4. Daire
Daire
Mariah Harey stared at me with her beady black eyes.
She was a powdery purple bunny covered in white stars, dense with the softest fluff.
Ingeborg had gotten her for me when we’d picked up my prescription when I’d been seven or eight and terribly sick, and as miserable as I felt, that trip to the drugstore still ranked high in my favorite memories.
We’d gotten lozenges that tasted like candy, and she’d taken me down the toy aisle and let me pick a treat.
Now, Mariah was judging me. She knew everything that was wrong with the world, and worse, she knew that I hadn’t done a damn thing to fix it.
Mother had come home from visiting the Wildwood pack and gone straight to her pantry. She’d been standing over a cauldron since, not stirring herself, but barking directions at the other witches.
As much as I wanted my awakening and to practice magic freely, one benefit of being a twenty-three-year-old virgin witch was that I didn’t have to help. Sometimes, I wondered if she even wanted me to have magic, which was absurd. I was her son and heir. Nobody in the coven ranked higher than me.
It was my fault that I hadn’t had an awakening yet, really.
Every time the matter came up, I looked at my options—someone like Tristan or Calliope, who thought of me first and foremost as my mother’s son; a surly-faced werewolf who had perhaps never had a proper shower and was either too eager to be considered or not pleased at all to find themselves in the coven house; or a vampire in a cage.
For years, I’d told myself that the problem was that I’d read too much.
Awakenings were literally magical. It wasn’t like any old human losing their virginity constitutionally changed in the process. The very idea was absurd.
But us? Mages and witches?
For us it mattered.
And if the process was magical, why shouldn’t it bestow everything I dreamed of all at once? Not just magic, but . . . all right, maybe I was pathetic, but when I imagined my awakening, it was with someone who loved me, someone who was as eager as I was to see all that I could make of myself.
I imagined something preordained, destined, permanent. I wanted a partner or . . . or if that was silly, I at least wanted someone who wanted me.
Not a business transaction.
Not anything coercive.
Just a moment for me and someone I loved and the unfolding promise of our future together.
And sure, maybe I read too many romance novels, but I’d grown up in a home that skewed heavily female, and reading was an acceptable pastime.
Sue me, I wanted Fabio with a ripped shirt to whisper sweet words in my ear while he awakened my magic. The crazy thing was that it didn’t seem like everybody did.
Hell, I was pretty sure Tristan was just pleased Mother had awakened him herself, and there was about as much romance between the two of them as there was between me and Ms. Harey.
Maybe less.
I frowned at her sweet, soft bunny face, annoyed that all this time, I’d thought I was just flighty and demanding, but now there was something else, like a splinter in my mind.
We had a vampire in a cage.
Do we tolerate enslavement?
The voice came to me from nowhere, deep and full in my mind, but Jiminy Cricket had never been a fixture on my shoulder, and last I checked, Mariah hadn’t learned to talk.
It wasn’t . . . enslavement, exactly.
Yes, it is.
But we were keeping people safe. Vampires were apex predators. They killed people. Their very existence risked exposing the whole magical world.
So why does Ermengarde keep him alive? Why take his blood?
Altair had been trapped in that cell longer than I’d been alive. Way longer. I didn’t even know how long, but Ingeborg had acted like he’d been a fixture since she was just a girl, and by the time I was born, she was ancient.
Now, she was in a home, and Altair was still locked away.
Why?
I didn’t know! To keep him from killing people.
Has he?
I didn’t know. He’d never hurt anyone that I’d seen. Mostly, he just looked . . . well, pitiful. Gray and sunken and eager to please. He was starving.
We don’t have to tolerate that.
Sure, and what the hell was I supposed to do about it? I hadn’t stuck him in that cell. Whatever his situation was, that was between the coven leader and him. And . . . and maybe one day, when I was in charge, I’d change things, but it wasn’t my place yet.
So we’re cowardly.
Yes! Yes. Absolutely. I was a big fucking coward in a world of magic and creatures that kill people with no power of my own. Yes, I was a coward, and really, I didn’t see why it was up to me to be anything else.
Pitiful.
“Shut up, Mariah,” I growled, snatching her off my bed as I fell into it and burying her face against my chest so she couldn’t look at me with her judgmental eyes.
No, it wasn’t really her picking at my sense of shame, but that was as good an answer to what’d gotten into me as anything. The stuffed bunny was judging me. That was it.
Except it wasn’t just Mariah, or the strange new feeling in my head. It was thinking at all. I wasn’t allowed to think! Who’d told me to think?
Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. He was trapped down there, alone and starving, and—
We could do something.
I had to do something.
Hopefully something that didn’t get myself killed by a starving vampire.
I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, not even sure what I was planning until I realized it was time. Finally, just before four in the morning, the house had gone quiet. Everyone was breathing steadily or snoring, and I could hear each one of them.
I set Mariah aside and crept out of bed, down the stairs, through the kitchen and to the basement. The keys were hanging on the kitchen wall by the stairs down, and I snatched them. I tiptoed into the dank and dark to hear Altair’s soft, silky voice. “Hello there.”
What the fuck was I doing? Mother was going to be so pissed . . .
Screw her. She fucking sucks.
I flinched. That was pretty harsh, even if I couldn’t actually say it wasn’t true.
Thankfully, Altair stepped up to the bars of his cage and pressed his face against them, demanding my immediate attention. “Are you finally ready for your awakening, pet, or are you going to disappoint me and take one of those disgusting dogs to bed?”
I swallowed hard, face flooding with heat. “I’m not—”
Altair’s gaze flicked down to my hand, to the keys gripped between my fingers, and a satisfied curl turned his lips.
“I’ll make it good for you,” he promised. “You know I can. No one leaves me unsatisfied, do they?”
Yeah, this was about as far from a loving rendezvous as I could imagine.
But Altair pressed on. “I want to,” he purred. “A pretty little thing like you—how could I not? And you can have me any way you like, but gods, save me from this drudgery. Come inside. Let me take care of you.”
Everything he said made my skin crawl, and that shuddering wrongness propelled me forward. I stuffed the key into the lock and pulled the door open.
“You need to go,” I said.
“What?” Altair blinked at me, eyes wide like I had lost my mind.
In that moment, he didn’t look very much like the predator I’d feared.
“It’s four in the morning,” I hissed, ushering him out. “You’ll have a few hours to find shelter, but not long. Everyone’s asleep. You might be able to make it, but you have to go now.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“For fuck’s sake, go!”
I stepped into his cell to grab his arm, but he jerked away from me, hissing.
He snatched my arm and tried to wrench it around, but somehow I got free.
He must’ve really been starving, for me to manage it, but with desperation or tenacity, I managed to get him outside of his cell and locked the door behind him.
With me trapped inside and him, staggered, outside the bars, we stared at each other. I dropped the keys behind me.
“If you don’t go and they find me like this, what do you think they’re going to do?” I asked.
A muscle in his jaw flexed, but the next second, he turned and fled. I had a split second of panic that he’d tear his way through the coven house on his escape, but he didn’t. I just heard him open and shut the front door.
Then he was gone, and I sat on that wretched old cot he’d used for decades and wondered what the hell had possessed me to let him go when I knew what that risked.
Not just people dying, but Mother’s wrath.
It’d all be my fault.
And it was still the right thing to do.