2. Altair
Altair
These bars had held me for over a century.
I ran a loose grip down one. The iron felt warm beneath my hand, because my skin was frigid.
When a vampire was well-fed, there was hardly a discernable difference in temperature between us and an average human. Maybe we were a little colder, but it was easily waved off as naturally being a bit clammy. Poor circulation. That sort of thing.
I wasn’t well fed.
I was hardly fed at all.
But yesterday, I’d managed to get my hands on a particularly plump rat, and I’d been restless ever since. After so long with so little, even that little morsel was a feast that left me antsy and eager to do something.
Only I didn’t know what.
I’d long since given up freeing myself from captivity. The witches, when they came now, visited me in my cell. They took my blood or enjoyed my services, and slipped back out to their sunny lives.
I sometimes wondered if they ever thought of me, out there where I could hear them walking through the coven house above. What would it be like, to have a predator pinned beneath you?
What sort of predator was I, when all I’d hunted recently was unfortunate rodents that scurried across the floors of my cell?
But these witches weren’t the first to hold me captive. My maker hadn’t needed bars, only words. His command was the iron, binding my will to his.
I couldn’t resist, but a slip of the tongue had given me an opening to escape, a turn of phrase that I’d known I was interpreting wrong.
There was no way he’d willingly send me across the Atlantic in search of something new. He’d craved novelty, and each time I met potential prey, I found some reason or another to convince myself that they were as commonplace to Ivan as the khubz the baker made in the town where I’d grown up.
The soft flat breads were the same every time, with a subtle flavor meant to be filled or dipped. They were never the star of the show.
And my maker had been alive a very long time. I’d spent decades watching him feast on many sorts of humans. He’d spoken to me of wolves and fae. He’d even sucked another vampire dry, and threatened to do the same to me if I couldn’t find some way to delight him.
But he’d never crossed an ocean, and there was much in the new world that was novel, simply nothing that was entirely so.
I’d freed myself with the command to provide him a unique culinary experience, and that impulse still pulsed in the back of my mind. One day, I’d return to him, and perhaps I’d be the novelty.
He’d consume a vampire who’d defied him for centuries. I had no doubt I was the first to survive this long.
In the meanwhile, I was trapped here, and whatever spells the witches had cast on these bars also kept my maker from seeking me out. In an oblique way, I was grateful to them. The witches were, by comparison, rather kind. I liked the sound of their laughter.
They clearly had motivations that drove them beyond simply increasing my misery.
Occasionally they brought me some game animal from the forests nearby.
And they felt nice. Their bodies were warm and soft, like they’d never fought or struggled to survive. They were eager for what I could give them—that I could awaken them, yes, but also the edge of danger from letting me drag my lips across their pretty necks.
I’d known decades of freedom in the American colonies, in the early days of the nation where war and ever-shifting goals and organization made accounting for people difficult.
It was when I’d taken off toward the west during the gold rush that I’d stumbled upon the witches and they’d taken me.
Before that, my time in the Americas had been grand. The way that white Americans treated a man with golden-brown skin and dark eyes made it all too easy to justify sinking my teeth into any number of them. I’d never eaten so well.
It was a land of promise and plenty, and I had let my guard down and landed myself in a cage—kept, but safe. My situation could have been worse.
It could have been better, too, and the tingling agitation that danced over my skin seemed to announce my guest’s arrival before he’d even slipped down the creaky wooden stairs.
It was the high witch’s pretty son, Daire. There were women and men both in this coven, but something about him stood out to me. Maybe it was simply that he was the progeny of my captor. I wanted to ruin him, to turn his pretty coppery waves dark and sopping with his life’s blood.
Maybe it was the desperate hunger in his eyes. He was always looking for something, but no matter how many times I’d offered it, he never acquiesced.
He was one of very few who held himself back.
“Hello there,” I drawled, pressing my cheekbone against the iron and letting my tongue slip tantalizingly between my lips.
No, I wasn’t planning on biting the witch.
I’d only dared once, in the first year when I’d been starving and a different witch had led the coven.
I’d been called on to awaken one of them, and in the throes of passion, I had bitten her.
She’d shrieked, and I’d swear that acid filled my mouth and burnt its way down my throat with every choking swallow.
Their matriarch had thrown me back with a blast of magic that had pinned me to the wall and sent searing pain dancing through my veins.
Whatever they did—tinctures they’d taken or spells they cast—it wasn’t worth the pain of drinking from them for only a sip.
Better the rats, disgusting as they were.
Daire sucked in a breath so deep that his nostrils flared, steeling himself before he stepped out of the shadows into the flickering candlelight I was allowed in my cell.
I didn’t need it to see in the dark, of course, but it felt civilized to have a proper light when the witches remembered to give me one.
“Are you finally ready for your awakening, pet,” I asked, dragging my fingers down the bar, “or are you going to disappoint me and take one of those disgusting dogs to bed?”
Sometimes, the witches returned to the coven house smelling like fur. I’d heard the mumblings of rough voices, promises and assurances and deals struck with a nearby pack.
I’d never been privy to them myself, but the witches were after something I couldn’t give them, and I was hardly in their confidence to figure out if I could use whatever it was as leverage.
Blood rushed into Daire’s cheeks, and they turned a pretty rosy color. Accompanied by the quickening of his pulse, it was the most beautiful tableau I’d ever seen.
Fuck, I needed to get my fangs into something more substantial than a rat or a rabbit.
“I’m not—” he started, but he met my eyes with his striking green ones and clenched his jaw.
The clink in his trembling hand drew my gaze down. He was holding . . . keys.
Blood and fire, had I guessed this right? It was about time for the little witchling to stand up, and a pity for him to leave his own power sitting on the shelf when he knew exactly what he needed to awaken it.
When we both knew.
“I’ll make it good for you,” I promised.
A jumping, jittery feeling in my chest tightened my words and made me sound overeager.
Daire was precisely the kind of mark I needed—spoiled and dense, easy to manipulate.
I’d make him happy, and if I was careful, I’d get favors in return.
It’d worked before, but the witches who’d liked me best always disappeared one after another.
I didn’t think Ermengarde was callous enough to dispose of her own son.
“You know I can,” I pressed, controlling my tone again. “No one leaves me unsatisfied, do they?”
That was saying something, as the cot they’d given me was hard and lumpy, and the only positive thing to say about my cell was that it protected me from the sunlight.
Daire’s lips pursed. He glanced at me again. He was considering it; I knew he was.
“I want to,” I purred. “A pretty little thing like you—how could I not? And you can have me any way you like, but gods, save me from this drudgery. Come inside. Let me take care of you.”
He took a deep breath and shoved the key into the keyhole. Success!
I grinned as the lock clicked.
But rather than come into my cell, he swung the door open and stepped back. “You need to go.”
My brow furrowed. “What?”
His hand cut through the air, waving me beyond the bars. “It’s four in the morning. You’ll have a few hours to find shelter, but not long. Everyone’s asleep. You might be able to make it, but you have to go now.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“For fuck’s sake, go!” He stepped into my cell to grab my arm, and something about the sudden contact had me hissing. I twisted, trying to pin his arm behind him, but Daire was shockingly quick for a human, even a magical one.
He shoved me and spun out of my grasp, slamming the cell door behind him and locking himself inside. He threw the keys back toward the brick wall at his back and stepped away from me.
“If you don’t go and they find me like this, what do you think they’re going to do?” he asked.
But that didn’t . . . it didn’t matter. I was standing outside the bars. Beyond the bars.
There was a creaky set of stairs and then what? The open night air? Freedom.
With one last, long look at Daire, I darted for the stairs, rushing up them on silent feet. This was a trick, only I didn’t know what kind.
In the end, I didn’t care. Freedom from my master had come from a trick, and I wasn’t a vampire who’d let an opportunity like this slip past without breathing the free air one more time.