Karhi Emelyn

“I don’t understand how a fledgling refuses to drink blood,” Karhi complained, slamming down his mug on the countertop.

“Hey,” Carry snapped, putting a cloth coaster down and moving his mug to it. “Don’t chip my counters.”

Karhi scowled but he ran his fingers over the granite to make sure he hadn’t damaged the countertop. It was fine.

He had gone over to Carry and Onyx’s place after his argument with Sloane. Their apartment was much larger and more open than his. A penthouse suite on the top floor, it was primarily an open rose marble floor plan with a spare bedroom and master bedroom off of the sides.

The kitchen separated the foyer from the living room, just a hexagon of counters and appliances enclosing the kitchen space. Low-backed stools were spaced evenly around the kitchen, allowing for people to sit while others worked in the kitchen.

Karhi sat at one of the stools, Onyx next to him. Carry stood cutting up strawberries to make a daiquiri. Karhi didn’t get the point of making drinks for the sake of making drinks if there was no blood. He had asked for blood instead.

“It is weird though, isn’t it?” Onyx asked. She was sketching on a pad of paper. “But also, maybe it’s not? Ilona starved all of us our first year. We were always thirsty.”

“Lunette didn’t starve her children,” Karhi replied, picking up his mug to drink. “They still drank anything and everything.”

“I wouldn’t use Luna as an example because too many of her fledglings went into frenzy,” Carry replied. “But . . . I would still agree because our fledglings also drank anything and everything.”

“The other day, she collapsed from not eating.”

“Yeah, you told us.”

“Did I tell you I had to open up a vein and feed her directly?” Karhi ran his hand through his hair in frustration.

Carry grimaced. “It was that bad?” She tossed the remaining strawberries in the blender and moved to grab the rum from her liquor cabinet.

“Yes!”

“Did you make sure she drank when she got home?” Onyx asked.

He rolled his eyes, but he nodded. “She didn’t give me shit about it. For once.”

“Maybe use a lighter touch,” she said, shading in something in her drawing. “Did you make her feel bad for eating?”

He scowled. “No.” He paused for a second. “I did point out that she always has to do something while drinking. Asked if it was so she didn’t have to focus on the blood.”

“If you think she hates drinking blood,” Onyx said, “don’t. Point. It. Out.” She rapped his shoulder with her pencil to emphasize each word.

He swatted at her to make her stop. “What the hell, Onyx?”

“Don’t punish the behaviour you want to see! You want to open another vein because she doesn’t drink again for a week?”

He sneered at her, but she was right. “Fine,” he grumbled.

“If you two just finally dealt with all that sexual tension, maybe you’d get along,” Carry said, putting the lid on her blender and starting it.

“Carry!”

She smirked at him, leaving the blender running to drown him out.

He seethed. Onyx and Carry always sided with Sloane. They told him that he was the one who decided to sire her into a vampire. He was the one who had chosen the most stubborn, childish human as his first fledgling ever. He was the one who had to act like an adult and take responsibility because he was over five hundred, and she was nineteen.

Oh, he hadn’t told them.

When Carry finally stopped blending, Karhi said, “She’s nineteen, Carry.”

Carry stopped in the middle of lifting the pitcher off the blender motor, staring at him slack-jawed. “What?”

Onyx looked up from her drawing, eyes wide. “I thought she was at least twenty-five.”

He rubbed his face. “I did, too, when I turned her. But recently she pulled that out when she was angry at me, and I do not know what to do about that.”

“Ooooh, you’re going to have to go on trial,” Onyx said. Her tone was far more amused than it should have been.

“How close is she to twenty?” Carry asked. She paused. “Wait, is that even illegal?”

He threw up his hands in uncertainty. “I have no idea. Twenty is the age of adulthood for us, but eighteen is the age for humans. Age of consent for humans is lower than eighteen, so, is the age of consent for us lower, too? But usually, consent means sex, and that’s not even what I mean.”

“Isn’t it?” Carry asked, raising an eyebrow.

He glared at her. “No. The power dynamic between a sire and fledgling makes everything imbalanced.”

“Ilona—” Onyx started.

“I don’t care what Ilona does,” he growled. “I wouldn’t ever use her as an example for anything except how to not treat your fucking children.”

Onyx looked away, going back to sketching. Carry, on the other hand, eyed him for a moment before smiling. “I’m glad to see your general rule of sleeping with anything that can consent doesn’t extend to your fledgling.”

He rolled his eyes. “She can’t consent. Things could be different if the fledgling-sire connection didn’t mean you could literally control your fledgling to do whatever you wanted. But as it is, no. The minute she hits her year mark and is a full-fledged vampire, she gets to live her life and get the hell out of mine.”

“If you can get that far.”

He made a noise of irritation in the back of his throat, clicking the ball of his tongue piercing against his teeth. “I’ve never heard of this. If the courts find out, will I get arrested for turning an underage-overage human?”

“That would be a question for Luna,” Carry replied.

He gave the ceiling a long-suffering look. “She’s going to be pissed when she finds out.”

“You cleaned up plenty of her fledgling messes. She can buck up.”

His phone beeped. He checked it to see a text message confirming that his order was ready.

He drained the rest of the blood from his mug and stood up. “I’ll talk to her. But right now, I have to go pick up more blood.”

“Don’t you usually get it delivered?”

“Yeah, but someone went through my whole stash this past week because she has no concept of maintaining her blood levels. She keeps starving herself, which means we went through almost my entire supply for the month to stabilize her. I had to order again so soon that Azlea told me I had to go pick it up myself.”

“Oooh, fun,” Onyx said.

Karhi grimaced, leaving.

Azlea and Thirn only lived a few buildings away from Carry and Onyx, but he still drove to avoid having to carry the blood bags back to his car.

They lived in the tallest residential building in Minneapolis, the Carlyle, on the top two floors. It was a long way up on a single elevator that only went to their apartment.

He stepped out of the elevator into a hallway painted a minty green. The carpet was plush, and he sunk into it when he stepped out.

The door in front of him looked like it belonged to a different time. The hallway was modern, with carpeting and paint and small, polished wood end tables on either side of the elevator doors.

The door was constructed of wood, lines of dark russet and pale cream circling to meet in the centre. Where the different colours met sat an old, burnished iron knocker polished to a dark shine.

He hit the knocker against the door three times. As always, the sound that emanated was far too deep and resonant for iron on wood.

“Come in!”

Karhi pushed open the door and entered into the dead of winter.

The room stretched out before him. Stalactites of ice gripped the cavernous ceiling menacingly with sharp tips. From their thick bases, big, fat snowflakes fell, blanketing the floor before him with snow. The snow drifts rose and fell as if wind had whipped them around the room. Some drifts came up to his waist.

He had known to expect it before coming in, but it was still a marvel. He hadn’t felt even a draft coming from under the door. Magic cloaked the room.

Every wall except the one he’d walked through was made of glass. From the outside, the windows were mirrored, but from the inside Karhi could see the Mississippi a block away.

Ice columns as wide as he would be with outstretched arms grew from the floor. Some were as low as Karhi’s knees, others twice as tall as him.

A small woman stood barefoot on one of those columns. Azlea.

She was as pale as the snow that surrounded her, her crimson lips standing out in stark contrast. Her hair fell to her waist, all the pale blues and greens of glaciers. She wore a white dress that looked like cloth, but Karhi suspected it was made of woven ice.

“Karhi!” she cried out, jumping down and running to meet him. Her dress moved just stiffly enough to give credence to his theory.

She stopped short just before she reached him, eyes wide. She peered up at him, almost two heads shorter than he was.

An uneasy feeling crept up his spine. “What?”

“You . . .” She tilted her head and sniffed. “What is that smell? It’s milky.”

His brow furrowed. “What smell?”

She leaned forward until her face was against his chest. She inhaled. “You smell like sandalwood . . . but the milk. And the lavender.”

A light went on in his head. “The lavender is probably my fledgling.”

Azlea stepped back, her eyebrows high on her forehead in surprise. “Tuhkanharmaa? A fledgling? Since when?”

He took a step back from Azlea. “Do not call me that,” he said coldly.

She put her hand over her mouth in chagrin. “I’m sorry. Old habits.”

He nodded stiffly and chose to move on. “Answering your question, since this past December.”

“Is that why I haven’t seen you?”

“I was busy.”

She looked to the back of the room. where a spiral staircase made of shards of ice the size of him rose to the ceiling. “Thirn!” she called. “Come down here!”

“No! If Karhi wants to see me, he can come up himself!” The voice sounded congested and huffy.

“He’s grouchy. This really isn’t his season. Come.”

She took Karhi’s arm and pulled him with force she shouldn’t have had for how tiny she was. They started up the stairs. Halfway up, the ice turned to stone.

If downstairs was what happened when winter was allowed to ravage a room, upstairs was what happened after winter passed and summer was well underway.

All of the colours of the season gripped the room. Pale green spruce and sweeping fire orange beech skirted the walls and windows. The paw-like leaves of oak swooped down from above over maples burning with red and tangerine. Flame maples, red twig dogwood, and boxwood hugged the ground between the trees creating a thick, brush-like forest.

Anywhere that was bare, creeping thyme grew, sprouted with purple flowers. A gentle breeze blew through the trees. The roof was open straight to the night sky here.

A colourful brick walkway from the stairs led to boulders the size of wrecking balls embedded into the ground. A man as tall as Karhi sat against one of these rocks. Shoulder-length blonde hair reflected strange green and red highlights, and vermillion eyes shone with white and yellow glints. He wore a business suit that normally looked like a second skin on him, he was so comfortable in it.

Today was abnormal because he didn’t look like he could be comfortable anywhere or in anything. His nose was red, his red eyes blood shot. His entire visage created a nightmare of blood staring at Karhi.

“Hello, Karhi,” Thirn said, voice flat and nasal. He sneezed, grabbing a tissue from the box on the ground next to him. A pile of crumpled tissues sat on his other side.

“Hello, Thirn.”

“Thirn!” Azlea cried out excitedly, letting go of Karhi to flutter over to her . . . husband? Karhi had never been entirely sure what their relationship was. “Karhi has a fledgling!”

Thirn’s eyebrows rose from behind the tissue he’d brought to his face. “You?”

Karhi nodded.

Thirn blew his nose. “I want to move to Hawaii,” he said, giving Azlea an unpleasant look.

Azlea waved a dismissive hand at him. “Tell us about your fledgling, Karhi. When will we meet her?”

“I doubt you will,” he said. “She hates vampires.”

Thirn grimaced. “One of those self-loathers?”

He threw up his hands in frustration. “I guess? Not like the religious, self-righteous types. You know why I’m picking up blood so soon after getting it from you? She keeps starving herself.”

Thirn’s eyebrows went up. “A vampire starving herself?”

“I don’t know if it’s because she hates that she drinks blood, or if it’s because she genuinely forgets—”

Thirn scoffed but the sound quickly devolved into a coughing fit. “Fledglings do not forget to drink blood,” he said when he could breathe again.

Karhi shrugged. “I have to monitor her intake. And, you know, I’ve heard that’s normal for a fledgling, because you have to make sure they don’t gorge themselves or kill too many people or whatever. But I don’t think this is normal. I have to monitor her intake to make sure she drinks enough.”

“Did she go into frenzy from not drinking?” Thirn asked, blowing his nose again.

“No. She passed out. I had to open a vein and feed her.”

Thirn and Azlea exchanged glances.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Thirn said. “A starved vampire not going into frenzy?”

“And you’re restocking on blood because she consumes more than she should after starving herself?” Azlea asked.

Karhi nodded slowly. “Yes . . . why?”

“You should talk to your sister, Lunette,” Thirn said. “You clearly know starved vampires need to be given blood directly from another vampire when they get too weak.”

Karhi knew first-hand, and he didn’t want to think about it. His first year as a vampire had been torture. Literally. “Yes,” he said stiffly.

“Of course you do. Ilona is your sire. But the second part, which you may not know since this second half was likely lost on you early in your second life—when they’re back to drinking blood, they can’t drink too much. It’s a shock to their system and can actually kill them.”

“She . . . drank two bags of blood in one go right after I revived her last week.”

They stared at him.

“That isn’t normal?”

“No,” Thirn said. “It is not.”

Karhi stared at them. He had definitely not known that. He had never been interested in siring anyone before. His siblings had sired their fair share, but Onyx, Carry, and Zeren hadn’t sired any in decades, maybe even centuries. And Lunette had put a soft ban on herself from siring anyone since the last incident with her fledglings about thirty years ago. That had put a damper on the campaign for the vampire courts trying to recruit her to make new vampires for them as a Producer.

“What’s her name?” Azlea asked.

“Sloane Briallen.”

Everything in the room stilled. The breeze stopped and an uncomfortable silence fell over them.

“Briallen . . .” Thirn said, looking at Azlea.

“That’s what the smell is,” Azlea murmured, looking to Thirn. “You’re stuffy, but I can smell it. It’s like . . .”

Thirn looked at Karhi. “The irony,” he said. “And you have no idea what you’ve done, do you? The danger you’ve put yourself in?”

“I doubt she has any idea, either,” Azlea shook her head.

“Mmm. True.”

Karhi bristled. Years of listening to his sire talk about him as if he wasn’t even there had left a bad taste in his mouth when anyone else did it. “What are you talking about?”

They glanced at each other before Azlea said, “All we can tell you is to be careful. Both you and she need to be careful.”

“Why?”

“It is not our place to get involved,” Thirn said.

Azlea waved a hand in front of Karhi. His stomach and vision lurched.

When they settled, he realized he had been transported out of the building. He spun around and saw his car parked on the street where he had left it. The back seat was filled with packets of blood.

The muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth. What the hell had that been?

Looking up at the building, the top floors looked normal with walls and windows. There was no indication that the roof opened up to the sky.

It was quiet, and nothing stirred.

Frustrated thoughts ran through Karhi’s mind as he arrived in front of the door to his apartment, carrying the boxes of blood Azlea and Thirn had teleported into his car. He set the boxes down, fumbling for his keyring in his pocket.

He hooked them onto his finger and pulled them out, immediately dropping them. He cursed, stooping down to retrieve them.

As he did, he saw a white envelope set neatly against his door. He hadn’t been able to see it behind the boxes.

Curiosity blunted his anger. There was nothing written on the front, just a white, crisp envelope.

He picked it up off the ground and set it on top of the boxes.

He unlocked the door and hauled the boxes back into his arms, making sure the envelope stayed on top. Walking into the house, he found Sloane asleep on the couch, the credits for Top Gun playing in the background.

He almost tripped when he saw her, just barely keeping the boxes in his grasp.

He had never seen her asleep out here before. She always locked the door to her bedroom and tended to sleep when he wasn’t home. She preferred going out during the day.

He fumbled the boxes but kept them all squarely in his grasp, biting his tongue before he could swear. He knew that awake-Sloane was generally unpleasant. Just-woken-up-Sloane probably wasn’t much better.

He glided to the kitchen and set the boxes down. He doubled back to close the door.

As he started to close the door, he heard Sloane sigh. He looked over to see her readjusting herself. She was leaned against one side of the couch, a fleece blanket pulled around her. Her long dark brown hair covered her face, stark against how pale her skin was. Even for a vampire, she was pale.

Absently, he pulled at the ball of his tongue piercing with his teeth. Asleep, she looked almost . . . pleasant. Like she wouldn’t punch him in the mouth for being annoying.

Her eyes opened and she sat up, scrubbing her hair away from her face.

Karhi shut the door behind him, and she started, looking over at him. Her green eyes were alert, as always. If not for her messy hair, she wouldn’t have even looked like she had just woken up.

He felt her uncertainty when she looked at him. She wasn’t sure if he was still angry at her or not.

Right. She had punched him in the mouth. And then two people of unknown magical origins had told him she was dangerous. And then they teleported him downstairs without his permission and didn’t give him a single explanation.

He looked away, stalking to the kitchen. “You should sleep in a bed,” he muttered.

He had expected her to say something along the lines of, “Well then, don’t be a fucking creep and watch me sleep”, but she didn’t say that. Instead, he heard her stand up, murmuring, “Yeah, he’s right.”

She went to her room and shut the door. He heard the lock click into place and then he heard her climb into bed.

He shook his head and started to unload the bags, setting the envelope to the side.

“Dangerous, my ass,” he muttered.