Chapter 25
Ophelia existed in a haze. There but not, her mind recoiled from her reality.
Around her, Vesper’s attendants whispered, their voices sharp and sibilant.
Cruel nails and harsh cloths scraped and rubbed at her face.
The skin around her eyes burned, raw from their attentions, their questions becoming more frenzied.
“Where are your tatuaj?”
“How did you get rid of them?”
“Look at her eyes—what does it mean?”
Her lip was raked up as they checked for her fangs, tsking and hissing with impatience, demanding answers in hushed tones with frantic glances toward the doorway leading back to Vesper’s chambers.
Slapping and pinching. Her body rocked with their abuse.
Her clothes rent from her. Scalding water flowed over her skin, then the sting of lye scrubbed into her flesh by coarse, horsehair brushes.
Ophelia stayed silent, her mind very far away.
Watching as if everything were happening to someone else.
This. This is what Thaddeus had been afraid of.
The vampires finding out. Rumor was already flying wide, the door cracking and strange faces peering in at her.
She quailed, shoulders slumping. Her stupidly trusting William had put Havers in even more danger than it had been.
Nothing she could say would make that better, no explanation would suffice.
… “If I were you, I’d be less concerned about what I’m about to do, and more focused on what’s already been set in motion…”
Set in motion. Ophelia bit back a sob. The only thing that’d been set in motion was the destruction of everything she’d begun to care about. Way to go, Phe.
One of the attendants slapped her upside the head, and she was made to stand, her skin crawling at the rasp of the rough towel drying her off. Tears rolled down her cheeks. This wasn’t the end. Oh, no. This was only the beginning.
Bile rose into her throat as a horrific, jagged weight settled onto her shoulders, encasing her in agony. Ophelia kept her eyes closed, her breath shallow as she was sewn into the tight robe, the blinding pressure around her intense. To move, to exist, was torment.
She wasn’t there.
Practiced hands set the last stitch. Her arms were lifted over her head, and a corset lowered around her torso.
The ground glass lining the robe tore into her.
Hot rivulets of blood trickled down her raised arms, along her ribcage, to her hips and thighs.
She bit back a gasp at the sudden, cruel yank on the corset’s ties.
Her skin scoured away by the millions of tiny, jagged shards embedded against her flesh, her body an open wound.
The hood of the crimson robe was raised, then lowered, darkness falling over her closed eyes. Only her fingertips, the tips of her toes, her lips, and her chin remained visible beneath the horrific regalia of the Dam?.
The attendants led her back into the other room, her skin slick with blood, the carpet sticky beneath her bare feet, to stand before Vesper.
“Leave us,” the vampire queen intoned.
Ophelia waited as the room cleared, head bowed, willing herself not to cry. For her lips not to tremble. Knowing what was coming. This was nothing. This, she could endure. She had countless times before.
And for what? a little voice from the Ophelia that was before whispered. You’re as much a queen as she is. More so, because if you’re here, her time is done…
“Kneel,” Vesper spat, leaning back in her chair and crossing her long legs with a look of supreme satisfaction on her face. The tip of her diamond-studded shoe bobbed beneath her silks with impatience. Anticipation. Whatever the vampire queen was feeling, it would translate to the lash for Ophelia.
She slowly lowered herself down, and Vesper kicked the robe beneath her, forcing Ophelia to kneel upon it. Jagged shards dug into her flesh, and her eyelids fluttered, her mind far away from the pain, back with Thaddeus and Gideon in the garden. A strange feeling stirred in her breast.
… “You and the rest of the Dam? are all the little queen bees the virus has spawned to fly far, far away and perpetuate our kind…”
Except they didn’t. Vesper hoarded them away and tore off their wings like a sadistic child.
“My. Just look at you, back at my feet, where you belong,” she crowed, standing as if to better inspect her. “I hope your little sojourn was worth it.”
Ophelia stayed silent, images playing through her mind.
Waking up to Gideon. Walking at his side through town.
Him pointing at their little house up on the hill.
She’d never get to see the inside. Never get to find out if Jena caved and named her kid Agatha.
That hurt more than she thought it would.
All of it did. Her psyche bled freer and faster than her body beneath the robe, and that strange feeling in her breast redoubled.
William’s words about what had been set in motion echoed through her mind, then Thaddeus’s voice.
… “At first, the lines darken, then they become blurred. Once that occurs, it allows one to incrementally access the other tribes’ abilities…”
Shadow walking. Hearing heartbeats. What else did she have access to? Her breath hitched, and Vesper tsked, pacing behind Ophelia to whisper at her ear.
“Tell me, does the blood of Havers taste as sweet as I’ve dreamed it to be? I imagine my poor deluded husband let you sip from his cup. Thaddeus always did have a soft spot for orphans and mongrels.”
And Vesper would murder him as assuredly as she’d murder Gideon by luring him from the shore.
Even after exile, she wouldn’t let the Thaddeus rest. No.
She needed to steal away his chance of redemption and grind it beneath her diamond-studded shoe like everything else.
She’d take the blood of Havers and turn it into a weapon against any who opposed her. Ophelia’s fingers twitched into a fist.
Vesper laughed softly. “I bet he adopted you with open arms, wanting to share the bounty he’s kept from me.
” She raked back Ophelia’s hood and raised her chin, scowling.
“Such a little whore. Did you seduce him like you seduced my son? Kremlyn’s obsession with you is irksome, but one way or another, it won’t last.” Her eyes narrowed. “I promise you that.”
Ophelia met her gaze. Once the threat would’ve given her comfort. An end. A way out. Now, it sparked something deep inside of her. A certainty came over her, that feeling in her breast growing to consume her. This wouldn’t be her end. Not by Vesper’s hands. Nor by Kremlyn’s.
Vesper pursed her thin lips, as if gauging Ophelia’s silence. “But first I’ll have your secrets and my errant husband’s. Tell me, have you discovered how he continues to defy my will? I know the answer lies in Havers’s blood. Is that what erased your tatuaj?”
… “Focus on what’s been set in motion…”
Ophelia stared into Vesper’s calculating ebony eyes, the tatuaj surrounding them turning them into sucking pits, a monster in their depths. This woman. This queen. She was the embodiment of hate, set to destroy anything and everything around her.
Yet, Ophelia’s tatuaj were gone, that stain removed from her being…but her abilities remained.
The slow thump of the vampire queen’s heart beat in Ophelia’s ears. She looked away from Vesper’s diseased gaze and embraced the emotion smoldering within, slowly breathing out as Ophelia put a name to it.
Rage.
Yes, it was rage, but not the kind Ophelia had survived on for all those years at the Citadel, impotent and poisonous. No. This was the righteous rage of oppression. Of the need to set things right. Ophelia’s fingertips twitched, gore spattering to the carpet.
And this rage, like her name, had power. An advantage borne of every last crushing pressure she’d been subjected to by the Vampire Court.
She was not a Dam?. She was Ophelia Diamondé, and she’d use this power—the power of a queen—to take back her own.
“You know something.” Vesper’s eyes narrowed. “What have you discovered?”
Ophelia raised her gaze to meet the vampire queen’s, overcome by a strange calm, all that righteous fury tightening in her core. It was time for her and all the rest of them to reap what they’d sown. It ended now.
“That all you’ve done has made me stronger.”
She focused on Vesper, sending out her rage in a concentrated burst of power, erupting flesh.
The vampire queen’s head exploded, her body torn asunder. It was thrown back onto her chair, tattered ribbons of entrails spattering down around her twisted ribcage, her blackened organs glistening in the cabin’s amber light.
Ophelia slowly stood and plucked out Vesper’s heart, crushing it in her fist before dropping it to her feet and grinding it into the floor. She looked up at the gasps in the doorway to the other chamber, glowering at the three attendants cowering there.
“Die,” she growled, her voice thick with compulsion.
They dropped to the ground, lifeless. Their corpses withered, aging in an instant and desiccating into brown husks.
Ophelia stood there for a moment longer, then raised the hood of her robe, and calmly walked from the room.
It was time for Kremlyn and the rest of the Crimson Guard to meet their new queen.
Gideon paced before the dying bonfire, his chest heaving.
He could do this. He could get to the ship Ophelia was on.
His reactions would be slowed, but the Court would be trapped aboard, and he could hunt them at his leisure.
Unless they escaped via the shadows, but—gha!
He tore at his hair, he had to do something!
Jena’s brows furrowed. “But I thought gargoyles couldn’t cross saltwater.”
“We can’t,” he said succinctly. “But if I can make it to the ship…” He trailed off, not liking the uncertain desperation in his voice.
“Magic doesn’t work out there, Gideon.”
“I’m aware,” he snapped back at her.
“Look,” Chase said, frowning, “all the boats in the harbor have already been put out to sea, but maybe we radio one to check it out? This is shady as fuck. Who the hell would send you coordinates? It’s gotta be the vampires trying to lure you out there.
We don’t even know if she’s on one of the ships. ”
“The photo I received earlier from the same number says otherwise.” And Gideon had a very bad feeling Jena’s father was at the top of the list of possible senders. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a trap. I have to try.” He had to go to her. He stripped out of his great coat and borrowed sweats.
He was airborne before they could argue, his mind in a tumult and Jena’s father at the center of the storm.
Chase’s recounting of the fiend’s offhand comment saving him.
Jena’s of how her father had encouraged her to take the node in hand.
Him saving her and Ophelia from the revenants in the basement. And that comment about balance.
Gideon’s jaw tightened at the implications, but it made too much sense to dismiss out of hand, no matter how improbable.
It would also explain Renard’s silence. There were rumors of creatures acting as karma’s agents, recruited to do its bidding after epic breeches of propriety.
Distributors of fortune, neither good nor bad, they sowed chaos, and in doing so, balanced karma’s scales in their wake.
Whatever Jena’s father had been, Gideon was positive he’d become a Nemesis.
Though what it was about Havers that had drawn one of his kind here…
it didn’t matter. Gideon had little doubt William had been the one who sent the photo and the coordinates as part of his task, but be that for the good or otherwise…
Damn it. A part of Gideon screamed that trusting intel from such creature could only lead to folly.
The rest of him didn’t care, as long as it also led to Ophelia, and in his heart of hearts he knew it would.
Gideon winged higher into the atmosphere, circling over the node. He paused to glance at the sleeping dragon curled up in the smoking desolation outside of town. A frown ghosted over Gideon’s lips. If he should perish, so would Havers when that leash snapped.
The node plucked at him, as if to hold him back.
He ignored it, his wings beating closer to the ocean, gaining more altitude.
Gideon snarled. If the node was so damned concerned, it should have stopped Kremlyn from taking Ophelia in the first place.
The dragon could raze the entire peninsula for all he cared.
A speck resolved on the horizon, and his eyes narrowed, the dense fog covering the rest of the ocean conveniently pushed back from a single vessel. Too conveniently. That it was a trap wasn’t in question, but if there was any chance he could save Ophelia, he had to take it.
The effects of the ocean were immediate as he left the shore. He dropped altitude, his body weight increasing, his wings not as responsive, hardening as he flew. A mile Gideon. You crossed the damned ocean once, you can make it a bloody mile.
Unfortunately, that hadn’t been under his own power. He knew what to expect, but the rigor in his limbs this early on wasn’t a good sign. Gideon struggled to hit an updraft, his reactions too slow and sweat stippling his brow. He dipped lower towards the sea.
Gideon struggled to gain altitude, his wings flailing as he searched for Ophelia.
She had to be there. Visions of how he’d found her in the bathroom crowded his mind’s eye.
The thought of that son of a bitch laying his hands on her fueled Gideon’s rage, and he pumped his wings harder.
His jaw tightened, tendons straining at his neck. He would make it, or die trying.