Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Denne arrived at the cabin by the s’Hisbe, she looked at the snowed-in stump of a structure and had an absurd impulse to burn it down. t’On’s words were stalking her and maybe they’d be frightened off by the flames.
Probably not.
At the door, she stomped her boots on the welcome mat and opened the way in.
She half expected her parents to be waiting for her, an ambush riding a tide of love and worry that swamped everything.
Or maybe it would be t’On again, out of the suit he’d put on for her, even though the feel of it made his skin crawl.
“Fuck me.”
Heading over to the rack of robes, she shucked her parka, and then hesitated.
With a heavy sense of guilt, she ran her hand down the falls of fine fabric and stopped on a random one.
It was a burnished gold, and with a sudden shot of shame, she couldn’t remember what the color was supposed to mean.
Next to it was a burgundy red, and on the other side, a navy blue.
Finally, there was the deep purple she’d tossed on last night.
Closing her eyes, she started all over again with the eenie meenie miney—
“Moe.”
Navy blue. She didn’t know what that signified, either.
Overriding a choking sensation, she drew the draping off the hanger, but instead of pulling it on, she ran her hands over the heavy woolen folds and measured the even, perfect stitching on the seams. There were three seamstresses who made the royal robes—or there had been three.
The eldest of the trio had died last year.
They’d been trained in the tradition by the previous generation of masters, who in turn had been trained by the masters before them.
She hadn’t seen anybody else coming in as an apprentice, had she?
She didn’t know. But if no one did, the artistry would be lost.
Slipping the weight onto her shoulders, she was struck by the instant warmth and the reassuring way the folds fell around her body.
The fastenings up the front were a series of pearl buttons that were hidden in a pleat that went from the short collar all the way to the hem, and as her fingers worked them, she imagined the old, infirmed hands that had made such precise knots.
When she was finished doing up the tie at the neck, she wondered why she’d never appreciated the details before. And the fit? The robe had been specially tailored to her so that nothing around the neck or shoulders pulled, and the tips of her boots just barely showed at the bottom.
She remembered the fitting. It had been…
“Ten years ago?” she said aloud. “Really? No, it can’t be.”
Except she was sure because she’d gone the night after she’d made it through her transition. She’d been totally frustrated during the incessant fussing over her, so impatient to get it all over with.
She had done her best not to let her true feelings show, but she’d been exhausted, nauseous, sore all over. But more than that, she hadn’t cared about any of it, not the tailoring, not the rainbow of colors, certainly not her role in the royal protocol.
Not even the fact that she’d made it to the other side of the change.
Now, though, as she lifted the hand-spun wool and marveled at what a beautiful blue it was, she wondered whether she’d been as good at hiding her derision as she’d thought.
Turning back to the rack, she realized that all the robes came from that session. Ten years, and she was still using them. And not just because they were of high-quality materials, and made by careful, trained hands.
It was because the only time those robes were off the hangers was when she yanked them on here, entered the palace, and raced for her own quarters so she could take them off fast.
Maybe t’On had a point, although not in the way he’d meant.
She had been hurrying through a lot of things, staying on the surface, too numb and disinterested to connect to anything and anybody.
Like, when was the last time she’d shared a meal with her parents?
Sure, there were pickup snacks at dawn when she checked in with them or a smoothie on her way out at night before she left for the restaurant…
but what about the last time they’d lingered over a table, shared stories from their lives or the thoughts on their minds, laughed at some memory they all had in common from when she’d been a young?
Had there even been any funny stories from her early years?
She didn’t know. She certainly didn’t remember—
“What the fuck is going on with me,” she muttered as she went to the exit.
It was like the transition was happening all over again, just on the inside. With her mind, her heart… her soul.
Something had opened up a door she’d just as soon had remained closed. In fact, the damn portal had been bricked over so completely, she hadn’t even known it was there.
Except the trigger wasn’t t’On’s accusations. Or even the chart that predicted those two stars and everything that supposedly came after their appearance.
No… it was Allhan, in the clearing down by the river.
That first kiss, and the one that came after.
It was what he had done for a stranger, and the way he had stared at her.
How she had felt when she had looked at him, stepped into his body, tangled her cold, hungry fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck.
Those stars didn’t mean anything to her. That male did, though.
Unfortunately, t’On was right about one thing.
Her future had to be with the s’Hisbe.
Stepping back out into the snow, she looked to the left.
On all other nights, she just dematerialized past the Territory’s great wall, but now she hiked up the robe and trudged through the moonlit winter’s forest to the boundary.
The going was hard, the drifts so high in places that the snow came up over her knees.
But she managed to cross the distance, and as she finally halted to catch her breath, she tilted her head back and felt a stirring of awe.
The s’Hisbe had staked out a claim to its land centuries ago, and marked the vast acreage with a towering stone edifice erected by hands that were long, long since dead and gone.
Some twenty feet high and a full arm’s length wide, its mortar had been shored up over time, different tints of gray showing a patchwork of incremental improvements against the nearly black, flat-faced rocks.
Up top, there were coils of barbed wire, not that you could see them from the ground, and there was only one gate for entry on foot or in a car on the far side from where she was.
That entrance was manned by human guards who had been hired through quasi-human channels opened and monitored by court representatives.
Did it still look imposing? she wondered.
The last time she’d been over there had been almost twenty years ago, when it had been installed.
From what she’d been told, her father had been the one to suggest that the Territory needed a proper gate because their secrecy and inaccessibility were attracting attention on the internet.
Evidently, he had seen what happened when curious humans became determined to get to the bottom of things.
The dreaded Netflix documentary, he called it.
Closing her eyes, she dematerialized inside. And as she re-formed in the snowpack, she had to make sure she was not—
“Wait, where are the apple trees?” She frowned and looked around. “What the fuck?”
There should have been a ring of hundreds of McIntosh, Braeburn, and Fuji apple trees, and she immediately shifted position to a quarter mile farther along the wall, just in case she was mistaken about where she was.
She wasn’t.
The orchard was gone. All of the craggy trunks with their contorted branches had disappeared.
Someone had cut them down. When?
Casting herself deeper into the Territory, she re-formed in the midst of the clusters of domed, round houses that marked the outer rim of residences.
She’d always thought these single-storied homes were like mushroom caps on the earth, and she had a sudden worry that, like the apple trees, the people who had lived in them were gone.
There were no lights glowing, no smoke wisping out of the venting at the apex of the smooth roofs.
Had the Shadows out here relocated somewhere else within the Territory?
Shouldn’t she have known if they had? Maybe that was what the new buildings that had been erected a couple of years ago were about.
Shouldn’t she know that?
As she continued along on foot, she reassured herself that she had walked the interior halls of the palace, and run into crowds of Shadows.
So there hadn’t been some radical population decline.
How could there have been. Her mother was a benevolent ruler who had protected and fed and defended the s’Hisbe through countless eras of human intervention and complication.
And there had been so much of it: Questions about land ownership.
Taxes owed. Rights to privacy challenged.
And t’On was helping her deal with the new issue raised about the data centers—
Abruptly, Denne had to stop again, her breathing so hard that she wheezed in the cold.
When she felt like she could finally go on, she lifted the hem of the robing and resumed the slow plodding toward the fancier abodes of the courtiers.
These three-story structures did glow with interior lights, their white stucco walls and ornate corners and cornices making her think of birthday cakes.
No humble hunkering down for the wealthier members of court—and she wondered whether they still had the walkways that connected everything.
The ones that were bracketed by beds of flowers, in the spring and summer.
She should know that, too. And she’d used to, thanks to those strolls that her father and her had taken at sunset for years.
She couldn’t remember deciding they wouldn’t do that anymore. It must have happened when she started going to the restaurant. Right?
The palace came into looming presence, but it wasn’t a Disney castle with gargoyles on the eaves and sets of steps that rolled up to unfurled royal standards and guards at attention.
Nope. The black and silver glass structure looked like a vast, upscale office or classroom building, all clean lines and dark mirrored panes reflecting the snowy landscape and the countless shades of blue created by the moonbeams.
It was a most un-royal facility, and the two floors underground where she and her parents stayed were equally modest and modern.
According to whispered lore she’d overheard when she was young, the palace was nothing like what her grandmother had lived in. But when her mother had taken over, everything associated with the previous Queen had been destroyed, burned to the ground, or torn down.
She’d never asked why.
On that note, did she like living here? she wondered as she made her way around to the front. For sure, it wasn’t bad digs. But she should have a better connection to her home, shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t she care?
“Of course I do,” she huffed between panting inhales. “This is where I am from.”
All of this was where Shadows lived and had always lived. Where their traditions were upheld, where the constellations were observed and interpreted, just as they had been for generations. Where humans did not tread and vampires were not encouraged to attend, as the saying went.
And no lessers had ever ventured, thanks to the Black Dagger Brotherhood keeping the war with the Lessening Society in downtown Caldwell.
As she arrived at the palace’s utterly nondescript entrance, the pair of double doors with push bars opened wide.
She expected it to be a guard, one of s’Ex’s males.
It wasn’t. And abruptly, Denne felt an absurd urge to cry.
“Hi,” she said to her father.
As with the Territory she had just trudged through, she felt as though she hadn’t seen iAm for years, and she searched his face.
She had always taken after his side of things, their features eerily similar, especially in the arch of the brows and their deeply set eyes.
But she was clearly her mother’s daughter, too.
She got her long, curling hair from Catra, and her voice was so much like the Queen’s.
She’d also been told that they shared the same rare smile.
The Queen was often serious.
Staring at her father now, in his out-of-Territory clothes of slacks and a black cashmere sweater, she felt like she was the impostor, even though she was the one in the robe: He was devoted to her mother, who was devoted to the s’Hisbe.
So that meant his life had been, and would be, centered on service to all Shadows.
Didn’t he have ambitions of his own, though? Something outside of here, something for himself? He could have opened another restaurant. A whole chain of restaurants.
Something that was his.
iAm lifted a hand, like he felt a similar separation. “Hi.”
Behind him, the figure of her mother appeared, the Queen’s golden robing spilling to the floor, her long, beautiful hair braided around her face with the ends left to fall in waves.
Just like Denne’s.
Both of her parents were so grim, it was as if someone had died.
So this is really happening, Denne thought.