Chapter Five
Samara
I froze.
I knew this moment was coming. But being so lost in the bloodlust, I hadn’t formulated much of a coherent story. As I’d learned earlier with Raphael, my words weren’t my own anymore. To avoid lying, my lips would spill any truth that came easiest if I wasn’t careful.
I walked over to the fireplace, trying to buy some time to think. If the wrong truth came out, I might very well get my wish for the true death—and the world would be without a necromancer for another two hundred years.
The embers danced in the fire, twisting from orange to red to yellow.
“He approached me shortly after I arrived. Titus,” I clarified, not looking at either of them.
I crouched and added another log to the hearth.
The wood frayed, shooting a splinter into my finger.
Blood beaded at the tip. I stared at it for a moment.
I felt nothing for it, no hunger, no thirst. The flesh closed a second later.
“He claimed that because I was Raphael’s Chosen, I’d be able to get close to him and could serve the Witch Kingdom. The first time, I declined.”
I turned around and faced my jury of two.
Thea was still lounging on the couch, but her expression was sharp, belying the casual posture.
Raphael leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. His face was blank, the way it had been blank when he’d presided over his court—before giving a death sentence.
“You didn’t tell me this.” This came from Raphael. Not an accusation, but… close.
I settled into a chair perpendicular to the couch.
“No. I didn’t. It was just after I arrived, like I said, and I didn’t plan to stay long.
I worried”—I had to pick my words carefully—“if I revealed I’d been approached, you might kill me just for that.
” And that if you captured Titus, he’d reveal secrets I couldn’t afford to have cast from the shadows.
“I may have… liked you at the time, but I didn’t trust the vampires.
Still, I did tell Titus I wanted no part of his schemes.
” Liked may have been an understatement, but the rest of it was the truth.
If only I’d stayed strong.
“I didn’t see him again for a while. But he was working in the shadows.
The librarian who went crazy? Titus somehow convinced him I was a threat with my research so that he’d attack me.
Then Titus kept telling me to see the donors.
And none of you would take me to see them.
” There was an accusation in my voice now.
Sometimes the best defensive maneuvers involved attacking.
“Because you clearly found it traumatic,” Thea argued. “Why expose yourself to something you find objectionable?”
“Something necessary for your survival now?” Raphael wasn’t gloating, but his gaze was direct, refusing to let me avoid that truth.
My gut twisted at the implication. “When I did sneak out to see the donors, I was attacked. And that had nothing to do with the spy.”
Thea frowned, truly perturbed for the first time. “I didn’t know about that.”
“You can say the system is necessary, but it’s deeply flawed. Titus had nothing to do with what went on that day at court either.” The day Raphael had carried out brutal justice when two accused—vampire and vampire aspirant—had tortured a child in a ploy to gain immortality.
“I never said this was a gentle world,” Raphael said, a touch defensive.
I considered another barb, but there was no point.
“The girl we saw later on the streets, she was a donor I met the night I went back to the donors. Murdered.” Even now, I could picture her.
The way I’d failed her… her body ripped limb from limb, like a vampire had toyed with her.
It reminded me of my greatest sin. “Only it was Titus, framing a vampire to manipulate me into helping him. He made a mockery of what was done to my mother.”
Raphael pushed off the wall. “What happened to your mother?”
Shit. I hadn’t meant to say that last part.
Words were slipping out too easily, but instead of awkward confessions about how I liked Raphael’s touch, I was risking far graver secrets.
Sweat beaded at the back of my neck. I needed to be very, very careful in how I answered this direct question.
“She was executed using a starving vampire.”
Thea gasped. Raphael said nothing, his red eyes glowing.
“Now I’m able to empathize with the monster that killed her, though I never wanted to.” The words were bitter in my mouth, but utterly true.
Because I did understand. The vampire… how hungry had it—no, he—been? There were no donors in the Witch Kingdom. He had rended her limb from limb, torn her arteries open and slurped her blood into his emaciated body.
Monsters. Unnatural beasts. And now I’m one of them.
“That’s awful, Sam. I had no idea.” Thea rose from her seat and came closer, pulling me into a hug.
I stiffened and didn’t raise my arms around her in return.
I was inches from her neck. I hadn’t given in to the beast before, when she’d been a room-length away, but now her vein was almost grazing my fangs.
I could bite. It would be better than the blood in the glass before, I just knew it.
Warm. Thick. Magic. I could hear it pumping in her veins, beguiling me.
“You understand the vampire isn’t at fault in that story, correct?” Raphael cut in. “A vampire allowed to feed normally wouldn’t do that. They were tortured—as you may now be able to imagine—and used to carry out some perverse form of justice for the amusement of a tyrant.”
Did he say that to distract me? Or to be an argumentative prick?
In either case, it accomplished both goals. Anger bubbled in me, as rapid as anything. I pushed Thea away so I could stare down the vampire king.
“My mother didn’t deserve to die that way,” I hissed. “No one does.”
“I don’t argue that point. I’m simply bringing your attention to the fact it wasn’t a vampire who decided she would die that way.”
But it was a vampire who did it. As civilized as they could act, they were ruthless creatures. Maybe that one had been starving, but I’d seen exactly how cruel they could be in service of their own desires.
For a moment, I thought I’d had a chance to help stop it, however misguided. What I’d done was wrong, but it didn’t change the fact that, unchecked, the vampires were capable of every ounce of viciousness the nightmares that had raised me said they were.
“It was a horrible tragedy, in any case,” Thea said, breaking the tension. “And then what happened?”
I swallowed down the anger, hard as it was. I needed to focus. “I… my loyalties were divided. All I knew was that this was a brutal, brutal world. There were so many parts, but after the donor’s murder, and then your initial reaction…”
“You decided to poison me,” Raphael supplied when I trailed off.
Thea, back in her seat, twisted to glare at Raphael for his bluntness. But I could only shrug. There weren’t two ways to tell this truth.
“These people matter. All of them, the donors, the weak ones, the humans, the voids. We—” I choked.
I couldn’t use that word anymore. “I told Titus I would help him. I didn’t know what he had planned.
I can’t say I would have disagreed given everything up until that moment.
I was so angry and powerless to do anything else with that anger.
But once I made the choice and he revealed his plan, what could I do?
Go to you?” I finished through gritted teeth.
“Yes!” Raphael was in front of me in a flash, his hands braced on either side of the arms of my chair.
“Yes, you were supposed to come and say, Raphael, I fucked up. And I would have accepted that, because we all do, and I would’ve snapped the pathetic weasel’s neck before he ever got to stab you in the stomach! ”
He was inches from my face, the air between us taut.
I glared back. “And just trust you wouldn’t be the one to kill me?
You seem to be fond of killing first, asking questions never.
” And you might still kill me if you learn that I’d planned to help the necromancer—let alone that I am the necromancer you’ve been hunting.
Raphael was across the room again, his back to me as he ran a hand through his hair and dragged a palm over his face.
It seems even I was able to get on his unending patience.
“I couldn’t go through with it.” I said it quietly, but I knew he heard.
“I know it doesn’t count for much. I know I messed up.
But can’t you understand that I couldn’t pretend everything here was peaceful and right when it wasn’t?
” When children were used as bargaining chips for power, when the vampires attacked, donors were exploited, and humans debased themselves because of their aspirations to become one of the monsters.
The same way I’d become one of them.
I expected Raphael to argue, but when he turned back, he was looking at Thea, not me.
It stung before I could stop it.
It’s a good thing. The less attention he paid to me, the better.
“And you saw none of this.” He spoke it like a statement.
“My visions aren’t always clear.”
That wasn’t an answer. The narrowing of Raphael’s white brows said as much, but he didn’t press. Since I was keeping my own secrets—a dangerous pile of them—I had little standing to pursue that line of questioning.
Raphael’s attention returned to me. “Again, you should have told me. I could have fixed this mess.”
“If you hadn’t tried to turn me, then you never would have had the poison.” The cruel irony is Raphael had nearly died when I hadn’t been trying to kill him. Things needed to change, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to kill him, even though doing so would’ve brought the kingdom to its knees.
“And then you’d be dead,” Raphael repeated for what seemed like the hundredth time. He cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Maybe Demos is right. Maybe I am a fool.”
I stared at him for a long time.
There was so much in that silence. Anger, regret.
Hurt. I felt it deep in my stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was even my own, but it ached as badly as anything ever had.
I’d ripped open a chasm between us and Raphael had done the rest. The line he’d crossed…
there was no way back. No way I could undo my betrayal any more than he could undo his.
It was Thea who once more broke the tension: “Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten this cleared up. Sam, why don’t you join me for some tea and biscuits?”
Even though I couldn’t eat or drink?
Yet I gladly accepted the exit. I needed space from the vampire king I’d tried to kill.
The king of a nation I still needed to bring to heel.