Текст книги "The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

20

ORAYA

The woman was still alive. Her throat had been cut, but not enough to make her bleed out fast. Her eyes, big and dark, danced wildly about the room. Landed on me.

A sudden intense wave of nausea made vomit rise in my throat. Images from another feast hall, another table, another human bleeding out on a wooden slab—shown to me by my own father—assaulted me.

I glanced at Raihn. His face was still for a moment—frozen, as if stuck momentarily between masks. Then it softened into a predatory grin.

“What a treat.”

I took a drink from my wine glass because I desperately needed something to do with my hands and immediately choked. Whatever flowed over my tongue was thick and savory, punctuated with an iron bite.

Blood.

My stomach lurched.

And yet—yet my body did not reject it. It accepted it. Some dark, primal part of myself purred as I forced myself to let the blood slide down my throat.

Goddess, what was wrong with me? I swallowed hard just to keep myself from throwing up.

The woman before me kept looking at me, her eyes blurring out and then refocusing. Like she knew that I wasn’t one of them.

Several other humans had been placed on the tables. Most were listless, alive but not moving. Some still weakly struggled and were secured to the table to keep them from moving—a sickening sight, when it was children doing the securing.

Mische sipped blood from her wine glass, doing a poor job at hiding her fascinated disgust. If the Bloodborn were surprised, they didn’t show it, gracefully accepting human wrists and throats, observing the rest of the room with wary interest. Septimus offered a pleasant smile and raised his glass in a wordless toast before setting the goblet down in favor of the woman’s limp wrist.

At the other place settings, children climbed over the tables, clustering around the corpses like starving flies, their only sounds the frantic drinking and the stifled moans of pain of their human offerings.

Raihn cast me a glance so quick I thought I might’ve imagined it. Then he grinned. “You have spoiled us, Evelaena,” he said, placed his hands on either side of the woman’s head, and turned her face towards him. Her eyes widened, a little whimper of fear escaping her lips—more like a gargle, actually. This woman was already dead, I knew. Nothing could save her now. She’d drown slowly in her blood, conscious while the rest of them drained her.

I watched Raihn, a knot of disgust in my stomach. I’d never seen him drink live prey before—let alone from a human. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him do this. He’d tricked me many times before. He was a vampire, after all.

And yet, a little silent sigh of relief passed over me when I saw the shift in his face when he looked into her eyes. I wondered if I was the only one who saw it—the brief trade of the bloodthirsty hunger for silent compassion, intended only for her.

He tilted her head back, lowered his face, and sank his teeth into her throat.

He bit hard—hard enough that I could hear his teeth slicing the muscle. Little flecks of blood spattered my face, which I promptly wiped away. He drank for several long seconds, his throat bobbing with deep gulps, before lifting his head again, crimson at the corners of his mouth and seeping into the lines of his grin.

“Perfect,” he said. “You have fine taste, Evelaena.”

But Evelaena frowned down at the woman—whose eyes now stared half-closed, vacant, to the other side of the room, bare chest no longer fighting for breath.

“You killed her,” she said, disappointed.

A quick, painless death. A mercy.

Raihn laughed, wiping the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. “I got a bit overzealous. But she’s still plenty warm. Will last the next few hours, at least.”

Evelaena looked put out by this. Then a smile rolled over her lips. “You’re right. No need to waste. Besides, there are many more where she came from.”

His grin stiffened, so tight it looked like it might crack.

A regular occurrence here, then. Then again, wasn’t it a regular occurrence everywhere? I’d just let myself be sheltered from it for so long.

The Oraya of the past wouldn’t be able to hide her revulsion. She’d let it all show on her face, and trigger a messy argument, and we’d all get kicked out of this city before we even had the chance to start looking for what we came here for.

But then again, the Oraya of the past wouldn’t be here at all.

So I decided to try my hand at acting. I lifted my glass and offered Evelaena my best, most bloodthirsty smile. “No such thing as too much for a family reunion,” I said. “Drink, cousin. You’re too sober for how late it is tonight.”

The tension snapped. Evelaena laughed, her childlike delight befitting of a little girl presented with a doll. She clinked her glass against mine, hard enough to send blood wine sloshing over both of our hands.

“The truth, cousin,” she said, and drained her glass.

“You’re much better at this than I would’ve thought,” Raihn whispered in my ear, several hours later. He snuck up on me—the sensation of his breath against the crest of my ear sent a shiver over my skin, leading me to take a big step away from him.

“It wasn’t very hard,” I said.

“Still. I give you points for even trying it. Feels like a very different kind of move for you.” He nudged my arm with his elbow. “Daresay you’re evolving, princess.”

“Your approval means so much to me,” I deadpanned, and Raihn’s laugh sounded like one of genuine delight.

All night, I had been working on getting Evelaena as drunk as possible, and I had been very, very successful. Raihn and I stood in the corner of the ballroom, watching her spin around in circles with one of her child nobles, laughing hysterically while the child’s face remained that of porcelain-still calm. The humans, now mostly drained, lay slumped over tables and against the walls, though a few of the children still crawled over them to lap at their throats or thighs. The Bloodborn remained clustered together, watching the scene before them warily, lazily sipping their blood.

“She,” Raihn said, “is going to be in a lot of pain tomorrow.”

“That’s the idea.”

There’s no one looser with secrets than a drunkard. No one easier to slip around than a vampire who needed to spend the next two days recovering from gorging themselves the night before, on blood or alcohol or, better yet, both.

“I loved the night after parties, when I was growing up,” I said. “They’d all be asleep and I could do whatever I wanted for a few hours. If she’s drunk enough, she’ll tell us what we need to know, and then she’ll be out of the way for the next day or two.”

“Sounds perfect.”

Perfect, so long as Evelaena was the only one we had to worry about. I still wasn’t sure that was the case. Lahor might be a city of ruins, but there had to be someone living here other than her.

“Have you seen anyone else?” I asked, voice low.

“You mean, other than the fifty-something golden-haired children in this room? No.”

We both paused, watching those children. They crawled over the bodies and grabbed at goblets, ignoring Evelaena’s wild flailing until she pulled them in and insisted they dance with her.

Even for vampires, their stares were so… still. Empty. And every one of them fair-eyed blonds.

“They’re Turned,” Raihn said, voice low.

I glanced at him. “What?”

“They’re Turned. The children. They’re all Turned.”

I looked at the children—lapping at pools of blood like stray cats drinking gutter water—with fresh horror. The suspicion had been there, in the back of my mind, but now that the thought had been yanked to the forefront… the horror of it rose up my throat slowly. With every second I considered it, it became a greater atrocity.

Born vampires aged normally. But children who were Turned would be stuck that way for eternity, both their minds and bodies frozen in eternal, crippling youth. A terrible fate.

“How do you—” I started.

“Have you tried to talk to any of them? Many of them don’t even speak Obitraen. Found one that only knew Glaen.”

Another wave of disgust. “She brought them here from the human nations?”

“I don’t know how they got here. Maybe she pays traffickers. Maybe some were shipwrecked. Maybe she gets some of them from her human districts. Hell, there are enough of them. Probably all those things.”

I watched Evelaena spin around the room gleefully, clinging to one of her child servants, who seemed to stare a thousand miles past her.

All the same appearance. All so young. And young forever, now.

My stomach turned. Raihn and I exchanged a glance—I knew we were both asking the same silent questions and both repulsed by every potential answer.

“Your cousin,” he said, between his teeth, “is a fucked up piece of work.”

I shook away my discomfort. “Let’s just get whatever the hell we’re here for and get out.”

I started walking into the thick of the party, but Raihn grabbed my arm.

“Where are you going?”

I yanked away from his grip. “Getting some information out of her before she passes out.”

I tried to pull away from his grip, but he tugged me closer.

“Alone?”

What the hell kind of a question was that? I expected my face to earn the usual chuckle and teasing remark, but he remained serious.

“What about these?”

His fingertips ran over the curve of my shoulder. Goosebumps rose on my skin, a chill trailing his touch. Then a twinge of pain, as he brushed the still-bleeding, half-moon marks Evelaena had left behind.

It was so shockingly soft that my rebuke tangled on my tongue. It took me a moment too long to say, “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“Nothing I can’t handle. I’m used to being hated.”

“No. You’re used to being dismissed. Being hated is infinitely more dangerous.”

I pulled my arm away, and this time, he let me go. “I won the Kejari, Raihn. I can handle her.”

Raihn gave me a half smile. “Technically, I won the Kejari, actually,” he said, and didn’t move, but he also didn’t take his eyes off me.

Evelaena was already very, very drunk. When I approached her, she released the hands of her child companion and held hers out to me, instead.

I genuinely could not bring myself to take her hands, but I let her drape them over my shoulders.

“Cousin, I am so happy you have finally come to visit me,” she slurred. “It does get so very lonely here.”

Not that lonely, if she’d Turned an army of children to keep her company.

She swayed a little closer, and I watched her nostrils flare with the movement. She had been gorging herself all night—there was no way she was hungry, but human blood was human blood.

I stepped away from her grasp, looping her arm through mine and holding it firmly, so that she couldn’t get any closer.

“Show me my father’s possessions,” I said. “I always wanted to see where he grew up.”

I wondered if the words sounded as unconvincingly sickly saccharine as they felt coming out of my mouth. If they did, Evelaena was too drunk to notice.

“Of course! Oh, of course, of course! Come, come!” she crooned, and stumbled with me down the hall.

I didn’t look back, but I felt Raihn’s gaze following me the whole way down the hall.

21

ORAYA

“Not much still exists,” Evelaena slurred as she led me down dark, crumbling hallways. There were almost no torches, and my human sight struggled to avoid the uneven tiles and cracks in the floor—coupled with the fact that an extremely drunk Evelaena had attached herself to me, it took a lot of concentration just to keep myself putting one foot in front of the other.

“But I kept it,” Evelaena went on, as she dragged me around a corner. “I kept all of it. I thought he might… thought he might come back someday. Here!”

Her face lit up, and she jerked away from my grasp. In the darkness, I tripped over a raised slab of stone and had to catch myself against the wall. Evelaena flung open the door. Golden light bathed her face.

“Here!” she said. “Here it all is.”

I followed her into the room. It, unlike all the hallways that we’d come down, was lit with a steady, golden glow—sconce lanterns lined the walls, all lit as if awaiting the imminent return of its occupant. The room was small, but immaculate—the only place in this entire castle that seemed to be, truly, in one piece. A neatly made bed with blankets of violet velvet. A desk, with two golden pens, a closed leather-bound book, a single pair of gold wire-framed glasses. An armoire, one door open, two lone, fine jackets hanging within. On the coffee table, a single spoon, a single saucer. One shoe, neatly placed at the corner of the room.

I stood there staring at it all as Evelaena flung her arms out and spun around.

“Is this it?”

I was grateful that she was too drunk to hear the complicated emotion in my voice.

“All that remains, yes,” she said. “He didn’t leave much behind, all those years ago. Much of it was lost when…” Her gleeful smile faded. A shadow fell over her. “When it all happened.”

She turned to me abruptly, her big blue eyes watery and glistening under the lantern light. “A mistake, surely,” she said. “That he would destroy so much when he left. This is why I kept all of this. Some of it took years to find in the dirt and rubble. I kept it. Cleaned it. Put it here, to wait for him.”

She picked up the single shoe, her finger dancing along the edge of the laces.

I paused at the desk, and the strange collection of random items atop it. One of them was a little ink drawing of Lahor—at least, what I thought was Lahor, but the perspective was from an angle I didn’t recognize, looking down at the city from the east.

“Is there anyone else here who knew him back then?” I asked.

“Here? Living here? In this house?” Evelaena seemed confused by the question.

“Yes. Or… well, anyone. Any of…” I settled on, thinking this would go over well, “any more of our family.”

The records didn’t speak of anyone else. But hell, Lahor was very, very isolated. Who knows?

She stared blankly at me, then burst into high, manic laughter. “Of course not. There’s no one else here. He killed them all.”

I didn’t know why I wasn’t expecting this answer. I stilled, not sure how to respond.

She paused. Turned. Peered over her shoulder at me.

“Everything here changed that day,” she said. “The day he left.”

Evelaena was much younger than Vincent had been. And yet, I hadn’t done the exact math—had assumed she was born after Vincent’s ascension. But that was a hasty assumption. It hit me just how hasty it had been when I looked into her eyes now.

“You were there.” I meant it as a question. It came out as a statement.

She nodded, a slow smile spreading over her face. “I was,” she whispered, conspiratorially, like we were telling ghost stories. “He did it before he left for the Kejari. Set up all the pieces. Even then, everyone knew he would win. Especially him. So he had to set up everything beforehand. Get rid of everyone who stood in his way.” She touched the wall, like stroking the arm of an old friend. “Lahor was beautiful a long time ago. Kings lived here. It is a safe place. These walls sheltered kings during the reign of our enemies. Perhaps they will do so again, one day.” Her gaze slipped back to me, amused. “All the little kings were here, and one king slaughtered all the rest.”

Little kings.

Vincent had always spoke so dismissively about his own rise to power, and all the things he had done to facilitate it. But none of it was simple. None of it was small.

“I hid here,” Evelaena said.

“Here?”

“Here.” She pointed—to the bed. “Underneath it. I was so small, but I remember.” She tapped her temple. “He did the older ones first, then the children. His father, my father, their sisters. He probably thought he needed to do those when his strength was up, because it would be difficult. I think my father gave him a good fight.”

She spoke of all of this dreamily, calmly, as if speculating on history rather than the deaths of her family.

“Then he came here. He got Georgia, Marlena, Amith.”

“Children?” I asked quietly.

“Oh, yes. So many of us. And then there were none.”

“Why did he let you live?” I asked. “Because your birth position couldn’t threaten him?”

Evelaena laughed, like I’d just said something very charming and foolish. “Birth position didn’t matter. My uncle was a very thorough man.”

Then, before I knew what was happening, she reached for the straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The light fabric pooled around her waist, leaving her torso and breasts bare—and revealing a star-shaped scar right between them.

“He didn’t let me live,” she said. “He dragged me out from under there and put his sword through my chest. I lay right here beside my brother and sister’s bodies. I thought my playmates and I would go to the next world together.” She smiled serenely. “But the Mother was with me that night. The Mother chose me to live.”

Goddess.

I asked, “How old were you?”

“Five summers, perhaps.”

My throat thickened.

I knew what Vincent was capable of. It shouldn’t have shocked me—disgusted me—to think of him slaughtering children when he slaughtered the rest of his family. And yet, the knowledge that this was the truth hiding behind his nonchalant non-answers, behind his matter-of-fact acceptance…

I have never hidden from you, Vincent whispered in my ear, the fact that power is a bloody, bloody business, my little serpent.

No. But it had taken me far too long to look closely at what that meant.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said quietly.

Evelaena’s strange solemnity broke, melting back to her wine-dipped euphoria. A grin spread across her bloodstained mouth. “I’m not. It all went as the Mother wanted it to. And it wasn’t so very horrible, considering all that we gained.”

It was horrible, though. It was so horrible I had to bite my tongue hard to keep from saying so.

“I know he knew that, too,” she said. “That I survived for a reason. To look after Lahor. Someone needed to. But he was so very busy. I never received any answers to my letters.”

Her gaze fell back to me, piqued with interest I’d spent my entire life learning how to recognize. “Strange, how no one knew that his blood ran in yours.”

She took a step closer, and I took a step backward.

“How strange of him,” she murmured. “To let a daughter live, the closest link to his line, when so many had been sentenced to death for much lesser crimes.” Her eyelashes fluttered. Another step—she was now so close I could feel her body heat from her bare skin, vampire-delicate.

“Half human, yes?” she whispered. “I can smell it.” Her fingers reached for my cheek, my jaw, my throat—

My hand fell to my blade.

“Step back, Evelaena.”

Her nose brushed mine, eyes lifting as her full lips curled. “We’re family.”

If I had to take her down now, I’d have to stab her right in the center of her chest—right over the scar that my father had left on her when she was only a child. What sickening poetic justice.

I didn’t want to kill Evelaena—at least, not yet. We hadn’t even come close to getting what we came here for, and who knew what chaos killing the lady of the house would unleash.

I said firmly, “Step back.”

She didn’t move.

“There you are.”

I never thought I would ever again be grateful to hear that voice. And yet, here I was.

Raihn leaned against the doorframe, taking in the scene with an expression that told me I was absolutely going to hear more about this when we were alone.

Evelaena turned to Raihn, approaching him. She didn’t bother to cover herself. Actually, by the way she was looking at him—with that still-insatiable hunger—it seemed very intentional not to do so.

I found this more irritating than I had any right to.

His gaze flicked over her impassively before returning to me. “Dawn’s coming,” he said. “Forgive me if I need to steal my wife away, Lady Evelaena.”

Evelaena ignored him, her hand going to his chest. I watched the press of her fingers against him and had a hard time looking away.

“Tell me, usurper,” she murmured. “How did my uncle’s dying breath feel? I have so wondered.” Her fingertips rose, dancing over the bridge of his nose, the hollow of his cheekbone. “Was it cold against your face? Or warm?”

But gently, politely, Raihn took Evelaena’s wrists and moved them away, instead slipping a wine glass into her grasp.

“I didn’t take any pleasure in that death,” he said.

And his gaze flicked over her shoulder at the end of that sentence—spoken so solemnly, with far more truth than I expected.

He held his hand out to me. “Come to bed.”

Evelaena stepped aside, still staring at Raihn with a blank, indecipherable look on her face. I placed my hand in Raihn’s.

And then I jumped as Evelaena burst out into uproarious laughter.

She laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed as she threw her head back and drained her glass of wine, and she didn’t stop as she turned away and staggered back down the hall, not even bothering to put her dress back on.

As her voice faded down the hall, Raihn shot me a silent, wide-eyed, are-you-hearing-this? look.

He leaned close and murmured, “I almost wished I didn’t interrupt, just to see where that was going to go. Wasn’t sure if she was going to seduce you or eat you.”

Honestly, I wasn’t, either.

“I had it under control,” I said.

He squeezed my hand, and it was only then that I realized I was shaking. He pressed his other hand over mine, as if to still the tremors, before letting go.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” he muttered.