Chapter 29
“You’re bleeding.” Xavier appears before me the second I step into the house. Sunlight touches his skin, searing it. He doesn’t even flinch at the pain. Dressed in black pants and a black button-up, he looks elegant and deadly as usual. I’ve yet to see this man in anything but a suit.
He takes my hand and brings it up to his face, looking at my finger. “You pricked your finger.”
“It wasn’t on a spindle cursed by an angry fairy, so I’m fine,” I say, trying to pull my hand away.
“You were doing magic.” Devon steps in behind us and closes the door, sealing out any and all natural light. Xavier’s gaze flicks from me to him and back again. “You were both doing magic.”
“I was merely a spectator,” Devon says, though he’s holding the maps and my little bag of supplies. I have the book in my other hand and my heart is still racing from seeing the circle around a vague area on the east coast.
“My parents,” I start. “They’re here in the US. Somewhere by Connecticut or Massachusetts.”
“Wren,” Xavier says gently. “I told you, they’re dead.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“I’m not,” he presses and I jerk my hand back. “Why would I lie?” His eyes search mine, trying to convince me to just believe him.
“I had nowhere to go before,” I counter. “You knew I wasn’t going back to the Order. But if I had family, I could leave.”
“If you had family, I would take you to them,” he says and I don’t want to be stupid and believe him. “But you don’t, Wren.”
“Everyone has a family. I literally couldn’t be born if I didn’t.”
“You know what I mean,” he continues. “Your parents and your aunt were killed the day you were taken.”
“How would you know?”
“I looked into it,” he presses.
“And what? You just expect me to believe it?” I widen my eyes and shake my head. “What’s my last name then?”
“Wren,” he tries. “This isn’t going to solve anything.”
“Yes, it will!” I reply, voice getting high pitched. “I deserve to know where I came from!”
“I tend to agree,” Devon says apprehensively and Xavier growls.
“Why won’t you tell me?” My brows furrow and I look at Xavier. “If you really know, why wouldn’t you tell me? I don’t believe you.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“You won’t like what I have to say.”
“I probably won’t believe what you have to say.”
“Wren,” he tries, and I can tell he’s losing his patience.
“Tell me,” I say through gritted teeth and the light above us starts to hum as they grow brighter.
“You need to learn to listen.”
“No,” I snap. “My locator spell worked. My parents are somewhere on the East coast and I’m going to find them.”
“You will find their corpses, because they are dead!”
“I asked to find my blood. Corpses don’t have blood.”
Xavier steps in. “I am trying to protect you, Wren.”
“Keeping the truth from me is hurting, not helping.”
“You are impossible,” he snarls, fangs coming down.
He takes the book from me and turns, going to the counter and loudly setting the book down.
“Fine. Have it your way.” He comes back, stopping just inches from me.
Electricity radiates off of him, pulsing through me. “Your name is Florence Blackwood.”
I gasp. Vivian was telling the truth. Which means my parents are alive. They have to be.
“Your mother was Felicity Blackwood and your father was David Walker. He took your mother’s last name because the Blackwood line of witches was more respected.
Your mother’s younger sister—your aunt—Francine, was with them in Italy at the time the Order of the Mystic Realm gave Vivian and Marco Russo the order to kill everyone in their way so they could get to you.
You weren’t born in Italy, but your family was vacationing there at the time.
The Order thought it would be easier to catch everyone off guard while they were out enjoying Rome and having a good time.
Marco fired the first shot and put a bullet in your father’s head from a rooftop across the street.
” He raises his eyebrows. “Want me to keep going?”
My body has gone numb. No, this isn’t what happened. Vivian and Marco might have taken me, but they didn’t slaughter my family to do so. They couldn’t.
“My parents are alive,” I say again.
“They’re not, Wren.” Xavier brushes my hair back and wipes away a tear I didn’t realize had run down my cheek. “I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. Your parents and your aunt are dead. They’ve been dead for nearly twenty-five years.”
“Why me?” I ask, voice breaking. “Why…why would the Order?” I shake my head, refusing to believe it. There has to be someone in my direct line then that caused the spell to work. Someone alive.
“I don’t know,” Xavier says gently. “Knowing the Order, it was strategic more than personal.”
Feeling like I might pass out, I put a hand on Xavier’s chest and close my eyes.
His hand lands on the small of my back, bringing me comfort.
I want to believe him. I want to trust him.
More than anything, I want to have a person that is a true ride or die, being the loyal and loving partner to me that I know I can be to them.
But this doesn’t make sense.
The locator spell was specifically done to show me my parents. And it did.
* * *
“Hey,” Mabel says, softly knocking on my doorframe. I’m sitting on my bed, flipping through the book. “You okay?”
She doesn’t need to tell me that she overheard everything that was said only a few moments ago. Vampire hearing is ten times better than humans and she easily heard every single word that was spoken even if she wasn’t intentionally listening.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“It’s okay to not be okay sometimes,” she says and comes into the room.
“I know. I guess I’ve been trained to not show emotions because it can be seen as a sign of weakness.”
“Not letting yourself feel anything is the real sign of weakness. You’re avoiding what’s scary because it’s easier to just ignore those feelings than deal with them.”
“You’re right,” I tell her. “That’s a good quote, actually.”
“Is it? Should I write it down?”
“Yeah. You should.”
She grabs her phone and quickly adds that to her notes app. “Hey, our pic from last night got so many likes! Want to see?”
Smiling, I nod and spend the next few minutes looking through Mabel’s Instagram account. It seems the majority of her followers are interested in seeing what it’s like to be a rich vampire, but there are a ton of comments saying she’s surprisingly relatable.
“You said that was my first kill last night,” Mabel says, abruptly changing the subject. “It wasn’t.”
“I meant the first demon kill.”
“I killed the first person I drank from,” she tells me and casts her eyes down. “I didn’t mean to. I bit him too hard and the bleeding wouldn’t stop.”
“Oh. I…I honestly don’t know the right thing to say here. Sorry?”
“I didn’t even drink all the blood. I just watched him die because I didn’t know what else to do. I hid the body in a closet for three days until it started to smell. Then I told Zek and he cleaned it all up.”
“I’m sure there’s a learning curve to drinking blood.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much what I was told, but I never wanted to do that again. That’s why I only drink blood that’s already been spilled.”
“The tea cups make sense now.” I give her a half smile, thinking about how confusing it has to all be. She didn’t want to become a vampire and yet she is one against her will and she has to drink blood.
“I don’t ask where the blood comes from,” she goes on. “Zeke brings it to me. I don’t want to hurt anyone. That was the one thing I had him promise me.”
“Zeke?”
“Yes. Before Xavier turned me. I told him never to let me hurt anyone. I saw a lot of it. Not all that I can remember. My children that remained human wouldn’t want anything to do with me if I was a killer.”
“This whole thing is so messed up.”
She laughs and makes a face. “I know, right? But you’re okay?”
“I mean…no. This is a lot to take in. None of it makes sense and yet it does and the spell wouldn’t have worked if my parents weren’t there.”
“I don’t know how magic works. Maybe try again?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I shake my head. “I don’t know much about how magic works either.”
She gets her phone out again. “Blackwood?”
“Yeah.” I lean in, watching her put different things into the search bar. “Blackwood murder” brings up a few different crimes, and searching the specific names gives us nothing. If the Order was behind this, then they would have scrubbed the internet of everything.
“Things rarely turn out how you expect,” Mabel tells me. “I’ve seen that enough just in the hundred or so years I’ve been here.” She logs back onto Instagram. “I can say with certainty that plans change at the last minute more times than not, even for people like Xavier.”
“That’s true,” I agree. “What’s that phrase that’s something like make plans and God laughs or something like that?”
“We have to be adaptable.”
“Yeah, we do.” I lay down and let out a heavy sigh. “At what point are we fooling ourselves though? Adapt, be willing to change, blah, blah, blah. It’s just crap we tell ourselves so we don’t feel disappointed.”
“That’s probably true, too. But what’s the alternative? Hate that life took a turn we didn’t want it to take and be miserable?”
“That is a choice.”
She lets out a snort of laughter and lays back next to me. “I wanted to leave the Order.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Back then, women weren’t allowed to hunt. I hated being told I wasn’t enough. I was good at a lot of other things.”
“You are.”
“I did leave the Order, not on my own terms, but I left.”
I turn my head, looking at her. “You came here.”
“Not here here. But the main house.”
“Main house?”
She nods. “The one in Long Island.”
“Long Island?” I repeat as my mind starts to whirl.
“Mh-hm. The house is quite fine. A few of Xavier’s great-great-great-great progenies live there now.”
“I need a history book just for this family,” I quip and Mabel laughs. “Xavier and Theo are brothers by blood. Xavier was turned, then he turned Theo.”
“Yes. But he never turned his sister because she was pregnant at the time and didn’t want to outlive her children.”
“And she was Ezekiel’s…mother?”
“Grandmother.”
“Okay,” I say. “They’re from Spain.”
“Yes.”
“And they came here, to this area in the south during the Revolutionary War?”
“I think maybe a little after? But yes. They help build this city.”
I sit up, shaking my head. “What about the New York house then?”
She sits up as well and shrugs. “I think it was just good real estate. It’s very fancy. I went there before I was turned. I didn’t know it was a business meeting then. About me.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.” She shrugs again. “It is what it is. I need to serve tea now. Want to come?”
“No, but thanks. I just need some time to process everything.”
“Of course. I’m here if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” I tell her and watch as she goes out of the room. Waiting just a beat, I get out the map and look at the pale circle stained into the paper. The way Mable said “Long Island” and not New York City makes me think she was talking about the other end of the island all together.
Which falls just on the very edge of the circle.