Sloane Briallen

“What the fuck?” Cailean shouted at the door, bolting forward to pull it open.  It wouldn’t budge.  And I couldn’t hear a thing from outside of it.  She spun around to look at me.  “What did you say?”

Fuck, she had heard me talking to Karhi?

Cailean advanced on me angrily, and I scrambled to back up.  “Karhi.  I heard you whispering to him.  What did you say?”

“Nothing!  He almost killed her.  He was freaking out.  I was just calming him down!”  I let the fear from having an angry vampire advancing on me fuel my lie.

“Hey!” someone shouted angrily.

We looked up to see Fiachra glaring at us.

The secret door had dumped us in a small entryway.  There was a mirror on one wall with a small table underneath it with a vase of dried flowers.  Directly in front of us, a hallway turned at a right angle, blocking us off from the rest of the panic room.  The walls were drywalled, like the other chambers in the Royal Wing.

Fiachra stood at the corner of the hallway.  There were dark circles under his eyes, and his shirt was torn, showing pale tawny flesh beneath.

“Fiachra,” Cailean said, surprise coloring her voice.

“No fighting in here,” he growled.  “Sloane, you need to turn Alice.  Come on.”

I blanched, but the glare that Fiachra leveled at me made me follow him without saying anything.  Cailean also followed, not saying a word.

The panic room about half the size of Karhi’s entire penthouse apartment.  There was a grouping of couches in one corner around a coffee table.  Another corner had a hospital bed with all the accoutrements you would see in a hospital room—pulse ox, heart monitor, IV drips, oxygen with nasal canula. 

Alice was pale, still unconscious.  Cyly sat to one side of her, Devlin on the other.  A dark-skinned woman wearing a lab coat was sitting at a table close to the couches.  She was working on a crossword.

What drew my attention, though, was the bay of screens on the entire back wall of the room.  Security feed after security feed.  Half of them was filled with original vampires fighting living vampires.  The other half were either empty or had people and creatures running through them.

The one in the center of the bay was the largest, showing the area where we had just been.  Karhi and Amara were talking.  Amara looked terrified, and Karhi was twirling his sword in his hand.  There was no sound.

“Where’s the sound?” Cailean demanded.

“Cut out the minute the shield went down,” the woman I didn’t know replied.  “Honestly, we’re lucky we still have video.”  Her tone was tired and bored, which was honestly impressive for someone in a panic room in the middle of a crisis.

“Why did Karhi shut Amara out?” Cyly asked.  He didn’t get up from beside Alice, but he was alert.

“We don’t know,” Cailean said.  She looked at me suspiciously.  “You kno—”

“There’s Aoife,” the woman said.

We looked up to see Aoife, Amara, and Karhi in frame together.  They exchanged words.

“Aoife’s suspicious,” Cailean said, her brow furrowing as she watched the security camera.  “Why is she—oh, no.”

Amara’s shifting blurred on the screen.  I remembered hearing that magic showed up weird on cameras. 

When she resolved, the blur sharpening into a person, I saw someone who looked very much like Amara, but was not her.

“Ameya,” Cyly breathed.  He stood up for the first time, moving towards the screen.  “What is she doing here?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t seen her in years,” Cailean shook her head.  “She—shit.”

Karhi was knocked to the ground, Aoife to the wall, and Ameya remained standing.  They struggled against whatever held them down, but Ameya looked unbothered by it.  The only thing I saw on her face was pain and anger.

“She betrayed us,” Cyly said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“She’s the one that’s been poisoning with dead man’s blood,” the doctor lady said.  She was watching the screens, anger in the set of her mouth, but her expression otherwise neutral.  “She put it in the gel capsules she used for her medicine and let them dissolve in good blood.”

I remembered the medicine that she had taken that one night.  She had put it in a pill.

“How do you know?” Cailean asked.

“Vegetal DNA found in the blood she drank.”  The woman nodded to me when saying “she”.  “Amara has vegetarian pill capsules.”

“To be halal,” I murmured.

“Exactly.  It allowed for extended release.  It was why Faren’s valet didn’t die.  It’s why when Cyly first drank his blood, he was fine.  And why, when Sloane drank it later, she was poisoned.”  Her jaw set and she said through gritted teeth, “She snuck into my kitchen and poisoned people under my nose.  I hope they fucking kill her.”

Devlin had come to stand next to me, watching the monitors.

“Who’s Ameya?” I murmured.

Devlin answered.  “Amara’s older sister.  She’s an illusomancer.”  At my blank look, he said, “A mage who can cast illusions.  In Ameya’s case, she can also do fully transformative magic, not just illusions.  Like shapeshifting, but with magic.  But there’s no real name for that type of illusomancer.”

“She works for the house?”

“No,” Cyly answered.  “She stopped working for us years ago.  She and our mother had a big fight.  But she still helps us out here and there.”

“They had a fight?” Cailean asked, glancing at Cyly.  “About what?”

“Ameya wanted to take Amara away from the house.  She didn’t like the danger Amara was put in for her missions.  But Amara wanted to stay.  She and Ameya had a big blowout and didn’t talk to each other for almost six months.  As far as Amara was concerned, we were her family.  She’s lived with us since she was seven.”

I glanced at Cyly.  “Since she was a kid?  Why?”

“Two decades ago, we heard whispers about an anthroshifter in Giza.  We went to investigate it.  And so did other interested parties.  By the time Aoife and her team got there, their parents had been killed and a twenty-eight-year-old Ameya was trying to protect her little sister from a group of human vampires.”

“Ilona’s?” I asked on a hunch.

“Never confirmed, but likely.  Aoife and her team dispatched the vampires and took Amara and Ameya in.”

“And you put Amara to work?”

“Of course not,” Cailean replied harshly.  “One, she was under twenty.  Two, it does not do for us to force people into servitude.  It creates resentment.  Amara and Ameya were free to go, but they stayed.  Ameya raised Amara.  And when she turned twenty, Amara started to work for us.”

“If it doesn’t do to force people into servitude, how does that work with the ‘bae?” I asked.  Mira had told me what Alice was working on with Faren.

The room went silent.

“Fledgling vampire coming in here, asking the hard questions,” the doctor lady muttered, standing up and going to Alice to fiddle with one of her IVs.

“So, Amara is dead then,” I finally said, when no one spoke.

That earned me shocked expressions, eyes wide, mouths open.  Except for the doctor.  She was busy with Alice.

I held up my hands in front of me in a what gesture.  “She betrayed you.  Amara isn’t here.”  I motioned to the monitor where Ameya was speaking to Aoife, gesturing angrily.  “She’s crying.  What do you want to bet the dead man’s blood is Amara’s blood?  It’s what I would have done.”  There was a poetic irony to it.

“Oh shit,” the doctor said, looking up from the IV.  “The blood we found was of unknown magical origin.  An anthroshifter would fit in that category.”

“Fuck,” Cailean whispered.

“I need to sit down,” Fiachra murmured, moving to the couch.  Devlin followed, sitting next to him.  They both looked shell-shocked.  It made me feel bad for just revealing that Amara was probably dead like that.  They had been her friends.  It was the only thing that made sense, though.

Cyly was the only one who didn’t look devastated.  He was still watching the screen as Ameya turned to speak to Karhi.

I could tell from Karhi’s body language that he was up to something.  I didn’t know what it was, but there was a furrow in his eyebrow and a tension in his neck that wasn’t usually there.

And then Karhi blurred out of the video.  Between one frame and the next, he was there, and he wasn’t.  Ameya was falling down and there was Karhi’s sword in her stomach.  Karhi stood over her, hand on the sword.  I had to look away when I saw him twist the sword. 

A moment later, Cailean and Cyly each let out choked off noises.  I looked up just in time to see something black crawling out of Ameya’s mouth.  Ameya wasn’t moving.  She was dead.

And then a muffled explosion shook the room, and the camera went dead into static.

“Shit,” Cyly growled, moving away from the monitors, back to Alice.  “Sloane, I need you to turn her.”

“I don’t know how to—”

“It’s vampire instinct,” Cailean cut me off, also moving to Alice.  “You’ll know.”

“‘It’s instinctive’ is just something people say to pretend that anything they don’t know how to do is somehow just magic,” I snapped.  “Fuck that—I don’t know how to sire someone.”

“Blood out of her body and into yours.  Blood out of your body back into hers.  It’s not that fucking hard,” Fiachra said from the couch.

I didn’t get the chance to reply when a massive wave of energy hit me.  I stumbled, hitting the ground.  My head swam, nausea heavy in my gut.

“Fuck,” I heard Cyly say.  Then magic tore through the room, and everything went dark.

I was back in that room.  Staring at the chrome of the kitchen sink, pain zigzagging up my spine.

But I was also in that parking lot outside of Lazarus.  Staring up at the sky, pain tearing across my abdomen.

“Ooh, this is interesting.”

I blinked, and my vision cleared.  I was half in that kitchen, half in the parking lot.  And straddling the memories with me was my subconscious.  She looked older than me by a little and was blonde.

“The fuck?” I said.  I could feel the fear in both memories, but it was like I was detached from it.  It licked at me, hungry for something to devour, but didn’t quite reach me.

“Shadowmancy is a bitch,” she said.  “Makes you relive the worst moments of your life.  But for you, these two are about equal.”

“So, I get to relive them equally?”  The fear wasn’t making it into me, but the wear of it was draining. 

“Oh, no.  I’m not allowing that.  This bitch does not get to go in your head and pick at your brain.  Not when we have shadowmancy’s counter on us.”

I stared at her.  “What?”

“The soulsilver,” she said.  “It’s metaphysiomancy.  It can counteract shadowmancy.”

“How do you know that?  I don’t know that.”

“You don’t.  But I have access to generational information embedded in your DNA.”

“You fucking what?”

She didn’t answer, just smirked.  And I wanted to punch her.

I heard whimpers of pain from somewhere distant.  I looked around, but neither memory showed anyone.  In fact, they were both frozen in time.  A view of a kitchen faucet and a view of the night sky.  Nothing else.

“Others in this room don’t have our abilities,” Subconscious said, not actually explaining shit.  “That witch is going to kill you all.”

I glared at her.  “What the fuck do I do with that?”

“I can hold the shadowmancy back.  And I think I can also . . .”  She pursed her lips before making a noise of annoyance.  “You need to distract her for a few minutes.  Make her go for the soulsilver if you can.”

“What?”

But then I was opening my eyes, and I saw the same woman that Amara—Ameya—had been pretending to be.  Absolutely fucking terrifying with black eyes, black hair, and deep blue and purple veins breaking her lily skin everywhere.

Everyone in the room, except for Alice, was either on the floor or, in Devlin and Fiachra’s cases, prone on the couch.  A blue and purple miasma smoked off of everyone.  Their faces were contorted in agony.  Here and there, someone let out a whimper.

Shadowmancy is like PTSD in magic form.

Oh, that was great.

The witch seemed to sense that I wasn’t controlled because she turned to me.  “Why are you awake, fledgling?”  As she spoke, blue and purple smoke bloomed in the air, darting for me.  It washed off my body like water on wax.  Where it hit, a faint green sheen of light flashed.

“Cursebreaker,” I said, giving her the finger.  Something told me not to say anything about the soulsilver.

“No matter.”  She flicked her hand at me, and I went flying into the wall next to the hallway we had come through.  Something in my shoulder cracked, sending sparks of fire down to my wrist.  All the air whooshed out of me, and I landed hard on the ground, coughing.  An invisible force pressed my chest into the wall, and my legs into the ground.  I couldn’t move.

The witch moved to me with a cat-like grace I had rarely seen on a human.  It was unnerving.

She stood over me, tapping one finger to her chin.  She had these silver metal claws on the tips of her thumb and first two fingers.  They glinted dangerously in the light. 

“You know, I was to leave you alone.  As a thank you for being so helpful in our endeavors.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” I coughed.  I felt whatever had broken in my shoulder knitting back together.  It was like pins and needles stabbing deep into my flesh.

“You are incredibly annoying,” she said.  She knelt down in front of me and gripped my chin with her claws.  “Though, your cursebreaking has been incredibly helpful.  Couldn’t have gotten into this room without the night you spent with Ameya.”

“It’s always the pretty ones that want to fuck you.  And fuck you over,” I muttered, trying to pull my face away from her.  It just made her lean in closer and shove my chin so that I had to meet her gaze.

Her eyes were pits where light went to die.  I saw nothing but cold calculation in them, and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. 

“You killed Ameya,” I said. 

“Well, that vampire was doing a really good job of torturing her for information.  And we couldn’t have her spilling all our secrets, could we?” the witch replied.  She pursed her lips in annoyance.  “I have no idea how much she spoke before I got to her, too.  Ameya was always a talker.  Shame that we got her and not her sister.”

“You killed her sister.”

The woman shrugged.  “Not me, but yeah.”

“Why would Ameya work with you?”

“Well, it wasn’t like she knew it was us.  She was so hellbent on revenge, it never occurred to her to really check who was behind her vendetta.”  She shrugged.  “Oh well.  Anyway, you and I have spoken long enough.  I promised I wouldn’t kill you.”

“Why?”

“You’re some fun toy.  I don’t get why, but he’s wants you alive.”

“Who?”

She tapped my nose with the claw of her index finger of her free hand.  “Don’t you worry about that.  You’ll find out when you find out.”

She started to pull away, but just as she let go of my face, I heaved my head back and slammed it forward.

Our heads crashed together, and the witch screamed in pain.  The force holding me down disappeared, and I got to my feet. 

“You bitch,” she shrieked, scrambling to her feet and hissing something in a language I didn’t understand.

Something with too many legs scuttled out from behind her.  I dodged out of the way, darting for her.  My claws grew out and everything sharpened.  The scent of her blood was bright and sour. 

Her arm suddenly turned oily black.  She backhanded me before I could reach her, sending me into the ground.

I rolled with the blow, ignoring that way my shoulder protested against the stone below me.  I came back up only for the bug with too many legs to land on my face.  It crawled up across my cheeks and something sharp poked at my mouth, trying to pry my lips apart.

I grabbed the thing and pain tore through my hand like I had been shot.  I screamed, prying the thing off of me.  Claws tore the skin off my face as I pulled, trying to dig in.

I knew that I needed to get it off me before it made its way into me.  Instinctively, I knew that it would do worse than kill me. 

I tore it off, peeling skin and flesh away with it as I did.  There was movement of air against my teeth that hadn’t been there before, and I resisted the urge to let out a terrified, hysterical giggle at the prospect of my cheek having been torn off.

I threw the thing on the ground and stomped on it as hard as I could.  A high-pitched ringing, like feedback, cut through the room before I felt whatever it was rupture beneath me.

I smelled blood, then.  Not the same sour brightness of the witch’s blood.  No, it was human and familiar.

I spun to see the witch standing over Alice, the claws of one hand covered in blood.  Blood spurted from Alice’s neck, soaking the sheets below her.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fu—

The witch flicked her hand at me again, and I crashed into the floor again.  Something popped and heat erupted inside of me. 

I screamed, fire consuming me.  It was as if something pressed against every bone in my body, threatening to snap them in half.  I bucked against the floor, back arching.  The pain tore through me like a wildfire during a drought.  Everything disappeared, and all I knew was pain.  No light, no sound, just mind-numbing, all-consuming agony.

And just as soon as it was there, the pain was gone.  It left so suddenly it left my ears ringing.

The scent of Alice’s blood roused me and I got to my feet.

The shadowmancer stood over Alice, who was struggling to breathe, her monitors a cacophony of robotic noises.  Her shadows were swarming Alice, and I saw a pale pink light glowing from Alice’s navel.  The shadows seemed to be attacking the pink light. 

I launched myself at the shadowmancer, knocking her down.  I swiped my arm through the shadows on Alice and they disappeared with a high keening sound.  The pink light dipped back into Alice.

The shadowmancer shrieked in fury and pulled her arm back to cast another spell.  Almost before I knew what I was doing, I caught her wrist and slammed it into the ground.  It shattered in my hand, and she screamed.

Purple and blue smoke wafted off of her but didn’t hurt me.  Everywhere it touched, a green sheen, like oil on water, seemed to reflect the smoke back off of me.

“Fucking soulsilver,” she said, opening her mouth wide.

Another oily bug with too many legs started to crawl out of her mouth but it never got the chance to go out.  I slammed the crown of my head into her mouth.  The bones cracked and popped and the witch screamed again, but this time it was muffled by blood and bug bits.

As I pulled away, something cut into the back of my neck.  I looked down to see the woman had hold of the soulsilver around my neck.  She was trying to pull it off.

Green flames erupted on her hand and ran up her arm.  She screamed something wordless, more blood and bug bits spurting from her mouth.

I had seen this before.  The flames would spread without my doing anything.  I got to my feet, already turning to Alice.  The scent of her blood was heavy in the air. 

Alice’s breathing was shallow, blood soaking the bed below her.  Her blood was so vibrant and fresh.  It was like someone was smelting copper, the scent was so strong.

I bent over, putting my mouth to her neck.  There was already a huge fucking wound here, might as well use it. 

Blood filled my mouth, and I swallowed as much as I could.  Her heartbeat was getting faster, pumping more and more blood.  How much blood was I supposed to drink?  I had never actually gotten to ask anyone how I was supposed to do this.  Fuck, fuck, fuck— 

Now is not the time.

Right.  Subconscious was right.  Do you know how to do this?

The information in your DNA doesn’t include ‘sire vampire’, no.

God dammit.

Fine, whatever.  Her heart was beating fast, and her breath was getting fainter and fainter. 

Karhi always opened a vein by slitting open his wrist.  It was a good place for blood, right?  That was why people slit their wrists for suicide?  You would lose blood from there fast and—

Focus.

Right.  At least the screaming had stopped.

Wait, the screaming had stopped.

I glanced to see that there was nothing left of the witch but bone, black pants, boots, and a shirt.  Well, that was one problem solved.

It was time for Alice, though. 

I bit my wrist and pushed it against her mouth, letting blood drip in.

Nothing happened. 

Was something supposed to happen?  Was I—

Alice suddenly latched onto my wrist, lips sealing around the wound.  I felt the pull of her drinking from me.  It was a weird sensation.  Like getting blood drawn times twenty. 

Her hands came up to grip my wrist, as she drank.  Her blue eyes opened, hazy and unfocused, but definitely filled with purpose.

This is probably good, right?

Again, I do not have a program called ‘sire vampire’.

You a computer program?

You’re the one who binged The Matrix with Mickey and Bell last month.

My vision wobbled.  It was probably time for Alice to be done. 

I pushed her off with little difficulty.  She was still too human to put up a real fight .  Her head fell back, and she was breathing evenly.  The sheets beneath her were still soaked with blood, but there was no new blood, and the wounds on her neck were already healing.

I slumped to the floor, leaning against the machines next to her.  At some point, they had stopped working, which was a fucking blessing because listening to her tachycardia when I was turning her would have been awful.

The door slammed open and a moment later, Karhi and Aoife were dashing into the room.  Karhi darted to me, kneeling down.  “Sloane—are you okay?  What happened?”

“We came, we went, we just barely conquered,” I answered tiredly. 

“You look like hell.”

I nodded to the pile of bones and clothes.  “I look better than her.”

Karhi glanced over before snorting, shaking his head.  “True.”

Suddenly, Cyly was standing next to the bed, in front of me, frantically checking Alice.  I looked up to see that everyone was slowly sitting up.  Fiachra and Devlin had tears on their faces.  So did Cailean.  The doctor lady looked unfazed, but I had to imagine that was a front because she couldn’t have seen good things.  Especially if she was a doctor.

“You turned her?” Cyly asked me, looking down from where he had been checking Alice.

I nodded.  I held up my wrist to show him where the wound was healing slowly.  I was exhausted.  I probably needed blood.  But I didn’t want to move.

“Wait,” Aoife said, joining us.  “Just now?”

“Just before you got in here, yeah.”

“Just now.”

I stared at her.  “Aoife, did that hit from the witch hurt your hearing?  Yes.  I just turned Alice into a vampire.”

“After your year mark.”

“Yes, after—oh.”  I furrowed my brow, looking up at her.  “After my year mark?”

“Sloane, you’re a full vampire now.”

Oh.

And my subconscious chimed in.  Oh, yeah.  That pain you felt where everything was on fire?  That wasn’t the witch.  That was me.  I activated your year mark early.

Well, fuck.