CHARLIE
Kitty and I stepped out onto the Ironberg street and I froze, taking in the scene around me.
It was mid-morning, but a haze of smoke hung in the air.
The apartment building across the street was half-demolished, the entire top floor ripped off, some windows boarded up, others still shattered and empty, black scorch marks streaked the brick facade.
The building next to it looked even worse.
It must have been at least seven stories tall once, but now it was basically a pile of rubble.
At the foot of it, a makeshift memorial had been set up, flowers, photographs, and handwritten signs bearing the names of people who’d been lost.
I blinked, taking it in.
“What?” Kitty asked, following my gaze. “Oh, I forgot, you’ve been out of commission. You haven’t seen any of this…”
“The golenae got to the city…” I said.
Kitty nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“How many died?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know yet. They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble. But it’s in the thousands. Come on...”
I followed her down the sidewalk, feeling numb. I’d seen the golenae coming and tried to get back in time. Tried to warn everyone. Clearly, I’d been too late. It made me sick to think about it.
A little way down the road, we came upon another sign of the times. Young men and women, hundreds of them, were lined up in a cue that ran all the way down the block. The line ended at a storefront with a makeshift sign over the entrance. Army Recruitment Office.
Kitty guessed my question before I asked it.
“They’re gearing up for an invasion of Maethalia—revenge for the attack.
Young people have been signing up in droves.
It’s funny, support for the war was at an all-time low before, but since the attack on Ironberg, everybody has been gung-ho to…
” She turned back to find I’d stopped walking. “What?”
“Revenge on Maethalia?”
“Who else?” she shrugged.
I shook my head. “I saw the barges those golenae came off of. They weren’t Maethalian. They were Sylph barges. From Koratain.”
Kitty frowned. “Well… the Sylph are traders,” she said slowly. “They must have been transporting the clay monsters for the Maethalians.”
“Maybe… But golenae attacked Maethalia, too. Do you think we hired the Sylph to do that?”
Kitty looked alarmed. “My reporting hasn’t turned anything up about that…”
“Exactly,” I said. “So, what if it’s the Sylph? Attacking both countries… turning us on each other...?”
I could see the wheels in Kitty’s mind turning as she took in the line of recruits across the street. Finally, she looked back at me and took my arm.
“I’ll look into it,” she said. “But first things first, let’s get you something to eat.”
Kitty was concerned someone from Army Intelligence might spot us in the city, so we took a streetcar west, all the way to the end of the line, and found a small but tidy diner in an immigrant neighborhood called Blockyard.
I was starving, and as soon as the waitress set the coffee in front of me, I snatched it up and took a grateful sip, but it sent my stomach into a painful spasm.
Still, when the food came, I immediately started wolfing down the eggs, sausage, and toast. It smelled amazing, and for the first time, I was aware of the enhanced senses I had as a vampyre.
I’d always loved the scent of fresh bacon, for example, but now it had an incredible dimension to it.
I felt like I could step inside the scent and walk around in it.
Like it had floors. Stairways. Basements.
And the taste—the taste was so good, so nuanced, I felt like it lit me up like a carnival game.
“Easy,” Kitty said. “You haven’t had solid food in a while.”
I ignored her, but I’d only taken a few bites before my stomach turned sour. I dropped my fork onto the plate with a clink that punctuated my frustration. I didn’t feel like eating anymore, but I could still feel the hunger inside me, scrabbling and restless, like a rat gnawing at my bones.
Kitty noticed my abandoned fork and gave me a pitying look. “Sorry. Eating is different when you’re… like us.”
“Like us,” I muttered, shaking my head bitterly. I looked her in the eye. “Why did you save me, anyway?”
“Charlie,” she said, feigning offense. “We were engaged. Just because you spurned me doesn’t mean I wanted to see you dead.”
My eyes narrowed. She squirmed under my gaze.
“Maybe I’m still in love with you,” she said.
“Bullshit,” I growled. “Tell me the truth.”
“Oh, Charlie…”
She gave me her best doe-eyed dame impression, but she couldn’t keep it going. With a sigh, she shrugged.
“Look, Edward is a big asshole, okay? Agent Langford, I mean. He’s the one who turned me. He’s controlling and… bad. Okay? I need you to help me get out of it.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“Out of… what exactly?”
She gestured vaguely with her fork. “Edward. The agency. Everything. I just want to be like I was before, a single girl in the city. Writing my articles. Taking walks in the park. Going out dancing. You know… free.”
“You’re not free now?” I asked.
She shook her head and I saw a rare vulnerability pass across her face. Sadness, and the memory of pain. They’d hurt her, Langford or his goons. That was clear. As much as I hated it, I felt a twinge of protectiveness for her.
“I’m assuming Langford’s thugs are all vampyres, too?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And what exactly do you expect me to do?”
She shrugged again, exasperated. “How should I know? Kill them or something.”
I tilted my head back, silently pleading with a God who I was pretty sure didn’t give a damn about me—especially now that I was a vampyre.
“You want me to single-handedly kill a bunch of vampyre special agents? Come on, Kitty…” My bitter laugh turned into a terrible coughing jag. I doubled over, hacking until my whole body ached. Kitty tried to thump me on the back, but I waved her hand away.
When it was finally over, my lungs burned, and I felt breathless. Other restaurant patrons watched me with concern. I dabbed tears from the corner of my eyes with my napkin.
“God. I can’t even smoke a cigarette. Or eat a plate of bacon…” I wheezed.
“Your lungs were burned pretty bad,” Kitty said quietly. “Bad enough to kill you, you know? You’ll keep healing, now that you’re…” She flashed a wide-eyed look instead of finishing the sentence. “But you still need to take it easy.”
I picked up my fork with a trembling hand and tried to take another bite of eggs. They were cold now—even less appetizing than before.
“And you’ll need my—blood,” she whispered the word, “if you want to keep on healing. That is, unless you want to go around attacking random people—which I know the hero of Admar would never do—or sucking the life out of farm animals, which—believe me—yuck. That’s why you can’t go to Maethalia.
You shouldn’t be away from me. Not yet.”
With effort, I forced myself to swallow the eggs.
Eating them felt disgusting now. But at Kitty’s mention of blood, I felt the hunger inside me deepen.
My gaze had settled on Kitty’s delicate neck.
I could almost feel her pulse, thumping in time with my own aching hunger.
Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. I forced myself to look away.
Our waitress whisked up to our table. She was young and full of pep, probably no older than nineteen.
“Can I get you two anything else?” she asked brightly.
I could smell her. And it stirred a desire in me like the scents of coffee and bacon and toast never could.
I found my eyes drifting to the tender skin of her neck, too, to the vein that ran from her collarbone to her jawline.
And I felt a faint ache in my mouth as my incisors began to grow long. I clamped my mouth shut.
The waitress noticed me staring and blushed.
“We’ll just take the check, thank you,” Kitty said with a wary glance at me, and the waitress darted away again.
I held my napkin over my mouth to cover my face.
“Dammit, what have you done to me?” I snarled.
“I know. It is hard,” she said. “And I’d be lying if I said you get used to it. But compared to being dead…?”
I wasn’t at all sure that being a vampyre was better than being dead. I’d never tried being dead. And so far, being a vampyre was shit.
But then if I were dead, I’d never see Essa again. That thought—the whisper of her name, the memory of her face, the thought of her skin against mine—stirred something in me…
Kitty was right. As long as I was alive and Essa was alive, there was hope we could be together again. And that was all I needed to keep going.
“I am going to Maethalia,” I said.
Kitty just dropped a five-dollar bill on the table and watched me, her gaze more calculating than flirty now.
“We’ll see about that,” she said.