked the door, Brone had four very angry foes facing him.
Draven watched the decision solidify on Brone’s face.
Oh, you coward.
“Stop him,” Draven cried, but Brone was already transforming into a bat.
“Go,” Callidora shouted at him. “I’ll watch Gregario.”
Draven leapt into the air and transformed, Ariadne and Rosanna following close behind. They hugged the ceiling, soaring over the fighter’s heads and out the door in pursuit of Brone.
They spotted him in the foyer as he returned to human form. The front doors were open and more dead guards lay nearby. They sped after him, but he pulled the hood of his reflective cloak over his head and sprinted out the doors and into the daylight.
They halted on the threshold. The morning sun outside was bright, without a cloud in the sky to dilute its deadly rays.
“Brone,” Draven roared at the fleeing figure, and Brone actually halted, turned, and looked back at them. Under the shadow of his hood, Draven saw his smug grin, his teeth stained red with blood from his broken nose.
“Enjoy this victory while it lasts,” Brone sneered. “It’ll cost you dearly. I’ll be sure to tell Selene and that old fool Damian about the choice you made today, so they know exactly how much you value their lives.”
With that, he fled into the trees.
Ariadne launched herself after him with a strangled cry of fury, but Draven caught her and held her back.
“Ari, no,” he shouted in alarm. “The sun…you’ll burn before you catch him.”
“Let go of me,” she growled, but she ceased struggling, for it was clear that he was right. There was too much sunlight between the Manor door and the tree line. To set foot in it unshielded, even briefly, would be to risk grievous harm.
Draven gently pulled her away from the sun. “Come on. We’re needed inside. Are you good to fight?”
“Better than good,” Ariadne said, her fangs bared, as they turned back toward the echoing sounds of screams and clashing blades. “I’ll kill every last Blackwing I see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the end, despite Ariadne’s rage, there just weren’t that many Blackwings left to kill. Abandoned by their leader, and with the tide of battle turned against them, the remaining Blackwing forces threw down their weapons and surrendered. Although they seemed to hold little value as hostages, Callidora nonetheless ordered they be spared. It was not as though the Manor lacked for dungeon space. The basements under the house were extensive and outfitted with cells, a holdover from the days when clashes between clans were more frequent.
As for Gregario, there was some debate about what to do with him. Some of the Winebloods, upon learning how he had sold them out to their foes for his own gain, called for him to be executed on the spot. The irony of that was not lost on Draven – only thirty years ago he had faced a similar punishment, and it had been Gregario who advocated for it to be a harsh one.
But as sweet as revenge might have seemed, Draven had seen enough of his kind slaughtered over the last few days, and he suspected he would see still more bloodshed in the days to come. And so, he and Callidora conferred on the matter in hushed voices and found themselves in agreement. Immediately after, she decreed that Gregario would be confined to a cell until Lady Selene could rejoin them and determine a proper form of justice for the traitor.
A specter of uncertainty loomed over that last point, however. Draven felt confident that they had done as Selene would have wished by resisting Brone and Gregario’s attempted coup, but he couldn’t help but worry about the consequences their decision might carry.
But first things must come first. It did no good to worry about the future and the fates of those beyond their reach – not when bodies needed to be buried in the here and now. And so, grim as it might be, Draven staved off his worries and doubts by tending to this work.
The task of cleaning up the battle’s aftermath and burying the dead took much of the following day and night. Draven worked through the pain of his wound despite Ariadne’s expressions of concern, refusing to let anyone examine it until the work was done. While some of the fallen Winebloods were unknown to him, many were familiar faces, people he hadn’t seen in decades; they had fought beside him and laid down their lives for the clan, and he felt they deserved his labor putting them to rest.
By the time they had finished, however, he felt about ready to collapse. Exhaustion, thirst, and the pain in his side gnawed at him, and so he finally allowed Ariadne to tend to his injury. It was a simple enough task – the wound just needed to be cleaned and bandaged, then given time for his body to regenerate. But it gave the two of them a moment alone for the first time since they had arrived.
“Hold still,” Ariadne said as she dabbed at the wound with a clean, damp washcloth.
Draven grimaced and tried to stop flinching from her touch. “Sorry.”
He sat shirtless on a chair in a bedroom. The room previously belonged to one of the dead guards they had just buried, but was now assigned to Draven. Callidora had given Draven permission to help himself to the fallen guard’s clothes to replace his own torn and bloodstained garments. He had yet to try any of it on, however. He felt awkward about the whole concept, like an imposter.
On the one hand, it was good to be back at the Manor again, despite the anxious and funereal atmosphere draping the place. Draven had spent a good portion of his long life in the dwelling, and it was only after returning there at the end of his exile that he realized how much the place felt like home to him. Home was in the shadows cast by flickering candles on the walls, in the dusty smell of the rooms and in the fact that he still knew his way around the halls and stairs. The entire place held a sense of comforting familiarity.
As nice as that familiarity was, though, the circumstances of his return made him reflect on the passage of time. Little about the Manor
had changed over the decades, but he felt he was not the same man he had been when he last set foot in it – years of nomadic exile, and the Devastation, had seen to that.
Now that he was back, he knew the homecoming was not, and could never be, a return to his old life. Some things remained the same, but the context surrounding them had changed, and he along with it.
And change was coming once again. What form it would take, he could not say, but change, like a storm, would soon force itself upon an unsuspecting world. He only hoped they could yet exert some influence on the direction of the wind.
But for now, there was just this quiet, bizarre moment – just him and Ariadne, cleaning his battle wounds in the quarters of a dead man. A familiar person and a familiar place, in a different and disorienting context.
“There we go,” Ariadne said as she finished wrapping the bandages around Draven’s torso. “Happy to report that you’re gonna pull through. But try not to get stabbed next time, yeah?”
“Is that a note of concern I detect?” he teased.
Ariadne glanced away self-consciously. “Well…it’s just that there’s only one of you, you know.”
Draven winced as he tentatively raised an arm and stretched his bruised body. “Trust me, I’m acutely aware of that fact.”
He noticed Ariadne’s eyes flick up and down his torso as he stretched.
“So, uh, you can get dressed now,” she said.
She had already changed into new clothes – black pants and a vest of black velvet fastened by two rows of buttons down the front, over a white dress shirt. Draven thought ‘stylish but practical’ was a look that suited her; she had never gone in for old-fashioned dresses and gowns like Lady Selene.
He glanced over at the pile of clothing waiting for him. “I will. It just…feels weird, wearing someone else’s clothes. You look great, though.”
Ariadne smirked slightly. “You say that like it comes as a surprise.” But she glanced away again as she said it, and Draven detected a note to her tone that tempered the casual humor. Beneath the layers of wit, he could tell she felt troubled. He could always tell with Ariadne.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Better than you.” She leaned against the wall, pointing at his bandaged wound. “You don’t see me having to get patched up, do you?”
“No, you made it through without a scratch. But what I meant was, how are you doing?”
She looked away, brow furrowed, and chewed on her lower lip. After a moment, she said softly, “Brone got away.”
“Yes,” Draven acknowledged.
“Brone will go back to Thanatos.”
“Yes,” he said, treading lightly. He knew where she was going, and already he was considering how best to alleviate her concern. But he had no easy solutions, not when the same worry gnawed at him as well.
“And Thanatos has my father.”
“So Brone and Gregario claimed.”
Ariadne looked everywhere but at Draven as she choked out, “Are they going to…do you think he –”
She broke off and swallowed roughly.
“Hey…” Draven said gently. “We did everything we could. You fought well. Damian would be proud of you.”
She shot him an incredulous look. “We did everything we could? We could have stopped him right there. We could have taken him hostage and used him to bargain with Thanatos, but we let him get away.”
Draven tried to head off the conclusion he saw forming in her eyes. “Don’t blame yourself, Ari. No matter what happens, none of this is on you.”
She pushed off from the wall and turned away from him, her arms folded tight across her chest. “Damn it, if they kill my father and there was something, anything I could have done to prevent that…”
“We don’t know for sure whether they were telling the truth about Damian.”
She spun to face him, a frantic look in her eyes. “But we have to assume they were. And that means we just turned our backs on him, Draven, him and Selene.”
He reached a hand for her shoulder, but she nudged it away. “What could we have done? Surrender the clan to Brone? Surrender you to Brone? He would have killed you – at best. Damian would never have wanted you to make such a sacrifice for him.”
“At least then he might have had a chance,” Ariadne muttered.
“There’s always a chance. I don’t want to drive myself mad imagining worst-case scenarios, picturing loss and death. I’ve already seen an entire civilization die. But I’ve also seen people survive and pick themselves up and continue on. There’s always hope. We just have to hold on to it.”
Ariadne’s voice broke as she said quietly, “I don’t know how.”
Draven’s heart mirrored the crack in her voice, but he kept his own voice calm and reassuring as he said, “I swear to you, Thanatos and Brone will get what they deserve in the end. And whatever happens, I’ll be there for you. I promise.”
He stood in front of her, wanting to take her in his arms and comfort her, but something lingered in the air between them that led him to hesitate, uncertain how she would react. Instead, he looked down into her eyes, and he could see in them how much she wanted to believe him, how much she wished she could commit to optimism, to faith and hope and all the things that could help shield her from the pain of uncertainty, if she let them.
But then something else took hold in her eyes, and she blinked and turned her face away.
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said stiffly, and pushed past him and out the door.
“Ari,” he called after her, but it was too late. She was already gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Damian leaned his head against the cold stone wall, closed his eyes, and tried to stave off his despair.
The days and nights had begun to blur together in his mind. Thanatos had not called for him and Selene since that first day. Locked in an empty room with nothing to distract him from his grief, and facing an uncertain future, he felt as though he would go mad if he did not distract his mind somehow.
He glanced at Selene as she stirred against the opposite wall. Her hand rested on the bandaged wound on her side. He knew she was healing, her body regenerating the damage, but for a wound that substantial, the process was not quick, nor without pain.
It occurred to him as he watched her that while his grief for Ariadne was unique to him, he was not the only one who had lost something. Selene had lived a long life, and seldom spoke of much of it. Surely, in all that time, she must have had some experience with grief.
He raised his voice. “My Lady? How long has it been since you took the Wineblood throne? I don’t think I ever really asked.”
Selene paused to think for a moment. “It’s been a long time. More than a century now.”
“It was you and Draven back then, wasn’t it?” said Damian. He forced down the memory of burning corpses piled in the sun. “We’ve never talked much about his time on your court.”
“It was,” Selene confirmed, a far-away look of remembrance entering her eyes. “He was one of my most trusted advisors, second only to my sister.”
“You and Callidora…two siblings who both became vampires and ended up as the highest-ranking figures in their clan. How did that come to pass, I wonder?”
Selene looked at him with curiosity. “You’re rather full of questions.”
“Begging your pardon, my Lady. I don’t mean to pry. But it occurs to me how little I know about your past, and the likes of us have more of a past than most.”
Selene looked away, rubbing her bandage absently. “Does it matter, really, the people we used to be? It’s as you say – we all have lengthy pasts, but the past is so distant now that it scarcely feels relevant anymore.”
“The past is always relevant. It informs us more than we realize. I’ve spent almost as much time now as a vampire as I did an ordinary man, and yet, at my core, I still feel like the same person I once was.”
“Hmm,” Se
lene said faintly. “But then, it’s different for you, Damian. You’re a man, and the age you lived in before your turning was a more modern time than mine. Becoming a vampire granted me a freedom I had never known. All the restrictions of human society fell away.”
Damian had never heard Selene talk about her turning before, and he had to admit he was curious. “How did it happen?” he asked.
“Keep in mind, the clans were younger back then. The vampires that came to this land from Europe along with the humans were few in number and lived in secrecy. As the humans formed their colonies, we quietly formed ours. We grew our ranks carefully, bit by bit, so as not to draw attention. People would go missing sometimes, but there was never a trail to follow, and there was always a more believable explanation to turn to.”
“And that’s what happened to you and Callidora?”
“You have to understand, turning humans was a more regular occurrence at the time. Humans would be culled from the neighboring populations to grow our ranks. So it was with me and my sister.”
“You were just…taken?” Damian said, slightly horrified. “Kidnapped?”
“That’s how it often happened. It was different for you and Ariadne. You were turned out of necessity, to save your lives, by someone who knew you and cared about you. But surely you realize that throughout our history, most have been turned against their will.”
“I mean…” Damian started. The idea danced across his mind, harsh and uncomfortable. “I suppose I knew that, yes, but I hadn’t really dwelled on it before.”
“Well, it’s like I said – fewer were turned during your day. But whether through fate or chance or simply because we caught the eye of some vampire looking for candidates, my sister and I ended up among the Winebloods.”
Damian’s sympathy felt odd and misplaced, given everything that had happened since then, but he voiced it anyway. “I’m sorry.”
