Chapter 12 Saskia
Before I stepped foot in the Blood Moon Palace, I’d never taken a bath. I’d never even seen a large body of water until I saw the rivers from the top of the palace’s balconies and the snow-capped mountain this morning, so I’ve never had any need to wonder what drowning might feel like.
Until now.
Now, my lungs explode with need, like oxygen has completely vanished from the world. Darkness encircles me, but it’s not a comforting kind. It’s restrictive, a white-hot band wrapping around my throat and chest and squeezing tighter and tighter.
Somewhere far above me, a familiar voice shouts my name, but I sink lower and lower toward the bottom of my torment. My need.
I need something, but I don’t know what.
It’s like a ravenous hunger raking long, jagged claws down my body from the inside-out.
Not for food, exactly. But not for touch, either.
What do I need? Why do I feel like I’m going to die if I don’t get it?
The answer hovers somewhere just out of my grasp, but even though I try to reach for the light, I only sink lower.
And lower.
And lower.
Until I thump against a solid ground.
“Not possible,” a deep, male voice echoes, like a whisper through the room.
What’s not possible?
Blinking rapidly, I open my eyes, expecting to find myself in bed with the people I love hovering over me, all concerned expressions and relieved smiles when they see me wake.
But I forgot who it is I love, and when the darkness ebbs away in watery ripples, I find myself back in the housing unit from my childhood.
I’m a girl again, just like in my last nightmare.
“Saskia,” that same voice pleads, closer this time.
I look up, only to find someone completely different smiling gently at me. Not a statue in a cruel garden. A flesh-and-blood human being with an olive complexion and freckles dotting her nose just like mine.
But it’s the wrinkles around her eyes I always loved the most. She used to compare them to a bird’s feet, but to me, they etched a map of all the smiles she’d ever given me. A map of comfort and love that so many other children my age never got from the parents who were forced into having them.
“Saskia,” she says again, this time her familiar tone like a song to my heart.
“Mom!” I cry, and race forward.
She enfolds me in an embrace immediately, warm strong hands grabbing my frame so that I don’t fall apart. She smells sweet and tangy, like some kind of fruit and flower mixed in one.
“My girl,” she breathes, brushing away a strand of my hair. “How I’ve missed you.”
“I-I’ve missed you, too,” I say, sniffing up tears before they fall all over the front of her shirt. “When I saw you in the garden, I thought it would be the last time. I thought I’d failed you.”
“Never.” My mother lifts a finger and wipes at my cheek. “If anything, it’s I who failed you. By omitting the truth, thinking that you’d be better off not knowing.” She sighs. “Thinking that as long as you weren’t Chosen, you’d stay safe and live a normal life.”
I rear my head back, confusion tugging my lips together. “What do you mean? You thought I’d be better off not knowing what?”
She doesn’t sigh again, but she does peer at me with a frown, the wrinkles around her eyes pulling tight as she appears to contemplate.
Then, with a swift nod of her head, she gestures toward the kitchen table, where a kettle and two steaming mugs have suddenly popped into existence. “Come. Have some tea with me.”
As soon as we take a seat across from each other, the housing unit dissolves into startling blues and whites that immediately make me squint.
When my eyes adjust, my mouth falls open at the scenery spreading all around us—the kitchen table, chairs, tea, and my mother all perched quaintly on the snow-capped top of the mountain from earlier, the sky wrapped all around us.
The first prickles of uneasiness tug at the back of my mind, reminding me of something pertinent I still have to do. But then—
“Drink up,” my mother says, smiling at me as if teatime at the top of the world is a perfectly normal Sunday occurrence. “It’s your favorite. Remember?”
I glance down at the steaming liquid in my cup, some kind of red-tinted tea that smells like the woods outside the Wall. As soon as I lift the mug to my lips and take a sip, that need in my throat seems to melt. Just a little bit.
“Saskia,” my mother says, gazing off into the depths of the sky now that she’s satisfied I’m nourishing myself. “Do you remember why you wanted to become a healer?”
“Because you were sick—”
“No.” She shakes her head, attention lost somewhere among wisps of clouds.
“Because your father was sick first, but you seem to have blocked him out.” When I startle, she lays a comforting hand overtop mine.
“I don’t blame you, my girl. If anything, I aided you in forgetting him.
I never answered your question the one time you gave me one, and you never asked again.
It was against the Cardinal Rules, of course, to pry.
But I saw that event spark an interest in you for the first time in your life, and I remember thinking it was the only good thing to come of it. ”
Her smile droops like a withering flower, and I shake my head.
“I still don’t understand.”
“Let me show you, then.”
The mountaintop around us dissolves, reforming into walls that rise up on either side of the kitchen table in uniform lines: the alleyways between complexes.
My mug shakes in my hand as I see my father walking toward us from the end of it.
“Dad,” I whisper, but my mother shakes her head.
“Just watch. He can’t hear you from there.”
I do as she says, assessing every detail of my father that I’ve forgotten over the years.
His straightened posture. His long, sharp nose.
His dark, auburn hair a stark contrast to his pale complexion.
He’s merely ten strides away from walking right into my mother when a shadowy blur barrels into him, knocking him into the alleyway wall with a resounding crack.
A scream of warning tears out of my mouth, but I’m too late, and my mother’s right—he can’t seem to hear me, anyway. He tries to shout as his attacker pins him to the ground, but a pale, marble hand clamps over his mouth, and then a pair of fangs sinks into the flesh of his neck in a flash.
The Eleventh Guardian. I’d notice that stupidly prominent Adam’s apple in his throat anywhere at this point. The same one who attacked Odette, attacking my father right in front of me.
My father gasps for help, and my mug of tea nearly cracks in my grip.
Just as I stand to try to help him, though—not caring whether he can sense me or not—the alleyway dissolves, reforming into our housing unit once more.
Silence settles over the kitchen as if my father’s shouts never left his mouth at all.
“He was bitten. That’s why he got sick,” I say to my mother, who lifts her mug to her own mouth and takes a sip.
“Just like you. Only, he was never Chosen. But the Guardians have been taking more than they promised they would take for a while now, using the catacombs to drink from people in the dead of night.”
“Yes,” my mother says. “And no.”
“What?”
“The Guardians definitely take more than they promise—or need—but your father didn’t get sick because he was bitten. The vampire venom didn’t work the same way for him. It… activated a different side of him, a gene he never even knew he had until weeks later, when he…”
Here, my mother cuts herself off, that faraway look stealing her focus as she gazes into the corner of the room.
“When he what, Mom?” I press, my voice rising as agitation nips at my chest. “What did Dad to do you?”
In response, she sets her mug of tea on the table with a clink, then scoots her chair back and stands abruptly, just as my father stumbles into the room and casts her a dazed look.
“You have to,” she says, her voice shaking and scared.
“I can’t keep doing this to you, Maribel.” My father’s own voice takes on a harsher tone despite the way he’s clutching his own chest. His eyes roam over my mother’s figure, and for the first time, I realize how wan she looks again, just like how she used to. “You’re sick.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” my father protests. “You’re going to die if it happens again.”
“Well, you’re going to die if you don’t.”
They stare each other down for a moment, two sick people trying to win a battle in order to save the other.
And I think I start to understand, as my father’s eyes flick toward my mother’s neck, toward the same spot the Eleventh Guardian stole blood from him.
He needs it. Needs the same sustenance I’m currently lacking in order to keep living.
But the more he takes from my mother, the more her internal organs begin to fossilize.
She was already turning to stone years before the Guardians picked her out of the crowd.
Bitten by my father before she was Chosen by them.
But my father shakes his head, a determined film clouding his eyes—his crimson eyes.
They’re not as deep of a red as Arad’s, but pink-tinged with popping blood vessels, as if they’re getting there.
To his fellow citizens, it might look like he just needs a better night’s sleep, but if they get any redder…
He’d look just like a Guardian.
“Then so be it,” he rasps at my mother. “I can’t hurt you just to help myself. It wouldn’t be living anyway.”
I don’t need to relive him dying all over again, even though now I know…
he was dying of starvation. Of thirst. Of refusal to drink from the innocent people around him.
The housing unit dissolves before he can crash to the floor, and suddenly, we’re sitting on top of the blood moon itself: a cratered ground the color of blood with endless space spreading beyond it.
“Dad was a vampire?” I breathe. Heartbroken. Horrified. Hating what it means.
My mother nods from across the table but doesn’t speak.
“How?”
Her voice twists, dropping into a low, guttural growl again. “The Thirteenth Guardian.”
“Mom?” I whisper, confused. It looks like her but doesn’t sound like her.
She shakes her head, clears her throat. “We never understood. Never could figure it out. The Guardians limit our resources and prevent us from learning about our past, present, or future. But it only made sense that your father had some kind of biological difference that responded to vampire venom by… becoming one. Because he didn’t change until after he was attacked in the alleyway. ”
I exhale, inhale, exhale again, feeling that treacherous burn slowly crawl up my throat again. Need. Need. Need. I needed the right kind of sustenance, and I failed to get it in time.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” I ask my mother. “That’s why I’m able to talk to you right now. I died like you and Dad?”
She stares at me for a second before swallowing thickly. “Not yet. You know what you have to do if you want to survive this, little nightmare. Drink.”
I cock my head. Little nightmare? She’s never called me that before. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to be that kind of monster.”
“My dear girl.” My mother reaches across the table and clutches my hand. “Whatever monster you become is the monster you choose to be. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Choose,” I repeat.
“Choose,” she confirms with a nod.
And then the crimson of the moon washes over us, crashing into the kitchen table, knocking over both our mugs of tea, and sending my mother scattering into mist. I try to scream, but water fills my mouth, and waves knock me back down into a state of drowning.
Only this time, that drowning smells a lot like blood.