Chapter 10 #2
My heart burns at the enormity of the Guardians’ cruelty—destroying countless lives except for the ones they could contain, control, and benefit from.
Still, I feel a puzzle brewing beneath all these words, as if several pieces are floating just beyond my grasp of comprehension as the rest of the pack bursts out with more ideas that all come down to the same grim facts.
We don’t have the key, so we can’t unlock the doors of the Wall.
It’s too strong for weapons to knock it down, and the werewolves can’t climb.
If we try to build something, the vampires will see us coming.
What other options are there? Surely, the answer lies in the nature of the Wall itself. In what made it change.
Just then, the doors to the room burst open, and a few middle-aged werewolves barge in with platters of food: smoking slices of what’s surely elk meat—the same one Vivian, Merrick, and Soren killed earlier—more bowls of sparkling berries, and freshly-baked bread with steam dancing from the slits in the centers.
It’s not the overabundance of food that I faced in the palace, but there’s definitely something more heartwarming about it than the bland trays of food I used to get in my housing unit as all the children jump up to grab a helping and everyone else thanks the werewolves who brought it, the spell of intensity momentarily broken.
In the shuffle, though, one of the little boys trips on an uneven floorboard and flies forward across the dusty floor.
Without thinking, I leap up and hurry forward, crouching at his side. “Are you okay?”
Sprawled out on his stomach, the boy’s eyes widen when he looks up at me with a frightened look that burns into me and makes me recoil. He cranks his head sideways and connects gazes with one of the middle-aged werewolves, who rushes forward to help him up instead.
And just like that, the food on the table doesn’t look quite as heartwarming anymore. I hurry back to my seat, fully aware that I’m only really welcome here because Lucan would demolish anyone who said otherwise. But you can’t force a kid to fake pleasantries.
Lucan leans into me, taking advantage of everyone’s attention now focused on the food to ask me in a low voice, “Are you all right?”
I realize he’s spent the second half of this pack meeting in silence, letting me speak over him even though he’s apparently their alpha. It makes me feel almost… powerful, and I allow him a smile to cover up the sick pit sinking low in my gut.
“I’m fine.” When he glowers at me, I relent with, “I just feel like I’m missing something.
If I could find out more about how vampires and werewolves function, then maybe I could figure out the link between the Wall and the pain you feel when you touch it.
” I sigh and cast my gaze around the room, watching everyone else fill up plates with food that fill my own stomach with queasiness.
When I realize Lucan’s still staring at me, the hues of his face paling slightly, I raise my eyebrows. “What?”
“I think,” he says under his breath, “you need to read my father’s journals.”
After Lucan dismisses the meeting half an hour later with orders for everyone to brainstorm our predicament, he takes me, not to his well-maintained house, but to another one farther down a beaten lane, sagging under the weight of a moss-slick roof.
Overgrown trees bow over either side of it, casting it in dark, jagged shadows.
“Um.” I stop in front of the house, staring at the two broken windows that look like empty eye sockets bordered by glass teeth. “Are you sure this isn’t haunted?”
“I’m about seventy-five percent sure,” Lucan responds without even a twitch of his lips to indicate he’s joking.
“Although it is where I used to live with my mother and father until he died. Then my mother and I both moved out, claiming other houses, because we couldn’t stand living in a place that smelled so much like him. ”
“Oh.” It’s about all I can think of to say, especially when Lucan marches to the front door and the deck beneath his feet nearly splinters at his weight.
He doesn’t even need to turn the knob, because the door doesn’t appear to be able to latch anyway.
He simply pushes it with a flat palm, and the hinges squeak as the door slowly swings open.
“I’ve maintained his office over the years, but the rest…”
Lucan gives me an apologetic wrinkle of his nose as I follow him into the house that only has a seventy-five percent chance of being haunted, him brushing away cobwebs dangling from the doorframe before they have a chance to touch me.
Chivalric, honestly. But I’m too on edge to give him more than a whispered thank you as we step inside.
Inside, abandoned furniture forms dark shadows in every corner—a sofa with clawed legs, a large, standing clock no longer ticking, a cabinet filled with trinkets covered in dust. More cobwebs sweep from the ceiling, and I swear I can hear the small pattering of rats racing along the walls somewhere.
The walls themselves are covered in faded, peeling wallpaper and portraits that dangle lopsidedly, too cloaked in dust for me to make out their pictures.
“Office is this way,” Lucan says, gently leading me past a staircase I’d never want to climb and down a short hallway, where an open doorway leads to…
“Oh, this is much better.” As soon as I step into the brightly-lit room, where late sunlight streaks through a clean window facing west, I feel each of my muscles relaxing again.
A large, polished desk sits on the other end between wooden cabinets, several old, leather journals scattered on its surface.
“Your father wrote in these?” I ask, grazing my fingers along a cover.
“Most of them.” Lucan watches me with an indecipherable expression.
“Some of them are from my grandfather, actually, chronicling the rumors of vampire attacks on nearby villages leading up to the final invasion—Taika managed to steal them before he escaped with some other werewolves after my grandfather was killed. But my father wrote his journals after the Wall turned to stone. They’re what I was reading when you were in the Blood Moon Palace, trying to find a cure for… ”
He stops, and the horrible truth seems to press into us from every wall: there is no happy ending for us, even if we can tear that Wall down. I’m still infected with vampire venom. Still going to become nothing more than a statue, sooner or later.
The thought makes me clutch the edge of the desk, my knuckles white, in an effort not to collapse. Lucan’s gaze lands on my fingers, and his brows tighten.
“We don’t have to do this right now. You barely ate anything at dinner. Maybe you should go to—”
“No, I’m not going to sleep,” I say firmly, and plop myself into the leather chair in front of the desk, already beginning to rifle through cracked, yellowed pages.
In my schooling phase, all of our textbooks were glossy, pristine, and printed.
These feel like the words are breathing between the pages, some ancient secret brewing just beneath my fingertips. “Maybe you missed something…”
“That one,” he says, nodding at a slightly smaller journal than the others. “Read that one.”
For the next several hours, I read while Lucan leans against the wall with his arms folded, watching me.
Most of the entries just give me a sense of who his father was: loud, proud, and full of the same vengeance that brews in Lucan himself.
The actual content about the Thirteenth Guardian I already knew because Lucan told me.
Until I get to an entry that reads more like a clinical study.
“You’re telling me you had this information right under your nose and you skipped over it?” I hiss, staring down at the words that swim before my vision.
I drag my finger over the worn page as I read.
October 28, 52 AX
The Thirteenth Guardian has been telling me more about the nature of his kind as we plan for my pack to breach the Wall. Everything makes so much more sense than it used to.
Vampire venom, for instance, is a magical substance that interacts differently with a variety of objects or subjects.
“I was so desperate to get back to you that I started to rush through them,” Lucan admits in a grumble behind me, but I shush him with a flap of my hand.
In regular humans and animals, vampire venom slowly fossilizes the organs from the inside-out, turning the victim to stone.
In some creatures such as ourselves—werewolves—it simply causes excruciating pain, due to our antibodies fighting it off.
I stare at those last words. Antibodies. Antibodies. My mind races at a dizzying speed, and my fingers quake over the pages as thoughts and ideas flash through me faster than I can grasp them. Of course, if the immune system was activated to such an extent, it would cause pain…
Pain. My own stomach clenches with pain right now, hunger ripping through me at such an inopportune time. Although, I suppose I’ve only eaten a handful of wild berries over the last few days, so that would be expected.
As soon as I finish reading this, I’ll find something to eat. But for now…
In inanimate objects, vampire venom strengthens and fortifies, effectively turning the material into something impenetrable as long as the venom resides in the material in an active state.
“That’s it,” I breathe as Lucan reads over my shoulder. “The Wall. It was wood, but the vampires injected it with their own venom to turn it to stone.”
“But how? Just by biting into the railings or something?” Lucan asks.
“That, or maybe they found a way to concentrate their venom and inject it somehow.” My voice seems to be slurring against my will.
My blood sugar must be dropping, but I don’t want Lucan to worry about me, so I try to push through.
“Lucan, if those veins in the Wall are filled with vampire venom, then it hurts you to touch it because your immune system is being activated every time you do.”
I drop my eyes to the next passage in the journal, realization after realization coursing through me.
And in someone with the vampire gene…
My vision blurs. My head spins. My stomach roils, like the riot of Xantera has invaded my very bloodstream. I snap the journal shut and rattle in a deep breath.
“Is everything all right?” Lucan narrows his gaze at me.
“Yes!” My voice comes out about two octaves too high, but I clear my throat. “I just need to pee. I’ll be right back.”
Before he can peer too closely at the mask I just so haphazardly constructed, I jump up, totter on my feet for a moment, and hurry out of the study, through the skeletal remains of the house it resides in, and out the door.
Just in case Lucan is moving to a window to watch me, I veer in the direction of his own house, where I skirt around it—
And into the woods beyond.
The truth of everything that journal just revealed is hammering itself against my skin, the words so glaringly obvious right in front of my eyes, but I don’t want to let it in.
If I let it in, my veins will wilt, my bones will crack, and the entire foundation of the world will turn upside-down.
Even now, the trees around me swirl, like I’m flipping anyway, despite my best attempts to push the dizziness away.
All I know is that I cannot stay here. I don’t belong, and I never will. The entire city of Xantera and everyone in the ghost town here are better off without me. Lucan is better off without me.
He’ll see. He’ll figure it out when he reads that passage in the journal. He’ll be glad I left.
Still, I don’t let the truth in. I just push forward, past tree trunks that warp around me, and soon enough I’m doubling over from the need that pierces inside me.
Need. I need…
My palms crash against the ground, grinding against rocks and pine needles.
I crawl forward, desperate to get as far away as possible, retching as I go.
When the last of my vision snags on a crisscross of fallen logs up ahead, I use all my remaining strength to haul myself into the dark, cavernous space between them, slathered in ferns.
Maybe I can’t run from the Monster, but I can hide.
Right?
The last thought that whispers across my mind is that at least it was nice, getting to experience life beyond the Wall. At least I got a few good memories with Lucan to carry with me to wherever I go next. I hope he can say the same.
Then I slump sideways, my cheek slamming into moss-slicked ground, and darkness gobbles me whole.