Chapter Four #11
She was confident that she did not want to receive texts or emails from Ingenuar, or anyone else from the Coven.
The only reason she owned a mobile phone was convenience, there was no one she could call.
If she needed to speak to another vampire she used the mind gift.
Sometimes she forgot and did the same with mortals.
The servants at the covens were used to these intrusions, but humans on the streets were not.
She needed to control her impulses better.
Her vampire brethren had assured her that in time she would grow strong and measure her vampiric gifts.
But Mihaela was already strong. And she had been from the day Ingenuar gave her his blood; it took her years to realise how different she was from the others. How unnatural.
The All Father ushered her to a pair of armchairs, blessedly away from the fireplace, and Mihaela sat down.
“Has any vampire ever made a deal with a devil?” she asked straight away.
Ingenuar’s eyes grew wide so suddenly and with such genuine confusion that Mihaela almost laughed.
From all the vampires she met, he continued to be the one with the most animated, most human reflexes and expressions.
And to think he was responsible for creating all of them—these stone-like creatures with faces frozen in caricatures of humanity.
The All Father composed himself and sat down, crossing his legs.
“Are you having a crisis of faith? With all your recent excursions I would not be surprised if you were off to Mecca next.” His hands gripped the armrests of the chair as he frowned.
“Or are you having trouble feeding? You can drink blood without killing, I have taught you this.”
“What? No. Look—” Mihaela was too exhausted from prolonging the truth. She also knew Ingenuar could easily get it out of her if he wanted to.
She told him about her devil. Feeling overzealous, Mihaela did not want to share Astra’s name, referring to her only as a devil.
A fiend who had promised Mihaela to grant all her wishes, and Mihaela had accepted without hesitation, thinking it was all a joke, a bad flirtation.
They had shaken hands, and Astra’s mouth on hers had tasted heaven-sent.
The more she talked, the more vampiric Ingenuar became. She noticed a shift in his features, those so human and mobile lines now stood frozen; the eyes studied her, trying to see through her.
“A devil? What did he look like?”
“He?”
Mihaela had gotten that often about Astra, this strange shift in perception as if the speaker was seeing something or someone different from how the lady of hell presented herself.
But she had not referred to Astra as a ‘she’ or ‘he’, nor had Ingenuar seen Astra.
Astra had never met the All Father, as far as Mihaela knew.
“The devils of my homeland had many names,” Ingenuar ignored her question.
His face had hardened like stone. It was the first time she was seeing him as he was meant to be, like the rest of them—inhuman and appalling.
“They played tricks on villagers and milkmaids; they stole goats and sheep. The ones you should be wary of, we called draugr. Petty, evil creatures. I know of demons and devils, but I have never seen one. It is extraordinary that a vampire so young, and of my bloodline, should have a demon do her bidding.”
Mihaela wanted to challenge the truthfulness of his confession, but something kept catching at the corner of her eye, a shadow moved and walked the periphery of the room, its reflection caught and multiplied in the mirrors.
And for one horrible instance it seemed like Ingenuar’s eyes, too, were seeing what was not there.
The familiar nagging sensation entered her head and crawled at the surface of her thoughts.
The moment she consciously started thinking in Bulgarian, the thing stopped and she could focus again.
Ingenuar rarely read her thoughts, the sensation of him was more unpleasant than when Emerick did it. Where Emerick crawled, Ingenuar tore.
The same presence had haunted her whenever she stayed in the Coven.
It followed and watched her; a shape she knew and felt but never saw.
Once, when she had visited the Marquis in Béziers, the feeling followed her around, but she had dismissed it as one of Emerick’s many tricks and pricks.
The sensation was the strongest in Berlin. In Ingenuar’s presence.
Of course it is, he is my maker. Doesn’t every vampire feel like this with their sire?
“You never told me why you made me. Why you chose me,” Mihaela uttered more to herself than him, expecting another diversion. She wanted to ask about others like her, other damned who had found their nature lacking and had dipped their hands into the occult, into the unexplainable.
Ingenuar’s composure crumbled. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it, having thought better.
Mihaela had never thought to read his mind before tonight.
She did not think it would be sacrilegious to read the All Father’s mind—only impossible.
Taking a gamble, Mihaela met Ingenuar’s gaze and sent a mental push, probing.
She was instantly shoved back, the force made her body slam against the chair.
The stunned look on his face showed that she had caught him off guard.
In a few years’ time, with more practice, maybe she would succeed.
She was his daughter after all; she was starting to believe she might be destined for more.
“Your making… Perhaps it is a story for another night,” Ingenuar finally said, suddenly eager to get her out of the room, as if he was expecting a guest who had been running late, one he could not permit her to meet.
His eyes scanned the room impatiently, as though trying to see through thin air and pluck from it the demon Mihaela had just revealed to him. It should have frightened her that something had unnerved him—the oldest thing on the continent, as far as she knew.
She found it strange how Ingenuar’s eyes kept scanning the mirrors, studying their reflections in them. The room she kept in the Coven did not have mirrors. She had grown used to their absence; what use was there to look at her reflection when it never changed?
Before she could ask what was wrong, Mihaela heard something like a splitting pop.
It was so faint and distant. The sort of popping sound she used to hear when Astra cut the membrane of reality right before appearing in front of her.
Mihaela looked around, but saw nothing other than the shadows of the fire.
Perhaps it was the wood in the fireplace cracking and fracturing into ash.
You have to go, Ingenuar said.
Mihaela hated when he did that, talking to her without words, intruding.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, first thing the sun sets. You know I’m going to Antalya. Scarlett has already notified the Sultana. She sends her regards and informs us that she is willing to grant me an audience.” Ingenuar grunted in acknowledgement. “But I wanted to talk first.”
If he was angry with her, she needed to understand why.
“If you won’t tell me tonight, will you when I get back?” She insisted. If she could control a Prince of Hell, she could control her own father.
Mihaela. He pleaded with her, his voice thundered in her mind, making her flinch.
When she tried to speak an invisible hand clamped over her mouth and hauled her by the head.
Her body was commanded to move towards the door.
She was too shocked to fight it off. He had never done that to her, never physically restrained or puppeteered her.
“Fath—” she snarled, her teeth snapped shut.
“We will talk when you are back. Now go! The Sultana does not like to wait.”
He repeated it in her head for good measure—the last words he would ever say to her. Mihaela surrendered to his will, her hands shook as she opened the door and closed it behind her. She heard the lock turn. The fear in his voice followed her into the night.