Page 5

Thea

T he dread-inducing use of the words Castle and moving in the same sentence was underlined by Hector’s decision to slip an arm under my knees, lift me up in his arms, and bolt—literally bolt, for he shot out of the room and down the stairs faster than thunder could crack down a blackened sky.

The Castle became a swerving blur of colors and shapes, and although I had the sense of us darting forward, I also felt by the tug in my stomach that we were drifting up.

Very, very high up in the air.

His velocity, or perhaps the Castle’s velocity—I couldn’t tell the difference anymore—increased rapidly, and the ribbon in my hair unraveled with a flourish and flew away. Dizzily, I watched it go over Hector’s shoulder, the white silk fading fast into the darkening distance until my nausea became so acute that I had to snap my eyes shut.

“Hector! Let me down!” I shrieked, but I’d fastened my arms so tightly around his neck I doubted he could peel me off him even if he tried.

Hector jumped over the landing and finally put me down on my feet by the entrance. I teetered helplessly, raising my hands to cover my head as the chandelier-spangled ceiling hailed a shower of crystals over us. Hector wound an arm around my waist to keep me steady before he flung the front door open. A furious gust of wind whipped into the hall and thrust both of us back. My hair flew over my face. My dress blew up like a balloon. Then the room slanted, making the door shut and me fall forward. I squealed, watching the marble rise up to hit me in the face, but Hector was quicker, and he managed to wedge his body between me and the floor to soften the impact.

For a moment, I just lay there, right on top of him, with my face buried in the crook of his neck while his two hands held firmly the back of my head.

“You okay?” he shouted so I could hear him over the manic roar of the wind outside the Castle. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

Our limbs entangled, and a fresh wave of embarrassment washed over me. Furiously, I shook my head and pushed myself up to a sitting position. But this was even worse. Now I was straddling him around the hips, with my skirts gathered around my waist and my palms pressing against the hard ridges of his abdomen.

“Get off me,” he grunted, his face heating.

“Well, help me,” I bristled, feeling as flustered as he looked.

In a flash of movement, Hector put me on my feet, then cast his enraged gaze toward the currently swaying ceiling. “Stop this, now!” he roared at the Castle, his clenched fists growing white at his sides. “I said stop moving, damn it!”

The Castle seemed to propel us even higher, making everything inside me drop and flip.

“Well, fuck you too!” Hector exploded, which was a shock all of its own, for I’d never heard him speak in such a manner before.

Shakily, I scrambled past the stairs to the row of windows, hiding under several mismatched draperies. As I drew back a set, a stream of golden light poured into the Castle and nearly blinded me. Squinting against it, I patted for the window’s latch, and when the shuddering glass gave in, I stuck out my head, grabbing onto the sill with both hands.

To say that we were not near land anymore would be a wild understatement. We had drifted into the sky, and now we were cutting through the undulating swell of the clouds. Exquisitely colored clouds, glowing yellow and pink as the sun rose high over the tiny black dot that was the Kingdom of Kartha. Even the massive mountains encompassing the city looked minuscule from this height, their snowy peaks glistening like sugar jars left out in the heat. In the faraway distance, I could even make out the curve of the coast, the vast Sandrea Sea as hazy as a sun-dazzled apparition.

Suddenly, I felt Hector’s solid body behind me, his big hand closing around my wrist. “Get away from there. You’ll catch a cold,” he gritted out, dragging me behind him so he could work the windowpane shut.

I touched a tremulous hand to my temple. “Where is it taking us?”

“Home,” snarled Hector. “Lumia.”

My heart shot up my ribcage and exploded like a firework. I could almost see the spray of sparks dancing at the edge of my vision. “Why is it taking us to Lumia?” I glared up at the Castle. “Why are you taking us to Lumia, you old wanker?”

Hector loomed over me, his windblown hair tumbling over his flaming eyes. “Because we have responsibilities and a schedule, which you interrupted.”

“What responsibilities?” I croaked.

“I have to host the conclave in less than forty-eight hours, and you cannot be found here. Our meetings are private, Thea. You know this. You know not to come to the Castle unannounced. What were you thinking?”

Something inside me convulsed, hardened. I gritted my teeth, resisting tears. But gods, I felt so… angry . With Hector, with myself, with the stupid Castle. My magic had tried to warn me, but I hadn’t listened. I never listened.

“Okay,” I exhaled, trying to think through my increasing and perhaps childish desire to break down crying. “Okay, so once we reach land, I will go to the city and find a Curiosity Shop—”

“There are no Curiosity Shops in damned Lumia! These people treat magic like it’s the fairy plague!”

“Stop yelling at me!” I shouted back, my voice silencing all the other noises of the Castle.

Hector retreated, his expression softening a little. “Thea,” he sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I took a moment to compose myself before I asked, “Isn’t the ball usually held in the winter?”

“I’m not hosting a ball. Just the three families. For the ceremony.”

“Ceremony?”

Hector raised his arms at his sides, his exasperation reemerging from the shallows of his patience. “They’re about to appoint me the new sovereign, obviously. And, please understand, I cannot start my reign by breaking the very laws that hold this society together. You’re not a little kid anymore. Your presence here won’t be tolerated, especially with the position you hold in the Thalorian Court. I can already hear them accusing me of harboring human spies in the Castle. ”

Out of everything he said, only one thing stuck with me. The most bewildering one. “You? The sovereign?”

“Yes, of course, me,” he hissed. “This is the title my mother bequeathed me. I am the only surviving Aventine, lest you haven’t noticed.”

“But you hate vampire society. You said they’re nothing but a bag of cocks.”

“I never said bag of cocks. ”

“No, just that they’re a bunch of vicious bastards who only delight in plotting, fighting, and sucking blood, and that you want to live your life as far away from their insidious schemes and politics as possible.”

“I was a child,” he clipped. “I was a privileged, ungrateful, egotistical child who knew nothing of legacy and responsibility.”

Indeed, Hector had spent his entire life disdaining privileges others would kill for. But that hadn’t been out of ungratefulness. Hector had just been incredibly, heartbreakingly lonely. He was unique in every sense of the word, and that had made him more guarded than perhaps his own heart desired to be. To this day he was the only surviving dhampir known to history. The vampire condition was so intricate that most dhampir children, who were rare to begin with, died within a month of being born.

In the course of centuries, humans had nursed many myths and legends about the creatures of the night, but unlike what some of these stories claimed, vampires weren’t dead, and their bodily functions weren’t far from human. They had come from humans, after all, when long, long ago, Nazriat, the goddess of witchcraft, cursed an entire village after they killed her half-human daughter.

The people had accused the young woman of making them ill so she could sell them her strange healing potions, and when her mother entered our Realm to find her child hanging from a tree, she cast the curse of vampirism upon them.

She took away their ability to walk in the sun, for they too had stolen the light of her life, and made them deathly allergic to juniper, which was one of the main ingredients in her daughter’s healing potions. She gave them long lives so that they would experience the pain of loss over and over again as well as a hundred demons’ strength so that they couldn’t touch anything without destroying it. Their bodies became their prisons. Their blood became a poison. And since they wanted to behave like mindless, bloodthirsty animals, they would live like ones too, bound by their unquenchable thirst for blood, a thirst that oftentimes ate away any redeemable quality they might have possessed.

But the goddess had also made them beautiful, irresistible even, so that others might get drawn to them and experience the agony of their betrayal. And so the first creatures of the night were created. Creatures that were not supposed to mate with humans but be their natural enemies.

Hector was a miracle. A fate-kissed miracle. Even his name was touched by destiny. To hold, as he was born to hold our two worlds together.

Growing up, the human children feared him, while the vampire children tormented him endlessly, deeming him a weak halfling who was entirely unworthy of the holy Aventine name.

That dream he’d had of the two of us leaving behind vampire society and my family’s expectations, working ordinary jobs, and living in a quaint little cottage in the middle of nowhere had not been a product of ungratefulness but of hope. Perhaps a silly hope, for he was the son of Esperida, star-chosen and with a castle in the sky for a legacy, but still. He’d wanted to study history and become a professor, to grow a garden, and maybe learn to play the piano. And I had promised to do all that with him. I had promised to never leave him, never go far from him.

A promise I had broken.

“Hector,” I said softly, “I hope you know that you don’t have to honor your mother’s legacy by sacrificing your future.”

His face changed, hardened, revealing a part of his soul I never knew—dark, tempestuous, unforgiving.

He curled back his lips, his body drawing forward. “Says the girl who threw her entire life away to honor her family’s wishes.”

I knew fighting was pointless. It was just one ego clashing with another. But this time I couldn’t hold myself back, couldn’t bite the words down, and with a fresh swell of anger, I pressed forward too, bringing our faces a mere breath apart.

“What life?” I snapped. “I had nothing—”

“You had me.”

“No, you had a plan. You had a dream. But not all of us live in magic castles in the sky, Hector. Some of us have to live on land, in the real world, where hard work doesn’t always pay off, and sometimes people have to marry into a better future.”

He jerked back as though I’d just slapped him across the face. “And you believe that I don’t know that? How out of touch do you think I am?”

I shook my head, struggling to find the words that would finally make him see the difference between us. Hector was of the sky. I was of the land. And for a few brief, magical moments we had found each other in the middle, in a sweet but precarious in-between, until the opposing forces of what we were made of deep in our souls pulled us apart.

“You, like Esperida, are extraordinary,” I said. “You were put on this Realm to do extraordinary things. I’m just a human girl with barely any magic in my veins. And I know I broke my promise—”

“I don’t care about that stupid promise,” he snarled.

“Then why? Why is it so hard for you to understand that I had to think of my future?”

“ I would have given you a future! I would have married you! I would have followed you to Thaloria! I would have given you the world!”

I stopped. Stopped breathing, moving, thinking.

For several thundering moments I could only stare at him, at the hurt that lay naked in his proud face. A mere whisper was all I was able to offer: “What?”

“This whole time you thought I was angry because you left me? Because I couldn’t be alone? I was not angry because you gave up on me, Thea. I was angry because you gave up on yourself. Because you let them convince you that you needed a man to make your dreams come true.”

He held back the silky strands of his hair in something like despair, his unraveling as rapid as our ascent in the air and as heavy as the cargo of clouds the sky carried above us.

“Have you any idea what it did to me?” he said, his voice like grains of sand. “To have no choice but to watch the most clever, capable, brilliant person I knew submit to the will of others like a mindless puppet. To know that the girl I loved was going to marry the first nobody her parents chose for her. A man she didn’t even know. A man she didn’t even love. Have you any idea what a torment it was to think that he was going to steal from you things that are only meant to be given in love? Your first kiss. Your first time.”

I could not speak. I was a jumble of confused thoughts and feelings, of things that hurt too much to admit.

Hector had never spoken of love, much less marriage, to me. Now I was drifting in the obliterating current of that one word— loved —and its faraway, irretrievable meaning.

“The girl you loved,” I rasped, both numb and aching all over. “Not love?”

Hector pulled himself together, returning to his usual sharp-edged reserve. “You shouldn’t have come, Thea,” he said steadily. “There is nothing left for you here.”

Before I could say anything, he disappeared, as swift and soundless as a ghost.

Once, on a hot summer night, I had asked him, When we’re older, will you go to Fairyland with me?

Thea , he’d told me, I’ll go to the ends of the world with you.

How silly I was, standing here in the deserted hall with tears in my eyes, realizing there was no distance Hector would cross with me anymore.