Chapter 31
Lazaro Reyes
Meeting Santos Reyes for the first time had been like meeting God. I was so terrified that my tiny body shook, much of it due to awe and love that only fear could inspire.
My life had expanded with the force of an explosion one spring day when I was only a child.
Up until that point, I’d lived confined inside the walls of a Spanish castle preparing for the fate I didn’t really understand, not until long after it came to me.
I was educated by red-eyed tutors, faceted to fit a role chosen for me before I could even remember being chosen.
I’d never really been a child, never met anyone my age, never even left the outer wall of my home, until one day I was tucked inside a carriage that took me to a ship that carried me across the ocean with everyone I’d ever known locked in boxes around me, and then after another long and arduous journey across new lands, I arrived in the Spanish colony of Santa Fe.
Santos’s home was eerily lacking in the usual dozen security guards protecting him.
I walked through the quiet halls as if they were a trap.
My father wasn’t in his office. That damned Hunter had me so paranoid that for a moment, I’d feared she’d somehow gotten to my father like she had the others.
I found him in the barely lit library, staring into a glass of blood on a plush upholstered couch.
The low table in front of him was cluttered with empty bottles. He didn’t react as I approached.
“Father?”
“What are you doing here, son?” It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed me. He was poised to snap up at any moment.
“You called me here.” I didn’t dare step any closer for fear he might actually jump me. Didn’t he remember the call? I’d abandoned a wondrous fight just to be here.
“We need to end Vicente. I need you to do it. He trusts you still, or at least I hope he does.”
What kind of fucking mind game was this? “Why would you possibly want to kill your brother?” I mistakenly let emotion color my words.
Santos got in my face, slow enough that I could have moved, but I didn’t.
I looked down on him with the few inches of height advantage I had, though it meant nothing when it came to real power.
“He’s trying to do the same to me. He sent me away, hoping I was fool enough to never return.
He’s conspiring against me. Against us.”
“Vicente wouldn’t do that.” He had Santa Fe. He had no use for a less significant city. And beyond that basic logic, Vicente respected Santos. He’d never betray his brother. I trusted him.
“You’re against me, too? Are you working for him?” Santos pressed his finger to my chest. I’d never known him to be this way. What had snapped in him?
“You really think that of me?” Santos shrugged, grinning at the challenge. “Is that why you have six bastards starving in the hold?”
His suspicious gaze cut into me. I held it, not backing down. I’d served Santos Reyes for 200 years. I’d been born and raised to be his son. Had he truly succumbed to madness?
“Is this about Nemesh?” I asked, my voice a whisper that shamed me. “Our meeting with him? The light he saw in me?” I would have extinguished that light tonight, but my loyalty to Santos was so strong that I abandoned the effort to come to him. Why couldn’t he see that?
“Nemesh is the only one I trust.”
“Then you’re a fool.” I’d never spoken to my father with such disrespect. I’d never needed to. The room reeked of blood and fear, and it set me on edge, unable to tame my words.
“And you’re no Reyes. Not anymore.”
All the air and all the light left the room. The whole world disappeared around me.
Not a Reyes.
That’s all I’d ever been.
I would be trudging through the dull humiliation of a party tonight to celebrate the turning of a woman my father chose for me, just because I was a Reyes. I had nearly murdered a woman at her home just an hour earlier to prove my loyalty to the Reyes name.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed in terrible silence. Santos had ceased paying any attention to me, like he expected me to walk away without a fight.
“Is that why you called me here? To disown me all of a sudden?”
“All of a sudden,” he repeated with disgust. Anger radiated off his body.
I’d never seen my father’s eyes look so dead with hate.
“There’s nothing sudden about this. You think this is about Nemesh seeing how weak you are, but I saw that weakness in you the day we met.
I thought I could make you into a man worthy of the family name, but I can’t take any more disappointment from you, Lazaro.
You’re done. You’re not my son, and you never have been. ”
It was too much, too painful, but it was like those human stories of sustaining grave injuries and adrenaline pumping through their bodies so they could carry on and survive. I didn’t know what I was surviving on.
“Don’t you see what he’s doing to you, Father?”
“Get out of my home before I kill you like I should have done 200 years ago.” Santos glared back at me as he left the library.
Suspicion was calcifying into truth in my head. That devilish bastard Nemesh had pushed Santos far enough to lose his soul, and there would be no getting him back.
* * *
Lazaro Reyes
Santos’s cruel words echoed through the dark cavern of my mind as I drove home. I couldn’t predict anything he was doing anymore, and he refused to acknowledge his own destruction, brought on by the puppet master Nemesh.
My father had disowned me, and he wouldn’t be coming to Selena’s celebration of her turning.
As I wound around the path to park in the back of my home to allow more space for guests, I was startled by the thought pounding in the shadows of my own mind.
There was no point in going through with tonight.
My love for Selena had never felt so shamefully hollow as it did now.
I needed time I wouldn’t be afforded to think about the question that had never before entered my mind.
Was I only going to spend eternity with Selena to please my father?
Caterers and party planners and all manner of deeply annoying humans crowded my home.
I ignored their every attempt at capturing my attention, but I couldn’t be so callous to the gaggle of witches who’d invaded.
I hadn’t had the chance to clean up the evidence of my fight, and Selena’s family commented on it with horror.
I couldn’t bother with charming them as I usually did.
“Where is the lovely Selena?” I asked her mother. My betrothed was preparing for her celebration in our shared bedroom, of course, which I would be avoiding while I made some attempt at screwing my head back on straight.
“Your brother arrived early, too, dear,” Ms. Castillo said. “There was a dark cloud of despair hanging over his head, so I sent him away.” She eyed me suspiciously, then, and I feared she might comment on my own turbulent emotional state.
“Right. Make yourselves at home, ladies. I’d better go get ready.” I rudely departed.
The light was on in the guest room, and my half a breath reeked of cigarettes and booze.
Peter was stretched out on the bed. He sat up like a scandalized woman, as if I was the intruder in my own home.
He would have been an easy enough target to take my anger out on, but the fun of it drained out of me when I saw the damned kid was crying.
“What’s wrong with you?” I tugged my shirt off and tossed it on the ground, not bothering to check it for damage just yet.
“Oh, hey, brother,” he blubbered, and oddly, his sad state made me feel better. “Did you get into a fight or something? You look like an unmade bed.”
I ignored the insult and waited for an answer to my question at the bathroom door. His innocent facade crumbled.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re not in love with Selena now, are you?” I asked.
His weak laugh devolved into weeping. “No. Don’t get me wrong, she’s gorgeous and wonderful and better than you deserve.” He shoved away the tears from his cheeks.
I didn’t have time for his emotional breakdown. I unbuttoned my pants and moved to go into the bathroom for a quick shower, but I couldn’t make it past the doorway. Now of all moments, I decided to take an interest in my failed brother?
“I’ve never seen you like this. Did something happen?” I stood with my arms crossed at the end of the bed.
“That’s the stupid part. Nothing happened.
Well, my motorcycle got stolen, but that’s not the reason I’m…
like this.” After muddling through his own dull thoughts, Peter brushed his fingers up and down his chest. “I’m all empty inside.
Like my heart is missing. My soul. I don’t want Selena to feel like I do. ”
“How long have you felt this way?” I spoke softly with fascination for the poor bastard’s condition.
It had to be his stolen memories that had rendered him like this.
Whatever the Hunters did to him left him half of who he was.
I wondered if his foolish love for Fallon Hunter had been sapped away with the memories, or if they’d cruelly left it behind with nowhere for it to go.
That damned woman’s power to render even a vampire like Peter Fenton into this mess was almost admirable.
Part of me wanted to rip Peter open and study this persistent love that was now choking him. What was it about that Hunter?
“It started…today? With the tears. Maybe after she gave me the invitation? It just made it real. Before then, I was happy, wasn’t I?”
He was begging me for answers. The pieces in his grasp weren’t fitting together for him to adequately explain his despair, and it was cruel not to tell him the truth.
I couldn’t make myself speak, though. I was too sickly fascinated with the Hunter’s power, and I didn’t want Peter getting in the way of my chance to examine it more closely. What a bizarre woman she was.
“Get it together, Peter. Selena’s party’s starting soon.”