Kace’s theatrical manner had completely disappeared and he looked like the scared teenage boy he actually was. His arms crossed over his chest did nothing to make him look bigger or stronger or tougher. He looked like he was trying to protect himself. I realized why he was hanging around behind Matt, and also why he wanted our protection. Not that it had done any good.
“None that I’d like to share, Lucas,” Kace replied and it was clear that Kace hadn’t told us his whole story. Or maybe, more accurately, I hadn’t bothered to ask.
“So you don’t want to share that the magic who has been in this vicinity for years is no longer here? That she went off your radar?”
Raven had left? God, that was odd. Although, from a magic’s perspective maybe it was just too much, living this close to a breach in the order. Raven had been in bad shape the last time we saw her.
“I must have missed that. Not been paying attention closely,” Kace said, looking doubly afraid at this point.
“Or,” Lucas said, really drawing out the word, “you didn’t want your new friends to know that.”
Lucas made a face like a cartoon character might make, eyes bugged out on purpose, mouth twisted into a vicious smile and then it hit me. He was Kace’s creator.
That’s why Kace was scared and that’s why he needed us.
The next moment it hit me that they had the same gift, which was exceptionally rare. Rarer than the existence of knowers. To have a creation with your gift was considered a particular blessing from the order. Or in this case, maybe it was a curse.
Lucas had clearly found another creation to feed on, though maybe Kace had narrowly escaped.
“You know, we all just met a couple of hours ago,” I said, sarcasm lacing my voice. “Maybe he just didn’t have a chance to tell us yet.”
Lucas stared at me, menace behind his eyes though he wasn’t coming any closer to me.
“Hmmmmm,” he said, looking down at the floor and then at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, maybe at the moonlight. “I’m sure you all will agree, but I just love the way the moonlight looks in here with night vision.”
I knew he wasn’t saying that so we could have a philosophical discussion about nature and beauty, so I egged him on.
“I had the same thought earlier. Didn’t realize anyone else would notice, much less you. You seem like you’ve got a lot on your plate.”
He turned his eyes on me and in my night vision they looked purple, which means they were a particularly bright blue during the day. Made him look sexy and dangerous at the same time.
“Do you know what else these windows are good for? They don’t just allow the moonlight in.”
The lump in my stomach exploded like a grenade. I knew what happened to Raven and I knew what they used this warehouse for.
Lucas drew in an exaggerated breath and sighed deeply, puffing out his chest a little.
“These windows are also really good for sunlight.”
Behind me, I felt Lola and Matt reach the same conclusion at the same time. Kace had already known, or at least had an idea.
The other five of Ivy’s were completely still, as they had been this entire time, including the woman with strength. Lucas was clearly Ivy’s right hand, but for the rest, their inexperience became completely clear to me in an instant.
It was like fielding an army of barely trained enlistees. Not smart.
I waited for Lucas to go on, but he was going to bait me to ask him more, and in this situation I complied.
“These would be good for sunlight. You trying to get a tan?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t like my skin crispy.”
The others laughed and I bet that they had barely been vampires long enough for the sunlight to have ever affected them. They were that brand new. Assholes.
“Alright, look,” I said, not wanting to beat around the bush any longer. “You use these windows to torture and kill vampires. That’s clear. You killed Raven after you got information out of her?”
My disgust and grief stayed out of sight. For as much as Raven had unnerved me, she never deserved this. And I felt that the vampire community had lost a good one. She was the one who set me on my path.
“Very good, Knower.”
As Lucas spoke the name of my gift, I picked up envy in his voice, maybe resentment, and I realized he suffered from the same affliction that Lola did—thinking his gift was useless.
I imagined being newly transformed and being a copycat, and wondering what your gift was and when it would show itself. And then realizing that all you could do was imitate others.
He had probably been disappointed from the get go.
“And what are you going to do with us?” I asked, feeling bold and getting sick and tired of this discussion.
“That depends all on you.”
“Okay,” I said, putting my hands palm up in front of me in a gesture that said he should continue.
“Join us.”
I hadn’t been expecting that.
Behind me, I felt Matt flinch.
“Why?”
I already knew why. I just wanted to hear him say it.
“Because of your gift.”
The warehouse went silent at that moment and Lucas and I locked eyes, daring the other one to break contact first.
“Ivy was ready to put me to sleep,” I said. “He had a change of heart?”
“He didn’t know then, about you. Or, I should say, you didn’t know then.”
I still wasn’t sure what to say. Something didn’t feel right to me.
“This,” Lucas said, waving his arms around, “all of this. It’s still an experiment. Ivy wants someone who’s close to The Three. It only makes good sense.”
I assure you, The Three don’t approve, I thought, but wasn’t going to say it out loud. He couldn’t be serious, could he?
“Seems to me a magic would have been pretty useful to you as well. You didn’t think to ask Raven?”
“We offered,” Lucas said, simply. “She declined.”
It struck me that a magic probably wouldn’t have been able to stand it—to be in a situation that was such a breach of the order.
“He does know that this will never work, right?” I said, letting the words I wanted spill from my mouth.
And in that moment, I felt it stronger than anything I had felt before. No matter what happened, the order simply wouldn’t allow it. The order would rebalance itself. Its own healing system. Maybe through me, maybe through someone or something else, but Ivy had already been defeated. He just didn’t realize it.
The anxiety veins and the shrapnel from the exploded lump in my stomach dissipated, and I was as calm as I had ever been. I didn’t need to worry. Matt didn’t either. It was time.
“Take us to him,” I said, and next to me I could feel Kace shudder.
4
The six of them walked the four of us through the neighborhood.
We looked like an incredibly odd street gang.
It was the middle of the night, the darkest dark, and light would be approaching in several hours.
I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but the sense of calm I had developed back at the warehouse was still with me, and I was going to go with whatever happened.
So Ivy wanted me.
It made sense, and it made me think back to my own transformation. He had left me alive (well, alive as any vampire is) out of my whole family. I had thought about this sometimes over the years, but I tried not to think of it too often. It was painful.
But then he had left me to figure things out on my own. A creator was often a mentor of sorts, depending on the circumstances. If he had wanted me so badly, why did he leave? I could have fallen asleep if I wasn’t careful. And then what?
Maybe that was the point. Maybe I had figured things out and gotten on my way before he could find me again. How long had he looked for me?
We stopped in front of a huge home that at one point would have been the nicest hous
e in the area. Now it was boarded up and in disrepair just like everything else around here. And typical of vampires, we didn’t enter through the front door but went around back and down a flight of stairs to the cellar. That’s where we entered.
I immediately wondered why he didn’t keep the bodies here.
And then I thought that maybe it was just too creepy. Even for Ivy.
There were humans in the house, which was just weird. They lingered in empty rooms and in hallways and staircases, standing sentinel, I guessed. I wondered what they were being promised, and then I realized. Fools.
Lucas still walked in front, and the others slowly broke off into various rooms, leaving the five of us behind. Or, more likely, we were leaving them behind.
On the main level of the house, we ascended a staircase, and as we began to rise I saw the face of the left-hand female member of The Three and her message to me.
Find your desire.
I still didn’t completely understand, but I didn’t care.
Poor Matt. He was probably thinking I was considering putting him to sleep, but, then I thought, how could he? After all that we’d been through. I’d die in the light before I drained him of his blood. I hoped he knew that.
We reached another landing, and Lucas directed Matt, Lola and Kace to stay. There was a sitting area that overlooked the staircase, open to the large foyer of the house. It was surprisingly plush. In fact, the entire inside of the house, besides being dark, was comfortable and clean. Maybe that’s also why he had humans—cleaning service.
Lucas led me to another doorway off the hallway we were in, and when he opened it, it revealed another staircase. I had the feeling we were going up to the clouds.
I wasn’t scared. Not really. Ivy could undo me if he wanted. But he had already eaten, his need was gone and he really had no reason to.
As a general rule, vampires were not aggressive, especially not to each other. Immortality had a negative effect on aggression and fighting. Most of the time, it just wasn’t worth your energy. And when you had all the time in the world, resources were never scarce.
Most vampires were lazy and hedonistic. The fact that we had fangs was just an accident of nature (and, obviously, a direct result of our need to feed).
This was what confused me so much about Ivy. He was unprecedented. The fact that he had found his way out of our “loophole,” as the left-hand female told me, was fine. But the fact he had recruited a team around it? Completely out of character for an immortal.
The fact that he wanted me dead, unless I joined him. Even more strange. Although I guess it did make sense.
The thing about Ivy is that he had ambition. And that was another rare vampire quality. I certainly didn’t have any. There was no need to.
As Lucas and I reached the top of the stairs, I braced myself for what would happen next.
“Doctor,” Lucas said, and a youngish, handsome man looked up from the chair behind his desk. There was the man I remembered as my creator.
Lucas swept his hand out across his body as he introduced me. Then he backed away and turned down the stairs.
It was just me and Ivy.
“Victoria. You’re looking well.”
I sat down in a chair across from him before it was offered to me.
“And you’re looking a thousand times better than when I saw you last.”
He chuckled softy and a lock of dark brown hair fell across his forehead, the only thing out of place.
“Yes, I am,” he said as he moved a pen between the fingers of his right hand. “Nothing’s ever easy, you know.”
“Seems like you’ve got it all figured out.”
Although he tried to hide it, I picked up on the pride that flashed behind his eyes. And something else too. A desire for approval?
“Just about,” he said as he got up from his chair. He walked around his office, arms folded behind his back, while I stayed in my chair. Just like doctor and patient. “Still, I feel...uneasy.”
Yes, because you have completely breached the order, I thought, and wondered why he didn’t understand this.
You couldn’t just mess with the way things were and expect it to work out in your favor. I don’t know. Maybe this was something I had only picked up recently. But I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it until now.
“You know why I sent for you?” he asked abruptly, and I picked up nervous vibes from him.
“Yes,” I said, figuring that less was more here.
“Join me,” he said, grabbing onto the arms of my chair and getting down onto one knee in front of me.
Something manic showed on his face, behind the cool, put together appearance.
“Join me or I’ll have to kill you,” he said, getting up and looking sad.
I stayed perfectly still, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing me squirm, but really, I didn’t feel that squirmy.
“Would you put me to sleep permanently? Or would you let me disintegrate in the sunlight?”
“Victoria, don’t be like this. I can offer you everything. Literally, everything this world has to offer. I’ve perfected being immortal. I have gotten rid of the one thing, the one problem with immortality. The taking of other life.”
I got up from my chair, tired of feeling like a pupil with a teacher who had lost his mind.
“But you’ve caused an even bigger problem,” I said, not caring if I angered him. “You have breached the order. I’m sorry, Doctor, but you will be stopped. If not by me, then by someone or something. The order will repair itself. This can’t go on.”
In one swift, unpredictable motion, he slammed his fist down on his desk, his hair shaking out of place again. Then, as fast as he did it, he composed himself, smoothed his shirt and went on like it never happened.
He leaned back on the front of his desk, hands to his sides for support, and looked off toward the right, to the only window in his office.
“When I was human, I begged to be immortal. When I found out it was possible, that it existed, I wanted it like nothing I had wanted before. It would solve all of my problems. And then I got it, and the real problem began.”
He paused and in his eyes there was no light. Not a beautiful purple like Lucas’s, not a few shimmers of gold in deep brown like Lola’s. There was nothing. No reflection in them.
There was no moonlight here, like there was in the warehouse. Wherever the moon shone tonight, it didn’t reach the window of this office in the sky. And, so, a gray pallor fell over the room. Darkness mitigated by just the barest of diffuse moonlight.
I watched Ivy, who still looked out the window, and I wondered what he was really searching for.
“I felt like an animal in a cage,” he continued. “A cage built from human flesh and blood. The constant feeding. The constant killing. I realized the joke was on me. That I had been had. By my own self. Locked myself in and threw away the key. It was an awful realization.
“I couldn’t die. I couldn’t even kill my creator. I was just trapped.
“And then it hit me. Maybe I could find a way to stop the feeding. To take the immortality, and all that came with it, and make it pure.”
There was something about the way he said pure that made me sick.
“So I started searching. Doing experiments. I felt I could sense something that would give me the key. And, believe me, I bled and fed on everything I could think of.
“I’d even draw my own blood, mixing it with the blood of certain animals or humans or vampires, if they would let me, but that was rare.”
As I knew it would be. Oddly enough, vampires were sensitive about their own blood. The thought of feeding on another vampire, or having someone feed on you—even simply drawing your blood for another—it was...off putting.
Matt wanting to revive that woman with his own blood was only because he was so young. If he had years, he would have been much more protective. That was it—vampires were protective of their blood.
“I knew—h
ad a hunch—that there was a key to my blood that would unlock it. That the transformative process could be controlled, made to move in a certain direction, but for years it eluded me.”
He turned to me suddenly, and in his eyes I now saw fire. The fire of anger or the fire of passion, I wasn’t sure, but his gaze burned into me and I felt nervous.
“I was drawn to you, and I didn’t know why,” Ivy said, and I hoped against hope this wasn’t where he professed his love to me.
“I thought it was love—” Oh boy, I thought, here we go. “—at first,” he finished and I breathed a small sigh of relief. “But then I realized that it might be something else. You know I’m a patterner?”
I was startled at his address of me and had to shake myself out of the reverie his speech was putting me in. I had to say, he did have something about him. If he wanted, he could turn a lot of people to his cause.
“Yeah,” I answered, waiting for him to go on.
“Right. Well, as you may or may not know, essentially what a patterner does is recognize things that fit together.” He stopped here and threw a single finger in the air. “Actually, recognize isn’t quite the right word as that tends to imply patterns are something that I look for and see, but really it’s a felt sense. Not unlike what you do—with both incarnations of your gift.
“So, a better way to say it is that I am attracted to what fits together. Both sides.”
If this had been a different circumstance, I would have felt lectured to and been out of here in a second. Ivy wasn’t a great conversationalist. He enjoyed the sound of his own voice too much. But I felt he was going to confirm something I already knew. Something I needed.
“And something in you... I was attracted to.”
I now had the reason he had left me alive among all my family. Not to mention why he wanted our farm animals.
“But I made a grave error when I left you on your own after your transformation. You see, I thought that after a few days of hunger and not understanding what had happened you would return to your family’s farm as the only place you had ever known. And I would be there. Waiting to help you and take you under my wing, to mentor you in your new life. You would be mine essentially, a piece of clay I could mold to my own liking. And I could keep a close eye on you.
Bored To Death Page 19
