Chapter 25
25
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
June 23, Year 1, Emergence Era
Our bubble is already bursting. DC is fracturing. Our discoveries could be destroyed any day now—either by the Saints or the vampires. They both think we’re the enemy when all we’re trying to do is keep humanity alive. Sometimes when I can’t sleep for fear of dreams of Candice, or Gregor, or even Juno, I wonder if any of this is worth it. Did I keep hope alive just so I could watch it die a slow death?
“— s earching his house. Holy fuck, Valen. Did you see his place?” David’s voice floats to me.
“I saw enough. Get over there and plant this before anyone realizes he’s missing. Put it somewhere only slightly hidden. We have no idea who Gregor will send to look for him.”
“Got it.”
“Your wing?” Valen asks. “He silvered you?”
“Yeah. He smashed it pretty damn good, then pinned me with silver. He came prepared. Took me the fuck out, but only because he got the drop on me.”
“He used a distraction. One you should’ve figured out right away. A smart move on his part, but you must be smarter.” Valen’s voice turns to coarse sandpaper. “He’ll never make any moves—smart or otherwise—again.”
“Yeah, I saw that too. Well done. And you’re right. I fell for it. I should’ve seen through it, and I was on my back foot.” David’s voice fades. “I’ll leave this in his place like you said. Back in an hour or so.”
I don’t want to hear them. I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to be conscious at all.
“You’re in my room. You’re safe.” Valen’s voice, softer now. Closer.
“Stop saying that. It’s a lie.” I keep my eyes clenched shut and curl up in a protective ball.
“He’s dead. He’s not coming back.”
I get a flash of an image—Whitbine’s head turned completely around, then the bloody stump of his neck. My stomach lurches. I lean over the side of the bed and vomit. Then I do it again. And again until nothing but yellow bile comes out.
“It’s all right.” Valen hands me a cool, damp washcloth, then kneels and starts cleaning the mess.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, then hate myself for apologizing to him. I wipe my mouth and nose, getting rid of the sick as best I can.
“Rest. I’ve cleaned up far worse than this.” He glances over his shoulder at the hallway.
Gorsky. He’s thinking of Gorsky. Now I am, too. At least Gorsky only wanted me dead. Whitbine wanted—my stomach gives a warning twinge. I force my thoughts elsewhere, anywhere else but there.
“What happened to David?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.” I curl up again.
“Whitbine brought a husk and set it loose. David went to investigate. Whitbine pounced and subdued David so he could get to you.”
“But David’s all right?”
“Worried about him?” he asks sharply.
“Yes.”
He sighs. “He’ll be fine. And you?”
“I’ll be …” I don’t know. I don’t know if I can be okay again.
Valen finishes cleaning and goes into the bathroom. When he returns, I watch him, his eyes meeting mine.
“You saved me.” I don’t know why the bridge of my nose is stinging, my vision going watery.
He moves slowly and sits beside me.
“How did you find me?” I close my eyes, then find I don’t like the dark. Not when I’m alone in it.
He glances away. “David.”
“You were close? I thought you were in Atlanta.”
“How far do you think Atlanta is?”
I curl up tighter. I’m too tired for games, too worn out and stretched thin. If he wants to ask me a question for a question, I’d rather be silent.
He sighs. “I was on my way back.”
“Oh.” I run a hand along my chest. My skin is healed there and also at my throat. I smell like soap, like Valen’s soap. He stripped me and washed me. I should be angry, embarrassed even. I’m not. I’m grateful every trace of Whitbine and his house of horrors is gone. I shiver.
“Did he …” Valen’s jaw clenches.
“No. He tried. He—” A sob overwhelms whatever I was going to say.
Valen’s hands fist, his body rigid as I cry. He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t comfort me. He simply stays. Somehow, that’s better. I don’t want to be touched. I just want to purge every horrible emotion. So I do.
After turning myself inside out until I can’t breathe from the strength of my fear, my sorrow, I finally pull in a shuddering breath. Smoother ones follow until I’m quiet. The awful memories are still there, the trauma from them still so raw and bloody that I can’t bear to look at them. But the tears were a slight release, at least for now. I know the horror will build up again, covering me like grave dirt until I burst through again, digging my way free with my bare hands. Only to be buried again. Slowly.
“He can’t hurt you ever again.” Valen’s voice is the touch of black moth, silky like shadow.
“What will happen when Gregor finds out you killed him?” I close my swollen, puffy eyes. The dark isn’t so bad when I know I’m not alone. “Will he torture you again?”
“Who told you?” he asks.
“Every time I see you, you look like you’re fervently ringing death’s doorbell, but maybe I’m just guessing.”
He’s silent.
“Okay, Fatima mentioned it.” I shrug one shoulder.
“Ah. I see.” He glowers. “I gave her strict parameters for her visit. She disregarded them.”
“She’s so different. Fatima always followed the rules. She practically wrote the rules. Now that she’s a vampire, she’s so …”
“She’s no different.”
“What? Yes, she is.”
“Becoming a vampire doesn’t instantly make someone vicious, little rabbit. That cruelty, or whatever it is, was always there beneath the surface.”
“No way. She was never like that. She wouldn’t even eat meat because she loved animals. I mean, come on. That’s practically saintly.”
“Underneath, she was something else. And now, in her current form, she’s free to wear it on the outside instead of masking it.”
I don’t know if I believe that. “She wasn’t a monster before.”
“She was. She was simply better at hiding it.”
I can’t deal with the additional emotion of frustration, so I backtrack. “You didn’t answer my question about Gregor, about what he does to you.”
He crosses his arms over his chest with a sigh. “Anything he does to me is nothing new. It becomes quite boring after a while.”
I don’t believe him. He’s suffering. Like knows like, I suppose.
“Gregor is still certain there’s a traitor in his ranks.”
“Is there?” I study him, his stark profile. Pale and sharp-angled, he’s as much stone as he ever was. But there are cracks now, more each time I see him.
He catches my eye, his gaze lingering on my face. “It just so happens I’ve discovered who was feeding intel to the humans and working with the disgruntled among our own ranks to oust the high lord. A traitor through and through, now unmasked by none other than the high lord’s Specter.”
I sniffle. “You mean Whitbine.”
He smirks. “It seems my little rabbit has a talent for subterfuge.”
“When you call me little rabbit, it’s like you calling me ‘bitch’ or ‘serf’ or ‘peasant’ or, I don’t know, something worse.”
“Is it?” he smirks, casual cruelty edging back into his demeanor. “Would you rather I call you one of those?”
I let my puffy eyes close again, blessed relief. “You know, I was never the sort who forced anyone to call me doctor. I was fine with Georgia or even Miss Clark, as long as it was done respectfully. But you,” I sigh and sink farther into the pillow. “You can refer to me as Dr. Clark.”
A tiny amused sound, nowhere near the enormity of a laugh but the closest I’ve ever heard from him, bursts and dies in his throat. “Would that make you happy?”
“Nothing can make me happy.” I answer, truthfully. “I don’t think ‘happy’ is something I can experience anymore.”
“Losing hope, are we?” he taunts. “I thought you of all people, plucky little scientist, would still be looking for a way to save the world.”
“The world doesn’t know I exist. The world …” I sigh, too tired to keep going. The world left me here to rot .
He rises from the bed.
Panic bells ring in my cranium, blurring out thought and replacing it with sheer terror. “Stay,” I blurt.
He stares down at me, his brows rising in brief surprise before his countenance returns to baseline stony.
“Just until I fall asleep. Or, you could compel me? So I can sleep?”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. You’re exhausted.”
“I know. Right. Don’t compel me.” I reach toward him, but only under the blanket where he can’t see my weakness. “Just stay. Please? You can go on a murder rampage after or drown orphans or whatever you want once I’m out. Just stay till then.”
“If I do, will you stop mewling like a lost kitten?” he asks.
“I’m a kitten now?”
“Worse.” He sits carefully, his back to me. “A human.”
“You’ll stay then?”
“Go to sleep, little rabbit. The wolf will keep watch.”
“Aren’t you a dragon?”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “Does it matter? Both have fangs.”
“I suppose not.” I pull the blanket up tighter and breathe out slowly.
I’m almost asleep when I feel the softest touch on my hair and hear him whisper, “ kedves verem. ” Unknown words that follow me into a comfortable, dreamless sleep.
“How far do the tunnels on the bottom level go?” I wander through the orchards and ask my question aloud.
David swoops down and lands about 20 feet away. “We have hundreds of miles of tunnel. They don’t all connect.”
“Where does the one that connects to the castle go?”
He has his hair up in a man bun tonight, giving him an even more youthful appearance. “You can’t use it to get away. You know that, right?”
“I know.” I roll my eyes. “You think I’m going to traipse down there in the dark? Now, if you give me a lamp, maybe I could?—”
“You aren’t getting a lamp.” He turns surly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Valen would turn me inside out if I let—” He swipes a hand through the air. “Not going there.”
“Just tell me where they go. It’s not a difficult question. Besides, I’ve already figured out we’re in rural Virginia.” I watch him closely.
His eyes widen a little.
Bingo . I guessed right.
“Come on. Tell me. Or I can go through all the parts of the smallpox virus if you like. I know you can hear me wherever you are up there.” I point to the sky.
He glowers.
I take a deep breath. “Well, the envelope of the virus?—”
“This one connects to DC and branches up to Philly and south to …” He stares off in the distance. “Somewhere to the south. I don’t know.” He shrugs.
“Atlanta?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
“How did the vampires dig all that without anyone noticing?” I wander farther through the orchard. All the leaves are gone now, the trees on the distant ridge past their brightest foliage and dwindling to morose gray.
“I’m sure some humans noticed.”
“And they didn’t say anything to anyone?”
“Think about it, Georgia. What would happen to a human if they tried to report vampire activity?”
“They’d be labeled a lunatic?”
He scoffs like I’m a complete moron. “No, we’d kill them.”
I stop and glare at him.
“Well—” He runs a hand through his hair, then stops when he realizes its trapped in the bun. “We’d definitely compel them to shut up. How about that?”
“I tend to believe your first response more.” I pull my jacket tighter and look up at the full moon. “Where’s your dad tonight?”
“He’s with Valen and the Tantun general, Carlotta. Meeting with Gregor at the Black Cavern.”
“And where’s that?”
“New York somewhere, or maybe it’s Jersey?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Never been.”
“Never?”
“No, why would I? I’m not one of the nobles.” He shakes his head.
“So there are classes in the vampire hierarchy?” I chew on that as I continue through the orchard, a branch catching in my hair. I untangle it. “Three separate Bloods plus a social structure.”
“We’re just as complicated as humans.” He snaps off a twig and twirls it around in his fingers. “Well, maybe not that complicated. Humans love to pick out all their differences and fight over them.”
“Rich coming from a species that wars among themselves constantly .”
“Not anymore.” He points at me. “Now we have a common enemy.”
“But all the vampires aren’t going along with it. Valen told Coal he killed plenty of Corvidions who wanted to rebel against Gregor’s plan.”
He freezes for a second then tries to play it off. “You don’t have vampire hearing yet you’re always eavesdropping, is that it?”
Interesting. He knows something about those executions, something he doesn’t want to tell me. I file away that tiny tidbit and continue asking questions. I’m almost at my limit; any second now David will start doing the thousand-yard stare or fly off to chase a bat.
“And the Tantuns seem to be just waiting to kill Gregor off so they can run the whole show their way,” I add.
“Not wrong there.”
“All the vampires at the party—they were nobles?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He bites down on the twig, then frowns and spits it out.
“What makes them nobles?”
“Age,” he says it like it’s obvious, the ‘duh’ heavily implied.
The nobles are the oldest vampires. Also the cruelest. Is there something to that? Does age make them more horrible? Or are they all that way? I glance toward Melody’s monument, gleaming white under the moonlight. No, they aren’t all that way.
“When does Valen come back?”
“Don’t know. But our time’s up.” He hooks a thumb over his shoulder toward the elevator. Sun’s up soon.
“What happens to a vampire in the sun.”
He gives me the ‘duh’ look again. “We die.”
“Can you be more specific? Do you turn into a vapor, burst into bats, dust, ashes, blood—what happens to your cells?”
“My cells?” He is utterly baffled.
“Never mind. Let’s go in.” I trudge past him, then stop. “Can you read ancient Romanian?”
“No, can you?”
“Ugh.” I was already pushing my luck with all the questions. Then again, David has been a lot more open to me in the days since I was taken. I think he blames himself for what happened. He hasn’t said that, and he hasn’t apologized, but I feel it in the way he’s more patient with me. The food has been better too, confirming my suspicion that he’s been my new cook all along. There was even an apple on my tray at lunch today.
He hasn’t asked me about what happened. That’s a mercy, too. I try not to go back to it in my mind, but I do. It’s like a scab, and I’m damned to pick at it, making it bleed all over again. I hope I stop doing that. I don’t know if I ever will.