6. Lazarus #2
“Wait.” He walks around me slowly and for some reason his gaze makes me self-conscious all over again. Tossing me right back to my early years. Back with, Mother. “You didn’t know.”
I’d ask how but Vex is proving to be more intelligent than I pegged him for, which is equally wonderful and terrifying.
He belly-laughs on the sidewalk. Thankfully we are alone.
“How is that possible?”
“I was getting to that.” I clear my throat. “If you’d stop jumping ahead.”
“You are painful to listen to.”
“Pardon.”
“You tell a story like an old man, you wait for each reaction like I care. What I care about is the fucking point.”
“Crude,” I sigh. “A bride is almost human. Always a woman and they are marked by the Goddess. A small half-moon freckle.”
“None of this is the point,” Vex cuts in.
“The point is a single vampire cannot tell if any woman is a bride.” He gets it. “Think of all the women walking around this city at any given time. Think of the women you passed on the way to the museum.”
Speaking of which, I sure hope my basement isn’t in pieces. I make a mental note to ask him.
“How would I even know.”
“And thus the paradox.” We turn right, intending to make a large circle around the Penn. “A vampire couldn’t know. A bride won’t know. In order for any of us to know if a woman is a bride we must form a coven.”
“That’s what this is?” He steps in front of me. “Listen, I’m thankful and all that you saved my ass, but here’s the thing I didn’t sign up to be in a coven.”
“Oh but you are. You are a part of my coven, Vex.” I step close to him inhaling the motor oil scent that perpetually clings to him. “You are of my blood. Your heart beats because mine does, you are mine, Vex Knight.”
“My name isn’t Knight.” He swallows as he feels the power radiating off of me. I keep it leashed. Hidden behind thick walls. The power built over many lives lived.
“It is now.” I fix his shirt and step around him. “A vampire can only sense a bride in a fully formed coven,” I explain walking away knowing he will follow me. “Three or more. It is, the Goddess’s way of ensuring her survival.”
“Because vampires are cunning creatures.” I don’t smell a lick of fear on him. Good.
“Calliope doesn’t know,” I explain. “And we cannot tell her.”
“Why?”
“Because Vex, she must love us first.”
“What kind of fairy tale bullshit is that?” He yells into an alley. He turns back to me. “What... even I can understand just how badly that can go. You got to be upfront with a dame. You can’t just… lie. Women don’t forgive that kind of shit.”
“They do not.”
Vex is saying this like a discovery. I have known it the longer way, the way you know a thing when you have already paid for the knowledge.
“Is there a way around that?” he stammers. “I don’t want to lie to Callie.”
“We are not lying. We are evading.” I sigh. “And there are few loopholes.”
“Tell me about them,” he says all too excitable.
“If the vampire isn’t of a coven and they offer the bride a blood bond. He doesn’t know she is a bride, but he will afterwards. It’s happened a few times in history.” I don’t tell him just how rare it is.
We don’t offer many blood bonds anymore.
“Skip,” Vex says. “No bonds, not out of the gate.”
“It’s no longer an option anyway,” I explain. “We are a coven.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know.” He shakes his head. “How long had she worked there?”
“Years,” I say drily. “If Calliope were to know before she’s ready it can go badly.”
“Stake to the heart badly?”
“Yes.” I’ve seen it happen. Though it’s often beheading that does us in. “She must fall in love first and then accept the Sanguine Agreement.”
“The fuck did you say?”
My lips twitch. Completely involuntary.
“The agreement. We offer her immortality, in exchange she gives us life.”
He’s quiet for a long moment as we head back to the Penn.
In fact as we cross the street he remains quiet. Unlike him.
I have had this conversation now twice in my long life. Soren’s didn’t go this well.
There are still nights I expect to wake to an empty house and a note. There won’t be a note. There hasn’t been a note in two hundred years. I have learned not to mistake that for safety.
Vex takes everything as it’s tossed to him. I don’t know yet whether that is endurance or absence.
And Calliope. Oh Calliope.
She hates me. I know it with all of my tainted soul.
She’s hated me since the day I hired her, not for the job she wanted. For the job so beneath her that her venom is well directed. I deserve it.
The choices I made were those of a vampire believing she was nothing more than a human beneath me. Making me no better than my family.
She hates me because she stays for the money I offer her.
She hates me because I knew if she continued her work she’d find something. Uncover something she can’t know.
I took away her livelihood, her spirit, her life, because she might uncover the secrets of vampirism.
I couldn’t have that.
So I kept her close.
And she hates me.
I made a choice. And every night since, I’ve sat in an office above hers and listened to her walk the halls of this building. I built her cage and gave her the key in installments.
Fifty thousand at a time.
“Alright.” Vex smirks. “I’m gonna go visit Callie.”
“Vex.” I grip his shoulder. “You are a part of this coven. Calliope is not for us.”
“Why?” He jerks away dislodging my hand and he crosses his arms. “Why.”
Fuck it. “She was too close to the truth when she interviewed for me. I told her I didn’t have a position for her, offered her the security position with the benefit of fifty thousand paid toward her student loans at the end of each year worked. Then I gave Soren the job.”
“If you fucked this up for me.”
“I’m telling you I fucked this up for all of us.”
He gets in my face. “Then start groveling.”