Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
WE REMAINED IN THE crypt until Moira found us lying side by side, delirious in joy and relief while we waited for our injuries to heal enough to tackle the monumental task of walking upstairs.
She was covered in so much ash her hair had turned grey and there were bloody claw marks down one arm, but she was very much alive.
She didn’t stop running when she spotted us, instead hurling herself onto the floor beside Raleigh.
‘I thought you were dead, you idiot!’
Yann appeared at the base of the stairs in time for Moira to shoot him an accusatory glare. ‘You told me he was dying.’
‘He was dying.’
‘Oh, I am quite dead,’ Raleigh said lightly. ‘Clara made sure of that.’
I grinned as Moira raised her leaking face to me. I hadn’t worked out how to retract my fangs yet. They were the first things she’d see. ‘Don’t kill me,’ I said.
‘When did you have time to— Actually, never mind. You can explain it all later. If you’re not on the brink of death, you can help us upstairs.’
She and Yann helped us both to our feet. Raleigh’s eyes lost focus from the pain, but he remained gallantly upright. My ankle protested, but it felt more like an old sprain than shattered bone. I could walk, slowly, though with each step my throat felt ever drier.
As we walked, I studied Yann for any visible trace of what was going through his head.
No one could be more justified than him in wanting Raleigh dead, and yet he’d brought Moira to us.
Perhaps more incredibly, the enchantment had let him find my room during the battle.
I opened my mouth, but didn’t know what to say. Then I stopped altogether.
‘Could I have a word with you, Yann?’ I flicked my eyes to Raleigh and Moira. ‘Alone.’
Moira furrowed her brows and opened her mouth to say something I knew I wouldn’t want to hear, but Raleigh cut her off. ‘We’ll see you upstairs,’ he said simply, then urged Moira along with him, leaving me alone with my former fiancé. Yann looked like he would rather follow them.
‘Thank you,’ I said once they’d vanished around the corner. ‘You saved us all. We’d be dead if you hadn’t arrived when you did.’
‘I saved you,’ he said. ‘You saved him yourself.’
He hadn’t changed, then. It was a strange relief to hear the familiar bitterness in his voice.
He closed his eyes, then sighed. ‘You’re about to break off our engagement, aren’t you?’
I felt a pang of shame. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d still think we were engaged, but of course he would. When we last met he thought I was entranced; he wouldn’t have taken my words seriously. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
He was quiet for a very long time. ‘Do you remember, when we first met the prince, when he first returned to the valley?’
I nodded. I remembered the night vividly, down to the taste of the krapfen we’d shared on Yann’s doorstep.
‘I’ve never forgotten the face you made when you first saw him. You loved him, right from the start.’
That was ridiculous. ‘I was ten. Do you know what a handsome prince looks like to a ten-year-old girl?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You used to look at me the same way when you told me you loved me.’
I froze, not sure how to respond.
‘You were always obsessed with him,’ he went on. ‘You’d bring him up, all the time, even after Juri banned us from speaking about him. Maybe it’s my fault. When you were grieving I thought the stories of him being a monster would cheer you up, but you never let them go.’
‘There was a vampire prince living on the mountain who we thought was slowly killing the entire town,’ I reminded him. ‘Did you expect me to go about my life like that was normal?’
‘No one thought it was normal. Obviously we all talked about him when you and Juri weren’t around. But you fixate on things, Clara, you always have, and there was a passion in the way you hated that no one else shared. And you never showed that passion when you talked about me.’
I stared at him, horrified at myself, stricken with grief for him. There was nothing I could say in my defence. Even on the day he’d proposed, how many times had my thoughts turned to Raleigh? ‘I did love you,’ I said, truthfully.
‘And I still love you,’ he said. ‘But of all the people the prince took from me, you’re the only one who wasn’t a surprise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered again.
‘Don’t,’ Yann said. ‘But if you want to atone, you can start by at least visiting sometimes.’
I threw my arms around him, overwhelmed by my surging relief. ‘I will.’
Upstairs was a maelstrom of activity. Men and women wandered the ground floor in a daze. The traumatised villagers from Orlfen who had somehow survived fared best. The injured had gathered in the dining room, and the very few who weren’t were using whatever they could find to bandage the wounds.
The other humans were more shaken.
Raleigh wasn’t the only vampire who had been cured when the Queen fell.
Most of the court had been changed by her hand, and as her curse dissolved so too did her hold on them.
There were dozens of them, newly human, who no longer knew what it meant to live for themselves.
Most had been hypnotised for centuries. They were waking up for the first time, suddenly alert to their atrocities and with no appetite for violence.
A few vampires were still in the mix – those changed by the Queen’s spawn – but they too were subdued.
Some remained with their once sires, discussing what to do next in hushed tones, but none seemed inclined to attack Raleigh and me as we passed.
In fact, all eyed us with a sort of quiet reverence.
They knew what we had done. And whether their loyalty to her was real or enchanted, the awe and fear they now held for us was entirely genuine.
Enrique was among them. Many of them knew him from when he was a boy, and in the weeks and months that followed he would be vital in helping them cross the bridge to their new lives.
In that moment we hadn’t thought of what would come next or how we would help assimilate an army of cured vampires with the people of Rostenburg.
I was only relieved to see him alive. He had a cloth pressed to a ragged wound at his throat, from someone’s failed attempt to feed on him before realising he wasn’t entirely human.
Like everyone else, he was covered in ash.
The survivors had gathered the fallen in the entrance hall, where the fighting had broken out.
There were nineteen in total – a colossal loss for a town so depleted, but so many fewer than I’d expected.
I searched each familiar face one by one, whispering their names and attempting to place them in my few happy memories of Orlfen.
The last one was the hardest.
I’d known from the moment that Father was launched from the stairs that he never could have survived the fall.
I’d known it, but I’d pushed the knowledge away long enough to survive the fight.
Now that I was no longer in danger I made myself look, and see, and know.
It was plain to me that he’d died on impact.
His skull was shattered. I hoped I was right.
I hoped he wasn’t alive when they tore his throat to shreds.
I closed my eyes, blocking out his visage as my tears began to burn.
This was the man who’d orchestrated the famine.
The man who’d killed half of Orlfen. Deep down I knew that he deserved this, worse than this.
But he was my father. And I knew that if there was the slightest flutter of a heartbeat, I would have brought him back.
If he hadn’t shot Lukas, he might have lived. And if he hadn’t weakened Lukas, none of us would have.
‘You fought well,’ I whispered, then covered his face, and left his side for the final time.