“Blade?” I looked up at him with big, pouty eyes. He’d been under my curse before, and maybe he’d fallen victim to Lily now, but the effects of loving me once would still be in his veins and nothing prompted faster action from an affected male than pouty eyes. “Please take us to her?”
David sighed in exactly the same way Blade did. They both knew damn well that Blade wouldn’t refuse me.
“Ara, please?” Blade begged, his entire lifetime staring down the barrel if I made him do this. “You don’t know what this will mean for me.”
“You’re right,” I said, reconsidering everything. “So I suppose I should apologize.”
“Apologize?” He looked at David. “For what?”
“This.” I whipped my hand out so fast that he didn’t see it move until it was in his chest. My spear-tip fingers made the cut through flesh like his skin was merely cling-wrap covering a whole turkey. His ribs blast apart around my fist and the meaty pulse of his heart pretty much just slipped into my palm, his eyes going wide in search of an escape right before his heart stopped beating.
“Ara!” David yelled, jumping back as Blade dropped to his knees. “What are you doing?”
I left his heart in his chest and gently withdrew my hand, cupping his shoulder to guide him safely down onto his back. He’d be in enough pain when he woke up. I didn’t want his pretty face all bruised up too. “He can’t be held accountable if he was unconscious, right?”
“Yes, he can!”
We both turned to the harsh voice behind us, my skin crawling with dread.
“What were you thinking?” Jason growled, the stern king swallowing up my sweet, boyish brother-in-law. “You could both be hanged for this. Lily does not discriminate.”
“It is all right, Jason,” Lily said, joining the party. “In this case, I am willing to make an exception.”
No one breathed, not even Jason.
Lily walked over, holding her lantern high until she found a hook on the wall. “I expected nothing less, really.”
“Lily,” Jason started in on our defense, but she waved her hand, a simple smile calming him.
She inspected my bloodied hand and then the opened chest of her guard, shaking her head. “She is much like me, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Too much so, yes.”
Lily laughed once to herself. “When I realized Blade was on duty tonight, I called to see if you were still in your room, and when you weren’t…” She looked down at Blade. “I do not blame him. Nor would I have if something had happened to Morgana. He is under our curse, Ara, and we must protect those poor souls, for they cannot shield their own hearts.”
I stepped back, my hand dripping with thick blood, and let her kneel beside him. She swept his hair from his brow, smiling down at him affectionately.
“This man truly is one of my favorites,” she said, reaching out to Jason. “Give him your blood, my darling.”
David stepped in to move me away, positioning us both against the wall as the king and queen fussed over the temporarily dead guard. “I can’t believe you did that to Blade,” he whispered gruffly. “What’s gotten in to you? Do you care nothing for anyone now! You—”
“David.” Jason stood, his wrist gushing with blood. He cradled his arm wrist-up, wrapping a strip of Blade’s shirt around it when Lily passed it to him. “What did you expect her to do, given the circumstances?”
David’s eyes went to my belly. He didn’t mean to, but as he let a simple moment of thought pass, Jason’s eyes lit up.
“You’re kidding?”
“What?” Lily looked up like a deer in headlights from where she crouched over Blade.
“That’s… God!” Jason stepped off slowly at first, but as he got closer, his steps picked up and he threw his arms around us both. “We’re gonna have another niece or nephew!”
“No,” Lily gasped in joyful shock. “You must be lying. That is wonderful!”
The cold wall at my back and the warm embrace of loved ones at my front made me feel a little cluttered and caged in, but it was also really nice. However, it would be even nicer if they moved and let me destroy that witch!
“I agree,” Jason said, stepping back. “It’s time to put it all in the past.”
“Put what in the past?” Lily said.
“Give her the key, love,” he said softly to her, so much taller and so much more commanding than I ever remembered him. He made Lily—the all-powerful original Lilithian—look like a mere human girl beside him. But he also made her look like the most loved mere human in the entire history of the world. No wonder I’d once fallen for him. If he ever looked at me like that—like David does—how would I have been able to keep my wits about me?
Lily sighed, reaching into her dress to draw out a heavy key on a long chain, sitting among several other chains around her neck. “Only because I agree,” she said. “Not because you told me to.”
“No,” Jason said with a wide smile and a breathy laugh. “Of course not.”
David laughed too—some private joke, I figured—and Lily held out her hand, cupping mine as I raised it.
“You must be allowed to set yourself free,” she said, laying the key in my hand. “It is time to move on, and if this is how—”
“I will be damned if I let you kill my daughter!” Drake yelled, his brute anger echoing through the tunnels and stirring a cloud within my soul. He appeared beside me, and within that same second, the key to my happiness was gone. “I knew it!” He backed away, eyes brimming with tears. “When I woke and Falcon told me you all had left the country, I knew damn well what you intended to do!”
“Drake.” I started toward him, but his steely blue gaze stopped me, as if he controlled my mind.
“You do not talk to me right now, daughter. I am gutted,” he screamed, swiping his hand across his midsection, “gutted by what you have done!”
“But not by what she did?” I yelled, pointing to the long tunnel behind him, where I assumed Morgana was.
“Yes!” he yelled, the agony ripping the smoothness from his voice, making it rumble. “I am horrified by what she did. It will never leave my broken, shattered heart, Amara, but you…” He shook his head, heartbreak moving out onto the stone face. “I talked to you. I reasoned with you—told you how I felt, and here you are, after everything we discussed, about to kill her.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand perfectly,” he screamed, silencing us all, his words echoing down the tunnels and repeating back a few times. “You, of all people—”
“She killed her baby,” Lily cut in, stepping into Drake without an ounce of fear, her lips stiff and her eyes sharp. Drake’s shoulders dropped and his attention shifted instantly onto his sister. “Morgana,” Lily continued, “when she took my dear Ara to the tombs, her first act was to abort the child growing within her!”
Those electric blue eyes moved past Lily to me, searching my face for the truth. He saw it, but I don’t think he believed it, because he moved his gaze to David then, and when he saw what I could only imagine was the lifetime of regret and grief that he would have to bear, Drake dropped the key. It hit the ground with a powdery thud, making the dirt puff around his shiny black shoes.
“Amara.” He coughed out my name, losing his voice to grief. “I…”
“You see now.” Lily laid her hand on his arm, moving his gaze to her with a tilt of her head. “You see why it must be done. She cannot be redeemed.”
Drake’s mouth hung open, taking air in slowly, deeply. He wiped his hand across it and as he reached out for me, I flinched, that sudden moment of fear shifting away as he leaned in and kissed my brow firmly. He said nothing, did nothing more aside from walk away, leaving the key there in the dirt like an unspoken form of permission.
It took a few moments after he vanished before I could breathe, before any of us could.
“What just happened?” I asked, my whole body pressed so close to the wall that my back was wet.
“To kill a sibling is one thing. You were a fully-grown adult,” Lily said, picking up the key. “And you were restored to life. All was undone in his eyes. But taking the life of an infant is an irredeemable act. One does not come back from that.”
My fingers closed protectively around the key as Lily placed it in my hand.
“Do what must be done,” she said, then turned and linked her arm through Jason’s, leading him away into the darkness outside the glow of that lantern.
* * *
Killing without rage was impossible. After Drake left and the air cooled in the absence of all the panic, I slid down on the wall and sat with my head in my hands, thinking about everything. David didn’t move. He stayed standing in the same spot, his face frozen in the same expression, not saying a word for a very long time.
“You can’t do it now, can you?” His voice crackled to begin with, struggling with the truth.
“I don’t feel as resolved now, no.”
He shifted then, the rustling of his coat louder in the dense quiet. He sat down beside me and picked up my hand, rolling my fingers out to prize the key from them. “You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No.” He tucked the key into his pocket. “You don’t.”
“She killed our baby—”
“And you have a very pure heart and soul, Ara. Killing is not in your nature—not for any reason.”
I sighed, rolling my face down. “She’s dangerous, David. She needs to be put to death for the sake of our future, and our children’s future.”
“Then let her be put to death. But not at your hand, sweetheart. It will eat you up eventually.”
“And if I don’t kill her, if I’m so weak that I can’t even avenge my own unborn child, that will eat me up, David.”
He sighed too, resting his head back on the slimy wall. I worried for his gorgeous hair. I didn’t want it getting gross and gooey, like mine was right now. “You will get resolution if her death is at your request. She can be beheaded in the square—”
“For a hundred children to see?”
“Yes. And it serves as a reminder not to betray your family—not to take a life. Nothing sticks as deeply as when it sticks in childhood. It shapes children, Ara—”
“But will it bring me peace?” I asked, truly needing an answer. “Or will I still feel empty and sad once she’s dead?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “You will always feel sad about it—worse when you do eventually remember. But you can’t ask yourself not to feel that way. No matter what you do or do not do in vengeance, nothing will make this go away, Ara. We lost a child.” He folded me into his chest, holding me tight as he cried for a moment. “But we get to go on, and Morgana doesn’t. She crossed a line taking our child from us. What lines will you cross trying to get revenge for that?”
“I…” I wish I knew. Right now, without anger, I just wanted to walk away—maybe back to the past and undo this, not have to deal with it. But when the anger surged, I could rip her eyelids off and eat them.
“You know me, Ara. I would be the first person to kill her. To torture her. But look where that got us.”
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to us, David.”
“And yet I always will,” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “But I won’t let you hate yourself like I hate myself. You’re not a killer. You never have been.”
I nodded, letting that truth sink to my core and ease my guilt.
“We need to get up off this floor, go take a shower and give this key back to Lily. Let it be on her shoulders.”
“But what about vengeance?” My voice sounded way too young and sweet to be down here in such a horrible place.
David kissed my head, taking a long, deep breath before speaking. “We move on without it, because it won’t bring us peace, Ara. We need to find that in each other—in the smile of our new baby. Morgana’s death…” He looked off to the darkness, seeking words there. “If we take her head with our own hands, then when the time comes and we look into our baby’s face—when we see Morgana’s resemblance as we did in Harry when he was born—we will never be at peace. Let her die by the righteous hand of the law, and bear witness to it, my love, but do not swing the axe.”
I was so in awe of the nineteenth-century king my head rested against that I couldn’t really speak. He’d never shown me this side of himself, but I liked it. A lot. I even liked his default language setting, as if being here, in these cells and this old manor, brought it out in him.
He kissed my head again, the breath from his nose strangely making me feel like everything would be okay, and in that moment of relief, I felt a light shine down on me. My skin and blood warmed, and my chest seemed to open up, making my heart grow.
“We have so much ahead of us,” I said, truly feeling that for the first time. “A new baby, our daughter’s return from her honeymoon. Grand babies.” I laughed. “So many things.”
So many things I could see so perfectly clear that everything Morgana had done slipped into a dark corner of the past. It still hurt, but it was just a pain I would carry. Not something that would shadow all this light I saw for our future. It seemed a certain outcome that we would be happy—that there would be more joy than there had been pain, and I didn’t feel like the pain had to make any sense. It didn’t have to have happened for a reason. It didn’t have to be okay now for me to move on. I would just walk, and David would walk with me, and we would honor our lost child by forgetting Morgana ever existed. My sister did not deserve to be remembered. She did not deserve to even be hated. My heart and my soul were worth so much more than that.
Instead, I would love this new baby and I would love the one we lost, keeping it there in the space of memory that vengeance and anger would otherwise occupy. It was a choice. Losing a child shouldn’t take love from your heart, it should only fill it with more to give others—to give them all that love that had nowhere now to go.
“I’m ready,” I said, making a move to stand.
David got up quickly and helped me to my feet, steadying me as my tired legs wobbled. “Ready for what?”
“To turn my back on the past,” I said. “Let the law deal with Morgana. I don’t want any more blood on my hands.”
David smiled, though his eyes held onto deeper pools of regret. “You are making the right decision, my love, even if it feels wrong right now.”
I touched his chest to steady his heart. I didn’t tell him that it felt right, even now. He would have to come to that conclusion on his own. After all, people were only ready to understand something once they had known it for a while. Preaching it wouldn’t make it happen faster, so I just started walking instead, and he followed, leaving Blade on the ground to recover alone.
* * *
David led me up through an alternate exit from where we came in, pushing me through the door ahead of him into a small space, curtained off from something larger. There was movement beyond those curtains, people coming and going, and for a moment, I thought we were backstage at a theatre or something. He stepped out behind me and shut the door, concealing it completely into the wall.
“Wow. A secret door.”
He just smiled to himself and walked past, grabbing my hand at the last second to drag me along.
“What’s beyond that curtain?”
“I’ll show you.” As he pushed it back, a dozen or so faces looked up from around an airy ballroom, with tall marble columns leading past high windows in two straight lines, ending above the slightly elevated platform where we stood behind two elaborate thrones. “This is the Throne Room.”
“Really?” I said sarcastically.
He laughed. “Fun fact: those pillars that support the ceiling were once only decorative.”
“Hm.” I nodded, not really caring either way.
“And that’s why the room we’re sleeping in now is bigger than it once was,” he explained. “Lilith had this whole wing torn down and rebuilt
to make those columns supportive.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I got time,” I said, but I also just wanted to go upstairs and take a shower.
“Once, when she first reigned,” he said, using his storyteller voice; I sighed quietly, realizing we’d be here for a while, “she lacked confidence in herself—always wondered who she was and where she stood in the world as a woman of power. She tried many ways to fit in, adopted many principles and styles from kings and queens she visited around the world, but she never really had the true support of her people. And she felt that. It was in her every action.”
We started walking, moving out past the thrones, out of the safety of the shadows and into the bright room, exposed to judging eyes.
“When she returned again as Queen, in this century,” he continued, “it was to a more welcoming world, and with a changed heart. She no longer felt as though she didn’t belong—that she was weak and that people would question her. She rebuilt this wing as a show of her strength, and each pillar you see in this room represents a core of the monarchy.”
He led me down the steps to the main floor and I started tidying myself, feeling very mucky and dirty, my hand still stained red.
“Our monarchy is held together by many structures,” he told me, running a hand smoothly through the air to present the thrones, “the king and queen at the helm.”
My eyes followed his hand past the two exposed beams being held up by the pillars, each one ending above a throne.
“Down one side of the room,” David said, pressing his flat hand straight and aiming toward the right, “are the pillars representing the Vampirian world—all of its strengths. The Vampirian, the Drakarian”—he pointed to the first two pillars—“The Vampire Council and, behind it, the people.”
If I looked a bit closer, I could see gold plaques on each pillar, which obviously explained that.
“And on Lily’s side, the side closest to the heart,” he added with a loving smile, “we have the soul of the people.” He placed a hand on the first pillar. “The greatest strength of your kind. The second pillar represents the heart of our nation. The Lilithian army—the very core of our foundation—sits right at the center of the room.” He pointed up to where the two beams branched off to the middle of the room above each column, coming together around a painted circle. “And the final two pillars are the Lilithian Council and the people.”
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