by Lily Levi
I opened my eyes and traced the length of his arm at my mouth. His forearm tensed and untensed as he struggled against keeping himself calm against my bite. The blue veins beneath the skin popped wildly with the effort of both resupplying and trying to stop the flow of lifeblood from his body into mine. The veins in his neck made much the same effort, but his face was as serene as the evening I’d met him - confident and full of knowledge from a world I had only briefly tasted.
I unhooked my teeth from his skin and released his arm back to him.
He took a long breath and opened his eyes once more. “How do I taste?” he whispered. His voice was weightless and far away, as though he had gone somewhere else entirely and was only just now on his way back.
“You taste sweet,” I said, pressing the back of my hand against the corners of my mouth to make sure there was nothing left to show for what he’d let me do. “A surprise.”
“Good,” he said, as though in some quiet daze, and unrolled his sleeve to cover the new wound I had given him. “It would be terribly sad for me to know it was expected.”
I held out a hand to steady myself against the gentle tilting of the boat and the new headiness that his blood had offered. It was much like when Orlando had allowed me to bite him - no, he hadn’t allowed me to bite him, that was wrong. He had dared me in some kind of thrilled sex game and I hadn’t thought twice.
“I don’t trust you,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to cement my position. “But thank you.” If I could no longer feel full, I could certainly feel satisfied in other ways, ways that included knowing that I should feel full, even if I didn’t. It was the most I could get anymore and it would have to be enough.
Ambrose lifted his eyes from the button on his shirt. His lids sat at half-mast and his mouth curved gently to the side in that half-smile that had etched itself into my memory from our first meeting. “It was a selfish act,” he said. “And so the ‘thank you’ goes unrequired.” He shook his head from side to side as if to shake the daze from his pale eyes. “As for trusting me,” he started to say.
“I don’t,” I said.
He nodded. “Trust no one, Serena Moon, little lamb, monster behind the dawning light.” He smiled at his own words. “Only do try to trust me. You can’t still think I want to murder you outright.”
I pushed the hair back from my face. “You say that I’m valuable to you alive.” The film of his blood still coated my tongue and I tried to savor it even through my speech. “But when I’m more valuable to you dead, then that’s what I’ll be. Isn’t that right? Dead?”
Ambrose closed his eyes slowly and reopened them just as slowly, like a wasted and happily tired drunk. “That’s right,” he said. “But I like you, Serena. Something about you - what is it? Oh, you don’t know and neither do I - but I like you alive and if I need you to be dead, I won’t fuck you and then drive you to New Jersey. I’m not Orlando. I won’t do that to you. No, you’ll just be dead.” He brought his hand up to his clean-shaven jaw and rubbed it with a new thoughtfulness. “Is that fair?”
I folded my arms and pressed my shoulder into the laminate cabinets. “Nothing is fair,” I said.
He nodded at this. “If I can’t always be fair, then I will try to be honest. How is that?”
“Honest,” I said. “If you’re honest, what’s in Iceland and why are we going there?”
He shook his head ever so slightly. “Theron mustn’t know,” he whispered. “It’s why I don’t tell you. I don’t want him to hear - and he can hear. He has excellent ears. The finest ears of them all.”
“Why can’t he know?” I asked, pressing him.
“Because,” he slurred. “If he knew why, he’d sink the ship rather than take us there. Can you understand?”
No. I couldn’t understand, but it was clear he wasn’t going to tell me the reason for our destination. “The Master spoke to you last night,” I said, taking another stab at more information he likely wouldn’t give me, but taking his blood had left him vulnerable and he might slip where he wouldn’t otherwise.
“He spoke to the others as well,” he said.
“What did he say?” I demanded. “What did he command?”
Ambrose raised his eyes above my head. “He said many things.”
“Well,” I said, shrugging with a heavy sarcasm I hoped would irritate him. “If that’s not honesty then I’m not sure what is.”
He lowered his eyes back down to mine. “The Master gives no commands, though often they sound like nothing else. No,” he said, seating himself in the plastic-covered chair. “The Master gives choices that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Can you understand such a thing?”
“No,” I said dully, but of course I understood. My life had been one long choice already made for me, to exist like a twisted leech on the earth until Deadmourn called me to be fed to his heirs, to Orlando, to Ambrose, to Cain, to Theron, and to all the rest. I had no choice in the matter and it hadn’t bothered me. I had known I was going to die from the moment I realized what I was, an innate sort of knowledge that I couldn’t shake.
But now…
Ambrose rested the back of his head against the bench seat’s plastic covering. “Choices,” he said. “To kill you, to protect you, to love you.” He pointed upwards. “To kill our brothers. To protect them. To love them, even. These things are not always…” He took a long breath. “Well, they’re not always possible.”
“And now they are,” I said.
He smiled up at me. “And now they are.” He looked lazily around the lower cabin of the boat. “Has free will ever appealed to you, I wonder?”
Theron
The first day passed and then the second. The rain never fell. The winds remained steady, though they had stymied themselves somewhat in the morning, but they picked up by the afternoon just as fine as they had been the day before.
It was only on the third day at sea that Ambrose could take no more.
“We ought to have taken an airplane,” he said, gripping the white railings so tightly that his hands turned nearly just as white.
Serena, sitting on the long bench opposite us, crossed her legs and tapped the toe of her black boot in the air. “Dracula loved ships,” she said, lips curling.
“Yes, Ambrose,” I said, leaning back against the railings beside him. “Did you know that? Dracula loved ships.”
He turned to me with a face more pale than I had ever seen it. “Well aware,” he snapped and then focused his eyes back out to sea. “How many more days?”
I squinted up into the clear sky. By the vessel’s navigation system and what I had perceived to be the tide in the weather, it would take us no more than eight days, though perhaps nine or ten if we were very unlucky.
“Sixteen days,” I said, hoping the smile would not come through in my voice.
Ambrose’s sunken cheeks took on a yellow hue. “Sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen days.”
“At the very least. Could potentially be twenty, perhaps twenty-one.” I met Serena’s eyes across the deck and gave her a small nod to let her know that I was bluffing.
She smiled back at me and took out a new cigarette from her front pocket. “Running low on these,” she said. “Hope the last men on this boat were real sailors and left a pack or two for us to find.”
“Sixteen days,” Ambrose repeated. His voice had grown faint and he moved unsteadily away from the railings.
“Sixteen unholy days,” I assured him. “Do you think you might sleep the nausea off?”
He looked from me to Serena and then back again. “Yes,” he said, dropping his arms. “Yes. But if there’s any trouble, if anyone shows themselves.”
“I can handle most things as well as you can.” I motioned towards the open sea. “If not better.”
He frowned at this and I took as great a comfort in irking him as I was so often unable to do. Ambrose could be irritated more easily that not, but witnessing his silent vexation was just as pleasurable as I’d imagined it
would be.
“Go on then,” I said. “Serena and I will keep watch.”
“Yes, Captain,” she said, standing, cigarette in her mouth.
I nodded at her and let my eyes wander down from her dark, knotted hair, over the soft curves of her breasts beneath the leather jacket, down long legs, and all the way down to the clipped tips of her pointed boots.
“All right,” said Ambrose, exhausted and sick. He stumbled away from us and clasped the overhang before sidling slowly down the stairs. “All right,” he mumbled. “All right.”
I turned back to Serena after his dark head of hair had finally disappeared below deck. She was still struggling with a match against the wind and I stepped forward to help her light the end of the cigarette.
She took in a deep lungful of smoke. “Thanks,” she said.
“It’ll kill you,” I said, hoping to playfully irritate her with the words I was sure she’d heard a thousand times before.
“What won’t?” she asked. She pressed up against the railings next to me and we looked out over the passing waves together.
The canvas sails snapped in the rising wind and then billowed back down again.
“Do you remember?” she asked.
“Remember what?” I said.
“Smoking in restaurants, in red-carpeted lobbies with the gold crosshatch? The black holders were so elegant.” She looked at me. “I used to be elegant, too,” she said. “Can you imagine that?”
“No,” I said. I could never mistake her for an elegant creature. The bitter confusion that brewed out from beneath her skin marred any chance of that. She’d been given a terrible lot in life and it hadn’t resulted in elegance.
She looked at me and a small smile passed over her lips. “Are you like Ambrose, too?” she asked. “Nothing if not honest?”
I laughed and patted the railing with my open palm. “Honest,” I said. “Ambrose, honest? Did he tell you he was? Well, he’s certainly not dishonest, so there is that to consider.” I pressed my weight against the railings and then stretched back from them again. “He simply tells things differently depending on who’s listening and what he wants them to hear.”
She nodded and blew the smoke from her nose instead of her mouth. The wind dispersed it. “You trust him,” she said.
I chewed thoughtfully on my own tongue to stop myself from spitting out the wrong words. I could only do the best I could with them which would always have to be good enough. What would Ambrose say to her?
“I don’t distrust him,” I said at last. “Now, that is. But every state is temporary, fluxing in and out, back and forth. You must know this. I don’t distrust him now, but I will most certainly distrust him later.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, not wholly examining not me, but my words. “And why is that?” she asked.
I shrugged. “It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Everything has its opposite and every opposite comes to fruition eventually.”
She nodded as though she understood and turned her eyes back to the wavering sea that surrounded us on all sides. “Do you know why he wants to sail to Iceland?” she asked. By the sound of it, it was a question she’d been mulling over since we left port. Only now, Ambrose wasn’t near enough to stop her from asking it or me from answering it with what knowledge I had of his connection to the place.
I looked back to the dark staircase that Ambrose had taken below deck. If he hadn’t told her - and clearly he hadn’t - there was a reason for it. Or, alternatively, there was no reason at all. One could never be certain.
Serena flicked the butt of her cigarette over the edge and into the water. “You’ll forgive a girl if all she wants is a little clarity in the hellstorm of her last days, won’t you?” She squinted out over the wavering horizon.
“I suppose so,” I said.
“I don’t have my own plan, never have. It was live, kill, be killed. That was it. And trust me when I tell you I wouldn’t have chosen any of it.” She licked her lips. “Better to have never been born like this.”
Discover what she is. The Master’s first command played once more through my mind, though it was only the memory of his voice. If he had changed the game and no longer cared what Serena Moon was, it didn’t mean that my questions weren’t still alive and well.
She was no vampire, or at least not of the garden variety. It had been three years since the thirteen of us had consumed every last red drop of her sacrificial blood. If she was an ordinary vampire, she would’ve been dead for three years, not clinging to the railings of a boat coursing its way to Iceland, her own blood renewed and life still in her eyes.
“Why Iceland?” she asked again. “He said you didn’t know why. Is that true? Do you follow him like a little lamb?”
“Hardly,” I said, though of course he would’ve wanted her to believe as much. “Ambrose was born in Grindavik,” I said, not knowing if it was true or not. It was only what he had told me one dark, drunk night and then I imagined that he’d forgotten all together. “His father had tried to throw him into the sea.” I watched the waves, envisioning what might’ve been the end of Ambrose’s life and what that would’ve meant for me. “The throwing part was easy,” I said. “It was keeping him in the frozen waters that he found rather difficult.”
She crossed her arms at this. “So we’re late for a family reunion?”
“No,” I said, stepping nearer to her.
Her eyes locked onto mine and I held them.
“There’s a nest beyond Grindavik,” I said in as low a voice as could be heard above the winds and the waves.
She raised her face to mine. “A nest,” she said. “And what would he want with a nest?”
I tried to replicate Ambrose’s devious half-smile and hoped I wouldn’t fall short. “What does he always want?” I asked. “Better yet, what do we always want?”
Her eyes flared wildly in a way I had only seen once before and my heart thundered with the sight of it.
“We are the darkness that comes,” she whispered, etching out the very words of my brothers and the Master himself - the words of us all, great and weak alike.
“We are the darkness that comes.” I repeated after her, a deep growl in my throat. My senses threatened to abandon me and I clenched my jaw to hold them together. I couldn’t afford to lose myself to a creature lacking identification.
What would have happened to me had I been dismissive of my logical senses against the sirens of Scandinavia? Their teeth and nails were more fierce than my own. And Serena? If she was more dangerous than Cain or as useless as Orlando, there was yet no way to tell.
And yet… and yet…
“Theron,” Ambrose’s voice broke the dark spell that had been manifesting between us and the afternoon sky seemed to brighten once more.
Serena and I turned from each other to find Ambrose above deck, two bottles of wine in his hands.
“I found the wine,” he said. A quiet smile plastered his face, no longer yellow from nausea. It was all he’d ever needed, wine.
Serena held out her hand to him. “Bring it here,” she said, but it was more of a purr than anything else, and for a moment, her pull was nearly irresistible.
Succubus. It was not a new thought, but the possibility reared its head in that moment as clear as the sky above us. She wasn’t a full succubus, of course, if she was one at all. No, she was most certainly a vampiric creature, just like ourselves, but there was something else there, something even I had difficulty naming.
Serena was something much darker, though it was buried so far inside of her that I could barely tell the shape of it. It was like some vague esoteric knowledge that I could only feel in some unquantifiable way.
I wondered if she knew, but perhaps she was too young. And if she did know, she never would’ve sacrificed her blood to us in the first place. She would never trust us with her life. She would never play our games, if in fact it was a game that we were still playing.
No, she was as innocent as a young girl
. If she had seen anything of the damp underworld, it was only from around the corners from which she could safely spy. She’d huddled in the darkness, alone. The years had passed her and given her no wisdom of her own existence beyond her primal need to feed and to hide.
Serena Moon knew nothing.
Zane
“You’re a bad thing,” said the boy as plainly as when he had pointed out that the plane was taking off and that the ocean was even less blue than he thought it would be.
I adjusted myself in the leather seat and flagged down a flight attendant with golden curls pinned at the back of her slender neck, just waiting for a bite. “Vodka,” I said. “Straight.”
She nodded and reached below her cart.
“You’re drunk,” said the boy. He shifted in the seat beside me and his white raincoat squeaked against the leather.
“That’s right,” I said, taking the plastic cup from the attendant. “I’m drunk.”
“And I can’t shut up,” the boy added.
I nodded with the plastic cup at my lips.
“I knew you were thinking that,” he said, but his face was flat where there would’ve been a smirk on any other child’s face.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m a sidekick,” he said, kicking out his feet and hitting the seat in front of him. The woman ahead of us turned her head to peer sidelong through the gap between the seats and, seeing me, pretended at once not to have noticed the disturbance behind her.
“You’re not,” I said, finishing the drink. I set the empty cup on the floor by my feet. “You’re a psychic, not a sidekick.”
He stared at me long and hard. “That’s what I said.” His raincoat squeaked again as he positioned himself once more in the seat.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s not what you said.”
“You’re arguing with a kid,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You’re not a kid,” I said. Even if he was, he wasn’t. There were no kids in the underworld, not really.
