Chapter 37 #2
I went to the door, leaving her there on the bed. And the last thing I heard as I slammed the door behind me was her sad voice, saying, {We both know that will not be true.}
It was dangerous to go to Septimus’s chambers.
I knew this. My logical mind reminded me of it with every step down the hallway. But I was too desperate to escape Zefiah’s words, too angry to listen to my rational self. If she wanted to call me reckless, then I would be fucking reckless.
I wasn’t sure what I expected to find there, nor what I expected to do.
Maybe some part of myself hoped I would lose myself in skin and wine, in bad decisions, like I always had—eager to ignite the spark that Septimus and I had played with in Bosqua, in the cottage before Ix arrived.
But even that little shard of simplicity didn’t seem quite so straightforward anymore.
I knocked at the door, and a low voice called, “Come in.”
I pushed the door open and stopped short.
Septimus sat on the couch. Alric was asleep beside him.
The child was sprawled out in a way that reminded me of how dogs slept—one leg up against the back of the couch, another dangling over the armrest. A book lay open against his chest. I glimpsed illustrations of animals on the pages, fluttering under his snoring breath.
At the sight of me, a barely there smile crinkled the corners of Septimus’s eyes. A subtle, quick expression—but maybe that was why it took root in my chest and burned there. Because I knew it was a reflex. No part of it practiced.
“He sleeps like the dead,” he said, waving me in.
I hesitated for a reason I couldn’t describe. If I’d found Septimus alone, if he’d invited me to his bed for a distraction, I would have seized on it. And even that, I knew, would have been dangerous.
And yet, this—Septimus here, unguarded, his truest self—seemed so much worse.
Still, I silently closed the door behind me and crossed the room, perching on the armchair beside the sofa.
“He wore himself out,” he said, and there was such a familiar warmth in those words.
I watched Alric’s sleeping face. I had never seen a living vampire child before—at least not up close.
“You’ve never mentioned him,” I said. An understatement, we both knew. Septimus had very deliberately left out Alric when talking about his family.
“Most people don’t know about Alric at all,” he said quietly.
His fingers toyed absentmindedly with a strand of the boy’s hair.
Up close, I noticed that silver was mixed in with the blond.
“My parents are . . . It was a small miracle that someone in my mother’s condition, even ten years ago, could carry a child to term.
I tried to tell them that they could not, should not, have another child.
But they were desperate. Just wanted to keep on making sons, even though they were practically corpses themselves.
You can imagine what kind of state they’re in now. ”
I thought of what I had seen of Erekkus, pinned to the wall in chains of his own blood, and shuddered.
“How much time do they have left?”
He let out a bitter laugh. “That is the cruelty of our curse, Kyrene. They will go on living until someone decides to put them out of their misery. They have been dead in every way that matters for nearly Alric’s entire life.
But I make sure they remain alive, because the moment I bear the title of king, it gets much harder for me to move unencumbered around the world. ”
“Because of the Heir Mark,” I said, thinking of the red swirls that adorned the Nightborn queen’s wings and throat—markers of vampire royalty.
Septimus smiled grimly and shook his head.
“We don’t even get that. The House of Blood has no Heir Mark.
One more punishment by Nyaxia. But even without a crown and a Mark, you can’t shake the stench of royalty.
I’m too public at this point to escape that.
My parents offer protection, both literal and symbolic, as they are now.
So, for my own selfish reasons, I keep them alive. I have always been a terrible son.”
His fingers twisted that silver lock of Alric’s hair, tender as stroking the wings of a butterfly. “But I have made it my goal,” he murmured, “to be a better brother.”
Brother, he said, but one look at the two of them told me that his role was closer to that of a father.
“That’s the real joke of it,” he said. “When you are surrounded by suffering, it’s easy to endure.
You know nothing else. There is no other possible future or past. Everyone you know or knew or ever will know suffers as you do.
But then. Then, there’s a little spark of hope.
” He twirled that strand of silver around in his fingers.
“One little piece of good, and suddenly, it all just becomes unacceptable.”
His eyes flicked up to meet mine.
“You asked me before, ‘why?’ Well. Perhaps now you understand.”
I did. I understood more than I wished I did.
“It’s easier, I think,” I said, “to want a better world for someone else, than it is to want it for yourself. Sometimes I think I would have been different if—”
I closed my mouth. Swallowed the words. But I could feel that Septimus heard the rest of what I didn’t say.
Because he’d stood right beside me as Ix and Kajmar had dangled my other potential future right in front of my face—the child that had died, who would have been nearly the same age as the one who slept here.
And when he said, quietly, “I’m sorry”—said it in a way that sounded like he really meant it—I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I looked into the fire. The flames taunted me with memories I preferred not to revisit. I had never talked about this with anyone—not even Mirie. So why now was the past pressing up against the underside of my skin?
“I was seventeen when the sun fell,” I said.
“I was already pregnant. And I was so—I was so fucking angry when I found out. I had sex one gods-damned time, and it wasn’t even good.
If I’d been even a little less destitute, I would have found a healer to solve the problem for me. But then, the sun fell out of the sky.”
I still remembered that day so vividly. The way it had shattered like someone in the heavens had dropped a vase.
All the pieces had streaked across the freshly blackened sky like little trails of fire.
We had all ooh-ed and aah-ed over it, like we were witnessing some incredible natural phenomenon and not the end of the fucking world. And then the vampires came.
“That was why I went to Vostis,” I said.
“I wasn’t religious. But I didn’t care who I prayed to so long as it meant that I could give birth to that child somewhere safe.
” Childbirth had terrified me. There was so much blood, and blood had become such a terrible liability.
“I was so angry,” I said. “I prayed every night that I would wake up bleeding. And even now I can’t say why it changed, after the sun fell.
” I paused, then answered my own question.
“I think it felt like she had defied the odds. Because I was still pregnant after Vostis fell. After I survived that attack.”
Killing vampires and falling from balconies and being thrown around by explosions. All of that, and my body still hung onto that would-be life.
“And then, after all that,” I said drily, staring into the flames, “I lose her afterward.”
I flicked my eyes back to him, and the way he was looking at me actually startled me—with such compassion. I viscerally lurched away from it, like a hand shying from a flame. With Zefiah’s disappointment still fresh, it seemed just as painful.
“There’s no need for that,” I muttered, looking away. “I’d be a shit mother. Some might say it was for the best.”
The words slipped free before I could stop them, bitter and raw. I thought of a voice saying those words ten years ago.
“It wasn’t.” Septimus’s face hardened. “And anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong.”
Ix. He was talking about Ix’s final words. You would have destroyed your daughter, just like you destroyed the other one.
My face heated, embarrassed that he’d heard them, and ashamed of the way the words themselves still ached.
I wanted to shrink beneath the conviction in his voice.
I still burned with Zefiah’s condemnations.
Now, I didn’t know what to do with this—someone looking at me, speaking to me, as if they actually believed in my goodness.
I said, too casually, “I don’t think so.”
“I have watched you tear down gods for the ones you lost. Those are not the actions of a person who doesn’t care.”