by Kayleigh Sky
Asa frowned. The necklace was nothing. How could they belong to the royal families? He’d seen similar ones dozens of times.
“Are his special?”
Solomon guffawed, filling the vehicle with thunder, but the menace that suffused his face in the aftermath of his laughter froze Asa to his seat. “Yes. We’ll say that his are special. They are clues. What they lead to belongs to the Ellowyn. A national treasure Dinallah has no right to.” Solomon’s mouth twisted. “It makes my skin crawl to think he might get to it first.”
“Why don’t you like your king?” You babbling idiot. He braced himself for the psycho’s gut punch but got only a narrow-eyed glare.
“He isn’t my king.”
Okay. “So I find the necklaces. How many?”
“Seven.”
“I find the seven necklaces and take them?”
“Don’t expect it to be easy. Dinallah is not a fool.”
“What’s the second half of my job?
Solomon raised an eyebrow. “You kill him if we tell you to.”
“I… How am I supposed to kill a vampire and get out?”
Not to mention he’d never killed anybody before. But this was… War? And they were vampires not humans. Why did the thought bother him?
Solomon shrugged. “Consider freedom to be your incentive. Do this, get out, and we’ll leave you be.”
Asa faced forward again and stared at the flat gray eyes looking back at him from the mirror. They didn’t look a bit scared. They looked hard, like his face. The things that haunted him only appeared in the tattoos under his clothes.
“Are you taking me there now?”
“Ask for Jere,” Solomon said by way of answer. “He’s the groundskeeper, and he’ll get you on the staff. They have an opening now.”
Asa suppressed a shiver. More vampires. Royal vampires.
The sun fell, and soon, wisps of fog drifted through the headlights. Nobody spoke. An hour later, Solomon said, “Turn here,” and the driver eased onto a narrow road that cut through a mountainside. Their headlights swept across walls of earth pocked by the roots of the conifers looming over them.
Asa took a breath. Slow breaths. He had a job. They wouldn’t kill him now.
The whistle of the tires on the pavement filled the silent interior. After another half hour, Solomon said, “Here.”
A field stretched out in their headlights before disappearing into a rocky escarpment beyond. The vehicle stopped, and Solomon said, “Get out.”
“You’re leaving me here?”
“You have legs. When you get back to the highway, go south.”
“Why here?”
“I want one more thing from you.”
“What?”
He tensed, but Solomon grabbed him too fast, dragging him out and pushing him toward the escarpment. “Just go over there. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Nobody? Who else was out here?
Asa reached the edge of the steep ridge and turned back toward the SUV. Solomon’s eyes glowed as though the light of all the stars burned inside him.
“You are about to meet a vampire among vampires. True Ellowyn,” Solomon whispered.
Dinallah? But the name hadn’t gotten past the first echo in Asa’s brain before he flew backward against a steel chest. The pain of teeth sinking into his neck shattered the dark, and he fell into the pit of the night.
4
Whispers
Come get me…
Zev’s eyes snapped open, and he gasped. A mural decorated the ceiling above him—a ceiling that wasn’t his. His heart pounded, pushing another gasp into his throat. He swallowed it and turned his head. His gaze swept over gray walls with dark stripes. Rose and gold paper. Eilelia lay beside him, one bare shoulder showing above the covers.
Her hair tickled his arm.
He rolled away and got out of bed.
Come get me…
Asa?
Is that you?
The carpet under his feet swallowed the sound of his steps. He stood at the window and stared outside. After a moment, his eyes sharpened and let him pick out the blurry shapes below. One of his enforcers moved under the trees, dipping his head under a tree limb. Tall. So Pan maybe.
Qudim’s enforcers had sworn obedience to him, something short of a blood oath, but they’d have died in agony for him.
Zev, though, was a king somebody was trying to kill. Or chase away.
The bed creaked, and Eilelia yawned. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Don’t you have advisors for that?”
“I have Moss.” Nothing moved near the trees now. Pan was gone. Or maybe it had been Hadda. Zev’s birthday was in two days. Would it be his last? “Are you coming to my party, by the way?”
She chuckled. “Don’t you know?”
“Moss planned it.”
The coldness inside him matched the frosty lace on the windowpane. When was his last happy birthday? A dim smile appeared on the reflection in the window. It had been Rune’s birthday, not even his. The day of the Upheaval. A typically noisy, busy day in Celestine. Rune had returned from a visit with his mother, who’d been banished to Kolnadia, though her body hadn’t been found there. Her last birthday gifts to him had been a bracelet called a spell-catcher—lost in the Upheaval—and a book that had probably turned to dust in the rubble by now.
Zev sighed and traced a frown forming in the reflection on the windowpane.
Eilelia’s voice came from behind him.
“What’s wrong, sire?”
Sire, not Zev.
He straightened. “Just thinking. Moss knows my friends,” he said. “Who to invite to the party. I’m not as sure of them.”
“You are a king. You don’t have friends. You have subjects.”
“I have enemies. I’m not Qudim.”
“Qudim had a wife and children. A stake of his own.”
His spine stiffened, and he gripped the window frame, digging his nails into the wood. “Do you think I’m not stable? Invested?”
What would make me stable? A wife? You?
“Are you?” she asked.
Was he? A king that seldom travelled, though he’d dreamed of visiting the world’s most famous libraries. None would rival Celestine, of course, but that… that was the past. Though sometimes he understood the Lotis family and their reluctance to leave the cities. They’d found solid pockets to live in, surrounded by the places that still collapsed in bits and pieces all these years later. Boulders and cracks in the walls seeped strange gases. No one worked the excavations of Celestine and Majallena anymore. The water was brackish, and dust choked the air. It was no place to live, and he had to forbid it, though he wanted no war with the Lotis family either.
“Moss says I wallow in work. I say I devote myself to my duties.”
“I was thinking of your heart, sire.”
His words came on a laugh. “My heart? You… The Ellowyn are my heart.”
“Hm… At least I’m in good company.”
He laughed again and glanced back at her rueful smile. She wasn’t his. And maybe, with the way he pined over a memory, he wasn’t stable enough for her either. Yet… Come get me.
So close. Could it possibly have been Asa at the train wreck? Zev had never been sure, confused by the straining of his heart, as though somebody had been pulling on it. But in the nine months since, he’d felt nothing.
He chewed his lip. “I was dreaming of something I can’t remember now.”
“Maybe it was a nightmare.”
“Maybe.”
“I got word of a strange vampire death,” Otto, his head of security, had told him. “No signs of foul play, but I’m keeping tabs on it.”
And then Princess Esseline’s letter had arrived. My count of drainers is above average. Their numbers are increasing.
He’d grumbled to Moss. “Tell her to stop counting. I have no desire to tally them like cattle.”
A shape moved under t
he trees again. His enforcers had no idea what they protected him from. From his enemies, yes, but they knew about nothing else. If Zev kept the threats he’d received secret, maybe they’d stay imaginary.
The pressure on him built, but kings didn’t take holidays. Only nights like this.
“The party will do you good.”
He smiled. “Will I become more stable? A king to rival Qudim.”
“I met him once.” She laughed. “I was young and lost my heart.”
“A vampire with stakes. A king with a wife and children,” he echoed.
“Theirs was a beautiful story.”
“You didn’t find the queen disloyal?”
Her voice held a gasp. “How?”
“She left her own people.”
The bedcovers rustled, and a moment later, her body warmed his side. He gazed into her eyes.
“For love,” she murmured.
He smiled. “I have duty. And enemies.”
“And friends.”
He softened his smile. “True.”
But not a love he wanted to marry. Not somebody he’d tear the world apart trying to find. No, that was…
He sighed and looked away.
Eilelia squeezed his arm. “Zev?”
Her body glowed pearl gray with the moon’s radiance as it sank below the tree line.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
She searched his face, her gaze moving over every feature. “It didn’t look like nothing.”
“It is,” he said. “Go back to bed. I’ll be right there.”
With a frown, she brushed his cheek with her fingers but said nothing else. He waited until she slipped under the covers, then turned back to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass.
Asa…
A sharp pain followed an image of a root shooting out of his heart and unfurling against the bluish sky.
Come get me.
Was it Asa calling to him after all this time? Had it been Asa on the train? So close to him? Not even Otto could find him.
I hear you.
Just as he had twenty-one years ago when the first whispers reached him and told him he had a fated love, though he hadn’t known who it was. Not until six years after that, when he’d heard a voice coming from the Lakewood Refuge and found a teenager out walking his dog. A teenager he’d rescued from his attackers. He would never touch anybody that young, but he’d climbed into the boy’s bedroom window that night…
“You came back,” Asa murmured.
“I had to make sure you were okay.”
“You sound like us.”
He smiled. “I am like you.”
“You’re a vampire.”
“I am Ellowyn. No… Don’t turn on the light.”
Asa fingers fell from the lamp. “Are you afraid for me to see you?”
“I’m afraid for you…”
Now Zev’s stomach knotted. Asa was close. The imaginary root unfurling from his heart fluttered like a ribbon against the horizon. He waited until it disappeared, then turned away.
I’ll find you.
5
The Feeding
A part of Asa welcomed the death slowly drowning him. Every nerve screamed, his skin curling and bubbling from the onslaught of the liquid fire in his veins. He wailed and thrashed, but the pain never let go. Never let him go. In his mind's eye, his blood gushed, blood vessels burst, his veins whitened and collapsed. Being drained wasn't supposed to hurt. Feeders wanted it. Craved it. But he was exploding from within and nothing could save him until the lights flared against his lids, and he followed them through the dark into another place.
A place with spotty illumination and the rumble of tanks.
Lakewood.
He was lying on damp pavement, staring into the gold and violet halo of a lamp in a parking lot. A car drove away, pebbles crunching under its tires.
What parking lot?
Was he alive?
Dead and forced to roam this place for eternity?
He rolled to his knees and got to his feet, reaching for the side of a car to brace himself. The nearby building was glass and metal, three stories aboveground, one below. He marveled that the glass was still in place, because in his memory, heavy sheets of plywood covered the windows on the ground floor. But the building was intact, and even now, at night, the parking lot was half full. He ran his hand along dew-damp cars as he made his way to the lobby. A row of palm trees in front of the building blotted out the stars. An obelisk of pink stone divided the driveway. On each side, silver letters against slate-gray plaques read Gladstone Solutions. Asa paused near the front curb and gazed around him. Other than the sound of the departing car a few minutes ago, the night was still. Nobody moved in the lobby, but the door wasn't locked. He opened it and stepped in.
The wall of mirror beside the security desk reflected a young boy staring back at him. A teenager, sixteen or seventeen. Unruly blond hair. Fair skin and pink cheeks. Fleshed out, with none of the sinew he had now. A skittish, kind of desperate-looking kid.
The guard at the security desk looked up, snapped off a quick salute and a smile. "Hey there, Asa."
"Hi, Andy. Just going up to see my dad."
"Sure. Go right on up."
In the weird way of dreams or hallucinations or lost memories, he was already on the second floor, floating through the maze of rooms—kitchen, conference rooms, library, offices. Marketing and sales was downstairs, labs on the third floor, production underground. Glass walls let the light flow in during the day. Sea foam and aqua mixed with sand and dove gray.
The window beside his dad’s door was dark. He looked inside, and Lady leaped off the couch against the wall.
“Hey, girl.”
She trotted ahead of him down the hall and around the corner. Lights glittered in a few of the other buildings. He startled to a stop, soft music suddenly piping out of hidden speakers in the ceiling. Lady whined. It was strange music, strings and a hollow thrumming. It quickened his heart, and he shivered. He hurried for the elevator at the end of the hall. Before he reached it, a bell dinged and the doors slid open. Inside, a vampire stood, smiling out at him. The creature held a sword at its side and blood dripped off its curved edge to the floor. “Well, well…” it murmured. “Come here, little one.”
Lady barked, and Asa spun and ran. He raced down the stairs, whipping around the corner on each landing until he burst into the lobby.
Andy was gone.
Asa dashed outside, and the cars were gone now too. One by one, the lights went out. He stopped in the middle of the parking lot and turned back. “Lady! Lady!”
The only sound came from pieces of tarp flapping over the broken windows. There was nobody there. Nobody had ever been there.
He ran across the parking lot and down into a pit. The stars were jewels against the black sky, and a luminous green light swelled and shrank. He inhaled a strange, stale scent. Warmth kicked higher and higher in his veins. He twisted and fell.
"He is perfect," a voice whispered. "You did well, my friend."
Asa’s blood was thick on the creature’s soft words. He was drained, floating in oblivion.
"He is yours now."
"No." A musing tone filled the voice, warming it with sorrow. "He is fated to someone else."
Fated?
Fated to die.
He stared blindly into black eyes, eyes that glittered, seared him. A palm cupped his cheek, a thumb brushing his lips. "At last…"
Then the fire whooshed back, incinerating his thoughts, heating his pain to incandescence. He screamed, throat torn, and the rumbling laugh of a vampire followed.
6
Nowhere Ville
Asa woke under wispy clouds with a weak sun shining through. He flung an arm over his eyes and winced at the pain in his shoulders and ass. A grating noise reached his ears as he moved, tiny rocks scraping the hard surface underneath him. He rolled onto his side and peeked through a slitted eye at a parking lot littere
d with pebbles and broken glass. His gaze fell on a crumbled tire stop, its cracks choked with weeds. Where was—
He grabbed the side of his neck and probed for holes. Finding none, he sat up. The sun fell soft and mild on his face, and a squat, gray building took shape in front of him. After blinking at it a few times, he struggled onto his knees.
What had happened? A vampire? At least… Something had bitten him.
Memories of the vampire who used to sneak into his bedroom at night swirled behind his eyelids for a moment. He pictured soft lips curved in a smile, dark silky hair falling from a band that tied back the rest of it. He’d kissed those lips in his dreams. Never in real life though. The intermittent splat of tears hitting the pavement took him by surprise. Weird. Sixteen years had passed since then.
Weird, too, that he struggled to get up. He’d fed vampires for half his life. One had tried to drain him, and the one on the train had… Well, Asa didn’t know what he’d done. Helped him out of the wreckage, he guessed. His suspicion that the vampire had actually fed him was ridiculous. Delirium.
On his feet again, he staggered and fell against the side of the building. The dank smell of urine hung on the air. They’d dumped him at a rest stop beside an empty highway.
His gaze fell on his knapsack.
He dragged it over and rummaged through a few T-shirts, another pair of jeans, some clean boxers, and socks. When he bumped the metal case of his chess set, he pulled it out and popped it open.
Wedged into the inside of the lid was a memorial card with a picture of his mom on one side and an angel on the other. He closed the case, shoved it back into his knapsack, and slung it over his shoulder.
Oak trees and sky spun.
He squeezed his eyes shut until he steadied.
Why was he here? Where was he going?
He crossed his arms over his chest, shivering in the cold, and shuffled across the parking lot.
The house.
Dinallah Manor.
Golden beige walls. A color so warm he shivered again. He wanted to be there. Crazy. What did the king look like? Would seducing him be a chore? He hoped not. He didn’t have to like him. How could he?
