by Rain Oxford
“A wizard and a vampire?” the youngest girl asked incredulously.
“Yes, so please help me find her. Once I find her, we’ll go back through the tower and you five can come with me. She has brown, wavy hair, hazel eyes, and I think she’s wearing a red leather jacket.”
“There are too many people in this world to remember everyone who has brown hair, hazel eyes, and likes red.”
“Nobody wears red,” the oldest boy said. “It’s like you’re teasing us.”
“She probably doesn’t know the customs here. She came through the tower.”
“Then the Master will be after her. All who come through the tower are taken to the castle.”
“Astrid is too smart to get herself caught. I spoke with her recently.” I wasn’t about to tell them she had been poisoned in case they gave up that easily. “Where would she be safe if she were trying to take out… the wizard in the castle?”
“Why would she be trying to kill the Master?”
“It’s a very long story. Basically, to protect Earth.” And revenge. Revenge was a big part of it. “Is there anywhere she might have gone where she could be safe?”
“If she’s smart, she would get as far away from the castle as possible. However, if she’s trying to bring down the Master, then she’s pretty stupid.”
Astrid was not stupid in the least, but I remembered what Langril said after he took her here. She thought I hated her for what Krechea made her do. While a lot of this was her way of protecting me, I knew some of it was because she felt like Krechea took what was most important away from her. He took her control.
For twenty years, I hated her as much as I loved her, and I couldn’t imagine how much that tormented her. During the entire time, she didn’t even know why she did it or if she would do it again. I couldn’t blame her for going after Krechea when she found out he was behind every miserable thing that happened to her.
Only, it was more my fault than Krechea’s or Langril’s. I was the one who pushed her away when she really needed me. As much as I was hurting, I should have asked her why. I should have trusted her to explain for five minute. I could have seen it wasn’t her.
“Okay, pretend you had nothing in the world to lose, that you believed you hurt the one you loved, and that someone had violated you in the worst way. Revenge wouldn’t help, but it is all you can do. Where would you hide to plot your revenge?”
All five of them considered it deeply. “Is she the kind of person who would get help?” the little boy asked.
“She’s a vampire,” Lyda said for me. “She wouldn’t want to share her revenge. If it were me… if it was my father’s murderer sitting on the throne of that castle… I would hide in the castle. I would pretend to be staff until I can plan the perfect attack. The Master has too many guards and too much magic, so the attack would have to be very carefully thought out.”
“He has already seen her and would recognize her in a heartbeat.”
“There are enough people in the council that she could hide from the Master.”
“Then that’s where I’ll go.”
“We’re not going there,” the youngest girl said.
“No, of course. I wouldn’t ask you to risk your life… or whatever, for her. You know where the tower is?” I asked. They nodded. “Hide there, and when I rescue her, I’ll return to the tower and we can all get out of here.”
I would come back for Heather. I wasn’t heartless enough that I would abandon her, but I had to get Astrid out first. Langril would damn sure let me back in to save her… if he was still alive. I said goodbye and good luck to my unlikely friends and traveled back the way I had come. It was easy to find the castle; it was so big I could see it from anywhere in the city.
Along the way, I had time to mull over my relationship with Astrid. That seemed to be all I was doing when it came to her; arguing with myself. We were both different people than we were when we were kids and the chance of us having a real relationship was very slim. I did love her and I enjoyed holding her in my arms, but I was more interested in saving her life than having anything deeper with her.
I almost made it to the huge castle without running into anyone, thanks to my instincts. Although there were only a couple of people out, any one of them could have ended my mission in a very quick and gory fashion. I started to cross the street to the castle when I heard a sound. My instincts weren’t bothered, but there was definitely someone coming. I hid in a hole in the side of the building.
There was a hole in the side of a building. In the middle of town. Talk about a dump.
To my frustration, a trio of adolescent wizards stopped in front of the large gates beside the tunnel. That was assuming they were wizards; they were pretty non-magical if my senses were correct. Then they started setting up a bomb and I sighed. If that went off, the only thing it would have accomplished was to make it impossible for me to get in.
I stepped into the street and held out both of my hands. Realizing that strength in my emotion was what gave me power here, I honed in on my own determination to not only survive this hellhole, but to do so with Astrid. Above my palms, fire formed, but it was a cold bluish purple color and wouldn’t burn anything.
They didn’t need to know that.
“Need a hand?” I asked, deepening my voice. I really wished I had a wizard’s robe instead of my leather jacket at that moment. I needn’t have worried; the three took one look at me and ran away screaming about a wizard.
Large gates protected the castle. What it protected the castle from exactly, I wasn’t sure, because nobody in their right mind would attack such a monstrous beast.
I went back into the tunnel and found nothing but a brick wall over a river. Grimacing, I got down into the water and climbed through the narrow, rough gap. Despite every effort not to, I lost a bit of skin off my hands. “Have fun keeping the vampires at bay now,” I grumbled.
The river came out in what appeared to be an abandoned service hall, which was pretty lucky in my book. It could have been a bathroom. I followed the hallway until I reached an old kitchen. From the dust on everything, I gathered that it was abandoned. Okay, I’m in… now what? I patted my pockets to see if the glass sphere Hunt had given me had returned. No such luck.
Once again, I tried searching for Astrid. Even with my strong resolve, I couldn’t sense her. I sensed many minds in the castle, but I also knew there were many more wizards in the fortress who were able to block their minds from me easily.
If Astrid really is here, she’ll be as close to Krechea as she could possibly get without getting caught, so I went looking for the most potent magic. I searched for fear, because these people would only fear someone much more powerful than themselves, and found myself outside a set of huge doors. I tried to listen in.
There were murmurs, but nothing I could make out. My next course was to hide somewhere where I could watch the comings and goings without being seen or detected. I just had to find one first, which proved to be easier said than done.
There was nothing fancy about the castle; it was big and pretty bare, with rock walls, no décor, and the random sharp or blunt object on a table here or there. I found an empty bedroom down the hallway from the room my instincts were driving me towards, so I left the door open a crack and watched.
After half an hour, I was about to give up and move on, only to freeze with my hand on the knob when I heard a familiar woman’s scream. I knew it. Heather’s scream was one of agony, not fear. It was coming from that room. My instincts demanded I move, that I get in there, but when I threw open the door, it slammed shut before I could get through it. Standing in my way was a wizard who materialized out of the shadows.
He grinned. “Well, what do we have here?”
I struck out with lightning, but he instantly melted into shadow and formed behind me. He shoved me against the door and two more men were suddenly grabbing my arms. I drove my elbow into the nose of the man on my right.
It hurt my elb
ow.
They were vampires, and damn strong. One of them held me against the door while the other forced me to face him with one hand on my throat and the other on my jaw. His red eyes seemed to get brighter, which was fascinating in an unnatural, ominous way. My brain told me to look, to stare, and never stop, but my instincts told me I had to close my eyes.
I was more inclined to follow my instincts than my brain anyway, so I was able to close them. As I struggled against the two vampires, I heard the wizard whisper something and grab me lightly at the back of the neck. My anger, as well as my adrenaline, just stopped. The calmness that followed was unnatural, but not unpleasant. It wasn’t mind-altering; I wanted to fight them, I just didn’t have the drive left.
In what felt like a matter of seconds, they had a cloth sack over my head, had cuffs on my wrists, and were half dragging me out of the room. The wizard’s magic was fading, but my body was slow to get the message, probably because of the hood.
I was thrown roughly to the ground and everything was quiet. My strength had returned just enough for me to push myself up to my knees, where my head encountered another forceful hand pushing it down.
“Bow to the Master!” the stranger said.
“That’s kind of hard to do when I can’t see him!” I responded. I didn’t actually want to see Krechea’s hideous face; I just didn’t want to face him blind. Then the bag was pulled off.
“Hello, Devon.”
I looked up in horror. “Astrid?”
* * *
My childhood friend, who I trusted and loved deeply, stood before me in a red leather top that showed more skin than it covered, including her midriff, and emphasized her very well-formed breasts. Her pants were black leather, as were her spike-heeled boots. Her hair was in one long braid over her left shoulder and her eyes were almost glowing green. She was no longer too thin, and was instead more athletically built.
There was something about her aura that was downright evil.
And extremely sexy.
She grinned at my shock and I glanced around, hoping this was some kind of trick. We were in a throne room, judging by the elegant, high-backed chair made of carved wood and red crushed velvet. To the left of the chair was a cage about five feet tall and two feet deep. Heather Anne was huddled on the floor of the cage with her knees to her chest and blood smeared under her nose. She was too thin, too pale, and dirty; even her gold hair was now dark with dirt and blood. If Langril saw her this way, the entire world would burn. Considering how beautiful, sweet, and full of life she had been when she was alive, I wanted to help Langril kill everyone who had done this to her.
I should have been here to save her, not Astrid.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say something?” Astrid asked, as if I should have been impressed.
I was pretty much just confused. “What happened? At the cave… in that room… the chalice… was that all a trick?”
She crouched in front of me and flicked my hair back from my eyes. “All that stuff with the poison and the chalice…” She clenched her fingers in my hair and pulled my head back to look at her. “That was six months ago!” She let me go, went to the throne, sat, and crossed her legs. “But I’m not mad.”
Oh, fuck.
“No, I’m not mad at all. The Shadow Master escaped Dothra and five minutes later, I was in control. That was about an hour after I drank from the chalice and returned here.”
“How could it have been six months? It hasn’t even been two hours for me.”
“So I guess you didn’t miss me then. I missed you. I thought about you quite a lot while I was restructuring my world. When I was overseeing the construction of new weapons and cells to subdue and contain wizards. Don’t worry; I rule wizards and vampires equally. I am, after all, both.”
“How did you come to this? The Astrid I know wouldn’t do this.”
She put her finger to her lips and hushed me. “You don’t want to give out my name! Someone could kill me… oh, wait. They can’t. Thanks to you, nobody can control me ever again. Thanks to you, I can never be killed.”
“I don’t understand.”
She scoffed. “Of course you don’t, human. You never listened to anyone. It was quite a shock the first time one of my servants stabbed me in the chest. After that, it was more like a thrill. I gave all of my enemies a chance to kill me and I just laughed when it dawned on them. I cannot be killed by anything.”
“How?”
“That chalice, you idiot. Drinking from the chalice made me immortal. Completely immortal. You can cut off my head and it would instantly reform.”
“Did you know? Did you plan this?”
She grinned cruelly. “Now how would I do that? How could I possibly have known that you would listen to me over Heather and get the key yourself?”
I looked at the girl in the cage. “I guess I made the wrong choice. I should have shot you in the head at Stephen’s coven.”
Obviously not happy with my response, one of the two vampires hovering over me grabbed my left shoulder and squeezed, easily breaking at least one bone and earning a pained grunt from me. Instead of being pleased, Astrid glared at the vampire.
“Did I tell you that you could break my toys?” she asked angrily. The vampire took a step away from me. “Do you know how long it takes humans to heal? Break your hand.”
“M-master?” the vampire stuttered. “I just w-wanted him to---”
She held out her hand like she was about to snap her fingers and blinding white light formed in her palm. “I’m not going to tell you twice,” she snarled.
I heard a painful moan and the cracking of bones, but I didn’t look. I had my own damn problems. The light faded from her fingers. “I see you figured out how to use your magic,” I said.
“Actually, that’s thanks to you as well. Every day you didn’t come to find me, I got better at surviving. Ironic, I know. I was always the one to take care of you when we were kids. I guess in a way, you made me weak by making me love you. It felt like a knife in my heart every day that you wouldn’t save me.”
“It’s only been two hours!”
“It’s been twenty years!” she yelled back. “Twenty years ago, I would have done anything for you, and you shot me! You tried to kill me! I wanted to be with you, to take care of you and love you! I stopped you from shooting yourself in the head!”
This wasn’t like it happened in my vision, but I wished for the first time in my life that I could go backwards in time. I wished I hadn’t gotten the key. I did lose what was most important to me; this wasn’t Astrid. My Astrid was gentle but protective, brave but cautious, and loving but a little bit nuts.
“Master…” the second vampire asked hesitantly.
“What?” she snapped. Apparently, he had pointed to the cage because she turned and rolled her eyes. Heather was gone. “Well, don’t just stand there you idiots. Go catch her and put her back in her cage. You know I don’t like my pets running around!”
The two vampires and the wizard took off like their asses were on fire. I let my head drop down. I knew I couldn’t even try to escape without Heather, and didn’t that just suck? It was probably a good thing my gargoyle had cured my heart, because this would have killed me otherwise.
Or maybe that would have been easier.
I felt Astrid move to crouch in front of me again, but I didn’t bother to look up until she ran her hand through my hair gently. Tears were running down her cheeks and she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.”
I sat up and she took it as an invitation to hug me, which she did. I grunted with pain in my shoulder and she let me go.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, whispering. “I tried to make it easy for you.”
“How is this easy for me in any way?”
“Do you trust me?”
I wanted to ask her how she expected me to answer that. I wanted to tell her I used to. I couldn’t get the words out. “Yes,” I said. “I love you.”
>
She leaned forward and kissed me. There was still a strong scent of strawberries behind the smell of leather and blood. She pulled back just a couple of inches. “That’s all I ever wanted in my entire life. We don’t have much time before they come back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Heather has made a potion that will basically replicate the power of the fire elementals. Krechea escaped with many of his most powerful and trusted followers. They can possess people now. The potion Heather made can expel any of the shadow walkers from a person. They can drink the potion or you can stab them with something dipped in it. Once it wears off, in about an hour, it will not work on them again. Heather has some other theories. If she can get to Langril, she’ll come up with a way to protect your mind and body permanently.”
This was all a ploy? I pushed her away. “What’s with the psycho spiel a minute ago? Did you just think it would be funny to try to crush me?”
She shook her head. “You have no idea how much it hurt me to say that.”
“Not as much as it did to hear it.”
Her eyes widened. “You think seeing hate in your eyes is easy? You are the only person in my entire life who has ever mattered to me or trusted me!”
“Then why?!”
“Because I need you to hate me!” she yelled. More tears spilled down her cheeks.
“What kind of fucked up logic is---” I stopped myself when I realized what she was saying. “You want me to leave you here,” I said quietly.
“I thought if you hated me, it would be easier for you. I thought you wouldn’t feel guilty and you could finally move on with your life.”
I couldn’t stop myself from wrapping my right arm around her. No matter what she said, I couldn’t stand to see her crying. “So you aren’t taking over Krechea’s work?”
“I am, sort of, but I’m fixing things. They pretty much call me ‘Master’ or ‘Wizard Master’ whereas Krechea was ‘Shadow Master.’ There have been a lot fewer massacres since I took over. He was using poisons to control the population, which I’m trying to stop.”
