Chapter 34
Arthur Van Der Mill was having a great day, then a very bad one.
He’d been saving up for fourteen consecutive summers to be able to afford a ticket to the The Council’s Annual Ball.
He’d been in the market for a new thrall for a while—someone young, and sprightly, not the old Nandos waitress he’d been stuck with half a century—and the pamphlet for the event had said, “let your fangs hang with a selection of beautiful goddesses.”
Which had all been true. He’d arrived early, gotten gangbusters drunk, and made out with at least seventeen different gorgeous women by the time his friend—some three-hundred year old idiot from Toronto—convinced him to leave the upstairs lounge behind and watch Leonard mess with Little Lady Death.
It was true that he’d been watching her all night.
He’d seen her and Sylvia Maroven enter, arm and arm, through the villa’s double-doors, and it was like the entire room took one shuddering inhale.
No one in the entire history of modern vampirism commanded more mystique than those two, ever since the Maroven Massacre.
And there was a good reason for that. A deep psychological reason that very few of them ever deigned to discuss.
Because the thing is, when you take a species like the vampire, who on the whole are a more powerful collection of people than every other creature on Earth combined, a certain kind of… natural ego develops.
A complacency at the top of the food chain.
So when news travels that the most vicious, powerful, untouchable vampires among them, people like the Maroven Clan, are reduced to a pile of corpses all in one evening, it does something to that collective ego.
It traumatizes it. It says you’re not in charge anymore.
And when a community is traumatized like that, unable to make heads or tails of something so unbelievable, rumors naturally sprout like hydra heads.
Especially when no one had ever seen Aster Castelmar before, not in person.
The prevailing theory was that Sylvia had made her up in order to scare off possible retaliators.
That, in fact, Sylvia had gotten away with a much more mundane sort of murder—like poisoned blood—and made up an elaborate story in order to raise her reputation.
But, out of nowhere, without a whisper or an invitation, here she was.
Strolling in like she owned the place. Apathetic and infuriatingly quiet.
Arthur could admit it made sense that The Council had no other choice but to assert dominance.
Vampires would have laughed at Leonard for years if he hadn’t done something to put the two of them in their rightful place—to make them pay for the crime of not kissing the royal pale foot.
So Arthur watched, sipping a margarita, as Leonard bashed his cane onto Aster’s back.
The resounding crack that followed convinced everyone she was dead where she was standing, that it was only a matter of time before she crumpled onto her knees.
But she didn’t. She coughed a bit, like she’d swallowed spit the wrong way down, then turned around, walked up to Leonard, and patted his forehead with her fingers.
Then she said something like ‘Boom’ or ‘Shoom’ or ‘Bloom,’ Arthur had no idea, it could have been anything, it really didn’t matter, because suddenly Leonard, King of the Vampires, was standing in his tuxedo, straight as a rod, with no head.
Arthur blinked once, twice. Unable to process it. How could he? Aster had pressed only the pads of her fingertips to Leonard’s sweaty forehead, and a moment later, his skull, and naturally his brain, had exploded like shrapnel.
Some spongy tissue even arrived shortly in Arthur’s margarita, just floating around like it belonged in a soup.
Oh, he thought, feeling the strange, eerie sort of satisfaction that comes with meeting a god, even one that might just annihilate you next. She’s real.
***
“Just relax, Sylvia. I can’t open your brain if you don’t relax.”
“I am relaxed.”
“You’re remarkably tense, actually. Which is truly, terrifyingly impressive, given I’ve drugged you with the maximum dose of my sedative.”
“Sounds like it’s a shit sedative, then.”
Vey sighed.
“Four drops of it can put a rhinoceros to sleep in five seconds. I’ve given you twenty-two drops.”
Sylvia groaned, shifting her weight around on the yoga mat.
The truth was, she was high out of her absolute mind in that moment—she was seeing shapes and colors float around behind her eyelids, was hallucinating screams and shouts and all myriad of horrifying sounds—but that wasn’t too different from the normal state of her brain.
“I’m much more formidable than a big gray cow,” she slurred, laying her head down, and feeling the floor rumble. “God, what are they doing down there?”
She frowned, reality suddenly breaking through the fuzz like a knife to the gut.
“Aster,” she breathed, lifting herself into a sitting position.
An immediate bad idea—the world spun, the cabinets in the dusty attic turning into one long brown streak across her vision.
She groaned, rubbing her eyes and trying to stand regardless.
“Have to check on her. Make sure she’s okay.
If one of those idiots is messing with her, I’ll make him eat his own—”
Tugging her sleeve, Vey pulled her back down onto the mat. Sylvia folded over with an embarrassing quickness, and she scowled at him, ready to bite.
He raised a hand to placate her. “She’s fine, Sylvia.”
“You don’t know that,” she slurred. He had grown three heads now. Like Cerberus. “Let me go check on her. Will be right back. You stay here. I’ve paid for ninety minutes.”
She tried to get on her knees again, and this time Vey didn’t try to stop her. Not physically. He just sat there, cross-legged and stoic, and asked her a question instead.
“Can you tell me the exact moment in time that you decided you were unlovable?”
Sylvia froze, her lungs tightening like a snapped balloon. For a second she thought she couldn’t breathe, but then she realized what she was feeling was something else entirely.
An intrusion.
He was inside of her brain.
She was so used to experiencing Suggestion the other way around—vacationing in the subconscious of other people, dragging her lawn chair in and sunbathing in their stupid little memories—that to be under the knife herself was a completely foreign procedure.
It felt like she’d walked into her kitchen and found a stranger re-organizing her spice cabinet.
Her knees wobbling with a mixture of fury and dizziness, she lowered herself back onto the mat, and, with a truly formidable amount of reluctance, turned to face him.
“You’ve been in my brain for three seconds,” she said coldly. “I don’t think you can make deductions like that so definitively.”
“I’m good at what I do.”
“No, I’m good at what you do. So, expert-to-expert, you don’t know shit.”
“For the sake of our time I’d like you try and not lie to yourself as much as possible.”
He said it so casually, without any judgement at all, that it made Sylvia want to hit him over the head with a pan, like in a cartoon.
She gritted her teeth.
Cálmate.
Sucking in a long breath, she licked her lips, then gave him an award-winning smile.
“Look, motherfucker.”
“I’m not here to talk about my—how would you unbearable therapist types phrase it—my limiting self-perceptions? I’m quite familiar with those, having lived in my claustrophobic hell-box of a mind for one thousand years.
“I’m aware of the fact that I think I’m a piece of shit.
I am! I’m a bad person. Big news. Alert Anderson Cooper.
Oh, wait, what? All of us bloodsuckers are terrible people?
Hm. How surprising that would be if I was a dumbass.
But I’m not. I’m someone with eyes and ears, and I have been ever since I was a child.
The evidence is right in front of us. Have you seen this party?
It’s like a pimp house on steroids. So no. That’s not what I’m here to unpack.
“I’m here to talk about the fact that I can’t control my suggestions.
And that’s not an emotional problem. It’s a wiring issue.
Like, there are circuits in my brain that are firing without my consent, and, like an itch in the middle of your trapezius muscles, I can’t scratch it on my own.
So I just need you to shut up, do your job, and unplug whatever cords are crossed in there. ”
Sylvia finished her tirade with a click of her tongue, crossing her arms in satisfaction.
The room was beyond spinning at this point—and the hallucinated screams she was hearing from downstairs had reached levels that would burst the eardrum on even a bloodhound—but the words flowed out of her regardless, like bile.
His stupidly kind blue eyes and grossly well-cropped goatee studied her for a second, and Sylvia foolishly thought that meant that he was listening to her.
“Thank you,” he said instead, and gave her a small smile. “That popped things right open.”
Before she could ask what the hell that meant, he was pressing a hand to her forehead, and she was tumbling backwards into the interior of her own mind.
***
Sylvia groaned. “Why the fuck are we in Riegersburg?”
It was a strange sensation, being yanked down the road of your own memory.
Usually she was the one shepherding the way, picking the right moments to showcase, which ones to stuff in closets.
But now she had access to none of the controls.
She just blinked open her eyes, and was suddenly staring into an empty corridor in the castle she’d grown up in.
Vey’s hand clapped over her mouth. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Watch.”