by Aja James
Tal stared into her eyes and pondered a puzzle of his own—why he couldn’t see her future now, when he could see her would-be actions when she’d first captured him.
Because somehow her path came too close to his? Or because she was Ishtar’s sister and her path was intertwined with Ishtar’s?
“No matter,” she said with a cold smile, “I am here to dispense with mind games and converse with you the old fashioned way.”
Still silent, Tal simply waited.
“I know about the messages you send to your band of rabble,” she began, her smile spreading wider when a muscle ticked in Tal’s left eyebrow, “though I haven’t told anyone, so you needn’t worry.”
“I’ve been watching you,” she said, flicking her avaricious gaze leisurely over his body with both appreciation and derision, “as you watched everyone else around you.”
“At first, it was out of a vengeful curiosity—yes, you’re a gorgeous piece of flesh with undoubtedly a nice big cock, but then so are all the other Dark males and Blood Slaves in the Palace. We vampires like beautiful things, after all, and pride ourselves on collecting the best. What makes a pale, yellow-haired Pure One so special?”
She slid her fingers against the bars of the cell door, her fingernails clicking against the metal.
“And then I recalled the way my sister used to sneak out at the crack of dawn when she thought everyone was deep in slumber.”
She huffed a humorless little laugh.
“So naïve, my little sister, to think that she wouldn’t be found out. Perhaps she managed to fool all others, but I’m her twin. I always know what she’s about. I even helped dissemble for her when she came close to being discovered a few times. If she wanted to have a little lark, then I intended to indulge her.”
The Princess slid her eyes to his as her smile abruptly disappeared.
“I love my sister. I forgive her for keeping the secret of you. I forgive her for Challenging me over you. She sat with me every night while I healed, deeply remorseful for hurting me. But she’s not sorry for taking you from me, because she’s deluded herself into thinking that she loves you more.”
A demonic red glow appeared in the centers of her black pupils.
“And that, I cannot forgive,” she hissed.
A shiver of apprehension chased down Tal’s spine. He had not given much thought to Princess Anunit in his strategies, and now he feared he would pay dearly for that mistake.
As suddenly as the red glow appeared, it was gone again as Anunit seemed to switch topics.
“Do you know why you’re here? In this dark, dank cell rather than with Ishtar in her luxurious chambers, coddled like a favored whore? You are a distraction the Queen wanted out of her way, that’s why.”
“My mother has given Ishtar two nights to get used to the idea that she is the Chosen Princess of our Kind. On her name day tomorrow night, the succession will be formally announced, and she will take my Enlil as her Blooded Mate.”
Tal could not prevent the burst of breath that left his chest as if someone had smashed it with a mallet.
“Hurts to know, doesn’t it,” Anunit accurately assessed, “that the female you love will belong to another. That her body will welcome his as he plows his seed into her womb. That you will ever be her Blood Slave, to use and discard as she pleases, never her equal, never her Mate.”
With each word, she might as well have been pounding wooden spikes into Tal’s body, for he felt as if he were bleeding from every pore.
She turned to fully face him and stared long and hard.
“You really love her, don’t you,” she mused, as if she’d just come to the realization herself. “I’ve seen the way you gaze upon her when no one else is looking. I’ve seen the pain in your eyes, the tenderness and passion, the helplessness. Hopelessness.”
Tal could only concentrate on breathing in and out. Everything within him hurt. It was as if her voice and words had released all of the dark emotions he’d bottled inside, engulfing every spark of light.
She chuckled, amused, as if she were having fun.
“Foolish Pure One,” she said chidingly.
“She will never love you back. How could she possibly? You’re a Blood Slave, no better than the shit in our sewers. You’re the leader of the Resistance, plotting even now to destroy everything she holds dear. She might be infatuated with you now, but she’s barely a full-blooded female. How long do you think her feelings will last when the male beside her, inside of her, every night, every day, is not you but her Blooded Mate?”
“What do you want?” Tal gruffly rasped, no longer able to contain his anguish.
He’d do anything to make her stop. Her words cut into him like a thousand blades.
She smiled that humorless, serpent smile again.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she hissed.
“Tomorrow night, when the succession is to be announced and the Chosen Princess’s Blooded Mate declared, I suspect my dear little sister will do something incredibly brave and stupid, just like the way she Challenged me.”
The malevolent red glow was back in her eyes at the mention of the Challenge. If she’d forgiven it, she certainly hadn’t forgotten it.
“It will set in motion a sequence of events that will inevitably lead to her being severely punished; and you, likely killed. I know my mother, and while she may love us in her own way, she is ruthless at heart. She will do whatever it takes to ensure the continuing rule of Dark Ones.”
The Princess slowly paced outside his cell, back and forth like a hypnotizing pendulum.
“Think about it. Your death means the end of the Resistance. My sister will go mad with grief. She’ll hate the male she’s forced to Mate. Given her nature, she’ll rebel and lash out, which will only make the Queen more determined to beat the defiance out of her, at least until she produces the requisite daughter or two.”
Tal did think about it. His mind was a whirlwind of possibilities, permutations and scenarios. All of them trapped him in fear and despair.
“And I…” Anunit continued on a deceivingly softer note, like the eerily quiet eye of a tornado.
“I will stand by useless and ignored, because I am not the Chosen one. And Enlil, who has already pledged himself to me, will be forced to take another for the rest of their existence. No one gets what they want in the end.”
“What do you want.” Tal no longer asked the question; he simply stated it.
A fatalistic calm came over him, like the brief moment of clarity that blinded those who were half a step away from death.
She would offer him a different path, he knew. One that led to different results. She would not be here taunting him otherwise.
She smiled again and inhaled deeply, as if enjoying the pungent smell of the pot of venomous brew she stirred.
“Attend me well, Blood Slave,” she said softly, staring intently into his eyes.
“And do exactly as I say if you want to save your people and your love from their destined doom…”
Hours after the elder Princess had gone from the underground prison, Tal continued whittling at his sculpture, adding the details for the eyes and ears.
He was glad he had this task to bide the time, for when he whittled, the screeching bombardment of thoughts in his head dimmed to a distant roar.
The comb he’d carved a few weeks ago was already tucked inside his tunic, oiled and polished to a fine-grained smoothness. This would soon be finished as well.
He’d intended to give them to her on her name day as a token of…
Tal’s hands shook too hard for him to continue, and he sat back against the prison wall, closing his eyes.
The truth was, he had nothing to give her. He was a slave and owned no property. Even the tunic he wore could be ripped off his body at will.
The blocks of wood the forge master gave him were too small to use for other things, simply scraps discarded at the chopping table. It was all he had.
He u
nraveled the strip of ribbon from his hair that Ishtar took pleasure in braiding for him every night and wrapped it around the wooden leopard in his hand. Until the leopard was wearing the ribbon like a coat of armor.
It would need the protection when he broke its heart.
“What are words but an expression of thought and emotion? Which is truer, the words, the thought or the emotion?”
—From the Ecliptic Prophesies, buried and forgotten
Chapter Nine
Inanna didn’t know what was worse—to meet her birth mother under these circumstances or to never meet her at all.
At least if she never met her, she could keep the dream alive of the perfect, loving mama, and the best partner for her beloved papa, an image so pristine, so beautiful and bright and joyful that reality could never hope to match it.
Well, her mother was indeed beautiful, Inanna reflected as she cast Ishtar a surreptitious glance. Inanna hadn’t been able to meet the other woman’s eyes for a good long while after she’d finished her story.
Slightly waving waist-length hair braided down her back in a utilitarian fishtail. Large, thickly-lashed dark brown eyes, a small straight nose, smooth cheeks and delicately sculpted pink lips, tilted naturally at the corners as if ever ready to smile.
She wasn’t smiling now, though. She was looking down at her hands folded together in her lap as she sat at a right angle to Inanna on an L-shaped couch in the waiting room adjoining the healing chamber.
Hard to imagine that this female was also the Mama Bear Inanna had come to know and love over the last two years. She didn’t believe it until Ishtar transformed before her very eyes into the plump, elderly gray-blonde haired lady and spoke familiar words to Inanna in that liltingly accented voice.
Inanna had been struck dumb for a long while, thinking back on all the conversations they’d had over baked goods and spicy teas in Mama Bear’s shop Dark Dreams. Despite her disbelief, it all started to make sense.
Ironically, she’d thought to herself before that Mama Bear seemed liked the perfect motherly figure.
If Ishtar were to be believed, she’d had no choice but to make Inanna’s papa into a Blood Slave.
Her Blood Slave.
The alternative would have been worse, though she didn’t go into details, for which Inanna was grateful.
Hearing Tal’s difficult history even before his imprisonment made Inanna feel helpless and small. She thought back to every time she’d asked too many questions of her papa, stirring up painful memories, every time she’d misbehaved and been a burden.
She berated herself for not having found and liberated him sooner.
She’d looked for decades after he disappeared on the day of the Great Siege, but if she were honest with herself, she’d been too preoccupied with her own loss. Bereft without Gabriel, who was known as Alad in his previous life, even without realizing that she’d been mourning and yearning for her one True Love.
If Ishtar were to be believed, she’d loved Inanna’s papa once upon a time.
But the Great War had happened, followed by the Purge in the aftermath.
She skipped many details again, Inanna instinctively knew, but she sensed that Ishtar had suffered her share of grief and torment, not the least of which was losing everything she knew and loved with the destruction of the Dark Ones’ empire and the death of Queen Ashlu.
“What about Anunit?” Inanna asked after a time, “what about…my aunt?”
“I don’t know what became of my sister,” Ishtar answered, still looking at her hands.
“I lost her in the Great Siege. I-I’d been captured by one of the human factions that vied for control of lands and gold in the aftermath of the Great War, seeing an opportunity to take a piece of the crumbling empire for themselves before a Pure One by the name of Sargon, with the Pure Queen at his side, brought stability and peace once more. But that wasn’t for many decades to come.”
Inanna comprehended a wealth of pain in the word “captured” as she listened to her mother’s voice. She wouldn’t ask for details. Perhaps one day Ishtar would trust her enough to share them.
Nothing was black and white, Inanna realized over the last few hours, in a way that she’d never fully appreciated in the millennia of her existence.
As the offspring of a Pure One and a Dark One, she should be able to bridge the divide, keep her mind and heart open to both sides.
She knew now that she’d judged her mother too harshly. She could feel Ishtar’s heart-felt remorse and soul-deep pain. But there was one more question she had to ask, even though she felt she knew the answer.
The issue was whether Ishtar knew it too. Knew it and embraced it.
“Do you still love papa?” Inanna asked quietly, with a gentleness that was inherent in her nature, rather than the furious resentment just hours ago.
Ishtar started, her entire body flinching, as if the question had caught her unawares, or because the question was too painful to contemplate.
“I…” she began, but quickly trailed off, at a loss for words.
Did she still love Tal? With all of her body, mind, heart and soul?
Whatever it was she felt for him, it was infinitely different from what she used to feel for him.
But it was still all-encompassing, tearing her emotions into extremes, undiluted and razor sharp.
She was no longer that untried young female obsessed and heady with her first taste of passion and love. She’d been worn and embittered by time, trials and tribulations. Lived through one apocalypse after another; there was no escape no matter where she went.
Military conquests, tribal wars, civil wars, plagues, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, demon and witch hunts, religious persecutions, World Wars… Some part of her wondered whether humans would have been able to cause so much destruction and chaos had the Dark Ones held their rule.
There was something to be said for the ruthless enforcement of law and order when she experienced first-hand a world without it.
Everything had seemed so simple when she’d been a girl, in love with a boy. But she did ask herself even then whether she’d still have enjoyed her lot in life had their situations been reversed. If she’d been one of the oppressed, and he, one of the oppressors.
“I don’t know,” she finally answered Inanna’s question.
“I just know that I want to help heal him. Whatever it takes to do it.”
It was not the answer Inanna had guessed, but it was close enough. She appreciated that what Ishtar had left unsaid was much more telling than what she did say.
But how to get Ishtar to realize the same?
“He’s awake,” Ava said, opening slightly the inner door to the healing chamber.
*** *** *** ***
Third millennium BC. Capital City of Akkad. The Ivory Palace.
Ishtar sat quietly subdued on her bed.
Queen Ashlu was well and truly furious this time. And rightly so, after what her younger daughter had done at the succession ceremony an hour ago.
In front of all the Dark noble houses and provincial leaders, all the Royal Consuls and Generals, the Dark Keeper and the Oracle, Ishtar had proclaimed right after her mother’s statement about her succession to the throne that she was not going to Mate with the Chosen Dark warrior Enlil, that instead, she was choosing to Mate her Blood Slave Tal-Telal.
The silence after Ishtar had spoken out of turn was deafening. Not even a gasp could be heard.
Nothing nearly so outrageous and blasphemous had been uttered in the untold millennia of Dark histories recorded in their venerated Scrolls. And she, Ishtar Anshar, “Star, Foremost of the Heavens,” Chosen Princess of her Kind, was the one to say it.
Oh yes, the Queen was in the blackest rage Ishtar had ever witnessed.
But she didn’t shout and she didn’t threaten. All she did was order in low tones for Enlil’s shadow warriors—ten of them—to escort her younger daughter to her chambers and keep her there.
So here she was,
sitting idly on her bed, not mistreated or punished in any way, though she had a feeling more was to come.
Food and libation were brought to her. Blood slaves were offered as well, though she declined.
She didn’t want to take anyone’s blood but his.
She missed him terribly, having been apart from him for three whole days. If Anunit had not come by the first night to assure her that he was well and unharmed, she would have taken leopard form and rammed down her door, tearing through the Palace until she found him.
Ishtar supposed that keeping Tal away from her was her mother’s way of infusing clarity into her mind, in the hopes of leading her to the right decision.
Well, her mind was certainly very clear. And this was the decision she came to.
That she was the Chosen Princess prophesized by the Oracle was something she could not fight. The only control she had, however illusory, was the way she began her rule.
She would not be dictated to. She would not be forced to Mate with someone she did not love, who everyone knew had given his heart to her sister already.
If she was to be Queen, she would rule with the male she loved by her side. She would Mate the male she chose. She would bring peace and equality to the land, free the Pure slaves and grant them the rights that everyone else had.
She never understood why Dark Ones had to oppress Pure Ones. They were so alike in so many ways. The Royal Sage would say things like “the strong always rule the weak; the aggressor always conquers the pacifist.”
What rubbish! What drivel!
Why couldn’t the strong protect the weak? Why couldn’t the aggressor find calm with the pacifist? Why did they have to be in this never ending struggle of domination and submission?
Well, Ishtar intended to break the vicious cycle.
She wouldn’t have made such a bold and untimely statement had she saw any other choice. But the Queen was going to Mate her with Enlil directly after the succession pronouncement.
There was no way Ishtar could have let that happen. Not only for herself, but for her sister and Enlil as well. They loved each other!
