Fifteen
Kaius
Dravon is still deathly still on the floor of Adelasia’s suite when I come for him. His eyes are open, wide with confusion and shock when I stand over him.
“Lord Kaius…”
he whispers.
I hold up a finger in warning to hold his tongue. “You will tell me what happened, and you will tell me now.”
As he opens his mouth to respond, I see that fog cast over his eyes. It’s subtle, but once it’s noticed, it’s hard to ignore. I squat down to look closer, and it’s gone.
“I wasn’t in control,”
he gasps, and in all the time I’ve known Dravon, which is the entirety of my immortal life, I’ve never known him to look…distraught. Worried. Scared.
It unsettles me to my core.
“Clearly,”
I mutter. “I seem to recall telling you several times that Adelasia was not to be touched by your insatiable thirst. I’ve killed our kind for calling her a liar. What should be your punishment for defying me? For harming her?”
Dravon whimpers. “I’m already a dead man.”
“Don’t be dramatic, the venom will wear off in a few hours.”
“It’s not the venom, Kaius.”
I stiffen. Dravon has never, not once in one thousand and twenty-seven years, used my name. It’s always followed by a ‘Lord’ or replaced with ‘sir’ or some other formality. Never just my name.
His eyes fog over, return to normal, and then fog over again. He begins to twitch, as if trying to thrash around while under the influence of the paralysis. He growls and grits his teeth.
I grab him by the lapels of his coat and shake him. “Tell me.”
Dravon begins to panic, and when a fearless man begins to panic, so do I.
“Dravon!”
I growl. “Tell me!”
He widens his eyes, and they flicker back to their normal glassiness.
“The Priestesses–”
His words are cut short by a thick wooden stake rising from the floor to stab him through the back, straight into his heart. His body goes through one thousand years of decay in a matter of a few seconds, and he falls to ashes on the black marble floor.
I catch myself with my hands as I fall backward slightly, staring at the stake as tall as I am protruding from the ground.
Dravon is dead, and he’s been immortal for nearly as long as I have. He’s got to have hundreds of thousands of vampires descended from him, and every single one of them just faded into dust.
I stare at that stake for a long while, contemplating his last words and what they could mean, and then it hits me. The fog cast over his eyes was the influence of the Priestesses, using him as a spy over my court.
And if Adelasia saw that fog over his eyes, then there is a very high possibility that the Priestesses now know of her existence.
They’re coming to reclaim their sister when their magic is at its strongest. At the next full moon.
Tomorrow.
I use magic to repair Adelasia’s bedroom and remove any signs of Dravon from the space. It takes not but a few seconds, and I spend nearly the entire rest of the night agonizing over the way she looked at me when I stopped letting myself feel.
I should have never tasted her. I should have never touched her. The more time I spend with her, the more I’m losing myself in her. She’s on my mind all the time. She never leaves. I can smell her, I can hear her heartbeat, I can feel her presence and now I can taste her. Not only does she linger in my mind, but now she’s all over my lips and my clothes and I’m wholly consumed by nothing but her.
I shouldn’t have walked away from her earlier, and I know I hurt her in doing so. I can practically feel her heartbreak in my own chest through our shared magic.
I want her more than anything, and coming to that realization while I was with her scared me, because it comes with a choice I can no longer make.
I don’t have the strength to.
Betrayed by my own heart once again, and I dread it more than I have ever dreaded anything before. She is tangled in one destiny that is dripping with blood and another that would ruin her as immortality has ruined me.
Adelasia, my sweet agony. My love is a poison on your lips. A curse far crueler than vampirism, destined to be the fated mate of a man whose life has been consumed by the desire to end yours.
When I return to my bedchamber, I step through the door to find Adelasia, thankfully, asleep. Cassius is in the bed with her. A ridiculous pang of jealousy shoots down my spine at the thought that he’s stolen my place on the bed. My bed.
I toe off my boots and approach the bed and lightly flick the invertebrate coiled there. He lifts his head and hisses quietly, and that’s when I notice the golden streak down his back and the golden line around Adelasia’s left wrist.
I scowl at him. I didn’t even know he could make vows. He can’t even speak!
“Move,”
I whisper angrily. Cassius shows me his fangs as if in warning that he has no qualms about biting me as he did Dravon. He moves to the foot of the bed to make room for me, and I climb into the vacant space as slowly and quietly as I can.
I don’t embrace Adelasia, but I lounge next to her, slumping slightly against the headboard as I watch her sleep. I use my magic to conjure a small jar of medicine for the cut on her cheek. I gather some on the tip of my finger and lightly run the balm along the cut to coat it.
The redness and swelling instantly begin to recede, and she sighs softly in her sleep at the relief. It brings a hint of a smile to my face. I don’t like the knowledge that she’s in pain, however minimal it might be.
I know when the night has reached an end and when the sun begins to rise, because the golden markings of my vow to Adelasia fade from my skin.
Vows have a way of knowing the truth, even if one is in denial about it. Perhaps I was a fool for wagering my life and the fate of the entire vampire race to prove my sincerity, but Adelasia wouldn’t have believed me any other way.
She sleeps through the morning and well into the afternoon. In her time here, she’s become more nocturnal simply because everyone else is. It pleases me to see her adjusting to this life, as temporary as it was always meant to be.
Vampires don’t require sleep, but some do it simply for the routine. Immortality can get incredibly boring. When one has lived for as long as I have–read and witnessed all of history as it happened, traveled the world, learned every language and studied every culture, there tends to be little to do except contemplate the existential loneliness.
It’s the thing I miss most about being a human. Humans are always learning, always clinging to their life because they know their time on this earth is limited. There’s no chance they’ll get to experience everything the world has to offer, and that's why their lives are so precious to them.
Because time is precious to them.
When Adelasia stirs at my side, I sit up straighter. I wait patiently for her to open her eyes and orient herself. She looks at me in confusion and lifts her head from the pillow, examining the room for a moment before her focus comes back to me. Her hand reaches up to feel her neck, and she winces slightly at the tenderness of Dravon’s bite.
“You came back,”
she whispers, unable to meet my eyes for longer than a second.
I smirk. “Someone had to make sure you weren’t the first human to turn into a vampire from a simple bite.”
My teasing doesn’t bring brightness to her face as I thought it would, so instead, I change the subject.
“I am sorry for last night,”
I tell her.
“Which part?”
she asks, and I can hear the pain in her voice.
“All of it,” I admit.
Adelasia stands from the bed and I do so with her. I try to reach for her, but she steps back and then looks up at me. She’s quiet for a long moment, and while she gathers whatever thoughts are in her head, I find myself staring at her lips.
I take a step closer to her and she doesn’t recoil this time. I press our foreheads together and the smell of me lingering all over her excites me all over again.
“Why do you make it so hard to hate you, Adelasia?”
I whisper against her lips.
“Maybe you’re not meant to,”
she whispers back. “And I think that scares you.”
I crave more of her, more than I allowed myself to take last night. More than I’m willing to take now and more than I ever should have taken in the first place.
“I may not know everything about your world, Kaius, but don’t mistake me for a fool. I had the same vow on my skin, and I think you're not sorry at all about last night.”
I don’t like the way she’s suddenly gained the ability to read me like an open book, and I find myself feeling defensive.
“You think I’m nothing more than a heartless, soulless, wretched monster. Why would I be capable of feeling anything for you?”
She doesn’t back down from my challenge, and instead meets my poison with tenderness.
“I don’t believe you’re any of those things, Kaius. I think for the first time in a long time, you feel like you have something to lose.”
She uses her free hand to tenderly caress my cheek. I close my eyes and lean into it. “Tell me what it is you’re so afraid of.”
I knit my brows together as a physical pain shoots through my heart. “Everything,”
I admit quietly, and my shoulders slump inward in defeat, because I’m in too deep now. The truth is there, and she’s going to pull it out of me, even if she breaks her own heart in the process.
“Tell me,” she begs.
I feel…ready to weep. Fractured. I sigh and lift her chin so she has to look at me. I want to see her let me go and watch the betrayal flash across her eyes. I want to watch her hate me all over again, however painful it will be for me.
“Adelasia, I haven’t felt my own heartbeat in centuries. It’s grown cold from all those years of loneliness. You’re the only thing in my life that makes me feel something other than despair. First, you gave me hope. Then you made me feel…alive, and in doing so stripped away that hope. I hate you for it.”
I sink to my knees and tangle my fingers with hers. “I want to be a human again,”
I whisper. “I didn’t realize until last night when I kissed you that my stolen mortality has never been my true curse. It’s you, my sweet agony. We are bound by a cruel fate to fall in love, and you are bound by a cruel fate to end this curse of vampirism.”
A single tear falls from her eye and I reach up to catch it with my thumb. “The scar on my back…”
she whimpers, finally understanding why I’ve tried so hard to keep this from her.
“Adelasia, I am so, so sorry,”
I whisper up from my place on the floor. “I never intended for either of us to grow attached, and I didn’t know until last night what we truly meant to each other.”
“So that’s the truth then? That I was a means to an end for you?”
She shoves my hands away from her.
“Adelasia, please,”
I beg, finally standing and trapping her between my arms. “I wanted my mortality back so badly that I would have done anything to get it. But now–”
I cup her cheek and turn her head to force her blue eyes to meet my red eyes. I sigh, my shoulders sinking in desperation at this impending heartbreak. “I’d live the rest of eternity as a vampire if it meant you got to experience the joy of a full human life that I never got to have.”
She turns her head away from me, tears flowing freely now. “Breaking the curse isn’t a ritual,”
she whispers, and then finds enough bravery to look at me. “It’s a sacrifice.”
Her voice breaks when she adds, “You were going to kill me.”
I shake my head. “Only in the beginning.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?!”
she shouts, trying to wriggle free of my grasp. “All this time I knew you would kill me, and you were too much of a coward to admit it to my face when I asked.”
“I may be a coward, but there is no curse or cause that would lead me to harm you now. I swear it.”
“You already have,”
she cries. Then, she attempts to shove me away. “Let me go. Kaius, let me go!”
When I don’t yield, she does something I never imagined she would. She conjures a stake into her hand.
And I let her impale me in the chest.