Chapter 10
Iknow you’re all wondering what’s going on.” Lucan straightens to his full height and stares around the room, making eye contact with every single werewolf with an intensity that crackles through the air.
I take deep breaths, calming my nerves in the face of so many pairs of amber eyes.
“Well,” an older man with graying hair to the left speaks up, “you’ve been keeping us in the dark for months. We don’t know what to think.”
“I don’t blame you. It’s my fault. But I also know you’ve been gossiping with each other enough to get the basic facts: that Saskia is the first human from Xantera who has ever managed to escape alive, and she’s here with us now.”
His reassuring hand rests on my shoulder, but it doesn’t do much to relieve the weight of everyone’s gaze on me, judging, thinking, assuming.
“What you might not know,” Lucan continues, “is that she also showed the rest of her people the truth about what’s happening to them and their Chosen Ones, and now the citizens are rebelling.”
Instantly, murmurs swell throughout the room.
I shift uncomfortably in my seat, all too aware that the way Lucan phrased that makes me out to be more capable than I really was.
I didn’t show the people of Xantera the truth—Eleni and Claudia did.
And we’re still no closer to helping them without any way to get through the Wall.
Still, a few of the gazes assessing me turn from skeptically curious to… admirable. Like they think I’m some kind of hero instead of just a human.
But some still don’t look convinced of anything.
“How do you know they’re rebelling?” a female voice to my right pipes up.
“Saskia and I went up to Eversnow Peak,” Lucan explains. “They’re fighting in the streets. Buildings are burning.”
The one named Gabriel, whose face is already turning a mottled black and blue from Lucan pommeling him earlier, keeps an obvious expression of distrust trained on my face.
“You actually fell off the top of the Wall?” he asks me, cutting through all the muttering until it dies away. “And lived?”
“Yes,” I answer quickly, startled. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken, but how else would I be here now?
Lucan bristles beside me, but Gabriel’s only asking a question, not accusing me of anything, even if the sentiment lurks beneath his actual words.
I just don’t understand what that accusation even is. “But Lucan caught me.”
Instantly, dozens of amber eyes flick toward Lucan.
Eyebrows raise, and Taika assesses me with a slight tilt of his head from the corner, his hands clasped patiently in his lap.
It dawns on me, then, like a fist to my gut, what some of them might be thinking, just as another male leans back in his chair with a scoff.
“How do we know she’s not a spy?” he asks the room.
The female sitting next to him nods in agreement. “Maybe she was lowered or let out.”
Actually, that sounds more plausible than the truth.
I stiffen and turn my head up to Lucan, but he doesn’t need to make eye contact with me to know I’m losing my burst of confidence. Instead, he chooses to stare down the female with such a withering expression that I’m surprised she doesn’t crumble to dust under the weight.
“I caught her, Kyra. I watched it happen, heard it happen. I’ve been inside Saskia’s head for months. I have full faith she’s not a spy. If you want to discuss the fact that I’ve kept you out of the loop, then let’s talk about that. Because I’m to blame for the secrecy.”
Vivian’s words ring through my head again: he wanted to keep you all to himself. Heads turn to their neighbors, shoulders dropping, but no one speaks.
That is, until Gabriel mutters under his breath, “It doesn’t matter anyway. If she doesn’t have the key, we’re back to square one. Like we’ve always been.”
Lucan tenses behind me again, but thankfully, Vivian pipes up before another brawl can break out.
“Not necessarily,” she says, crossing her arms from across the table.
“Saskia has insider information about the vampires and the nature of Xantera. This whole time, we’ve only been able to guess what’s been happening within that Wall, but now… ”
Every head in the room turns back to me, blinking expectantly.
I swallow, realizing they’re waiting for said insider information.
The details of my everyday life back in Xantera are unfathomable secrets to these werewolves who have been living on the outside for centuries.
And Lucan, it seems, hasn’t told them anything about the information he’s gleaned from our previous conversations.
I glance over my shoulder to find his eyes pinned to me, and when he reads the question brewing in my own eyes, he nods.
A strange sense of gratitude swells in my chest over the realization that he chose to keep our entire relationship private up until this point.
Letting me take the lead on what I want to share or not.
Clearing my throat and digging deep for more courage, I address the rest of the room with my chin a little higher.
“The vampires breed us carefully to achieve the perfect number of humans to satisfy them. Not just their needs but their greed. They control every aspect of our lives—from who we’re supposed to love to where we work to what we eat—and they make it seem like an honor to give our blood.
There’s this thing called the Choosing…”
Over the next hour, I spill everything to every listening ear, watching the mixture of expressions morph from shocked to appalled to outraged all over again as I spew the details that sit in my stomach like rocks.
The Cardinal Rules. Sanctuary Sunday. “Keep your spark alive.” Even Gabriel’s mistrustful twist of his mouth ends up in a clenched jaw when I tell them about our names and how they’re chosen—something I’ve never thought was abnormal until now.
“Your parents really don’t name you?” Soren asks, wrinkling his nose.
“Not often. They can request a name, but the Guardians would have to approve it. Usually, baby names are chosen from a random approved list right after birth.”
I clamp down on my bottom lip, wondering, for the first time, if my mother requested my name for me or not.
Just another thing I won’t be able to ask her now that she’s a stone statue in Arad’s garden.
Blood wells in my mouth before I realize how hard I’m biting down to keep from crying, and I swallow it, my throat somehow drier than before.
“What about your last name?” someone else calls out. “How are those chosen?”
“Last name?” I repeat, swallowing again.
“Yeah. Your family name?”
I blink. “I… I don’t have one. It’s just Saskia.”
A grumble emits from behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know that Lucan isn’t pleased with the phrase “just Saskia.” But it’s the truth.
“Wait. So you have a family name?” I ask, turning to frown at him.
The room goes quiet, as if I’ve just asked the most obvious question in the world. Something I can’t quite place sparks in Lucan’s eyes, but he recovers with smooth precision, the spark gone before I can truly make sense of it.
“Yes. It’s Veradel,” he answers evenly.
“Lucan Veradel,” I whisper. “So your father and mother had the same last name?”
He nods. I didn’t know family names even existed.
I’ve never been more than a random citizen to the Guardians, and I never will be.
Arad might have developed some kind of weird obsession in his efforts to get me to bend to him, but even that’s just a game to him.
A fleeting chase. To the vampires, we are nothing more than resources for them to cultivate, consume, and destroy.
I wish I could change that.
I need to change that.
And maybe the only way to do that is to ask some more questions of my own.
“What I don’t understand,” I begin, “is the nature of the Wall itself. How come none of you can touch it but I can?”
“We don’t know,” Taika says, and even though his voice is on the quieter side, everyone gives him respectful silence and attention—even the children.
“There was already a wooden wall around the capital of the kingdom before the war, but when the vampires invaded, it… changed. Now, it causes us excruciating pain when we touch it, so we can’t climb it, and it’s too strong for any weapon or tool to so much as make a dent in it. ”
Something about his tone makes me wonder if he knows more than he’s letting on, but Vivian speaks up before I can fully analyze it.
“A few hundred years ago, we tried to build a scaffold that would be tall enough to jump off onto the ledge, but the Guardians spotted us and shot it down with flaming arrows until it disintegrated. So I doubt that would work again.”
“Maybe we can build another scaffold more discreetly,” a werewolf near Gabriel suggests.
“That would take months,” Vivian says. “The citizens need our help now.”
“We could try to tempt the vampires into coming out so that we can just kill them out here,” Soren muses.
“Tempt them with what, though?” Merrick asks.
“My perfect naked body dancing in the moonlight, of course.” Soren winks at me, and a growl rises up from Lucan’s chest.
A few of the children giggle, and a smile pulls at the corner of my mouth, but another frown pulls it right back down.
“What about other people?” I ask, glancing at the wall of the town hall as if I can peer through it, to the rest of the world I’ve never seen. “Is anyone else out there to help?”
“Not other werewolves. We are the last of our kind on this continent as far as we know, and the vampires attacked most of the other human villages before they invaded the palace, leaving them dead or injured until they all died out.” It’s Taika who answers this one, his face crumpled with grief and shame, as if he blames himself for not saving them all. “It’s up to us.”