Page 37 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

“When you were a boy, you would fold into yourself when something was amiss and you didn’t want to speak your mind,” his father said. “You’re doing that now, Jin.”

“H—how can I trust you?” Jin blurted out. He wished he had his umbrella, for comfort, but that only made him scoff because he’d carried it around for the comfort of his father. “That captain said you wanted more vampires to test on. What would you have done to me if I wasn’t your son?”

His mother opened her mouth to answer, but Jin cut her off. “From the beginning. Unless we have to worry about your guards coming in to check on us.”

She nodded. “No, no. We don’t. From the beginning, of course.

Unlike many, our work involved the welfare of both humans and vampires.

We weren’t strangers to criticism and angry folk, but when Penn warned us that the Ram had eyes on us, I almost want to say that we didn’t believe it.

And then a decade ago, we discovered that liquid silver could be formulated and used in vaccines and other protections against viruses and the like. ”

“For humans, mind you,” Jin’s father added.

“Yes,” his mother said. “Shortly after, the Ram came to us promising more duvin than we’d ever seen.

Silver has long been known to be detrimental to vampires.

‘If the silver can help humans, it can do the opposite on vampires, yes?’ but the question itself left us little room for escape.

If we answered yes, the Ram would demand our services.

If we answered no, we knew the Ram wouldn’t let us or you live. ”

You . Jin had always known his parents had been stolen from their home, but he couldn’t bask in the satisfaction of being right, not when their words brought a lingering question to the forefront of Jin’s mind: Had his parents become traitors to protect him?

“When we wavered, the Ram burned down the estate.”

The Ram had done the same to him and Arthie when they had wavered, too, hadn’t she? When they’d kept the ledger one day too long, she had burned down Spindrift. The woman wasn’t very creative.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Jin asked.

“Who would we tell?” his mother asked. “We were imprisoned, shuffled from place to place with such randomness that we dared to hope we were close to being found. The Ram wanted the inoculation refined for use on vampires, and it was a back-and-forth battle with us losing a little more every time. Sometimes tortured, sometimes starved. We had no way of ensuring you were safe, no way of reaching any of our contacts. Even if we did have a soul to speak to that wasn’t a part of the Ram’s cohort, who would trust the word of a pair of scientists, albeit with high standing, against the monarch’s? ”

“That must have persisted for—what, three years, perhaps?” his father asked.

“A little over two. Time blurs,” she said with a scrape of her throat. “Look at our boy now.”

Her hands fluttered in her lap. She kept leaning forward ever so slightly and pulling back. As if she wanted to reach for Jin. Hold him. Hug him.

Jin stayed put.

They were talking about the beginning of their imprisonment.

In the years since, Jin had found a sister, helped her steal an Ettenian artifact she carried with her every day, and opened a successful tearoom that doubled as a bloodhouse.

He’d lived long enough to become a thorn in the Ram’s side and see Spindrift burned to the ground.

“And? Do you plan on accounting for the remaining eight years? What were you doing?”

His father gave a short laugh and seemed to age another decade in that moment alone. He slumped back in his chair. “Slowing the Ram down, my boy.”

His mother’s response was a harsh whisper. “In any way we could.”

The words gave Jin pause. A flicker of hope ignited inside him, and despite the gusts of doubt, a part of him tried to keep it safe.

“We stopped being unwilling participants once we realized we could do more outside a prison than inside one. Once we committed to refining the formula, work for the Ram had just begun. This sanatorium needed to be built, the fort around it, the contraptions produced, mass amounts of liquid silver and other materials needed to be gathered. Kidnapping vampires off Ettenia was the final step in the procedure, the part we were dreading most, but at that point we had better ideas for double-crossing the Ram.”

“But the vampires—I saw your letter,” Jin said. “You wrote that you require more vampires to continue your testing. That doesn’t sound to me like double-crossing.”

“In Ettenia, the vampires are kidnapped and locked in coffins lined in barbed wire,” his father said. “Once they’re shipped here, we have some semblance of control. If they’re in our sanatorium, we can at least ensure they’re not being mistreated. We can care for them.”

“Care for them?” Jin asked.

“The long-lasting effects,” Jin’s father said haltingly, choosing his words carefully, “of the silver are… still unknown.”

Jin didn’t quite like his hesitation, and that flicker wavered. “They’re sent here to be starved.”

His father nodded. “But they need to be awake to be starved. We created a serum that puts them to sleep, to prolong the process in which they’d be ready for the Ram’s needs.

We’ve told the Ram that awakening them from the silver inoculation can take months, but really, we’re purposely keeping them asleep for as long as we can. ”

“I heard noises on the way here,” Jin deadpanned. “They’re not all asleep.”

“Vampires are yet a vastly unstudied group of beings,” his father conceded. “Some don’t take to it, some do and don’t remain asleep for long. Sora and I visit each cell several times per week, administering…”

“Administering what?” Jin pushed. What was he hiding?

“The required necessities. The longer they remain unconscious, the safer they are. Asleep, vampires’ bodily functions are halted.

They can survive. Awake, they deal with the results of the silver inoculation, and their starvation leads them to a crazed state, upon which they’ll be deployed to the Ram’s station of choice. ”

“And have they? Been deployed?” Jin asked.

It felt, to him, that he was trying, struggling, fighting to keep that flame alive just then.

He was asking questions in the hopes that he’d receive answers that were different, better, morally perfect.

But the more he asked, the worse he heard.

The more they appeared simply a level above the Ram—she wanted something vile? They’d find a way to make it less so.

His father tilted his head in question.

“Have they been deployed to the Ram’s stations of choice?” Jin asked again.

“No,” his mother proclaimed.

His father shook his head too, though he looked a little ashamed by the pride with which she answered. As if they didn’t deserve that pride. As if the good that they’d done was outweighed by the atrocious.

He turned his eyes from Jin to the floor, but not before Jin saw the look in them.

His actions haunted him. There were those who did terrible things and regretted them later.

Grew and bettered themselves after a time.

Then there were others, like his parents, who did terrible things with or without regret, who knew they were wrong but did them anyway.

But there were spaces in between too, where people like Arthie and Jin lived, perfectly capable of doing terrible things to right wrongs.

Out of retribution and vengeance, sometimes for a greater good.

“For our own sanity, we needed to strive for a single aim,” his father continued.

“The Ram wanted the weaponization of vampires on the ground, and we needed to ensure it never happened. It’s horrible for the undead, of course, but it’s also horrible for the living soldiers on both sides of the battle.

Even beyond that, if a vampire worked their way through those soldiers and fled the battleground, innocents would be placed in danger. ”

Like the Wolf of White Roaring attack.

“The Ram’s wishes sound simple enough, but it has taken us a near decade to achieve what we have, and deliberately so.

What would have taken six years to create, we stretched to eight, and so on,” his mother said, and Jin watched his father as she spoke.

Did he agree with what she said? When he spoke, it was with dismay, a man disheartened.

She spoke with more embellishment in comparison.

At last, she reached forward and pressed her palm to Jin’s cheek.

He couldn’t help it; he leaned into her touch, and it felt as if no time had passed at all. As if he wasn’t a foot taller than her now. As if his voice hadn’t changed. As if he hadn’t gone from high society prig to undead criminal.

“You were never traitors,” Jin whispered. “You—you were prisoners.”

His parents said nothing. His father shifted, ever so slightly, and Jin could smell him. He could smell the memories , which was the strangest feeling he’d ever experienced. He smelled like comfort and coconuts. He smelled like Spindrift, a connection Jin had never made before.

His father exhaled long and slow. “No, Jin. The vampires are prisoners. Outside of our imprisonment, we’ve lived with some semblance of freedom within these walls the past several years, but given the chance, we can’t—we couldn’t leave them behind.

Even without you to protect, we would have undertaken this project.

For them. The Ram made plenty of threats.

You were the first, yes, but after a while, it became clear to the monarch that we”—he stopped and looked away again—“we would risk our son in order to save the lives of countless vampires and the humans they’d kill.

Then the threats moved to other things, our notes being shared to other scientists who would do better, our in-progress theories tested as rigorously as the Ram wished. ”

He stopped with a sob.

“In order to prevent one evil, we committed our own,” he whispered.

What? Jin wanted to ask. There was something weighing on him, something he wasn’t telling Jin, and Jin couldn’t bring himself to ask. How had he expected a ten-year ordeal to be clear-cut, black-and-white, bad and not?

His parents spoke with care for the vampires—they always had.

His father’s work had involved bettering life for both the living and the undead, even when Jin was a boy.

The coconuts scattered throughout their house had been proof of that.

He couldn’t believe that had changed, despite everything else that might have.

He had worried they had, after the numerous changes he himself had gone through, but some things remained, didn’t they?

Jin rose to his feet, wishing he wasn’t so numb, so strangely hollow.

The image of his parents the morning before the fire was still seared so vividly into his mind that it was odd to see them like this.

Older, wearier, the world weighing on their shoulders.

He felt like he’d walked into a fortune teller’s tent and stared into her glass ball.

Only he wouldn’t walk out of here snorting at her con. This was real.

He swallowed everything: his emotions, his questions, his thoughts. “Grab your keys.”

His father blinked up at him, his eyes wet, confusion furrowing his brow. “Whatever for?”

Jin nudged the still-unconscious guards with the toe of his shoe. “To meet my sister.”