by Thea Devine
So he reached to find a way into Mirya’s mind. Pushing, stretching, heaving, as if he could, by force of will, plant those mind tendrils where he intended.
But he couldn’t—not yet. The frustration brought him to the point where he wanted to destroy everything else instead. His body, what there was left of it, contracted in the dirt and debris in which it was rooted with a fury and frustration to move.
But he would never move again. He had chosen—to be one with the ash and char forever. He felt the helplessness of it now, the utter sin of a mind like his rotting in the coal cellar of these burned-out ruins.
He did the one thing that was left for him to do.
He howled in pain and anger to the moon and the sky.
Rob watched her. From within the crowds that often surrounded her, from across the street, from a block behind her as she walked, Rob was there.
From secret places she didn’t know, couldn’t see, Zekka and Deklan followed her. From her hovel, Mirya protected her.
It was like the calm before a storm.
“We have to find Charles.” Rula didn’t know why now she was the only one who felt the urgency of it.
“Dvora is working on it,” Rob assured her. “Naik is searching everywhere possible. Charles will have to make a move sometime if, as we suspect, he wants your blood.”
“Until he does, your assumptions are guesses.”
“Good ones, though,” Rob said with a hint of a smile. “There’s nothing left for him—his plot to replace the Queen backfired. He never impregnated Dnitra. He couldn’t steal you or Renk from your parents. There will be no Eternal Ruler. The Keepers were disbanded. Vampire activity has diminished. What do you expect the poor sod to do?”
“Die,” Rula muttered wrathfully.
“Just keep yourself among the crowds and you’ll be fine. We’re all here. We know what to do.”
The problem was, Rula felt as if she couldn’t wait. Waiting meant all decisions were in someone else’s hands.
And despite Rob’s caution, she could do some things. Confront her parents. Find Charles.
She went back and forth between the two warring impulses, but the desire to face her parents was stronger than anything she felt about Charles.
She decided she wouldn’t tell Rob. Let him follow her and find out as she did what her reception would be.
Accordingly, she made her way by degrees toward Berkeley Square as the afternoon progressed.
She heard Rob’s voice in her ear. “Don’t do it.” She whirled, expecting to see him, but he was nowhere near her.
She rounded the corner briskly and the sun glared in her eyes, so that she couldn’t clearly see the houses.
“Stop now.” Rob again. She ignored him and mounted the first steps she came to and knocked on the door.
A butler answered. “Miss? The service entrance is downstairs.”
She ignored that. “I’m looking for Lady Augustine’s house.”
“Lady Augustine is dead,” the butler said, and emphatically shut the door.
“Stop here.” How did she keeping hearing Rob? She mounted the steps to the house next door. There was no answer at all to her knocking.
And so it went along the left side of the street. The occupants weren’t home, they didn’t answer, or they slammed the door in her face.
“They tend to be suspicious,” Rob’s voice sounded.
“So do I,” Rula retorted as she crossed the street to the opposite side of the square.
Immediately, she felt a chill. Death cold. Her parents were close, very close. Rob was silent, a sure indication she was heading into trouble.
She walked slowly along the line of houses, until the cold reached out to her with welcoming arms, stopping her in her tracks.
She caught a subtle movement from behind the front-window curtain.
Senna?
“Don’t,” Rob nearly begged her now. Where was he?
She mounted the steps.
Ice-cold, so much so, she started shivering.
She didn’t even reach the top step before the door slowly creaked open. She froze, waiting for someone to appear. No one did.
“Don’t,” Rob said, like her conscience in her ear.
She stood on the threshold, her heart pounding like a hammer.
She took a deep breath and stepped inside . . . to come face-to-face with a woman who looked enough like her to be her twin.
She was looking into her own deep blue eyes, only these were cool and removed, seeing her as an unwanted guest rather than . . . what?
Not the daughter she wished she hadn’t given up.
Rula couldn’t tear her eyes away. Her mother was her, just a little older; when she looked closely, she saw Senna must have been turned sometime in her late twenties. Strands of gray were in her glossy hair that only Rula could see. It left her shaken, it defined the reality of what her mother really was, what Rula herself could have been.
Yet they were both slender as reeds, both had eyes a deep cobalt blue, their movements were similar, and both had the same facial expressions, which Rula could see just from watching her mother’s reaction to her.
And in the corner of her mother’s mouth, Rula could just see a little pearl drop of blood. For all she knew, Senna had just come from a kill. The thought chilled her.
She froze. That was the reality.
She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
This was a mother who had no motherly feeling for her child. It meant nothing to her that Rula stood before her, grown, beautiful, protected and nurtured by Mirya’s loyalty.
Nothing.
“Where’s Charles?” she asked abruptly.
Her mother stared at her as if she were speaking gibberish.
“Where is Charles?” she said, louder this time, with more anger.
“Senna?” A male voice. Her father strode into the hallway and stopped abruptly as he caught sight of Rula.
She stared at him. His eyes were bluer than hers, he was tall, ascetic looking, impassive; he had the reddish hair of the Iscariot, and he looked to be in his thirties, having been sired twice by the Countess, by Mirya’s account.
He was dumbfounded to see her. “Rula?”
She nodded.
“What are you doing here?”
Well, there. Some curiosity about her at last. This man had loved her mother, enough to create a child with her—no, children. Shouldn’t he be curious about her? Even to just ascertain it was her.
“What do you want?”
The blunt and pointed manner of his speech ended any fantasy she had that he cared. All right then. Then maybe he had answers.
“Where’s Charles?”
“He’s dead.”
“Is he? They’re saying he’s coming after me.”
“He’s dead.”
“Who said that?” Rula’s mother asked suddenly.
“Mirya says.”
“She’s wrong.” Dominick again. “He’s dead. You should leave.”
Rula lifted her chin. “And if he is alive?”
Dominick gave her a long, appraising look, as if he were evaluating a piece of furniture. “I killed him. He didn’t survive.”
“But if he did?” Rula persisted.
“Hello, what’s this? If who survived?” And there he was, male to her female, with the same deep blue eyes and the reddish hair, his shirt soaked bloodred, the prominent fangs indicating he’d just returned from a kill.
He stared at her. She stared back.
Ugly monster with her face. Ghoul. Murderer. The bile rose in her throat, and for the first time she felt a violent urge to harm someone.
“Charles is dead,” Renk said gleefully. “Everyone will die eventually. Including you.” He gave her a ghastly grin. “I’d be happy to sa
ve you the anguish of the wait.”
“Renk!” Her mother’s tone was faintly scolding.
“I need to clean up,” he muttered.
Rula watched his retreating back. So like her, the way he walked, a certain timbre in his voice. His eyes, his hands. The shape of his lethal hands.
She could have been born him, of the blood, and he with no taint but for forces at work that could never be explained.
There was nothing more here. All her fretting had been for nothing. They knew and cared nothing. And Renk—even his hello was suspect as far as the truth went.
She moved toward the door. This situation definitely did not call for social niceties. There just was nothing to say. The truth was right there, and she must accept it.
Mirya had always been her mother. Senna had just been the vessel that had given Rula life.
They made no move to stop her or prolong her stay.
But as she crossed the threshold, she felt a presence behind her and whirled around to find Senna standing there, with a great sadness in her deep blue eyes.
Then, with a quick ruffling sound, she disappeared and suddenly a bat materialized and flew right into Rula’s hair.
Rula shrieked and began slapping at her head.
A hiss of words in her ear: “Ash on his shirt,” so blurred she couldn’t even be certain she’d heard them correctly.
She turned to see Dominick standing and watching her as she frantically brushed her fingers through her hair. Then she felt the hideous brush of a bat wing against her cheek.
She shrieked again but the bat was gone.
Nothing. He’d spent the whole day but for a break when that piece of crap, Renk, brought him a body to feed on probing this way and that.
That was the other thing—it wasn’t enough to have fed on Dnitra’s body for these eight years. Blood was still vital. The hell of it was, he was dependent on someone else to take care of that need.
And he had to force the little bastard to do it.
Beyond that, he goddamned couldn’t get anywhere with his ceaseless probing. It was as if a wall were obstructing him, and it wasn’t that Mirya was aware yet that he sought her. That would come. But something blocked his probing tendrils.
It had to be that he wasn’t strong enough yet, he decided. Or he still hadn’t had enough time because he had Renk under his control now and manipulating Renk took a damned lot of his time.
To be fair, he’d had to practice endlessly to slip in and out of Renk’s mind. But that was when he’d been learning how. He’d have thought he’d be agile enough to probe anyone by now.
Or maybe he just needed more time.
Maybe that was the key to an old dragon such as Mirya. Time.
Or—the thought struck him—maybe someone else was in the game.
His rage started building. What dung beetle dared get in his way? That brainless piece of shit Renk?
He rammed himself into Renk’s mind. Nothing there.
But wait—in his mind’s eye, he suddenly saw Senna . . . peering at Renk reclining in the grave dirt in the secret room, and she was looking at him with some compassion in her eyes.
Senna, his nemesis?
No, Senna was wide-open. And he didn’t like what he was seeing—Senna regretting something she’d done, something she’d said. Senna silently begging forgiveness from that vermin she called her son.
Interesting. Relevant, he thought, but he didn’t have time to dissect what it meant now.
He shot out tendrils toward Mirya’s mind, deciding he didn’t have any more time to waste, and he wasn’t going to quit until he’d prized her mind wide-open.
She emerged from the house shivering, icy cold, confused. The temptation to look back had died. She was certain Dominick watched her, and the last thing Rula wanted him to think was that she cared.
She cared. She wrapped her arms around her midriff, almost as if to protect herself from those feelings. Nothing could have been more clear than her reception by both her parents and her blood-soaked twin.
And the horror of seeing her mother disappear like a magician’s assistant; Rula could still feel the repulsive whisk of that bat wing against her cheek. She shuddered just thinking about it.
And the barely audible message in her ear. If she had intuited it correctly.
Ash on his shirt.
She should have listened to Mirya. And Rob.
Where was Rob anyway? She had fully expected questions, scolds, and recriminations.
She should not have gone there. To have seen her twin, dripping with a victim’s vitals . . . to imagine it could have been her, had things been just little bit different . . . and her mother’s eyes, trying so hard to feel something for the daughter who looked so much like her. Her father, so cold and removed, because he couldn’t wait for her to leave . . .
She felt cut open to her soul.
She was done, vampires and all. She didn’t care about threats or death or anything. It was over. Mirya was her mother, she herself was what she’d always been, the child of a Gypsy, and the streets, whose life would run the same course, and she should be thankful it was so.
And thinking that, she blindly walked right into Rob’s arms.
“Hey.” His voice was gentle in her ear. “Slow down.”
“I’m done.” Her voice was muffled, her head suddenly buried against his chest. “And where were you, with all your dire warnings?”
“I was there,” he murmured, turning her so that he could hold her while they walked. “You weren’t alone. I have some powers, which are not public knowledge.”
She fell silent. That capped it. She didn’t need to tell him anything. He knew. With his so-called powers. Everything except the still shiver-making brush of that bat wing. Maybe that too, since he knew everything.
Nevertheless, something was reassuring about the way he held her and how efficiently they wound their way back to Mirya’s hovel, where Mirya awaited them, her anxiety written all over her face.
“Stupid thing to do,” she muttered as she pulled Rula into the room and pushed her onto the bed. “I told you. You didn’t believe me.”
“I believed you. I just had to see.”
“Truly,” Mirya spat. “And what did you see? I could even tell you.”
Rula shook her head. “Renk had just returned, saturated in blood. Senna and Dominick couldn’t wait for me to leave, and they denied knowing that Charles was even alive.
“But—I think maybe Senna knows,” Rula added, unaware she’d used her mother’s proper name. “As I was leaving, she whispered something to me.”
“Senna did?” Mirya asked skeptically.
It did sound unbelievable. Especially after the icy reception they’d given her. “She did.”
“Why would she do that?” Mirya said, still picking and prying.
Rula shrugged. Even she couldn’t fathom the reason Senna had given her that message. She wanted to think it was because Senna had had a moment of regret for the daughter she’d abandoned.
But how could that be? Vampires didn’t have those feelings.
“She whispered, ‘Ash on his shirt.’ ”
Rob’s eyebrows rose. “All that? When you were leaving?”
“She turned into a bat,” Rula said hesitantly after a pause. Even saying it gave her the shivers.
“Ah.”
“It was awful. She got in my hair.”
“I see,” Rob murmured noncommittally.
“Eat something,” Mirya said, pushing some bread and soup in front of Rula. She wanted to wave it away, but she realized that Mirya, like her, needed to do something.
Right now, they were at an impasse. They had the intuitive sense that Charles had not perished under Dominick’s assault. But nothing much more, except the random raids of the vampire community on the c
ity.
But that had nothing to do with Charles or the Keepers of the Night.
Or did it?
“We keep looking,” Rob said at last. “We examine what the bat told you.”
Rula shuddered. “It brushed my cheek.”
“It was Senna, you know,” Rob said. “It was an acknowledgment of something that she couldn’t bring herself to do in human form.”
Rula made a face. “I’ll never forget the feeling. It was all entangled in my hair.”
“And it whispered, ‘Ash on his shirt,’ in your ear?”
“If I even heard it correctly.”
“We’re going to assume you did. And we’re going to figure out what it means,” Rob said firmly.
“You mean, dig in the dustbin?”
“That, and burned-out buildings and fireplaces and wherever and whatever we can think of. Maybe starting here.”
He got up, knelt by the fireplace and shuffled through the ashes, turned, and shrugged. “Just a thought.”
Mirya handed him a rag. “The Vraq have operated solely on instinct for as long as they have banded together,” she said to Rula. “This wasn’t so when I was young. There was no one. Now, there is individual and collective power. There is community, family. And there is a mission—to rid the world of vampires.”
“Even though their existence goes beyond human knowing,” Rob added. “But there will always be Vraq, living in tandem with vampires, in a world beyond our imagining, in a time beyond the night.”
“We will win,” Mirya said fiercely. “And we will wipe the vampire off the face of the earth.”
“We protect each other,” Rob added. “But that means we do what’s necessary when necessary. Which means when you join us, you’ll have made that ultimate decision.”
Rula didn’t dispute his reasoning. She’d felt violent toward Renk. She could have attacked him. Killed him, even. But would she have?
She still hadn’t touched her soup, or the bread. She tore off a piece, dipped it in the lukewarm soup, and took a bite. No better or worse than anything else Mirya had ever cooked, but Rula was surprised to find she was hungry.
