by Ava Benton
“So why is it so hard for everyone to admit that I’m right?” she asked.
It was a rhetorical question, I could feel it, so I didn’t bother answering. At any rate, there was no answer. And I was too busy remembering the warmth of blood on my hands, soaking into my clothes, as Charlotte took her final breath.
I didn’t say a word to her as we rode up to her penthouse. Not that we ever were much for conversation. Even if I hadn’t already learned my lesson and decided to never get too close to another charge, I wouldn’t have anything to say to her. Her mother and sister were right. She had caused undue chaos with her dramatic announcement.
Mariya had a point when she told Vanessa that her logic was sound, but not her approach.
I wondered if she would ever learn to listen to her sister, or to anyone a little older and wiser.
She pretended not to care, leaning against the elevator wall with her arms wrapped around her body. She was too young.
I almost felt sorry for her when I considered how young she was—not young by human standards, though she looked no older than her twenties. Young by witch standards, especially by High Sorceress standards. Most of them didn’t come into power until they’d crossed the century mark, and her mother was nearly one hundred fifty when she took control of the coven.
Vanessa was like a teenager compared to the others. A petulant, headstrong one who had never been denied a single thing in her life. She was coven royalty from the moment she drew breath, and her status had only grown the older she got. When her powers had started to manifest.
I had felt that power the moment her blood touched my lips and brought me out of my long sleep.
Her entire history had hit me at once, like a wave of information carried in that single first drop of thick, sweet red liquid. The more I drank, the more of her I understood. And the tighter we were bonded.
“Are you hungry?” she asked as we entered the penthouse. She immediately bent to unzip her boots, then tossed them aside.
The pleasure on her face as she walked in her stockinged feet made me wonder why women wore those things in the first place.
“Yes,” I admitted, feeling vulnerable as I always did.
I hated needing her—her blood—so much. I hated needing anyone, but especially her.
She had the upper hand, no matter how much wiser or stronger or more jaded I was.
I couldn’t survive without her. She knew it.
She led the way, only we weren’t going to her room or any of the others she typically left open to company.
Instead, we crossed the kitchen floor, and she pressed her hand to the wall beside the refrigerator. A door sprang open, leading to what used to be the butler’s pantry when the building was first erected.
It was long, narrow, with only a cot and a few hooks for clothing along the walls. The walls were primer gray, like whoever had painted the apartment before Vanessa moved in had forgotten to finish the job. The color suited me.
She sat on the cot as always, and I took my position at her feet as I withdrew the silver blade from its holster. No animalistic biting into her flesh for Vanessa. She wouldn’t have it.
A few murmured words over her outstretched wrist, then Vanessa drew the blade over her pale skin. Like magic, a thick line of ruby-red blood appeared.
My thirst overcame me all at once, and I latched onto that wrist to draw out as much of the sweet, salty liquid as I could. I swallowed greedily, overcome with blood lust and hating myself for it all the time. How I needed her. How I couldn’t survive without her blood, just hers. No one else’s. That was the magic of the witches—making their Nightwarden need them, and only them.
A trickle of the precious liquid rolled down my chin, but I didn’t stop to catch it. I couldn’t stop.
And as I drank, I experienced everything she felt. I couldn’t see her thoughts, I could never see those, but the impressions of her emotions came at me all at once.
Fear, jealousy, loneliness, and anxiety swirled around in my head, and I wanted it to stop, I couldn’t take much more of it, but I wouldn’t stop drinking for anything because it tasted so good.
I groaned, swallowing more, sucking harder.
“Enough.” Her voice was firm and demanding.
Even the barely-slaked blood lust wasn’t strong enough for me to disobey her power. I released her, my tongue darting over her skin before she pulled her wrist away so I could get just a little more. It would never be enough. I was breathing heavy as I licked my lips.
She was paler than before, and there were circles under her eyes. Just like always. She stood, a little shaky, and left my room without a word.
The door closed silently behind her.
I was alone.
My breathing returned to normal after a few minutes, and I could stand without my head spinning from the blood intoxication. The moments after feeding—especially after a deep feeding—always left me a little dizzy.
I pulled the cord attached to the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and got undressed, hanging my clothes on their hooks when I finished.
It was time to wait until she needed me again.
That was always the part I disliked most, never knowing when something would come up. I had a general idea of her schedule and knew coven meetings came once a month, but the rest was always a crapshoot. I had to be with her even when she took a trip to one of the million and one coffee shops within a two-block radius.
What was it with twenty-first century humans and their coffee shops? It had taken a while for me to get used to that after she woke me in my cell in the bowels of The Fold.
It took a while to get used to everything. A century spent underground would do that.
I reflected on those early days as I cleaned her blood off my dagger, then polished it until it gleamed. Waking up in two thousand and thirteen, one hundred years after I went into stasis, was nothing I could’ve imagined.
Of course, there were differences between all of my Nightwarden assignments, especially between going to sleep in the early 1800s and waking up at the dawn of the twentieth century. But the last time had provided the biggest shock of all. I had missed two world wars, the atomic age, the dawn of radio and television, the birth of the internet.
All of it in one hundred years, while I waited to be awakened again. While I waited for the last of Charlotte’s imprint to wash out of my system.
New York was a different world, too. I had always lived in the heart of it, since back before it was a proper city.
It was a beautiful place in the old days, when Charlotte and I would walk the streets together at night. Sometimes we would be out until dawn, doing nothing but talking. Passing gas-lit restaurants and hearing the soft clip-clop of hooves on cobblestone as carriages rolled past. A gentler time. Not like the one I was in with Vanessa.
I looked at my reflection in the shining blade. I was the same as I had been when I was first turned, or virtually the same. Some of the youthful exuberance was gone from my face, some of the light gone from my eyes. But my hair was the same thick, deep brown and my eyes were the same clear, icy blue.
I stared into those eyes and almost wished it were all over. There was only so much I could take of being little more than a glorified slave.
I returned the dagger to its holster and crawled into bed with one of the books I’d gotten into the habit of storing beneath the mattress. It would be a long night of torment and self-reproach unless I found a way to distract myself.
4
Elias
It wasn’t until the next morning that I left my room—cell, really, but what of it?
The door swung open on its silent hinges, and I stepped into the kitchen and walked down the hall to the little bathroom she had assigned as mine when I first moved in. Another marvel of the modern age. A quick shower before I dressed.
It was only then that I noticed how quiet the penthouse was.
I passed by the windows in the main room.
The sun was halfway up in t
he sky—that happened sometimes when I sank too deep into whatever I was reading. I had finished a massive history of World War II, focusing on the European theater. I was a bit obsessed with it, seeing as how I could still remember the early days of my life in what had since become Serbia. I wanted to know everything that had gone on across the continent while I was in my state of slumber.
I concentrated and listened carefully the closer I came to Vanessa’s room.
No sound.
Not even breathing.
I knocked. “Vanessa? Are you all right?”
She was never an early riser, but I would normally hear her stumbling around the kitchen by nine or ten in the morning, fixing coffee and something to eat. It was unlike her to lie in bed for so long. She must’ve had a long night.
I hoped she’d done a lot of thinking.
I decided to take my life into my hands and tested the handle on the door. It turned easily, and opened with no problem.
And her bed was empty.
“Vanessa?” I kicked aside the piles of clothing all over the floor and looked in the bathroom.
Nothing.
I went back to the bed and placed my hand on the pillow.
Cold.
She hadn’t been there in a long time.
“Vanessa!” I ran through the penthouse, calling her name.
She knew better. She should’ve known better, at least.
Where would she go without me?
The choices were endless in a city like New York.
I couldn’t even feel her.
She was too far away. How could it have happened? How would I bring her back?
Think, think.
I took a few deep breaths and regained control of myself. It was the twenty-first century. Communication was much easier than it used to be.
I still carried the cell phone she had purchased for me after that first imprinting, and had laughingly shown me how to use. I had never actually used it since then, however, since we were always together.
Damn it, I had told her time and again that our rooms were too far apart for me to hear if something went wrong, but she had insisted on privacy.
Her number was programmed into the phone, and I pressed on her name on the phone’s screen as I paced back and forth in her bedroom.
I had ended up in her bedroom after searching the entire penthouse, hoping to find a clue as to where she’d gone.
It had only been five minutes since my discovery, but she could’ve been gone for as long as nine or ten hours by then.
“Hey, this is Vanessa…”
I squeezed my eyes shut when I heard her recorded voice and left a message ordering her to call me immediately.
I then called the only other person listed in the phone.
She picked up on the second ring. “Elias?” Mariya couldn’t have sounded more surprised.
I looked over at the doors leading out to the balcony.
Vanessa stood out there sometimes and always demanded that I leave her alone when she did—all I asked was that she let me know when she planned to get some air.
The door was slightly ajar, but the balcony was empty.
I craned my neck and looked down, down to the street below. At least it was empty. There wasn’t a body splashed across the concrete.
“Elias!” Mariya shouted.
I had already forgotten she was on the phone, in my ear.
Immediately, I knew it would be a bad idea to tell her about the balcony doors.
A very bad feeling swept over me.
“I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think we have a problem.”
5
Elias
I remained silent while a storm raged around me. A storm called Cressida, Vanessa and Mariya’s mother.
“How could you let this happen?” Cressida stormed around the penthouse, practically turning the place upside down.
As if that would magically reveal her daughter’s whereabouts.
Mariya stood by the window, chewing one fingernail as she looked out over the park.
“He didn’t let it happen, Mother.” Mariya shot me a look of apology.
“Well? How else would you explain it?” The older witch glared at me, hands on her hips.
I wanted to lash out at the witch, tell her she’d done a shit job of raising her little brat. That things like this wouldn’t happen if she had only given out a little discipline when it counted, when it might have done a little good. If the entire coven hadn’t treated Vanessa like she was the second coming of Christ from the moment she was born, she wouldn’t get it into her head to do stupid things.
I had no choice but to remain silent. It was part of the role I played as Nightwarden, taking the abuse of the witches we were forced to associate with.
Even though I itched to get outside and start looking, I stood there and absorbed her words. Even though I imagined crossing the room in three long strides, picking her up by the back of her neck and tearing out her throat, so her blood coated me from head to toe, I stayed in one spot and made my hands into fists, instead, but that didn’t keep me from fantasizing about killing Cressida. I could almost feel the warm, sticky blood dripping down my face, my body, as the life drained out of her. One less self-important witch in the world.
“Mother, please,” Mariya said, going to her. “Sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
I could see where Vanessa’s entitled attitude came from, based on the way Mariya coddled her mother.
“I don’t understand. How could you let her get away from you?” Her shoulders slumped as the fight drained from her. “How?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
It was the first time I had spoken since they arrived and Cressida began tearing the place apart in search of a clue.
“I was in my room all night, reading. Normally, I’ll hear her. Or feel her presence nearby. Nothing caught my attention.”
“And now? Do you feel her presence?”
I shook my head. “I don’t. I know you wish it were otherwise. So do I.”
“She’s not the first charge you’ve lost, is she?” Cressida held up one hand to silence me before continuing. “You lost the first witch you were assigned after making the trip to the New World.”
She was oh-so-lucky I didn’t want to die over her murder, or else the main room would become the scene of her brutal, bloody death.
I could almost taste her blood on my lips, the vision was so clear.
“You know the villagers took her away and burned her, Mother.” Mariya slid past me with another apologetic smile. “Those were different times.”
“My charge didn’t go against my orders then, with all due respect.” I ground my teeth together and wished I could get away with saying more.
All I needed right now was for someone in The Fold to find out I had mouthed off to a former High Sorceress. Good thing they couldn’t find out what I was imagining.
Mariya spoke before her mother had a chance to. “You think she ran away?”
I looked down at her, holding her mother’s hand in both of her own.
How could two people look so alike yet be so different? Mariya had Vanessa’s black hair, gray eyes, full lips. But the eyes were softer, kinder. The lips curled up in a smile more often than they frowned. She was gentle, where her sister was rough.
But dealing with two such strong personalities for so many decades had turned Mariya to steel inside. I couldn’t know for sure, but I got a very strong feeling that there was more to her than met the eye.
“She was still in a sour mood when we returned,” I explained. “She felt as though no one understood her.”
“She said that?” Cressida asked.
“Not in words. I felt it. And I felt it again when I fed, before we parted ways for the night. She left me in my room, and I didn’t see her after that.”
Mariya blushed when I mentioned feeding. Maybe she thought it was something too intimate for me to talk about. I was in no mood to m
ince words with them.
Cressida shook her head. “I don’t think she would’ve run. I know my child.”
“Mother, you also know how headstrong she is. She was probably angry after last night, and she wants to make a point. We need her. We can’t go on without her.” She rolled her eyes. “You know how she likes to drive a point home in the most dramatic way possible.”
“And she’s not above putting herself in danger if it means proving she’s right. I think Mariya has the right idea here.” I went to my room and took my trench of its hook, sliding my arms into the sleeves as I returned to the main room.
It was torture, holding back the other factor in her disappearance. That open door. I still wasn’t sure what it meant, but I intended to find out.
“Where are you going?” Cressida asked.
“To look for her, of course.” You stupid witch. I thought I would go out for one of those lattes the humans are so crazy about.
“Do you think that’s wise? I mean, you haven’t been out in the world on your own very much, have you?” She looked at Mariya, then back at me. “What if something were to happen, while my daughter walked in safe and sound? She wouldn’t have a Nightwarden to protect her.”
Good points, but they made no difference. “I have to go. It’s part of my duty.”
“I’m going with you.” Mariya was already halfway into her coat.
“Are you sure?” I asked, looking her up and down.
She wouldn’t be much help.
I was the one who had imprinted on her sister—and that connection would be stronger than ever, thanks to having fed so recently.
But Mariya would know if we were dealing with creatures like herself—witches. I might be able to use that skill of hers.
She glared at me. “Positive. You’re not the only one who knows the way my sister thinks.”
“I’m beginning to believe nobody could ever really understand.”
We exchanged a brief look, and she blushed again.
“Mother,” she said, turning away, “wait for me back at the apartment. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”
