Chapter 52
Fifty-Two
MARIS
Ijerk away from Isla’s hand and raise my gun again. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I look around the room like the reason for her bizarre statement might be there but there’s nothing.
Isla crosses her arms and sighs. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to go the long way around but I suppose there’s no fixing it.” She holds up a hand and snaps her fingers. “Oh, boyyyssss. Say hello to Maris, won’t you?”
At first, I don’t see anything. I turn and look around the room but still it’s just Julian, Isla, and I but then I see it.
There on the back wall. Materializing out of the wall is a dark stain.
It grows and spreads until I see that it’s not just a stain, it’s blood and it’s forming into the silhouette of a man.
A second passes and the silhouette moves.
It lifts its arms and turns its head to look at me with sightless eyes.
I gasp and level my gun at the blood man.
“Maris, there's more.” Julian points to the far wall and next to the fireplace I see two more blood silhouettes stain the wall.
“What is this?” I look at Isla. “What the fuck are those things?”
“They’re the guardians of Vesper House, darling.”
“Guardians?”
She nods and wiggles her fingers in a hello to one of them near her.
In total, I see four blood shadows sliding from the walls and stretching across the floor at Isla’s feet.
“Yes, guardians. Though they weren’t so useful when they were alive.
They were just men then. You know how terribly useless men can be.
” She gives me a knowing smirk and kneels down to run her fingers along the shadows with a hum.
The shadows move and swirl in a frenzy, each of them forcing their way closer to her, fighting for the place next to her.
When she lifts her fingers they’re stained crimson.
“These men I sacrificed here and entombed in the walls to watch over my bloodline. My hearth.” Isla looks up at me and touches the shadows at her feet again.
“They’ve protected you all your life. This house has worked tirelessly to keep you safe.
Even when that man came here. They guided your hand to do what you had to. ”
I swallow hard. Things have always been different in this house. The noises, the thumps and sounds of feet when no one was there but we ignored it. Accepted it. We made jokes and lived our lives alongside it because it was easier than leaving.
Why didn’t we ever leave? Why didn’t we question it?
My hand starts to shake and the gun with it. “You trapped us here like them, didn’t you?”
Isla lifts her hand up and looks at it in the firelight. Blood drips down her fingers and palm. She flicks it off her hand when it reaches her wrist and stands.
“Yes, and none of you fought it. Only your mother. She was…trouble.”
The world narrows down, it’s like I’ve put on goggles that are blacked out except for two small pinprick holes.
Your mother.
“What did you say about my mother?” I whisper.
Isla doesn’t answer me. Instead she looks up at the ceiling of the house and starts talking.
“When I was young, I came here from the East Coast. Our family hails from the Atlantic, but you already know a version of this story.” She smiles and looks down at me.
“We’ll skip to what you don’t know, granddaughter. ”
Julian moves to come to my side but stops when I flinch. “Maris. We have to go. Now. Don’t listen to her.”
“Silence, vampire. We’re having a discussion. We’ll get to you in a moment.”
Julian is quiet. He glares at Isla and I know it’s whatever magic he said that I had. The Siren’s Call. “How are you doing that to him?”
Isla tucks her hand behind her back and turns to the fire like I didn’t say anything.
“Now, I came here because I’m royalty. I was meant for the throne, just like you.
But the thing with princesses is they refuse to let them live.
I didn’t want a throne. I wanted the world. I felt the longing the way you do.”
“How do you know what I feel?”
Isla looks over her shoulder at me and smiles.
It’s such a gentle smile, the curve of her cheek, the barest tilt of her lips.
It’s the smile my mother used to give me when we shared a secret just for us.
How do I see the people that have mattered the most to me in Isla?
It’s like she shifts, second to second, wearing their skin before she’s her again.
The living manifestation of the portrait above the mantle.
“I know it because I’m in you. Every woman of my blood was made for a reason.
” Her hands go to her belly and she looks down at where she touches her sea-soaked nightdress.
“Not just as my offspring but as my connection. My tether to this world. I made you from my essence. I feel you through that. Just the way this house is my anchor. The guardians carry me with them as well. Every soul and thing in Vesper House is connected to me. Mine to control.”
“Just like my mother?”
“Don’t rush the story, Maris.” She drops her hands from her belly and looks at the fire.
“Where was I? Oh, yes, the connection between us. It’s a beautiful piece of magic.
Every emotion you have, very nearly any thought you have is mine if I want it.
I’ve looked as I pleased but nothing has ever really stuck out to me.
Not until him,” she turns back to face me and points at Julian.
“This vampire has complicated things but I see now it’s for the best.”
“What does Julian have anything to do with it?”
Isla glares at me. “I told you to stop rushing the story. Now shut up like a good fucking little girl before I rip your tongue out. It’s not like you need one to sustain me.
” I watch as my great-great-great-great-grandmother turns into a monster.
She’s all monster right now. Outside I hear the sound of a car crashing and a scream.
Gunfire follows but I don’t look away from Isla. She’s like a snake poised to strike.
“I made you. I made this house. I made them,” Isla points at the shadows still swirling like obedient dogs at her feet, “For one reason and that reason was to keep me alive. You might be thinking how? How would anyone do that, and it’s very fucking simple when all you need are four willing sacrifices.
And everyone is willing when you’re a Siren. The guardians were men once, remember?”
I nod because she’s bitchy enough to attack me if I say anything. I’d shoot her but she hasn’t told me the one thing I want to know. My mother. How does she play into this? I’m not saying a word until Isla tells me what she did to her.
“Good, you’re learning. You know, out of all my descendents you’re the most like me. You’re cunning and ruthless. It hardly took anything at all to push you over the edge when it came to that intruder.”
This time I can’t stop myself. “Intruder?”
“Yes, the one who thought they could come into my house and get away with it.” She crosses her arms and smiles at me.
Isla presses a finger to her neck and slowly draws it across her throat.
“You handled him perfectly, Maris. Even if you’re mostly human, you are so much like me. It’s astonishing really.”
“That was you?
“It was. Didn’t you ever wonder why it felt like someone else?
Like you were possessed?” She’s right. I felt like I was someone else.
The rage at seeing my home destroyed had made me blind, irrational, that’s what I’d told myself.
It had been Isla all along. “I was the influence you needed, the little push to do it but I didn’t make you kill the second one. That was all you.”
Julian moves. He’s trying to get me to look at him but I don’t. I keep looking at Isla. “Go on, your story isn’t finished.”
“You’re right, it’s not. I'll get to the good stuff. This reunion is starting to drag, isn’t it?” She points at me. “And don’t worry, when we’re done here I’ll leave you to your house. Safe as a bug in a rug.”
I can sense she’s not saying what else she’s going to do but still I stay silent and wish Isla would get on with it. I chance a look at Julian. He’s still silent per Isla’s command but he’s watching me.
Run.
It’s plain as day in his eyes. He wants me to run. For a second, I think about it. If I do, he’ll rush her. If he rushes her, I don’t know who will survive.
“Pay attention, Maris. This is my favorite part.” She snaps her fingers and I look away from Julian to her.
“The guardians sacrificed themselves for our family, for me. Slit their own throats when the foundation was still being poured. I buried them right where they fell,” she says, pointing down at the floor where her blood shadows move.
“They’ve watched over our family ever since.
I can always count on them to tell me any interesting tidbits that are going on in our home.
For you, it was this vampire,” she makes a face at Julian, “for your mother, it was her plan to leave with you. Foolish woman.”
I feel like the air is being punched out of my lungs. Even if I knew what to say, I wouldn’t be able to. I’ve forgotten how to speak. Words are beyond my grasp right now.
She killed my mother.
“Yes, that’s right, look horrified. I was just as aghast as you are. She thought she could leave our ancestral home and take you. Your mother…she was spirited. Curious. Too curious and she found out the real meaning of being a woman in this family. Do you know what that is, Maris?”
I shake my head. My eyes fill with tears and Isla comes close to wipe the tear that slips down my cheek. The second she touches me, I’m that small scared girl who hid in her granny’s closet because the world was too loud.
“She learned that to be a Martinez woman meant to be food for my soul. All of you only exist to keep me topside, here in this world long after my kingdom fell.” She stops stroking my cheek and grabs my chin, her nails sharpen into claws and they slice into my skin.
“I’m not a god though. The only way my magic holds is if a Martinez woman, my blood, lives here in Vesper Hall to feed the guardians.
They, of course, need someone to guard but that task could never be me.
I’m much too busy enjoying life to come back here and sustain ghouls.
Now that role has been filled by you, your mother, your grandmother, all of you my daughters.
So long as one of you resides in these walls my magic holds.
Your meddling mother tried to break that chain. ”
“You killed her.” When I talk, Isla’s claws dig deeper into my face. I don’t care. “You killed my mother, you fucking monster.”
“Technically, she killed herself and your poor father. I merely influenced her. It was such a dangerous night to take a drive. He knew that, being raised by sailors here in this town. Everyone knew it, but he would go anywhere for her. Follow her anywhere. A perk of our bloodline. I only nudged her to go faster, and maybe I made her lose her grip when she took that final curve.”
“Don’t touch me.” I slap her hand away from me. “You killed my mother.”
“I did. She tried to take you away. She tried to break the chain and that’s not how blood magic goes, Maris. It has to have a locus and our home, our line is that. There’s no escaping it. Every day of your life has been forfeit from the day you opened your eyes. All of it borrowed time.”
“Borrowed time? No, you trap us here to keep you alive? You selfish fucking bitch. You keep us here so you can see the world and we get nothing but a prison?”
“I hardly call being the Lady of Vesper Point a prison. You have all the money and status you could ever need. This town bows to you. The world would never do such a thing. You’re safe here, Maris.”
My mother wanted to travel. She wanted to see Paris. She kept a scrapbook and would show me. She told me she started to make it when my father left for college. She’d always had a crush on him but when he left she finally thought of leaving too.
If he did it, why couldn’t she?
My mother didn’t deserve to die. She never got to see Paris. She stayed here. She died beneath the dark waves. She never saw anything again.
“The world won’t bow for me, for my mother, for any of us,” I let out a bitter laugh, “but it does for you, right? Because you’re so much more worthy than us?
We deserve to live and die in the same patch of fucking land over and over again for you, a spoiled princess, who forced her family into servitude to keep her what?
Young? Pretty? Are you really that fucking scared to die? You coward.”
Isla’s eyes go black. “I fear nothing.”
I shoot three times. Twice in Isla’s chest and another meant for her head.
That shot catches her in the neck when she moves from my gunfire.
The gunfire doesn’t do much but piss Isla off.
She’s at my side and on me before I can try to aim again.
She rips the gun from my hand and pistol whips me in the mouth with it.
“Remember, I only said I needed you alive. I never said in what condition.” She throws me to the ground and turns to catch Julian by the throat when he attacks. “Do not move,” she tells him. “You’re mine now.”
I spit blood out and get to my knees. “Get away from him!”
“No.” She turns to face me. At her back Julian stands motionless just like she commanded him. He can’t speak. He can’t move. The only thing that’s his are his eyes.
Run.
Still they beg me to run.