Chapter 20 #2
I don’t look back. Running south, I force myself to stay at a pace equivalent enough to that of a human, but just out of reach of their swords. Claudia’s head lolls against my chest. Air swishes against my back as the sentries swing.
When I reach the farming fields, sprinting down a column of high-rising stalks, a cloud passes in front of the moon, shrouding the night with more darkness.
I’m so close to the Wall, only one giant leap away.
But the sentries’ sudden silence makes me wheel around.
At the edge of the field, they surround me in an arc like they’ve got me well and truly cornered, their swords drawn and a gleeful gleam in their eyes as I press my back against the cold, veiny stone that sends those vague echoes of pain shooting through me.
Then Rosalyn’s simpering face sharpens across my vision as I home in on her grinning back at me.
“Saskia,” she says politely, as if we’re back in my housing unit with Malcolm, hiding threats behind pleasantries all over again. “So good to see you again.”
I scoff in her face. I won’t play this game any longer. “Sorry. I can’t say the same.”
Rosalyn flushes, but then her smile grows wider as her eyes rake over Claudia in my arms.
“So sad,” Rosalyn tuts, “to see a Chosen One go feral like that one did. I don’t know how she got into the tech room, but she was as wild as the Monster himself when we tried to stop her.
” She sighs heavily, placing a hand against her heart as if the memory weighs on her, even though I can see the pleased gleam in her eyes from here.
So I give Claudia the only thing I can in death: glory.
“Seems to me that if she still got the truth out to all the citizens with you and four others trying to stop her, she wasn’t just wild. She was strong. Stronger than you.”
Now Rosalyn’s smile slips.
“Not strong enough to survive my blade through her throat, unfortunately. I do hate to give consequences, but the Guardians rewarded me for it. As they will when I do the same to you.”
She raises her sword as if she’s actually going to charge me, and I take a step back. Not because I’m worried about my own life, but because I don’t want Claudia to be mutilated any further.
But before she can, the other sentries suddenly sweep apart, parting down the middle, and an overwhelming presence fills the gap. The same presence I’ve felt during every Choosing, magnetizing in all the wrong ways.
Rosalyn stops abruptly, her hands slamming into her sides with doe-eyed obedience. Compared to who just arrived, she’s no more of a threat than a spider or snake.
Arad takes one lazy step toward me, the sentries fill the hole he left behind, and then it’s just me and him surrounded in a ring.
He crosses his arms over his chest, not threatened in the slightest, cocky even. But I swear, there’s the faintest hint of confusion and fear brimming beneath that expression.
“You survived that fall?” he asks, tracking his eyes down my body as if trying to see through the cloak and the shadow of my hood.
“And without hurting yourself? What did the Monster do, throw you back over?” He laughs, the sound like nails scraping stone.
“Even he didn’t want to mess with my scraps. ”
Lucan responds by howling out loud, right on the other side of the Wall against my back, and Arad actually flinches. Especially as the cacophony of the rest of the pack continues on the other side of Xantera.
I clutch Claudia’s body tighter against me. “I’m nobody’s scraps. But I am a nightmare. Haunting you forever.”
Arad forces out another laugh, piercing through the heavy, hushed breathing of the sentries.
“I don’t actually believe in monsters, Saskia.
So, tell me, how did you get back in? And why?
Feeling nostalgic for your old life? Did you realize how well I treated you in here?
How much better it is than the real, cruel world?
Wanted to see if I still have the city under my thumb after the stunt you and your friends tried to pull? Or were you coming back for this?”
From beneath his velvet cloak, he pulls out that same key I searched so long for, swinging it before me like the pendulum of a clock. Taunting me. Trying to bait me.
It doesn’t work. I know that if I get close enough to grab it, he’ll grab me, and then I won’t be able to get these supplies to Taika. So instead of lunging for it like he expects me to, I scoff.
“Do you ever actually wait to hear an answer after you ask a question, or do you just like to hear yourself talk?”
For a moment, Arad keeps dangling the key out in front of me, as if he hasn’t quite processed that I’m not falling for it.
Then with a wrinkle of his nose, he tucks it away and waves his hand lazily.
Like I’m a bug he’ll squash easily. One that isn’t even worth exerting his energy over. “Bring her to me.”
The sentries lunge.
Easily, I swing out a leg faster than humanly possible, knocking two into the rest until they all tumble backward. Only Rosalyn manages to sidestep the chaos, leaping through and swinging her rapier toward me, toward Claudia—
Until I grab a knife from my belt in a flash. I’ve never handled a weapon before, but even without training, my sharpened eyesight and agile movements send the blade whizzing right on target, sticking into her shoulder and jerking her sword backward.
A scream of pain tears out of her mouth. The sound floods me, but my usual healing propensity doesn’t so much as cringe with guilt. Because she killed her. She killed Claudia.
The remaining sentries scramble to a stand, hesitating.
Just like Arad. His nostrils flare, eyes bulging, as realization dawns on him that I’m no longer someone he can bully around.
He crouches, his face mottled with rage, and spits, “They turned you into a werewolf?”
“I wish,” I laugh, which only makes me grin harder and bear my fangs, revealing the truth. I can’t help myself. This moment is so sweet, I can taste it on my tongue. To bolster it, I lower my hood and shoot him a glare with my new crimson eyes. “Try again.”
Arad gasps, too stunned to move.
With the extra second, I raise my middle finger just like Lucan showed me.
Then I scoop Claudia up over my shoulder and clamber back up the Wall.
It only disarms Arad for a moment. I can feel the air stir as he leaps, flying up behind me, cursing me, or maybe himself, as I pull myself up, faster and faster and faster.
When I reach the top, I don’t hesitate. Launching myself off the edge, I soar through the air and land perfectly on my feet, right between Vivian and Lucan, still in their werewolf forms. Instantly, Lucan leaps in front of me, putting himself between me and the Wall with his back arched, teeth bared, and claws digging into the earth in preparation.
Far above us, Arad hesitates on the top of the Wall between two spikes.
Do it, Lucan thinks. Jump, motherfucker.
But the clouds clear, causing moonlight to spill over all of us, and he jolts back just as quickly, clinging to the spikes.
“One vampire who can touch the Wall still doesn’t mean anything.
Come back again, and it’ll be twelve against one.
” Even from way up high, Arad’s voice carries to us on the crisp night air.
Or maybe that’s just my new vampire hearing at work.
My eyes also detect how he zeroes in on Lucan, lifts a lip in a sick, one-sided grin.
“And next time, I’ll gladly take her away from you.
Give her something to really scream about—”
I stop listening, blocking the rest of Arad’s words out, because his idle threats don’t matter. Neither he nor the centrifuge matter right now, with the weight of this body in my arms.
We need to bury her, I tell Lucan instead, choking on my words.
He half-turns toward me, his hulking silhouette more terrifying than anything else in these woods, but his ears twitch, and the amber in his eyes seem to melt when they look at me. Relief fills them, but all I can feel right now is guilt and grief.
Of course. Vivian?
Yes, alpha? Vivian’s tail flicks.
Guard the Wall until Arad slides back into his lair. Have the others run the perimeter with you. And if a Guardian tries to come after Saskia… tear them to shreds for me.
Would be my pleasure.
At that, Vivian flings a howl up at Arad, one that seems to bite at the air with jagged teeth.
I don’t look up to see if he flinches or not, or even if he’s still there.
I just turn my back on the Wall, Claudia in my arms, and put as much distance as possible between her and her former cage that she never got to escape alive.
We march through the brisk night air until the dirt road turns into grass, through the wrought-iron gate circling the graveyard.
“This way,” Lucan instructs me as he veers to the left.
I follow on his heels, weaving around tombstones, an iron bench, a worn statue of an angelic woman with wings.
Lucan stops in front of a group of headstones laid out in neat rows.
Each one is blank. No names. No dates.
He steps carefully between them, stopping on the last row, all the way to the right. There, Lucan gestures for me to lay Claudia’s body at the end.
“These are the graves of every citizen who has jumped before you,” he says, wrapping a comforting arm around me as soon as I straighten, his thumb rubbing circles against my shoulder. “I don’t know their names, but I was born to protect each of them. Just as I was born to protect you.”
The emotion comes on suddenly, knifing up my throat. I swallow the sting, but the tears still fall.
“While you dig,” I say, blinking through them, “I’ll clean her.”
Lucan nods and shifts without a word.
Leaving him behind to claw through the dirt, I race at full speed toward the river, collecting a bucket and rag from Lucan’s house along the way.
When I return, the top of Lucan’s monstrous head barely pokes out of the hole he’s already made. I drop to my knees before I dip the rag into the bucket of fresh water.
I start at Claudia’s wrists, washing away the dried blood, trying to soothe the raw skin. Next, I switch to her face and neck to wipe away the dirt caked into the lines of her skin. With my nails, I tame her knotted hair and tuck it behind her head, then smooth out her clothes.
“There,” I say quietly when I’m done. It takes another beat for me to speak again, the words stuck like a pit in my throat.
Nothing justifies or makes up for this. “You won’t be forgotten,” I whisper to her.
“I’ll make sure of it. I’ll tell everyone how brave and courageous you were.
How you stood up for what is right and how much you sacrificed for others.
How you helped end this. How you were the one behind the camera, giving them the truth. ”
I halfway expect her to say something back, but of course, her lips remain still. When Lucan hoists himself out of the hole, he helps me lower her down onto the soft earth.
At least I can give her this: a place of eternity to rest instead of a stone garden where she’d be a decoration for the Guardians, like my mother. I think she would have preferred it this way, even if I never really got the chance to get to know her within those palace walls.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again, for the last time. Because even if Claudia knew the risks, I was the one who told her about the Chosen Ones turning to stone and came up with the idea to reveal the truth. The only way I can avenge her death now is by making sure she didn’t die in vain.
When Lucan and I are done blanketing her in the loose earth and placing a stone overtop her grave, he sucks in a breath and brings out something pinched between his fingers.
The crimson vial that used to hang from my necklace, before he snapped it off.
“Taika gave this back to me, and I’ve been hanging on to it, just in case…
” His eyes rove over my chest, where the vial used to sit.
Just in case this new communication between us quit working and you needed it back, he doesn’t have to say.
“But now,” he continues, “I think it’s time to put my grandfather’s blood back where it belongs. ”
As the wind makes the branches beyond the graveyard creak, Lucan leads me to a pair of gravestones a few rows away from Claudia’s.
They’re weathered from time, patches of algae growing in various spots despite the fresh bouquets of wildflowers lying at the base of each one.
Unlike the nameless Chosen One graves, these ones are labeled.
WARREN VERADEL
ADRIAN VERADEL
“My father’s body is buried here,” Lucan says, nodding at Warren’s headstone, “but we didn’t have anything to bury my grandfather with. Until now.”
Slowly, he bends and places the vial of blood in the middle of all those wildflowers, and it looks… perfect. Exactly where it was always meant to be.
A rustle sounds behind us. I whip around, my nerves still on edge, but it’s just a couple dozen pairs of amber eyes blinking at us from the edge of the cemetery. The other pack members, come to pay their respects to their ancient king who is finally resting in some semblance of peace.
Swallowing the scream I want to fling back at the Guardians for all they’ve taken away, I turn toward Lucan, something much different hovering on my lips.
Half of me feels like now isn’t the right time to be declaring anything heartfelt, when we just buried a woman who might have been my friend in another life.
The other half of me knows that it’s always the right time to tell someone you love them.
So I do.
“I love you, too,” I declare, raising myself on tiptoes to press my lips to his.
Lucan captures my kiss with a surprised widening of his eyes before closing them, gripping me tighter, the centrifuge in my cloak’s inner pocket pressing between us.
“I love you,” I mutter against his neck, “and I should have said it earlier. Life is too short, too fleeting not to—”
I choke on those last words, and Lucan pulls back to swipe a gritty thumb along my cheekbone, wiping away the single tear that spilled over.
“Then we have a weapon the Guardians could never see coming,” he whispers back.
Realizing what he means, I suck in a breath and nod. Arad might know I’m a vampire now, but I’m willing to bet he could never predict the depth of the love I have for the Monster. Or how much he has for me.
And together, we’re going to avenge Claudia and all the others who have suffered.
I just hope like hell the object in my pocket was worth it.