by Aja James
“Why must I choose? I would love both of you, if you let me. But I will never forgive you for hurting him.”
Anunit huffed a derisive breath, stepping back from her.
“So that is your answer then? You would still choose him? You would challenge me for him?”
Anunit idly began stalking in Tal’s direction while Ishtar eyed her sister warily.
“You would never forgive me for hurting him,” Anunit echoed as she drew closer to her prey.
“Do you have any idea what I’ve done to him, little sister?” she said casually when she was within arm’s length of her prisoner.
Ishtar involuntarily took a step in her direction but was immediately held back by two vampire soldiers.
She attempted surreptitiously to transform only a part of her body—her tail, make her hands into claws, but even the slightest shift sent a debilitating shock through her body.
“Would you still want him if you knew?” the serpent whispered slyly, her lips curling at the corners.
Ishtar refused to speak. She stared not at Anunit but into Tal’s face.
He held her gaze with those mesmerizing turquoise orbs, half clouded, half clear.
Be brave, he told her with his eyes.
Be strong.
“You challenged me for him and had him for all of what? A few months and now a handful of nights? I do hope the fucking was worth it,” Anunit taunted with a snarl.
“But I’ve had him for thousands of years. Millions of hours. Can you imagine how creative I’ve gotten with ways to…hurt him?”
Ishtar flinched in the relentless grasp of the vampire soldiers who held her.
There was a reason Anunit used that word, emphasized that word.
It was a word that had echoed like a never-ending litany in Ishtar’s mind from the afternoon she’d seen Tal again in her shop to the night she’d savagely taken him.
Hurt him.
A voice she now recognized to be Anunit’s had commanded her, making her crazed with fury and vengeance.
Anunit’s smile grew wider, as a teacher’s would do when her pupil finally understood what was being taught to her.
Ishtar knew that any reaction, any response, would only spur Anunit on, so she bit down on her inner lip to keep quiet.
Unblinkingly, she held Tal’s gaze, drawing strength from their connection.
Anunit moved ever closer to her prisoner and stroked one hand almost gently down his torso, raking her nails across his lower abdomen, hard enough to scratch but not deep enough to cut.
“Very likely I invented the various tortures savage humans have employed across the ages to punish criminals, traitors and conquered rebels,” Anunit went on, her tone casual, as if she were discussing a different kind of invention, innocuous and genteel, like basket weaving or needlework.
“I’ll give your Blood Slave one thing,” she allowed grudgingly, a perverse admiration alighting her eyes.
“In all the millennia I’ve had him, I can count on two hands how many times he’d given voice to his pain. And only once did tears escape those useless eyes.”
Ishtar’s lower lip began to quiver, so she inhaled deeply through her nose and braced herself anew.
Tal needed her to be strong. As strong as he was.
She couldn’t fail him.
“I’ve had him in ways you can’t begin to fathom,” Anunit hissed, without warning biting into Tal’s throat and infusing his blood with a toxic venom that corroded his veins like acid.
He jerked at the agony that assaulted him, but made no sound, resolutely holding Ishtar’s gaze with his.
Ishtar strained against the warriors who held her, but to no avail. In her current form, she was no match for two full-blooded vampire males.
Anunit pulled slightly away from her prey to give her sister a proprietary look, Tal’s blood coating her lips, dripping down her chin.
“You think that a few nights of blood-letting and copulation can break my Claim on him?” she said with a nasty smile.
“Thousands of years of marking every vein in his body and injecting them with venom? Thousands of years of using him as a Blood whore should be used?”
She pressed herself against Tal’s side and held his neck with one hand while the other traveled in a snaking path down his abdomen to his hip.
Ishtar struggled to continue holding Tal’s gaze, the temptation was to follow Anunit’s actions instead.
He gave her one infinitesimal shake of his head.
Don’t look at what she’s doing, he communicated to her with his clouded gaze.
Look only into my eyes.
“Did you know that if you cut into the same vein, the same place in the skin, muscle and tissue, everyday before it could heal, that eventually, even a Pure One’s body can no longer regenerate?” Anunit said softly, almost scientifically.
“It takes dedication and patience to mark this body with all of those beautiful scars. He is, perhaps, my greatest masterpiece.”
That meandering hand with its long fingers and nails scored the two scars of his Blood Slave brand, reopening the wounds until they bled anew.
Ishtar blinked.
Even though she kept her eyes on Tal’s face, she could detect the thin trickle of blood that leaked from his wounds in her peripheral vision. Her fangs quivered with rage as she involuntarily began to transform.
And was shocked to her knees again by the bolt of lightning that split from the collar on her neck up to her brain and down to her internal organs.
She coughed and wheezed on the ground on all fours, head lowered.
“The problem with you, dear sister, is that you never learn,” Anunit deplored. “How many times are you going to electrify yourself before you learn to keep that beast inside on a manageable leash?”
She indicated with a slight tilt of her head for the vampire guards to haul Ishtar up to her feet again and raise her head to look back at Anunit’s masterful display with her prisoner.
“What do you want from me?” Ishtar couldn’t help but grind out.
The female before her was no longer her sister.
The moment Ishtar realized that she was the female whose blood tainted Tal’s, that she was the one who’d held him prisoner, Anunit became her bitterest enemy.
All she wanted to do was to tear the bitch apart.
As if Anunit sensed the violence and fury inside of her, she laughed a delighted laugh.
“Oh, such power within you, Ishtar,” she congratulated. “Such strength and raw passion.”
“If only you directed it at something worthy of your attention instead of one insignificant male. We could accomplish so much together, you and I.”
“What do you want to accomplish?” Ishtar asked, at first simply trying to distract her from hurting Tal, but then because she truly wanted to know.
What was so important that Anunit would blacken her soul and shrivel her heart to become this hideous, terrible monster?
“Finally,” Anunit said, taking a half step away from Tal, “you are finally asking the right questions.”
“Then tell me, sister,” Ishtar prompted, “don’t keep me in suspense.”
*** *** *** ***
The Creature was royally pissed off for not being invited to the hottest party in town. A party it had labored assiduously to prepare for.
But the Mistress told him in no uncertain terms to stay away from the cellar.
Better yet, to return post haste to its preferred base in Boston or New York. She no longer needed it here.
The Creature had apparently served its purpose.
Well, at least it had finally glimpsed the legendary General in the flesh.
The Mistress had ordered it to accompany the shadow assassins to the hotel in which her prey resided. Her instructions were to first transform its appearance into the Mistress herself when it encountered the female target to stun her momentarily while the assassins subdued her, then to transform into the female’s looks when it
encountered the General.
That was all. Easy peasy.
Everything had gone as the Mistress predicted.
Both targets were subdued without a fuss, both having lost the struggle before it even began within the half second of shock at the sight of it in its various disguises.
It had done exactly as she’d instructed, delivered the results she’d expected.
And then the Mistress summarily dismissed it.
Didn’t even share with it who the female was. Something that had never happened before.
Well, this simply wouldn’t do.
It had worked hard and taken great care to set up the reunion.
It could have been busy with any number of other tasks—spreading the fight club networks that it had started at the Mistress’s behest a couple of years ago, inciting vampire rogues to attack more humans, plotting assassinations of the Pure and Dark inner circle of warriors and advisors, setting more wheels in motion to take down the New England vampire queen Jade Cicada…
On and on went the well-ordered list to induce mass chaos and mayhem.
But no, it was here in bloody, boring Baltimore. Setting up perfect props for a long-awaited get-together.
And it wasn’t even invited.
Well, fuck that.
It was going to crash the party anyway.
Surreptitiously, of course.
It wouldn’t do to incite the Mistress’s displeasure. It had seen the results of that displeasure many, many times over the millennia that it had served her.
She didn’t always punish immediately; it was much worse when she waited. She could wait years, decades, and apparently—millennia—to take her revenge.
It really didn’t want to be on her blacklist.
But it was damn well going to the party.
*** *** *** ***
“All I have ever wanted was to continue the Dark Ones’ glorious reign and make our mother proud,” Anunit began quietly as she approached Ishtar with serpentine grace.
“I would have been an even stronger queen than she, for I have none of her weaknesses.”
“What weaknesses?” Ishtar asked.
As far as she could tell, Queen Ashlu had been a shrewd and just ruler, if ruthless at times.
Anunit smiled at her.
“Don’t tell me Mother never shared with you her one appalling mistake? The one that almost cost her the entire empire?”
“The Blood Slave,” Ishtar whispered.
“Ah, so you know,” Anunit inclined her head. “Because of her obsession with him, she lost the allegiance of our father, and the empire was on the verge of civil war.”
Ishtar remained silent, not looking at Anunit.
If Ava was right, they didn’t, in fact, share the same father.
“If you paid attention to the Royal Sage and read the Ecliptic Scrolls that recorded our histories, you would have known that all of the Dark noble houses had risen in protest, demanding the public execution of the Pure slave to assuage the shame of Queen Ashlu’s offense. They insisted that it be her hand that dealt the killing blow, signifying her dedication to Dark rule and making herself worthy of followership.”
Ishtar’s heart pounded loudly in her ears.
What had it cost her mother to slay the male she loved for the stability of the empire? What about her father? Did he love her mother back?
“She did, you know,” Anunit said with grim satisfaction.
“She killed him.”
Ishtar raised her eyes to her sister once more in horror.
“But in private,” Anunit said, somewhat disappointedly.
“Even at the last, she wanted to save him the public humiliation. The Royal Keeper of the Scrolls had written that the slave had taken a dagger to the heart. Ironically, the same kind used in the Mating of our Kind. But instead of her blood on the blade to bind his life force to hers, it was coated with poison instead.”
Anunit considered silently for a moment and mused, “Rather Shakespearean or Greek in the poetry of this star-crossed love story, wouldn’t you agree? They say she tried to catch the stardust of his body in her hands as it disintegrated into the air when his soul departed.”
She sighed dramatically.
“How sad. How touching. The publically documented moral of our mother’s story is: do what you have to do to secure the empire. And she did. But the moral I learned privately is that if you want to be on top, if you want to be the strongest, there can be no weaknesses.”
“So you want to rule the world? Be on top, is that it?” Ishtar asked.
Anunit huffed dismissively.
“I don’t want to rule it, dear sister. Have you ever known a ruler who had fun ruling? No, I realized when you took the succession away from me through that ill-timed Challenge that I never really wanted to rule in the first place.”
“Then what do you want?” Ishtar’s impatience vibrated in her tone.
She just wanted Anunit to get to the point. Perhaps then she could find a way to save Tal, if not herself.
“I want to conquer it,” Anunit said benignly, as if she were talking about joining the Peace Corps, not world domination, “I want to bring civilization to its knees, one soul at a time.”
“Why?” Ishtar asked, truly bewildered.
“Because it makes me happy,” Anunit answered simply.
“Pain. Chaos. Destruction. Violence. I realized long ago that these things make me much happier than anything else. They keep me interested and entertained over the interminable boredom that defines our existence.”
“I could help you end your existence if you find it so taxing,” Ishtar offered.
Anunit laughed, delighted.
“Oh you are such a treasure, Little Star. So bloodthirsty and primitive. It’s why I love you, you know,” Anunit said this with something like true affection in her gaze, reminiscent of the way she used to regard her sister.
“There’s an uncontainable wildness, a force of nature about you that I envy. You’re all passionate instinct, and I’m all cold, hard logic. We’d make an unstoppable team.”
Anunit sobered abruptly and regarded Ishtar with hypnotic, reptilian black eyes.
“But until you rid yourself of your weakness, you’ll never fully unleash your inherent power. And we’ll always be at odds with one another. Just like the way we were during the Great War.”
Ishtar narrowed her eyes.
“What are you talking about?”
“How do you think I was ever going to get what I want?” Anunit sneered, “if you replaced our mother as Queen? Whether you or her, it would all be the same to me: I would be left aside, ignored, forgotten. Powerless.”
“No, I refuse to accept that fate. I will always be on top,” she asserted.
“So I used the Pure Ones’ Rebellion as the spark that triggered the inferno, spreading uncertainty, instability and ultimately chaos and destruction. Human greed, fear and ignorance were the dry kindling that made the blaze burn hotter. I never predicted that they would all but wipe out Dark Ones from the face of history in the Purge after the war.”
“You…” Ishtar whispered. “You started the war?”
Anunit rolled her eyes to the ceiling in recollection and nodded to herself.
“More or less,” she allowed.
“I triggered the battles that escalated the Rebellion into a full-scale war. I incited the Queen to launch a full-on attack against the Pure Ones’ base that harkened the end. And I made sure the rebels had a fighting chance.”
“By taking Enlil and the shadows out of the equation,” Ishtar finally realized.
“Oh well done!” Anunit clapped her hands in approval. “You’re not as dimwitted as I always feared, merely ignorant and unobservant.”
“But Mother could still have won the battle,” Ishtar argued. “Her armies were larger, better-trained. She’s a fearless leader. She—”
“Would be most difficult to take down head on, I know,” Anunit agreed, “which is why
I dealt the killing blow from behind.”
“What is written cannot be unwritten, what is said cannot be unsaid. What is remembered can be a vision; Fate can be unwoven by pulling a single thread.”
—From the Ecliptic Prophesies, buried and forgotten
Chapter Seventeen
Ishtar lunged at her and was immediately jerked back in line.
“You!”
Anunit didn’t even blink.
“Yes, me. Who else could I have trusted to do the deed? Two birds with one stone, that last critical battle. I made it back from my false expedition in time to kill our mother and collect my payment.”
“Payment?” Ishtar could only echo, so horrified by Anunit’s revelations that her brain could no longer process what she heard.
“Did your whore never tell you?” Anunit hissed, a gleeful sparkle in her eyes.
“I suppose you were too preoccupied with matters of the flesh to discuss the finer details of our intertwined fates,” she said with disdain.
“Allow me to enlighten you at last, sister. I made a simple bargain with the Blood Slave—in return for my help in ensuring that the Pure Ones had a chance at freedom, he would reject your heart, your love, and when I came for him, he would submit himself to me as payment, to do with as I wish.”
Ishtar looked to Tal.
He stared back at her with those half-clouded turquoise eyes, a deep well of sadness within them.
“He rejected you to save his people,” Anunit spat out, her voice gaining volume.
“He never loved you, just as our mother’s Blood Slave never loved her. She stole him from his Pure Mate, you know. They even had a little girl together, the slaves. The greatest vampire queen that ever ruled almost gave up everything for a male who never, not even for a moment, loved her back.”
Ishtar kept her eyes on Tal as old doubts assailed her with Anunit’s venomous words.
“What did it cost you, Ishtar? To love someone as unworthy as he? Your people, your home, everything you knew,” Anunit went on relentlessly.
“You bore his spawn amidst chaos and violence at great risk to yourself and to your unborn babes. What would have happened if I had not hid you from the Queen and her court? She would have killed your bastards the moment she knew of them, as tradition demands.”
