“Huh?”
“You sound like you’re growling back there,” Nathan says.
I guess I was, but I can’t admit that. “Sorry,” I say. “I must have drifted off. I’ve been told I snore really bad when I sleep sitting up.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ben Wake
Dulce et Decorum Est… One of my favorite poems from my first Great War, the one from 1914 to 1918, penned by Wilfred Owen. The poor man was cut down by the anonymous violence of machine gun fire exactly one week – almost to the hour – before the end of the war while crossing a canal. The title refers to an even older line from the Roman poet Horace, written over two thousand years ago. Owen referred to it as the Old Lie. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori, “It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland.”
I finish reading the poem to Ivy, and put the book down. It is our third night in the cabin, and she wants to know more about my past.
“Is that really what it was like for you?”
“Well, poison gas doesn’t affect me. It’s unpleasant, but not deadly. At that time, I was both too scared and confused about what was happening to me, and then intoxicated by my newfound immortality to really understand what the boys around me were going through when we got hit by gas. It wasn’t until years later when I came across this poem that it really hit me how horrible of a weapon gas is. And by that time, I’d seen worse ones used.”
“You’re talking about the other war, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. “The other Great War, between the vampire clans and the thropes.”
“Thropes?” Ivy asks.
“It’s short for lycanthropes. Werewolves.”
Ivy frowns at me. “I thought the war was between the clans themselves. And now you’re telling me that werewolves are real too?”
“Oh, we were still at war with ourselves, too. The pressure the thropes put on us made for some grudging cooperation between warring clans, but it never lasted long. In many ways, nobody hates a vampire more than another vampire. It is another unfortunate side-effect of immortality. When you know you’re going to live forever, sometimes you stop caring about the little lives of the people that will die, and you concern yourself only with those you consider your equals. In such a small population, petty disagreements are greatly magnified, and you can literally hold a grudge forever.”
“Is that why you’re on the run from your clan? Somebody has a petty grudge against you?”
“Yes and no,” I say. “I fought hard in the second Great War. I let my clan manipulate me into believing that the thropes were such a threat not only to us, but to all life, that any measures against them were fair. Nothing I could imagine was too cruel, too low, too evil. The simple end of surviving them justified any means. Ironically it was my belief that they were not human that let me believe that. It is something so deeply embedded in the human psyche that even after a hundred years of thinking I was more, that reflex still exists within me. When humans can find a way to dehumanize another person, the line has been crossed, and you will justify or forgive yourself anything. But a thrope is no less human than I am, or you are, really. Some of them are humans that were turned. Some of them are pups born of two thrope parents. But at their heart, they are still humans. Just humans infected with some disease, just like me.”
Ivy takes a drink of water. Since I finished the poem, her posture has closed up, her body language is very guarded in my presence. “I understand,” she says. “I read the news and what people post online. We do it all the time, don’t we?”
“We do,” I say.
She unfolds her posture a little bit, as if that admission that it is a weakness she and I both share makes me a little more approachable again.
“Something obviously happened during that war to finally change you,” she says. “What was it?”
I tell her about the Sângele Pierdut – the Lost Bloods – the vampires that would intentionally starve themselves until they went violently feral, and then we’d unleash them on thrope packs. “When we dehumanized the thropes so much that we willingly and consciously rejected our own humanity that much. When I looked into the eyes of one of the Lost and saw that there was almost nothing left, that it barely recognized me as one of its own, and it was just that bare shred of recognition that kept it from ripping my throat out. Realizing that we had decided to fight what we thought was evil by choosing to embrace an even deeper evil. That’s when I knew that we had lost our way even more than the Lost Bloods had. They were willing to take themselves to those depths, but we were willing to pretend we were above that while we sent them off to dirty their hands so we could keep ours clean.”
“That is truly horrible,” Ivy says, visibly shuddering. “Are any still around?”
“No,” I say. “For a while, they had turned the tide of the war in our favor. The thropes couldn’t stand against them, they couldn’t gather in packs, because all we had to do was release one the Sângele Pierdut on them and they’d disorient the whole pack enough for us to wipe it out. But the thropes learned how to fight in smaller packs, better ways of communicating and coordinating between groups. It got to the point where each Lost Blood brought us fewer pelts. There was less glory in it, so fewer vampires took that route. Some clans, including the Negre, tried to force vampires to become Sângele Pierdut, but it wasn’t worth it. The new breed didn’t have it in their hearts to go that deeply feral, and the time and effort spent creating one by force, only to have it take one or two pelts at most, was greater than the effort required to just go out and hunt them down the old fashioned way.”
“So I don’t have to worry about one of them coming after us here?”
“You don’t,” I say. “It would take a much stronger enemy than just me for a new crop of volunteers to undertake the process.”
“Good,” she says.
“But the Negre still do consider me a traitor, and they still want you, independent of that, so we need to remain vigilant out here.”
“You keep dancing around that traitor bit,” Ivy says. “I think it’s time you told me what that’s all about.”
For the first time in a very long time, I find myself wishing that I could consume the food and drink of the warm without becoming horribly sick, because I could use a stiff drink right about now.
I still get up and pace for a moment. I feel so ridiculous for doing so, needing to work off nervous energy like some thrope feeling caged.
I finally settle a bit and sit back down. “There’s a Truce now between us and the thropes. It happened about eleven years ago. They had gained the upper hand in the war again, but we all knew it would only be a matter of time before the balance shifted. The clans were starting to unite a little more, their temporary alliances lasting just a little bit longer. We knew that in another decade or so, we’d push them back, but we also knew that the clans wouldn’t be able to cooperate for much longer than that, especially if they started sensing a final victory coming up. If the clans ever get to the point where they feel they’re going to wipe out the thropes for good, they’re all going to turn on each other to try and gain as much as they can before the external pressure to cooperate is gone. We knew it, the thropes knew it. There were just enough on either side that didn’t want to see the tide of the war flow to our favor and then ebb again, leaving us in fifty years or so no closer to a resolution than we were then.”
I shift a bit in my seat, not able to get comfortable, and I go on. “Of course, even as we were negotiating the Truce with the thropes, the clans were maneuvering against each other. That external pressure of the war that I mentioned. We all knew that the moment the Truce went into effects all of the old grudges and enmities were going to flare back up. Thing is, I had made genuine connections and friendships with vampires of other clans. There were – are – a lot of us younger vampires that have no use for the old feuds.”
Ivy definitely looks at me funny when I describe myself as one of the “younger” vampires.
“Shut
up,” I say, and she cracks a smile at me.
“If I checked your wallet right now, would I find your AARP card?”
“Funny,” I tell her. I’m glad of both the break from the story, and of Ivy looking like she’s starting to genuinely relax despite the gravity of what I’m telling her. Maybe she’s adapting to the situation, and accepting that things will be a little rough for us for a while. Maybe she knows there’s still danger, but that we can pull through together.
“May I continue,” I ask, making a slight bow as if I’m petitioning royalty for some favor.
“Please, do,” she says.
“I’ve told you before that I’m one of the best vampire hunters among the clans. Despite my youth.” I wink at her. “So as the threat from the thropes lessened, I was being pulled back from that front and prepared to start going after my own kind again. By this time, I really had seen way too much killing. Between the human wars I’d been caught up in, the Great War, the clan wars. I can’t say there was a big epiphany moment. I mean, seeing the Lost Bloods was a huge point, but I can’t really identify the exact moment that I swore off war. I can clearly remember the day that I vowed to never again feed on a human, but that moment was not the same as when I made the final decision to turn away from being a soldier for the Negre.”
“That makes me feel a lot safer, being here alone with you,” Ivy says. “The part about not feeding on humans.”
“I know,” I say. “Even if I still were, though, I wouldn’t feed from you unless my life truly depended on it. Some vampires find it very intimate to feed from their warm lovers, but I don’t see it as such. It seems too much like I’d be using you, and not like we were sharing something. It’s all taking on my part, with nothing of equal value that I can return.”
This closes Ivy up a little bit again. “I mean, I think I can see why some might find it meaningful or romantic in a relationship, but I don’t think I could. You kiss like I never imagined anybody could ever kiss. So intense and powerful. I guess I just can’t imagine looking at your mouth and thinking it’s sexy if I’d ever seen my own blood in it, you know?” she asks.
“I do,” I say. I understand exactly what she means by that. When I brush my lips against her neck, the thought of breaking her skin and taking from her seems like it would be such a betrayal of her trust in me, and of her being as a whole. I get up from the chair at the kitchen table where we’d both been sitting, and go to the small couch in the front room. I pat the cushion next to me and Ivy comes to join me. As she’d requested, I’d gone out to discreetly feed just before I woke her at dawn, so I have some body heat to share with her. She curls up against my chest, and I feel some more of her tension from the last few days melt away.
Once she’s settled in, I pick up my account again. “I had proven useful enough as a killer that I was starting to gain status among the Negre. Being a killer is a huge virtue among them, but having any kind of status or influence is dangerous. While the Negre have rival clans, there are also constant rivalries within the clan as well. Mihai Racoviță, our Bunicul în Sânge, the elder of the clan, holds his position by keeping an iron grip on the entire clan. He also encourages us to betray and backstab each other. He wants only the strongest and most cunning to thrive in the clan. I believe that he orchestrates more than half of the rivalries himself, so he always knows who owes who and who has a silent grudge against who. This way, if anybody ever becomes strong enough to threaten his hold, he knows who to nudge which way to take his potential rival out.
“As it became more obvious to some that I had lost the heart for violence and wanted to turn away, they saw a chance to use me in one of their intrigues. Take me down, and everybody holding me up as a hero of the clan and of the Great War would lose face. One night another very old vampire named Ion Georgescu, one of Racovită’s top lieutenants here in the United States, went missing. His jewelry was eventually found among some ropes and stakes out on the south face of a hill. He’d been exposed to direct sunlight until it burnt him to nothing. The investigation showed that there were only three vampires that had easy access to get into his home, and of them, I was the only one who’d been nearby at the time. Unfortunately, while I’m an extremely skilled hunter, I am very bad at court intrigue. I was taken by surprise, literally, when I was seized and hauled off to Romania to answer for his death. I realized way too late that somebody who wanted Georgescu dead had also taken the opportunity to set me up as the one who either killed him, or aided those who had. They were good, really good, because they left it ambiguous as to whether it was me or not. Whoever had taken him down had great skill, but had also faked the kind of mistakes I would be unlikely to make. I felt especially trapped by that. If they had tried to pin me as either the killer or an accomplice, I could have drafted a defense for myself. But not knowing exactly what I was being accused of, I couldn’t figure out how to properly defend myself.”
“That is terrible,” Ivy says, putting a reassuring hand on my knee.
“I was sure that I was going to find myself staked out myself, still alive, on a south-facing hill, to die slowly of sun poisoning and hunger. Vampires are very much into two eyes for an eye, two teeth for a tooth in our sense of justice. If the metaphor makes sense, it was in my brightest hour that I was saved from that fate.”
It takes Ivy a second to understand that a vampire’s darkest hour is actually their time of greatest strength. She nods and taps my knee to tell me she gets what I mean.
“One of my blood brothers, another vampire that had been turned by Sonia Vătafu, came into my cell at high noon on an unusually sunny day for late fall in that part of Romania, and smuggled me away from the old clan castle. We had learned to hunt together, and I consider him one of the few that surpasses my skills. I still only understand half of how he managed to get me off of the castle grounds safely, and there is an elegance to how he had created his plan that to this day I can’t help but admire. He knew who had set me up and why. He told me he could gather proof if I could stay hidden for just a few weeks, but I swore him to silence about it.”
“Why?” Ivy asks.
“To speak up for me would be to put himself into the center of whatever rivalry I was caught up in. The ones that set me up were just pawns to very powerful vampires. You don’t go after a lieutenant as high ranking as Georgescu unless you’re nearly as powerful yourself, if not more. Breaking me out of the castle was an unforgivable insult to the entire clan as well – he not only corrupted the course of what passes for due process by the laws of the clan, but he humiliated them by single-handedly taking me out of the castle’s well-guarded dungeon. Even if I were exonerated of the crime of murder on his proof, Papa Racoviță would have punished him harshly for that humiliation, and whoever had framed me would most certainly take an even worse revenge on him for revealing their plot.”
“I’m glad he’s on our side,” Ivy says. “He is, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I would like to assume so. He rescued me because we have always been close, and he knew the charges against me were false. He even knew who had set me up, he could prove it. I trust him with my life, because he has shown me that he considers me a brother above and beyond the ties of clan. I believe I am safe with him, but I still would not bet your safety on that. Whatever it is that is drawing the Negre to you is something I do not yet understand so I will not predict the actions of any other vampire that gets close to you or it.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ivy Sparks
Day five in the cabin, and I’m stuck between two moods. On the one hand, Ben and I have settled into a rhythm together, and life here actually feels kind of normal. I wake up to Ben making me breakfast. There is even creamer for the coffee that he picked up on his run into town the other evening. It’s not the same as actual cream, but it is much closer to what I’m used to. Ben feeds a little bit every day now, so he’s not constantly cold to the touch. It also means a little bit of fresh meat every day to mi
x in with the dehydrated and canned goods stocked up here. During the day, I can forage around a little bit near the cabin, putting the skills Grandma taught me to good use – sometimes, the difference between plant you use for food and one you use for magic is intent. We’re early in the year for a lot of the good pickings, like wax currants and other berries, but I still find small amounts of salsify, lambs quarter, and alfalfa. All nice, wild greens that make a decent, if somewhat bitter, fresh salad. Seeing something with bright and lively color on the plate helps a lot.
On the other hand, Ben is very strict that I shouldn’t wander too far from the cabin. He lets me go up and down the hill to get close to the roads, but warns me to never get close enough to be seen by passing traffic. The fact that he’s run into town twice since we came out here makes him nervous enough. I still have not told him yet that I am a witch, and have been reluctant to set up a circle on the land. I don’t know if he’d be able to recognize it for what it is, but I’m not ready to reveal my craft to him that way. I have been doing what I can to practice what defenses against a vampire I can without a circle or any of my tools. I don’t need any of that, of course. Grandma’s line learned long ago that all a witch should really need is herself and her training. But never having actually practiced defenses against vampires, I feel like my attempts are weak. Especially since I’m also trying to keep them subtle enough that Ben won’t detect them. So I have done nothing actively protective, more attuning myself to his presence and his moods, and being ready to strike if he or one of the ones hunting him ever attempts to harm me.
I miss Grandma terribly, though, and Kate and Nathan most out of all of my friends at school. The hardest thing to admit to myself is how much I miss Carl. Our last conversation together was not civil at all, and we both left feeling hurt and angry. I can now truly understand the people that have lost somebody they were mad at, or who never took that one last chance to say, ‘I love you,’ to someone before they unexpectedly died. I don’t plan on dying out here, and I’m not worried that will happen to Carl, but it still hangs over me constantly that the last thing I said to him was basically get out of my life. Now he’s out of it, and I wish I’d never said those words, but I can’t take them back. It especially hurts that Ben has spoken so kindly about Carl. Not to mention that since I first kissed Ben, I’ve had this weird desire to kiss both Carl and Nathan. I wonder if those three men would be able to be friends if they hadn’t all been vying for my affection. Carl and Nathan seem to have dealt with it amongst themselves long ago – probably when they both realized that at the time I was interested in neither of them, but with Ben. Well, Ben has what they’ve both wanted. I have heard so many tales of men who have lost friendships because of a pretty girl coming between them, and I had always hoped I would not be the pretty girl that did that to anybody, but here I am, barely a week into my first relationship.
A Witch's Fate_A Reverse Harem Romance Page 16
