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Thea

T he air was sodden with horror. It seeped into my skin and wreathed between my bones, making me still. I had no idea how long I stood there, numb and desolate, cut off from my thoughts completely.

“You know,” said Arawn after an eternity of him watching me through cold, calculating eyes. “I tried to save you. Time and time again, I tried to get you out of here.”

The words rang through me like a wraith’s call, distant and bereft of meaning, their only purpose to ensnare me.

I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, a raw ache in my throat, but I was so disconnected from myself that no sob escaped me in the end, only a shuddering breath.

“You poisoned me,” I whispered. “When I went to the door to welcome the Ravenors into the room, you put the nightshade in the teapot. You poisoned me.”

His voice came so loud compared to my own that it was a shock to my senses. I flinched back against the mantel, the heat of the flames licking the back of my calves.

“To scare you. To chase you out of here. To knock some sense into that thick skull of yours.”

“You killed Camilla,” I choked out, the sword clattering in my fist.

Arawn squared his shoulders, reaching to fix the cuffs of his shirt with the unperturbed serenity of Death himself. “I had to. She saw me slip the nightshade into the teapot. Not that she cared.” His passionless blue eyes snapped on mine, twin blades stabbing through my heart. “That viper cornered me instead and tried to blackmail me into an alliance with her and Kaladin. To overthrow Hector. So later that night, I sneaked into her bedroom and cut off her head.”

“You could have gone to Hector… You could have… I don’t understand… Why? Why would you do something so…”

“So… what?” Arawn prodded, his fair brows raised. As he swayed toward my direction, I flung the sword before me, filled with this terrible, boundless fear. Not for the things he’d done. But for the things he meant to do.

Arawn moved past me, and standing before the window, he gazed out into the vast, new-moon night, his steady breathing fogging the windowpane. “I needed them all in here and you out there. Safe. As you should be.” He turned to me again slowly. Slowly . Like a predator being careful as to not startle its prey. “The last thing I wanted was for you to get caught up in this, to have to hurt another innocent.”

I shook my head, floundering in bouts of numb shock and blazing rage. “This? What is this ?”

For a second I saw the bleak future in his eyes.

No, not a future .

In his dull, passionless gaze, there was no tomorrow at all.

“The basket you found in the kitchen?” he ventured calmly. “Mother did not arrange it. I did. I was going to make the ceremonial wine, you see. A Thalorian custom, of course, and a token of appreciation for my new sovereign.”

I listened with rising dismay, unable to make any sense of what he was trying to imply. “The blueberries?”

His whole face darkened, his eyes shifting into the indigo of midnight. “Only the first layer was blueberries.”

Dread like I’d never known before welled up in my chest and choked me. Sobs racked my insides, for there was only one kind of berry that, in its ripe state, was almost identical to a blueberry. “Gods. I made… I made…”

“You made a fine juniper wine for us, Thea. And now, you’re going to sit here like a good girl and let us enjoy it. Don’t worry, I’ll find some excuse to tell Hector. Perhaps you forgot to drink your water again.”

A white-hot blade of fury cut through my despair, and when he aimed for the door, I cast myself upon him like a curse, brandishing the blade. The image of what he was planning to do rose to the surface of my consciousness, stark and horribly familiar. I had already seen it happen in a dream that was not a dream. Everyone—dead. Gathered around the dining table with their mouths stained purple, their bodies limp.

“Why?” I snarled through clenched teeth, tightening my precarious hold on the sword. “Why would you want to kill your own people?”

The words ignited a burning rage in his eyes. A rage that had him right before me in an instant, sucking the air out of the room.

I wielded the blade, slashing the air, but Arawn was too fast, his hands a mere diaphanous blur. He stole the weapon for me only to throw it far across the room, metal clattering on marble. Then he lunged at me, banding an arm around my waist and closing a fist around my jaw, his fingers digging painfully into the hollows of my cheeks. “We are not people ,” he growled in my face. “When are you going to understand it? We are curses. We are the darkness of this world, and we need to be vanquished.”

The opposing forces of what he’d done and what he was still planning to do assailed me all at once. He didn’t just want to kill them. He wanted to die with them. Whether the ceremony would happen for Hector or Dain did not matter to him, only the outcome, the seizure of this opportunity.

We’ll find accommodations in the city. After you’ve settled somewhere safe, I’ll return to the Castle.

Yes, he would have returned to the Castle, not to stand by Hector but to finish what he started. He just wanted me out of the way so he didn’t have to do to me what he’d done to Margaret.

Margaret’s sweet face hovered as a true ghost over the edge of my memories. Her blonde curls, her kind brown eyes, the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile. A quiet girl. A nice girl. A girl who trusted easily.

The grief in my chest was raw, primitive, her name growing into a sickened prayer in my mind.

“You bit her,” I cried, writhing in the narrowing prison of his arms. Swift gusts of pain swept through me. I felt my flesh bruising, my bones groaning beneath. “You didn’t mean to kill her. You lost control, didn’t you?”

His rage peaked, peeling back the last shreds of his composure. “Of course I did!” he roared, spinning me around so fast that for a second everything around the room became dazzlingly white.

When the rapid movement stopped, we were standing before the full-length mirror, its glossy facade trickling with water. Arawn loomed behind me, twisting my wrists at the base of my spine. His face came up next to mine, wild and demonic in the unsteady glass, his eyes as red as the blood in my veins. “Look at me,” he hissed, and the more I resisted, the closer his mouth seemed to draw to my throat. I could feel the burn of his fangs already. “Look at this. This is what I really am, what vampires really are. An urge. An appetite. And your dear Hector is no different. He doesn’t love you. He’s not devoted to you. He’s obsessed with you.” He tilted his head, burying his face in my neck. “Your scent. Your taste.”

“Stop,” I snarled, taking advantage of his hunger-dazed state to wrench myself free.

A look of despair glazed over his face as he dashed forward to recapture my wrists. “Listen to me, Thea. You are blood to him. Nothing more. I’m not your enemy here. I’m trying to save you. I’m trying to save everyone from us. If I do this, no one will fall victim to our curse again. No one will suffer as she did.”

Everyone , he said, and a sinking feeling stole over the whole of me. Everyone.

With a pang of horror, I realized just how far his agony and self-loathing had ventured. He’d done a terrible, irreversible evil to the person he loved the most, and now everyone was going to pay the price of that sin, his revenge so tremendously complete that the entire world would stand altered. That was what he was really after. The eradication of the vampire curse, starting with its leading pillars.

“Arawn,” I wheezed, calling on a reasonable tone unfit to the unreason of his mind. “Think of the children. The children are innocent. They’ve lost their aunt already—”

“No one is innocent! None of them!” he exploded, squeezing me so tightly against him I could no longer breathe inside the cage of my corset. “They are nothing but monsters in the making. Why can’t you see that?”

He spiraled on and on, less a creature of a frayed sanity than a man who truly believed he was about to do the honorable thing. I stopped listening. My eyes darted to the door, my thoughts racing faster than my galloping heart.

I wasn’t sure how far his conviction ran. He was planning to die tonight, so there was nothing he was afraid to lose. If I screamed for help, would he kill me in an instant, consequences be damned? If I tried to escape through the mirror, would he simply drag me back, snap my neck, and go downstairs to finish what he started?

I knew I had to be careful. I knew I had to manipulate my way out of here. But he was Arawn . He was Arawn, and my heart still hoped to find the words that would reach through him.

“Please,” I beseeched, shaking all over. “Arawn, please, you won’t achieve anything by doing this. There are thousands of vampires out there.”

“But everyone who keeps them in order is within these walls,” he said steadily, the gleam of calculation the only lucid spark in his eyes.

“You want vampires to fall into anarchy, revert to their old ways,” I understood with a fresh rush of horror. “You want the vampire hunters to go after them again. Until they’re all gone.”

“They should have never allowed us to come out of the darkness to begin with,” said Arawn in a quiet, controlled voice as if to soothe me, as if I was being the irrational one. “There is a reason we can’t survive the light, why the goddess cursed us so. But you see, Esperida spun this pretty little fairytale that we’re not all evil because we can love . Isn’t that, after all, the only thing that redeems evil?” He laughed bitterly. “We do not love, Thea. We obsess. We lust. We hunger. And we wait. And when our victim is vulnerable enough, we do what vampires do best. We take.”

“Gods,” I sobbed as one terrible realization struck me after the other. “Your parents… they’re not on vacation, are they?”

“It would be hypocritical of me to let them live, don’t you think?” Arawn muttered, his fair lashes falling heavy upon the network of purple veins below his eyes.

And finally— finally— I understood.

During these past few days, I had watched Arawn eat food and drink cup after cup of wine but not blood. Never blood. There was only one thing that could drive a vampire to this level of insanity, and that was not grief. It was not guilt. And it was not hatred.

It was hunger .

Shakily, I reached up and closed his face between my palms. His skin was frail and clammy beneath my fingers, like an insect’s wings. Hector had been right. We’d been so absorbed in our own problems that we’d missed all the signs. And now it was too late. Now we had lost him.

“Arawn,” I panted, “please, listen to me for a moment. You’re not well. You don’t really want to do this. You’re just in pain.”

His crimson eyes shot up to mine. They were huge, unblinking in their fury. “I deserve it.”

“No,” I gasped. “No, you need to drink some blood. The hunger is making you like this.”

He pushed me off him hard enough that I was knocked breathless, pain humming across my collarbone. “ Blood is what made me like this!” he roared, his voice so resonant it seemed to spiral through me. “I will not drink another drop of that sickness. No more. Tonight we die. Tonight I free the world from the curse that is the vampire.”

He started for the door, but I latched myself onto him, forcing him to face me. “This won’t bring her back. Listen to me, she wouldn’t want you to destroy yourself like this. She loved you so much. She told me. She loved you.”

Suddenly, Arawn stopped resisting, and I stopped pulling. Everything in the room fell still. Even my thundering heartbeats crashed to a halt.

When his eyes found mine again, they were soft and tearful, shifting to their usual pale blue. He cupped my cheek softly. “Don’t make me do this,” he whispered. It was a tender whisper, but like a premonition, I felt the veiled threat in it.

My lips parted, my lungs gathering air, but before I could scream for help, his fist closed around my throat and silenced me.

The shock of his hands on me was worse than the pain, the sensation of breath being taken from my body. Even as I watched the stone of his face darkening over me, I could not believe that they were his hands that were killing me. I might have thrashed and kicked and clawed at his wrist. I might have tried to lie to save my life. I will sit here as you asked. I will do whatever you want. But I didn’t. I was too scorched with shame, too immobilized with guilt for not seeing what had been in front of me all along.

My vision blurred, shifted. An eerie, white light swooped down and dazzled over my head. I wanted to resist it, turn my face from it, and lean into the dark, but something deep inside me, a bright spark of magic, told me to surrender to it instead, and for the first time in my life, I listened. I bared myself to the strange light, dropping all my shields of ego and vanity and small mortal fears. It wrapped around me, pulling me like a pair of hands away from Arawn and into its opal embrace.

I felt cold and damp and weightless as air, moving through an indefinable passage of water. Then the light ceased.

Now I was in the dark. Now my only thought was: Hector .