Sloane Briallen

I’m sorry that I’ve repeatedly failed you.

What the fuck did that mean?  How had Karhi failed me?

I had wanted to ask him about siring.  The process, what it felt like, and what being a sire was like for him.  But then everything went weird, and it turned into this bizarre pity party.  What the fuck was that?

In retrospect, I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised about how Karhi responded to my question about siring.  He had been an absolute asshole that first day I was a fledgling, and for months after that.

That first day had been a trainwreck.

Noise woke me.

It wasn’t a specific noise.  It was a cacophony of grinding metal, whirring electricity, voices, cars, and more.  It was like I could hear every noise there had ever been.

I sat up, and my head spun.  A deep rumbling took over the sounds.  It was like a jackhammer to my ears, and I covered them, but it did nothing more than replace that rumbling with the pulsing of my blood through my veins.

A high pitched whine cut through the rumbling, finally resolving the noise for me—a jet engine.  A plane had passed overhead.  Wasn’t there some law that said planes had to fly at a certain altitude above a city?

I covered my head with my arms, fingers locked at the base of my skull, forearms covering my ears.  The pulsing was easier to manage than all the other noise.  I could focus on the pulsing of my heart—had it always been that slow?—and my breathing.

The dizziness subsided, and I could finally look up.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up in a stranger’s home, but, apparently, I’d picked someone with good taste.  The bed was a nice four-poster with ornate carvings at the top of the posts.  It was comfortable.  The room was dark, black-out curtains drawn to cover what were either large windows or a balcony.

Something was off.  Beyond just waking up in a stranger’s bed and hearing everything all at once.

I looked around the room.  There was a closet door.  A door out of the room.  There was a chest at the foot of the bed.  Bookshelves on one wall.  A full-length silver mirror.  Two bedside tables with lamps.

I stopped.

The lamps.  They weren’t turned on.  There wasn’t a single source of light in the room, but I could see.

The noise finally dulled with that realization.  Something began to worm into my brain.  I focused on it, willing it to come to light.  I looked down as I did, and for the first time, I realized I was naked.

It all came back.  Swanskin’s.  Karhi.  Letting him take me home.  Hooking up with him.

Letting him drink from me.

Without telling it to, one hand moved from the base of my skull to the side of my neck.  My fingertips brushed the ragged bumps of a scar. 

“No,” I whispered, finally getting up.  My vision threatened to pitch but I stayed steady.  I moved as quickly as I could to the mirror, fingers still touching the scar.

There it was.  A crescent scar, top teeth, on my neck and bruising below it where bottom teeth had been.  That would scar up too.  My breath quickened.

No.  No no no.  This couldn’t happen.  Not to me.  Not to me.

I couldn’t look away.  I focused on my eyes.  My pupils were dilated to twice their normal size.  But it wasn’t dark at all. 

I looked at my hands and saw they were normal.  There was nothing special about them.  I pulled back my top lip and saw my teeth were normal.

I rubbed at the scar on my neck.  Maybe it hadn’t happened.  Maybe this was an accident.

I chided myself.  Get that weak shit out of here.

I went to the blackout curtains and pulled them to the side.

The light pierced through my skull like knives through my sockets.  I threw up my hands, closing my eyes as I did.

The light didn’t die down so much as I got used to it.  I looked out to see there was a set of French doors in front of me.  They showed me the terrace through which we had entered the night before.  The snow was past my knees but cleared out enough in front of the doors so as not to break the glass.

I squinted in the light and there was just enough reflection in the glass of the French doors to see that my pupils had turned to pinpricks.

I took the handle and opened the door.  The sound of the dead latch coming out of the strike plate was loud, but it didn’t hurt my ears.

I walked out onto the terrace and the sound of the wind hit me immediately.  It was a force of sound, but it was constant and after the initial surprise of how loud it was, it didn’t hurt.

It took me a moment to realize that I was standing on the snow.  I was barefoot in the snow, and I hardly felt it.  My body was handling the cold as if I had just walked out onto cold tile in an air-conditioned house. 

I shied back into the room, closing the doors.  The change from being outside to being inside barely registered.

Dead people didn’t feel temperature.

“Shit,” I whispered.  “Shit shit shit.”  I found my clothes on the floor by the bed.  I pulled them on, expletives streaming from my mouth.  My boots were laying on the floor next to the door. 

I had been with a vampire the night before.  I could hear everything.  I had a scar.  I could see in the dark. I didn’t have the luxury of denial.  Denial was for people who had time and didn’t have to problem-solve on-the-fly.  It was for people who hadn’t spent their lives climbing until their fingers bled to keep from falling.

I jerked open the door and went out into the hallway.  There was an archway into the kitchen from the hallway.  I could see Karhi’s back to me, fiddling with something on the stove.  I could hear the electronic whirring of appliances.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” I demanded.

Karhi turned around, caught off guard.  I could see a bag of blood in his hands that he was putting in a formula dispenser.

I blanched.  Not a formula dispenser.

A blood warmer.

This was really happening.  There was no other reason to just have a bag of blood in your house.  Only vampires, and really sick people, just kept blood around.  And the man in front of me was certainly not a really sick person.  “Fuck.”

Karhi started to speak.  “You—”

I turned and fled.

I didn’t know where I was going until I was pushing open the door to Swanskin’s and running inside.  Niqui was alone at the bar, thankfully.  It was too early for vampires to be drinking and too late for others to be eating, maybe a couple hours after noon.

When Niqui saw me come in, she froze.

I sat down numbly on a barstool.  She didn’t move away from me.  In fact, she stepped closer to me.

“What happened?”

I shook my head.  I didn’t even know what to say.

“Sloane.”

“I fucked up big time,” I whispered.  I put my head in my hands, letting my hair curtain in front of me, blocking Niqui from view.

“What happened?” she pushed. 

“I came back last night for a few drinks after my shift.  I met a vampire named Karhi.”  I couldn’t look her in the face.  She was a bounty hunter at heart.  Even if she worked here, I had probably lost her friendship.  “At least . . . I think it was last night.  That’s all I remember.”

“It wasn’t,” she said.  Her voice was flat.  “Your shift starts in two hours.”

I had been out for over a day then. 

I couldn’t see Niqui’s face, but I did know, somehow, that it was pale.  And that made it worse.  She was surprised.  She was surprised that I, of all people, had been turned into a vampire.  And that made my stomach sink.  I had shocked her.  Maybe even disappointed her.  And I couldn’t handle that.  She was literally my only friend in this stupid city.

She said in a quiet voice, “Karhi . . . Emelyn?”

“I think so.”  He hadn’t ever said his last name, but it had to be.  I hadn’t been able to remember why his name nagged at me that night, but now, in the light of day, I fucking knew. 

“Uh-oh.”

“I know.”  

“You know who he is?”

“Ilona’s,” I answer, barely wanting to say the name out loud. 

I had asked Aoife once, years ago, if she had ever heard of a vampire named Karhi because my grandmother had mentioned him.  I didn’t know his last name.  Even though it had been when I was much younger, his name had been Finnish and stuck with me because my grandfather had been Finnish.

Aoife had immediately known who I was talking about.  She hadn’t really told me much about him.  She had said they worked together sometimes, and he was old and powerful.

That had been the first time I ever learned about Karhi’s sire, though.  Aoife’s description had been disturbing, to put it mildly.

I knew enough to know how famous Ilona was.  That talk with Aoife had been the first time I heard of Ilona, but it had certainly not been the last.  And looking at Niqui’s face now, I could see that she knew similar things.  She pressed her lips together so tightly that they turned white.  “Yeah . . .” 

The door into the bar opened.  I didn’t have to look up to know who was there.  I could fucking feel him.  This foreign thing in my head with emotions tugging and pulling at me.

“I need to talk to you,” Karhi said.  I felt him move toward me, but I didn’t look up at him.  I looked at Niqui.

To my surprise, she was glaring at Karhi.  “You turned my best bartender, asshole.”  She looked at me.  “I will ban him if you need me to.”

That threat helped calm the fluttering in my chest.  She was probably wary, but she still chose me over abandoning me.  That meant more than she would ever know.

I moved to the booth farthest away from the bar.  He followed and sat across from me. 

I felt his emotions like a tug at mine, but I couldn’t identify them.  They were foreign to me.  It would take weeks before I could interpret them.

“It appears you are not totally unaware that something about your fundamental state of being has changed.”

I sneered at him.  “That is so many words to say that I’m a vampire.  Jesus fucking Christ.”

“How familiar are you with vampires?”

Something about that question lit a fire in my chest.  I wanted to scream at him.  But I was in public.  I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.  Not like this, as a newly-turned vampire.  I didn’t want anyone to take note of me like this.  “Familiar enough to know how fucked this is,” I growled.  “A girl flirts with you in a bar and you decide you want to have a companion for life?  What about me?  What about my life?  What the fuck is wrong with you?”

His eyes bore into me.  “You did not act as if you had anything to lose.”

A stab of cold ice went through my stomach.  There was that niggling thought again.  Somehow, I had made this happen.  I had wanted this.

It was a terrible fucking decision.  The worst I had ever made.  I knew who this was.  I knew who the Emelyns were.  I had known who he was the night before.  And I had let him . . . do this.

But I wouldn’t tell him that.  I needed to blame him.  “You’re going to try to blame me?” I demanded.  “Blame me for your mistake?  Blame me for the fact that I get to be one of Ilona’s children?”

Something heavy lurched inside of him.  I felt it, but I couldn’t tell what it meant.  His expression turned even icier, and his jaw tightened.  “I won’t let her hurt you.”

I had touched a nerve.

Good.

“You’re her child.  Are you even Free?”

He didn’t reply and I felt that heaviness sink even further inside of him.  His expression was dark, the muscle in his jaw jumping. 

If what I was saying hurt him, then I would dig the knife even deeper.  I would twist it.  I would make him pay for doing this to me.  “You don’t care if I get hurt.  If you did, you would have either left me alone or just let me die.”

His eyes flashed silver and for a moment, I felt like a bug.  Something he could easily squash without even blinking.  Something soft and small and vulnerable.  I froze, muscles itching to bolt.  But I knew I wouldn’t be able to flee from him.  Nor could I fight.  He would destroy me in either instance.

Before I had to decide what to do, he closed his eyes.  He took a deep breath and when he opened his eyes again, they were back to grey.  He said, “As long as we ignore each other, you’ll be fine.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that.  I chose to repeat it.  “Ignore each other.”

“She does not typically care about her children’s children.  Doubly so if we have no real connection beyond the child-sire.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.  Because Ilona would come to figure out who I was and who my grandmother was.  And she would feel threatened that I would “take” Karhi from her.  She would learn about Mira and my family.

Karhi could not have picked a worse person to turn.

But I didn’t know any of that yet.

“Fine,” I finally said.  I started to get up.  “I’m going home, then.”

He moved faster than I could, blocking me from exiting the booth.  “I assume you’re not talking about my apartment.”

I sat back down, unable to continue forward.  “Why the fuck would I?”

“I broke your lease this morning.”

My mouth dropped.  Outrage and shock bounced around inside of my head like the worst game of Plinko.  “Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because, as my fledgling you are now to live with me.”

My muscles itched again, straining with tension.  I glanced to the door.  Maybe I could try to run.  Somehow get the jump on him.  Somehow—

A light went on in my head, and I quieted. 

He didn’t know who I was.  He didn’t know anything about me, it seemed.  As far as he knew, I was some girl who worked for Niqui.  He probably assumed I was at least twenty, the legal age of adulthood for magics.

But I wasn’t.  I was nineteen.  He had turned a minor.  That might change things.

I felt his gaze on me, but I ignored him, still thinking.

I could let him underestimate me—keep my age to myself and use it against him if I needed to.  I would bide my time.

Looking back on it, hiding my age never actually helped me out.  But by playing dumb in that aspect, it meant that Karhi also assumed I was ignorant.  Working at Swanskin’s meant I couldn’t be completely ignorant of the magical world, but he definitely hadn’t expected my family to be filled with magics when he stumbled on them in Phoenix a year later.

But deciding to bide my time, to take him at his word and live together and ignore each other—that decision had made a world of difference.

Of course I didn’t yet know that.  But it was still a plan.

I finally looked up at him.  “How long do I have to live with you?”

He paused, caught off guard by the sudden change.  “Until your year mark.”

“So, one year from yesterday.”

“Approximately.  Give or take a day.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

I had only ever gone by vampires on a need-to-know basis, but I had known that there were certain expectations of fledglings and sires.  Sires were expected to keep their fledglings under control and teach them how to exist. 

“And then I can leave?”

“Correct.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

“I give you my word that you are free to leave me once your year mark has passed.”

That was a hefty fucking promise to make.  But I didn’t let him know that I understood how hefty it was.  Which, thinking back, was probably the first thing that made him think I was ignorant of magics.

“Okay,” I said.”

“Good.  Then we are in agreement.  We will abide the typical laws or else . . .”  He didn’t finish what he was going to say.  It didn’t really matter.  There were so many things that could go beyond that “else”.  But he probably meant “or else Ilona will have something to say.”

“I don’t think submission is agreement.”

“Sometimes, it’s all you get.”  He shrugged one shoulder.  He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a set of keys.  “For you to get in and out.”

I took the keys and kept my tone only marginally acidic as I said, “Thanks for your consideration.”