Sloane Briallen

I woke up with Amara curled up with her back against me, my arm slung over her.  She had put her pajamas back on after we had finally collapsed together.  I had my underwear and sweater on.

The light from outside was the type of muted brightness that spoke of the sun descending behind the mountains. 

I kissed Amara’s shoulder.  She stirred with soft noises.  Her grip on my arm tightened for a moment before she turned.  When she saw me, she smiled, eyes soft with sleep.  “Evening,” she murmured, voice husky.

I kissed her.  “Morning.”  I felt her smile against my lips.

“What time is it?” she asked, reaching blindly behind her for the bedside table, where her phone was charging.

“Probably around five.”  I watched as she got her phone and clicked a button to check.

She nodded, one side of her mouth quirking up.  “4:58.”

“I am good.”

She turned over until we were chest-to-chest.  She stretched before resting one arm over me, her other coming up to cup my cheek.  “You definitely are,” she purred.  She kissed me again but before it could go any further, she pulled away, a frown worrying the corner of her mouth, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows.  “What happened last night?”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Did I fuck your memories out?”

She blushed so furiously that I couldn’t help kissing her cheek and chuckling.  “No,” she scowled without any real heat to back it up.  “I meant, why did you come to see me?”

The sleepy, hazy contentment of the slow awakening after a night well-fucked disappeared.  The memories of Cailean and Saeran and Devlin came back.

“I needed to get out of my head,” I said.  The screaming wasn’t back, but the vague keening of something unpleasant kindled in the back of my mind.  I pressed my face into her hand, hiding in it.

She was quiet for long enough that it made me want to peak and see what her expression looked like.  Before I gave in, she asked, “Do you feel better?”

I kept my cheek pressed into her hand, but I did open one eye to look at her.  Her expression was gentle and kind.  It made me feel warm, like sitting at the edge of a hearth.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I do.”

Her smile was so bright that it made the light reflected from the snow outside look dark.  “Good.”

I reached up to take the hand slung over my shoulder, lacing our fingers together.  Something hard nudged into the bases of my fingers.  I looked to see the stone rings she wore there.  Had she never taken them off the night before?

As if she heard the question in my head, she said, “They never come off.”

I ran on of the fingers of my free hand over them.  They were all various metals inset with small gems maybe as wide across as the stem of a Q-tip.  They were precious stones—rubies, emerald, sapphires.  I knew a bit about spotting fake gems from years of pawning things.

“They’re pretty,” I said.  The metals were silvers and golds and bronzes.  Her fingers weren’t green, so I had to imagine the metals were all legit.

She smiled.  It was soft like her other smiles, but there was an echo of pain in it.  “They’re from my parents.”  She bit her bottom lip.  “I got them when they died.”

I felt the loss in her words like a heavy weight in my gut.  “I’m sorry,” I murmured, bringing her hand to my mouth to kiss her knuckles.  The rings were cold against my lips.

She nodded, not meeting my eyes.  “Thanks.”  She inhaled a huffy breath.  “You’ve lost someone.”  It wasn’t a question.

“Foster kid,” I replied.  “I’ve lost a lot of people.”  I wasn’t going to think about it right now.  I didn’t want the screaming to come back. 

She didn’t say anything.

We laid there for a few more minutes before Amara finally sighed.  “I should probably shower.  Go eat something.”

I nodded, letting go of her hand.  “Same.  I need some new clothes.”

She sat up and reached over to her bedside table and fumbled with something there.  I looked over her shoulder and saw her unscrewing the top of a metal canister.  “What’s that?” I asked.

“I’ve had stomach issues since I was a kid,” she said, pulling off the top of the canister to reveal a yellowish powder.  She reached for a small metal scoop like what you see in laboratories and scooped out a small bit of the powder.  “This is a combination of dried, powdered plants like mugwort and yarrow that one of the doctors that work for Hazel makes.  But it’s so bitter, I can’t stand it and can’t put it in anything to make it taste better.”  There were a bunch of half-capsules scattered around the cannister.  She picked one up and held it out to me.  “But you can buy pill capsules in quantities of like a thousand on the internet for twenty bucks.  So, I just fill a pill every morning and pop it.”  She demonstrated by tapping the powder on the scoop into the capsule before closing it with another half of a capsule.  Then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed with the aid of a water bottle next to her metal cannister.

“Huh,” I said.  “That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah!”  She screwed the top back on the cannister and stood up, stretching.  “Meet at the dining hall after showering?  Maybe in an hour?  I have to do my prayers.” 

“You missed some, right?”  I knew a bit about Muslim prayers but not much.

“If I make them up, I count it,” she grinned.

“Fair, fair.”  I stood up, too, getting my jeans off the floor.  “See you later, chipmunk.”

“What?”

I pulled my pants on, smirking.  “You’re like a chipmunk.  Tiny and squeaky and fucking cute.”

“Well, we can’t all be fucking elk like you.”  She pursed her lips in a pout. 

I threw my head back, laughing.  “An elk?  That’s a first.”

“You’re huge and terrifying.”  Her hand was on the door of her closet, and she was looking up at me indignantly.

I grinned wolfishly leaning over to whisper in her ear, “Didn’t seem to deter you last night.”

She shivered, putting her hands on my shoulders and pushing me away.  There were spots of color high up on her cheeks and ears.  “Stop that,” she hissed.  “I need to pray.”  She opened her closet to show where a prayer mat hung on the door.

I laughed, stepping over to the door that led me out of her room.  “Alright, alright.  Though, you definitely said enough prayers last night.”  I winked at her.

She tried to reply but couldn’t get anything out.  She closed her mouth, the flush going further down her cheeks and spreading to her neck.

“Later,” I winked, leaving before she could find something to say.

I was just pulling my pants on post-shower when there was a knock at my door.  I grabbed a clean sweater and put it on before opening the door.

It was Alice.  I blinked in surprise, my brow furrowing. 

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi . . .”

“I’m Alice Costa.”  Her hands started to move from her sides before she caught them and put them back.  It was a strange, aborted move, as if she had gone to fidget and stopped herself.  Or maybe tried to shake my hand, which wasn’t a thing that vampires really did.

“Sloane.”

“I, uh, I wanted to introduce myself to you since . . . well, you know.”

I nodded slowly.  This wasn’t who I had expected to find.  But it also wasn’t entirely unwelcome.  Unlike most of the people I had come across in the castle, she didn’t immediately ring warning bells for me.  Amara had thought she was nice, and her way of talking to Saeran had made me like her for that alone.

A moment passed where neither of us spoke before Alice dipped her head.  She looked just as awkward as I felt.  “Well, yeah, so I just wanted to, uh, do that.  I can—I’ll go, then.  I don’t—”

“Do you want to come in?” I interrupted her.

She met my gaze, eyes darting to look past me before she smiled.  It was a relieved smile.  “Yeah, sure.”

I stepped away from the door, and she came in. 

Alice looked around the room, smiling.  “Oh, right.  One of the neuropath rooms.  You know, I helped design these rooms.”

“You did?”  I’d never really considered who would be in charge of doing designs for rooms in a castle, but I guess it had to be someone, right?  I remembered thinking that the interior design for this castle must have been a nightmare.

“They’ve existed for as long as Hazel has had her castles.  But they were dreary things.  Most of the rooms were so cold and uninviting.  A lot of stone and tapestries and candles.  Very Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

I huffed a laugh through my nose.

“I studied interior design in college, specializing in making spaces inviting and livable, especially for children.  Hazel let me redesign the neuropath rooms.  And over time, she’s let me redesign a lot of rooms.”

I thought back to Amara’s rooms and the king and queen’s chambers.  “Are you why the rooms will sometimes suddenly have like, normal walls and shit?  Instead of all the stone?”

She smiled broadly.  “Yeah!  Amara’s room is like that.  Mine and my husband’s is like that.  Matadi let me loose on the royal chambers a few years ago.  Hazel is pretty utilitarian, but he wanted a warm space.  We got to draw from his Congolese roots.”

I looked around with a new appreciation for the care that went into designing this room.  “I love the paintings on the walls.  I really like the mola mola on the closet door.”

“Thank you!  There’s another room that’s like a scene out of Bambi, and another room that’s an African plain, and another that’s from the Amazonian rain forest.  I tried to avoid doing any sort of fantasy settings because, well, we live in a castle of vampires.”  Her smile was so big as she spoke.  “It was such a fun project to do.”

I reflected her smile with a small one of my own.  But her comment about fantasy settings caught in my head.  “Vampires . . .” I said.

She tilted her head, brow knitted in a question.

“Can I ask you about the request?”

“Of course,” she said.  She glanced at the desk and chair.  “Can I sit?”

I nodded, sitting on the bed as she moved to sit on the chair.  She faced me, hands clasped in her lap, and waited.

“You want to become a vampire.”  I wasn’t going to ask it like a question when we all knew why we were here.

She shrugged one shoulder, which I hadn’t expected.  I had expected an enthusiastic yes.

“No,” she said.  “I mean, not really.  It’s never been any specific dream of mine.  I grew up reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, not Interview with a Vampire.”

I didn’t interrupt, letting the confusion on my face be enough to prompt her for a real explanation.

“I grew up human, like you.  If I had any family to go home to, I’d say no, I’m staying human.  But I have nothing left outside of this place.  I can’t go back into the life I had before.  And I can make something out of myself here.”

I remembered those awful women talking about reforms she was trying to push, though I hadn’t really understood what they meant.  She had to be referring to that.

“They . . .” I trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence without sounding awful.  But, when no better words came, I said it anyway.  “They didn’t kill your family or anything, right?”

She burst into peals of laughter, doubling over in the chair.  It wasn’t mean laughter.  It was laughter from someone who was shocked and genuinely amused.

A moment passed before I started to get impatient.  Apparently, the answer was no, but I needed an explanation.

Finally, she sat back up, wiping tears from her eyes.  She shook her head.  “No.  No, they didn’t kill my family.  That was mostly done by the United States government.”

I grimaced.  I had known a lot of Indigenous kids in foster.  Alcoholism, poverty, straight-up racial violence—America did so hate anyone who wasn’t white.

She nodded, echoing my disgust in the sadness around her mouth.  “My mom got real sick when I was sixteen and died when I was a few months away from nineteen.  Cancer.  The hospital bills were astronomical.  She didn’t have much money to her name when she died, and it all went to the bills because she was out of work with no insurance.

“So, I got stuck with the bills.  I was on a plan to pay them off.”

I looked down.  “Fantastic.”

“Yeah.”  She huffed out a bitter laugh.  “It was just her and me.  My dad died when I was a baby.  No other family.  They all died from poverty due to alcoholism and other stuff.  My mom was the only one left from her family.”

I had heard that story a lot.  Or stories of Indigenous people being forcibly taken from their homes and separated from their families.  I knew a lot in foster.  “Well, that blows.”

“Probably not as much as growing up without a mom and living on the streets until you were a teenager,” she said.

“Aoife tell you about me?”

“Yeah.”

Of course she would have.  She would want to know the sire she was potentially chaining herself to for the next couple centuries.

“Saying you shouldn’t be sad because there’s someone worse off than you is like saying you shouldn’t be happy because someone out there has it better than you.”

She looked at me curiously.  “Never thought about it that way before.”

“No one ever does.  How did you wind up here?  A human among vampires?”

“You know they own a chain of fancy hotels?”

I did.  La Suite Royale, or whatever.  It was where Karhi had stayed in Phoenix.

“I used to work at the check-in desk at the one in Billings.  Usually their hotels are in bigger cities like Phoenix or London, but they have one here since this is where the castle is based.  I’m pretty sure Cyly just opened it for fun, though when I ask him about it, he launches into something boring using buzzwords like ‘core competencies’ .”

I snorted.

“He travels to Billings once a month to do business-guy stuff.  He’s explained it to me, but honestly it sounds absolutely boring.”  As she said the last word, I could still see the fondness in her eyes for Cyly.  She loved him.  “When I was on shift, I usually checked him in, and, most times, I was the one who answered the phone when he called to make a reservation.  I probably worked 80-90 hours a week to get overtime.  Eventually I just wound up being the person who would get him reserved, get his conference rooms set-up—everything.  I got a lot of facetime with him because I was always there.  I didn’t know he owned the hotel, I just figured he really liked it for business purposes.”  She shrugged.  “I didn’t have a lot of energy outside of work to think about it.”

“When you’re poor, you’re just trying to survive,” I said.  “No time to think beyond base necessities.”

She snapped her fingers and pointed at me.  “Exactly.  Well, Cyly really liked my work, and he pushed it through to offer me an event coordinator job.  When they told me and proposed a salary, I declined.”

“Being salaried is a scam.”

“Yep.  I worked so much overtime that I was making over double my base pay and still just barely surviving.  The salaried position was more than my base pay, but significantly less than what I got with OT.”

“Yeah.”  I hadn’t really expected her to tell me her life story of meeting Cyly, but I did feel like I was getting a much better sense of her through the story.  It was helping with the idea of turning her, actually.

“The next time he was in town, he was baffled to see me behind the reception desk again.  He pulled me aside to ask about it.  I still didn’t know that he was the one who owned the hotel, so I just mentioned that it wasn’t enough money to stay afloat and that I needed the OT.  It had never occurred to him that that was why I was around so much.  He still didn’t tell me he owned the place.

“An announcement came out that everyone’s salary was being adjusted and everyone below upper management got a significant pay increase.  The same day it was announced, the job offer came again, double the original salary they offered, and with a stipulation that I was only allowed to work forty hours a week.”  I could see the echo of relief that reliving that memory brought her.  Her smile was colored with amazed wonder.  “I slept a full eight hours for the first time in maybe five years?  It was amazing.”

A moment passed of her smiling as she fell into her memories before she finally shook her head.  “Right.  So eventually, I figured out who he was when someone mentioned the owner of the entire chain was the Ruaidhrí family.  I had read that name so many times working with Cyly that it finally clicked.  And with my promotion, it meant I was working with him even more now.  We were on the phone every day, basically.  I think it was a year before he finally asked me to dinner.  It was a legitimate business dinner, but we wound up staying in the restaurant for hours talking.”

“Did you know he was a vampire?” I asked.

“I knew he was something.  My mother was a sensitive and her father was a parahuman.  I grew up knowing about magic and my mother taught me to identify human versus non-human.  I never got far past that—I can’t really tell vampires apart or a shifter from a mage—but I knew he wasn’t human.”

“So no big reveal?”

She snorted.  “No.  It was actually Saeran’s fault.”

I rolled my eyes.  Of course it was.

“Saeran came in for a meeting with Cyly and Cailean. And of course, being Saeran, he started flirting with me.”

I made a noise of disgust in the back of my throat.

She nodded.  “Basically.  Like, yeah, Saeran’s hot, but he’s too forward and obnoxious.  He’s used to girls just melting for him.  I was polite, but I didn’t give him the time of day.  And when, Cyly spoke to me—we already had this weird flirty thing going?  So, I was a lot nicer.  Saeran picked up on our dynamic and got weird about it.”

“Gross,” I grimaced.

“Yeah,” she agreed, rolling her eyes.  “So, anyway, I only lived about a mile away, so I usually walked home in the summers.  He snuck up on me and scared the living daylights out of me.”  She chuckled a little.  “I maced him.  But he got real mad about that and then real threatening.  He’s got a serious thing about his pride.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said drily.

“I got out of it unscathed.  Cyly had suspected something because, you know, brothers, and had followed us.  He intervened.  They got all made up in their fancy little vampire outfits, you know with the white eyes and the black fingernails?”

I nodded.

“They fought, and Cyly managed to get Saeran to back off with threats that I later figured out pretty much summed up to, ‘I’m telling mom and dad on you’.  They only said ‘the king and queen’ but I figured it out later.

“I was real shaken up, and Cyly took me back home.  He said if I quit, he’d still give me a good severance package.  I didn’t answer him because when I’m trying to process things, I get pretty quiet and wrapped up in my own head.  He left, and I was still trying to figure it out.  I went to bed, and when I woke up, I felt better.  REM sleep for the win.

“I decided fuck Saeran, I liked my job.  I was good at it, and it paid really fucking well.  I had paid off more debt in the past six months than I had in the past decade.  So, I went back to work as usual that morning and was there for a few days before Cyly came in to meet with someone.  When he saw me, he was so shocked.  It was hilarious.  He practically flew to my desk and was all like, ‘I thought you were never coming back blah blah blah.’  And I just gave him this look and was like, ‘When, in our conversation, that wasn’t really a conversation, did I ever say I was going to quit?’  He said, ‘Well you were all freaked that night blah blah blah’ and I just said, ‘Look, you helped me out.  I live in Montana.  I’m not really going to find another job this high paying.  I’m sticking around.  But, could you keep your brother on a leash?’  He told me I would be okay.  I never mentioned the vampire thing, and he figured I’d blocked it out.

“It was another six months before he finally asked me out.  I found out, in that year, that he had people watching me twenty-four-seven to make sure Saeran wasn’t an asshole again.  Our first date was funny, because he didn’t expect anything serious, and then I finally asked him about the vampire thing because I was insanely curious.  He got real shocked, and it was just a funny night.

“Two more years passed.  I wanted to maintain my independence even though I was well aware of who he was.  Prince of the Ruaidhrí family and all that.

“But then, of course, someone tried to kill me,” she said.  “Assassination attempt.  Burned my house down.  So Cyly asked me to come live with him.  I didn’t really have other good options that I wanted to take because my rent had been impossibly cheap and trying to find a new place would have been hard.  So, I agreed.  I mean, I love him.  Been here ever since.”

I found myself chuckling.

“What?” she asked, tilting her head.

“I moved in with my boyfriend because it was cheaper than finding a place to rent.”

She scowled at me.  “Shut up.”

“No, fucking props, man.  I live with Karhi because, you know, fledgling-sire thing, but also because I don’t pay shit for rent.  I’d have done it the same way too.  Added bonus of protection in a magic castle is pretty dope, too.”

Her scowl gave way to an amused grin.  “That was my thought!”

I chuckled again.  “How old are you?”

“Just turned 39.”

I stared at her.

Her brow furrowed.  “What?”

“I had you as 30 at the most.”

Her face split into a grin again.  “Good genes.  I look young as hell.  I only stopped getting carded at bars a couple years ago.”

Hot damn.  I had honestly thought she was some starry-eyed girl enamored with a vampire.  It happened a lot—vampire groupies.  People who wanted to be turned for immortality or eternal beauty or whatever.

But no, this woman wasn’t too far off from being middle-aged.  She actually had some sense of autonomy.

“You want to be turned so that you can stay with him and the rest of the family you’ve built here.”  I didn’t phrase it as a question, more a confirmation.

She nodded.  “My entire circle is vampires at this point.  Cyly, Fiachra, Devlin, Aoife, Cailean, Faolan—so on and so forth.  So, why not do the vampire thing?  Have a life with a family and friends and maybe do some cool shit in the meantime?  And, if I eventually decide I’m done with immortality, we have a fully functioning guillotine in the sub-basement.  I don’t really have anything to lose from this.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, thinking.  Here was someone with nothing left in the human world.  She wanted to do something different, with people she loved.

I guess there wasn’t really any reason for me to say no to this request, was there? 

“Why a human vampire?” I asked.

“Dead man’s blood won’t kill me.”

That was true.  It hurt human vampires but killed living vampires.  “You didn’t want to have kids?  We’re sterile.”

She shrugged one shoulder.  “I’ve always been neutral on it.  If Cyly wants kids, we could adopt.”

Huh.

“Okay,” I said.

She tilted her head, an eyebrow raised in question.

“I’ll do it,” I said, standing up.  “Guess it’s time to talk to Hazel.”

Alice popped up off her chair, beaming at me.  “Really?”

“Really.  But first, I need to go ask Mira something.”