Chapter 22
Nicholas
Nicholas made a decision while dying in Gabriel’s bed. He wouldn’t waste time he didn’t have on silly questions and denial. He was long past that. From this moment forward, he’d deal in truths. Honest answers were what he sought now.
The first truth. His heart was giving out on him. So much so that Gabriel didn’t even notice he lay there, paralyzed by exhaustion but awake, watching him stare absently into the storm raging outside his balcony doors.
There was no quickening of his pulse, no escalation in breathing, or slight movements… Nothing that would trigger Gabriel’s senses.
The crackling fire combated the cold chipping away at his bones; the feral flames casting a subtle glow on the shadowy corner Gabriel stood in, spotlighting his agonized expression. Blood stained his hands and tarnished his once-white shirt, depicting him as savage.
Nicholas didn’t have the strength to look down at himself, but knew he was covered in red, too. He could smell it, but for once, something other than his cravings had a hold of him.
Imminent death.
Gabriel slipped a clear vial from his pocket, swallowing the contents quickly with a shudder, and Nicholas understood that whatever was coming next had just begun.
“You’re the monster.”
He’d never seen Gabriel caught off guard before.
“You’re awake.”
“And you’re the monster.”
It didn’t matter what skin he wore, or how it was possible, but Muharib resided behind his unblinking gaze. Nicholas could see it clearly now.
Gabriel could’ve cleaned himself off, and he could’ve changed clothes, too. Instead—short of dropping whatever illusion he hid behind—it seemed he chose to face Nicholas as the most honest version of himself. An unbreathing monster ruled by blood and sin.
“I’m dying, aren’t I? Answer me. I need to hear you say it.”
“Only temporarily.” He tried to sell it as a good thing with his tone, yet his eyes were full of pain.
“How do I look?” He wanted Gabriel to put words to his cunning cruelty.
“Beautiful.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Nicholas didn’t know how much time had passed since they left Ashfall, but he felt like a sunken husk, hollowed and dried. Seemed death was hasty once welcomed, once on the sharpened edge of it.
“What happens next? How do I become…” He couldn’t even say it. “Like you.”
His dreams and visions excluded that ugly part of things. He’d seen Zayn sick, their symptoms closely aligning, and then he’d witnessed his fangs sink into Muharib’s neck.
“My blood needs to make it into your body a split second before your heart stops.”
“Before it stops?”
“Yes, at least that’s how it happened with Zayn.”
Nicholas wondered what would happen if he said no. Would Gabriel pin him down and force the change on him? It killed him to believe that he would, but he could see the determination lurking beyond his pain. It didn’t matter anyway, not now that he had the solution he needed.
“How long?”
“Hours. Maybe less.”
Nicholas refused to cry.
“How did we get here, Gabriel?” If he was running out of time, he wanted to spend what was left of it learning the truth. How had he ended up in this predicament, in this life?
Gabriel stepped out of his corner, appearing lost, as if searching for a place to start.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, rattling what Nicholas assumed to be more glass vials.
Nicholas fixated on that sound, knowing it couldn’t mean anything good.
He used that knowledge to staunch the dam threatening to overflow inside of him.
“I am what you would call a vampire. In Saraad, I was known as massas dimae, the singular form of—”
“Massasu dimae,” Nicholas finished for him.
“Saraad was also home to witches with innate magic. They aren’t human, but they aren’t like us either. They don’t require blood to survive, and they don’t live as long. We called them saharah.”
A bolt of light arced across the night sky, followed by the crack of thunder.
“There was a clan of saharah called Awlad Abqar, and they were treasured by our governing council. Every saharah clan had a specific gift, sometimes many, and theirs was primarily blood-reading. They could untangle your darkest secret if given access to your blood.”
Nicholas hadn’t seen that in his dreams.
“Is that why they were treasured?”
“No. Not really. Every century or so, the Awlad Abqar bloodline produced a seer, whom they then presented as an offering to the council. Seers were born with the rare gift of clairvoyance. They aided in protecting our land.
“Nearly a millennium before my time, closer to the beginning, a seer reported a bleak prophecy. A vision of war, blood-famine, the dismantlement of our government, and the end of our people. All at the hands of a mix-breed. That’s when the hybrid exterminations began.”
The rain quickened, doing the job that Nicholas’s pulse could no longer do.
“Was Zayn a hybrid?”
“Yes. He was part saahir and part massas dimae.”
Saahir… Nicholas knew that word. He looked toward the nightstand drawer containing his journals, wishing he could siphon the details from them.
“A male witch,” he said without certainty. Saahirat’s were female witches, with saahira being their singular form. So it made sense that saahir represented male.
“Massasu dimae and saharah couplings were forbidden.”
It didn’t escape Nicholas that Gabriel spoke of his homeland and its people in the past tense.
“Births were closely monitored, and all infants were scanned for the mark of the hybrid.”
A conjoined half sun and moon. Nicholas knew instantly, having recalled seeing the peculiar mark on Zayn’s inner thigh, right before Muharib sank his fangs into it. Even now, even after everything, Nicholas still experienced the scorching burn of jealousy at the recollection.
“Breaking the law resulted in the final death for everyone involved.”
“The final death?”
“Regardless of the injury sustained, with enough blood, a massas dimae’s body would repair itself.
Decapitation or death by sun were the only two things my kind couldn’t come back from.
Including disease—the same things that can kill a human could take down a saharah, but they too couldn’t survive the sun. ”
Irongard didn’t get much sunlight, but Nicholas had seen Gabriel’s burnished skin go unharmed beneath it. He wanted to point that out, but Gabriel had already moved on.
“By the time I was born, Saraad hadn’t been under the watchful eye of a seer for many centuries.
It was said that a curse was placed on the Awlad Abqar bloodline, tainting the rare gene that enabled the visions.
That part was all hearsay, legends passed down, and due to the cleansing rituals, there was no one alive from that time to corroborate the tales.
No one except the council. They were allowed to live forever. ”
Gabriel’s tone darkened, adding to the gruesome image made by the specks of crimson along his jawline. He went on to explain that the cleansing rituals were established to control the growing population.
“The saharah were exempt from the rituals. They never lived beyond a century, and their gestation period lasted much longer than ours, causing my people to outnumber them three to one. Because of the council’s fear of the hybrid and their lack of a seer, further measures were taken to ensure the prophesied future didn’t come to pass.
We were segregated. The saharah were moved across the Nile into the desert, a little more than a month’s journey away by horseback. ”
He paused, and the pain in his gaze seemed to extend far beyond what he’d done to Nicholas.
“What happened next?”
“The night our parents died, my father seemed agitated. He’d been teaching me how to fight, helping me strengthen my sword hand.
He cut our lesson short, and I complained like a spoiled child.
If it were up to me, I would’ve spent every second of every day sharpening my skills. Fighting was in my blood.”
He meant killing, Nicholas thought.
“He gripped me by the shoulders, whispering urgently for me to listen.”
Gabriel rubbed his shoulder as if he could still feel the pressure of his father’s grasp.
“Listen to what?”
“I don’t know. My mother called him inside, putting an end to whatever he’d been about to say. That’s the night I snuck off in search of the boys who’d harmed Rayyaan. My parents were dead when we returned.”
Nicholas remembered that story from the night Gabriel rescued him from The Vault. Hamza and Marcus had followed after him, leaving their parents at home alone. Marcus’s real name must have been Rayyaan.
“I’d learn later that shortly before my parents were murdered, another seer was born and placed into the council’s vision pool. A miracle,” he sneered. “The supposed curse had been broken.”
Gabriel looked violent, something Nicholas hadn’t yet gotten used to.
“Hamza wanted to leave justice in the hands of the legion assigned to our village. They conducted a subpar investigation that turned up nothing.”
“You wanted vengeance.”
Gabriel nodded. “I was enraged, bitter, ready to head out on my own in search of answers, but I hadn’t yet reached my maturity—the point at which we peak, when we no longer age.
I was now Hamza’s charge. Rayyaan as well, and by law, we had to remain under the care of our guardian until we reached maturity. It was our way.”
Nicholas was positive his decision had little to do with obeying the law, but he could see Gabriel staying if leaving meant his brother would get into trouble.
He thought back to the journals again.
“You left home and became a mercenary.”
“Much happened before then, but yes. After years of searching and failing to find the truth, I turned to the one thing I had become good at.”
Killing.
Nicholas wondered how many people he’d had to kill while on his hunt for justice. He fought hard to remember something Gabriel had said to him at the restaurant.
“There is nowhere that anyone can hide from me.”