Page 35

Hector

T he sun still rose that morning, brilliant and uncaring for our small mortal torments, and the Castle was kind enough to draw all the curtains shut without my command.

Tieran, after having to throw me out of my own bedroom so he could examine and bandage Thea’s throat without my constant intervention, was still upstairs tending to her while the others paced outside, nervous but relieved, thinking that this madness was over . But this madness was far from over, for I was staring at its face.

Roan and Dain were guarding each of the two exits of the destroyed dining room, but Arawn, standing in the middle, was only looking at me, his eyes red-rimmed and enormous. I felt numb under the weight of their fury as I set a cup of blood at the table closest to him. The darkness of his actions was still trapped behind the veil of my denial. I could not believe the things he’d done, the things he’d meant to do. I did not want to.

“Drink,” I rasped, a million how-could-yous sawing the back of my throat.

Arawn let out a bitter laugh. “You want me to feed ? Aren’t you going to kill me, sovereign?”

I should kill him. For the crimes he’d committed and attempted to commit against vampirekind, the punishment could only be death. If he were anyone else, I would have done it without a second thought. Slowly and painfully too. I would have made an example out of him for putting his hands on Thea alone.

But he was not anyone else. He was Arawn. He was the boy I grew up calling a friend. And there was not enough justice I could deal in this world to exonerate me of my own guilt for all the things I didn’t do to help him when he needed me the most.

I’d been so blind, so selfish.

Now I was clinging to slivers of foolish hope.

“You will feed,” I told him, my voice raw from all the screams I didn’t let out. “And we will talk. And if you don’t want to talk to me, Tieran knows a physician in Elora who specializes in—”

“Madness?” said Arawn mockingly.

“We all know you’re not mad, Arawn. Your actions have been nothing but lucid and calculated. This isn’t insanity. It isn’t even grief. This is an obsessive ideation. Vampires have them when they don’t feed—”

Suddenly, he surged forward, a wraith in full speed, only for Dain to tear through the room, wedge himself between us, and shove him back with a jut of his arm.

Arawn’s physical state had fallen into such dissolution that this was all it took to make him topple on the floor. “ I am not the obsessed one,” he roared. “You are.” Dragging himself to the cup I’d brought him, he shattered it under his bare hand. “I will not feed. I will not put another drop of this sickness in my body.” I saw the flesh of his palm leaping open to take the glass shards in. The cuts seeped for a long time before his skin began its knitting. Then he pushed the shards deeper, slitting himself anew. “I will be free.”

I cannot bear this anymore , I thought to myself as the scent of his blood, frail and decaying, blanketed the room. Loss after loss after loss. When will it be enough? When I have nothing? When I have no one? When I don’t recognize what’s left of me anymore?

But then I thought of Thea and how she always persevered through the darkest of times. I thought of the Castle that, even in its most devastated state, didn’t fail to fill our lives with wonder and magic. And I thought of my parents, whose love had been invariably tender and infinitely pure not in spite of who they were but because of it.

I didn’t want to let my parents’ story become an exception, an impossibility in a cruel, fickle world. I wanted my life to be filled with love, and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible.

I told myself I was doing this out of love now. But gods knew there was nothing lovely about it.

“Arawn,” I said with more patience than I knew I had in me, “if I free you, will you come with me to Elora? It doesn’t matter how long it will take. I will be there. I will not fail you.”

A heart-rending darkness glazed over Arawn’s face. His gaze grew bleary, his mouth slack. “It felt so good to kill her,” he sighed in a sort of ecstasy. “Her blood. Her agony. She was life itself, and I drank her. I’ve never felt such clarity before. I’ve never seen myself clearer. When you finally tear through Thea’s throat, I hope it feels just as wonderful.”

“You fucking bastard,” Roan snarled, reeling forward, but Dain grabbed him around the shoulders before he could tear through Arawn’s throat. I didn’t think I would ever see Dain Valkhar wait for my command. But here he was, looking at me with expectation in his eyes. What do we do now? What do we do with him?

Perhaps Arawn wanted me to kill him. Perhaps he wanted to put an end to this as much as I did. I could try to convince myself it was his hunger talking, that he didn’t mean any of it, but I knew the truth. We all did.

This was not a vampire’s hunger.

This was a vampire’s bloodlust.

I started for the door, not wanting to let my rage get the best of me and repeat the mistake I’d made with the Ravenors. I’ll talk to Thea first , I thought, my heart heavy as stone. Together we can decide what the best course of action is.

I was almost out of the room when Arawn’s whisper crawled through the air the way a faded memory crawls into the forefront of your mind when you least expect it. “Nothing can redeem me, Hector. Not even you.”

Then there was a sound. A swift, swishing noise like fabric brushing against wood. Roan and Dain hissed, rushing to escape the room as it leaked sunlight.

Sunlight.

Golden. Dazzling. Relentless.

I veered to find Arawn standing before the giant window, his body radiant, bathed in morning light for the first time in his life. “Is that all?” He laughed quietly, and as he turned to look at me, his face half-gone in black dust, he was no longer this deranged, bloodthirsty murderer who sought vengeance on the entire vampire kind. He was my friend again. He was just… Arawn. “I really thought the fucker would be more glorious.”

I’d heard stories of vampires going up in flames at the first rays of the sun, stories that claim the goddess’s curse lay in the light itself, which revealed the true nature of our kind: creatures of the night.

In the end, it was no demonic fire that took him. Everything he was, everything he could have been, transformed into a pile of black and white dust.

The world stopped. Sound. Shape. Color. It all stopped. There were only Arawn’s sunlit ashes on the floor. And for a long, long time, that was the only thing I knew.