Thirteen
Kaius
I lead her to the center of the room and pull her to my chest, closer than we were in the dance studio earlier tonight. I can feel her heartbeat spike at the proximity. She takes my hand and rests her other on my shoulder, and the action feels natural. She doesn’t hesitate or falter when I take the lead. Her steps are perfectly in sync with mine, without a single hint of uncertainty on her face.
Adelasia is graceful, even under the influence of wine and her cheeks flushed red from witnessing the impropriety of others.
Her blood smells so alluring when she’s blushing. Not mouthwatering like when she’s scared, and not hypnotizing like when she’s angry, but alluring. It doesn’t make me want to feed, it makes me want to protect.
It frustrates me that she’s not a cruel, malicious person like Yekaterina was. It would have made this last month so much easier. All she has wanted from the very beginning is to go home. After she told me the story about her father and brother, I felt worse for her mother, who has lost everyone she loves to demons.
Unlike me, Adelasia’s thoughts do not seem to be of her home this night. Her captivating blue eyes are slightly dilated from the wine, but the solemn expression she so often has when she’s around me is nowhere to be found.
As the song goes on, a smile graces her features and our steps become more elaborate, adding dips and turns that are done with such precision and speed that any other human would find themselves disoriented. Not her though. With each new step, her face grows more radiant with challenge. She’s enjoying this–showing off her talent and technique.
I’ve been alive for a long, long time, and I’ve never seen anyone look more precisely confident than her when she dances. She puts the elegance of all other women combined to shame.
When the song ends, I have her in a dip so low the crown of her head nearly touches the floor. When I lift her back up, strands of hair have fallen out of her bun and now frame her face, some stuck to a thin sheen of sweat. Her chest heaves against mine, and we’re so close I can almost taste the lingering soap on her skin from her earlier bath.
A small applause fills the room, and whatever thoughts were floating around in her head cease in that moment. She takes a step back from me and murmurs under her breath that she needs some air. I nod, and give her a few paces worth of space before I follow her out of the ballroom, down the hall, and out to one of the balconies overlooking the lower city of the valley.
I give her some physical space, lingering in the doorway. She looks over her shoulder to address me, but doesn’t meet my eyes.
“You should go back to your celebration. I won’t be long.”
I approach her side and lean over the railing as she is, my hands clasped together with our shoulders and arms touching. “I’d rather be here with you.”
She laughs quietly to herself at that, and my brow furrows. “What’s so funny?”
“You’d have dropped dead if you lied to me just now.”
I incline my head slightly. “Then it’s fortunate that I was not lying.”
She looks back out over the railing and nervously picks at her fingers, zoning out towards the horizon. I brush my shoulder against hers to grab her attention. “Was it me?”
“Hm?”
she hums in response.
“You ran away from the celebration for a reason. Was it me?”
“You wish,”
she teases humorlessly. Then she looks at me from under her lashes. “I was thinking about my mother. About how she’s probably crying and alone right now while I’m dancing under the moon with a smile on my face.”
I consider that for a moment, and then brush her shoulder again. “Write to her,”
I suggest. When she gives me a confused look, I say, “Write her a letter, telling her that you’re alive. I’ll get it to her.”
“Really?”
she asks hopefully, and I can hear the emotion getting caught in her throat.
“Really,”
I confirm. She looks as though she wants to ask if she can simply go home, but I think she understands well enough at this point that I would not allow it, even if she doesn’t know why.
“Thank you,”
she whispers. “But you’re scaring me with all this sudden kindness.”
I smirk. “I can go back to being a cold brute if you wish.”
She shakes her head. “You’re not as cold as you want the world to believe.”
“I was though, once,”
I admit. “I think you’re overdue for a history lesson, Adelasia.”
She stays silent, waiting patiently while I contemplate how to tell her the truth without revealing her part in it.
“Do you remember when you told me that human legends believe that the vampires and the disappearance of the Tenth Priestess were related?”
I ask. She nods. “I told you your legends are correct, but only partially. The Tenth Priestess was unfathomably powerful. She had an affinity for magic her sisters could not even begin to possess. She was…extraordinary. Cruel and malicious and ruthless, but extraordinary. She created the vampire race because she was bored one day and wanted to unleash her evil on the world.”
“And…you were one of the first?” she asks.
“I was the first.”
I watch as she does a calculation in her head, and then she gives me an expression of awe. “But that would mean you’re a thousand years old.”
I give her the slightest hint of a smile. “One thousand and fifty-eight. I was thirty-one when I was cursed. I was the only one the Tenth Priestess ever made before her death. Every vampire walking this earth is descended from me. I originally changed two others. Dravon is one of them, and that’s why he’s my closest advisor.”
Her lip curls at his name. “What about the second?”
I tighten my jaw and continue without answering. “After I changed them, they created more vampires, and those vampires created more vampires and so on, but all of them lead back to me.”
“That’s why you rule them. They owe their immortality to you.”
I nod. “Yes, but that’s not the only reason. That man I killed in the kitchen? He was younger. Less than a decade as one of us. You can tell how young an immortal is by the hollows of their cheeks. The younger a vampire is, the more malnourished and sallow they appear, because they have not yet fed enough to become strong by vampire standards. Most vampires reach full maturity after about a century, if they even make it that long. The younger ones tend to stick together in their own clans out in the world and either get mauled by the werebeasts or cut down by demon hunters. If one gets killed, the rest fall.”
“Why?”
“Because if you kill a vampire, every vampire descended from them also perishes.”
The weight of my words and my earlier vow begin to settle on her shoulders. “So…if you died…”
“Then the vampire race would cease to exist.”
This is not information humans should ever know. It’s dangerous even, but I have trust in her that she will keep it to herself. I am finally opening up to her, after all. She’s always wanted me to tell her the truth, and now I have. I don’t think she’d do something to jeopardize that.
But as those thoughts enter and leave my head, I turn to her and notice she’s crying. I feel a genuine concern in my heart and wipe away a tear, though they continue to spill faster as she turns her head away from me.
Her lip quivers as she finally meets my gaze, and she whispers, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
I pretend to be shocked at that conclusion, but the truth is, I’m not sure myself. “Why would you think that?”
“Why else would you tell me how to kill the entire vampire race if that knowledge wasn’t going to just die with me?”
I take her wrist in my hand but she tries to tug it away. I grip it harder and force her to keep her gaze locked with mine. “Everyone dies, Adelasia. Eventually.”
She scoffs. “Yes, you’re right. Everyone dies. After they live full lives and…and…and get married and have babies or spend their entire adult life working towards being a professional dancer. Nobody deserves to die alone in this depressing, empty marble cage!”
I match her outburst with one of my own. “Dying in a marble cage is nothing compared to the millennium I have endured alone.”
She roughly pushes away from me. “How many other unsuspecting women have you stolen from their lives in a thousand years? Hundreds? For what? Because you’re lonely? Because you like your meals frightened? Does the despair make us taste better?”
“No. But silence does,”
I say coldly, before turning my back to her.
“Maybe you deserve to be alone,”
she says to my back.
I turn to her, my gaze filled with enough fury that it causes her to stumble backward. “You think I chose this life? You think I wanted to become a monster? You think I enjoy this life of eternal punishment?! I was cursed because I foolishly gave my heart to a cruel mistress incapable of loving me back. She wanted my devotion, but my heart was too much. It disgusted her. So when she grew tired of my simpering at her feet and worshipping the ground she walked on, she turned me into a monster. She watched me slaughter my own mother and had the gall to tell me it was better this way.”
Her anger suddenly dissipates.
“It was the Tenth Priestess? She was the one you loved?”
“Yekaterina,”
I whisper. It’s been centuries since I’ve said her name out loud. I don’t like the evil that lingers in the air with it.
At the admission, Adelasia softens and steps closer to me. Her proximity brings me some peace and the rage within me begins to subside.
“I’m sorry,”
she offers gently.
“Don’t be. I don’t deserve nor want your pity.”
“It’s not pity,”
she argues. “It’s empathy.”
“Empathy is just pity in disguise.”
“I’ve never met anyone more stubborn than you,”
she says, nudging her head against the sleeve of my coat.
“I have. You.”
She playfully scoffs. “I am not stubborn!”
“It must be nice, living in such delusion.”
She tries to shove me teasingly, but I catch her wrists in my hands. Her mouth parts slightly, like she’s forgotten how quick I am compared to her. Her delicate fingers trace along the filigree details on my coat, and when she meets my gaze from under her lashes, her blue eyes look more vivid than I’ve ever seen them. It’s like new life has taken place there. I could not recall the color of any other human’s eyes in this palace even if my life depended on it.
But hers? I could never forget them, not even if I lived another thousand years.
“Stop it,” I warn.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
She blinks. “How am I looking at you?”
“Like I’m not a monster.”
She lets out a shaky breath, and still staring into my soul, she says, “Ask me nicely.”
I feel something shift inside me at her request. Like a small crack in my chest, allowing something to seep out of the very essence of who I am.
The black line intertwined with her golden vow begins to burn, and my hand begins to tingle ever so slightly.
This doesn’t make any sense. That line does not belong to her. It’s the remnants of a fate I abandoned long ago and a fate that she is not supposed to be destined for.
I close my eyes for a moment, and my jaw tightens as I loosen my grip on her wrists. “Please have mercy on my immortal soul, sweet Adelasia.”
When I open my eyes, she’s still gazing into the darkest, deepest parts of me. She finally breaks the gaze, only to meet it once again. “What color were your eyes, before you became a vampire?”
I think about it for a long time. Longer than anyone should think about that answer. I feel my face fall at the sad realization, and admit, “I can’t remember.”
“Kaius…”
Adelasia whispers, freeing one of her wrists from my grasp to gently caress my cheek. “If there were a way for me to help you break this curse, I would.”
Out of all the things she could have said to me at this moment, that’s probably the one I wanted to hear the least. I take an abrupt step away from her, severing any lingering contact.
“We should go back,”
I prompt emotionlessly. “We’ll miss the best part of the night.”
I don’t wait to see if she follows before I leave the balcony, and these conflicting feelings, behind me.
Adelasia does end up following me back to the hall where the celebration is being held, though she gives quite a wide berth between us. I stop in the center of the room, and she joins me a few seconds later. I nod my chin upwards to prompt her to look. As she does, the moon reaches its crest right above the enchanted red glass ceiling.
The moonlight filters through the mural, creating a stunning aurora above our heads in warm shades of red, orange, yellow, and pink. Small specks of the aurora fall to us, dusting her cheeks like freckles and her raven-black hair like gemstones.
“What is this?”
“Moonlight,”
I answer. “To remind those of us who long for the sun that there’s beauty even in the deepest part of the night. When you live for hundreds of years, sometimes you need the reminder.”
“Is it really so bad? Being immortal?”
I circle her until I’m standing behind her. I carefully pick out the pins holding her hair in place to let it fall down her back, and then trail my hands up her scalp, tangling my fingers into her hair. She lets out an uncertain sound of pleasure at the feeling.
“We gain strength and apt senses, yes, but think about everything we lose. Everyone we’ve ever known as a human will eventually grow old and die. We can never taste our favorite foods again. We’ll never feel the warmth of the sun. You’ll reach a point in your immortal life where you can’t even remember what your own eye color was before you were turned. If we are religious, then we lose our connections to our deities because they believe us to be abominations. We’ll never see a full sunset or sunrise again. We can’t have children, and if we had children before we turned, they’re unable to survive the change themselves. We lose so much more than you can even comprehend, Adelasia.”
I feel the sharp rise and fall of her shoulders. She’s crying. I nudge her temple with my nose and rub her arms with mine before wrapping her in a calming embrace. “You’d hate losing those things, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not why I’m crying.”
She turns slightly to look up at me. “I’m crying for you.”
I smile. “Don’t waste your tears on me, Adelasia. I don’t deserve them.”
I use my thumb to brush away one of the drops streaming down her face.
After the initial awe from the ceiling wears off, the room grows quiet as people begin to leave. Adelasia and I are left alone under the filtered moonlight. My hand still caresses her cheek and I can see her heartbeat pounding wildly in her throat. The air between us is warm with delicious tension, and the rosy sheen of her lips is even more tempting than the smell of blood coursing through her veins. To resist the sudden and overwhelming urge I have to feel those lips pressed against mine, I take one of her hands and spin her around a few times until she’s pressed into my chest in a dancing position.
“May I have one last dance?”
She smiles and teasingly rolls her eyes. “I think I liked it better when we were fighting all the time.”
“We can go back to that tomorrow. Just give me this night to pretend otherwise.”
We have no music, and no audience, but our dance isn’t any less passionate as it was before. Dancing with her feels ethereal. She’s so confident in the way her body moves. She needs so little direction from me that my presence here feels almost useless, but I wouldn’t trade this moment with her for anything.
Not even…
I pause abruptly as she spins out of my arms and Adelasia’s face falls. I swallow and stiffen my back. “It’s late. Let me take you back to your room so you can sleep.”
I can see in her face that sleep is probably the last thing on her mind right now, but I’m not giving her a choice. I can’t think rationally when she’s around, and this is not the time for me to lose my head.
I have to look away because I can’t stand the disappointment on her face when she takes my arm and allows me to lead her out of the room. The walk to her suite is silent, with only the tap of her light footsteps filling the halls. When we reach our destination, she turns to face me again.
Despite my better judgment, my trembling, still tingling hand brushes a loose strand of hair away from her cheek before I trace the angles of her jaw with my forefinger. When I reach her chin, I use my thumb to feel the fullness of her bottom lip. I hear her stop breathing.
A low growl emanates from deep in my throat before I drop my hand from her face.
“Goodnight, Adelasia,”
I whisper as I turn my back to her and slowly retreat down the hall. With each step I take away from her, I grow more and more frustrated at the knowledge that I haven’t heard her door open. She’s still in the hall, watching me walk away from her.
I stop walking and drop my head in defeat, and that’s when I notice the golden vow line on my hand is glowing still, and the black one seems to be throbbing in sync with her heartbeat. With all the enhanced speed my curse of vampirism gives me, I’m standing in front of her again in an instant, so quick it causes her to gasp and step backward into her bedroom door.
“Damn you,”
I whisper, before gently grabbing her throat and pulling her lips to meet mine. She lets out a sound of shock, but quickly meets my fervor with her own. Her hands fist themselves into my coat as she pulls me deeper into her. She melts into my embrace, practically going weak at the knees.
When I break the kiss to let her breathe, the gravity of what I’ve just done devastates me. Without saying another word to her, I walk away.
And this time, I keep walking.
I find myself in my private study among old, dusty tomes and candles that haven't been lit in centuries. I hardly ever come in here, only when I need absolute silence and a place to think.
I flop into my large wingback chair and prop my feet up on the black marble desk.
The dagger that has become both my salvation and my worst enemy in the past few hours sticks out of my boot. I take it from its sheath and hold it by the blade in my hand, examining it carefully.
I sigh quietly to myself. “What have I done?”
Kissing Adelasia is one of the worst sins I’ve ever committed.
Now she’ll feel rejected at the first hesitance of any further affection, and what’s worse, is if she wasn’t already growing attached, she certainly is now.
I take it back, the worst part is that she doesn’t even know why she feels a pull between us, but I do—and it’s not for the original purpose of her presence in my life.
What a mess.
I can still feel the softness of her lips against mine. I can still feel the passion and I can still hear the soft sigh of pleasure when she melted into me. I can still see the desire in her eyes asking me to do it again before I walked away. It’s woven in the deepest part of my thoughts.
And with this damned vow on my skin still golden, even she knows she’s still on my mind. She’s been engrained there since I met her. She’s burrowed her way into my soul and now I’ve developed…feelings. Feelings I shouldn’t have for the only thing keeping me from earning my mortality back.
One more night.
That was all that was supposed to be standing between me and the only thing I’ve wanted for the entire millennium I’ve been living with vampirism. Now I’ve gone and added a kiss to that equation.
I’ve never known myself to be so stupid.
“Cassius,”
I call out softly. “Are you in here?”
I don’t look away from the dagger as I wait a few moments. Cassius slithers up the side of the desk and coils himself on the edge.
“Tell me what to do,”
I beg. “I can’t be trusted to make wise decisions when I can still feel her lips on mine.”
Cassius’ tongue flickers out. I narrow my eyes at him. “Don’t give me that look. I didn’t intend for it to happen this way! I just wanted her to enjoy her last night!”
I rub the bridge of my nose as if I have a headache, though the ailment doesn’t manifest itself in vampires. “It’s her fault. She makes it hard to hate her. She’s the furthest thing from that wretched soul she’s hosting. It’s…it’s not fair.”
I glance at Cassius. “I should just kill her in her sleep and get it over with.”
The limbless reptile companion I’ve known for hundreds of years has never been one to show any emotion other than aloofness. Rarely does he show signs of anger or irritation.
But what I see in his eyes when I utter that sentence is nothing short of pure, unfiltered fury. He tenses and opens his mouth to show me his fangs. His white eyes peer straight into my black soul, and for the first time in the centuries I’ve known him, I feel threatened.
I open my mouth to defend myself from his wrath, but I suddenly feel like my chest has collapsed. Like the weight of the world is pressing down. I rub my sternum with my palm, and the ghostly feeling of an unbeating heart beginning to pound resonates within my chest. It’s like some force has restarted my petrified heart. Cassius slithers away from me and out the door quicker than I’ve ever seen him move.
And then I realize I’ve known this feeling in a past life.
Panic. Anxiety.
Adelasia!