CHAPTER 4 AILEEN
CHAPTER 4
AILEEN
Zion was one of Atalon’s Lieutenants. He had close-cropped dark hair, deep-brown skin, and a pair of startlingly bright amber eyes. Tall, at six feet, and slender yet with broad, swimmer-like shoulders, he could’ve easily been a model in a different life, what with how he held himself, all aloof and stoic.
Sitting in front of him in his office, I felt a foreboding sense of danger. Unlike my previous boss, Lon, the kitchen manager at the Rayne League whose combustive emotions were written all over his sweaty face, Zion was a blank slate. I couldn’t get a read on him no matter how hard I tried.
And for the past ten minutes, I’d been trying my best, shifting anxiously in my seat as Zion read through my first-ever written compare and contrast essay.
A couple of hours ago, when I’d first walked in the office, Zion had greeted me with a blank face and told me to take a seat. Right after, and without too much preamble, he handed me two printed pictures of different portraits made by the same artist and told me to write an essay about them.
For the first few minutes, I stared at the portraits until I sweated buckets, trying to find what to write about. But the two pictures seemed almost identical in terms of technique and coloring.
In the end, I forced myself to lift the pen and scribbled down nonsense about whatever I could think of, like stating that a paint mark on the first portrait must be a way to show the tears of the artist in contrast to the other or that the second portrait’s shades were darker as if to reflect the artist’s state of mind.
It took me over an hour to finish, and when Zion took the paper and began reading, I turned into a bundle of nerves. The last time I’d written an essay was back in high school, before I dropped out. To say I wasn’t confident about my writing skills was an understatement.
“Who is the artist?”
I whipped my head up and stared at Zion. He stared back, amber eyes swirling, and I gulped. “B. Hightower,” I replied quietly, referring to the scribbled signature at the bottom right of each portrait.
Zion’s face remained stoic as he asked, “Have you seen other paintings by this artist?”
Was that a trick question? “No,” I responded carefully, not taking my eyes off the Lieutenant.
His face didn’t change, but his voice sounded a touch colder than before when he said, “Then you shouldn’t assume what the artist felt based on two very similar portraits.”
After grabbing a chair, Zion took a seat next to me and put my paper on the desk. “When writing a compare and contrast essay about an artist you’re not familiar with, do not resort to assuming their emotions, but try to focus on the mechanics of the paintings.”
I tensed when he gestured toward the paper with his chin. “For a first attempt, it’s not too bad.”
Surprised, I turned to look at him. “What?”
“You heard me,” he said, and was it my imagination, or did his face soften a bit? “You’re perceptive, and it seems like you can capture details well. The only thing you lack is better understanding of terminology.”
Then ... it wasn’t bad? I felt my cheeks warming, and I lowered my gaze and turned away from him, not wanting him to see how much his compliment meant to me. It reminded me of that time at the greenhouse back at the Rayne League, when Ragnor saw my sketches and said I had talent ...
A yawning abyss of pain opened at my chest at the sudden thought, and I curled my hands into fists. “I thought I was supposed to be a museum guide assistant,” I said, trying to distract myself from remembering painful things. “How does writing papers come into this?”
“To be a museum guide assistant for the Atalonian, you need to have a depth of understanding that common folk do not have,” Zion said quietly, and I focused on his voice to distract myself. “Writing papers is more for you to get familiar with the Atalonian artwork and practice verbalizing the appeal of these works so that when you start working as a full-time guide, you will be professional enough to not just broaden the viewers’ horizons but sell certain works to potential buyers. It will take you a few months, but you’ll get there. For the time being, focus on these essays.” He paused suddenly and gave me a long look. “At least until the annual gala event occurs, that is.”
I nodded jerkily, trying not to think of how he said I’d be ready in a few months . It was driving home the fact that I was really here, at the Atalon League. That I had a new job now. That I was no longer at the Rayne League, no longer a mere kitchen assistant.
And the pain was so unbearable that focusing on the rest of Zion’s lecture became a feat of sheer willpower.
Purple sky greeted me when I opened my eyes.
At first, I simply accepted what I was seeing. But then I remembered that I shouldn’t be able to see the sky, since I was in the Atalon League’s underground compound. I sat up quickly, and when I saw where I was, my heartbeat quickened, and cold perspiration collected on my skin.
For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. In the days after I started my job at the Atalonian, I’d been so mentally tired from viewing a bunch of artwork until my eyes bled and writing compare and contrast essays until I wished I could use a thesaurus to find other words for marvelous that when I returned to my room in the evening, I would pass out into a dreamless slumber.
But now, I was in a distinctly familiar field. Wilting grass spread across the plain, brushing against my bare hands, and there didn’t seem to be an end to this field in sight.
It was the same field from the Auction. The one I’d been transported to, where I’d held the dying bird in my arms.
But why was I here now, in my dream?
I looked around me, and when I turned around, I froze.
It seemed I wasn’t alone.
Before me stood a petite woman I’d never seen before. She had curly dark-blonde hair braided down her back and a large scar running from her sealed-shut left eye down to her collarbone. Her other eye was brown and open, trained on me.
With her short build and somewhat smooth face (but for the scar), she could pass as a teenager rather than the adult I suspected she was. The real question here was, Was she a figment of my imagination?
“Aileen Henderson in the flesh,” she said suddenly, her voice raspier and lower than I would’ve expected. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
Tense, I folded my arms and asked, “And who might you be?”
She stepped toward me. “I’m Eliza,” she said simply, “though who I am doesn’t matter. What matters here is who—or rather what —you are.”
An ominous feeling crawled into the pit of my stomach. “I don’t think I follow.”
Pausing mere inches away, Eliza raised her hands and pressed her fingers against my temples. “You have some interesting power within you,” she said almost casually, as if she was speaking about the weather. “I could feel it the moment you appeared, but this proves it.”
I swatted her hands away and stepped back, grimacing. What did she just do? Did she somehow realize I had a time-stopping power? But that wasn’t possible ...
Or was it? I knew nothing about my powers, after all. I had tried using my newfound ability in the past few weeks, but no matter how much I tried wishing time would stop, nothing happened, and I got only a headache for my trouble.
But how could this woman know?
“I can see the wheels turning in your head,” she told me with a lopsided grin. “How about we sit and talk for a bit?”
She sat down and patted the spot next to her. Hesitantly and still very much on guard, I took a seat beside her.
“First of all,” she said once I sat down, “pray tell, where the hell are we?”
I didn’t expect her question, because, to be frank, I hadn’t thought about it before. “I have no clue,” I replied with a frown. “Isn’t this a dream or something?”
Her single eye widened, and she suddenly laughed. “A dream? I highly doubt that.” She put her hands behind her and leaned back, smirking. “You might be asleep, but this is no dream, Aileen.” She looked ahead, a thoughtful expression taking over her face. “Right now, we’re in the space within your mind.”
All I could do was stare at her speechlessly.
She glanced at me and smiled when she saw my raised eyebrow. “I see they don’t teach you about the changes made to your soul in your newcomer vampire course.” She sighed. “Well, I’m not going to get into the whole science of it, but the gist of it is, the moment you received the Imprint, your soul, your very mind, irrevocably changed. This plateau”—she gestured toward the field—“is the shape your soul and mind took after the change.”
While what she said was far more outlandish than everything I’d learned about being a vampire, I somehow understood. “So every vampire’s mind is depicted like a field?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s the first time I’ve seen a mind like yours. Normally, the mind becomes a chamber of sorts, for all of us—humans, vampires, and other supernatural beings—have a limit to how far and wide our minds and souls can stretch. But here there is this false feeling of limitlessness. Intriguing,” she murmured, turning to appraise me once more. “Very intriguing.”
I was at a loss now. Other supernatural beings? Limits? What the hell was she talking about?
“Anyway,” she said and jumped onto her feet, “show me your powers.”
Suspicion crawled into my head. “Why do you think I have powers?”
She gave me an exasperated look. “Lying won’t help your case,” she said, offering me her hand. “Now get up, and let’s see what you’ve got.”
I ignored her hand and stood up on my own. “Why should I trust you?” I asked her directly. Because by now, I fully understood that Eliza was a real person. How she ended up in my mind, so to speak, was a question for another day. Right now, I needed to understand what the hell she wanted with me.
As she turned to me, Eliza’s face grew serious. “As things stand, I’m debating whether to kill you or let you live.”
How considerate. “That doesn’t help your case.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I could’ve lied to you and said I’m here to help you with no ulterior motives, but I’m choosing to give it to you flat out. You are dangerous”—her eyes narrowed—“and I would rather have you be on the right side than falling to the wrong one.”
Smiling bitterly, I folded my arms. “You seem very confident about being able to kill me.”
She gave me a pitying look that made my hair stand on end. “I hope, for both your sake and mine, that you never find out.”
I was about to give her a biting retort when she clapped her hands and said, “Now let’s start with homework: take out a book called A Sacred Past from the library of the League you’re currently in, and start practicing according to the instructions on page five thirty-two. I’ll visit you again in a few weeks to check on your progress.”
Her words made a different question jump to my mind. “Are you a Sacred vampire, then? Which League do you belong to?”
Eliza smiled, and I realized she was beginning to vanish. In fact, the entire field was growing darker, opaque, as if someone were pulling the shutters down.
But just before the field, the sky, and Eliza disappeared, I heard her whisper, “Study hard, Aileen, and I might feel like keeping your secret.”
The clock came to a stop.
With shallow breaths and cool sweat dripping from my face to the cold red-tinted marble floor, I stared at my battered wristwatch, which I’d placed on top of the dresser in my bedroom.
I’d finally done it.
It’d taken two days since Eliza appeared in my dream, or my mind, for me to check out the book she’d told me about. In those two days, I’d been going back and forth between whether to ignore the stranger who appeared in my dreams or to at least test the book out. Eventually, curiosity won, and I went to the Athenaeum, the Atalon League’s library, and threw caution to the wind.
And now, after studying this one page incessantly, I’d finally managed to see the results of my hard work.
Time had stopped.
Eliza’s words were not empty after all.
My face breaking into a smile, I slowly climbed to my feet and began counting the seconds in my head. I reached only five, though, when the pain began.
Release! I thought determinedly, eyes on the watch, and the moment the clock hands began to move, the pain was gone.
Taking a deep breath, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, listening to my rapid heartbeat. I could hold on for only five seconds, but it was better than nothing.
Once I felt my heart returning to its regular pace, I rolled to my side and grabbed the book, A Sacred Past . Apparently, it was the first volume in a comprehensive trilogy detailing the accounts of all known Sacred vampires through the ages to date.
It went into quite the minute details too.
For instance, the page I was on read:
As the second Sacred, Tiglath had the privilege of learning from his maker, Menes. Menes, who had observed his long-gone Lord and the first Sacred practicing the principles of what was then believed to be the “Physics of Light,” thus passed his knowledge to Tiglath. In the ancient vampiric texts, it is said that Menes had Tiglath practice the three conditions, which are as follows:
“?a?”—the act of emptying one’s mind and launching it into the void.
“Là-ga”—the act of sharpening the void into pure, undiluted focus.
“?u”—the act of pulling one’s will to the forefront of their mind.
Once these three conditions are met, as long as the vampire has magic, it will present itself and lead them accordingly. Such was the case with Tiglath; once he perfected the three conditions, he described the experience in his personal journal as follows:
It was an unintelligible voice in my head. I understood its intentions; it wished me to act. To bring forth the storm inside my heart and conjure it into reality. It is a compulsion that’s not meant to be rejected, and I let it enfold me and lead me to my long-craved goal. [p. 1098, “The Fangs of Assyria”]
When asked about the accuracy of Tiglath’s description, my friend, who helped immensely with the creation of this book, advised me that it was a personal experience for each Sacred. Not every Sacred would feel the same way as another when it comes to the conjuration of magic. In Tiglath’s case, he heard a voice. In my friend’s case, it was close to a physical sensation that guided him. Another Sacred might even smell the intent, or taste the knowledge, or perhaps even visualize what needs to be done.
So long as the three conditions above are met, in one way or another, the Sacred will know what to do.
This was the page Eliza told me to read, saying that it would help me utilize my powers. While it was definitely helpful—I could finally stop time, even if only for five seconds!—it also made no sense.
I was a Common, and over the course of my few-minutes-long Auction performance, I’d suddenly gained some sort of magic.
But becoming a Sacred only a few months after being given the Imprint was insane. In the end of the book, there was a list of all known Sacreds all over the world to date, Atalon and Ragnor included. All of them gained magic after hundreds of years. Renaldi, too, the youngest Lord in the States (only ten years into his Lordhood), developed his magic after two hundred years, which was considered the fastest out of all known Sacreds.
So how come someone like me gained magic? And to stop time, no less?
Ragnor would’ve known, a voice whispered in my ear. If you only put your ego aside, you could ask him.
I cut that voice off just then, heart racing. I would rather die ten times over than approach Ragnor of my volition after what he did to me.
My chest tightened. Once upon a time, what he did to me referred to giving me the Imprint without my consent. Now, it was about throwing me away. How low I had stooped when I had chosen to have an affair with the man who took away my freedom.
Despite it all, it was impossible to stop my mind from betraying me with thoughts about how it had been between us. Ragnor’s warm hands caressing the sides of my body, his thumbs softly gliding down my abdomen, then lower ...
With a jolt at the sudden intrusive thought, I slammed the book shut and went to the bathroom, ready to take a cold shower to give me a good wake-up call, when I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. At first, I thought my eyes were betraying me, but when I leaned forward, I saw that it was real.
My hair, which I’d dyed only a few days ago, was as fair as sand, when just two hours ago, it was still chestnut brown.
I’d been dyeing my hair regularly once every six months since I was ten years old, and even then, it was always the roots, since they grew in my natural hair color. Never before had the dye worn out of my entire head of hair, and never so quickly that it required I go to the hair salon so frequently.
In one of the vampire-anatomy classes back in the Comprehensive Newcomer Three-Month Course, Abe, my former teacher, taught us about the ways our biology differed from humans’. For instance, we didn’t excrete bodily waste through urine or feces. Instead, the food and liquid we consumed was generated into metaphysical energy called Lifeblood. That meant we never had to go to the toilet, but we did need to eat three meals a day and drink blood instead of water—since our blood helped the generating process, it needed to be refilled on a constant basis.
Our hair cells, however, worked exactly the same as humans’. The cortical cells, keratin, and melanin remained the same and could be manipulated by chemical means, meaning that if I wanted to permanently straighten my wavy curls, I could do it just as well as any human, and the same went for the hair pigment—dyeing the hair held steady just as much as with humans, especially since my hair was naturally blonde, meaning it was far easier to darken than if I was a brunette going blonde.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew that this was somehow related to me developing the time-stopping magic in the Auction, since this strange phenomenon had been happening since then only. But no matter how much I read about Sacreds, especially in A Sacred Past , I read nothing about hair dye wearing off. Perhaps no Sacred had ever dyed their hair before?
Whatever the reason, it was obviously related to my magic. Perhaps I should ask Eliza about it.
Though trusting a mysterious woman who suddenly began to appear in my dreams didn’t feel like the best course of action.
I was again in the field under the purple sky, but this time, it seemed different.
Gone was the wilted grass, and instead there was a bed of healthy green grass intertwined with wildflowers of all colors. The vividness of the flowers made me feel a tad bit dizzy, as if it was all surreal.
Was it the space in my mind again, the one Eliza had talked about? But something about it not only looked different but felt different too ...
I began walking, my bare feet brushing against the sleek grass. As I walked, I could see in the distance a silhouette of what I thought was a man. The person was too large to be Eliza.
As if they knew something I didn’t, my feet picked up the pace until I was running through the field, watching as the figure became larger, more coherent, and when the man turned around and I found neon-blue eyes looking back at me, desperation I didn’t know I still had in me propelled me forward as I tried to reach him—
A hole opened in the ground, and I fell through. Before I even had the time to scream, my vision shifted, and my feet touched solid ground. I looked around and saw a familiar room waiting, one that shared an eerie resemblance to Ragnor’s office back at his League. Only, in this office, greenery covered the walls, and wilting flowers, seemingly imported from the dead field, dangled from the ceiling.
My heart booming in my ears, I reached for the office door and pushed it open. Inside the office, the neon-blue-eyed man turned around to stare at me.
And suddenly, I couldn’t contain it anymore. “Don’t leave me,” I breathed out, feeling wetness welling in my eyes. I reached out to him, and to my utter relief, my hands landed on his hard chest. “Please,” I murmured, standing on my tiptoes to kiss his neck. “Please stay ...”
He was immovable as my lips pressed upward, toward his. I curled my arms around his torso and smashed my breasts against him, desperately needing to become one with him.
“Take me,” I whispered against his ears. “Take me, Ragnor. I’m yours, after all—”
“Are you?”
His words made me jump, and I dislodged myself from his body as if it was on fire. I stared at his face, confused and hurt. “Yes,” I said pleadingly. “Yes, Ragnor, I am—”
“Then why?” He cut me off, eyes blazing, and suddenly it seemed like he was yards away and not just a few steps in front of me. “Why did you never tell me you’re a monster?”
I froze, fear climbing up my spine. “That’s ... I ... Ragnor, I—”
“You’re a monster,” he said flatly, his voice so cold I jolted as if he’d slapped me. “I don’t need monsters.”
He turned around and disappeared into smoke that suddenly filled the space. I gasped, tried to grab at the smoke, feeling as if everything I’d built was crumbling under my feet—
My eyes flung open, tears sliding down to my pillow.
I’d been doing everything I could not to think about Ragnor. I’d been busy with my work and secret time-stopping practices. I’d been spending every bit of free time I had with either Eleanor or Isora or both, helping myself to enough social time to not think about unnecessary things.
The days went by so smoothly that I thought I’d succeeded. With every week that passed, I felt like I could make it. That the future wasn’t so bleak anymore.
But then night came, and I found myself right back at square one.
I thought it was easier to get used to my new League. I thought I was doing well. More than well ; I thought I was doing tremendously, wonderfully great.
And yet it seemed it was all for naught.
Ragnor still reigned over a large piece of my heart.
I missed him. Terribly.
But I hated him terribly too.
Ragnor digging his fangs into my throat.
Ragnor kissing me and tearing my clothes off.
Me begging Ragnor not to sell me to another Lord in the Auction.
Him giving me hope that he might still buy me out.
The Auction host exclaiming, “Sold for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to Lord Atalon!”
Burying my face in my hands, I sucked in a deep shivery breath and told myself, “You’re moving on. You’ll show him what he lost. None of it is your fault. It’s all his.”
I repeated this unshakable truth a few more times until the tears dried and my heart stopped breaking.
And yet Ragnor remained lodged in my head, stubborn as ever and refusing to leave.
Would I be able to have a day when I no longer thought of Ragnor Rayne and didn’t feel like I was falling into a dark, endless abyss?