by Am Hudson
“But I loved them!”
“And yet you see my reasoning.”
My eyes drifted slowly away from his.
“I have taken many young lives in my time under Safia’s thumb, and I could bear it no more.”
“So it’s true—she needed their blood for her immortality.”
His eyes shrunk as he studied me. “How could you know that?”
“Like I said, Dad came to see me.”
He nodded in understanding. “Amara, I need to tell you something, and it will hurt. And it will scare you. But I want you to promise me you will listen—until I finish.”
“I promise,” I said with a very uncertain nod.
“I know about the child.” He bowed his head, motioning to my belly. “I know that she is soulless.”
My blood ran cold. “And yet you don’t plan to take my soul and put it in her body, do you?”
He shook his head. “I have fought a secret war all this time to see that Anandene never returns. But I almost lost the battle when Safia saw to your timely return to America that year—”
“Safia?” I shook my head at him. “That was you! You killed my mum and Harry. You forced me back into the guardianship of my father—”
“No. You had to believe it was me, so you would not dig any further. What you know already about that witch puts everything I’ve worked for at risk.”
“What do you mean?”
“To stop this madness—the resurrection of Anandene, the deaths of all my sister’s daughters—I must continually prove my dedication to Safia and our cause. She must trust me. I need time and I need to be able to get close to her when I find a way to kill her.”
“Why not just stop giving her the blood of children?”
“If it were that simple, I would. But without that blood she would not die. She would merely age, and I know from previous experience that it will not stop her or slow her down; it will only enrage her.” His tone carried a hundred sad stories under it, and I got the sense that he’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“So what keeps her alive then—if not the blood?”
“I have read every book, studied every spell, tried every toxin, and I have not found a way to either kill her or break what spell holds her here.” He lowered his head. “I am ashamed to say I do not know. However, there may be a way to stop her. And—” He looked down at my hand and then reached out for it, his shoulders dropping when I refused. “I may not see you again after the battle at Loslilian.”
“Why?”
“I feel the time has come to sacrifice myself for the greater good of those I love.”
I raised a sceptical brow at that, folding my arms.
“Do you remember when we spoke in the Garden of Lilith that day, and I asked that you wear the emerald stone of Anandene’s?”
“Hm. What about it?”
“I was relieved that you declined.”
“Why?”
“Because it was spelled—with the same kind of incantation I used on your bracelet.”
“If you spelled it, why would you be glad I refused to wear it?”
“It was not I who spelled it.”
“Safia?” I studied his eyes for confirmation. “She wanted to watch us?”
“Hear you, yes. And I acted as her agent to deliver it. Had I refused, she would have caught on that I was working against her.”
“Why didn’t she just plant it somewhere—?”
“The evil in her meant that you were safe at Loslilian—under Lilith’s power, with the Stone and its purity to ward off her tainted soul. But out here, safety is an illusion, and she can reach you if she so desires. There is a possibility that she has already spelled a talisman with a listening spell and placed it somewhere inconspicuously.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful what I say.”
“Good, because if she were to find out about the child, pain will not be the worst you will suffer.”
“She’ll take the child from within me,” I said. “And threaten everything my dad loves so he’ll transfer the soul. I know.”
“No, Amara, she will force you to transfer it,” he said, smiling as if he’d seen right through my attempt to cover up what I knew about my own powers. “I told you once that you would one day have the power to bring a man back from the other side—”
I nodded.
“The same pathway your Cerulean Light creates for a soul is the same pathway you yourself walked when you left your last body.” He picked up my hand and nodded to it. “Once you create the pathway, you can leave your own body and enter another. You do not need Lord Eden.”
That just made this so much scarier. “How long have you known the baby is not Anandene?”
He cleared his throat. “A very long time. Perhaps as long as I’ve known the boys were switched at birth.”
“And… how long is that?”
“Since I told Elizabeth to switch them.”
My jaw dropped. “You sneaky bastard!”
He laughed. “Never underestimate me, Amara. I thought you knew that by now.”
“I just…” My mind ticked, rushing back and forth over the past like a pendulum, trying to fit this new information in with everything I thought I knew. “Wow.”
The forest woke with the sound of his laughter then, birds chirping suddenly in the trees. Until he sobered himself. “However, this is not what I wanted you to know before I am gone for good.”
“Okay, so what else is there?”
“My father does not know I too hindered the efforts to resurrect Anandene—he, like Safia, needed to believe I was on her side. And it could not just be an act. Like a commitment to a character in a film, I had to play my life like a role—wholeheartedly—undoing things from behind the scenes, leaving only for the audiences’ eye what I needed them to see.”
“So, are you saying you did other things to mess all this up, or are you trying to ask me to forgive you for everything you did to me?”
“Rose, when she was a teenager,” he said with a slight pause on each word, “met Jason—”
“My mother met the pure soul?” My eyes widened; holy crap! Jason could have ended up being my father. “Did they connect?” I asked, feeling a bit sick. If they connected, then they would have fallen for each other. And that would mean the man I once had sex with had also been in love with my mother. “Did they have… sex?”
Drake laughed. “No. But they did feel the connection of their souls. However, formalities meant that Jason could not just whisk her away and make love to her as a stranger. He was curious about what he felt for this young girl he met on the street corner that afternoon, but before he could see her again, she was already with child. And so, he backed away.”
“That was lucky.”
“I do not believe in luck.” He grinned.
“You set it up?” I realised. “You made sure she met my father?”
He nodded once, taking a small step closer, and he gently grasped my arm, leaning in. “I did not just make sure she met your father, Amara…”
I rolled my face up to read his eyes, his grave tone filling my heart with worry.
“I am your father.”
My skin left my body and my past fell away with it, leaving behind a raw and cold rush of emotion. “No.”
“I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, but it is true,” he said apologetically.
As it all engulfed me and ripped my mind open with clarity, the only thing I felt was disgust. “You mated with your own niece!”
“Very distant niece, Amara,” he said sternly. “There was nothing incestuous about it. Lilith was my half sister, and Rose was the diluted blood of generations of genetic interference. You carry traces of the blood of Lilith, but… you mostly carry mine.”
“But…” My teeth chattered in my mouth, making my lip quiver. “No. That would make me more vampire than human, but I’m—”
“No. Only if you were born of my Created. But you were born of an original vampire and a human, j
ust like my sister Lilith.” He grabbed both my arms, stepping closer again so he stood over me. “You are not a descendant of an original Lilithian, Ara. You are an original Lilithian, and it is through me that you inherited your incredible Cerulean abilities.”
I pushed away from him, my hands shaking as they shoved his chest hard. “It was you—all those years as I was growing up. You were the creature in the dark corner of my room; the man that I always felt behind me. You were watching me?”
“I let Safia believe it was to ensure you grew to childbearing age but, in truth, I just wanted to see my daughter grow.”
“Then Morgana?” I took a breath so deep my shoulders lifted. “She was my…”
“Sister.”
My lungs seemed to collapse then and I let myself cry, the fat tears flowing in threes down my cheeks and into my mouth. David didn’t just kill Drake’s daughter. He killed my sister.
Drake wrapped his arms around me, holding me for the first time in this world of truth. Holding me for the first time as my father. My real father. And I let him. I wanted to push the monster and all the bad things that monster had done away. But a lot of those bad things, I knew now, were a lie. He’d protected me all this time, and anything he’d done in contradiction was also to protect me from a situation much worse.
Some things would eternally be unforgivable, but so much of it just wafted away as the truth sunk in.
“My dad—your dad…” I stood back from his arms. “Lord Eden said my father was a soldier, that he died…”
“Rose lied about her true lover,” he said gently. “She would not admit to anyone that an older man stole her heart for a night of true passion and then vanished. She was ashamed. And so her best friend at the time promised to stand in for her.”
“Does Dad know? I mean, does he know now that you’re my… my real father?”
“No. And he cannot know. No one can.”
“Not even David?”
“No one. I went to great lengths to keep this truth from David when he was searching for your true family. He came very close,” he said with a nervous laugh, “when he tested Vampirie’s DNA.”
“But the tests came back—”
“The test results were altered—tampered with by one of my best IT guys.”
I felt a little lost then, knowing how close we came to truth, so long ago. It seemed unfair that Drake had managed to keep us from it.
“My point is, Amara, we are safe here, in this circle of conversation—” he waved a hand around the air, “—Safia cannot watch us here because her power does not reign over this domain. Even she is not strong enough to stretch her enchanted ear that far. But once we step away from here, our words will reach any object she spelled—”
“But we’ve spoken openly—David and I. We—”
“Then you better hope she does not already know about the child, but, more importantly, pray she does not find out you are mine, because she will take you from me. And you would eventually die a horrible death just for the sake of my pain.”
“So it’s me you’ve been protecting all this time?”
He nodded once. “You are my greatest secret.”
I felt weak. Completely weak. I looked down at my fingertips and watched them shake for a moment, amazed by how the body could react to something as simple as truth. “If she’s so powerful, how come Safia didn’t know—when she touched my belly, how come she didn’t know I was carrying a soulless child?”
“How could she know that just from touching you?” He laughed. “She’s a witch, not a mind reader.”
“I don’t know. Can’t she, like, tell?”
“She can predict the sex of a child. She can sense if it’s well, or suffering. But she cannot feel a soul. No one can—until the child is born.”
“We can,” I said, showing my hand. “With the Cerulean Energy—”
“No, you can.” He smiled affectionately. “You are more powerful than I, Amara. And that is why you will one day be a Seeker—a freer of lost souls.”
I looked at my own hand. “Then how come I couldn’t sense that my child was soulless?”
“You did. However, you just didn’t know that was what you were sensing.” He reached down and laid his hand flat across my belly. “The love you have for her is one thing; but you do not feel a connection in the way you know you should. And that is not because you’re a bad mother, Amara. It is because the soul is what we connect to.”
I moved his hand off my belly. “Why did you tell me all this now? Where are you planning to go after the battle?”
“I will die before I let Safia hurt you; and that, my dear, is most likely what will happen when I do what I must do to take Safia’s life, because every minute draws us closer to the day of the child’s birth, and I will not see my only living daughter lose her firstborn.”
“You’re going on a suicide mission?’
“Yes.”
“Well… how are you going to kill her?”
“Lock us both away in a tomb spelled with magic—never to be opened. Perhaps, in time, she will die. And if not, then we will mummify together and remain that way for eternity.”
“And that’s the only option?”
“After centuries searching for a way, I believe it is.”
“Have you told Dad? I mean… your dad?” I frowned at myself. That sounded so weird.
“No. And neither will you.”
“Why?”
“Because he will try to stop me.”
“And maybe he should, I mean, this is madness. What if it doesn’t work? What if she kills you?”
“If she kills me, she will still be trapped, but I will not be made to suffer eternally with her.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“I am.”
“Couldn’t you just cut off her head?”
He smiled, his eyes moving to my belly. “Her entire body is protected by the same spell used to make your skin impenetrable—aside from her face, because it is renewed so often by magic.”
“Spell?” I put my hand over Bump—over the skin that could not be cut.
“Yes. Safia taught me the spell to protect one from all physical harm—a weaker version of the spell she uses, which means it fades every few months—but I cast it on you one night while you lay sleeping.”
“When I first fell pregnant?”
“Yes—to disguise the heartbeat as long as possible. However, I was not taught how to undo it. I’ve tried to undo Safia’s in the past, kill her, and each time she has met that betrayal with thousands of human deaths.” He scrunched his eyes to emphasise his grief.
“So you’ll lock her away? And we’ll be safe?” I asked, making a point of touching Bump. “We’ll never have to worry about the witch again?”
He touched his heart. “On my honour as a father, I swear it.”
So I’d lose a father I never knew I had, and gain my freedom. Sounded like a pretty good exchange. But for my heart—for the little girl inside it that had always wondered what was missing—I wasn’t sure I could let go.
“What about Lilith?” I said. “The original Lilith? Surely she knows a way to kill Safia?”
His lip edged upward on one side in a wistful smile. “I am no longer welcome in her realm.”
“But I am,” I offered. “She will see me.”
His eyes changed. “Yes, she will, won’t she.”
“When we attack Loslilian, David is sending me into the forest with Jason. I can speak to Lilith—see if she can think of a way to help us, and if she can’t, the wisdom inside that Stone, or perhaps the fruit, might.”
“The fruit?”
“Lilith offered me an apple—from the Tree of Wisdom.”
He smiled mockingly. “Have you learned nothing of your ancestor, the First Eve’s, mistakes?”
“‘Do not eat from the Tree of Wisdom’?” I said with a smirk.
Drake nodded.
“Screw that.” I wiped a hand across the air. �
��If it gets me what I want, I’ll accept whatever God punishes me with.”
“Then it is settled.” He laughed once, bowing low. “And now I must go. Your husband stirs and I have things to prepare for our meeting this afternoon.”
As I took a breath to say something—anything—maybe thank you, maybe goodbye, maybe I still hate you, he vanished, leaving me alone with my worries in the still, too quiet forest.
I looked over at the house, showing in the distance as the sun lifted itself into the sky over the treetops.
In order to keep it from David that I met with Drake, I needed to sneak back up those porch steps quickly, slip in to bed and pretend to wake beside my husband, and for the fear of Safia’s watching spell, make like everything was normal—like I didn’t have a new, even darker secret than I ever had before.
***
David walked quietly, his heavy black boots crunching the fallen twigs on the dry earth. With only hours to go until Lord Eden, Jason and a few others would arrive, David had donned his royal battle-planning attire of combat boots, cargo pants and a black t-shirt, while I dressed similarly dark in a black maternity dress, a pair of woolly stockings and knee-high boots. He looked damn sexy in that outfit, as if he could take on anything—and in my world of dangers, I couldn’t think of a better turn-on.
But sex was the last thing on my mind as we neared our lake. I could smell the water up ahead and the decomposing leaves that left the forest here bare and too open—but more concealed than the house. Despite the evergreens growing in greater numbers there, leaving our little hideout hidden and on most days quite dark, the possibility that Safia had charmed an object and left it there to spy on us made the openness of the lake the most secretive place we could talk.
The trees thinned out a few meters up ahead and the air cooled a few degrees; I could feel that rain I smelled earlier edging in.
David opened his mouth as if to speak, but didn’t say anything until we reached the clearing by the lake. Then he clasped his hands behind his back, rolled his head high, and looked sideways at me with only his eyes. “Your walls are up.”
“My walls?” I said, realising then what he meant. “Oh. Yes. They are.”
“Why are you blocking me out?”
