The Vampire's Witch

by Emma Glass

  Below Bleakwood, the rest of North America was known as the Timberland Plains. This hold was clearly the most varied of all, containing all the appropriate geography of the United States: powerful mountains, scorching deserts, rolling hills, vast plains, thick forests, and much more. The people of the Timberland Plains were chiefly nomadic by nature, following the food supplies and living a warrior’s lifestyle. Everything I read told me that, in this vampiric Earth, the Native Americans were never defeated and continued to control their homeland.

  The final hold was Selvara Karn, known to me as South America. Now, this one was particularly interesting; there was just as little known as with The Wastes, but what little information remained captured the imagination. Dominated by thick, hot rainforests and jungles with mountainous temples, Selvara Karn will filled with voodoo, old magic, and ancient customs. Almost nobody who had ventured there had returned alive; those that tried came back unhinged by the experience.

  “Hey.”

  Snapped back to reality, I glanced up from the encyclopedia in my hands. Wilhelm was waving his palm in front of my face.

  “Glad to see you’re back!” He chuckled. “As it turns out, we’ve been in this musty old library all day. Aren’t you getting hungry?”

  I could already hear how badly my stomach protested. “Yeah, actually… I’m starving.”

  “Good,” Viktor replied as he approached from the side. “Because it appears Lord Elliott has called for us. Dinner is about ready.”

  After we packed up our books, I followed the Knightly Trio towards the main dining hall. As I listened to their entertaining banter, thinking of all I had learned about their mysterious holds, I stayed unaware of the sudden, earth-shattering surprise that awaited us all…

  Elliott was distracted during dinner, but we made small talk about his day. I knew that he was under a lot of pressure lately. As of today, he was deeply concerned over rumors of chrysm shortages and mining troubles.

  It was increasingly sounding like he would be pushed to leave the castle for a short while. The problem only mounted, and it seemed clear that he was needed on the mainland. It was selfish of me, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Truth be told, the idea of being separated from him for the first time since arriving made me shiver.

  Sure, I had my guardians and Lorelei… but Elliott’s mother had been rather scarce lately, and my friends already had my attention for so much of the day. I hope he doesn’t have to go for long, I thought to myself quietly.

  Ripped from my bleak thoughts, I glanced up. Asarra stood before us, delivering a message. Her usually stoic face looked anxious, and she had my immediate attention.

  “My Lord, you have a visitor.”

  “A visitor?” I asked. “I thought nobody could get in or off this island without special access.”

  He paused conspicuously. “You’re not wrong. With the security around the hold rulers, it’s very difficult to surprise a vampire lord in their own castle…” He turned to my guard. “How could this have happened? Who is it?”

  Asarra opened her mouth to answer, but a loud banging at the gate cut her off. Startled, all of us turned to the doors as it thudded hard once, twice, and then–

  They were thrown wide open in a spectacular burst as a hooded stranger strolled into the room, dressed in sleek, dark leather armor. It conformed to the curves of a woman as she swayed several strong, blatant strides towards the dining table.

  As Elliott Craven defiantly rose in his seat, the mysterious visitor whipped back her hood: a thick burst of platinum blonde hair bounced down along her shoulders, and she stopped several seats down from us with a confident grin.

  I was mesmerized at her natural beauty.

  Had it not been for the smoky, dark shadows around her radiant and piercing eyes, I could have mistaken her to be a real-life angel.

  Elliot glared daggers at our unexpected guest. I could see how he bristled at the very sight of her; his entire body was stiff with mixed surprise and irritation. A low, sinister tone slid down into his voice as he growled out a name.

  “Nikki…”

  Her shining eyes twinkled over an evil smile. “Hullo there, brother dearest… did you miss me?”

  20

  Clara

  My eyes quietly shifted from one vampire to the other. “Elliott… you have a sister?”

  “Yes…” He gave me a quick, frustrated glance. While I met his stare, I couldn’t imagine why he would possibly hide a huge fact like this from me. Diverting his irritated gaze back to the visitor, he muttered bitterly. “Yes, I have a sister.”

  “See, now I’m almost offended!” The young woman laughed airily, putting a hand on her hip. “Elliott, you never thought to mention me to your new little friend? Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d nearly say that you didn’t like me…”

  He grunted. “What are you doing here?”

  “I had to come see for myself, of course.”

  Elliott wasn’t amused. “See what?”

  Naturally, I knew what she was talking about. If these two were estranged, then there could only been one explanation for what might bring her back to the castle out of the blue, and that was…

  “The human,” she responded bluntly.

  That’s when Nikki turned to really look at me for the first time. With wild, curious eyes like those of a predator, it felt as if she could peer deep down into me even from across the room.

  Elliott was livid. “How did you find out about her?” He slammed his palms down hard on the dining table, glaring across at our visitor.

  Her head tilted. “Everyone knows, brother.”

  “What do you mean, ‘everyone’?”

  “Well, everyone. Duh.” The vampire shook her head with an amused sigh as her eyes shifted back to me again. “I mean, I was on the mainland when I heard the news. Not that I believed it, of course, but then after I moved to a different settlement, I heard it again… and then again… until finally…”

  I swallowed fearfully.

  Is this related to that tailor he had exiled?

  “Brother dearest – I heard hushed whispers of your little pet even in the furthest reaches of your little kingdom…” As her smile quickly fell, Nikki gazed upon him with almost complete disinterest. “News traveled fast. Who knows what they’ve all been speculating since I came racing back…”

  He stiffened up. “That can’t be possible. The only explanation is Jerald Puckett, but he couldn’t have traveled that far so quickly. This must be something else…”

  “Jerald? Like, our tailor?”

  “Not anymore,” I noted sadly.

  She inquisitively trailed her eyes back and forth between us. “What does she mean, Elliott?”

  He sighed. “Jerald attacked her, overwhelmed by bloodlust. Seeing as she was a guest of mine at the time, the laws intervened. They called for executing him, but I knew the attack was beyond his control… so I had him sent away to the mainland instead.”

  “Well, that bites.” Nikki grumbled. “You know, I really liked the old guy.”

  “We all did,” Elliott reminded her.

  I couldn’t help but be made well aware again that if it weren’t for me, he’d still be here – happily whipping up outfits for the royal family and the vampire nobility. Guilt consumed me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he stubbornly responded. “It’s impossible for you to have known that there was a human in Stonehold Castle. She’s only been here a week, if that!”

  “It’s clear that your sister already knew I was here somewhere,” I reminded him. “Look at her, Elliott. She doesn’t look even remotely surprised to see a human being. Safe to say, she’s probably telling the truth...”

  “Curses.” He straightened up and lifted his hands from the table. “You’re probably right.”

  Nikki’s gaze shifted from him to me again. “Curious that you can speak our language. You’ve even got a sensible brain in there, by the sound of it. Tell me, human, do you have nam
es wherever you come from?”

  “Call me Clara,” I smiled curiously.

  She smirked. “Clara. What a peculiar name… of course, you’ve probably worked out by now that I am Nikki Craven, Princess of Stonehold.”

  “It crossed my mind. Pleasure to meet you.”

  Nikki gave a small head tilt. “Polite, too.” She turned back to her brother. “You could honestly stand to learn a lot from this one.”

  “There are more important things than that right now,” he replied sternly as he looked at her. “Things that might include rumors among the kingdom of a particular human’s arrival…”

  Even I could see that her gaze kept straying to the leftover food on the table. As I watched this beautiful, charming creature, I realized she looked utterly exhausted.

  Elliott noticed too. He sighed, slipping back into his seat and waving a hand at a chair across from me. “But I suppose a few minutes’ waiting won’t hurt, since you bring important news. Sit down, Nikki. You’ve undoubtedly had a long ride here. You must be starving.”

  “Thanks. I’m definitely starving.”

  As she walked around us to take her seat, Elliott directed Wilhelm towards the kitchen with a click of his fingers. The guard quickly returned with a clean plate and silverware.

  Nikki dug into the leftovers without another word; Elliott plunked his elbow onto the table, holding up his chin with his splayed hand as he quietly watched her.

  The only sounds in the chamber now came from Nikki’s silverware against her plate. Before the silence could start getting too awkward...

  “So, which of you is the older one?” I asked.

  “I am,” Elliott replied offhandedly.

  “Really?” I was genuinely surprised. Elliott looked like he was in his early twenties, just a few years older than me, but Nikki seemed to have the same sort of gap over him.

  “Yeah, but don’t let him fool you. It’s not by much,” Nikki replied as she quickly bit off a small chunk of a strange, roasted drumstick. “Only by, what was it? Fifty years?”

  “Try sixty,” he rolled his eyes.

  “Pfft.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Fifty years? Sixty years? Whatever. I mean, either way, it’s still not even a century.” She stopped to thank a server as he brought her a generous wine glass of red blood.

  “Be that as it may,” Elliott continued, “Don’t forget that I’d already reached my equinox. In fact, I already had a seat at royal meetings by the time I was helping bathe and look after you!”

  “Equinox?” I asked. “Like, a solar equinox?”

  “Not quite. The term comes from an older misunderstanding on how our physiology works. It’s when a vampire reaches their prime age and the aging process slows to a crawl,” Elliott briefly averted his eyes my way, a small smile on his lips. “We have several equinoxes in our lifetimes, but it’s a little different for every vampire. Mine started around the time I hit twenty-three years old; I expect to have to wait another century to have my next.”

  Nikki swallowed a sip of water. “You might have noticed that I look a tad older than Elliott, but I’m younger than him. That’s because my first equinox was after I turned twenty-seven. So, for the first few centuries of my life, I can look the part of the older, wiser sister.”

  “Enjoy that while you have it,” he noted dryly. “Even after our next ones, I don’t expect you to catch up to my appearance.”

  She twirled her fork lightly, her eyes glued to a few slices of black carrots that she’d stabbed onto the end. “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that…”

  Listening to the two of them speak so casually about entire centuries only served to underline our biological differences. I realized just how young and naïve I must have sounded to be among these two. It made me truly wonder how old their mother was…

  “You look dejected,” Elliot observed.

  I shrugged a little. “It’s nothing. Only that I nearly forgot that, you know, barring executions, you guys are immortal.”

  Elliott laughed, his chin still supported with his arm on the table. “Nobody is immortal, Clara. Why would you think vampires are immortal?”

  Now that took me for a spin.

  “Vampires have always been immortal, right? At least, in all the stories…” I realized that Elliott and Nikki had both paused to listen intently, and I hastily continued. “Vampires in our folklore have always had eternal life, unless they were killed by sunlight or someone staked one in the heart.”

  “Staked in the heart, yes,” he noted with a chuckle. “So far as I’m aware, stabbing basically any living creature in the heart tends to kill it…”

  As I took something like a strange, orange strawberry to my mouth, I couldn’t argue that he made a fair point there. The fruit tasted lightly sour, but with a sweet aftertaste.

  “But sunlight?” Elliott twisted an exasperated frown. “That’s where I draw a line. Honestly, how pathetic of a creature must you be to drop dead from simply going outside?” He laughed heartily, straightening up in his seat and taking a sip from his glass of blood. “You humans need to get your lore together…”

  “Actually, you burst into flames.”

  Nikki winced in mid-bite. “Flames?”

  “Yeah, vampires in human folklore kind of just…” I realized how gruesome it must sound to them. “Well, they burn alive in direct sunlight.”

  The siblings shared a horrified glance.

  Elliott was in disbelief. “Well, whoever came up with that one has one dark sense of humor. It sounded pretty stupid at first, but... seriously? Fire? What kind of monsters are your people?”

  Nikki swallowed a bite. “What a way to go...”

  They sat in silence and dwelled on that for a moment; it was just long enough for me to remember their casual chats of ages old enough for me to never experience. I took another one of the strange strawberries and studied it in front of my face. “Alright then. If vampires don’t really live forever, then how long are your lifespans?”

  Nikki kept eating, but kept her eyes on Elliott as he pondered. “There are a lot of factors, but the easiest answer I can give you is this. Assuming any hypothetical one of us is generally healthy for the duration of the lifetime, that vampire could expect to see a thousand years.” He turned to his sister. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  She nodded, swallowing quickly. “Maybe a few centuries longer, but that’s pretty rare.”

  While I thought on that, Nikki leaned closer. “So, what about you guys? How long do humans live for?”

  “Oh. Depends on a lot of things for us too. But most of us live for seventy, maybe eighty years, and we’re usually weak and frail things by then. There are older ones who make it past a hundred, but those are extremely rare… and they don’t get that much past it.”

  “Under a century? Seriously?” Elliott shook his head. “No offense, but that’s kind of depressing.”

  Nikki agreed with a nod, sipping her blood.

  “It used to be a lot less than that,” I added. “For almost all of human civilization, actually. Life expectancy really jumped up when we finally started getting it right with medicine and science. I guess it wasn’t really that long ago that the average lifespan of any given person was thirty, maybe forty years… that was if you were lucky.”

  “That’s it?” Nikki looked incredulous. “Well, how old does that make you then?”

  “I turn seventeen in maybe a week.”

  She looked over at her silent brother. “Did you know about that, Elliott? She’s so young!”

  “Yet she easily has the maturity of a vampire several times her age,” he noted with a sly smile. “Perhaps human brains develop faster than ours.”

  “Or she might just be wise for her age.”

  Elliott winked at me. “Equally possible.”

  I was surprised to hear compliments like this, especially from royal vampires. It was only in that moment that I realized I hadn’t had any trouble talking to any of their species I’d met so
far – and I apparently hadn’t met one who was less than hundreds of years old. “So, how old are you guys?”

  “I am three-hundred-seventy-six years old,” Elliott smiled proudly.

  “Three-hundred-fifteen,” Nikki added.

  My jaw dropped in a heartbeat. “You’re over three… hundred… years old…”

  Elliott grinned. “Is that a problem for you?”

  I leant back in my chair and shook my head. The realization was so wild that I started to laugh at the absurdity. Elliott Craven is already nearly four times older than I’ll ever live…

  21

  Elliott

  After dinner was over, I brought Clara back to my chambers and left her to pursue her own devices. Before I could close the door and return to the nearest chrysm node, she pulled my attention back with an odd question.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  Clara had spent most of the meal zoned out after she learned our ages – her sudden display of concern had me slightly taken aback. “Of course I’ll be okay. In fact, I’m going to be fine. What on earth makes you ask?”

  “I was thinking on the way up here,” she said nervously. “I mean, you’re so worried me being here, and about the mainland and the other holds. Now there’s this thing with your sister. You were clearly pretty frustrated to see her at first…” Her words were simple and blunt. “To be honest, I was surprised to see the two of you getting along so quickly after that.”

  “Nikki and I have a… complicated history.”

  I refused to think back on it. Instead, I took some relief in the fact that my sister had kept on her best behavior around Clara. Maybe she’s gotten better after all. A hundred years away might have put her back together again…

  “Is that so?” A pensive look clouded her face as she bit part of her lower lip. “She mentioned residing out in distant parts of the kingdom. Is your past together why she spends a lot of time living outside the castle?”