Page 29 of Once Upon a Dark October
Chapter Twenty-Nine
M orrigan did not see me off to the castle. I’d left earlier than usual, though I hadn’t the heart to go looking for her. The change in her demeanor had startled me so badly that I had to wonder if consuming the demon’s blood had left some lingering effects. But then, the two of us had been so mired in our emotions, battling something new every time we turned around, that perhaps the ichor had merely shoved unpleasant things to the fore.
Or it had simply revealed the truth neither of us had wanted.
And I hadn’t the time to dwell upon any of it.
Overgrown grass sparkled with dew in the soft periwinkle light of the early dawn. The mists eddied low around my boots while I picked through the ruins, the autumn wildflowers bleary with muted colors. It would be one of those perfect October days—a chill on the air eclipsed by toasty-warm sunlight, the sky that rare shade of blue between heavy, broken clouds.
Climbing over a headless gargoyle, I began to feel the fatigue of the blood-hunger I’d been ignoring. I couldn’t immediately remember when I had last taken Morrigan’s blood. The cloaking serum wouldn’t have been enough. My limbs ached with weakness, sluggish and burning. A hollow pang stabbed at my side. The mist—creeping ever toward winter—breathed a chill into me that wouldn’t have been so unkind if I had the heat of her blood to fight it back.
If it weren’t for my fangs and the scarring on my neck, I wouldn’t have needed the cloaking serum at all.
My foot caught on a stray pile of crumbled stone, and I had to catch myself before I landed facedown in the weeds and tangled foliage. I needed blood, perhaps desperately. I hoped the lady of the castle took my fading vampiric strength as a mortal illness, a consequence of running myself ragged in her coven’s service. Not that she would recognize the toll it had taken.
I could easily feign sickness. That was familiar enough.
A weathered archway towered above, ushering me around to the kitchen. It must have belonged to some grand entrance in its previous life, doors spanning like dragon’s wings from a folktale. Now it was a somber relic from an empire that had drowned in its own blood.
The back door to the kitchen was still unlocked. I’d left it that way, betting no one else would use it while I was gone for the night. After trudging miserably through the gardens—if they could be considered gardens anymore; they were barren and withered, choked with invading weeds—I slipped inside without notice. A servant’s corridor would take me up two floors, but I had forgotten this path had become riddled with disintegrating stone.
“Almost there.” I had to talk myself into continuing on. “It’s not so bad.”
It was much worse, but I had to believe in my own lie.
Burgeoning daylight speared through the walls. Clambering up these steps felt like scaling the cliffside with the rock threatening to give way from under me. I listened to pebbles drop somewhere every time I disturbed the stone. The stairwell was steep, winding a narrow bend. My muscles protested the entire shortcut, and I was sweating beneath my layers when I finally made it to the landing.
My vision dotted with black. Knees wobbling, I braced against the threshold of the hallway. I wish I’d drank that teacup.
“This way,” I reminded myself. “It’s this way. Left, then a right turn.”
Wake up, Elspeth. You cannot lose your focus now.
With Gwen and Clarabella’s map in my mind, I moved through the halls on the lightest footsteps I could manage. Most of the coven slept in these rooms. I suspected my heart did not have enough blood to flutter like a trapped bird, or perhaps I’d finally achieved calm, barely breathing as I went.
The map’s route ended at an alcove secreted away behind an ugly tapestry. No one else had lit the torches and the windows were blocked, so the cover of the castle’s omnipresent darkness helped to conceal me. Pushing aside the fraying cloth, the alcove revealed an old wooden door recessed into the stone, one that required a cumbersome skeleton key. I had no such key, but I’d been neighbors with a woman who had been quite adept at picking locks.
And I’d been eager to learn, even after we had finished an entire bottle of cheap whiskey between us.
I worried my fingers over the clasp of the pouch attached to my chatelaine. For a moment that came and went too fast, I thought of Morrigan. Her blood as gleaming silver, a death memento from an immortal love. Did she regret that, too? Had she thought of the blood she’d bestowed upon me, the love in her kisses, as a mistake? Perhaps I had been right all along—we couldn’t survive on bloodlust alone. Whether it had been the only tether connecting us, I was no longer sure.
A growl rent the chamber within.
It was buried far below, I knew, but it had called out to me clear as the morning sky.
“Elspeth! ”
Oh, stars damn me—
“Where is that rotten girl?” I found myself somewhat relieved when I half-recognized the whining tone of Anastasia’s underling once it grated on my last remaining nerves. “Elspeth!”
I skittered back into the hall. “I’m on my way.”
“What’re you doing all the way over here? Lady Tremaine’s been waiting on you upstairs. You’re late . She doesn’t take kindly to tardiness.”
“My curiosity got the best of me.” I glanced over my shoulder at the curtained door I’d left behind. “It won’t happen again.”
That was at least a lie I could fully believe in.
The library must have been beloved by the last High Council to reside here because it had the most well-kept rooms in the castle ruins. When I had first started in the coven’s employ, it had been easy to figure out which were once maintained by the councilors, where they had pushed back the slow creep of decay. I imagined they had moved a lot to the archives when the High Council took up living quarters in the central district. I hadn’t expected the shelves to still be bursting all these decades later, but the coven, it seemed, had traveled with a well-stocked library of their own.
Though sometimes I wondered whether or not I was its sole patron.
It was austere compared to the estate’s. Not cozy but grandiose, sleek with the same red and white marble of the throne room. Columns held up its mezzanine, while squares covered the polished floor, gilded at the edges. Rows of bookshelves were nestled in the walls from the bottom floor up to the ceiling, spines winking like distant stars under roving candlelight. Since no daylight was allowed in, the flames amplified the gold detailing and cast an ethereal radiance across the rooms.
The library’s curved ceiling also mirrored the throne room, though these paintings were almost fully intact. Age had speckled and cracked the surface, but the gloomy nighttime scenes shone through. Tall ships upon a perilous sea, starlight and foam creating a wondrous, imaginative scene. A closer view of the beach, with its black sand and jagged coastline. The painting was so old that the sleeping giants weren’t monuments to the past. They were guardians of the coastline, the sea’s tides surging against them.
A shame something so beautiful was held prisoner here.
“Elspeth?” My name filled the library, Sonia’s voice talon-sharp. I found her leaning against the balustrade of the mezzanine as if she were already a queen looking down upon her subjects. “You’re late.”
“I’m sorry, my lady.” I bobbed a curtsy in the middle of the floor, then left my cloak on the back of a chair before joining her on the upper floor. Someone else had started the hearth’s fires in here. “I got a bit…turned around.”
Her red eyes—shadowed with a shroud of demon’s blood—narrowed. “Are you feeling all right, child? You’re looking sallow this morning. Running a fever, are you?”
“Unfortunately so.” I mopped the sweat from my brow onto my dress sleeve. “I woke up rather out of sorts, I’m afraid. It’s the season for it.”
Sonia clicked her tongue. “Soon you’ll be free of such ghastly mortal failings.”
If only she knew.
“Come along, child,” she invited. “Do try to keep up.”
We moved deeper into the top floor, where sparse candlelight flickered on cramped aisles of bookcases. In all the time I’d spent in these rooms, I hadn’t explored much of its second floor. The books appeared a lot more aged, their bindings falling apart at the seams, pages curled with rough edges.
“Scattered here in this library are grimoires and academic texts from generations of elder alchemists,” Sonia explained. “The High Council didn’t see a purpose for them after the fall of the monarchy, but their refuse is our gain. I’ve found some that might be helpful, but you’ll have to search through the catalog yourself. You know your way around these rooms.”
“Yes, but…why me?” I asked. My fingers were as hesitant as my question, poised over a thick book spine. “Begging your pardon, my lady, but I’m not anyone exceptional.”
“I fear I do not trust my coven to make sense of these texts,” she admitted. “You’re high-born, you have a sharp mind. An interest in learning, or so I’ve seen. You’ve shown loyalty in the time you’ve been with us. I can make something useful of you. It will be a strength to our coven—and my future court—to have a reliable alchemist.”
“I’d hate to make your coven unhappy,” I said, opening the torn cover with a careful touch. “Or envious.”
“They’ll be none of your concern.” Sonia was already pulling hefty tomes from the shelves, lifting plumes of acrid dust into the air. The pages smelled strongly of mildew and ink. “You’ll be appointed by me, and whatever they have to say about it is irrelevant.” She cleared her throat. “There is, of course, the matter of your…human nature.”
“Ah, right.” I feigned interested in the pages. How could I sneak these books back to Josephine and Clarabella? “My mortality, you mean.”
“One must have a vampire’s blood to pursue the craft. I do not concern myself with making fledglings, but I’ll be keeping a close watch over your studies.”
I glanced up from a rendering of alchemical wards, though the ink had faded and turned the instructions near illegible. “Did you have someone in mind for my education, Lady Tremaine? ”
“I don’t expect cooperation from anyone in the harbor. And our time down the coast did not yield anything, either,” she said. “It was an alchemist who gave us our sunlight affliction.”
I pretended as if this were the first time I’d heard of such a thing.
“Oh.” I preoccupied myself with sliding another book from its shelf. A spider crawled out from its gilded pages and I held in my startled yelp. “I had no idea alchemy could be wielded like…like weaponry. My cousin was only ever interested in transmuting blood to gold.”
“It’s a duplicitous, cunning discipline,” Sonia said. I went still, as if she could smell the cloaking serum on me. “A pity the most talented of the lot seems determined to waste her skills on a dying sorcerer’s coven.”
Josephine.
My fingers curled around the book’s spine. “Will she teach me, then?”
Sonia laughed, the bitterness almost pungent. “She’d never agree to such an arrangement.”
“That’s rather a shame,” I ventured. “I’d have liked to learn from her if she’s so highly regarded.”
“Not to worry, my dear girl.” Sonia added a slim volume to the stack, perhaps an ancient grimoire. “We’ll still find use for her.”
“H-How so?” The books slipped from my hands, plummeting to the floor with a clamorous echo. “My apologies, my lady.” I stooped to pick them up after wiping the perspiration from my hands. “I thought… From my cousin, you know—my understanding was that it took decades of study for a vampire to become a blood alchemist.”
“The faster we rid you of your human weaknesses, the better.” Sonia turned on her heel and gestured for me to follow. She was blissfully unaware that I still had my clumsy moments in spite of my vampirism, that my fledgling body was new and strange. “Come along, child. ”
I trailed behind the sweep of her dress, and she led me back down the gilded staircase to a long wooden table set in front of a hearth. The room was bookended by two of them, enormous and gaudy, artifacts of a forgotten time. An old map of Dreadmist was preserved over the mantlepiece, less sprawling than the harbor I’d known in my lifetime, but the silhouette of the town’s center was still familiar.
“A vampire, you must learn, is only as powerful as their heart,” Sonia continued. “We take in blood, our immortal hearts keep beating. And if we take in the heart of a vampire, then their power becomes ours. The throne of Dreadmist was once built this way by the sorcerers of old.”
She wants Josephine’s heart. Foreboding numbed my fingers cold. And Morrigan’s for herself, too, I’ll bet.
“You’ll be inheriting power well beyond your mortal understanding,” she warned. “It might be wise if you learned something of it in the meantime.” The books she’d carried over dropped onto the table, stirring new clouds of dust from their leather-bound covers. The flurry of motes itched my nose. “These are not to leave this castle. They’ll stay within the library. Perhaps we can see about setting up a laboratory whenever the—”
A stampede of footsteps trampled whatever the lady of the castle was going to propose next. There was a wild blur of motion—skirts and limbs, locks of hair flyaway—that ended with Drusilla standing in the middle of the library looking torn between rage and heartbreak, her hair disheveled. From the opposite end of the table, I saw Sonia’s unrepentant smugness, her body straightening, a venomous serpent planning to strike. I kept my eyes toward the pages but didn’t see them.
Drusilla’s heart was pounding furious.
“Whatever Ana’s told you isn’t true,” she began, while Anastasia appeared in the threshold of the doorway like an unwanted storm on the horizon. “She’s been jealous of me from the start, I told you she can’t— ”
“Oh, please, Drusilla,” Sonia mocked. “Enough of your atrocious lies. None of your secrets were ever worth anything to me. You were on borrowed time, and we cannot afford to hemorrhage more. This should have been dealt with properly, but now that misfortune has fallen upon me.”
“You have enough,” Drusilla begged. “You don’t need her.”
Sonia groaned. “Don’t tell me you’ve felt something in that heart of yours. How could you be so careless?”
“Please.” She dropped to her knees and pawed at Sonia’s skirts. “Please, don’t do this. You have others…just let her go. Let her go …”
“ Silence. ” Her command snapped through the air on a current of reeking blood sorcery. Drusilla made a choking sound, grasping at her ruffled blouse as if the air had suddenly rushed from her lungs. “You are right about one thing, I suppose. I don’t need her.”
More footsteps stole my attention from the book’s pages. I backed away toward the shelves as if I didn’t belong there. I’d been forgotten, anyway, though I was witness to this disaster unfurling slowly. A pair of fledgling vampires had joined Anastasia, hauling Drusilla’s dhampir lover, Rosie, into the library. One of them shoved into her shoulder, tried to force her to kneel.
It felt like I was seeing a glimpse of her future reign as queen.
“No,” Drusilla sobbed. “Not like this, I’ll do anything you ask of me. Anything , I don’t care what it is. I’ll…I’ll scrub the dungeons clean when you’ve had your fun if that’s what you want. Just spare her, please, please —”
“Drusilla, do shut up .” Sonia massaged her brow, pinched the bridge of her nose in disgusted irritation. “I am exhausted of your groveling.” A flourish of her hand and Drusilla’s nonsensical mutterings went quiet. “Listen to me very clearly. The only reason I haven’t impaled your heart through your own ribcage is because I cannot afford any more losses. But make no mistake: you have disgraced me. ”
She scoffed when Drusilla hung her head. “Carrying on with the dhampir, that sloppy affair at the brothel. Yours will be the first heart I claim when I take the throne, so enjoy it while it’s still in your chest. Every beat is a small mercy.”
Drusilla fell forward onto her hands, her chest heaving with sobs. She was weeping so loudly, so violently, that she could barely get a breath between. Her tears and spittle dripped onto the marble.
“It’s all right, Dru,” Rosie said. “I’ll go to my death knowing this monster took my father’s life before me. It’ll bring me peace…our blood on the same hands. Poetic, isn’t it? The only language you know is violence.”
Drusilla only sobbed harder as she heard Rosie shoved onto her knees at Sonia’s feet. It was then, with Rosie’s hands bound behind her back, that a glint of silver caught my attention. Whatever it was, she’d concealed it in her fingers; small enough that it fit into her closed palm. It didn’t matter what it was, only that it was sharp, that it was our chance to draw blood first.
She needed a diversion. A fumbling and utterly careless mortal to pull Sonia’s wrath elsewhere.
And those candlesticks had been lit awfully close to the curtains, hadn’t they? I moved about like I was rearranging the shelf beside me, preoccupying myself while turning my back on the scene unfolding. Pushing a stack of books across the side table, I watched a gilded candlestick wobble. Another nudge, and it fell at an odd angle, the flame catching the curtains.
Of course, I’d sacrificed one of the books, too, but it did the job. A roar of fire taking hold of the fabric wasn’t enough to keep Sonia from her prey, but the tendrils of smoke reached her senses quickly. Like an utter fool, I tried to put it out—but not quite, not really—by rustling the curtains in my graceless mortal panic.
A beam of sunlight slanted across the marble. It caused even more chaos than the fire that was still eating the curtains. Anastasia shoved the fledglings in front of her as shields, yelling at them to put out the flames, to cover the window. Drusilla stayed prone on the floor, her auburn hair haloed blood-red in the light, smoke curling up from her skin.
She didn’t make a sound while her flesh burned like dead autumn leaves cast on a winter’s bonfire.
“Wretched girl!” Sonia hissed. “Look what you’ve—”
Rosie seemed to glow in the sunlight. I saw her jolt forward before one of the fledglings knocked me out of the way and I skidded on the marble. When I turned back to watch the aftermath—blood suffusing the library at last, the air hungry for it; the stench of ichor rising—Sonia was screaming in unbridled rage. Rosie was caught in Sonia’s sorcerer’s grip at once, but her striking fist had landed. She’d stabbed Sonia in the neck, perhaps a few times. Her throat was smeared red, her hands dripping.
Her ichorous blood was all over the marble.
Sonia couldn’t gather a coherent word, she was so filled with wrath. She hissed at Rosie, holding her suspended slightly above the floor, Rosie’s bare toes dragging through the blood she had spilled. The scent of Drusilla’s scorched flesh unsettled my stomach. The fledglings had doused the fire, blocked the sunlight, but the damage had been done. Sonia’s fangs glinted deadly. A twist of her fingers, and Rosie’s body slumped, landing before Drusilla.
Her heartbeat had ceased.