Category: The Soulfire Series

3. The Pawn Shop

September 24th, 2024

Mikko Lawrence

The garden at Arizona Center was one of Mikko’s favorite places in the city. It was a public green space, meaning anyone could go there, and it was the most green he usually saw in the city. A brick plaza enclosed a long pond, palm trees standing at the edges. Grasses and bushes dotted the garden at different levels. He thought they were called “terraces” or something like that.

Someone had obviously put a lot of effort into the design of the garden, and it was so calm. Small fountains bubbled in the pond and the chatter of people shopping buzzed in the air.

Footsteps sounded behind him. It wasn’t until he felt the weight of someone sitting on the bench next to him that he looked up.

A fifteen-year-old girl in jeans and a fuzzy brown sweater sat next to him. Her golden-brown eyes were bright, and she was almost buzzing with excitement. Her smile was crooked. “I won.”

He raised an eyebrow, smiling in challenge at Genie. “Oh? What’s up?”

“You know that coffee shop two block over? I was sitting across from it, and a woman sat down next to me. She had a bag from a jewelry store. She got distracted, and I got what was in the bag.” She grinned, reaching into her pocket and pulled out a ring box. She opened it, her movements fast and fluid. She only showed him inside for a second before snapping it shut and putting it back in her pocket.

Mikko’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. A white gold diamond ring, with a huge rock in the center and small gems on either side. “What?”

“The tag says it’s over eight thousand dollars. Almost one and a half carats.” She grinned triumphantly. “I win.”

He shook his head, chuckling. “You’re right. I think I got maybe a thousand in cash? And a few gift cards.”

“You just stole wallets?” The look on her face told him she had expected more.

He shrugged. “It’s almost Christmas. Way more cash than any other time of year. How much cash did you get?”

She scowled because he had there. “Like two-fifty.”

“So, if you hadn’t hit the jackpot, I would have won.”

She shrugged. “I stole the ring, and after that, it was hard to care.”

“Fair enough.”

Doing one of these little operations so close to Christmas was always tricky. Their normal plan when it wasn’t Christmas was to go to an indoor mall and spend the day pickpocketing and stealing. It usually netted them five or six hundred dollars. It was usually a slow process because they worked together to keep people distracted while they stole wallets and jewelry. They always put the wallets back because there was less of a chance of people realizing they had lost their cash. Most people assumed they had less cash than they had initially thought. It meant that no one would be reporting the theft to security, and they could fly under the radar better.

But security was usually tighter because theft was high during the holidays, and it was much easier to get caught. So, this time of year they had to avoid malls and spend a lot of time in the outdoor shopping districts. It wasn’t normally as lucrative as mall theft, but it was Christmastime, and the sales were everywhere.

He and Genie had made the plan the day before. Normally they would do this during the summer, but it had been a hard year for them all and Mikko and Genie wanted to surprise everyone with an expensive dinner and some fun presents.

Thus, the plan to rob people blind by stealing anything even remotely valuable had been born. They weren’t even returning wallets.

But when it came down to it, Mikko had resorted to lifting wallets. He wasn’t good at taking jewelry off people like Genie was, and he wasn’t good at lifting things larger than a wallet. Trying to take purses was tricky and stealing whole shopping bags got unwieldy fast.

“If you want, we can go through lifting jewelry again,” Genie signed as they got off the bus. “I know you hate it, but it’s so fun!”

“I’m good at lifting wallets!” he argued. “Why do I need to get better at jewelry? You and Frankie can do jewelry, I’ll stick to lifting wallets and scamming people.”

She scowled. “We’d make more money if you lifted jewelry.”

“We’d be in jail if I lifted jewelry. You do that, I’ll stick to making the techs from the power company feel bad for us, so we don’t lose power.”

She shrugged but dropped it. “Fine. Where’s this pawn shop?”

They were about a mile from Mira’s house, on a short boulevard filled with strip malls. This was where knock-off stores and budget salons lived amidst pawn shops and loan sharks disguised as payday loan services.

He pointed ahead to a pawn shop squished between a Mediterranean restaurant and a “bank”. It was called “Cash & Diamonds”.

“Is that . . . a picture of a diamond instead of the word ‘diamond’?” Genie asked, staring at the sign.

She was right. In place of where it would say “diamonds” was a simple graphic of a diamond.

“How do you think they filled out the paperwork for their business with the city?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Diamond emoticon on the application.”

He snorted.

They stopped at the edge of the strip mall, and Genie pulled out the ring. She tore off the price tag before stooping down and scraping the band against the ground a few times. She checked it and scraped it again.

When she was satisfied, she wiped the ring against her shirt to get any asphalt dust off and put it back in her pocket. She was making the ring look like it had been worn. Some pawn shops wouldn’t accept something obviously stolen.

They started off for the shop. “Did you say this was Carlos’s brother?” she asked.

“Carlos’s brother’s prison cell mate or something.”

She nodded, but he could see the wariness settle in her shoulders. Dealing with new Hearing people always put her on edge.

Inside was the cluttered chaos Mikko had come to expect from pawnshops over the years. TVs and DVD players were at the forefront—the big-ticket items that brought people in. What a lot of people didn’t know what that it was almost always a rip-off to buy big electronics at a pawn shop unless they offered some sort of warranty. And most didn’t. It was too risky.

Along the wall to their left was a glass counter with jewelry on display sandwiched between two pillars. On either side of the pillars were metal gates that extended from the pillar to the wall, a safety feature to keep people from getting behind the counter.

A short, barrel-chested man with a large belly straining against a stained, white tank top stood behind the counter display, drinking a glass of ice water. His hair curled around his ears like dark, wispy clouds avoiding the summit of his bald head. The clouds moved with the fan that was oscillating on the counter next to him.

He eyed them suspiciously, putting down his water. A nineteen-year-old beanpole and a fifteen-year-old girl always resulted in furtive, distrustful glances.

“Are you Javier?” Mikko asked tentatively. He wished his voice didn’t sound as weak as it did. He envied how strong Sloane or Annie always sounded when they were dealing with new people.

“Yes,” he said, the suspicious look intensifying. “And you are . . . ?”

“I’m Mikko. We’re friends of Carlos. He sent us over to you to sell something off.” That wasn’t exactly what happened, but he doubted that Carlos would mind. He always let them use his authority, as long as it didn’t come back to bite him in the ass.

The suspicious look disappeared. “Oh? Carlos Vásquez?” He said Carlos’s name with a Spanish inflection. VAS-kez, not VAS-kwez.

“Yeah,” Mikko replied, relaxing a bit. “He said you and Luis served time together. Told us you opened a new shop and that you were our best bet for fair prices.” He glanced down at the jewelry display and immediately looked away. A ring with a tooth set where a gem would go sat front and center in the display.

Javier puffed up, his beady eyes sparkling. “Well, he told you right. What can I do for you two?”

“Well—”

“Can you stop that with your hands?” Javier interrupted. “It’s distracting.” The sparkle in his eyes had dimmed, a slight frown of annoyance in the corners of his mouth.

Mikko glanced down at his hands. He had been signing as he spoke—sim-comming—without thinking about it. “Um . . . I can’t. My friend is Deaf.” He normally would have called Genie his sister, but he was already beginning to see that this man would be intrusive and rude if he did. Why don’t you look alike? Oh, foster kids? And sometimes finding out they were foster kids would get them kicked out. Even if Mikko wasn’t even a foster kid anymore.

“Deaf?” He eyed Genie. “She don’t look deaf.”

Mikko didn’t interpret that, but it didn’t matter. Those words had been spoken enough in front of Genie that she could read them on people’s lips.

“What does Deaf look like?” Genie snapped back, glaring at Mikko.

“What did she say?” Luis asked.

“She said Deaf people look like everyone else,” Mikko answered.

“No, I didn’t,” she replied. But she didn’t push it. She just reached into her pocket and slapped the ring down on the class counter. It made a sharp noise. “How much?”

Mikko interpreted for her.

“Aww, que linda,” Javier said, smiling at Genie in a way that was normally reserved for puppies or children.

“What?” Mikko said, raising an eyebrow.

“Just, she’s so cute, you know?”

Mikko didn’t reply, just looking from Javier to the ring in a way that told him to move along.

Javier shook his head before finally looking at the ring.

His tune immediately changed. His wide eyes betrayed his shock and surprise before he spoke. “Where did you find a nice piece like this?”

Mikko was already feeling exhausted talking to this man. “Does it matter? We have it. We want to sell it.”

Javier didn’t respond, examining the diamond. He reached under the counter, below the glass, and came back up with one of those magnifying glasses that jewelers had. After a moment of looking it over, he said, “I could take it off your hands for . . . maybe two-fifty?”

Mikko didn’t even have time to finish interpreting before Genie’s hand shot out and snatched the ring back. “Fuck this guy,” she snapped. “Trying to fucking rip us off and treating me like a goddamned infant.”

Javier didn’t know what Genie had said, but he knew it wasn’t good. “Hey, what’s she so mad for?” he demanded. “The gold is nice, but those diamonds aren’t real.”

Mikko blinked at him for a moment before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a lighter. Taking the ring from Genie, he bunched up the hem of his shirt and held the bottom of the ring through the shirt for protection before flicking the lighter and holding the flame to the diamond. Sloane had taught him this trick for determining a real diamond. He had already tested it himself on their way to the bus stop. And he had checked to make sure the ring sank in water. The inside of the ring itself was stamped with 24K, telling him it was real gold.

After almost a minute, Mikko dropped the ring into Javier’s ice water.

The diamond did not shatter.

“The retail value on that is over eight thousand dollars. You should be giving me five thousand minimum,” Mikko said, grabbing the water before Javier could. He pulled the ring out and set the water back on the counter.

Something on the shelf behind Javier caught Mikko’s eye, and he almost gasped. He held it back and forced himself to look back at Javier without reacting.

Javier hadn’t caught Mikko’s momentary distraction. He was too busy pushing the water away from him, a disgusted look on his face. He glared at Mikko. “Was that necessary?”

“You’re trying to rip us off,” Mikko said, keeping his voice even and nonconfrontational. He didn’t need to use this particular pawn shop, but he subscribed to the honey-versus-vinegar school of thought.

Javier eyed Mikko, and Mikko held his gaze. He kept his eyes soft—he wouldn’t bend, but he also wouldn’t challenge Javier. Mikko didn’t think Javier was a magic of any kind, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. And letting Javier think he was in charge would keep him underestimating Mikko.

Finally, Javier cracked a smile. “Can’t pull one over on you. It was a test, you see. I had to make sure that you wouldn’t get ripped off. Look out for a friend of Carlos’s, you know.”

“How altruistic,” Genie said.

“Hush,” Mikko replied without interpreting to Javier. He put on a warm smile. “Of course. Thanks. So, five grand?”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t have that much liquid. I can offer you four thousand five hundred and your pick of anything in the store.”

Genie bristled. “How does a pawn shop not have five thousand onsite right now?”

“Hold on.”

She eyed Mikko suspiciously, but she didn’t reply.

He allowed himself to turn from Javier, eyeing the rest of the store. There were four aisles. The first had been TVs and big electronics, but as you went further into the store, the shelves changed from electronics to tools and antiques. Pawn shops were one of the best places to get nice silverware and plates. And usually the tools were old, but well put-together.

Mikko made a show of appraising everything he could see. He even stepped over to one of the aisles, looking over a flat screen TV.

“You can’t go wrong with that LG,” Javier said, his smile a little too wide. Something about it told Mikko he could absolutely never buy electronics from here.

Mikko continued, turning slowly. He looked over the jewelry in the case, carefully refusing to look at the tooth ring. He realized there was a matching tooth bracelet laid next to it. Why would anyone ever want to make something like that? Or buy something like that?

He continued, looking up at the two long shelves behind the counter. A low stack of open boxes sat below it. On the shelf behind Javier were a few of those display busts for necklaces. There were a couple of nice necklaces, with sapphires and emeralds and small diamonds.

But the one he saw that he wanted was plain with a black leather cord. A large, bright chocolate brown gem, smokey quartz the size of a golf ball, hung from the cord. It was set into a simple silver plate. In the center of the silver plate, just barely visible from where Mikko stood, was a rune.

He eyed it before looking at the dark blue necklace next to it.

After a moment, he pointed at the smokey quartz necklace. “I want that.”

Javier looked behind him. “Ah, yes, a nice choice.” He reached for the dark blue necklace.
“Sapphire in a white gold—”

“No, the brown stone. Next to that.”

Javier turned to stone. He didn’t just pause—his entire body stopped, tense.

“Uh, my apologies. That is unavailable, on hold for another customer. I thought I put that away.” He pulled the necklace and its display down, setting it into one of the open boxes. He was stiff as he moved, as if he didn’t want to touch it.

“But—” Mikko started.

“You know what,” Javier interrupted, “I may actually have enough cash in the back. Follow me.” He turned back to them, reaching to one side of the counter where there was an extending metal gate installed into one of pillars. He pulled it across the counter and latched it into the other pillar, keeping anyone from getting behind the counter while he wasn’t there.

Javier exited from behind the counter through the metal gate on the right. He latched it behind him with a lock, slipping the key into his pocket. Several boxes were piled next to the gate, one of which he strained to push out of his way as he moved.

Mikko moved to follow Javier to the back. He glanced back to see Genie lagging behind, looking at the jewelry in the case. He tried to get her attention, but she ignored him.

“It’s fine,” Javier said.

Mikko looked up to see Javier waiting for Mikko.

“She can look at the jewelry. If she finds anything she likes, she can have it.” He turned from Mikko, heading to the back.

Mikko didn’t say anything.

“You know, I used to have a dog that was deaf,” Javier said as they reached a door in the back of the room. He opened it to show a small office the size of a bathroom. A huge safe was built into the wall.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But he died.”

Mikko blinked. How was he supposed to respond to that?

“Wait here,” Javier said. He stepped into the room, letting the door close halfway behind him.

A couple minutes passed. Mikko noticed he couldn’t see Genie anymore. She was too far away to hear, too.

“Something wrong?”

He started, turning to face Javier. Searching for Genie had distracted him, and he had turned his good ear from Javier toward Genie.

“Nope,” he said, looking down to see Javier holding three stacks of cash. Two were twenties with a purple band, the third was a stack of tens with a yellow band. Five thousand dollars straight from the bank. Genie had been right—he was full of shit about his cash flow.

“Here’s your five grand,” Javier said, holding out the stack.

Mikko held out the ring, and they exchanged money for ring.

“Thank you,” Javier said, holding up the ring to the light before nodding. “Perfect.”

Mikko nodded, shoving the money into his pockets and pulling his shirt down so no one saw the bulge.

He followed Javier back to the front.

“Where’s the niñita?” he asked, heading toward the gate to go back behind the counter.

As if on cue, Genie stepped out from behind the next aisle over. She had a telescoping baton in her hand, and she was grinning.

Javier blinked in surprise before laughing. “Ah, okay. Tell her she can have that.”

Mikko interpreted and she grinned, pocketing the baton. She signed thank you to Javier.

“You’re welcome,” he said, opening the gate and getting behind the counter. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“You, too,” Mikko said.

Genie waved at him, and they left the pawn shop.

It wasn’t until they were a block away, out of sight from the shop, before Mikko stopped, turning to face Genie. “What did you do?”

She pouted. “What do you mean?”

He gave her a look. “You live to fuck with Hearing people. What did you do?”

She continued to pout but when he didn’t drop it, the pout turned to a grin. She reached into her shirt and pulled out the necklace that Mikko had wanted.

Mikko’s jaw dropped, and he inhaled sharply, putting his hands to his mouth.

The devilish grin disappeared, replaced with concern. “What’s wrong?”

He reached out slowly for the pendant, closing his hand around the stone. It was warm from being in Genie’s bra.

Genie let go of it and the leather strap fell against the back of his hand.

He opened his hand to look at the necklace. Smokey quartz. Rune in the silver beneath the stone. He turned it over to see an inscription in the back. My love.

“Hey.” Genie waved her hand to get his attention. “What is it?”

“This was Mira’s grandmother’s.”

Genie’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What? How do you . . .” Her eyes widened as she realized. “You’re why it was in a pawn shop.”

He bit his lip, unable to meet Genie’s eyes. “This is the thing I regret the most. Sacrificing this necklace for cocaine.” He smiled bitterly. “They only gave me ten dollars for it.”

Genie wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into a hug so tight, it was difficult to breathe.

He hugged her back awkwardly. He didn’t think he deserved this sympathy, but he also wouldn’t reject Genie’s embrace.

“You have it now,” Genie said when she pulled away. “I’m sure Mira would love this as a Christmas gift.”

He smiled. “Thank you so much for taking it.”

She grinned. “Of course. That guy was a fuckhead, and he deserved it.”

He chuckled, handing her back the necklace. He didn’t have the space in his pockets for it. “How did you get it anyway? All those gates—you don’t have your lockpick on you, do you?”

She shook her head. “All those boxes he had stacked next to the gate? They went up high enough that I just climbed up on them.” She rolled her eyes. “What an idiot.”

He remembered how Javier had struggled to move one of those boxes out of the way. They must have been heavy enough to support her weight.

Genie took his hand, and they started walking in the direction of Mira’s house.

“He told me he had a dog that was deaf. But it died.”

Genie stared at him in confusion. “Why?”

Mikko threw his hands up. “I’d say I wish I knew, but I really don’t want to know why he felt the need to tell me.”

She shook her head. “Fucking Hearing people.”

“Seriously.”
2. Port Orchard

September 24th, 2024

Sloane Briallen

The scent of wet asphalt and brine slammed into me like a punch in the gut, as I stepped out of the car. I found myself bracing against the door frame, my heart racing. I had to close my eyes to stop the lightheadedness that threatened to overwhelm me.

I had spent the past several days anxious, thinking of confronting my adoptive parents for the first time in two years. I had been so focused on this trip that it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I’d have to deal with sense memory.

I had only lived in Port Orchard for two years. And I had been gone for just as long. I had expected it to feel familiar.

I hadn’t expected the way my heart would ache at the scent of grass and forest and salt.

Mickey, Bell, and I had driven together, but I was alone as I got out of the car. I had to let Mickey and Bell out a mile out of town. As far as anyone here knew, they had disappeared midway through our senior year of high school. Pulling up in a car when everyone thought you were dead in the woods somewhere was a good way to make a scene, and none of us wanted that.

I had parked a few houses down from our house.

The air was wet, the sky filled with grey clouds. Sad, sloshy snow covered the ground in patches. This was the Olympic peninsula and whenever it snowed, it tended to get very wet.

But, even though it was cold out, the neighborhood was filled with life. Kids played catch in the street; parents talked to each other over fences; neighbors worked on getting the slush out of their yard. This community was outdoorsy.

As I walked, I saw double takes and heard whispers with my name. I’d been a well-known figure in Port Orchard.

“Sloane!”

I looked up to see Rita Berber, our next-door neighbor, standing in her yard with her son, Jonathan. Jonathan was working on getting slush off the front steps while Mrs. Berber stood in the doorway.

I stopped, putting on a fake smile. “Oh, Mrs. Berber! Jonathan.”

“Hey, Sloane,” Jonathan mumbled, looking down. I could hear his heart speed up in reaction to his blushing. He still had a crush on me even two years later.

“It’s been, what? Almost two years since I last saw you?” Mrs. Berber glanced toward Jonathan, who was doing his best not to look at me. I felt bad for him. “Hasn’t it, Jonathan?” she asked him.

“Yes, Mom.” The words were barely intelligible as he scrapped snow off the bottom step with a shovel.

Jonathan was a cute boy with long, curly brown hair and friendly brown eyes that lit up whenever he smiled. He had strong shoulders from years of yard work for his arthritic, green-thumbed mother.

I heard footsteps inside their house, and the screen door opened. A girl with rosy skin and dyed dark red hair stepped out. She wore black glasses over bright blue eyes. In her hands was a college chemistry book.

Tessa. Bell’s ex-girlfriend, and now, apparently, Jonathan’s girlfriend. She’d be a sophomore at Seattle U now.

“Ah, Tessa!” Mrs. Berber called out. “Do you remember Sloane?”

Kind of hard not to. She’d hated me since the first day we’d met when I had shown up in Port Orchard, and suddenly, Mickey, Bell, and I were inseparable.

She didn’t even try to fake a smile. She just rolled her eyes. “Hello, Sloane.”

“So, where do you go to school?” Mrs. Berber asked, either not noticing Tessa’s disdain as she went to ask Jonathan a question about something, or just politely and kindly ignoring it.

I shrugged. “At the moment, I’m just getting on my feet, a few things have happened, and I’ve had to reorganize my priorities.”   Yeah, like the daily question of whether I should drink bottled blood or animal blood.

She nodded solemnly. “I can imagine,” she said. “Life is crazy sometimes.”

She had no idea.

She caught me glanced at Mauve and Leah’s two-story house next door. “Are you visiting Mauve and Leah?”

“Yeah.” I caught her sad look out of the corner of my eye. If she only knew about Mickey and Bell.

“Okay, well I won’t keep you. Give them my best.”

I managed another smile. “I will. It was good seeing you. Goodbye.”   I left. I could feel Tessa’s cool gaze on me as I went.

Mauve and Leah’s house was a two-story Victorian painted navy blue, framed by two leafless oaks. A walkway led from the sidewalk to four concrete steps that went up to the wraparound screened-in porch. Two wicker chairs and my favorite rocking chair sat on the porch, still where they had been before I’d left.

I heard four heartbeats in the house. Two were normal human heartbeats and two were fast, shifter heartbeats. Mickey and Bell had beaten me here.

Walking toward the house and thinking about the Berbers, it was crazy. My life was so . . . not like that. It never would be. Mrs. Berber would maybe become a grandmother, and she would die. Jonathan and Tessa would maybe get married one day, maybe have kids, grow old, and die. And their kids would grow up, get old, and die.

I would never have a life like that. Not ever. I would continue my life, and I would never die until something killed me. I would never get married. I would never have kids.

I would never live a vanilla life. A quiet, sentimental part of me ached at the thought of that.

I found myself standing before the front door. Before I could decide not to open it, it opened for me. A man almost my height, but twice as wide, stood there. He wore a pair of sweatpants, revealing the body of a wrestler, with thick arms and a trunk for a torso. His chestnut hair stuck to his wide jawline, fresh from the shower.

“Let’s get it over with,” Bell murmured.

I followed him through the door. The threshold let me pass without any issues. This had been my home for two years. Apparently I was still welcome.

I followed Bell through a hallway filled with framed photos into a living room. The room was painted a soothing burnt sienna, with warm brown furniture in a circle around a glass-topped coffee table. A TV and sound system sat across the room from the furniture.

Another man, taller than me, sat on a recliner, dark red hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had the same sharp jawline as Bell and their mothers. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. Mickey.

Two women sat on a loveseat facing me.

Mauve was a tan, curvy woman with dark hair wearing jeans and a red knit sweater. She had the same eyes and nose as her son, Mickey. On Mickey, these manifested as friendly, approachable features. On Mauve, her brow was heavy, and the strong jawline and nose made her look hard.

Leah, on the other hand, was slender, wearing leggings and a long tunic. She had blonde hair and the same eyes as Bell, but her face was softer. She was paler than Mauve, and heavily freckled. She had the same jawline and nose they all had. They were all clearly related.

I was the oddball out. Pale skin, bright eyes and almost-black hair.

I stopped in the doorway, unsure of what to say. Seeing Mauve and Leah wasn’t the same punch in the gut that the asphalt and brine had been. The sight of them didn’t bring any of the anger or sadness.

It just brought a weird, uncomfortable numbness.

Leah stood up. “Hi, honey.”

I couldn’t find my voice to reply. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“Sloane?” Mauve said.

Here were the two women who had hidden Mickey and Bell from me for two years. The women who slept in the same house as their grieving daughter, keeping to themselves the knowledge that could stop her grieving at any time. The women who had called me their family while lying to my face every day.

But here were also the two women who had taken me in. Who had fought to take me from Phoenix. Who had done everything to bring me here.

How did I reconcile those two things?

I heard the clicking of nails on tiles. Something pressed into my hip and I looked down. A white German Shepherd grinned up at me, tail wagging, tongue lolling out.

“Norton!” I cried out, stooping down to scratch his head. God, I had forgotten about him. We had only gotten him about a year before I left. He had been a police dog before being retired.

He was wet and panting. He must have just come through the doggie door from the backyard.

Norton was content to let me scratch him, eyes closed in pure bliss. He was a dog—historically very unfriendly to vampires—and he had no problem with me being a vampire.

Finally, I exhaled, looking up. Mauve’s face was impassive, but Leah’s was not. I could see the worry on her face.

Bell had moved to stand behind the loveseat. He was one of those people—a stander. One of those guys who never sat down in a group of people.

But him standing there, with his mom and Mauve and Mickey . . . there was a gulf between us. A separation, with them on one side, and me on the other.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The question hung in the air between us. It widened the gulf. An ocean of separation inside of fifteen feet.

“We wanted to,” Mauve finally said.

“Sweetie, we really did,” Leah said.

I blinked at them, staring in disbelief. “Really, that’s all you got?”

“Don’t you—” Mauve started in a scolding tone.

I cut her off. “No—you lied to me.” I gestured to Mickey and Bell. “About them.” I pressed my lips together to keep them from wobbling. I was angry, but the tears were threatening to flow. I didn’t want to cry. Not right now. “How could you?”

Mauve opened her mouth, but Leah put a hand on her arm. Mauve shut her mouth.

“It was to protect you, baby.” Leah stood up, stepping forward. She shortened the gap between us.

“From what?” My voice was reedier than I wanted it to be.

Leah looked at Mauve for a second before saying, “Come here and sit with us.”

I sat down on the floor. Norton climbed in my lap, and I glared at them.

“Mature,” Mauve said.

“You’d do the same.”

She didn’t have a reply for that. Mauve survived on spite.

Leah held up a hand to Mauve to silence her. She came to sit on the floor in front of me, meeting my gaze with warm brown eyes. “Honey, it was a terrible situation. But we were trying to do what was best to keep you all safe.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice cracked, but I held in the tears that threatened to spill. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t cry. I had already spent too much time crying over this.

She shook her head sadly. “We thought we were doing what was best for you all. Their anger was so explosive in those first few months. They were dangerous and—”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” I protested. “I’ve spent my whole life around shifters. They weren’t dangerous when they first transformed—”

“Were those shifters who transformed as young teenagers? With parents who were shifters, too?”

I paused. “Yes.”

“That’s not how it works when you transform as late as they did. And shifter parents generally have the strength to reel their kids back in.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t know anyone who transformed late. Most of Annie’s friends started transforming as early teenagers. Annie started even earlier at age eight, but halfshifter bodies were different than fullshifters’. And a lot of shifters I had known in Phoenix had been adults. I hadn’t known them when they first started shifting.

“Shifters who transform as late as the boys did—their aggression is ten times worse.”

She pulled down the neck of her tunic to her shoulder to reveal three parallel scars, the center scar the longest, across her shoulder and down halfway across her chest.

“I had to have a blood transfusion and I have permanent nerve damage in this arm,” she said, rubbing her left forearm.

I blinked. “What?”

“This happened four months after you left,” she said.

I looked up at Bell, but he met my gaze. I had assumed it was him. He was so much more the hot head.

But, when I looked at Mickey, he was the one who couldn’t meet my gaze.

Mickey had done this to her.

“This was what we were dealing with, Sloane. They were out of control. You’ve had experience with wolves and vampires—they can handle an attack like this.”

But a human couldn’t. I couldn’t have survived that.

But it didn’t matter. “You took the choice away from me.” I gently pushed Norton off my lap before standing up. “Did they tell you?” I looked at Mickey and Bell. “That I had experience with magics?”

“They did. But again, what did it matter?” Mauve replied, speaking over whatever Leah was going to say. “You could have still gotten hurt.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make!”

“It was the decision we made to protect our kids. All of our kids.” Mauve’s gaze was hard and unwavering. “Maybe it wasn’t good—but we did what we thought would keep you all alive. Especially you.”

“Yeah, well you didn’t do such a good job of that did you?” I shot back. “I’m fucking dead anyway.”

Mauve’s mouth dropped. Pain flashed across wide, shocked eyes.

Good.

“Sloane!” Bell said sharply, taking a step towards me.

“No, fuck you guys. I’m out.”

Anger colored my vision as I ran. Everything was so much clearer, and I could smell the pine around me so sharp, it was like I had plunged headfirst into a pool of sap. My thoughts ran with me, vacillating between anger at them and anger at me.

They had done what they thought was necessary? They were “keeping us safe”? What sort of bullshit excuse was that?

But then again, hadn’t I done the same thing to Mickey and Bell so many years ago? Hadn’t I cut them off to save them the heartache of seeing what I had become?

How was I so different?

I had been twelve, and Mikko had been with me. It was his birthday, and I had some money from pickpocketing at the mall. I wanted to take him to the ice cream shop as a celebration.

The shop was almost blinding from the Phoenix sunlight coming in through the wall of windows. Everything in the room was white—white floors, white tables, white walls.

There was a case along one wall displaying the ice cream flavors next to a cash register. We sat at a plastic white table, Mikko with strawberry, me with cookie dough. Mikko was turning twelve.

“Aren’t you sticky?” I asked, watching as melted ice cream dripped over his hands, sticking between his fingers.

He shrugged, using his non-sticky hand to push his dark hair from his face. He refused to meet my eyes, which annoyed me. But I had promised Annie that I would leave him alone today. It was his first birthday with us. I had to be nice.

“Sloane?”

I hadn’t heard that voice in months.

I looked up to see Mickey and Bell standing just inside the doorway of the shop. Bell had been the one to call my name.

They hadn’t changed much since I had last seen them. Maybe a little taller. But Mickey was still pretty chubby with round cheeks, and Bell was skinny with knobby knees.

“Uh . . . hi.”

“How are you?” Bell asked, a tentative smile on his face.

The smile made my stomach fall. I shrugged. “Here and there. You guys?”

“Mauve got offered a job in Seattle to work there,” Bell replied. Mauve was a literary agent.

I knew what that meant. They’d move. They’d be away from me. And that was their best chance.

“Oh, that sounds great. I’m glad you’re going,” I told them, keeping my voice even. The words sucked the air from my lungs as I said each one.

I apparently wasn’t the only one who felt the breathlessness. Mickey’s mouth twisted, and he glanced at Bell. Bell had stiffened.

But, God bless him, Bell tried anyway.

“Sloane, you can come with us. We can adopt you, and you can move away with us.”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t.”

Mickey finally spoke. I heard the way his voice hitched as he did. “Why not?”

I glanced at Mikko, who was looking between us. He didn’t say anything.

I stood up and nodded towards the door. I didn’t want to talk in front of Mikko.

Bell and Mickey followed me out into the ninety-five-degree weather. I stayed under the awning to avoid the sun shining directly in my face. I noticed the way Mickey’s nose wrinkled as he stood closer to me. I hadn’t had access to a shower in days, and I hadn’t changed clothes in almost as long. I couldn’t even smell it anymore.

“You should go,” I said. I kept my voice as even as I could. “I don’t belong with you guys.”

“Yes, you do,” Mickey argued. He took a step forward and I could already see the sweat beading on his forehead. He hated the heat. “You should be with us. You should come with us. It’s—”

“No,” I barked.

Mickey jumped, and Bell’s brow furrowed in confusion.

I hadn’t meant snap at them. But . . . the dreaded day had finally come. I had hoped I would never have to do this.

I took a deep breath and smoothed my expression out. When I felt like I looked impassive enough, I said, “Because, Mickey and Bell. I don’t care anymore. Not about you. Not about Mauve and Leah. I wish you’d move so I never saw you again. Then we wouldn’t bump into each other all the time, and it wouldn’t be this awkward small talk and desperate begging.”

The words hung between us. And for a moment, I found my hands twitching, wishing I could grab them out of the air and put them back. I wanted to tell them it was a lie. I wanted them to know that I didn’t mean it. That I missed them more than they could ever know.

But the anguish in their eyes stilled my hands.

I couldn’t take this back. And I shouldn’t take this back. Because they didn’t depend on me. They wanted me to be a part of their family, but I already had a family that needed me.

I glanced back at Mikko through the window. His eyes were on his ice cream.

I looked back at Mickey and Bell. “Please go, before you embarrass yourself more.” I hated every word as they came out. I was the embarrassing one.

Mickey opened his mouth, but Bell put a hand on his shoulder. Bell’s anguish had disappeared, replaced by the anger he had always done so well.

“Fuck you, Sloane.” He turned from me and started down the street.

Mickey looked between me and Bell. The distress in his eyes made my chest ache. I could barely meet them.

But I needed to. I needed him to leave. I met his gaze.

And finally, he did.

I waited until they turned the corner before going back inside. My chest felt hollow, a buzzing noise filling my head.

I sat down numbly across from Mikko.

“What’s wrong, Sloane?” Mikko asked, his mouth covered in ice cream. He only glanced up at me for a split second.

I shook my head, ignoring the stinging sensation behind my eyes. “Nothing, Mikko. Just had to take care of some old problems.”

He didn’t reply, going back to his ice cream. Mine was melting in the sunlight.

I didn’t tell Mikko about how hollow and cold I felt inside. It was easy to pretend that I wasn’t falling to pieces. It was something I learned to do, living like I did. It got to be routine where I woke up every morning, pretending everything was okay and that my life wasn’t spiraling out of control. Being with Mikko was no different. It was easy to fake everything.

I had thought I was doing the right thing at the time. I thought I was protecting everyone. By that age, I was with Annie and Mikko and Mira, and we stayed together. I couldn’t go back with Mickey and Bell. They had family. They did. And I wasn’t part of “they”. I was part of “we”. I had to stay.

So, going back to now, going back to reuniting after Mickey and Bell had disappeared—didn’t that all mean that I walked out first? Eight years ago, wasn’t I the one who walked out first? When I told Bell and Mickey that I didn’t need them?

Was this what I deserved?

“Sloane.”

I’d already heard them coming. I didn’t bother trying to pretend otherwise. I had escaped into the woods behind their house and climbed up a cedar tree, sitting on the lowest branch, twenty feet in the air. It was cold and wet, and the air was almost oppressive in its weight. I couldn’t feel cold, but I could feel the humidity.

They stood at the base of the tree, looking up at me.

“This was a horrible idea,” I said.

“They were just trying to do what was best,” Bell shot back defensively.

“Taking away my choices from me is what’s best?” I stood up on the tree branch. I took a certain amount of satisfaction in being above them.

Mickey was the one to reply. It was the first time I had heard him speak since we had come back to Port Orchard.   “Sometimes parents have to do what they think will best protect their kids. Even if it hurts.”

“No.” I shook my head. “They were stupid and reckless, and they hurt all of us in the process. Why are you siding with them?”

“It’s not sides, Sloane,” Mickey said. “Come down here.”

I sneered at him, but he met my gaze with a steady expression.

Finally, I jumped down behind them. They turned to face me.

“I lived in that house. For six months. And they knew. They knew where you were. And they knew what I was going through.” I glared at them, tears threatening to spill. My throat ached as I spoke, and I fought to keep my voice from cracking. “How is that protecting us?” I clenched my fists. “How did that protect me?”

“Better sad than dead,” Bell replied. His brown eyes were hard, his jaw clenched.

“And apparently better dead than happy.”

“But you’re not dead, Sloane. You’re a vampire, but here you fucking are. You’re here, fighting with me.” He motioned to Mickey. “Talking to us. Don’t stand there, fucking telling me, that you’re miserable as a vampire when—”

“When what, Bell?   When being a vampire means this?” I grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled up to show the thick, white scar that tore from my sternum down to my pelvis.

His mouth shut so fast that I heard his teeth click together.

“I was torn apart because Ilona decided I was taking away her toy. My insides were ripped out of me. My uterus is gone.” I glared at him. “Or have you already forgotten?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mikko was tortured. Genie and Frankie’s parents are dead. All because I met the wrong guy at a bar. In a city I would have had no reason to be in, if I had known you were alive.

“So, no. You’re right. I’m not dead. But what price did I pay that I’m still here?”

Neither of them had an answer to that.

“Did anyone think of that? Did anyone realize the consequences of this? Because the only fucking reason that I am right here, right now—standing here—is because of a decision they made without consulting me.”

“There was no way to know—” Mickey started.

“The fuck there was,” I snarled. “I was broken. When you left, it broke me. And everyone could fucking see it. Everyone except, apparently, your parents.”

There was no response. Bell’s jaw was clenched, and Mickey was obviously trying to search for something to say.

“Whatever,” I finally said, waving my hand dismissively at them. “I’m leaving.”

“Sloane, don’t you walk out on us!” Bell shouted as I turned my back.

“You walked out on me,” I replied. “I’m just continuing the legacy of walk-outs.”
1. Punishment

September 24th, 2024

The receiving hall of the vampire courts had been carved out of grey slate. Not built, carved. The walls were smooth, but Karhi could see the fine marks where a tool had cut into stone.

The woman who had led them here had called it a hall, but it wasn’t nearly large enough to constitute a true hall. It was a receiving room at best.

A portion of the floor was raised, taking up half of the room. There were a handful chairs meant to be small thrones—mid-eighteenth-century wood, carved with the ornate detail expected from their time, upholstered with richly coloured chintz and silk. A single woman sat at the front on a dark wood chair with birds carved into the legs.

Her hair was a glossy dark walnut, bound to her head. An enormous gold Byzantine crown sat atop her hair, gems glittering from the sides and top. Long earrings made of green gemstones and gold hung from her ears. A gold neck piece sat on her shoulders, from which a green and gold gown flowed.

The woman herself was gorgeous, with honey-coloured eyes and flawless olive skin. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth. Even though she was close to fifteen hundred years old, she looked to be in her mid-fifties. She held herself with the grace expected from an empress, head high and back straight.

“Sloane Briallen Emelyn,” Empress Theodora said, looking Sloane up and down.

Karhi felt Sloane’s annoyance at the use of Briallen as her middle name. She hated the tradition of calling fledglings by their sire’s last names.

Outwardly, she didn’t react. She curtsied, as Karhi had been teaching her, and said, “Your Grace.”

Sloane wore a charcoal grey suit, not a dress, but the curtsy still worked to show deference. This was the woman who would sentence her (read: Karhi) for her violation of the Samhain covenant. She needed to make a good impression so her (read: Karhi’s) sentence wouldn’t be too bad.

“You understand of what you have been accused?”

“Yes, ma’am. I broke the Samhain covenant.” She made sure to pronounce Samhain as sow-in like Karhi had told her to. It was the traditional Irish pronunciation. It wouldn’t ingratiate her, but it wouldn’t hurt her, either, like pronouncing it sam-hane would.

However, she didn’t say Your Grace. That would hurt them if she kept it up.

The empress looked annoyed. “It is ‘your Grace’, not ‘ma’am’.”

“Yes, ma—your Grace.” She caught herself that time.

She eyed Sloane but didn’t comment. “Yes, you broke the Samhain covenant. You used your soulsilver on Ilona Muire Emelyn.”

She didn’t say that Sloane had killed Ilona. No one was quite sure where Ilona was or what had become of her, but they all knew she was still alive. Karhi would know if she was dead.

“I did, your Grace,” Sloane replied.

“But you are not yet twenty, nor have you yet met your year mark. As such, the punishment will go to your sire, Karhi Emelyn.”

Karhi felt Sloane’s annoyance when his middle name was not used. She glanced at him, but he didn’t meet her eyes as she said, “Yes, your Grace.” He didn’t want to explain why the courts didn’t use his human surname as his middle name.

The empress looked at Karhi, and he met her gaze. He was old enough that he didn’t need to show quite as much deference. “Your punishment has been determined. You will return to your home to receive the decision.”

He allowed his confusion to show. This was weird. And the empress knew that. “Your Grace?” he asked.

Annoyance coloured the empress’s features. “A special request has been made for your punishment. The requestor wants to inform you of their wishes to you and only you.” Her eyes were narrowed as she said, “They also wished to reveal themselves to you and only you.”

With each word out of Empress Theodora’s mouth, Karhi’s confusion only grew. “Your Grace, do you know the identity of my requestor?”

“I do,” she said stiffly. Karhi’s question seemed to push her annoyance closer into anger territory.

Karhi’s confusion wasn’t cleared by the answer. But it was best not to invoke her ire.

He bowed. “Your Grace.”

Sloane took that as her cue to curtsy again.

Empress Theodora nodded and made a motion best described as her shooing them out. It was still an elegant gesture.

Karhi had been to the courts a few times over the years. He knew the way back to the double doors through which they would exit the courts.

The doors were four times taller than Karhi and as wide as his full wingspan. One door was pale wood, the colour of peeled almonds. The other was dark wood, the colour of shelled cocoa. Where handles should have been, were twin shafts of light the length and width of his forearms. The light bled out into the doors, swirling through carvings that covered the door, the light dimming the closer it got to the edges.

Next to the door stood a figure draped in a long white cloak with a hood. A thin black line started at the top of the hood and swirled around the cloak, thickening until it enveloped the bottom hem that touched the floor.

The figure’s face was beautiful but unsettling. Their eyes were flooded with the same bright light as on the door, and it cast strange shadows on their face. Their cheekbones were sharp, their jaw cast in shadow that almost melted it into their neck.

They turned to regard Karhi and Sloane, blinking, projecting the curious air of a cat watching for a mouse.

“Location?” they asked. Their voice was pleasant.

“Mortal Realm. St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.”

They nodded, moving to the light door and putting their hand on it. They closed their eyes and as they did, the shadows on their face receded, giving them normal features. A button nose and small ears.

They opened their eyes, and the illusion of humanity shattered, the shadows returning. “Make sure to jump when you arrive to help with the dizziness.”

They opened the door and beyond it was the alley through which they had come to the vampire courts.

“Thanks,” Sloane murmured.

Sloane disappeared through the door.

Karhi followed her, and his world lurched.

Everything around him rolled, a conflagration of colours spinning in his vision. He shut his eyes, but the feeling made his stomach rise. Stupid old human reactions. He couldn’t even throw up.

Karhi opened his eyes to find himself back in the alley. The brick wall behind them showed no sign of the portal that ejected them.

He brought his hand to his head as everything continued to spin. He made a noise of annoyance.

“Jump,” Sloane told him.

He ignored her and stepped forward, immediately stumbling. Sloane stepped aside to avoid him falling on her.

He cursed as he barely caught himself on one knee, glaring up at Sloane.

“I told you to jump. You didn’t. This is all on you.”

He replied with something vulgar as he got up, sneering at her.

“You go find a horse’s vagina,” she snapped back, moving to exit the alley.

Karhi followed her to the street, surging forward to catch up to her. “What?”

She jumped, not expecting him to be right at her side. “What?” she shot back defensively, continuing down the street. They had exited onto Kellogg Boulevard, which ran parallel to the river. There was a black Town Car parallel parked just outside of the alley, motor running. Plumes of white vapor puffed off the muffler.

Normally, they could have just walked back to their apartment. But Sloane was in heels, and Karhi was in loafers—Minnesota in the middle of winter was not conducive to dress shoes. The snowbanks came up to their hips.

Sloane climbed into the backseat of the car. “Welcome back, ma’am,” he heard the chauffer say.

“Thanks.”

Karhi climbed into the car, shoving Sloane over as he did. She glared at him, but he ignored her. “Swanskin’s,” he told the driver.

“Yes, sir.”

“Swanskin’s?” Sloane asked as the car pulled out of the spot. “Aren’t we supposed to go home and wait?”

Karhi waved off the question, making a face of annoyance. “Ilona doesn’t hold any sway over me anymore. I’m not going to allow anyone else to make me wait on them. They can see me when they see me.”

Sloane shrugged. He could feel that she thought it was a dumb decision, but she also didn’t feel the need to argue. She would have likely done the same.

But that didn’t matter. He wanted to know something else.

“Sloane—you understand Finnish?”

She looked up, green eyes meeting his. Confusion coloured her features. “What?”

“I said, ‘Painu hevon vittuun’.”

She blinked in confusion. “You . . . didn’t say that English?”

“I did not.”

English didn’t really have swears that involved horses. And while the sentiment behind his curse had meant, “fuck off”, it translated more to, “go find a horse’s vagina” or “go climb up a horse’s vagina”.

Sloane ran her fingers through her hair and looked back out the window. “Uh . . . yeah. I do.”

“How?”

She bit her lip, and he could feel her contemplating how to answer before finally saying, “I had a mummi and an ukki.”

Those were the terms for grandmother and grandfather in Finnish.

She had learned it from her grandmother and grandfather.

He had questions, but he found the wind out of his sails. He didn’t want to know anymore. She had only grown up with one set of grandparents, having never known her father or his family.

They pulled up in front of Swanskin’s, and Karhi got out. It took him a split second to realize that Sloane wasn’t moving to get out on his side. She stayed in place.

He stuck his head back in through the door. “You coming?”

“Bell and Mickey are waiting for me in the lobby at the apartment.”

“I thought that was later. All right, I’ll see you in four days.” He didn’t let his relief that she was leaving show on his face. She could probably feel it anyway.

“Yup.”

He closed the car door and heard Sloane direct the chauffeur back to their apartment.

The car left, and he went inside.

The room was a dark wood that gave it a slick, clean look. Tables made of pale wood popped against the darkness. They broke up the monotony of the colours while tying the room together nicely with accents of the pale wood in the floors. The walls were painted a muted sage green. Paintings and prints for purchase by local Indigenous artists adorned the walls.

The most notable aspect of the interior was the pillars that held up the room. The owner of the bar came from an Indigenous family that had both O’odham and Tlingit roots. The pillars were covered in traditional carvings, lacquered for preservation. His favourite was a black bear with mountains jutting out from its back.

The owner of the place, Niquita Swanskin, stood behind the bar, mixing a drink with blood and alcohol. The top of her head came up to his chest. She was slim, corded with lean muscle. Her jawline was sharp, but her short hair framed her face in such a way as to soften it. She had warm, tawny skin, still dark despite the winter.

She glanced up as he approached the bar and nodded to him. “Isn’t it early for you?”

“Unfortunately. A certain fledgling had court.” Sloane’s case was especially well known amongst the magical community in Minnesota. A fledgling, not even at her year mark, attacking and winning against a millennium-old vampire? Who was also her grandsire? She was already making a name for herself.

Niqui smirked, a glint in her dark eyes. “And what did you get punished with?” She scooped ice into the shaker she’d poured alcohol and blood into. “Hopefully nothing too fun.”

He snorted but it didn’t have much in it. “I still don’t know.”

Niqui raised an eyebrow. “What? Don’t your courts pass judgement quickly?” She capped the shaker and shook it.

“And they did. But they didn’t tell me what it was. Just that my requestor ‘wanted to talk to me face to face’.” He used air quotes as he said that. “Whatever that means.”

She grimaced sympathetically, grabbing a glass from under the bar and setting it down. “Where’s she now?”

“Dealing with more family stuff.”

“Never ends with that girl, does it?”

“It does not. Can I get a bloody screwdriver?”

“Anything for you,” she said, winking at him and putting the shaker into the sink. “Bloody old fashioned!” she called out.

“Hey, when are you off?” he asked watching her press the shaker down on the glass rinser.

“In an hour,” she replied. She looked up from the shaker. “Unfortunately for you, I will remain forbidden fruit.”

“Oh?” He arched an eyebrow. “My fledgling doesn’t work for you anymore, and I don’t have the whole sire-will-kill-you-for-messing-around-with-me thing anymore.”

“Still trying to sleep with anyone with a pulse?”

Karhi had not expected to hear that voice. He turned to see the owner of the bloody old-fashioned order.

A woman with shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair stood next to him at the bar. She wore jeans with heeled black combat boots and a dark red cashmere sweater. There was a neat look to her—pressed clothes, no make-up, and her nails were manicured with no polish.

She looked up at him with big blue eyes, barely coming up to his chest. She was a petite woman.

She was also one of the most fearsome vampires in the world.

“Aoife?” He stared at her, eyes wide with surprise.

“I knew you wouldn’t go back to your apartment like you were supposed to. I knew you would be petty and come here.”

His eyes couldn’t get any bigger, but his confusion didn’t get any smaller. “Wait . . . you’re my requestor?”

“On behalf of my house.”

He stared at her.

“Bloody screwdriver.” Niqui set Karhi’s drink down.

Aoife took his drink and moved over to one of the booths. Karhi saw that she had a backpack already there, propped against the wall.

“Where’s your fledgling?” she asked, sitting down in the booth. “I assumed she would be with you.”

“She does her own shit,” he shrugged, sliding in across from her.

Aoife passed his drink to him, and he took a sip. Orange juice and blood was always a strange combination, but it was one he had found himself developing a taste for over the years.

“She’s not here?” she asked, reaching for her backpack.

“No. She has a family thing to deal with. She’ll be back in four days.” He wasn’t going to tell her that Sloane was probably still here. Sloane had been obsessing about going to Port Orchard ever since she had agreed to it. And her anxiety had put him so on edge all week that he had been relieved when it turned out she was leaving earlier in the day.

Aoife’s hand was on her backpack, and it stilled. She looked at Karhi. “Four days?” Her expression was unreadable.

“Yes . . .” He took another sip of his drink. Why would Aoife be interested in this?

“You didn’t make her stay with you until you knew your sentence?”

Her voice was curiously devoid of emotion, and it made Karhi’s hair stand on end. He had just spent the better part of five hundred years terrified of a vampire who was much older than him. And Aoife was also much older than him. That coupled with the ride he had been put through in October with Sloane had instilled a certain distrust of anyone who questioned how he handled his fledgling.

“And why would it matter if my fledgling was involved?” he asked through a sharp smile. “It is illegal to force a fledgling to pay a court’s punishment.”

Aoife’s even expression turned to annoyance. “Calm down, Cujo. I was asked to speak with both of you about this. I’m not asking because my Queen is asking for her head.”

Karhi’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

“It’s a sensitive matter,” she replied. “Her Majesty wants me to speak only to you two. And you have the right to refuse.”

Karhi blinked.

What the fuck could Hazel want so bad that she would involve Sloane? And was willing to allow them to walk away from?

What could Hazel want from a fledgling?
Prologue

September 24th, 2024

Her awakening was steeped with agony.

“Carrick,” she croaked, barely keeping her call from turning into a whine. The fentanyl had worn off, and she needed another blood whore to drink from. The damage that bitch had done to her would take centuries to heal. Ilona didn’t know if she would ever be without pain again.

“Hardly.”

She couldn’t see the source of the voice in the dim room. It was out of her line of sight, and any movement she made sent waves of pain crashing through her.

But she recognized the voice. “You,” she hissed.

“Me,” he agreed. He stepped into her line of sight, the faint haze of the salt lamp casting harsh shadows over him. Tall, over six feet, with a tapered waist and broad shoulders. His silver eyes luminesced in the low light. Silver . . . like Karhi’s.

The heat of anger overtook the pain for a moment. “You did this,” she hissed.

“Me?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “You broke the Samhain covenant.”

“You didn’t tell me she had soulsilver,” she rasped.

“I didn’t know,” he shrugged.

“Liar.”

He took a step forward, baring his teeth, silver eyes turning almost white. “I do not lie, fledgling,” he snarled. As he moved forward, he jostled her bed.

She bit back a scream of pain, fresh as the day that bitch set her on fire. The bits of her skin that she still had remembered the green flames as if they were alight right here and now.

“I warned you,” he hissed. “I warned you that she was more powerful than you could imagine. Did it even occur to you why someone like me would even be interested in her? Or were you so wrapped up in your petty jealousy and obsession with control that you couldn’t see anything?”

“She’s a fledgling,” Ilona whispered, just barely holding back the whine that threatened to engulf her words. “What power could she hold?”

He looked her over pointedly. “A lot. You learned that firsthand.”

Fury blazed, dulling the pain. “That bitch.”

“If you had just left her alone, you’d probably be in one piece right now,” he shrugged. He glanced up at the ceiling. “Well, no. Once I learned that Karhi didn’t know anything about her, and that you were useless, I was going to incinerate you anyway. I wouldn’t have allowed you to be the one to kill Sloane Briallen.”

The fury threatened to overwhelm her, but she couldn’t do anything. She didn’t have any muscles to control her limbs, just bone. “Why do you care?” she hissed.

He stepped away. “You did this same exact thing with Elizabeth. Tried to control her. You didn’t learn then. You didn’t learn now.” He sneered. “You’re probably going to die a slow, agonizing death because of it.” He shook his head. “Tyrants like you never learn.”

Her fury overtook her, and she screamed. “What do you want?”

He shrugged. “To save the world.” Michael disappeared.
Previously on Sloane’s Shitshow

September 24th, 2024
Synopsis and Characters

Synopsis of First Light

Sloane is a nineteen-year-old fledgling vampire who lives with her sire, Karhi, and works at a bar. While working, Sloane recognizes an old friend, Corvine, Queen of the Ravens, sitting at a table. Corvine has auditory hallucinations that go away with proximity to Sloane. Corvine calls her a cursebreaker and tells her that she owes Sloane a favor for her cursebreaking abilities.

Sloane has a dream of her adoptive brothers Mickey and Bell, who she’s assumed are dead, where they meet her mother, and she gives them each a gift of soulsilver. Sloane wakes up to a call from her childhood friend Mira telling her that their friend Mikko is missing, and their other friends, Genie and Frankie, are in foster care after finding their parents dead. Sloane leaves for Phoenix to help her family and find Mikko.

Karhi receives a call that he is expected in Phoenix for the Samhain festival. Going to alert Sloane, Karhi learns that she is gone. He goes to Phoenix and meets with his abusive sire, Ilona. She threatens him and Sloane upon finding out that Sloane is missing.

Sloane’s return home is disastrous with her family shunning her for being a vampire. She runs into Mickey and Bell and flees, unable to deal with the unexpected, painful reunion. Sloane tries to find information on the missing Mikko and instead finds out that Genie and Frankie have been arrested.

Sloane runs into Lunette, Karhi’s sister, who can’t find Karhi. Sloane agrees to help Lunette find Karhi if Lunette helps her get Frankie and Genie out of jail. They go to the city’s vampire brothel and find Karhi there high on heroin. When Karhi is sober, they infiltrate the police station with Lunette’s help pretending to be a social worker to get Frankie and Genie out. Outside the police station, it’s revealed that Mikko has been kidnapped and is being held somewhere and tortured. Sloane uses her favor with Corvine, who finds Mikko in an abandoned warehouse and brings him back to Sloane.

Sloane goes to a club and runs into Theron Kaiho, a vampire hunter, as well as two vampires named Angus and Ava who try to antagonize her and Theron before being kicked out of the club. She calls Karhi outside, but is interrupted by Angus and Ava, who turn out to be two of Ilona’s children. They overpower Sloane with dead man’s blood and torture her before killing her. Karhi finds Sloane and manages to stabilize her through a process known as double-siring.

Together with Mira, Karhi confronts Theron and his partner, Zero, who they believe may be involved in what’s been going on but it’s another dead end. Karhi and Mira leave, and they’re hit by a truck driven by Ilona. She takes Karhi and leaves Mira with a note for Sloane to meet her at the Samhain festival.

It’s revealed that Ilona is behind everything that has happened up until now. At the festival, Sloane confronts Ava, Angus, and Ilona. Ilona monologues about how she did this because Sloane kept Mira and her abilities from Ilona. Ilona attempts to force Sloane to submit to her, but Sloane overcomes the compulsion. She kills Ava and Angus and burns Ilona using her soulsilver before Ilona’s partner is able to Jump them away.

By attacking Ilona, Sloane has broken the covenant of Samhain which says there is no violence on the grounds of the festival. She is given a court date for sentencing. They learn that Sloane’s soulfire did so much damage to Ilona that she will likely die soon. Sloane also learns she is a free vampire, untethered to any sire. With Ilona gone, Sloane and Karhi talk about having a newfound freedom to explore.
Characters
Primary Characters

Sloane Briallen is a human vampire with advanced healing abilities. Her mother died when she was nine and she grew up as a chronic foster care runaway. She built a family in Phoenix of magics and other foster runaways. At sixteen, she was adopted by her childhood best friends. At nineteen, she was turned into a vampire.

Karhi Emelyn is a century-old human vampire with the ability to make people forget things by looking at them (fuscopathy). He was turned into a vampire in the 1500s by a sadistic sire, Ilona Emelyn. He was tortured and abused by his sire over the course of his entire life until Sloane all but killed Ilona. He has a heroin problem and sleeps with anything that consents.
The Phoenix Family

Mira Ríordan is a neuropath who can read minds and use telepathy and mind control. She is the only member of Sloane’s Phoenix family who was never in foster care. Her mother was a meth addict who was hardly around, and Mira’s now-deceased grandmother raised Mira. At age 16, Mira had a child, Evelina “Lina” Ríordan. Her moniker is “the White Psychic”. She has a contract with the house of living vampires for protection, which is what draws Ilona’s ire.

Mikko Lawrence is a human. He was horribly abused by his parents to the point of losing an ear and most of the hearing in that ear. His parents’ rights were terminated, and he went into foster before becoming a runaway due to more abuse in the foster system. Sloane found him and didn’t like him at first, but overtime, she grew to love him. Mikko developed a cocaine problem as a teenager. With the help of Sloane and the rest of his family, he was able to kick it after a couple of relapses. He is held prisoner by Ilona.

Annie Falk a halfshifter lost her mother when she was a kid, no dad in the picture. She ended up in foster care where she met Sloane. To make money, she boxes in an illegal underground boxing ring.

Frankie Cirocco is a human and Genie Carwyn is a kinesiopath (supernatural balance). They came as a pair, also foster runaways. Genie is deaf and the reason why all of Sloane’s family knows ASL. Frankie and Genie met in a foster home together and have never been separated. They were adopted by a couple, Shirley and Rolando Castillo, who were later killed by Ilona’s minions.

Lina Ríordan is Mira’s five-year-old daughter. She has the same abilities as her mother.
The Adoptive Family

Bell and Mickey Blackthorne are werewolf cousins and Sloane’s adoptive brothers and childhood best friends. They turned into wolves for the first time on Sloane’s eighteenth birthday and were taken in by a mentor and were forbidden from contacting Sloane. They were presumed dead until they showed up at Mira’s doorstep looking for Sloane. They are now the heads of a pack comprising their distant cousins.

Mauve and Leah Blackthorne are two human sisters. They were Sloane’s mother and have known Sloane since she was five. They tried to adopt her after her mother died, but it didn’t work. They were successful in adopting her as a teenager.
The Emelyns

Ilona Emelyn is a human vampire. She is the sire of Karhi, Onyx, Carry, Zeren, Lunette, and Carrick Emelyn. She is sadistic and would regularly torture her children. She is the primary antagonist of book 1, having killed Genie and Frankie parents, tortured Mikko, and attempted to kill Sloane through two of her other blood children, Ava and Angus. Sloane nearly killed her by burning her with soulfire. Her whereabouts and condition are unknown, but she is presumed alive for now.

Onyx Emelyn is a human vampire and Karhi’s blood sibling (turned by the same vampire). She can make people hallucinate (illusopath). She is married to Carry.

Carry Emelyn is a human vampire and Karhi’s blood sibling. She has advanced strength and speed (velocikinetic). She is married to Onyx and is biologically related to Zeren, another of Karhi’s blood siblings.

Zeren Emelyn is a human vampire and Karhi’s blood sibling. He is a neuropath who can influence people’s emotions. He is biologically related to Carry.

Lunette Emelyn is a human vampire and Karhi’s blood sibling. She can make people feel pain with just a look (a cruciopath).

Carrick Emelyn is a human vampire, Karhi’s blood sibling, and Ilona’s partner. He can make portals to other places (a Jumper).
Characters that are mentioned but never seen

Hazel Ruaidhrí is a living vampire and the queen of the House of Living Vampires. She has a contract with Mira where Mira works for her for payment or favors. She is Ilona Emelyn’s biological sister.

Aoife Muireadhach is a living vampire. She gave Mira the moniker “the White Psychic” and is Mira and Sloane’s connection to the House of Living Vampires, the governing body of all living vampires.

Amos Black is a shapeshifter that would help out the Phoenix family occasionally. He is a private investigator and Sloane’s art mentor.

Carlos Vásquez and Timber White are shapeshifters that would help out the Phoenix family occasionally.
Epilogue

January 4th, 2024

“So. The end is coming.”

The Oracle looked up from the fire she tended in her cave. She was making a jambalaya dish that a seer in New Orleans had taught her at the turn of the century. It was one of her favourites.

A person with short brown hair and two different coloured eyes, one green and one brown, stood at the opposite end of the fire. They regarded the boiling copper pot hanging from a spit over the fire.

“Éire,” the Oracle smiled. “Lovely to see you. You don’t visit anymore.”

“I’ve been so busy recently,” they said. “The animalia are . . . well, some of them have been compromised.”

The Oracle nodded, wrinkling her nose. “Nasty business with King Rok. Attacking that little girl?”

“Corvine may be among the youngest of the animalia, but she is not a little girl by any means. If she were not so fiercely loyal to that vampire and everything she stands for, I would worry about her,” Éire sighed. “The curse Corvine’s heritage leaves her with is tricky. But Corvine says the vampire is a cursebreaker.”

“Yup,” the Oracle nodded in agreement. She stood up from where she sat on an outcropping of rock that she had made from the cave walls as a seat. “Éire, would you like some jambalaya?”

“What is it?”

“They make it on Earth, famously in a portion called Louisiana. This one has chicken, shrimp, and sausage along with a lot of tomatoes.”

Éire eyed it. The Oracle could see they were weighing the benefits of eating meat.

“The pig king will eat anything,” the Oracle pointed out. “Queen Galla disdains her own people. King Crustacea has so many in his phylum that he won’t notice the difference.”

“That’s why you could never do my job,” Éire said, giving in and taking the bowl the Oracle offered them. “Just because Galla is not a kind ruler does not mean that she disdains her people. It’s hard when chickens and pheasants are so stupid. And you know he goes by the name Arthur, not Crustacea.”

“As if Galla is so smart.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about my choice of animalia—”

“And then Arachne. A human? Éire, that choice was so poor I found it panhandling in the streets of Britain.”

Éire put their free hand to their head. “Here we go.”

“Human minds fracture when they live so long. Popular examples include: Ilona Emelyn, the Fates, Atlantes, almost all of the gods.” She glared at Éire. “Their psyche fractures.”

“Popular bad examples: Hazel Ruaidhrí, Grey Cross, Frey, and Freya,” Éire countered. “Anyway, Oracle, that’s not the point.”

“You’re right. Hazel and Grey had kids, which made it very different. And Frey and Freya have kept to their purpose with great resolve.”

Éire tilted their head and looked at the Oracle. “You’re evading.”

The Oracle sighed. “I know. I heard what you said when you first came in.”

“Ah, I was beginning to wonder if my remark on the apocalypse was to myself.”

The Oracle scrunched up her face and shook her head distastefully. “I dislike that word. It refers to Earth, not any other realm.”

“What do you prefer?”

“Just, ‘the End’,” the Oracle said. “As you said when you came in.”

Éire nodded. “It has begun, then? I wasn’t wrong?”

“The vampire is coming into her powers. Ilona’s alliance with that . . . creature . . . to interfere with the fledgling was a portent of things to come.”

“Like?”

She ignored the question. “It is surprising how many mortals will be involved,” she said. “Remember the last time we thought the End would come? There were so few mortals. Humans were building their homes in the Eastern portion of their world. The Lights destroyed so many of their homes and reduced their population so drastically.”

“And this time?” Éire asked.

The Oracle shook her head. “There are more creatures in the universe now. So many mortals.”

Éire nodded.

“The vampire will only trust mortals. It is her nature, though she is no longer one. She will bring mortals to the fight.”

“Then we’ll all die,” Éire said, shaking their head in disgust. “They are so weak.”

“Éire, you underestimate mortals,” she said. “You do not see all as I do, only your domain. They will prove formidable. Their short life spans force them to be much more cunning than you would think.” She looked up the ceiling thoughtfully before shrugging. “But enough of this talk. It isn’t my job to end your prejudice.” She pointed to the cooling bowl in Éire’s hand. “Eat your jambalaya.” A spoon appeared in the crudely carved wooden bowl.

Éire stirred the soup-like food in their bowl. “Oracle . . . should I prepare my people?”

The Oracle’s light humour and temper faded, and her age showed for a moment. She was normally so vibrant and cheerful. She had been blonde with blue eyes and young.

But with the change in her expression, the blonde gave way to grey roots and the bright blue clouded to grey. The supple skin wrinkled.

“I don’t know what the End holds in store,” the Oracle admitted.

“How long?”

“We have less than three human decades.”

Éire stared at her. “You’re joking.”

The Oracle shook her head.

“The tremors only just began—”

“Mortals work quickly,” the Oracle waved her hand. Her youthfulness returned. “I told you that. Everything is much more accelerated.” She shook her head. “The Old Ones. You guys always expect that things are a long way off. It isn’t so.” She looked to her bowl. “The end of an era is coming. We cannot stop its coming, but you all can influence how it ends.”

Éire looked down at their bowl.

“Eat before it gets cold.”

Éire picked up the spoon and brought a mixture of tomato, celery, rice, and shrimp to their mouth.

“Ow, that’s spicy.”
32. Freedom

January 4th, 2024

For my troubles, I received a court date to be at the vampire courts for sentencing for violating the Covenant of Samhain. My court date was given to me by Empress Theodora. Apparently, she was the only one of the assembly available.

What fucking timeline was I living in?

“Don’t worry,” Karhi said as we walked away from the vampire delegation. “The judgment will be on my shoulders. And it will be something annoying, but ultimately harmless.”

I cocked my head at him. “I know?”

His confusion echoed mine. “You do?”

“I’m nineteen, Karhi. I grew up in Phoenix where I used to be a dancer at the Samhain festival. My best friend is contracted with the Queen of the Living Vampires. I know the age laws because I used to flout them all the fucking time. I got into a fight with a shifter here once. Because I was human and underage, they couldn’t really punish me. So, I was banned from dancing the following year. Joke was on them, that was after I got adopted, so I didn’t even go to the festival the next year.”

He stared at me.

“Who was that guy?” I asked. “The one that made me feel calm and was just . . . giving orders.”

“King of the Elves.”

Of fucking course he was.

“They’re good at mind magic. Neuromancy. That’s where the sudden calm came from.”

I fucking hated magic.

“Sloane!”

Mickey, Mira, and Bell had followed us up until the vampire delegation. They had stood outside, waiting for us to come back out from the tent in which the Empress had been. At some point, Annie and Mikko had joined them while we had been inside.

Mickey grabbed me and hugged me. “What happened?” He pulled away but laced his fingers with mine as if to make sure I was really still there.

I shook my head. “Karhi gets in trouble because I killed some sadistic vampires. My court date is in December.” I glanced at Karhi. “Well, really, your court date for raising such a rebellious teenager.”

The look on his face was like I had stuck a lemon in his mouth. “You are not my kid. Gross.”

I shrugged, focusing back on Mira and the others. “I’m safe.”

“What the hell happened?” Mira asked.

“Where were you?” I shot back.

“I lost track of you in the crowd. Too many minds to read.” She grimaced, unable to meet my gaze. “And Bell and Mickey got turned around with all the scents.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I used my soulfire, isn’t it?” My last bet had been for Mickey to save me because he was under twenty, too, and the age law protected him like it protected me. But honestly, after what I experienced . . . I doubt he could have done anything. Ilona was too strong.

Karhi looked at me. “Wait—you have it, too?”

I touched the pendant at my throat. It vibrated against my fingers like it was humming.

Then it registered. “Too?”

He pointed at the wolves. “Those two attacked Lunette and me.”

I had known about that, but I hadn’t known Mickey and Bell had used soulsilver. I spun to face them. “You used your soulsilver on them?” I demanded.

“They shot me!” Bell fired back, pulling up his right pants’ leg to show a puckered bullet wound. “With moon silver!”

“You attacked first,” Mickey said, giving him an annoyed look.

Bell shut up.

Mira ignored them. “Sloane, focus. It doesn’t matter right now. What happened?”

Right.

I told them all what happened when I got to Ilona.

When I was done, I said, “And that bitch wanted them all to watch. Fucking cu—”

“Sloane!”

I looked up to see Carry and Onyx sprinting for me. Behind them was Zeren and Lunette.

Carry and Onyx bulldozed into me, knocking me to the ground. The sand here was hard packed and uncomfortable. I felt the impact through my ribs.

They ignored my discomfort, embracing me and shoving their faces into my neck. I patted their backs awkwardly, looking up at Karhi, imploring him for help with my eyes. He shrugged uselessly.

“Guys,” I said after a moment of this. “Let me up.”

They got off me and helped me up. But they each kept one hand in theirs. I gave them strange looks, but they pretended like there was nothing weird happening. There was a springiness in their steps as they moved.

“What is going on?” I asked.

“We could ask the same thing,” Lunette said when she and Zeren arrived. “Where did you get soulsilver from?”

“Long story.”

“Explain—”

Zeren cut her off. He had the biggest grin on his face. “It really doesn’t matter, Luna. She did so much damage to Ilona that Ilona couldn’t even control us anymore at the end. She’s going to die.”

And that was where this was coming from. Karhi hadn’t yelled at me for having to make a trip to the courts. Onyx and Carry were holding my hands and practically prancing around. Zeren had the biggest grin on his face that I had ever seen. And considering the man only ever smiled, that was saying something.

Lunette was the only one who still seemed pissed. But even then . . . there seemed to be a lightness about her that I had never seen before.

“What happened after we left?” I asked.

Zeren glanced at Lunette, who was about to say something. She swallowed whatever she was going to say—probably something snarky—and Zeren answered. “Well, Alaric was going to take Ilona in, but Carrick grabbed her before he could and jumped away. We couldn’t stop him.”

I forgot that Carrick was a jumper.

“But there’s something that’s missing,” Carry said. She squeezed my hand. “Before, we always felt Ilona, even if she wasn’t here. We knew that she was out there. But now . . . blessed silence. That tense rope is gone.”

I glanced at Karhi, who nodded, a slight smile on his face. “She can’t survive injuries like that,” he said. “And even, on the slim chance she does, it will take her centuries to regain any semblance of the power she had before. Ideally, at that point, someone will have killed her anyway while she healed.”

“And you,” Lunette said. Her tone was more even but still accusatory somehow. “You’re Free.”

I tilted my head in confusion. “What?”

“You broke free from her. In that last instant before you set Angus and Ava on fire. We all felt it. She lost any pull she had on you. She couldn’t control you.”

I blinked.

Free. I was Free. I wasn’t tethered to any vampire. My link to Ilona, and therefore, my link to Karhi . . . it was gone.

But wait . . . I could still feel Karhi’s emotions. It wasn’t as strong as it had once been, but it was still there. Gentle tugs instead of pulls. I looked at him. “I can still feel you.”

“Double siring has some weird side effects,” he said. I could feel from him that he didn’t really know much past that.

“Double siring?” I asked. I hadn’t heard of that.

“I resired you. You died.”

That didn’t explain anything, but I couldn’t find the will to care. I felt light and airy in a way I hadn’t felt in years. “Freedom,” I said wistfully, looking up at the sky. A sire’s control was absolute. Especially in the first few years of a vampire’s life. Strong vampires, like Ilona, could maintain control for centuries. Not even Karhi had gotten his Freedom, and he was over five centuries old.

“Did . . . did I Free you all?” I asked after a moment. Surprisingly, my chest welled with hope. I didn’t care for vampires, but I did care, however minutely, for these vampires. I wanted them to be Free like me.

They all exchanged glances.

“Not quite.” Karhi was the one to answer. “When you burned her? She lost her control over us. And you rendered her power over us almost useless, but, if she were to regain it quickly, say within the next few decades, she could regain control.”

The hope disappeared, and my chest deflated. Until . . . “Wait, you said it would take her centuries to recover.”

Karhi nodded. “Yes. And with those centuries, our ties to her will fade.”

I breathed out a sigh of relief. “Good.”

“And on top of that, King Alaric asked us what happened,” Lunette added. “We told him. She’s also up for disobeying the Samhain Covenant. But unlike you, she’s old enough to know better.”

“I mean . . . Mira and I kinda planned to, at the very least, use Mickey to help out if I couldn’t tap my soulsilver,” I said. Though now I understood that that plan would not have worked.

That earned me some confused looks.

“I wasn’t going to Ilona blind, guys,” I said, looking between the vampires. “Mira’s twenty-one, but Mickey and I are still nineteen. I’ve been flouting the Samhain Covenant since I knew what it was.”

I felt a measure of pride from Karhi, but he didn’t show it. He hid a smile, looking away from Lunette, who was scowling.

“That is a stupid gamble,” Lunette said. “Especially if you’re repeat offender.”

“You can only be a repeat offender if they catch you,” I shrugged.

“Lunette, Carry, Onyx, and Zeren Emelyn!” a deep, booming voice called out.

We looked up to see the same dark-skinned man that had called Karhi and me into Empress Theodora’s tent standing at the edge of the vampire delegation.

“They wanted to see us, too,” Lunette said by way of (absolutely useless) explanation. “Bye.” She turned from us and headed towards the man.

Onyx and Carry each hugged me one more time. “Thank you,” Carry whispered in my ear before she left.

Zeren also got a hug in. “Stay safe.”

“No promises,” I replied, hugging him back.

He let go and went after his sister.

“I think I’m done with the festival for this year,” Mira said, stretching. As she did, it brought attention to her chest, which made me realize—

“I wore this fucking outfit to dress up and make myself semi-presentable, and that bitch didn’t give a fuck.” I looked down at my scarf shirt and long skirt. “Son of a bitch. Should have worn jeans and a shirt.”

“Hey . . .” Karhi murmured, stooping down to look at my stomach. “That’s the wound from Ava and Angus?” He touched the scar.

I shied away from the sudden contact. “Yeah. Why?”

“We don’t tend to scar, but that was bad enough that I thought it would be worse. That is way too faded to have only been inflicted two days ago.” His brow furrowed. “And thinking about it, for a fledgling, you shouldn’t have healed so many broken bones that quickly. Even if you were double sired. It should have taken at least a day. I wonder if you’re a healer.”

“A healer?”

“It’s not common, but some vampires manifest an incredible healing ability.”

I glanced down at my belly. Even I had thought it was a bit weird that it was so faded. Being a healer could explain it.

“I do have a power.”

“So it would seem. On top of your self-control.”

I hadn’t realized that was a power, but cool, cool.

“You were always a good healer as a human, too,” Mira pointed out. “You were up and about within a week after that other scar on your stomach.”

She meant the one that had introduced us, the big one next to my latest scar.

“Hm . . .”

“Were we serious about leaving?” Annie interrupted, looking from me to Mira. “I’ve about had my fill of people for today.”

“Yeah,” Mira agreed. She looked at me. “You ready to go?”

“Uh . . .” I glanced at Karhi. I hadn’t actually had a chance to talk to him and I found myself actually wanting to. He cocked a questioning eyebrow at me.

“Take me back to my car and we’ll leave you behind,” Mira said.

“Deal.” I turned to her to allow her a piggyback. She climbed on and we were off.

As we ran, I thought, Subconscious?

I’m going back. What?

Thanks for kindling my fury for Ilona.

There was a pause for a moment before, Yeah. You’re welcome.

If Mira heard me talking to myself, she didn’t say anything.

I brought Mira back to the car, Mickey and Bell bringing Mikko and Annie back. Annie tried to argue that she was healed enough again, but Mira had forced her to go back on Bell’s back again. I honestly wasn’t sure if she used mind control or not.

“I didn’t,” Mira said before she got into the car.

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t force her to get on Bell’s back. Thought about it. But I figured you had seen and experienced enough mind control for tonight that I didn’t really need to remind you of it.”

I chuckled. “Thanks for the consideration.”

She hugged me. “I’ll see you later?”

“I’ll text—” I remembered that my phone was in pieces back in the Lazarus parking lot. “Yeah. I’ll be back later.”

She smiled and nodded.

Mikko, Annie, and Mira went to the car.

Just before Annie got in the car, she eyed Karhi. “You still owe me $600.”

“Get it from Sloane,” he shot back, pointing at me. “She stole thirty grand from me.”

She shifted her scrutiny from him to me. “Give me money.”

I rolled my eyes. “I will. Get in.”

She made a motion to let me know she was watching me and then she got in.

Mickey and Bell took a bit more coaxing to get in the car. They didn’t want to leave me with Karhi. After I threatened them with something physically impossible, they finally left.

As the car pulled away, Karhi said, “You know, Lunette makes a similar threat sometimes. But you need tentacles for that.”

I shrugged, watching the red lights on Mira’s truck shrink. When they were far enough that I knew none of them could hear me over the sounds of the car, I turned to Karhi. “I have somewhere I want to take you.”

“Oh?”

Neither the pastor nor I had ever believed it was coincidence that my mother had been buried directly in front of my grandmother. My grandmother and mother hadn’t paid for plots by each other. Mom’s friends had said that it was such a strange coincidence.

It wasn’t a coincidence, but what it was? I couldn’t tell you. I still can’t tell you. I don’t believe in divine intervention or anything of that sort, even if I do know the gods like to play tricks. But I was pretty sure that this was way too minor to belong to any deity.

I don’t know.

I hadn’t visited the graves in years. The last time may have been just before I left to live with Mickey and Bell to say goodbye.

And now I was here with Karhi.

My mother’s gravestone had been simple, made of white granite with black engraving.

Sheila Briallen

1953—1997

Loving Mother and Friend

I touched the granite. It was cold from the desert night. It was still dark out, dawn a few hours out.

“Why did you bring me here?” Karhi murmured solemnly from beside me.

I pointed to the grave behind my mother’s.

Karhi looked up, and I felt him stiffen next to me. He stepped away from me and went for my grandmother’s grave. Good. I wanted to be with my mom.

I sat in front of the gravestone and traced the lettering.

What were you doing that night? I asked her.

I brushed the lettering with my fingers. There was nothing behind it except the cold of the gravestone. But I had seen her once already after death. And tonight, we were on the cusp of the veil between our world and the next. Or so they said.

Why did you give that soulsilver to us? Why the dream?

I bit my lip, focusing on the engraving beneath my fingers.

But I didn’t get any answers.

“I know you could answer if you wanted to,” I sighed, standing up.

There were no profound realizations coming to me. There was no ghost voice of my mother in my head telling me exactly what I wanted to know.

I wasn’t in the type of story where the character gets epiphanies from beyond the grave at crucial, necessary points. I was in the type of story where the character bumbles through everything, coming to stuff only because they step in the middle of a wasp’s nest of epiphanies.

I rubbed the gravestone again and looked up.

Karhi stood before my grandmother’s grave, hands in loose fists at his side.

I watched him stare at the tombstone, as if he was afraid it was going to disappear.

Or wanted it to disappear.

I looked at the gravestone.

Elizabeth Seeley

1924—1996

Loving Grandmother and Mother

I startled Karhi when I slid my arm under his and held it to my side.

He looked down at me. “Sloane?” He seemed far away, but I saw no tears. There was a profound sadness in his features, but it was the type of grief that didn’t need tears—it was years faded.

I looked at the gravestone. “Makes it real, doesn’t it? Seeing the grave?”

He followed my gaze. “Yeah,” he said after a moment.

“That’s how it was for Mom. Her death didn’t feel real until I watched them put the coffin in.”

He didn’t say anything. Silence prevailed between us, only the sound of locust drones breaking up the night.

“How did you know about us?” he asked after some time had passed.

“She told me, not long before she died.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That she was with a vampire. That she couldn’t stay with him. She had to leave him.”

He nodded somberly.

“She was devastated.”

Karhi looked up sharply. “What?”

“She didn’t want to leave you. But she couldn’t leave her family. She loved them too much.”

He didn’t say anything.

“She loved you, though. I saw it in how she spoke. She never wanted to leave. She told me that she couldn’t love you how you needed.”

He sighed, reaching out with his free hand to touch the grave. “It was brief, but it was . . . she meant a lot to me.”

I leaned against him and waited. I could feel that he had something he needed to say before he could leave.

I waited.

“I loved her,” he finally said.

“I know.”

He nodded slowly.

We stood in silence until he finally turned from the grave. He started towards the parking lot, through which we had entered, and I followed him.

We stopped at the edge of the cemetery. He couldn’t seem to force himself to step onto the concrete. I could feel the heaviness inside of him.

“How are you?” I asked.

He blinked, and I felt his surprise and confusion as dull pushes against me. “Me?”

I nodded.

“I’m not the one who was gutted and left for dead. And then threatened with more or the same.”

“No, but we just visited the grave of the woman you loved.”

He shook his head. “That pain is old. Seeing that helped me finally put that to rest. You’ve had way more going on.”

“So have you.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

“Look, I’ve had my people hug me and help me grieve. I talked to Mickey and Bell. I talked to Mira. I’ve been able to process bits of it.”

“What did you do with your uterus?”

A twinge of regret niggled at the back of my head. “By the time I was awake, it had petrified.” That was something vampire organs did when left outside of a vampire’s body for more than a couple hours. “I burned it in Mira’s backyard. I didn’t want that reminder.” I looked away. “It was the only thing I could think to do.”

“I think that’s appropriate,” he murmured. Then he chuckled in a self-deprecating way. “I mean, I don’t have a uterus, so I don’t get much of an opinion. But it seems fitting.”

I looked up at him and saw a gentle smile on his face. I felt the tug of his emotions like gentle waves against me. Something about the emotion he was feeling was off. I hadn’t felt it before, and it took a moment to place it.

Affection.

He was feeling affection towards me.

I wrapped my arms around him and rested my forehead against his shoulder.

He tensed and surprise washed over the affection. But the affection didn’t fade.

After a moment, he hugged me back. He rested his head against mine. It was a minute before he voiced what I had felt from him when he hugged me. I felt the thrum of his words in my ears as he spoke them.

“I’m not doing okay.”

I hugged him tighter. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”

He nodded against me but didn’t say anything. I felt as a dozen emotions bubbled up, usurping the affection but not completely squelching it. It stayed as a base emotion in the back of his mind.

But at the forefront was anger. Sadness. Loss. Confusion. Pain. Helplessness.

I couldn’t help with any of that. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he had been through in the past few days. The kidnapping. Ilona’s threats and actions. Whatever had happened to him after Ilona had crashed his car and taken him.

I couldn’t imagine what the past five centuries had been for him.

But I could be there for him. I could listen if he wanted to talk. I could just stand silently with him.

He squeezed me to him as thoughts and feelings roared through him.

I stayed there with him until the sun started to peek over the horizon. I dried his tears when he pulled away. I combed his hair back from where it stuck to his face. I took his hand when his embrace finally loosened.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We had a newfound freedom to explore.
31. Samhain

January 4th, 2024

I had always liked the desert. Scrub brush and cacti covered the rocky sand. The saguaro cacti towered over everything else, reaching anywhere from five to sixty feet tall. But without any foliage, it was still easy to see across the terrain for miles.

Mesas towering hundreds of feet in the air dotted the landscape. We used to climb the bases of the mesas when I was a kid and my mom would drive Mickey, Bell, and me out to hike. We had to be careful of loose rocks, but we had found tiny caves and slivers of space between boulders. The desert had been the best playground in the world, if also the most dangerous.

The Samhain festival was in the same part of the desert every year. There were cab UTVs that would shuttle humans and magics that couldn’t run the terrain from the parking areas to the festival. I could hear their engines racing across the sand and brush. There was one about fifty feet from where Mira ultimately parked, waiting to pick up a group of people.

We exited the truck. I could see a fire off in the mountainous distance that marked the front of the festival.

“Are you okay to run?” I asked Annie. “I can take you if not.”

“No, I’m—”

Mira interrupted her. “Annie, you ain’t fully healed. Get on Sloane.”

Annie scowled but she didn’t argue. She climbed on my back.

Mira climbed up onto Bell, and Mikko on Mickey.

“Let’s roll,” I said.

And we were off.

The closer we got, the more I realized that the fire I had seen from afar was a bit larger than I anticipated.

“Did they set a house on fire?” Annie asked as she got off my back.

“Is that . . . the Wicked Witch of the East’s house?” Mira asked. She looked windswept, but a quick run of her fingers through her hair fixed that.

I stared at the fire.

“It is,” Mickey said after a moment.

They were right. The kindling for the fire appeared to be a house. And there were sparkling red shoes sticking out from under it, slowly being consumed by the fire that engulfed them.

“Last year they did that fire scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, including carved wooden status of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery,” Mikko said, fixing his hair from our journey. It made me check to make sure my hair was still in place.

I looked out over the festival. It was early, but it was already busy. Hundreds of people were spread out over a mile across my field of vision. Men, women, animals, faeries, rainbows, shadows, and too many other things to even begin to try and describe. I could see the Unseelie queen sitting on a throne of pure ice.

Shifters and vampires talked to each other without trying to kill each other. Mages practiced their magic freely, things flying around. I saw some kids working on lifting up a boulder together. Leprechauns argued with nymphs, sylphs talked to maenads, and in the flames, I could see salamanders swimming. Creatures floated through the air and stalked along the sand.

There were tables upon tables of food, drinks, and things I couldn’t begin to identify. Different creatures milled around the food, paper plates bending under the strain of their loads. The sound of tuning instruments floated from somewhere in the crowd.

I didn’t see anyone I recognized. I couldn’t feel Ilona’s cold presence, meaning she wasn’t here yet. Or, at least, not close enough to feel.

“The dancing is about to begin,” Mikko said, interrupting my scan.

I looked to seem him pointing off to where a stage had been erected on the other side of the fire, filled with musicians. There were traditional instruments from all over the world—Guqins, erhus, bongos, Veenas, drums, and . I had always liked to go up after the dancing to talk to the musicians and ask about their instruments. Erhus, the two stringed Chinese fiddles, were so cool to me. The bow sat between the strings.

Behind the traditional instruments, as always, sat a modern-day rock band. They were complete with guitars, drums, keyboards, and a vocalist.

It was always a cool combination. The festival always mixed up traditional music with contemporary music.

A beautiful woman walked out onto the stage. “Places!” she called out. She had long black, blue, and green hair that flowed down a slender back. She wore a white silk dress interwoven with jewels and peacock feathers. The peacock queen. She was alone, the elephant queen likely one of the dancers.

A hush fell over the crowd and all that could be heard was the crackling of the fire.

The dancers darted out from beside the stage, each one in a different colored outfit. Some were traditional clothes from different cultures, most of which I didn’t recognize. Men and women of all races and colors filled the crowd of dancers. They moved in concert to surround the fire.

A single drumbeat started the dance.

Because there were only a few weeks to practice every year, the choreographers always made the dance as simple as possible. Which meant they spent about six months out of the year planning it. I knew from experience that the choreography that went into this dance was insane.

But you wouldn’t know it to watch the dancers as the drums picked up. The movements of dozens of cultures echoed through the dance. Some moved as if their goal was to touch the sand as infrequently as possible. Others moved as if they wanted to bury themselves into the ground.

Mira’s grandmother used to be a known dancer for the festival and when her granddaughter began to attend the festival with her, she was included in the dances as well. When I start to hang around, I was also invited to dance. As were all of us. Even Mikko had danced some years. I didn’t know if Frankie had ever been invited.

The thrill of watching the dance raced through my veins, my heart pulsing in time with the beat of the drum. The heat of the fire was dull on my skin, but it burned inside of me.

It was easy to forget why I was there.

But not for long.

I felt a cold gaze on me. It wasn’t Ilona but . . .

There.

Arachne was beautiful. A jaw that could cut glass and a long, down-turned nose. Black eyes beneath thick black eyebrows. Long black hair like obsidian down her back.

Her olive skin was tattooed with black spiders and spider webs. Her dress was white spider silk with an empire waistline cut to her knees to reveal endless legs.

I hadn’t seen her since I had broken up with her almost four years ago. And seeing her now as an adult was unnerving. When I had been with her, she’d had the body and mindset of a teenager.

Her gaze on me was intense but I met it. I wouldn’t let her . . . cow me? I don’t know. I wasn’t going to be the type of person who was afraid of their exes.

A moment passed before I leaned toward Mickey. “Can you stand a bit in front of me?”

Mickey glanced at me, raising an eyebrow. I shook my head. “I’ll tell you later.”

He shrugged and took a step forward. I guided him and let him block Arachne from my sight. It was a blessed relief.

Mickey remained where he was, and we watched the dancing until the drumming stopped. With that, the dancing came to a close. Cheers erupted from the audience, and a swarm of onlookers overtook the dancers. Friends and family congratulated them on a job well done.

Throughout the dance, I had scanned the crowd, searching for anyone linking back to Ilona. But she was still in the wind. The only stare I felt during the dance was Arachne’s.

“I’m gonna find Corvine,” I told Mira. “See if she’s seen anything.”

“I’m going to Hazel’s contingent. I’ll ask around, too,” she replied.

“Thanks.”

I disappeared into the crowd with a tail. Mickey and Bell were following me everywhere until we finally found Ilona.

It wasn’t hard to find Corvine. I just had to search for the goth, brooding shifters that always trailed her at the festivals. Some of them were ravens and crows, I was sure, but most of them just came for the aesthetic.

I saw the occasional corvae, similar in stature to Korbin, with dark shiny skin and claws for legs and giant bird skull hats.

Corvine sat in a black throne. It was shiny with lacquer and filled with feathers. Corvine had told me once that the throne was made of dead crows. I honestly wasn’t sure if she was serious or not.

Korbin stood next to her, surveying the festival. When he caught sight of me, he nodded to me. Corvine looked up.

“What, did you get bodyguard detail, Korbin?” I asked once I stood in front of Corvine’s disturbing throne. Mickey and Bell stood behind me, looking around Corvine’s entourage in awe.

Korbin glanced at Corvine, and she waved her hand in a motion telling him she didn’t care if he spoke.

“I am her Majesty’s military general,” he said.

I paused for a second, surprised. It only last for a second because, “Of course you are. Corvine, you were watching me after I saw you in the bar, weren’t you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You knew. When you came to see me in Minnesota, you knew things were going to hell. That’s why Korbin was the one I found when I needed you the other night.”

“I was aware some strange things were happening down here,” Corvine shrugged. “I thought having a reminder of my debt would help you. And I hear you have everything resolved.”

She was right. Had Corvine not contacted me, I don’t think I would have thought to call her favor. “Not quite.”

She tilted her head to the side in a silent question.

“My sire would like a word.”

She grimaced. “Well, ideally, that should be helpful.” She pointed to my neck.

It took me a second to realize she meant my necklace. I touched it absently. “You know what this is?”

“It’s hard to mistake soulsilver for anything else.” She nodded to Mickey and Bell. “Wherever you all got yours, you’re very lucky. Soulsilver is rare.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It had many uses, but it’s foremost use is as a weapon. It’s made with a type of magic called metaphysiomancy. And it is usually only made by elves.”

“Usually?”

She paused for a moment, mulling over her answer before saying, “Or spirits. It’s uncommon, but it happens. And usually, once they’ve made it, they move on. Who made yours, Sloane?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk about it.

Before she could continue, she tilted her head to look behind me. I followed her gaze, and my heart sank.

Arachne stood behind us, waiting. She regarded me coldly.

My time was up. “Corvine,” I said, “have you seen my sire or his sire?”

She shook her head. “If she’s here for you, I have not heard anything or seen anything.”

“Thanks. See you.”

Korbin bowed his head to me. I turned back and gave Arachne a wide berth as I headed back to the bonfire.

As I passed her, I could have sworn I heard her say, “We aren’t finished.”

I looked back at her, startled, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was walking towards Corvine.

“Did you hear that?” Bell muttered in my ear as we left.

I nodded.

“Was that Arachne?” Mickey asked.

I nodded again.

“Fantastic.”

Their stomachs groaned in tandem, and I jumped at something else to focus on. “You hungry?”

“Always,” Bell replied.

“Let’s set up somewhere close to a food table.”

There was a rule at Samhain that any offered food couldn’t have any obligation attached to it. The stereotype of the Fey offering food and using it as a way to trap someone wasn’t just a story. But here, all food was to be free and plentiful during Samhain.

I explained this to Mickey and Bell while still urging them away from the Fey food. They made me uncomfortable. Especially the faerie with sunset-colored hair that was eyeing me as we approached and passed their food.

We found Mira eating from a table from the elf contingent. The food on her plate was all weird-looking fruits and vegetables made into pastas, kebabs, and salads. She was facing the bonfire, watching more people dance.

“Any luck?” I asked, as Mickey and Bell made their way, picking through the elf food.

“No,” she shook her head. “Hazel didn’t know where Ilona is. She said she would keep an eye out for her. Said she would let me know. She also asked to meet you if you get the time.”

“Nope. Enough meetings with vampires today.”

“I thought so, but I told her I would let you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Here.” Mira held out an edge of her plate to me. There were four red berries on it.

“What are they?”

“I don’t know, but they’re gross. They taste like blood.”

I raised an eyebrow and picked one up. I popped it into my mouth and bit down.

Warm, juicy copper burst in my mouth. I chewed and swallowed before grabbing the others. “This is amazing!”

She shuddered. “No. Ew.”

I shrugged, finishing off the remaining berries and looking out at the bonfire.

“What’s wrong?” she asked after a moment of silence. “Seems like more than Ilona.”

I shrugged. “I saw Arachne.”

“When it rains, it pours.”

“Yeah. It does.” I took a step back and hit something solid that made a deep noise of annoyance.

I turned and saw a tall man with white hair. It took me a second to recognize him as the man that had helped me outside of the Swanskin’s in Albuquerque.

“Watch it, vampire,” he growled.

I started to respond, but Mira interrupted. Sloane.

Mira didn’t say anything out loud, she just nodded to the man who had stopped to glare at me.

“Sorry,” I said without any feeling.

He eyed me for a second. Then he said, “You’re that bloodsucker from Albuquerque.”

“So nice of you to remember.” I smiled at him without any warmth.

“You’re bad at keeping out of trouble,” he said. Then he turned from me and continued on his way. He looked like a middle-aged man, but he was spry and quick as he moved.

“You know him?” Mira asked.

“I told you about that fight in Albuquerque. He was the guy who helped. Why did you stop me?”

“I thought he’d hurt you.”

“Why?”

“That was Frost, the vampire hunter.”

I stared at her. “That was who, the what?”

“You heard me.”

My eyebrows went up. Frost was a famous vampire hunter, up there with Zero and Theron.

“Why the hell did he help me in Albuquerque then?”

“Search me,” she said. “He should have let those dogs kill you dead.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“Where the fuck is the meat?” Bell growled as he returned to us with Mickey. His plate was sparse with some pasta and salad. He also had some of those red berries that Mira had given me.

I reached over to pluck the berries off his plate, but he smacked my hand. “Just because I’m complaining, doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

“I doubt you want those.”

He sneered at me, grabbing three off the plate and throwing them in his mouth. As he bit down, I saw the immediate regret. He spit them out. “Ew, what the fuck?”

I took the rest of them off his plate and ate them. The relief was so similar to what I felt with blood. What the hell were these things?

Mickey handed me all the berries he had without any fanfare.

“Not going to try them?”

“Don’t need to know why it’s gross, just that it’s gross.” He had a lot more food on his plate and was going to town on bow tie pasta with the green strings of some vegetable mixed in.

I ate the rest of the berries. Mira had been kind enough to go to Lazarus to get me some blood when Lunette never came back with it. I was okay on blood, but these were great.

Movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked up to see a blonde man in his mid-thirties. He looked familiar.

As he got closer, it was clear he was headed for me.

It was Carrick, I realized with a start. All of the heat drained from my body, and I felt cold. I swallowed my last berry, my tongue turning to sand.

“Sloane,” he said, nodding to me. His voice was tight.

“Carrick . . . is she here?”

He nodded. I noticed a vein jumping in his jaw as he did. He didn’t seem to want to be here anymore than I wanted him to be.

“She has requested your presence. I assume you got her note.”

My fists clenched and for the first time since I had gotten her note, I felt anger. It wasn’t hot enough to overcome the cold fear in my body, but it was there. I hated fear. It was a reminder of being powerless.

Anger, I could do.

“What does she want?” I demanded.

“Just to talk,” he lied.

“Bullshit. I know how she likes to treat her children. And I know she hates me.” I had felt it the night I had met her for the first time. The seething, furious hatred.

He stood up straighter. “You’re calling me a liar?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely. You and your fucking sire.”

He bared his teeth at me. His canines were just a little too sharp, and his blue eyes flashed to a metallic cobalt for a second. “I will not take disrespect—”

“Or you’ll fucking what, Carrick? We’re at the Samhain festival. Neutral. Ground. Especially for someone as old as you.”

He gritted his teeth, but he didn’t continue his threat. “I would suggest you follow me back to Ilona. Otherwise, when the festival is over, the consequences will be worse than you can imagine.”

I glanced at Mira. Her expression had iced over.

“The psychic and your . . . wolves . . . are not invited,” Carrick said. He made sure to emphasize his disgust when he said “wolves”.

That’s fine, Mira replied in my head. We’ll be there. Fucker thinks he’s too old for me to see into his head.

I didn’t react to Mira. I just said, “Fine.”

Neither Mickey nor Bell reacted with protests, which made me think that Mira was in their heads, too.

Carrick turned from me and led the way. I followed him, glancing at Mira, Mickey, and Bell. I saw Mickey already had green flames licking at his hair. But otherwise, they didn’t make a move to follow me.

I followed Carrick through the crowds, passing the different entourages of various magics—bestia, mages, Fey, shifters; they were all here.

He led me through all of these until the entourages thinned and all that was left were couples and families sitting on towels, eating food from the overflowing tables inside the festival.

Finally, I felt her cold, cruel presence. I couldn’t see her, but I knew it was close.

We rounded a rock formation and I finally met Ilona for the first time in months.

Karhi, Lunette, Carry, Onyx, and Zeren were standing off to the side. Not a single one of them met my eyes. Not even Karhi. Their attention was rapt on Ilona.

She’s forcing them to do that, I thought. They can’t look at me.

And on either side of Ilona were Ava and Angus. When they saw me, their faces cracked into cold, cruel smiles.

Cold seeped down my back, like someone had cracked an egg over my head. I hadn’t thought that Ilona would have these two here. I would have thought she’d do the dirty work herself.

“You,” I whispered, staring at them.

“Honestly, didn’t expect tae see ye here again, lassie,” Angus said, stepping forwards. But he stopped, glancing back at Ilona. “Sorry,” he said. He moved back to where he had been standing. “I thought ye wanted me tae—”

“I don’t want you to do anything, Angus. You or your sister.” Ilona’s voice was like she had put a chalkboard against my back and scratched her nails down it. I felt that awful, awful sound inside of my bones.

He pouted, but he stayed put.

Ilona took a step forward to meet me.

“Sloane. How nice to see you again,” she smiled.

Nausea welled up in my stomach at her smile. The heavy pressure of her cold presence against me made me want to run and find somewhere to throw up.

“You haven’t come to visit me,” she murmured. Her tone was lifeless.

I felt her emotions inside of me like they were my own. Her fury was a pit in my stomach, weighing me down, trying to break me from the inside. I never felt Karhi like this. He was always a soft presence in the back of my head.

Ilona was visceral. She knew how to make her children feel.

Fire tore across my chest, eating through my skin and down my abdomen. I shrieked in pain, dropping to the ground.

The pain disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. I was face down in the sand. I heard Ilona say, “Get up.”

Almost without telling my body, I got up. I looked up at Ilona wildly. She had used my own impulse to stand and rode it to make me move faster.

She was so much worse than I had ever thought. Every fear I had ever had of her, everything I had thought she was—it was so much worse. The anger I had felt earlier, when I was talking to Carrick, it was gone. Gone and replaced with cold, all-consuming fear.

Ilona was a Copier. She copied other vampires’ powers. That paired with her mind control made my hands shake. My mouth was like sandpaper.

“My children came to visit me. I even requested you. And yet you didn’t show up. After I was so gracious and allowed you to take up Karhi’s time for so long.” Her tone wasn’t even anymore. There was a volatility in it. And it, ever so slightly, seemed to vary when she spoke of Karhi. She was angry that I had taken Karhi.

But how was that my fault? It was vampire law that a sire was to stay with their fledgling until their year mark. It was required. How was any of that my fault?

Helplessness threatened to give way to tears. But I fought them. I wouldn’t cry in front of her.

“Why haven’t you come to visit me?” she asked.

Everything inside of me wanted to apologize. Everything wanted to beg for her forgiveness.

But I had never been one to beg. “My family needed me.”

The ice in her eyes grew colder if that was even possible. I could feel it like liquid nitrogen against my psyche. It was painful.

“Yes,” she said. “Family. Tell me, Sloane, you were friends with the White Psychic since before you were turned.”

“We lost touch.” I needed to stop talking. I knew I needed to stop talking.

“But you knew her? Growing up?”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t stop talking. Because I wasn’t the one really answering. She was forcing me to talk.

“And you didn’t think to tell me,” she said. “She only received the contract with Hazel two months ago. So, I could have had a contract with her before that. I could have had the White Psychic.”

“She’s not property,” I growled.

I saw a flicker of surprise flash across her face. She hadn’t controlled that answer.

She regained her composure quickly. The anger didn’t fade from her eyes. But that anger kindled an answering fire in me.

Why did she get to do this?

“Your insolence,” Ilona said, green eyes glowing, “is growing tiresome. But this? This is treacherous.”

“Treacherous?” The anger burned against my neck. It was like fire to steel. I could feel my resolve strengthening. The fear was waning.

“You are my fledgling, under my control. You are loyal to no other, and yet you keep this from me? You knew who she was, and you said nothing? You allowed Hazel to control her before me?”

“And yet you still hit her with a car and sent her to the hospital. I can only imagine what it would have been like if you’d actually contracted with her.”

There was no surprise this time at my answer. Instead, she smiled. “I didn’t know she was there. It was an accident.”

I could feel that she was telling the truth. I could also feel that she didn’t regret it. “But you sure as shit didn’t try to help her.”

She smiled even though her next words didn’t match her tone or face. It didn’t even sound like it was part of the same conversation because she didn’t address what I had just said. “And then, you have this connection to one of the bestia. You are mine. You shall use no such connection without my permission. You won’t use it to save another whelp.”

I blinked. Something in the way she had said that . . . it sounded like she sounded when she was angry about my distracting Karhi. As if I was taking away a toy.

“It was you,” I said, my voice so low I could hardly hear it myself.

I had figured it out with my subconscious but hearing her say it made it so much more real. She had taken Mikko and tortured him. For no reason.

“I knew that if I came after your family, it would lure you here,” she said. “Consider it a taste of the punishment I have planned for you.”

“Did you hurt Annie, too?”

“Who?” she said. “Oh, that halfborn shifter? No, it looks like someone got to her before me.”

I ignored the slur. I had suspected the answer was no. It wasn’t cruel enough. But I couldn’t dwell on it now.

“Did you kill Genie and Frankie’s parents, too?”

“I did not,” she said. She looked at Angus. “I believe that was mostly you.”

“I cannot take all the credit,” he smiled, the angle of his lips razor sharp.

“I dismembered them,” Ava nodded, looking at Ilona.

I gnashed my teeth together. “Why?”

“I told you,” Ilona said. “I wanted your attention. I wanted you to have a taste of what I was going to do to you.” She stepped forward until we were inches from each other. I felt her cold fury against the heat of mine. “I will teach you to respect me.”

I stepped away from her advance. “Respect me,” I mimicked her without even pausing to think.

“Sloane!” Karhi shouted, stepping towards us.

Ilona spun on him. He froze where he was standing. “I forbade you from speaking to her,” she hissed.

The heat in my neck started to spread. “You did what?”

She spun back to face me. “You don’t question me,” she snarled. “I am your master. You will obey me.” She stepped closer.

“I obey no one,” I roared back. “You think you fucking scare me?”

Without warning, my knees buckled, and I knelt into the sand before Ilona. It left me level with her chest.

She reached forward, grabbing my face and forcing me to look up at her. It hurt, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of voicing the pain. “I think that I scare you a lot,” she purred. “And your attempts to prove otherwise are childish and pathetic.” She let go of me, a sparkle of pleasure in her inhuman emerald eyes. She was having fun.

“You came after my family to get to me. You’re a fucking coward.” I spat at her feet.

The glint of pleasure disappeared, her beautiful face contorting into a horrifying mockery of humanity. “Take her,” she growled at Angus and Ava.

“With pleasure,” Angus grinned, darting forward. He grabbed me by my hair and yanked back.

I shrieked, reaching for my hair. I tried to claw at his hands, but he slapped me so hard that I saw stars.

Fear threatened to consume me, images of my own death flashing through my head. Angus and Ava had torn me apart before. They would do it again.

Where was Mira? Bell? Mickey? Why weren’t they here yet?

Tears threatened to overwhelm me, and I screamed. Not again.

“Stop whining,” Ilona snapped. “You would be so lucky to be their victim. They would just kill you. I will do much worse.”

And then I couldn’t scream anymore. I couldn’t move. The only thing I could do was lay there as Angus dragged me across the sand by my hair.

Who the fuck does she think she is?

I didn’t know where that thought came from. It startled me.

You said you wanted to use that fire on her. What are you waiting for? She’s trying to take us away from our familyagain. She’s trying to take everything from us. Why are you so fucking scared? Why aren’t you angry? Why aren’t you fighting back?

Why wasn’t I fighting back? Why was I . . .

Ilona could get in my head. She could stoke emotions she wanted and push away ones she didn’t.

Fear served her. It made me compliant.

Anger didn’t serve her.

Fury, stronger than anything I had felt that night, erupted inside of me. Who the fuck was she to force me into submission? To force me into compliance?

She had killed Genie and Frankie’s parents. She had tortured Mikko. She had me torn apart.

She had her own children, people who I had come to develop a fondness for, watching this. She was making them watch, and they couldn’t do a fucking thing.

She had tried to break me. And she wouldn’t stop here.

She would make sure everyone suffered.

No.

Angus screamed, and the pressure on my head disappeared. The lock that Ilona had on my body broke.

And I could move.

I rolled to my feet and came up in time to see green flames devouring Angus. Where he had held me, his hand was just bones. And the flames were continuing to eat him. He screamed for them to stop.

This was the power Bell and Mickey had tried to explain to me. Soulfire. I felt it, anger and magic coursing through my veins, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. It was warm and comfortable. It fit me like an old, cozy sweater.

Ava watched her brother burn with wide eyes and I darted for her, grabbing her and pushing the flames forth.

She screamed as the soulfire consumed her arm and spread up her body.

I turned from them to Ilona. I could see the green flames flickering in my peripheries. They ran up and down my body and splashed out on the ground like a long dress. They followed me perfectly as I moved.

Ilona’s mouth hung open in shock, my green flames flickering in the reflection of her eyes. She seemed rooted to the spot. “How . . . how . . .” Her eyes narrowed and she reached out to me with a hand.

I felt her will against me, but it was like waves on a rocky shore. Over years, maybe she could wear me down, but right now? She was nothing.

I flicked my hand towards her, and a column of green flames shot out at her.

A blur knocked into her, just avoiding the flames.

It was Carrick. He had protected her.

“Loyal lapdog,” I growled. “Carrick—how much of what happened in the past few weeks was under your direction?”

He bared his teeth at me. “I haven’t been around. She did this on her own. Sloane don’t do this. Killing her would mean—”

“I don’t give a shit,” I snarled. “I don’t care what effect it would have on anything. She has spent a thousand years torturing people because she thought it was fun. She was going to do it to me just because she didn’t like that I took away her toy.” I looked over to Karhi. He watched us with wide eyes. “People aren’t fucking toys.”

“Carrick!” Ilona screamed, shoving him to the side. “You do not speak for me. I won’t let this little bitch—”

Green flames erupted where Ilona stood, and she screamed. The flames ate away at her feet and climbed up her body, laying waste to any flesh in its way.

“What is going on?”

I looked up into deep blue penetrating eyes. They towered over me by at least a foot.

I felt the fire extinguish as my anger suddenly cooled.

A pale man with straight corn silk hair that fell to his waist stood over me. A delicate silver crown with a center deep blue stone that matched his eyes held his hair from his face. Long, pointed ears emerged from beneath his hair. He wore long white robes accented with blue that complimented his eyes and the crown.

A gasping voice rasped, “K-King Al-Alaric. Sh-she broke th-the Samhain covenant.”

I spun to see that Ilona was still alive. The flesh was gone from her legs and arms, leaving only sinew and bone, but she was still alive. My green flames had extinguished just short of her vital organs.

Angus and Ava had not been so lucky. Only bones lay where they had once stood.

But Ilona was bleeding so much that the point may have been moot soon enough anyway.

“I see that.” The man—King Alaric—look down at me. “Do you have an explanation?”

“I’m nineteen, and she was going to kidnap me and torture me.”

King Alaric blinked. I got the feeling that I had caught him off guard. I also got the feeling that this wasn’t a common occurrence.

He looked up at everyone else who wasn’t half dead. “Is this true?”

Except Ilona and Carrick, all of the Emelyns nodded their heads.

“Nineteen?” Ilona croaked.

“So was Mikko, you fucking bitch,” I snarled. I lunged but a firm hand on my shoulder kept me from moving forward. I looked up to see that Alaric held onto me.A soothing, mild chill soaked into my skin from his hand.

I realized he was calming me. What the hell was this guy? He had extinguished my flames by calming me, too.

“Sloane!”

I looked up to see Mira, Bell, and Mickey running towards us.

“Where the fuck have you been?” I demanded.

“Enough,” Alaric said. “I will deal with Ilona. Is she your sire?”

I shook my head. I found myself pointing at Karhi before I knew what I was doing.

“Karhi,” he said. “You and your fledgling are to go talk to the committee.”

Karhi nodded. And then looked surprised that he had nodded.

Ilona didn’t have control anymore.

“Go,” Alaric said.
30. Preparation

January 4th, 2024

Sloane Briallen

I froze when we walked through the entrance of the hospital, unable to take another step forward. I hadn’t been in one in so long, but everything came rushing back.

Hospitals made me uncomfortable under the best circumstances. I had spent a lot of time in them as a child, when my mother was dying from lung cancer. She had been in and out of the hospital for months before she finally died. The smell of disinfectant and medicine made my stomach churn. The beeps of monitors and announcements over the loudspeakers grated on my ears.

Annie took the lead, taking my hand and guiding me through a few doors until we turned from a hallway into a room. It was just me and Annie. Mira was in Observation until she could be released (they suspected a concussion, apparently) and they only allowed two visitors in that unit.

Mira was the only one in the room, though there was an empty bed meant for another patient. She sat in the bed with the TV mounted on the wall set to a kid’s channel. She was eating red Jell-O, a saline drip in her arm. A huge bandage covered part of her hairline, and I saw bruises on her neck and chest, where her hospital gown didn’t cover. A bag with her clothes was set on a chair next to her bed.

When we walked in, she sat up suddenly before having to sit back. She exhaled in pain.

“Don’t make it worse,” Annie growled at her.

“Where’s my baby?”

“School. When you weren’t back this morning, Mikko took her. We figured you were still with Karhi, knocking skulls or whatever.”

Mira exhaled in relief, setting the Jell-O down on a tray table that swung over her bed. She pushed the table away.

“Mira, what the hell happened to you?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

Mira looked up at me with trepidation, her hands shaking. “She hit us. While we were on our way back.” She pointed to the bag with her clothes. “There’s an envelope in there.”

I rummaged through the bag until I found the envelope in the pocket of her jeans, folded into quarters. My name was written on it in Ilona’s horrible, loopy handwriting.

I tore the envelope open to see the single sheet of paper with two sentences on it.

I read it and looked up at Mira helplessly.

Annie took the letter from me and read it. She handed it back to me, sitting next to Mira on the bed. “Mira, what happened?”

Mira inhaled shakily. “We were coming back from Lazarus. He was driving. A truck T-boned us. When I came to, she was dragging Karhi from the car.” Her voice shook. “I was in and out, but I remember her. Ilona. She was so . . . s-small. But I could feel her. Like old paper and . . . dead animals. She was disgusting.”

I took her hand and rubbed the back of it with my thumb. She squeezed it, looking up at me with wide eyes. “She reached into the car, and she dropped that envelope in my lap. Told me to give you her regards.”

“Bitch,” I said through gritted teeth. “Fucking bitch.”

Mira pulled her hand away. My emotions were too strong for her, and physical contact made it almost impossible for her to ignore what was in my head.

“When I woke up again,” she continued, folding her arms over her chest like she was cold, “I was here, and there was a cop waiting to ask me about what happened. I didn’t tell him about the letter or Ilona, but I told him that the driver was dragged away. I didn’t tell him much, and he bought it. Assumed I was unconscious for it. Then I called you. I guess I’ve been out for like eight hours. They tried to keep me awake in the beginning, but they couldn’t. I think my mind control went a little haywire when they put me on the pain meds. I kept making them leave me alone.” She grimaced.

“Are you okay?” I asked, realizing that I hadn’t actually asked that question.

“I hit my head against the seat belt holder and the seat belt gave me burns from holding me back. The car pushed us into the curb, and we hit a lamp post. It crumpled my side of the car and cut up my stomach. But they stitched it up, and I should be okay to leave later today. Once they’ve decided no concussion.”

“So . . . okay?”

She nodded. “I’m okay. I should be able to go to Samhain with you.”

“No,” I said flatly. “Absolutely not.”

“Sloane, I—”

“Mira, I’m only going because I have to, or else Ilona is going to hurt them. I don’t want you anywhere near that place.”

“Sloane, it’s safe. It’s neutral ground tomorrow. She can’t hurt me.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be able to hurt you now, either.”

“Yeah, and I’ve already called Hazel to let her know. She was my second call after you.” She glanced at the phone mounted on the wall next to her bed.

I didn’t have a reply for that.

“I’m going,” she said. “I know I can’t back you up because I’m over twenty, but I can be there as a reminder.”

“Fine,” I said. “But Lina, Genie, and Frankie are staying home.”

“Oh, absolutely,” she said.

And that all had led us to now. I was back in Mira’s room, primping for a festival I didn’t want to go to, to face a monster I was terrified of.

Samhain was a safe night. The festival was neutral ground and violating that was met with swift justice from any offenders’ courts. Anyone not covered by any courts (halfshifters, humans, etc.) were punished by whomever was in charge of the committee that year.

And Ilona was using that safety as a shield.

I glanced from the mirror, where I was putting my makeup on, to the letter sitting on the vanity. I read it for the hundredth time.

“I still don’t understand why we have to be on time,” Annie said from behind me. “You know she won’t be.”

“I know,” I said. “But it makes me feel better to get there early. Get the lay of the land.”

She glanced at me in the mirror before nodding.

The festival was the biggest event of the year. People went all out with costumes and make-up and décor. I was here putting on make-up because I knew that it might smooth Ilona over a bit. She was big on appearances and if I, as a fledgling, showed up to the festival in street clothes, she would have that much more to hold over me.

Any other year, I would have shown up in street clothes. Well, except for the years that I had been one of the opening dancers.

“Genie was invited to dance this year,” Annie murmured.

I glanced at her. “Oh?”

“The coordinators are the peacock queen and the elephant queen.”

I thought about it for a second. “India and . . . Africa?” I knew elephants were native to Africa and Asia, but I was pretty sure that the current queen associated with Africa.

She nodded. “Heavy percussion. Perfect for her to dance. She practiced for weeks with them.”

I winced. Poor thing. All that work for nothing. Annie and I had been dancers at the festival a couple of times.

“I guess, as long as none of the bestia take a liking to her.”

Annie grimaced. We had both had our experiences with bestia who took a little too much interest in the dancers. Hers had never come to fruition but mine . . .

“Do you think she’ll be there this year?” she asked. “Arachne?”

“God, I hope not.” I capped the mascara and stood up, turning to look at Annie fully.

Annie wore a grey skirt that went down to her ankles with a slit mid-thigh, and a matching belt slung around her waist, decorated in black flowers. Her top was little more than a scarf wrapped around her chest and held in place with some pins and clips.

Her eyes were rimmed in black to emphasize their jade. Her locs were bound back away from her eyes, and her dark skin glowed.

She looked beautiful, like a princess or something. Silver bangles hung around her wrist and ankles, jingling when she moved. A scar snaked around from the right side of her rib cage and disappearing behind her back, leftovers from a crazed ex-girlfriend of Mikko’s.

“You look good,” I said.

She nodded to me. “You, too.”

Mira had combed out my hair, straightening and gelling it back so it didn’t get in the way. It came out a little longer than the bottom of my rib cage.

My outfit was identical to Annie’s but off-white instead of grey. It bore the spoils from my very first fight, a zigzagging, crude scar that went across my ribs. That was ten years old at this point, from when Mira had first found me. There was also my newest scar going from my heart down to my pelvis, courtesy of those Scottish fuckers. They joined a dozen or so other white scars crisscrossing my body.

The strange thing was that the old scar on my stomach was faded, as would be expected of ten years. But so was the new one. They looked almost the same age.

Vampire healing, I guess.

“Why are you dressing up?” I asked. “You’re not dancing.”

She shrugged. “We always go dressed up together.”

I smiled. I appreciated her act of solidarity, even if I wasn’t going to let her meet Ilona. It helped me feel less alone in all of this.

We left Mira’s room and entered the living room where everyone was waiting.

I was surprised to find Mikko in nice, clean jeans. They weren’t ripped, and they were black. And his shirt was a bright teal button-up with short sleeves. His hair was swept back from his head in a high ponytail. I could see the scar where his ear had once been, and it made me smile. Mikko used to be so sensitive about his scar and the damage it had done to him. He only had about half of his hearing in that ear. But here he was, unashamed to have it out in the open.

Genie and Frankie were in jeans and T-shirts, sitting on the now-folded-up couch. There was a trick-or-treat bucket and plastic bags next to Frankie’s leg.

Mira had gotten dressed before we had. She was in a similar outfit to Annie and I except she had a proper shirt that covered her shoulders and stomach. Her skirt and shirt were black, a matching black ribbon tied around her neck. She had taken off her head bandage to reveal a stitched-up wound that went from her hairline down to just past her ear. There was a barrette in her red hair to hold it back from the wound while it healed.

Lina stood in the middle of the room in a Snow White costume with the red and blue top and yellow skirt. She wore white tights and black sneakers.

They were in the middle of an argument.

“But Mom, you take us every year!” Lina whined, her hands clenched into fists at her side as she glared up at her mom in indignation.

“Yes, honey, but this year it’s not a good idea. Look, Genie and Frankie are going to take you trick-or-treating. And this year, you can do it for longer than you normally do. You’ll get so much candy!”

Lina’s brow furrowed in frustration. She wanted to go trick-or-treating, but she also wanted to be where the rest of us were. “But you guys get to go.” She stuck out her lip.

“I could hang a dress on that lip, girlie,” I said, moving to crouch in front of Lina.

She looked at me and pouted. “Sloane, I want to go with you guys.”

“I know. But not this year. Can you be good and go trick-or-treating with Genie and Frankie?” I glanced at Frankie. “Look, Frankie is already prepared with your pumpkin bucket and some bags so that you can get as much candy as you want!”

“But I haven’t gotten to see you guys at all this week, and I wanted to dance at the festival with you after they finished the big opening dance!”

“We can do a dance party when this is all over. How does that sound?”

She eyed me suspiciously before nodding. “Okay.”

I kissed her on the forehead and stood up. “Get going before it gets too dark.”

She scowled again but turned to Frankie and Genie. She signed to Genie. “You ready?” She signed in that clumsy way that kids did with huge movements where they couldn’t quite move their fingers how they needed to.

“I’ve been waiting on you, princess,” Genie replied, smiling.

Lina stuck her tongue out at her, but she picked up her pumpkin. Frankie and Genie stood up, Frankie taking the bags. They left.

I waited until she was gone to let myself think, I don’t know if I’ll be here for a dance party. I hadn’t wanted her to catch that. She didn’t need to know that I was afraid that Ilona was going to take me away.

“Is it safe for them to go?” I asked, looking uncertainly at Mira.

“What you didn’t see were the two living vampires outside waiting to escort them,” Mira said. “I asked Hazel for protection while we were at the festival, and she delivered.”

My uncertainty disappeared, replaced with relief. “Good.”

“Alright, then we should get going, too,” Mira said.

I glanced around. “Where’s Mickey and Bell?”

“Outside. They were feeling cramped in the house. They also wanted to keep an eye on the vampires.”

We exited the house into the front yard. Mickey and Bell stood by Mira’s truck. They wore new grey sweatpants and T-shirts. Mira had told me they’d gone through about three pairs of clothes since they go here, borrowing from Mikko. This last time, when they had gone to attack Karhi, she had made them go buy their own clothes and pay her back when they had cash again. I guess they had both lost their wallets while they were transforming and destroying their clothes.

Bell smiled when he saw me. “Looking good, Briallen.”

I gave him a thumbs up. I was too nervous to respond any other way.

Mickey, on the other hand, was staring at me with wide eyes. It was unnerving.

“What?” I said defensively. I knew I didn’t wear “girly” clothes all that often, but I did sometimes. I didn’t like the attention.

He shook his head. “You look really nice.” He looked away, flushing.

I smiled, the nervousness easing just a little. “Thanks.”

He nodded, not looking at me.

“Hey, Sloane, if you’re going to have to deal with this bitch, why not just use your soulsilver?” Bell asked, ignoring his cousin’s awkwardness.

I tilted my head in confusion. “My what?”

He pointed to the cuffs on his wrists. The silver ones my mom had given him in our dreams. We hadn’t talked about them. I was still trying to understand what it meant.

“Soulsilver?”

He held his hand out in front of him, hand loosely cupped, as if holding a rounded glass.

A single green flame puffed into existence in his hand. It flickered for a moment before steadying.

He closed his hand, and the fire winked out of existence. “Yeah,” he said, looking at Mickey, who also held out his hand and repeated the same thing that Bell had done.

I stared at them. I glanced to my sides to see that Annie, Mira, and Mikko were also staring at the two of them. “What the fuck?”

Bell and Mickey exchanged confused looks. “What do you mean?” Bell asked. “Haven’t you done that?”

I reached for my necklace. I remembered my mother calling it soulsilver. I looked from the cuffs on Mickey’s arm to the cuffs on Bell’s wrists. “You can . . . those help you make fire?”

Mickey’s brow furrowed. “Yeah . . . soulfire. You haven’t?”

I shook my head. I remembered the green fire I had seen in my dream with my subconscious. I had said I wished I could use it on Ilona. My subconscious had said, “Soon enough.”

Is this what she had meant?

“How did you know what to do with it?” I asked.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” Mickey said, grimacing and looking away from me for a moment before meeting my eyes again. “I’ll tell you about it later. But we learned that strong emotions activate it. And it’ll kill any living creature. I guess, except for like plants and shit. I don’t know. But it’ll burn anything that it comes across down to the bone.”

“Which we saw firsthand when we first came to Phoenix,” Bell said. “We were trying to find Mira’s place, and we got stuck in a rough part of the city. A couple vampires came after us. We triggered the fire, and it left nothing but bones. So . . . not really a long story.” He glanced at Mickey with a raised eyebrow that Mickey pointedly ignored.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to understand. Our new jewelry wasn’t just a gift from my dead mother. No. It was also a dangerous weapon.

Why hadn’t it activated when those two vampires were tearing me apart? I had been feeling some very intense emotions then.

“Maybe mine’s defective,” I murmured.

They didn’t have an answer for that.

“Wait . . .” Mira said. “With that—Sloane, you’re still nineteen?”

I glanced at her quizzically. She knew I was. “Yeah?”

“I . . . maybe have an idea?” Mira said, brow furrowed.

“Oh?” I said.
29. Imprisonment

January 4th, 2024

TW descriptions of torture

Karhi Emelyn

All that he saw were flashes.

The SUV that ploughed into the side of the car.

The arm that pulled off Karhi’s crumpled door even though it should have been practically welded to his car.

The flash of green eyes that came level with his.

The hiss. “Why are you always doing something for her when I find you?”

The pain as she jerked him out of the car. Searing pain zigzagging down to his hand as her claws tore through his arm.

The feeling of the asphalt grinding into his back as she dragged him out of the car and towards her damaged Lexus.

The smell of her. Intoxicating and nauseating. Parchment and roses and death.

The fear as he realized the game he was playing—the one where Ilona wasn’t in charge of him—was finally over.

She had him.

He opened his eyes to almost complete darkness. The only light into the room was a thin strip at the bottom of what he presumed was a door.

He stood up. “Fuck.”

“You’re awake.”

He spun around but he couldn’t make out anything in the darkness. The strip of light was useless.

He clipped something as he turned, and he heard a hiss of pain.

“Lunette?”

“Yes, you clumsy fuck. She got me, too.”

“When you went to get blood?” he asked.

“Yes,” she growled. “She got me at the fucking hotel.”

“Did she hurt you?”

“No, but that fucking remains to be seen.”

“Do you know if the other three . . . ?” he trailed off, unable to say what he was thinking. Were Carry, Onyx, and Zeren also in trouble?

“No, I don’t. I mean, those three haven’t been sneaking around, getting into shit she doesn’t want them in.” She let out a high-pitched muffled scream of frustration. “I shouldn’t have fucking helped. I should have never gotten involved with your fledgling. I knew this is how it would end.”

She continued with a stream of regrets and expletives, but Karhi didn’t reply. She was right. And Karhi shouldn’t have asked her for help. Ilona already despised Luna. Karhi honestly didn’t know if he or she had been tortured more by Ilona, or who had had it worse over the years, but either way, he knew it was bad. He knew how afraid of Ilona she was.

“This is all my fault,” he murmured.

Lunette suddenly stopped talking. Karhi couldn’t see her, but he heard when she moved and felt when she fumbled for his arms, hitting his shoulders, before grabbing his biceps in a tight grip. “No,” she said. “No, this is not your fault. This is her fault. Ilona. She is the one who put us in here. She is the one who makes us afraid to exist. She is the one who tortures us if she doesn’t like something we do.” Her voice wobbled but it didn’t break. “This is not your fault. It’s not my fault. And as much as I’m loathe to say it—it’s not Sloane’s fault either. This is all Ilona. Do you understand?”

Karhi couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was looking up at him, glaring at him, demanding with her eyes that he agree with her. He could feel it.

His shoulders fell. “Yes.”

She let go of him. “Good.” He heard fabric against concrete, and he knew she had sat down against a wall.

He held his hand out in front of him until he felt the coarse wall she had reached. He felt around before pushing himself to sit against the wall. He was maybe a few inches from Luna. He could touch her if he put out his left hand.

“I had one of the interns look into things while I was running around with you. Including the information Zero gave me.”

“How did you justify it being relevant to their research for the courts?”

“I didn’t. The interns are always jumping all over themselves to please me, so they do what I ask. I have a particularly tech-savvy one that I’ve actually taught to hack. She does a lot of good work for me. I don’t think she’ll wind up being a researcher for the courts.”

Lunette had a few doctorates in arcane information. He could never remember what her actual PhDs were in—maybe History and English? Definitely some subsets of that. But she was the foremost expert in a lot of niche fields, especially ones that mages were interested in. She had an agreement with the mage courts that was basically an internship program. They would send young mages, who had academic interests in old histories and magical theories, to work with her. They often stayed in her mansion in California and lived with her and worked on her research projects.

“I had her look into some of this, and I was able to get the information from her right before Ilona took me. I’ve figured out what the fuck is going on.”

“Okay,” he said hesitantly.

“The building where Mikko was held is currently owned by a shell company owned by the vampire courts. It is commonly used to hold highly dangerous, magically volatile prisoners. My intern looked up some of those glyphs. They are used is heavy duty containment spells.”

“That’s why Corvine struggled with it. Why the glyphs were all burned out.”

“Yeah. And then, the house that you were taken to? It’s a safehouse for the vampire courts.”

“Okay . . .” Things were starting to click into place for Karhi.

“Do you know the name Amelia Swift?”

It sounded familiar but he couldn’t place it. “Maybe?”

“It tugged at my memory, too. That was the name of the buyer that Zero’s cousin gave her. She works for the vampire courts. And she’s one of Ilona’s children. Ilona turned her in the fifties.”

Karhi remembered then. “That annoying little fucking empath.”

“Yup. I think Ilona’s behind all of this. Amelia bought that dead man’s blood for Ilona. Tipped her off to the safehouse and that warehouse so Ilona could use it.”

“She’s always been a suck-up.”

“Exactly.”

“What about the shifters that came after me?”

“I checked the names on their credit cards. Goons for hire.”

“And it was hemlock that killed the one shifter.”

“It was Ilona’s method of disposal, yes. For their failure to keep you in that safehouse or recover you from the brothel, I’m sure. Terrible way to do business—killing people for failure—and yet people still work with her.”

He shook his head in disgust.

“And I also did some digging into the other things that happened to Sloane’s friends. I couldn’t get anything on the shifter, so I don’t think Ilona targeted her. Seems like something else. But those kids—their parents were killed.”

Karhi nodded but then realized Lunette couldn’t see him in the dark. “Yeah.”

“They were tortured before they were ripped apart. No dead man’s blood that could be found, though I don’t think that would be necessary for a human. But the mother was missing her uterus. Just like the woman you were framed for. Just like Sloane.”

Karhi swallowed. This was making him more and more uncomfortable.

“And I remembered something. Amelia was one of three triplets that Ilona turned.”

Karhi didn’t remember that.

“The other two being Ava and Angus Swift.”

Karhi’s blood went cold, numbness seeping through his shoulders like ice. The butcher twins. “Ava and Angus like to torture and kill.”

“Yeah. And something I learned is that Angus has a certain proclivity for removing women’s reproductive organs.”

“How do you know?” His stomach was slowly bottoming out in his abdomen. It couldn’t sink any further.

“I had to work with them on something a decade or so ago. And Angus is so vicious, I knew he wouldn’t have been tame as a human. So, I looked into him. I linked him to the murders of eight women in Scotland and Wales in the 1950s. Torture, occasional dismemberment, and missing reproductive organs.”

Karhi pressed his hands into his face, pushing against his closed eyes until white flashed behind his lids. “That’s who went after Sloane.”

“I think so. Ava just likes to goad him—she doesn’t actually like to get her hands dirty. But what I don’t understand is why they didn’t absolutely tear Sloane apart.”

Something like a gate slammed behind the door to their room, a deep, clanging sound that reverberated through Karhi’s body. A moment later the lights went on. Karhi had removed his hands from his face, but he threw them back up to shield his eyes. He hissed at the sudden light.

He felt the slow, pulsing desire inside of his abdomen that signified Ilona was around. It was like a presence in his head, fogging up his senses.

Ilona’s voice was like diamonds. Beautiful and hard. “You scared them away before they could get into the dismemberment.”

Karhi and Lunette barely had time to stand up before the door to their prison opened.

Ilona wore a dress of the deepest burgundy with a train that disappeared through the door. The front of the skirt arced up to the middle of her thighs, revealing pale skin that made Karhi think of poachers hunting elephants.

Her hair, pale blood, cascaded down her back, acting like a cape as she walked. Her movements were stilted and tense. She was furious.

“I took you,” she said, looking at Karhi. She had a curious smile on her face that didn’t reach her eyes. “I put you up in that safehouse until I could do something with you. And you escaped. But I thought, here is an opportunity to learn more. To understand more about what was happening between you and Sloane.”

Her smile turned into snarl. “And then you interrupted every single plan I had with your stupid investigation.” She surged forward until she stood inches from them. “You saved the boy. You broke out of the house I held you in. You resired Sloane.” She grabbed Karhi’s face, pulling him down to her height. “You should have left her to die,” she hissed. “That was the first time she wasn’t with one of those humans protected by Hazel.” She spat. “I wanted her dead, and you didn’t let her die.”

He couldn’t argue with anything she said because if he did, he would be worse than dead.

She pulled him forward until her mouth was next to his ear. “You’re already going to be worse than dead,” she whispered. “I will make you beg.”

Agony, like he was being flayed across every inch of his skin, tore through him. Fire ravaged his body and he screamed. A red miasma covered his sight, blocking out anything past the agony.

“Stop it.” He barely heard Lunette through the roar of all of his pain receptors.

“And you—why would you work with him? Why make it so much worse for yourself? Make it so much worse for him?”

Lunette shrieked and the sound of bone on concrete told him Lunette had slammed her head into the wall.

Ilona’s powers were that she could copy anyone else’s power and she was using cruciopathy on them.

The pain faded and along with it, his and Luna’s screams. The red miasma disappeared from his sight. He breathed hard, laying on his side. He didn’t remember falling over.

“Why would you two—of all people—go against me?” Ilona demanded. “You know how I feel about Sloane.”

“How could we know what you wanted?” Lunette croaked. Karhi heard the tears in her voice even though he couldn’t see her. “You never fucking told us not to go after her.”

Ilona’s shriek of fury made Karhi slam his hands uselessly against his ears. His eyes shut reflexively and when they opened again, Lunette was on the ground, blood pooling around her head. Her wild russet eyes were filled with tears.

“Why did you kidnap me?” Karhi choked out. “Why frame me for killing that girl?”

Ilona let out a harsh, high-pitched laugh. “You, my pet, were to stay there until I could prepare a room for you. Because I knew you weren’t looking nearly as hard as you could for Sloane. I found her that night you came to me, claiming you couldn’t find her.

“And that girl—Angus was the one who injected you and Ava brought you to me. But Angus took a liking to the girl. Not my fault he couldn’t hold back. She was asking for it anyway.”

“She was just a young—”

A hard blow to his left ear sent Karhi’s head into the concrete. He shouted in pain before he felt claws at his throat. His vision had gone white from the blow.

Ilona’s voice was hardly recognizable with the fury colouring it as she spoke in his ear. It didn’t help that she had ruptured that ear drum when she hit him.

“Do not contradict me, pet,” she hissed.

Karhi stayed quiet.

“You brought her into my life, my pet. I will teach you and I will teach her. Together.”

His blood went cold, and his vision finally cleared from the blow to his ear.

Her eyes glowed green, her fury like a storm in his head. Focusing on anything except the raw power behind the tempest was impossible.

“I won’t let this blatant disregard for me continue, Karhi. You will answer to me.”

He flinched. She had screamed that last word.

“It’s been so long since you respected me, my pet. I’m glad to see you’ve finally regained enough sense to fear me.”

“Ilona—”

He choked as her grip on his throat tightened.

“You will refer to me as Mistress,” she hissed.

Images flooded his mind. His body strung up by chains. Strips of skin missing from his torso and thighs. A vice between his legs. His fingers at odd angles from his hands.

And next to him, Sloane. Sloane strung up by chains. Sloane . . .

“No,” he whimpered, cringing away from Ilona.

She let go of him. His ears rung, and he couldn’t hear what she said to Lunette. But he heard when Lunette moaned. “No, please no—”

“You should have thought of that before you crossed me.”

The door to the room had slammed shut before he realized Ilona was even gone. She had left the lights on. And looking around, he could see the chains in the walls. The tables with wrist and ankle clamps. The implements that sat on racks along one wall.

She wanted them to see what was coming.

Karhi understood now why Ilona had wanted him. Why she had gone through so much trouble to take him. From the very moment he had come to Phoenix, her intention was for this to be the end result. His imprisonment.

Karhi knew what this meant. He knew what was in store for him.

It had been centuries since she had last “taught” him a lesson. But those lessons had seared themselves into his mind like brands to his psyche. They would be a hundred times worse than anything he had experienced in the past few days.

No. He couldn’t do this again. He wouldn’t get through the torture. He wasn’t as young as he had been. His mind couldn’t tolerate it.

She would suspend him. She would lift him off the ground. The flaying he had felt under Lunette’s cruciopathy? That would very much be a reality. And it wouldn’t just be his reality.

It would be Sloane’s, too.

Now he understood why Ilona hadn’t taken Sloane sooner. She couldn’t because Sloane had almost exclusively been with people that were under Hazel’s protection. And then, when it had been Lunette, Karhi, and Sloane alone together, she had left it. She wanted to give them just enough rope to hang themselves.

Ilona would make them all witness it. The torture. The things she would do to each of them.

He couldn’t survive the torture she would put him through. Not this time. Not if Sloane and Lunette were there, too.

He wouldn’t be able to handle their screams.

“No,” he heard Lunette whimper.

He struggled to roll over. The aftershock of Ilona using Lunette’s powers had left him dizzy and unable to stand. He crawled, dragging himself with his arms to her side

“Luna,” he groaned.

“No, no, no,” she cried, tears rolling down her face. “Please, no. He didn’t do anything.” Her voice was high-pitched.

“Lunette.” He reached over to put a hand on her shoulder, and she shuddered. Her eyes opened to see Karhi. They were so red—red-brown irises and blood shot sclera.

“Zeren didn’t do anything,” she whimpered, shuddering where she lay on the ground. Flaking blood surrounded her head.

She had seen the same things he had. Ilona liked to give them previews of what was to come.

He pulled her to him, and she hiccupped, grabbing onto him desperately. He wrapped her small form in his arms, pulling her in tight.

They sobbed together.