by A. M. Manay
“Is that what she said?” he asked, the edge back in his voice. “That was rather indiscreet of her. I’m afraid I did not make clear to Lilith the reason for my order.”
“Then please, do enlighten me,” she replied, but all the fire was gone from her voice. She just sounded tired. She was already wrung out, and the night had barely started. The beauty in the garden that had so cheered her now just looked alien and strange, and she realized how chilly she felt in the Christmas air. Cold as she was, she was not about to accept Ilyn’s overcoat.
“I did not send her to fetch you in order to . . . make use of your person, November. I had, in fact, already fed. I don’t like feeding at parties, you see. I prefer a little privacy. At any rate, I summoned you because it occurred to me after our little . . . encounter this afternoon that if you entered the ball on my arm, the guests would likely leave you alone, seeing that I had apparently staked a claim on you. Ordinarily, blood would have to be exchanged to produce such deference, but since the throne, though threatened, is still mine, the visual message should suffice. I simply wished to spare you unwanted attention from strange vampires. I also wished to spare my son the indignity of having to fend off his underlings. Every vampire of any importance in his holdings will be here this evening.”
November turned her sad face back to face him, trying to see if he was telling the truth, wanting desperately to believe him. A full minute passed as he waited patiently in silence, and finally she replied quietly, “That sounds like a good idea. Thank you.”
“It’s rather the least I can do,” he replied. He looked at her closely. “Please take my coat. You must be quite cold.”
“It is a kind gesture, your grace, but I have trouble wearing other people’s clothes. I tend to see things.”
“Ah.” He continued, “I am sorry about the misunderstanding with my servant Lilith. I’m afraid we are not used to having to be careful with human feelings. The ability to enthrall makes one rather cavalier, I’m afraid.” He looked back out toward the fairies dancing in the garden. “They must think quite highly of you to permit you to witness a conclave. Humans have been killed for getting a glimpse of one, I’m told.”
“Good think I’m so popular, then, because that would be pretty inconvenient.” She gave him a little smile.
“Indeed it would,” he responded before offering his arm. “Shall we?”
William was waiting for them outside the ballroom. He looked relieved when November and the king came into view arm-in-arm. The hum of conversation behind the doors indicated that it was a full house. November’s eyes widened as two guards threw the doors open. The room was full of vampires and humans dressed to the nines. She knew security was tight, and that every one of them had been thoroughly searched, guests, servants, and human snacks included. The whole household had been talking about the preparations for weeks.
Still, she was nervous. She hated crowds. And this crowd was composed mostly of vampires who all knew her name and had heard of her gift and would be watching her like a hawk. Then there were the humans, enthralled and creepy. She prayed that she wouldn’t fall into random visions. She hoped, with some reason for optimism, that a crowd of vampires would be easier for her than a crowd of humans. The party on New Year’s Eve would be even crazier, she’d been told, with out-of-state lords and their entourages added to the mix.
The moment had come, and the king entered, the most valuable human on the continent on his arm. Curtsies and kneeling ensued until the king ended the reverence by signaling the band. November began to panic as Ilyn led her to the center of the ballroom. The guests pulled back, leaving them alone in the center of the dance floor.
The king sensed her distress and said, “You’ll be fine. You practiced, after all.”
“You might have warned me,” she hissed.
“That would have only given you more reason to be nervous,” he replied in a most reasonable tone. “Relax, little one,” he said. “Follow my lead.” So she did, since there was nothing else to be done. She tried to ignore the eyes boring holes in her back. The song was long. It gave her the time to learn the steps and slow her heart.
Eventually, she even relaxed enough to laugh with when Ilyn dipped her or tossed her in the air. She tried to look in his eyes, but she found that rather too intense and settled for gazing over his shoulder with the occasional glance at his scarred but somehow still handsome face. By the time the dance ended, she was almost a little disappointed to have to stop. He released her and bowed slightly. She curtsied deeply, and they left the dance floor, which was quickly filled as the band played on.
Ilyn passed her off to Savita so he could work the room, and November was smiling brightly until she caught sight of Lilith’s face. The Grocer’s eyes were fixed on November, and they burned with hatred. Savita saw this as well, locking eyes with her father’s servant until Lilith wavered and turned away. It continued to surprise November how many people were afraid of her friend Savita. She tried to shake off the feeling of doom Lilith provoked in her stomach and pasted a smile back on her face.
“I don’t believe you’ve yet met my wife, Noemi,” Savita said, steering her to a beautiful Latina vampire leaning casually against the wall in a hot pink ball gown in a style more punk than prom. Savita herself was wearing a black and gold sari.
“I’m so thrilled to finally meet you!” November cried with genuine enthusiasm. She’d caught a glimpse or two, of course, in her months of working with Savita, and her friend had told her a little about her love. She knew that Noemi was young by vampire standards, barely one hundred years old, and the couple had been together nearly all that time. Savita had not turned her. Greg was Savita's only child. Noemi’s maker had turned her for love but had let her go when it became clear to them both that she had been born inclined to love a woman rather than a man. He had even given her away at the wedding.
“Likewise,” Noemi replied with a smile. They continued chatting for some time. November was under strict orders to stay near vampires she knew, and she required no persuasion to comply. She felt like a goldfish in an ocean of sharks. Various vampires approached her throughout the evening, getting introductions from Savita, whose presence along with the king’s attention kept everyone on his best behavior. She did her best to be charming and to show loyalty to the king and his house. She left no room for anyone to think they could woo her away. She was much relieved that no one but William and Greg asked her to dance and assumed she owed that relief to her entrance with the king. She did enjoy watching the dance floor, especially when they recreated centuries-old group dances. The band, composed entirely of vampires, was, of course, wonderful. She was a bit sad that Zinnia wasn’t there to see it. She wondered if Ben could hear them from the dungeon.
November tried to keep her eyes off the humans. Most were only lightly enthralled so far. It made them seem a little high. They danced and flirted, doing their job of entertaining everyone, only the few favorite companions having any idea of where the evening would inevitably take them. November was the youngest human in the room, though not by much. Some of the girls looked barely of age to drink. She found it all terribly sad. Around midnight, William came over to tell her that the fangs were about to come out. She wasn’t surprised; peoples’ eyes had been growing more and more predatory over the previous hour. “To the library with you, and lock the door,” William ordered. “Don’t come out until dawn.”
“Aye-aye, captain,” she said. The library doors were a lot stronger than the one to her room. Her bedroom door would present no obstacle to a vampire coming after her, either to further his ambition or because he had lost control. There would be a lot of blood flowing in the ballroom, and accidents were known to happen. After she passed through the ballroom doors, the guards shut them behind her. She walked quickly, hoping not to hear any screaming as dinner was served behind her. Her heartbeat didn’t slow down until she had locked and bolted the library doors behind her. The outside of the doors were clad in silv
er to protect the literary treasures inside. The only way to open them was to have the single key which was presently located in William’s pocket.
She’d taken over a corner of the library by the windows, with her own little desk filled with art supplies, but tonight she was too keyed up to draw. She kicked off her shoes and settled down on the comfiest couch to read. Her current project was “The Werewolf and Fairy Wars: A History in Six Volumes,” an opus covering 1500 years of intermittent conflict between all three groups of supernatural creatures, from a vampire perspective. She was on Volume 3, which covered the near genocide of the fairy people and the resulting alliance between vampire and fairy. It was all rather a downer, but she wanted badly to understand better this world she’d fallen into.
Just as she began dozing under a knit blanket, and long before dawn, she heard something at the door. The tumblers in the lock were turning. The bolt lid back. Her heart skipped a beat. She pulled out both her rosary and her knife, knowing full well how hopeless she was hand-to-hand but determined not to go down without a fight. She was trying to use her gift to peek through the door when it opened.
King Ilyn raised an eyebrow when he saw November standing shoeless next to the couch, knife in hand. He raised his own hands above his head, saying, “My wallet’s in my back pocket. Just please don’t hurt me.” November responded by dropping her weapons back in her purse and throwing a pillow at his head. He caught the pillow without using his hands and placed it gently back on the sofa.
“You’re lucky the crossbow didn’t fit in my bag,” she said, trying to steady her breathing. “Also, making fun of little girls isn’t very regal. What are you doing down here? And how did you get in the door?” she asked, belatedly adding, “Your grace,” as she realized how familiar she was acting.
His lips twitched. “As I mentioned, public feeding does not interest me. You, however, do interest me. Besides, they will have much more fun without my supervision. I am not exactly known as the life of the party. And picking an old-fashioned lock is rather trivial for a telekinetic. I simply reach out and move the tumblers.” He sat down at the opposite end of the couch and snatched a New Yorker from the rack across the room. “May I join you?” he asked after he was already seated with his legs crossed, magazine dropping neatly out of the air into his lap.
“Of course,” she answered, a bit amused, to her surprise. She wondered if he would have left had she refused his company. She felt safer with him around, to be honest. The thought of the vampire orgy likely taking place upstairs was rather creeping her out.
November settled back down with her book, curling up once again under her blanket. She alternated pretending to read with staring at her vampire companion, trying to figure him out but lacking enough information to do so. She continued doing this until she realized that he was doing the same thing.
She found the courage to ask, “Is there something you, um, wanted to talk about?”
“I don’t understand you,” he replied quickly, as though dashing at a door that had finally opened. “You seem so happy most of the time. You laugh so often. I can hear you from anywhere in the house. You even seem happy around me, misunderstandings aside. In the ballroom tonight, you smiled at me whenever you caught my eye. So genuine. No one but my children smiles at me without wanting something from me, but you . . .” He threw up his hands in perplexity. “I am a 2500 year old vampire who you believe is going to end your life by drinking your blood and forcing you to drink his in return. You have been pressed into service for my cause and my house. Yet you seem neither bitter nor frightened nor angry with me, at least not about that.”
“Sometimes I am all those things,” November admitted. “I just let it pass through me. I let it fall away without grabbing hold of it. That’s the only way I’ve been able to function. It’s the idea of being helpless and in pain that I’m really afraid of, I think, more than the fact that I’m going to die young. I spent my whole childhood crazy from fear and from the non-stop visions I couldn’t control. Eventually I found a way through it, and I chose to make happiness where I can, and to not hold grudges.” November shrugged, thinking briefly of the many things she’d had to forgive.
“I just don’t see the point in being miserable over a fate I can likely do nothing about. It helps that in the vision, none of you seem happy about my death. You look like you’re burying a family member. It also looks like you won’t have much of a choice, as far as ending my life goes. I mean, there’s an awful lot blood on my dress. I must get shot or stabbed or something first.” She paused, shivering slightly.
“Coming here was not exactly my idea, but quite honestly, it’s the best home I’ve ever had. And since I’ve come here, my gift seems to have more of a purpose, and it seems that perhaps my death when it comes won’t be for nothing, like most people’s. I’ve watched so many people die for nothing. And all alone. At least I won’t be alone when I die.”
Ilyn’s eyes looked sad for a moment. “I never thought to make another vampire. And I am not in the habit of killing such young humans. Not recently, anyway. Do you want to be a vampire?” he asked.
“Not really. I’m afraid of becoming a predator, of what I’ll be like after, of what I might do. At the same time, the idea of being strong certainly has its appeal. But what I want has never made much difference in how things turn out, anyway. Why would it this time?” she said. “Did your children want to be vampires? Did you?” she ventured.
“I would have died otherwise, slowly and very painfully. So, yes, I chose this life when Marisha offered it to me. I already loved her. I was her favorite human, you see. She was a young vampire, perhaps a century old, and she was frightened that she would botch the process, I remember. William was too delirious to give permission or to object when I turned him. When we found him, he’d been lying on the battlefield for hours, dying of his injuries, too weak to cry for help and too strong to pass over. Now, Savita . . . she would have preferred a true death at the time, but she was too valuable. Like you, she was far too special to waste, and she had had such a difficult human life that she would have welcomed the release of death. In time, she was glad for the chance for a second, happier life, or so she tells me. But it took quite some time.” He smiled sadly. He seemed very fond of his daughter.
“Luka wanted it, badly. He wanted the strength. That should have been a warning, but Marisha was too softhearted to see it, and I dismissed it. I thought the love and loyalty would come after she turned him. It often does, as the years go by. He did love her, I suppose. But never me.” He shook his head, thinking of his late wife and their wayward son. “A soft-hearted vampire . . . it must sound rather unbelievable to you.”
“Not really. No one is all one thing or all another.” Since Ilyn seemed to be in an answering mood, she combed her mind for more questions. “Did you have children?" she asked. "When you were human, I mean?"
“I had a son. He died of fever before his third birthday. My wife died the next day. I was 19 years old.”
“I’m so sorry. How sad,” she said softly, reaching out a hand to touch his arm. He looked down at her hand in surprise, and she pulled it back.
“Yes, it was sad. Life was brutal and short then,” he said. “So many dangers. So little medicine or protection. We were helpless in the face of disease, injury, war, disaster of all kinds. So I do sympathize with you, little one, in your fear of being helpless. I may be the most powerful vampire on the continent, but I know full well how that feels.”
He turned back to his reading, so November followed suit. They remained in companionable silence until dawn, when the king retired to the crypt and the human collapsed in her bed, covered with a blanket of warm sunlight.
Chapter 10
Ilyn stops shoveling dirt and looks down at the girl in the ground, peppered with clods of earth. He tosses the shovel to William and jumps into the grave. “Bury us,” he barks. William opens his mouth to question him. His father cuts him off. “I don’t want her to wa
ke up alone in the ground. It’s frightening.”
“We did, and we survived,” William argues. “At your age, you’ll be awake down there for hours before she comes around.”
“Do it,” comes the command as Ilyn curls up next to the corpse. So his son does.
November awoke on Christmas afternoon to find herself in a darkened room with a vampire king sitting at her desk, leafing through a binder of her drawings whilst smoking a pipe. He turned at the rustle of her sheets as she sat up. “Merry Christmas,” he said matter-of-factly, then returned his attention to the binder. The only light in the room was her desk lamp. Her shutters, she now observed, were indeed light-tight.
She stared at him for an incredulous moment before throwing up her hands in resignation and returning his Christmas wishes. “Merry Christmas. May I ask what you are doing in here, your grace?”
“I wanted to examine your older work to see if anything useful jumped out at me. Savu only showed me the binder about your burial, and your recent work on the bombings,” he replied after taking a pull from his pipe. “Also, I was bored,” he admitted with a shrug. “The plight of the elderly vampire. We only need a few hours rest.” She wanted to be irritated at his intrusion but found this admission charming in spite of herself.
“That’s fine, but I would have appreciated your asking my permission. It’s kind of personal. I’ve never shown most of those drawings to anyone.”
