CHAPTER 11 #2
Alex: Believe me, I want to roll my eyes every time I’m around Lara.
I should have warned you. The media are like vultures, looking for any possible opening to make a situation appear like something that it isn’t if they think it will sell.
You don’t have formal media training. I should have better protected you, but things were chaotic in there.
Dani: So you’re saying this is my fault?
Alex: I’m saying Lara’s father owns seventy percent of the media outlets. He can force them to write any story he wants. Just ignore it. This will blow over.
Alexander shut down his phone. He would have to deal with Lara and her constant need to manufacture drama another time. Right now, he and Henri had more pressing matters at hand.
“You ready?” he said to his bodyguard, who was pulling on a black facemask beside him.
“Just once, Your Highness, when you text and inform me that we have plans for the evening, it would be refreshing if you were referring to a hockey game where we consume far too many spicy barbecue wings.”
Alex squeezed his shoulder. They dissolved in a swirl of smoke, reappearing seconds later in the palace dungeons.
The air was noticeably colder, barely above freezing. Water dripped from icicles that hung from an exposed pipe in the ceiling. The lone guard on duty, who was shivering before a crude heater, started to shout, but was instantly quieted when Alex pressed a cloth doused in chloroform over his mouth.
While Henri checked the rest of the corridor to make sure they hadn’t been overheard, he went to the closest cells, where prisoners were already emerging from beneath painfully thin blankets at the futile hope of rescue.
“Can you get us out of here?” a woman in the first cell whispered hopefully.
She was small, coming barely to his shoulder, with dark, curly hair. Her hands were locked in front of her with silver manacles that gleamed so brightly in the dark, dank prison block, they almost seemed to glow.
Fae magic.
Inwardly, Alex swore. They were connected by a thin silver chain to a collar at her throat.
Bindings like these were expensive, and very effective for holding vampire and werewolf prisoners.
The silver alloy drained moon magic, preventing wolf shifters from changing into their stronger beast form and fighting back.
Fae magic was required to hold the strongest vampires, and it effectively locked the prisoner in place, preventing them from scattering themselves into ash and escaping.
“When did they collar you? Do you know where the keys are kept?”
“The king has them.” A boy in the next cell, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, pressed his dirty face up to the bars. “He wears them on a chain around his neck.”
“You’ve never seen any of the guards with a copy?”
The boy leaned in, voice urgent. “The only time he removes the manacles is when he comes for one of us. You know, when it’s time for him to feed again.”
The boy sounded so terrified, and yet so resigned, that Alex wanted to be sick. “You’re aberrants.”
He looked down the row of cells, to the dozens of faces staring back at him.
He wasn’t na?ve. He knew his father had been kidnapping magically gifted humans off the streets for decades, driven by the insane belief that draining their blood and their life energy might somehow increase his own strength.
Had it? He couldn’t be sure. He held few memories in which he hadn’t feared his father.
As a child, he’d told himself the king was feeding from the prisoners he captured, and letting them go.
That it was wrong, as any feeding that happened without consent was wrong, but…
this went so horrifyingly beyond that he wanted to be sick.
As he’d gotten older, he’d been forced to accept that his father was a monster, slaughtering humans like they were just another cut of meat at the butcher shop.
Judas Visconti was far from the only cruel and sadistic vampire out there.
There was a growing movement in vampiric society that wanted to stop treating the killing of sanguines as a taboo topic.
He recalled what Finneas had said, that the race of vampires would, for better or worse, have to decide for themselves what sort of society they wished to become.
Thirty years had passed since the pandemics had fractured society, dividing the world into wolf and fae, human and vampire.
Alexander sometimes wondered in the generation that had passed since the world fell and rose again as something new, if some of his kind, those who hadn’t had the benefit of being raised by human mothers like him, had lost their compassion entirely, had forgotten how very close they once were to those they wished to treat as a food source, animals to be hunted and killed without thought or consequence.
“How often does he come?” Alex asked the aberrant boy. “I might know a way to get a copy of the key. But I need information.”
It would be a big ask. Finneas hadn’t exactly been willing to help the rebellion when Sera had pressed him. They had to first find the missing fae.
“Every three days.” The woman glanced down the hall. “We were all picked up in the last raid. The king doesn’t seem right, Your Highness. There’s a madness in his eyes. Please, you have to help us. He’ll be coming for another one of us in two days if he keeps to his schedule.”
That didn’t give them much time.
“This is very important,” Alex said. “I need to know if any of you have heard of fae being abducted near the border at the east side of the sector.”
“One of the girls they brought in on the first night of the raids was fae.”
Alex hurried down the line of cells to find a thin woman wrapped in the blanket from her cot. She’d been beaten so badly one of her eyes was swollen shut.
“You’re sure? You saw her?”
“We were all in the holding cell together. She was quiet, scared. Kept to herself. There were several like her that were very young and we were trying to protect them.”
“That was very good of you.”
Her expression darkened. “When they brought out the silver manacles, I think she might have tried to will herself back to the fae realm. She was breathing really hard. I’m not sure why she couldn’t.
Maybe she’d been injured when they captured her or they dosed her group with something.
As soon as they locked the manacles around her wrists, her glamour fell away.
We could all see the pointed ears she’d disguised, the too-sharp teeth.
They immediately grabbed her. At first, I thought they would just put her in a different cell, like maybe the fae were a danger to us, but they took her away immediately. We haven’t seen her since.”
That was a start, at least.
“You’ve been very helpful.”
“Can you get us out?” The woman reached through the bars. The moment their hands touched, Alexander felt the dark power of the fae manacles leaching his strength away. He quickly pulled back.
“First, I have to find a copy of the key.” He glanced down the corridor. Henri was hurrying towards him, twirling his finger in a wrap it up gesture. They needed to go.
“If you walk out of here, if you turn your back on us, we will all die.”
“I’m coming back.” Alexander lowered his voice. He could hear guards approaching from the end of the corridor. “I need you to trust me.”
“Your Highness, we have to go,” Henri said urgently.
The woman’s eyes widened in surprise. Immediately recognizing his error, Henri swore.
“I thought it was your voice,” she whispered. “Please, Prince Alexander, don’t abandon us.”
“I’ll be back. I swear it. I’ll find a way to get the keys.”
“Sire, we’re out of time. I’m sorry.” Henri gripped his arm, ghosting them out of the prison block.
They reformed back in Alex’s apartment. A fire was burning in the grate. Sera was curled up on his sofa in leggings and an oversized hoodie, staring into the flames. She didn’t look up when they approached.
Henri cleared his throat. “I’ll be just outside if you require my services, Your Highness.”
“I think I’m staying in for the night. And thank you again for earlier.”
Alex waited until the door quietly closed behind Henri, then sank into the armchair opposite his sister. Sera’s dark auburn hair was loose over her shoulders, and she was toying nervously with the black gloves she always wore. Now he was pretty sure he understood why.
“Is it true what Finneas said?” he asked gently.
She bit her lip. “Do you hate me?”
“I could never hate you. I wish you’d told me. I hate that you’ve been dealing with this on your own.”
Sera swiped beneath her eyes. “For a long time, I was convinced I wasn’t going to manifest with any powers.
It’s rare enough, you know? Dad is freakishly strong, but Mom was human and I thought I wouldn’t have to worry.
But then I started feeling sick at night.
Terrible fevers. I would sweat through all my clothes.
I would feed all the time and nothing helped.
I was in med school by then, and it was grueling. ”
Alex nodded. “I remember how hard it was for you. We were all worried.”
“I wondered if I could have picked something up at the hospital. Then I thought maybe I was just working myself sick from the stress. For a while,” she pushed a strand of hair behind one ear, lip starting to tremble, “I even worried maybe I was getting sick like Mom.”
Alex moved to the couch to sit beside her, and she inched away.
“Please. I know you mean well, but this is easier if you don’t try to hug me. Touch… terrifies me now, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Gods, Sera. I wish I’d been paying more attention.” He stayed beside her anyway. When he held out a hand, palm up, she hesitantly placed her gloved fingers into it, eyes filling with tears.
“My power is volatile. Finneas is right. I am strong. Maybe even stronger than our father. But I can’t control it. Sometimes, I think I’m suppressing it, but then something happens and—”
She bit her lip, wiping away a fresh wave of tears.