Chapter 20 #2
“You can’t save yourself, so how can you save him?” The words were soft, barely perceivable, but they beat at my sanity, which was always hanging by a thread.
I willed my wings out, wrapping Richard inside with me, which pulled us together, and vanished the light from his sword. The voice was also cut off, and it was just the two of us in the cocoon of my protection.
“Thank you,” Richard whispered, lips brushing my ear.
Shiver. “I was starting to doubt whether I was worthy of you. That is, I already know I’m not good enough for you, but was almost convinced that I wasn’t what you wanted.
It’s not about being good enough, but about being what you want.
If I’m not what will make you happy, if I’m not what you want in your life, then I’ll leave, but until you decide that, I’m yours.
Forever.” He kissed my hair and held me tight.
I shivered again and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my forehead to his neck, inhaling his sweet, sweet, glorious blood.
And then I bit him. Because he said he was mine, and I needed the vampire in me to defeat this monster.
The darkness smelled of the Vampire King, but not quite right.
Why would my father want to kill me when he could have done so at any time before this?
He’d given me to the Scholar. If he wanted me dead, why didn’t he just let me die when I was a helpless baby?
Rich groaned and wrapped around me, bodies closer than was entirely appropriate.
Or at all appropriate. Except that we were married.
How were we married? He tasted so good. Outside of this little cocoon was despair and misery, but in here was absolute bliss.
This is what good relationships could be like, built with love that acted as a shield to protect you from the difficulties and hardships of the world.
His thoughts bubbled over into mine, the sweetest thoughts filled with his love and devotion, but there was an underlying layer of fear, that he couldn’t protect me, that I’d be ruined for loving him, that he’d mess up worse than I could ever forgive.
That he wouldn’t be enough to keep anyone’s love, like he hadn’t been good enough to keep his mother.
My heart ached for him, but I wasn’t drinking him because I wanted to taste his thoughts or because it made me happy on a molecular level.
I used his magic, his strength, with the blood binding and the life binding, and it was like having heavenly fire in my veins, rumbling power that seemed inexhaustible.
I drew it into me and then I sent a tendril of seeking out of my cocoon, searching the darkness for the origin of the miasma of misery and depression that would devour everything if it could.
I found it, and slipped inside the mind of my own father.
He should have realized I was there, but instead he let me walk through an opium dream filled with images of my own blonde insane mother and someone else, blonde, sweet, innocent, until she turned and became a vision of blood and death that he had to put down.
His sister. The one that reminded him of me.
And my mother. The one that he’d hoped he could save from her demons, but only ended up killing with his love.
Vampires couldn’t love. Vampires could never love or they’d break the world and their loves.
For a long time I was lost in his darkness until I felt Richard call me back, his lips on my ear. “I love you. I was lost until I found you. I’ll love you forever.”
I blinked and then refocused, firming up my mental boundaries so the Vampire King couldn’t get inside my head as I went into his, and then I went back out into the darkness. If I couldn’t stop him, we were all dead. Or undead.
His sadness and keening anguish beat at me, but I pressed through it, searching for the reason. Why did he come here to kill me? Why had he sent all of the assassins? But there was nothing about me at all. Only the misery of his past.
Richard bit my ear and I was once again in his arms, happily soaking in the feel of him. “Whatever you’re doing, I don’t like it. You’re turning cold in my arms even while you’re drinking my blood. I don’t mind you using my magic, but your life is precious.”
I licked his throat and pressed my fangs deeper while he made a sound of desire that brought back the bathtub scene and the bower. None of that.
I needed to focus. The Vampire King wasn’t here for me. He didn’t have motivation on his own and so must be externally directed. But who had the power to do that? Demons? Angels?
I sent my thoughts back to the Vampire King and went through his head, searching for the hooks in his psyche.
Pain. I reached into that pain and found so much self-hatred and loathing, it almost swallowed me up, but somewhere Richard was murmuring the words of our duet, his sun-born perfect vampire.
I wasn’t alone. And I wasn’t completely hateable. And neither was my father.
I found a memory of me, after I was born, when his hands were stained with my mother’s blood. She smiled at him like sunshine, like everything that had been cut out of his life when he’d been turned along with his sister.
Her voice was weak, but her soul was strong. “She’s so beautiful. Our love is so beautiful made flesh. Protect her from the darkness. You’ll do that. Because you love us.” She said it with so much faith. So much hope and trust.
His despair and misery was an ocean burying me down with him.
I struggled against the despair. “But you did protect me. You gave me to the Scholar, who would teach me everything I needed to know to be safe. Protected me from your court. You loved us well.” My words weren’t said out loud, but my intention was strong, loud as thunder and bright as lightning, cutting through the darkness.
“You loved us well. You did your duty. You chose love against your nature. You saved me from your darkness.”
The hook dissolved, but there was another memory, his sister alive, making daisy chains and stories about how to defeat the dragon.
Then a shadow fell over her, and she became the monster’s toy.
Tortured, twisted into the darkest abyss.
He’d failed to protect his sister. The monster turned him and then made him turn her.
Instead of saving her, he condemned her to an eternity without a soul, damned in eternal torment.
There was no light, not in the darkness of that reality. Tears ran down my cheeks somewhere while Richard stroked my hair and murmured words of sweetness that held me together.
I forced the words out. “But you released her from the darkness. She’s at peace. You gave her peace instead of suffering. She loved you. She wants you to be at peace with your past. She loves you still. Like you love her. Love doesn’t have to be pain. Sometimes it’s more than pain. It’s purpose.”
The hook dissolved and then the darkness dissipated.
The moment he realized I was in his head was a horror. Instead of opium dreams, it was crystalline daggers, but he wrapped around me, pinning me down, holding me hostage in his head.
“You came to die.” His voice was much saner than earlier.
“No, I came here to save you. Someone else was controlling you. Unless you meant to crash my tv show and kill everyone. Also with the hiring of assassins. Goblins are so expensive.”
His mind was very still, but I could feel him stretching his awareness elsewhere.
With a snap I was released and placed inside my own mind with perfect smoothness, much better than I did it. Like he’d had centuries of practice or something.
“Show yourself,” the Vampire King commanded. “I would have words with my daughter and her new husband.”