Chapter 33 #2
“Two contracts, and your thrall will take care of some things for us. Just a few tasks, in the southern hemisphere. We’ll rent her for, oh, say, a decade or two. Nothing big.”
Sylvia felt newly invigorated to kill him. Ferally, she hissed, “No fucking deal.”
He groaned, leaning back into the satin couch he was spread against. “Agree to the terms, Sylvia, or Aster won’t leave her alive anyway.”
Sylvia froze, her blood going cold. He rolled his eyes.
“Oh, please. You’re a negotiator at heart, Sylvia. You must understand that this is just good business. She’s far too great a threat for us not to neutralize her while we have the chance. So either you lend her to us, or we deal with her now, after your session with Vey.”
“You’re bluffing,” Sylvia said coldly.
He hummed, then lit a cigar. “I don’t bluff.”
Sylvia’s mind reeled. It calculated a hundred different plays in a matter of seconds, rehearsed them all in her head from top to bottom.
Most of them included her tearing his head off his body and playing tennis with it.
Most of them ended with both her and Aster dead on the floor in a pile of tragic, Shakespearean carnage, Aster “Romeo” Castelmar and Sylvia “Couldn’t Get Her Shit Together In Five Hundred Years, Even With Every Chance To Do So” Maroven.
In the end, only one plan made sense to her. It wasn’t surefire, but nothing was.
She selected it with her mental cursor, and let the consequences reverberate through the timeline as they may.
“Fine,” she said, taking the cigar out of his mouth. “I agree to your terms.”
He smiled, fangs shining under the lamplight.
“Atta girl,” he laughed. “He’s in the penthouse.”
***
It only took fifteen minutes for Sylvia’s command to kick in.
Aster was standing by the bar when it happened, stock-still, listening out for the sound of Sylvia’s voice. She had zoned in on it somewhere at the top of the manor, on the highest floor, murmuring something. It filled her chest with relief. As long as Sylvia was talking, she was alive.
Strangely, being a thrall made her even more attuned to Sylvia’s vitals than she’d been before.
She knew that when humans were enthralled, they very frequently became vampires, but she’d never thought about what a vampire thrall might get out of the equation—it was so unusual to think of enthrallment as positive in any way, the potential pros were so rarely discussed.
But there appeared to be a few.
For one, all her senses were dramatically heightened. She could hear everything, every word out of every mouth, all circling the drain of her brain stem. And yet, at the same time, her thoughts were less muddled. She could organize them and catalogue them—Threat, not Threat—and then snap them away.
It was a very clear, single minded existence.
It was also seriously boring.
She leaned on the bar and sighed, peering around the room.
The couch in front of her was squeaking as two vampires were making out loudly in front of her face, one of them pausing briefly to handcuff the other. She grimaced as they struggled with the constraints, unable to click them together correctly, before ultimately throwing them aside.
Jesus Christ.
The whole room just oozed amateur, low-grade p*rn. The kind you bought for two dollars at the back of a video store then turned off after about fifteen seconds of disgustingly bad acting.
Which is why, all things considered, she wasn’t even that mad when one of Leonard’s goons strolled up to her, pinched her cheek, then said to his buddy next to him, “Leonard just told me we’re renting her out for the next two years. How about it, a night with Lady Death herself?”
Aster blinked, and Sylvia’s words flashed in her head.
If anyone tries to touch you, kill them.
Aster inhaled. Sylvia always knew the right thing to say.
“Hi there,” she said, extending her hand. They both took a step back in shock, to which she smiled warmly, her eyes bulging just a bit. “What? Didn’t you want to get to know me?”
The man began to stutter, looking back and forth between him and his friend. The entire room had seemed to take notice, too — all the chatter abruptly screeching to a halt, like a broken vinyl record. Even the couple on the couch broke apart to stare.
“Leonard told me she couldn’t talk,” he muttered, speaking to the crowd.
“That’s fair. I’m not much of a conversationalist.”
She took a step forward, and cackled when he shuddered backwards, collapsing onto the floor by accident.
She could feel Sylvia’s command pulsing at the back of her skull, demanding her to work faster, but she pushed against it — as much as she would love to start popping bones from sockets, killing just about anyone would jeopardize Sylvia’s session.
So she fought against the instinct with as much force as she could manage, her whole body feeling like a ticking time bomb. If she just focused on her breathing—
The stairs creaked. Aster’s ears perked, her gaze quickly sliding across the room to meet Leonard’s.
The man stopped at the foot of the stairwell, then proceeded to pound the hardwood floors with the bottom of a long, black cane.
He’d been carrying the cane around for the duration of the party, and at first Aster had thought it was purely decorative — but now, with her enhanced senses, she could see a faint glow around it. It was an enchanted item.
Something that could kill.
“I wouldn’t worry, Robert,” Leonard said, walking slowly over to the man who had collapsed on the floor, and helping him up with a lowered hand.
“Once Vey puts that misguided Maroven daughter out of her mournful misery, Lady Death will be ours for much longer than two years. Something more like an eternity. That’s more than enough time for us to fully tamp down her personality, don’t you think? ”
As Leonard’s meaning crystallized in her mind, Aster’s entire world stopped spinning. Like a polaroid dipped abruptly in a bucket full of blood, everything turned suddenly red; the ceiling, the table, the chairs, the windows, the vampires’ pudgy, age-less faces, the dark night sky, the moon.
She felt a rage inside her unlike anything she’d experienced before.
It wasn’t some kind of flash of fury, like a gun going off.
No, it didn’t flash at all. She was just dunked in it, like falling into the ocean in the dead of winter.
For a moment it was frigid and cold and everything felt terrible, like the world just might end, but a second later, everything became obvious.
They were planning on killing Sylvia. And for the crime of even entertaining that thought, every single one of them was about to meet whatever afterlife existed for monsters.
“What did you just say?” she asked calmly.
Leonard chuckled. Lightning cracked in the window behind him, and in that brief flash of light, Aster could see a hundred yellow eyes watching her.
“Nothing that concerns you,” he said, smiling placidly as he took her chin in his hand again.
“Sylvia told me how you work. Without her go ahead, you can’t do anything.
And she told you to stay right here, with us.
Not to move an inch for the next thirty minutes.
Lucky for us, that’s plenty of time for Vey to do his best work. So why don’t you just sit quietly and—”
Aster gently took the hand which was holding his cane, and tapped it gently. He trailed off, confused by the action.
“Hit me with this,” she said, matter-of-fact.
He let out a surprised bark of laughter.
“Hit you…? I know thralls are masochistic, but I’ve never seen one so transparent—”
“I won’t retaliate. I promise. Just hit me with it. Aren’t you curious how much I can take?”
He paused. Then smiled.
“I can sniff a loophole from a mile away, Ms. Castelmar,” he said, licking his lips. She could tell he was considering it. “You want to trigger some sort of self-defence mechanism in yourself. Quite wise for a thrall, but I won’t give into it. I’m not stupid.”
“I just thought it would sate your curiosity,” She shrugged. “It’s fine if you don’t want to.”
She turned away from him, toward the bar, and took a swig from a shot glass. Vodka burned down her throat, and in her head, she began counting down from ten. Ten seconds until they all died. Nine seconds until they all died. Eight seconds.
At six seconds, she felt the equivalent of an earthquake land on her spine.
All her vertebrae shattered in one go. Impressive. It even made her cough a little, seizing into the table. She gripped the sticky surface, and took a breath in.
“Are you sure you didn’t kill her, boss?”
Four seconds.
“No. I can still hear her heartbeat.”
Three seconds.
Aster could feel the shockwave working its way through her. Aster swallowed the force like a black hole, pulled it into herself and held it there, simmering.
That was the trick of her entire thing, after all. While those who didn’t know her called her Death, Sylvia affectionately—and stupidly—referred to her power as the handbag.
It was annoyingly correct. And also a little bit of an undersell.
Aster could hold every ounce of violence ever thrown her way inside of her, and carry it like a dumbbell. And just like a dumbbell, it hurt a lot when you threw it at someone’s face.
She straightened her back, vertebrae snapping into place like a zipper, and slowly turned around. Leonard's face shifted—from idle curiosity to open alarm—as she smiled at him. She gently wrapped her hand around his forehead.
“Boom,” she whispered.
***
Sylvia was sitting criss-cross on the floor of Doctor Vey’s studio, inhaling incense and preparing to have her mind dug through, when she heard the equivalent of a bomb go off.
“What was that?” she mumbled, sitting somewhere between panic and confusion. He had already started the process and had given her a drink that served pretty much like a sedative.
Vey squeezed her shoulder.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said, eyes glowing red. “I’m sure it’s just Leonard dealing with a cockroach.”