Chapter 4
4
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
January 4, Year 1, Emergence Era
The world is changing. DC seems so far away, but Juno has made it possible, and with it, a whole new way to fight the plague. New lab. New chance at finding the answer. But it also means working with her new political partners. I don’t trust them, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why she seems to.
“ W ake up, bitch,” someone hisses.
I groan and open my eyes. My throat is dry and scratchy. I try to ask where I am, but no sound comes out.
“Move!” Someone shoves at my side.
I scream as pain cuts through me, and I fall, landing hard on a floor.
“Oh my god, if you don’t shut up I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands!”
I roll onto my back and stare upward at a dark ceiling.
Someone peers down at me over the edge of a mattress. “Do you want them to come for you?”
“Who?” I croak.
“Idiot.” The dark eyes disappear.
I breathe in, past the pain, past the confusion. I’m alive. I have to start there.
The room is dark, but there’s enough light for me to get a decent look around. My neck hurts when I turn, so I just scan with my eyes. It’s a bedroom, the walls paneled in wood, the ceiling high. I’m lying halfway on a rug.
“Where am I?” My throat feels like I’ve been gargling glass.
The person doesn’t answer.
I lie there for several minutes, just breathing and trying to adjust to whatever the hell this is. It’s not the cell. I hold onto that thought. In the cell, I was dead. Here, maybe … Maybe I’ll live a little longer.
“Hello?”
“Shut—in the most direct of terms—the fuck up.” The bed shakes and settles.
I reach across my body and feel my left arm. It’s in a splint, the limb immobilized and wrapped neatly. I feel along my ribs. They ache, the soreness going so deep I gasp and settle back down.
“I didn’t agree to this.” The voice comes again. “I don’t want you here. You should be dead with all the rest of them.”
The bed shifts again.
“What?”
“Oh, shut up.” The eyes appear above me again. This time I notice dark hair cut short and pale skin.
“Are you one of them?” I whisper.
“Not yet.” He mumbles against the mattress.
“Please tell me where I am.”
The dark eyes roll. “I heard about you. You’re smart. Isn’t that right? A doctor or some shit. If you’re such a genius, figure it the fuck out.”
“Somewhere with the vampires?”
The eyes roll again.
“Do you know where the others are? The people from the White House. J-Juno?” I ask.
He snorts. “Dead. All dead.”
All the air rushes from my lungs. It’s as if he’s punched me, my entire being rocking back on its heels. “No.”
“Yes. High Lord Dragonis wiped out most of them.” He folds his arms beneath his head and rests his chin there. “Then his Specter finished the job. He’s quite thorough,” he smiles admiringly.
“Juno?” I ask again.
“I heard you came from the Black Cavern.” He ignores my question, his eyes smirking. “I’m sure you noticed the bodies, right? What do you think happened to Juno Clark?”
My eyes water.
“Serves her right, when you think about it. I mean, I know she was your sister and all, but she wasn’t a friend to her own kind. Then again, I hate humans, so I’m cool with it.” He shrugs.
“What?” I wipe at my tears and wince. My face is bruised, and I notice two of my fingers are splinted. “You aren’t human?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that. I just said I hate them.” He sighs. “I was waiting for the plague to kill them all, but now, the timetable is moved up. Good news for me.”
“So, you’re human.” I stare at those eyes. What the hell is he talking about?
“So observant.” His tone turns even more snide. “Yes, I’m human, so I know the depths of our depravity. We need to go. Our time is done.” He sighs. “Think how nice things will be once we’re all gone. Peace and quiet. No more war. No more bitching and accusing and fighting. It’ll be like paradise.”
“The plague can’t kill every single person on the planet. Nothing can. It would take?—”
“The vampires can.” The skin beside his eyes crinkles. He’s smiling. “They can ensure humanity dies.”
I realize I’m dealing with someone who’s either violently psychopathic or deeply mentally unwell. In either case, he seems to be quite pleased about it.
He disappears again.
“Just tell me where I am.” I groan and roll over onto my good side—if it could be called that—then push myself into a sitting position. Blood pounds in my ears, and everything hurts. I have to take slow, deep breaths just to make it through. I’m wearing a loose dress, more like a nightgown than actual clothes. I don’t recognize it. Being stripped and dressed while unconscious is the least of my worries at this point.
When I can finally breathe steadily again, I turn my aching neck slowly to see the man lying on the bed, his back to me.
“Where am I?” I grit out.
“Castle Dragonis. Obviously.” He tugs the blanket up to his neck. “You’re a blood consort. Just like me.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “But not like me. I’m first consort. Understand? You’re second. Unnecessary. A spare, if you will. Master won’t want you, especially not in that state.”
“Master? Do you mean?—”
“Valen Aronov Danior Constantin Dragonis. Heir to the throne. The finest of his kind.” He says it all with warmth that quickly fades with his next breath. “Now shut up. I’m tired.”
“I—”
“Shh.” He holds up a hand and clamps it shut. “Close your mouth. Sleepy time, bitch.”
I gawk at him, but in what seems like an impossibly short amount of time, he starts snoring. “I don’t even know your name,” I mumble and grab the side of the bed. With more effort than anything should ever take, I get to my knees. Then, after doing more deep breathing, I force myself to my feet.
I hold onto the four-poster bed, my body staying together despite all indications to the contrary. Head swimming, it takes a moment to adjust. The man snores louder and flips over to his back. Even in the shadowy room, I can tell he’s young. Maybe around 20 or so. Perhaps it’s better that he’s sleeping. It’s not as if he’ll be any help.
I scan the room again, looking for anything that I can use as a weapon. But as I lift my one good arm, I realize there’s no way I could wield anything. Not like this. I’m thin, far thinner than I’ve ever been. My muscle mass is gone from my time spent in the cell, and I can barely stand.
I examine my splinted fingers. Who tended my wounds? Something tells me it’s not the young man in the bed.
There are two large, curtained windows on the wall to my right. The opposite wall has a door, and the wall in front of the bed has two doors, one of them open to a bathroom. The urge to pee hits me hard, and I wonder how long I’ve been out. With struggling steps, I make it to the bathroom. Marble floors and walls, it has a giant tub and a rainfall shower. I didn’t think anything could put my bathroom at the DC hotel to shame, but I was wrong. After relieving myself, I ease back into the bedroom and go to the window. Pulling the curtain back, I find nothing. No glass. Just a wood casing around a smooth black obsidian wall.
“Underground?” I move slowly, excruciatingly to the next window and try it. The same.
I have no idea if it’s day or night. It’s discomfiting. So much so that I move a bit faster as I make my way to the first door past the bathroom. Pulling it open, I find a mostly empty closet.
I keep going, my body aching in new ways as I make it to the third door, half expecting to find it locked. It’s not. The handle turns smoothly, and I pull it open as the man in the bed lets out an obnoxious snore.
A hallway stretches right and left. Doors line the paneled walls, and flickering lights hang from what I can now see is a stone ceiling. Goosebumps rush along my arms, and I stick to the golden rug running down the center of the floor, my bare feet quieter and warmer there.
Slowly, I ease along. I nudge a few doors open, finding empty bedrooms, each of them lavishly furnished. After the first few, I stop checking and continue toward what looks like a more open area ahead. I have to keep bracing myself against the wall, my head swimming, my heart pounding. A cold sweat covers my skin, the stink of stress and sickness hitting me.
I come out onto a rotunda with a black filigree railing. Looking over it, I see a staircase winding downward, sconces glowing softly to show several floors below. Far ahead of me is more stone, a flat wall that extends up to the ceiling and down into darkness.
There’s no light, no hint of a way out. If I truly am underground, how do I get to the surface? I lean against the wall at the top of the stairs, my breath already labored and my ribs aching. Nausea churns in my gut, but I keep going. I have to. There’s only one way to move. Down.
I painstakingly descend, my steps silent on the stairs as I keep one hand on the wall. The sconces give off a warm light despite the chill in the air, and I find them a slight comfort. I silently thank each one when I pass it and hope they stay lit.
At the next landing, I find a grand piano, several sitting areas, and more art. A large statue of some Greek hero commands the center of the open landing, his body draped across a chair, his eyes rolling toward the heavens. A gash mars the stone at his chest, a deadly wound. Macabre but also somehow beautiful, his eyes seem to follow me as I creep past the large piano and into another hallway.
Again, I have to lean against the wall, my hands shaking as I brace myself and take in steadying breaths. My head is spinning now, exertion eating up my adrenaline and leaving nothing in its wake. I’m out of gas.
I slide down the wall despite my efforts to stay upright. It’s a losing battle. When my ass hits the floor, I groan and rest my forehead against my knees.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Valen’s voice, cold and curt.
I look up at him. “No shit.” The words pop out. No filter. No thought. I don’t even have the energy to be startled. If he’s come to kill me, maybe it’s a relief. Maybe … Maybe I’m done.
He sighs, irritation in the sound. “Go back to your room.”
“Why am I here?”
“You know why.” He crosses his arms, looming over me.
“I remember you, you know? I remember you from before.”
His eyes flash for a fraction of a moment, then return to their stony color. “From what your jailors told me, your brain is diseased. You haven’t been able to tell them anything about your work or what happened to Theo. You’re just as useless to me now as you were then.”
“Maybe.” I grit my teeth. “But I remember you .”
“What is it you think you remember?” He reaches down and takes my arm, hauling me to my feet with ease as I let out a yelp.
“You were supposed to help me.” I can’t stop him from pulling me past the piano and statue. I’m nothing more than a doll to him. “We were going to find a cure. I was going to find it. I-I’m a scientist. A doctor. I was working on?—”
“You failed.” He walks me up the stairs, his grip sure but not painful. “Not to put too fine a point on it—after all, I want you to be able to understand me, so I’ll use smaller words. There is no cure, your people are doomed, and you’re never leaving this castle.”
“That’s not true. I found—” A splitting pain hammers into my temples, and the world seems to flash into black and white, then back to color.
“You found something?” he asks. “What?”
“I …” I don’t know. When I think back to my research, everything is scrambled. I know I had a lab, had people working with me to find a vaccine, but beyond that—it’s gone. Just like I remember Valen, but nothing specific. Nothing that could help me piece together what happened. I get a flash, but this time it’s of the torture. Of what happened to me after I was captured—not that I remember being captured. I simply woke up tied to a table. That’s when my memory becomes far too specific. Fangs and blood. Whitbine. Questions, so many questions. But I couldn’t answer them then. Just like I can’t answer them now. Whatever the vampires did to me, its effects are lasting. Will I ever know how the hell I ended up like this?
“Too bad you never found a cure. We could’ve used that to lure humans into the blood camps. But I suppose the objective has changed now.” He pauses when I lose my balance, the pain in my head obliterating whatever thoughts I might’ve been having. “Total annihilation works best when there’s no help coming. Nothing to stop the plague. Nothing to stop us .” He sounds almost bored as he talks about destroying an entire species.
“You won’t win. We’ll fight you. We’ll?—”
“Your military has already been crippled from the inside. We have people everywhere. It was pathetically easy. Truly, humanity should be ashamed.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be that way.” Memories fade in and out. Blood samples. A lab. We tried to find a way to fight the plague. We were working together . “You were going to help us. You were supposed to?—”
“I was.” He gives me a ruthless half smile. “I was going to help you find the cure. Those were my orders. Then I would take it from you, kill you and your friends, and raze your lab to the ground.”
“My friends? Where are they?”
He sighs with irritation. “A smoldering hole in the highway. They didn’t make it far.”
He knows people I can’t even remember, and he knows it would hurt me to learn their fates, yet he tells me with that same bored tone. Horrible, wretched creature. I glare at him, my eyes watering. “You never intended to save us from the disease. You were just using us. Using me.”
“Ah, the chimpanzee finally sees the bars of its cage.” He smirks as we reach the landing.
“Fuck you!” I seethe with all the hatred in my heart. Hatred—it’s all I have left, a mountain of it smoldering and burning me slowly from the inside out.
“Such language, Doctor,” he chides. “I expected better from the would-be savior of humanity.”
“Let go.” I put one hand on the wall to steady myself. “I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help.”
He does, stepping back and watching as I try not to fall, my knees threatening to buckle. Watching, he crosses his arms over his broad chest, the crisp line of his collared shirt mirroring his jawline. He was always beautiful—haughty and derisive—but beautiful. Somehow, I remember that. It makes me hate him even more.
I need to focus on the now. On how to get away. Instead, I ask the wrong question. “Where’s Juno?”
“You don’t remember?” he taunts.
I take a halting step away from him. He follows me in one easy, almost imperceptible movement.
“Tell me what happened to her. Is she alive?” Maybe the vicious man I met when I woke up was lying to me, maybe Juno is alive somewhere. Maybe she’s safe.
“Alive after the high lord found her?” He gives me a flat stare. “What do you think?”
“I think I hate you.”
“Revelatory.” He smirks. “I’m surprised you’d bother to ask about Juno’s fate. You still care for her?” He cocks his head to the side like a cat that’s curious about whatever creature it’s about to impale with its claws.
“She’s my sister .”
“That isn’t an answer.”
I clamp my mouth shut. Whatever he wants from me, I won’t give it.
“Is the chat over?” He feigns disappointment and walks slowly at my side as I retrace my steps.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re my war spoils, apparently.” He grimaces and looks me up and down. “I suppose I’m not doing a good enough job.”
If I could find some way to kill him right here, right now, I’d do it without a thought. The devious half smile that turns his lips tells me he guesses what I’m thinking.
“Your room is to your liking, I take it?” He stops in front of the bedroom door.
I force myself to push off the wall and face him. “I’m not giving you my blood.”
“I think you’re aware that I’m not asking for it.” He steps to me, our bodies almost touching. Looking down at me like this, his eyes have a catlike glow. “It’s mine to take.”
“I’ll fight you.” I scowl up at him. “You’ll never get anything from me. Not freely.”
“As I said, that isn’t an issue.” His hand is on my throat so quickly that I gasp. Then his mouth. His lips lingering at my jugular as he pins me to the bedroom door. “You are mine, Doctor. Every bit of you. I will drain your memories for High Lord Dragonis, and once I have the knowledge I seek, I’ll keep you here to serve me as I desire. That is your purpose. When you’ve fulfilled that purpose, then and only then will I let you die.”
“I’ll kill you.” I try to push him away. He takes my wrist and twists it behind my back, pressing me against him.
“Oh, I do certainly hope you’ll try.” His silky tone is laced with malice.
I shudder as he runs his fangs along my bare throat.
“What a pleasure it will be to watch your efforts, little rabbit.” He releases me so suddenly I almost fall.
I slump against the door, my heart hammering, head spinning.
The door at my back swings open, and I fall. Before I hit the floor, Valen has his grip on my arm again and drags me to the bed, depositing me there before whirling on the rude man from before. He’s scrambled up, his eyes wide as he stares at Valen.
“Gorsky! What are you doing in here?” he yells, his voice low and thunderous.
The man pales. “I wanted to try a different room. See if I like it better than?—”
Valen hisses and shoves the man—Gorsky—into the hallway so hard he hits the opposite wall and slides down it. “You are not to enter her room. Ever. Am I understood?” He looms over the man, who looks up at him with a mix of reverence and fear.
“Yes, my lord.” The man drops his gaze. “Apologies, my lord. It won’t happen again.”
“You dare endanger the high lord’s plans?” He takes the man by the throat and slams him against the wall. “I should kill you for this.”
“P-p-please,” Gorsky cries.
With a disgusted look, Valen drops him, then turns and strides away, leaving the man glaring at me as I try to catch my breath.
“Happy now?” He gets to his feet, his dark blue pajamas rumpled.
“No,” I say weakly.
He rolls his eyes and disappears to the right. A short moment later, I hear a door slam.
“What is happening?” I rub the heels of my palms into my eye sockets, as if I could somehow make all this disappear. All I do is restart the headache that’s come and gone in intervals.
Exhausted, I lie on my side and curl into a ball. The air is still, silent. I feel the permanence of the stone all around me, hemming me in. My blood pounds, my heart racing.
I trace the scars at one of my wrists, the marks embedded far deeper than just skin. I’m trapped again. At the vampires’ mercy. Whitbine. His fangs tearing my flesh. I can feel his hot breath at my cheek, his hands— “Stop.” I clench my eyes shut and force myself to think about being somewhere else. A lab. Samples. Running images across a screen while I check pathology. Rubella. I focus on the shape of the virus, the way it invades and destroys healthy cells. Then I imagine smallpox, and after that, different strains of the flu. I keep my eyes closed as my thoughts wander to the Sierravirus. The plague. It’s unusual structure and proteins. If only I’d been able to stop it, to—I groan as a lightning sharp pain crashes through my skull.
No, no I won’t think about Sierravirus. Tears well, and a single one rolls down my cheek. I shiver, unable to fall asleep, unable to think, unable to do anything except wait and wonder when the next horror will begin.