Chapter Thirty-Three #2
“A family friend.” Penny is family. My words aren’t exactly a lie. All the same, I can’t look Aliz in the eye as I say it. “I’m sorry you overheard that.”
“Did she…” Aliz falters, and I already hear the strain in her voice. “Did she really call me a leech?”
I’ve used that word in my head. I’ve directed it silently at every vampire I’ve met here at Tynahine. Ife, Julia, Elia, Aliz. But now the word makes my skin crawl. “She’s a bigot,” I say. Aliz tilts my chin up, her expression hurt.
“Your family has worked with vampires for centuries,” she says. “So, why would you associate yourself with someone like that?”
“How do you know my family works with vampires?” I ask, trying to worm my way out of her question.
Her cheeks gain a red tinge. “Because I googled you,” she says. “You never tell me anything about yourself.”
My breathing stills. I feel warmth draining from my face, and I look at her.
Aliz draws out her phone, her face still tense as she opens a website.
“ ‘The Smiths have been longtime partners with the Macleod and Willow families, a partnership dating back to the eighteenth century.’ That’s on your parents’ website. I know those are vampire families.”
I try to find my voice, but there’s a lump in my throat.
“Why should a family that’s made their fortune thanks to vampires have the nerve to be bigoted towards us?”
“I’m not like them,” I squeeze out, trying to ground myself.
“What are you like then, Cassie?” she says, her voice growing tight.
“I’m not like them,” I insist, and as I reach for her, she steps back, face still flushed with anger. “I may have been like them before coming to Tynahine. I won’t lie to you, but—”
“You are always lying!” she says sharply. Whatever expression I make forces a bitter laugh from her. “You think I can’t tell? You lie to me all the time. Right from the moment we first spoke.”
My eyes burn. All this time I’d thought I’d been careful. Aliz looks like she wants to say more—to say the words that will ruin everything between us.
“Tell me, do you think I’m a leech?”
Aliz doesn’t raise her voice. Yet somehow, it’s loud. It echoes in my head, the words tell me a lasso around my mind, digging deep into the space that’s been shrivelled and burnt since I first became a vampire hunter. Pain sears across the Familiar’s mark, thorns digging into me, and I say, “No.”
My face is limp. I recognise this feeling. I thought I’d forgotten it, but it’s as real as it was before I became immune to it.
“Then why don’t you trust me?”
Her grip on my will has loosened, and I gawk at her, her black eyes without even a hint of red.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“You just compelled me,” I say. My legs crumple, but I don’t let myself fall. I look away from her. Not meeting her eyes won’t make any difference. I can feel it, her will mingling with mine. Strings tugging at my words, my thoughts, my movements.
“What?” Aliz is still furious, but when she takes in my expression, something shifts.
It’s over.
We still had six days left, but somehow, something—I clasp my hands over my mouth and try to slow my breathing, try to stop myself from screaming.
No. I didn’t go through months of torture at Callisto training to bypass compulsion just for Aliz to be able to do it without even looking at me. “This can’t be happening,” I say.
“I didn’t—”
“Try it,” I say, my throat tight. “Give me an order.”
She shakes her head, not looking me in the eye. But she must have felt it, too, a new power granted by the Familiar’s mark, because she looks up at me again, expression resolute. The wind blows against the window.
“Twirl,” Aliz says, and my body moves, tethered to her volition, spinning around.
I run.
I run because although she told me to twirl, she didn’t tell me to stay, and as long as I’m not next to her, I’m still free. I don’t care if it hurts. I can’t let it happen again. I can’t let Aliz compel me. No matter what.
I run till I’m past the pine grove, past Kinsnet Library, out in the uncharted field that stretches behind campus. I run to the river, to the bridge that leads to the hunting lodge. Its bricks are riddled with moss, slowly eroding under a few centuries of rain.
Someone is sitting on the wall, legs dangling over the edge.
Her hair looks white beneath the dim glow of the half-moon.
As I get closer, I see a sketchbook on her lap and a small watercolour palette resting beside her.
Julia turns when she notices my presence and tenses.
I’ve been meaning to ask her about her paintings.
I know my reaction must have set off some alarms. I wanted to see if there are any sketches that might help me find out more about Gustavsson, or what I’ve forgotten.
But after she ran into Aliz and me in the library, I have a feeling she might be a little less fond of me now.
I’m about to break the silence when I notice her gaze is glued to my neck.
I’m not wearing a polo neck or a scarf. I clasp my hand over the mark, but it’s too late.
She’s seen it.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I say. But it is.
“What is it?” Julia says, voice wavering.
Of course she doesn’t recognise it. My stomach feels heavy. “A Familiar’s mark,” I say, and she stares at me, silence falling between us. I step closer, till I’m practically next to her. “I’m Aliz’s Familiar,” I say. For a long moment, minutes perhaps, Julia doesn’t say anything.
“Familiar,” she says. I dig my nails into the damp wall of the bridge. “You performed a blood contract?”
After a moment, looking into the black river that flows beneath us, I tell her.
I’m not sure why, exactly, I can speak to her like this.
Maybe because of that strange link in our pasts, which Julia doesn’t even know of.
But I lean on the wall next to her and tell her everything.
“I’ll be under her command until the day I die,” I say, chest aching.
The damp, cold wind blows at the pages of her sketchbook.
“Immortality isn’t as bad as you’d think,” Julia finally says, putting down her paintbrush.
“I thought my life was over when I was first sired. But the night is just as beautiful as the day when you have our eyes.” After a moment, she hands me her sketchbook.
The first page is an exact replica of what’s in front of us, a sinuous river, moss-covered rocks dictating the water’s path, and the Highlands rolling in the distance.
But the colours don’t match what I see. The shadows that cloak my vision aren’t present on the thick, still-damp pages. Night, captured here upon Julia’s sketchbook, is a myriad of blues and violets, of sparkling water and vivid stars.
“Being a vampire has its perks,” she says.
I don’t know how, but looking at the painting calms me. Slowly, as I breathe, I’m able to focus on the present. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because only humans can be Familiars,” she says. “So if you want, I can sire you, Cassie.”
I look up at her, and she’s smiling. I’ve been so caught up in not missing the deadline, on breaking the contract before the full moon, that it hadn’t occurred to me that there was another way. A far more obvious way.
Laughter bursts from me before I can stop it, and Julia gawks down at me, brows knotted. “What?”
I shake my head. “I can’t,” I say. “I’m glad you’ve made peace with what you are.
And thanks for offering, but…” I shake my head.
“But no thanks.” She lets out a whistle-like sigh, before glancing down at me.
I feel as though I’ve offended her. “I know you didn’t have the choice,” I add. “I’m sorry, Julia.”
“Don’t apologise,” she says softly. She pats the space beside her on the damp wall.
Adrenaline is still rushing through my veins.
But there’s something soothing about Julia.
And soothing isn’t a word I ever thought I’d associate with a vampire.
“I don’t hate what I am now, but the way I was converted certainly could have been better.
” I hoist myself up onto the stone ledge, moss between the old bricks.
My boots feel heavy as they dangle above the snaking river.
I turn to look at her, and she begins to flick through her sketchbook.
“Do you want to know how it happened?” she asks.
“If you are comfortable sharing,” I say in a small voice.
She presses her lips into a tight line. I have a feeling that, whatever her story is, she’ll never be comfortable with it.
“Well, I should warn you that it’s not a pretty tale,” she starts, trying to force her voice into a casual tone. “It involves my death, after all. But most important, I still don’t know why they did it.”
“They?”
“The—” She hesitates, as though her tongue is stuck on the roof of her mouth.
“A vampiric organisation. Not the Council,” she clarifies.
“I don’t remember any names, just—” She flicks through the pages until she stops on a portrait of a woman.
With thin layers of watercolour, she’s painted a grey hood hiding the vampire’s face.
The portrait is so detailed that it seems like the woman might come to life at any moment. “She was the one who split us.”
“Split?” I ask, zipping up the top of my jacket. The mark still itches, but I focus on Julia’s voice.
“It was three weeks after graduation. I was eighteen,” she starts, turning the pages of her sketchbook until she stops on the drawing of the Tube I saw a while back. “I was going to meet my parents in Trafalgar Square. But the train didn’t stop. I honestly don’t know how they did it, exactly.