Sloane Briallen

Aoife had been right to question why I had chosen Karhi.  It had been a lapse of drunken, lonely judgment.  He was the bare minimum for a sire.  Non-abusive, non-interfering, and unwilling to use the fledgling-sire bond for his gain.

But when it came down to it, he was useless.  Like everything else, I was going to have to figure out the siring thing on my own.  Bold of me to put my faith in a man when that had never done a single good thing for me before in my life.

I still couldn’t fucking get over, “I’m sorry that I’ve repeatedly failed you.”

What in the whiny-self-loathing-vampire was I supposed to do with that?

“I know what you are,” I muttered around the unlit cigarette in my mouth, flicking the lighter open to light it.

“Say it.”

I started, looking up wildly for the source of the voice.

I had left my room again to go outside.  Being in the fresh air, I felt much less jittery from all the magic.  It was easier to hear myself think.

I hadn’t set up in the breezeway again.  It was too out in the open, and I really didn’t want to run into Prince Jackass again.

Instead, I had wandered the castle proper until I came out onto the outer wall.  I thought it was called a curtain wall.  I walked halfway around the perimeter before finally settling on the parapet of a tower that faced north.  Mountains rose before me, dark trees and bright snow rolling over uneven ground until they met the sky.  Stars flooded the night above me, the moon waning.

It was Devlin, hands in the pockets of his coat, a cigarette tucked behind his ear.  He was alone.

I huffed out a chuckle through my nose.  “This is the skin of a killer, Bella.”  I lit my cigarette and inhaled, the smooth smoke filling my lungs.  A part of me longed for the harsh burn of a Marlboro or a Camel.

He snorted.  “Did you read the book or see the movie?”

“I read the book in high school because, why not?  That’s funny as shit.  Then I went with my . . .”  I hesitated before forging forward.  “I went with my brothers to go see the movie after it came out last month.”  The back of my mouth only tasted a little bitter talking about them.  Was that progress?  Fuck if I knew.

He laughed, sitting down next to me.  I faced outside, legs dangling over the edge of the tower.  He sat with his feet on the ground, back to the forest.  “I went with Fiachra and Alice to see it, too.  Alice read the book, but I couldn’t get past the first ten pages.”

“Understandable.”

He moved the cigarette from behind his ear into his mouth.  I handed him my lighter, and he lit his cigarette.  As he closed the Zippo, he held it up to look at it.  “Shit, you got one of these lighters?” he asked, handing it back.

“Is it actually gold?”

He nodded, taking the cigarette out of his mouth to exhale.  “Saeran had like ten of them made for some party he had last year.  When Aoife found out, she confiscated them all and has been keeping them under lock and key forever.”

“It’s like a fifteen-thousand-dollar lighter or something.  That idiot dropped a hundred fifty Gs on this?”

“Flaunting wealth for the sake of it.”

“You know what else flaunts wealth?  A guillotine.”

He snorted.  “Fair.”  He handed me back the lighter.  “Could probably pawn that for a few thousand.”

“That was my first thought, too.”  I pocketed the lighter and inhaled.  The cigarette had taken the edge off my irritation with Karhi for now, letting me focus on other things.  “You’re not a living vampire.”

He shook his head, exhaling through his nose.  “Human.  Same as you.”

“Young.”

“Two years.”

“How’d you wind up here?”

“That’s . . . a bit of a long story.”

Probably involved his time in foster care.  I would leave it.

I stubbed out my cigarette and climbed off the parapet.  “Any idea where Aoife would be?”

“This time of night?  Try checking the armory.”  He pointed further down the wall to a tower that connected to the castle by a skyway to the fourth floor.  “Go into there and it’s straight down the hallway you come out on.”  He motioned for me to go through the skyway.

“Thanks,” I said.  “See ya.”

“See ya.”

I would say Karhi had been worthless in answering my questions about siring, but I never even got far enough to ask him about it.  He had just been nonexistent in answering my questions.

Aoife was the only vampire here with whom I was comfortable.  Maybe she would be familiar with it.

I did find the armory, but she wasn’t in there.  Sevilen, however, was.

I hadn’t seen him since the first night I was here.  This time, he had his prosthetic arm on.  It was made of black thermoplastics and titanium.  It connected halfway down his bicep.

The armory was about what I expected, in that it didn’t match any other aesthetic in this godforsaken castle.  It was lit entirely by bright white recessed lights.  One half had wire panels on which were mounted guns, grenades, and other automated and explody weapons.  The other half had wooden racks with swords, spears, halberds, and other combat weapons I didn’t know the names for. 

The juxtaposition of warm wood against the sterile white light and metal was jarring, but it was practical.  There were metal tables in rows in front of each side of the armory, some with disassembled weapons, others with clamps and magnifying glasses and tools—stations for building weapons, I guess. 

There was a black line painted across the floor four feet through the door.  I stepped towards it and immediately hit an invisible wall. 

I cursed, stepping back and shaking out my hand where it had collided with the wall.

Sevilen looked up, a clipboard in one hand, the other with a pen, checking off what looked like an inventory list.  When he saw me, he smiled warmly, but with a hint of humor at my collision.  “Hey, Sloane.”

“Sev.  What the fuck is wrong with this room?”  I reached out tentatively with one hand and hit the wall again.  It was an odd sensation.  Normally walls had an ambient temperature and texture to them.  This one had nothing.  It was just a force against me, keeping me from passing through.  It didn’t feel like anything except being hard.

“Well, we can’t have just anyone coming into the armory and taking what they want,” he said, setting the clipboard on a nearby table.  “Especially not hooligans like you.  You can walk in, but you can’t move past the warded line.”  He stepped forward so he was closer to me.  “I think it’s safe to assume you’re not here for weapons.  There’s a whole shit ton of paperwork you would need—”

I cut him off.  “I was looking for your wifey.”

One side of his mouth turned up in a smile, looking dreamy.  “Wifey?  Ooh, I like that.”  He grinned, focusing back on me.  “I’m going to call her that.  Wifey left a few minutes ago for a meeting.”  He sobered.  “Is it something I can help with?”

“Not unless you have answers about how to sire people.”

His eyebrows rose, but he didn’t seem surprised by my statement.  He was Aoife’s partner and . . . did something for the king and queen.  Maybe he was an armorer or something?  Would explain why he was here. 

“You know why I’m here?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Unfortunately, I cannot help you with your question.  I have not done it myself.  Aoife would be the right choice.  Or you could ask your own sire?”

“Captain Unstable?  Yeah.  He’s fucked off to brood somewhere, and I can’t ask him.”

Sevilen chuckled.  “Sounds about right.  When I see Aoife next, I can tell her that you needed her?”

“Thanks.”  I turned to leave.

“Sloane.”

I glanced back at him over my shoulder.

“How are you doing since the other night?  You looked rough.”

I shrugged.  “Looking rough is my aesthetic, Sev.”  I left.

Staying out of the Royal Wing, I wandered the halls.  They were busy, but people moved so fast, I didn’t have to acknowledge anyone.  For all practical purposes, I was alone.

I had blown off Sevilen’s concern, but I also wasn’t stupid.  I knew I was running on fumes.  I was one bad interaction away from lighting up the entire fucking castle with green soulfire.  I hadn’t really talked to anyone about what had happened in the dungeons or the PTSD dreams or any of it.  I dissociated so hard after Hazel took me from the dungeons that only the nudge of Karhi’s nearing consciousness brought me out of it. 

I would talk to Mira, but she was so busy, and I didn’t want to bother her.  I had, in a way, tried to talk to Karhi, but he was so fucked up from . . . siring me?  I honestly wasn’t sure because the man had literally five centuries of shit to be fucked up about.  But regardless of what was causing it, I couldn’t talk to him either.

For the first time since I had reunited with Mira and my family, I felt alone.

I would have tried to look back at the past two years to figure out how I had handled being alone before, but I knew the answer—I hadn’t.  I didn’t remember much between when I graduated high school and when I met Karhi.  Six months, just gone.  Honestly, I didn’t even really remember all that much about the six months prior to that, either.  Bits, here and there—school, homework, graduation—but everything had been heavy with grief. 

Until I got the diploma in the mail this past summer, I had also just completely forgotten I finished my associate’s not long before Karhi sired me.  I barely remembered getting a fucking degree, even though I had worked my ass off with dual enrollment during my junior and senior years of high school and finished off the final classes at a community college in Minnesota.

I did remember the past year well enough, but there had still been so much anger and self-isolation.    Though it had been different.  I chose to be alone.  I chose to keep everything inside and stay silent.  It was all silent rage and pain and grief, but it had still been a choice.

This wasn’t a choice.  I was alone, by myself.  I was in a strange place for a strange request, walking strange hallways with strange people.  By myself.

“Ooh, and what are you doing out of your cage?”

Strike that.  Strange hallways with assholes.

I looked up to see Saeran.  I stood at a corner where a hallway turned at a right angle.  My internal map placed me by the outside wall of the castle.

He was alone again.  I hadn’t caught it before, but he had a forced-casual look to him.  His hair looked windswept, but it didn’t really move with him, as if it was styled to look careless.  His shirt looked like a red T-shirt he had just thrown on, but there was a subtle cut in at his waist.  He wore light wash skinny jeans with careful rips at the knees.  And while ripped jeans were definitely a fashion thing—all of it was tailored to fit him.  He hadn’t just “thrown on whatever”.

And like an asshole, he wore brown leather boat shoes with no socks.

“What are you doing out of yours?” I countered.

His eyes flashed from indigo to deep magenta.  “Others may think your disrespect is cute, fledgling, but I don’t.  You will treat me with the proper respect and deference.”

“Why?” I shot back.  “You’re not my prince.  But you’re right—I am a fledgling.  So why do you feel so threatened by me and how I act?  Highly doubt you’d ask this deference from Karhi.”  That last bit was a shot in the dark, but something told me it was right.

He sneered at me.  “You need to learn your place.”  In the blink of an eye that my meager enhanced fledgling senses couldn’t track, he stood in front of me.  He grabbed my arm, hissing, “I will teach you to respect me.”

Memories of when Ilona said those exact same words flooded my head.  Fear and fury seized me and before I even registered what I was doing, I had already broken Saeran’s grip. 

With practiced movements that flowed from muscle memory, I rolled my arm over his.  As I did, I turned away from him, slamming an elbow into his jaw, throwing my bodyweight behind it.

The bone broke under the force of my strike, the sound like the popping of a dry branch.  Saeran howled in pain, the blow knocking him down.

When you’re outmatched, don’t stay and fight.  Surprise and flee.  You can’t drop a limb like a spider, but you can flee like one.  Those words came to me unbidden, echoing from the depths of my memory.  The man who taught me to fight had had a lot of comparisons to spiders in his teachings.

I bolted before Saeran could move, fleeing back the way I came.  I didn’t know the castle walls well, but I knew enough to roughly go towards the Royal Wing, to Mira’s room.

I flew out of the door into the breezeway leading to the wing.  I felt the immediate shift of magic, the breezeway much less heavily laden than the castle.

I was barely outside before something slammed into me.  I cried out in pain as I hit one of the pillars.  A hand at my throat pinned me back against the stone, cutting off any air to shriek.

Saeran’s eyes were a dangerous violet red.  His jaw was lopsided but already resetting.  Bones for younger vampires could take a day or two to heal, but for older vampires, it could take minutes.

“You’re going to regret that,” he hissed.  “You—”

I had a few inches on him, and my arms were longer.  I reached up, claws tipping my fingers, and jammed my thumbs into his eyes.

He screamed, releasing me and staggering back.  I took the opportunity to dart towards the Royal Wing but before I could go through the door, a hand wrapped around my wrist and yanked back.  Pain tore through as my shoulder dislocated.  I crashed into the ground, landing on my back.  It knocked the wind out of me—something I didn’t need, but still wanted instinctively. 

I tried to scramble to my feet, even while dark spots blotted out my vision.  Fiery pain blazed in my back and shoulder, but I needed to get out of there.  I needed to find someone.  I needed—

“You fucking bitch,” Saeran hissed in my ear.  Claws tore across my back, and I cried out in pain.  A heavy weight knocked me onto my stomach, grinding my hips into the ground. 

The weight was only there for a moment before it was suddenly gone.

“What the hell are you doing?” a female voice shouted.

There was a moment of stunned silence that gave me enough reprieve to catch my breath, the pain in my back easing.  I darted to my feet as fast as I could and had to slam the hand not attached to the dislocated shoulder into the closest pillar to keep from pitching forward.  My vision spun while Saeran hissed and struggled against something.

When I could finally see, the sight that met me wasn’t what I expected.

Saeran lay on his stomach, the side of his face mashed into the pavement.  Flaking blood surrounded his eyes, the delicate skin around them bruised from my attack.  Cailean knelt with one knee on his neck, the other at his shoulders, her hands pinning his wrists to his back.

 “Shit,” I said, looking between Saeran and Cailean. 

“Finally back, dearest sister?” Saeran said into the concrete.  The hiss that had been in his voice when he threatened me was gone.  It was replaced with an even tone filled with more venom than I had ever heard in my life.

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” she snarled, pressing her knee just a little bit harder into his neck.

“No, you’re embarrassing me, Cailean,” he snarled back in a combination of fury and pain.  I noticed for the first time that claws tipped his fingers.  “She attacked me.”

“She is both a fledgling and a guest.  You are a four-hundred-year-old prince.”  She leaned over to bring her mouth to his ear.  “Act like it,” she hissed.

“You gave up any rights to tell me how to conduct myself,” he shot back.  “You made your choice.  I’m just cleaning up after you.”

Whatever the hell that meant, I saw Cailean’s eyes widen.  She blinked in surprise, looking from Saeran to me and back.  “That’s what this is about?”

In the blink of an eye, she stood in front of me.  She glanced at me before looking back at her brother. 

Saeran was getting back to his feet, his eyes healed and his jaw back to normal.  He bared his teeth at his sister, but there were no fangs.  “You two get to abandon everything, and I get stuck with the fallout.”  He nodded to me without taking his eyes off his sister.  “She shouldn’t even fucking be here.  Useless fucking bitch.”

I would say that having Cailean between me and Saeran was what gave me the courage to reply.  But that would be a lie.  I had been born to stir the pot.  “Call me what you want, prince,” I said.  “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your tiny dick will never hurt.” 

Cailean’s head snapped back to look at me with a combination of disbelief and rebuke written in her scowl.

“Don’t look at me like that.  You’re still on my shit list,” I sneered at her.

Saeran glared at me before finally waving his hand.  “Have it your way.  You always do, dear sister.”  He turned from me, stalking back into the castle.

“Fucking prick,” I muttered, bracing myself against the pillar.  I grabbed my arm and shoved my shoulder back in its socket.  The pain was sharp before it settled into a steady ache that would fade over the next several minutes.

“I’m sorry for my brother,” Cailean said as I rolled my shoulders and winced.

I leveled a cool glare at her.  The fear and panic at Saeran’s attack had disappeared when I had a job to focus on—namely, fixing my shoulder.  But now, in the face of Cailean, the woman who had forced me to relive some of my worst memories, anger and disdain had settled in.  “You sound sorrier about him than you did the other night after you tried to have one of your neuropaths violate me.”

She winced.  “I sincerely apologize—”

“Fuck that,” I snarled, fists clenching at my sides.  “Fuck you.  Using subpar neuropaths is a real good way to fuck someone up irreparably.  Did you know that?”  I gave her the finger.  “Fuck you.”

I left before she could reply.