Karhi Emelyn

Karhi hadn’t expected to find Sloane making out with a human, but it also wasn’t that much of a surprise, either.  There was a human barista at her favourite coffee place that she hooked up with every once in a while.  Sloane wasn’t picky about race—she’d sleep with human and magic alike.  And he had never been concerned about her ability to control herself in the heat of the moment.  She had never hurt a human.

Mira and Sloane peeled off when they were closer to Mira’s quarters.  Hazel said that she would have a doctor sent to them.  Aoife went off to make the request for Hazel.

Karhi followed Hazel and Matadi back to their quarters.  He untied the shirt from around his arm, the bones back in place and healing.  His arm was sore, but it would be okay soon.

When the door was closed to their colourful chambers, Karhi said, “Your Majesties, I believe I have been very patient.”  And he left it at that, folding his arms over his chest and leaning against the door.

Hazel’s expression was impassive, but Matadi looked at her with a look that said, Told you so.  He turned from his wife, heading towards one of the doors off of the living room.  A moment later, he came back with bags of blood, already pierced with plastic tubing as a straw.  Blood Capri Suns as Sloane called them.  Matadi handed one to Karhi before giving one to his wife.

Karhi maintained eye contact with Hazel, putting the tube in his mouth and sucking down the blood, biting back the urge to gag.  He hated cold blood.  It was thick and viscous like molasses.  He didn’t mind it when it was mixed with alcohol—the alcohol thinned it out and most of those drinks were meant to be cold.  But just blood on its own cold was disgusting.

Hazel met his gaze, but Karhi’s well-being had depended, on more than one occasion, on his ability to maintain eye contact.

Of course, Hazel knew that.  She was the first to looked away, opting to sit down on the couch, motioning for Karhi to also sit.  She set her bag of blood down on the coffee table to let it warm to room temperature.  Karhi sat across from her as Matadi settled next to her.

Karhi managed to get the pint of blood down before setting the empty bag on the coffee table.  The copper was strong in the back of his mouth.  It was always stronger cold.

“My intent with bringing you and your fledgling here was twofold,” Hazel said after a moment of collecting her thoughts.  “I had hoped to have your fledgling’s consent before talking to you.  My husband had pointed out that you would start noticing something was amiss before I could, but I chose to move forward ignoring his sage advice.”

Matadi was a man of few words, but his facial expressions said everything.  His chest was puffed out, a self-satisfied smile on his face as he watched his wife.

“You have a request of me?” Karhi asked.

“Correct,” Hazel said.

There were very few things that Hazel would want him for that she couldn’t get within her own house.  He had played detective for Ilona for a number of years, but Hazel had people more than capable of doing that for her.  Hazel had really only used him for stealth missions suited to his particular brand of neuropathy. 

Since children were basically slaves for their sires to rent out, Hazel had paid Ilona a lot of money for Karhi’s assistance in the past. But with Ilona out of the picture, Hazel could ask him for much more than she previously could.

“A request wholly separate from what you’ve asked of Sloane.”

“Correct,” she said again.

Why hadn’t she asked this to be his penance on Sloane’s behalf?  It wasn’t illegal and didn’t run the risk of the courts finding out and punishing Hazel.

The answer came to him almost as soon as he thought the question.  If Hazel had asked Sloane, outside of the covenant, there was nothing stopping them from saying no outright.  No period of “thinking it over”.

But with Hazel asking, and allowing Sloane to say no, it would throw the penance back to the courts.  And at that point, Sloane would be past her year mark.  She would have to do the new penance.  Karhi could no longer do it on her behalf.  It didn’t matter if she had broken the laws before she was past her year mark.  Once she was past her year mark, she was to bear the consequences of her actions. 

Anger flared up the base of Karhi’s spine, and he just barely bit back the growl that seethed into his mouth.  Hazel had played them.  If Sloane said no, she had no way of knowing what new thing the courts would ask of her.  The courts were generally fair, but they also worked on a long time scale.  They could ask penance to be completed somewhere far away over the course of ten or twenty years.  And while that length of time was nothing in the face of the eternity she would potentially live, it would mean that Sloane missed years out of the lives of her primarily human family.  Hazel knew that.

Karhi’s fists clenched, and he stood up.  “Whatever you want from me, consider a blanket ‘no’ to be my answer.”  Before Hazel could reply, he said, “If you try to threaten that you’ll pull your request for Sloane, I will tell the courts what your request is.”

Hazel pressed her lips together, her expression unreadable.  “Karhi, what—”

The door to their quarters opened without warning and a small girl who looked to be no more than seventeen wearing a dark blue sari ran in.  She was Indian, her black hair tied up in twin pigtails with red ribbons.  She came to a stop at the edge of Hazel’s couch and bowed quickly.  “Your Majesties, I apologize for the intrusion, but I must speak with you urgently.”  When she saw Karhi, she bobbed her head in greeting.  “Karhi.”  She had a faint Indian accent mixed with an Irish accent.

That was Savita, their best truthseeker, and a rare vampire mage. 

“Karhi,” Hazel said.  “We’re not finished.” 

He left the room without saying his thoughts out loud.  Says you.

It wasn’t until he was closer to his own room that he stopped and finally let the fear crash against him.  His knees gave out, and he sank to the ground, using the wall to guide him down.  He pressed his forehead into the crevice where his knees met, wrapping his arms around his shins and holding himself tightly.

He took a deep breath in and out.  He knew that if he tried to fight the fear, it would debilitate him.  He would be stuck here, blood frozen in his veins and ice in his lungs, for an amount of time that only his sympathetic nervous system had control over.

He had stood up to Hazel.  He had stood up to a woman with more than enough power to wipe him off the face of the earth.  And he had done it without giving away that beneath all his calm, a small part of him was screaming at him to submit to her.  He had managed to call her out and had gotten away unscathed.

But this woman still looked very much like the nightmare that had plagued him for five hundred years.  And he had told her ‘no’.  He had seen through her awful plan, and he had told her no, and he had gotten away.  He had survived.

But he was still so fucking afraid.

A part detached from his fear hoped that no one would come across him having a panic attack in the middle of a hallway.

The moment he had that thought, a door nearby opened and shut, and his fists clenched where they wrapped around his knees.  He dug his nails into the flesh of his calves, but it did nothing to stop the shaking.

It was only when he felt a flush of cooling calm over his frayed nerves that he realized Sloane was there.  He looked up to see her walking towards him from the hall that led to Mira’s room.  Her face was inscrutable, but the soothing aura emanating from her was enough.

She barely paused in her walk, reaching down and scooping him up in her arms.  She didn’t have the strength of a full-fledged vampire yet, but she had enough to pick up his two hundred pounds.

“H-hey,” he protested, trying to push her away so he could stand.  “I don’t need—”

“My room is a hallway down.  You don’t want anyone seeing you, and Aoife will be coming out of Mira’s room soon.”

He didn’t have it in him to argue with her.

She brought him back to her room, setting him down when she had to fumble with the key to it.  By then, he was calm enough that he could stand upright, but he still shook.

She unlocked the door and took his hand, leading him into her bedroom.  He barely registered that it was decorated like a child lived here.  He remembered someone saying that Sloane was in one of the rooms that isolated her from neuropaths.  Something about nightmares that kept Mira up.

She led him to sit on the bed and turned away to take off her jacket and boots.  She moved to the opposite side of the bed and climbed on it to sit and lean against the headboard.  She didn’t speak, pulling out her phone to play on it.

It was like when she would take care of him after his heroin comedowns.  She sat with him and let him be.  She didn’t ask questions, and she didn’t pry.  They just existed in the same place.

Shame crept down his spine.  She had done this so many times for him.  She wasn’t even twenty years old, and she was taking care of him like she was the sire, and he was the fledgling.  She’d done it back in Phoenix; she’d done it every time he came home out of his mind on heroin; and she’d pushed him to talk to his siblings about what they’d been through collectively.

What had he ever given back to her?

He looked up at her.  Her face was neutral, her emotions conflicted, but she wasn’t distressed.  She was thinking.

When she finally said what she was thinking, her question was not what he expected.

She put down her phone and looked at him.  “How is it that Ilona and Queen Hazel are sisters but they’re different species?” 

“Turned by different vampires.”

She gave him a sour look.  “Yeah, no shit.”

He huffed out a laugh.  “They were the children of some king centuries ago.”  He knew what king, knew their original names, and even knew the history of Ilona being married off to yet another king.  He also knew that Sloane’s eyes would glaze over if he gave her a boring history lesson on Irish monarchs from the tenth century.

“Ilona and Hazel liked to sneak out with their servants to go to festivals and pubs.  In something like 976 AD, they were doing their usual game of ‘slumming it with the peasants’ and got caught up with some vampires.  They ended up turned by two double-teaming vampires.  Ten years later they killed their sires and parted ways.”

Karhi could feel Sloane doing some mental math.  They were over a thousand years old.  “That’s old,” she said when she had calculated the amount.

“They are among the oldest vampires,” Karhi agreed.  “Vampires aren’t notorious for their life expectancy in comparison to other magics like Fey or elves.”

“No, they are not.”  She bit her lip in thought for a moment before saying, “Shame on me for being Eurocentric, but I also wasn’t expecting Hazel’s family to be black.”

“You thought the name Matadi was, what, from England?”

She glared at him, giving him the finger.  “I grew up going by magics on a need-to-know basis.  I knew Aoife.  I knew Sevilen.  I knew of Hazel.  I didn’t know the names of any of her fucking children or her husband.  It wasn’t useful information.”

“Fair enough.”  He pursed his lips, looking up at the ceiling.  It was painted a pale blue with a blurry sun, as if looking out from under the water.  “King Matadi’s story is pretty interesting.  Are you at all familiar with slavery in Colombia?”

“Thanks to the American education system, I’m just barely familiar with slavery in the US without supplemental reading.”

He couldn’t argue with that.  “King Matadi was brought from the Kingdom of Kongo by Portuguese slave traders.  They brought him through a port in Colombia called Cartagena de Indias. 

“The port wasn’t too far from a settlement called San Basilio de Palenque.  In the early 1600s, the settlement was founded by a man, Benkos Bioho.  He was an escaped slave and he helped other slaves escape.  They would ambush slave traders and free any Africans taken to be sold into slavery. In the 1640s, Matadi was brought here by slave traders, they were ambushed, and he was set free.

“Matadi went on to live in the settlement.  He met Hazel when she was traveling through.  They fell in love and had Cailean. 

“Matadi still worked with other former slaves and black men stolen from Africa to ambush slave traders.  When Cailean was four, he was almost killed during an ambush.  Hazel had to turn him immediately to keep him from dying.”

Sloane’s eyebrows went up.  “Damn.”

“Matadi and Hazel have an interesting history.”

“Matadi himself has an interesting history.  Who gives a shit about Hazel?  Does she have slave revolts on her resume?  No?  Then don’t come at me with that.”

He shook his head, chuckling.  Sloane had the hint of a smile around her mouth.  It was the first time he had seen her smile like this since . . . well, he wasn’t sure.  A couple days at least. 

“How are you?” he asked.

She paused, tilting her head to the side in a question.  When he didn’t elaborate, she shrugged.  “Things have been better.”

He chuckled bitterly. 

“I’m struggling with Hazel’s request,” she admitted after a moment.

He nodded sympathetically.  “Siring can be a burden.”

She bit her lip for a moment, an expression on her face like she was about to disagree.  But instead, she said, “I need to ask you a question I’ve been avoiding.”

His brow furrowed.  “What’s that?”

“I don’t remember the night we met very well.  But I feel like I . . . did something bad that night.”  She set her phone down and sat up, crossing her legs in front of herself and turning to face him.  “We’ve never talked about it, but I know something about it bothers you.  And I wasn’t in a good place back then.”

His heart dropped.  He had avoided thinking about it for the past year.  There was too much from that night to unpack.  In fact, he had hoped to throw out the entire suitcase without ever examining the contents.

But when had things ever worked like that?

He met her gaze and her mouth twisted unhappily.  “Yeah . . . I thought so.”

He shook his head, the shame from earlier returning twofold.  “You didn’t do anything.  I was the one who lost control.  You didn’t choose to become a vampire.”

She looked away from him.  “Karhi . . . I wanted to die.”

He sat up straighter, shock like cold water down his spine.  “What?”

He felt her emotions like an undercurrent brushing up against his own.  Bitter regret and horrified realization. 

“We met the night of my birthday.  And I went home with you.  My birthday has always been the absolute worst fucking day of my life.  My mom died.  Mickey and Bell disappeared.  My . . .”  Her fists clenched in the comforter.  “I was . . .”

He didn’t know what she was trying to say, but he could feel the shame and fear that underlaid her words.  Whatever it was, it was too big for her right now.

He reached out to cover her hand with his own.  She didn’t look up, but her grip on the bedspread relaxed.

“I wasn’t actively suicidal, but I definitely didn’t care if I lived.  And . . . I think I tried to use you to make everything go away.”

Karhi knew what she meant.  He himself had never had a particular attachment to living.

“We had sex,” he said.  “I drank too much.  Got too wrapped up in the heat of the moment.  I kept going until . . .”  He removed his hand from hers.  “I’m five hundred years old.  You shouldn’t be trying to comfort me or make me feel better.  The fact that you’ve had to do it multiple times over the past few months is wrong.  I’ve failed as your sire.”  He stood up finally, unable to look her in the eye.  “I need to take responsibility for my actions.”

He felt Sloane’s confusion.  “Karhi . . .”

“I’m sorry, Sloane.  I’m sorry that I’ve repeatedly failed you.”

He left before Sloane could say anything else.