Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
In the dream, I was always the prey. Aliz was always the one hunting me.
Now everything is different. Everything is over. I snap a branch in two, making myself a cross. I stalk through the hedges, ire bubbling in my veins. Don’t follow me. It’s over. Even if I lose my free will tonight, Aliz will never look at me the same again. She’ll never love me again.
I dig my nails into my palms. This is how I was back when I was training. When the wound of my parents’ deaths was still fresh and open. And with every stake, every arrow meeting its target, Penny would say, You’re closer. I rub tears away as I realise that I’ve wasted four years of my life.
And as soon as I got breathing room from Callisto, I started to feel whole again.
“You’re so slow, Rebecca!” the vampire calls, three hedges ahead of me, and I speed up. I know the maze’s path by heart already.
I reach him just as he arrives at the rosebush at the centre, sheltered by four statues. He stops, and I do, too, scared that the wrong move will send him flying off in bat form.
“I usually forget most of the girls I select,” he says, inching behind the rosebush, leaning on one of the sculptures, missing its head.
I take a careful step towards him but keep the makeshift cross down at my side.
I have a stake tucked behind my costume wings.
But I can’t show him my cards yet. “Do you want to know why I remember you?”
“My blood tasted amazing?” I ask. The wind blows at the maze, the drying branches making a rattling sound. The moon’s still high above us. If I were to carve out his heart and eat it alone, would that work?
“Oh, it still tastes good,” he says. “Even better than when you were eighteen.”
My chin trembles, and I try to get the image out of my head. That which I can’t remember. Maybe my mind comes up with something far worse than the truth. Maybe all he did was a small cut. Maybe it was just a small taste. That’s all Gustavsson did, wasn’t it?
“No, Rebecca,” he says, and his eerie grin softens, expression losing tension. “Usually, I don’t get involved with what happens next, and while I wouldn’t have known you were related, your father’s blood smelled exactly like yours. Tasted even better.”
The lines that cross my body burn, digging into me. For once I’m grateful for the pain, because without it, I would have lost my mind.
“Do you work with Callisto?” I say, blinking, trying to detach myself from his words.
“That’s a rather loaded question,” he says, snapping one of the roses from the bush and lifting it to his nose.
I could swear that blood drips from the stem.
“Sometimes they are running short on hunters, so we point them in the right direction. Most girls I pick are for parties,” he says, inspecting the rose.
“Though if I know Callisto is looking for people, I’ll compel my girls to do a little more. ”
I dig my nails into my neck, breathing through the pain.
“You, for example. I made you run around the hotel three times. Run up the stairs, and even in high heels, you did an all right job. You showed potential. But the main test was when I compelled you to kill me. Some people are natural-born hunters, and as soon as I saw that look in your eye, I knew I’d found something special. We had such a wonderful time.”
My fingers shake around my makeshift cross.
“And then you killed my parents?” Somehow, my voice is still steady enough, even though I feel as though every inch of me has cracked.
“It wasn’t me,” he says, lifting his hands up in a mock plea of innocence.
The rose falls to the ground. “It was Callisto that ordered it. They had to give you a reason to join them, so they found one for you. I was just there to clean up the mess and have the leftovers. See, Rebecca, if you weren’t about to die, I wouldn’t tell you this.
But I can see it in your eyes, you need closure, don’t you? ”
I give a small nod. Die? Does he really think he can kill me?
“The night your parents died was what we call the Feast of the Parched,” he says.
“The parched are quite easy to control, you just give them your blood and send them off to kill whoever you wish, without having to get your hands dirty. We kept fifty newly sired vampires in an old train station, deprived them of blood, and ever so slowly, they transformed. Then we set them free to ravage the city. The vampires who killed your parents had another five targets that night, so don’t feel too special. ”
“Who is we?” I ask, as the massacre he described starts to come into focus. “The Vassals?”
“You’ve heard of us?” He cocks his head. “If only you’d completed your mission correctly, Rebecca,” he chides, “you would have been made a Stake of Callisto, and who knows, we may have wound up working together.”
At this, I finally snap, lunging forward.
My blood boils as I knock him down, a scream caught in my throat.
It was all my fault. If I hadn’t caught his eye, if he hadn’t smelled my blood, if I hadn’t shown potential, my parents would still be alive.
I land a punch in his face, and he laughs.
Then I press my thumbs against his eyes, screaming at him, but before I push inwards, I feel the thorns of the Familiar’s mark moving, shredding through my skin.
For a moment, I see white, the pain freezing every muscle in my body, telling me to seal the contract with Aliz. But Aliz is gone. And as I try to remember how to breathe, I feel him pushing me down.
“I seldom get to enjoy this,” Gustavsson says, his grip on my arms gentle.
“I’ve only led to the recruitment of a handful of hunters, but they all die before our paths cross again.
So from the moment I saw you here”—he clasps my cheek, and I look up at him, taking in his crimson eyes—“I’ve been fantasizing about this moment.
Every time you looked at me from the back of my classroom, I imagined how it would feel to snap your neck. ”
Slowly, the pain starts to recede. I wonder if midnight has passed already, if the mark is now permanent.
Regardless, I feel my strength return to my muscles, and after a short breath, I throw my weight against him, flipping us over and digging my knee between his legs.
He hisses, and I do what Penny did earlier, stringing together prayers to keep him down.
He covers his ears, all while I reach behind my back, through the feathers of my wings, where I know it’s hiding, just in case.
There’s no point in keeping him alive. It’s too late.
I grip my stake, and just as I’m about to slam it into him, he stabs my arm.
I miss, pain searing through me as I spot the open gash.
The wound heals a few seconds later, and, “That’s interesting,” Gustavsson says, as he gets on top of me again.
“You became someone’s Familiar? If I knew you were willing, I may have offered you the position myself,” he says, grabbing the stake that missed his heart.
“But alas, we’re running out of time. The quartet are missing their cellist.”
I stare at the moon as he plunges the stake through my torso, a guttural scream muffled as he clasps a hand over my mouth.
I try to reach for the stake to pull it out, but I’m already losing feeling in my hands.
The wound can’t heal if the stake is still inside.
My whole body feels like it’s melting, my skin trying to lace itself back together but finding an obstacle.
Gustavsson ducks down, licking the side of the stake.
My scream is bottled beneath his hand. “You know something, Rebecca,” he says, his voice slowing.
“When I moved their bodies into the car, your father was already dead. Yet somehow, your mother—and I’m sure you remember the state in which she was found—she was still breathing.
I told her I was a police officer and to squeeze my hand if she could hear me. ”
Dread climbs through my chest, momentarily washing away the pain. No.
“She squeezed it, so then I told her what awaited you. ‘Your daughter is going to spend the rest of her life avenging you,’ I said. And I went into every detail of a hunter’s training.
‘They’ll fry her brain,’ I said, ‘and they’ll cut her off from her family,’ I said as well.
But I think what really killed her was when I told her what your missions would consist of.
‘Your daughter will be the lowest of hunters. She’ll be used as bait and will be dead after a few missions. ’ Oh, you should have seen her face.”
My tears spill over my cheekbones.
I look up at the moon again, and that’s when I see her behind him, a flash of white.
Her silver sword cuts through the back of his head, and Gustavsson lets out a growl, eyes wide. And before he can turn into a bat, Aliz plummets the sword down onto his neck, a clean slice through it, so that his head rolls into the rosebush, and his body falls limp beside my own.
If we left him, in a few hours, the strings between his severed neck would start to lace him together. His headless torso would pull itself towards its missing appendage, and after a few weeks, or sooner, depending on his strength, he’d regain consciousness. Such is the power of the undying.
“Forty seconds.” Aliz’s voice is trembling.
Her eyes are bright red, and I know, without looking down, that my white dress is soaked in blood.
She squeezes her eyes shut as she pulls the stake out of my stomach, and I let out a cry, unable to hold back tears.
“It’s all right,” Aliz says. “I made it in time, I made it.”
Before she explains what she means, I watch as she tears through Gustavsson’s torso, cracking through his rib cage and grabbing his heart.
It’s smaller than I expected, still beating furiously.
“Open your mouth,” she says as she sinks her fangs into the organ, and blood drips straight onto my tongue.
It burns the back of my throat. “Bite it,” Aliz says, mouth covered in crimson.
She swallows more, and as the wound on my chest starts to knit itself together, I sit up and bury my teeth into the heart’s rubbery flesh.
Then the lines of the mark are tearing through me again.
I try to stop drinking, pushing Aliz away as I feel them travelling up my torso, but she forces me, with a hand gripped behind my neck, to remain still.
I swallow his blood and see my parents in the mortuary, their disfigured bodies the entryway into this awful world of monsters.
Penny, beside them, offering me her condolences.
Penny, at the back of the church, telling me I can get my revenge.
Handing me a train ticket to London, with the promise that I’ll find out who did it once I’m good enough.
Penny, sitting with me after my first mission, drying my tears, running her hand through my hair, promising me it’ll get easier. You’ll get stronger.
Then I see my parents again, out in the back garden, chatting about something I no longer remember, but with the sun, which so seldom shines in Scotland, washing their faces gold.
Aliz’s arms are around me, her lips are on my head. She came back for me.
I hide my face in her chest. She squeezes me tight, kisses my hair again.
The itch on my neck vanishes.
She rubs my skin, and lets out an airy laugh, filled with disbelief. “It’s gone!” she says. Aliz tilts my head up, and her eyes are bloodshot, but her irises are black. “We got rid of it, Cassie.”
Her face falters, as though she remembers what adrenaline forced her to forget. “I wanted to tell you,” I whisper.
“What’s your name?” she asks, thumb running across my cheek. “Rebecca what?”
“Charity,” I reply, before she bends down, pressing her lips to mine. The adrenaline, I think. Because now that the mark is gone, Aliz’s feelings for me will disappear. That’s what I think, at least, but as the kiss deepens, I forget about everything, drawing her as close to me as I can.
Only when I feel Gustavsson’s stiff undead corpse beside me, do I stop, and Aliz looks at him.
The cavity where his heart used to be has already begun to knit itself shut.
“What do I do?” she whispers. I reach for the stake, covered still in my own blood, and hand it to her.
Then I nod to the half-eaten heart on the ground next to us.
Her hands tremble before she slams it down into it, and in an instant, Sven Gustavsson’s rotten existence turns into a cloud of smoke and dust.