WATER SURROUNDED ME when I opened my eyes. It was dark, the gloom unrelenting. I opened my mouth and choked as the liquid ran into it. I thrashed, fear of drowning swamping me, my hands beating at the sides of the metal coffin I found myself in. For a long moment, I thought they'd buried me, thinking I was already dead.
I screamed, and did my best to pound on the lid, trying to force it up. It resisted before sliding away. I exploded from the water, dragging in a deep breath as soon as I was out.
Panting, I clawed at the gunk covering my eyes, wiping them clear as best I could. My hands were red, and I looked down at the water I sat in. It was black with a ruby tinge. Blood. They'd put me in a coffin and submerged me in blood.
My gorge rose.
"Don't you dare throw up any of it," Nathan ordered from the corner of the room.
I swallowed back the vomit, my chest heaving as I tried very hard not to think about what coated my body. I might have been a vampire, but I still had a human's squeamishness. Not many people I knew would welcome the idea of bathing in someone's blood. At least no one out of the Romanian dark ages. There was a countess around then who liked bathing in young virgins' blood, thinking it would keep her young; I had no such illusions.
"Why am I sitting in blood?" I managed to get out through the panic threatening to steal my voice. There was no way all of this had come from just one person. The average human body only holds about 1.2-1.5 gallons of blood. There had to be several gallons in this thing.
"The bite was pretty brutal. You almost died. Thomas and Liam thought this was the best way to make sure you didn't," he said.
"And how many people did they kill to ensure that?" I asked.
His lips twisted. "None. It's all vampire blood. Your conscience can rest easy."
"Vampire blood?"
"Best thing for healing. Full of power and restorative properties. You should feel honored. I don't remember the last time they opened a vein for someone."
I looked down at the blood cradling my lower half. "This is too much to have come from just the two of them."
Nathan held out his hand. I grasped it and let him help me out of the metal coffin. My legs wobbled under me, and I would have fallen if Nathan hadn't caught me, uncaring as the blood stained his clothes.
"You underestimate a master vampire’s healing ability. They both had to top up on human blood a few times, but they were able to fill the tub with just the two of them," he said as he helped me over to a chair.
"What happened?" I asked.
He tilted his head as he looked at me. "How much do you remember?"
I glanced away, one hand going to my leg. It was healed, the skin smooth through the torn jeans. "Caroline biting me." And then escaping. "Did they catch her?" I was afraid of the answer.
"No, she got away."
I nodded. I remembered her swimming away, her larger size giving her an advantage over the smaller wolves trying to catch her.
"She seems to be one of a kind," Nathan said, sounding unhappy about that.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"The alpha forgot to mention that her bite can be highly toxic to anyone. Something about the demon taint affecting things again. It's why Brax was unsuccessful when he tried to pull out the toxin, and why Liam couldn't heal you when you were injured."
I blinked. "Wait, didn't she attack that woman, Lisa, I think her name was?"
"Yeah, her bite hadn’t fully developed yet." He leaned against the wall.
He watched me with enigmatic eyes as I tried not to touch anything on me. I'd never been a fan of dirt, and blood was even worse. It covered every inch of me, and I knew if I licked my lips I'd taste it. Tempting as it was to experience the high their blood would no doubt give me, I needed to be clearheaded.
"Where are Liam and Thomas now?" I asked.
"Giving the alpha the third degree. They're not exactly happy about how things turned out," he said in a sardonic voice.
"It's not his fault," I said in a quiet voice.
Nathan snorted. "He withheld valuable intelligence about the danger she posed. If you hadn't been hurt, it could have been one of us. Not to mention she killed the companions."
"She said she didn't," I said. "She got there after they were already dead."
"And you believed her? After this? She almost killed you. She damn near ripped off that leg. Do you have any idea how long it would take you to regenerate that? Decades."
I was silent a long moment. All that was true.
"She's dangerous, Aileen. She can't be allowed to roam the city unchecked. I'm not even sure at this point if Thomas will allow her to live. Demon taint is very serious, and a wolf that can kill with its bite alone is a weapon he won't allow his enemies to have." Nathan straightened. "You should prepare yourself for the worst."
I stared up at him, unable to respond.
His shoulders bunched before he relaxed. "Come on. You should get a shower and clean up. You look like a murder victim right now."
"More like Carrie at the prom," I said.
He chuckled. "You're right. Only you don't have the cool powers."
True. Baby vampires were notoriously weak when it came to raw power. It'd be a century or more before I became any kind of player.
I let him lead me to a shower that was thankfully part of the same suite I'd found myself I in, since it meant I didn't have to walk around the mansion letting everyone stare at me. Even for a vampire stronghold, I would present quite the sight. He left me alone in the large space, with a shower as nice as the one in my room. What did they do—design every shower in this place with a hedonist in mind?
I discarded my ruined clothes on the bathroom floor and stepped under the warm water, letting it rinse the blood off me. I didn't let myself linger, even though I felt fragile after my brush with death—the closest I'd come in a very long time—since my turn in fact. There wasn't enough hot water in the world to wash that experience off.
I didn't have the luxury of indulging my weaknesses either. Caroline's life depended on me finding a solution to the problems facing us.
Despite her attack on me, I believed her when she said she didn't kill those people. Call me crazy or naive, but I know she would either have told me the truth or not remembered it at all. Even if it was a lie, I owed it to our friendship to verify it.
Her talk of Thomas’s descendants had gotten me thinking.
I stepped out of the shower, having scrubbed myself clean three times over, and wrapped myself in a big, fluffy towel—the kind you find in really high-end hotels. Clothes had been folded and left for me on the toilet. I wasted no time in getting dressed.
Nathan waited for me on a sofa in the next room. One wouldn't guess he was a century-old vampire from the way he watched his cell phone. He would fit right in with people my age who never seemed to lift their faces from their smart phones anymore.
Hearing me, he clicked a button and stuffed the phone in his pocket. "Liam wants you to stay here for now. He'll be down once he's done."
"I have a better idea. Why don't you take me to see the rooms of the companions who died?" I suggested.
He hesitated, the request unexpected.
"Look, you're all convinced she's the murderer. It won't hurt to let me take a look at their things." I shrugged. "If I find nothing, I find nothing. Maybe it'll even help me process this shit."
He frowned in consideration and studied me, looking for an angle. I kept my expression expectant without trying to seem impatient. There wasn't an angle. I really did just want to look around.
"Fine, but you don't go anywhere but those rooms, and you don't try anything like escaping to go find the mad wolf." He pointed his finger at me.
"Deal."
He sighed and looked up at me. "I have a feeling I'm going to regret this."
"Only if I'm right."
He shook his head.
*
Catherine's room looked like a unicorn had thrown up in it. It was a frilly, pink, purple, and blue mess. Not exactly a room I pictured a companion occupying.
"This was her room?" I asked in a skeptical voice. It looked more like a preteen’s.
The bed was wood carved with four posts that she’d hung gauzy sheets from. The coverlet was white, and there were pink and blue pillows at the head of the bed. It was a princess bed—the kind that featured in many a young girls' fantasies growing up.
She had a makeup table, one covered in various shades of eyeshadow, lipstick and nail polish. There were also stuffed animals all over the place.
Nathan looked around and nodded. "Yeah, this is hers. Anton always complained about feeling out of place every time he visited her here."
"What was their relationship like?" I asked, curious. He had seemed to have a great deal of feeling for her, but that could also have been the shock of her death.
"Fraught with tension." Nathan circled the room in the other direction.
"Really?"
"Yeah, they were a bad match. We all knew it, but nobody interferes with companions."
"The vamp code?" I asked with a sly smile.
He snorted. "Something like that. Anton's never been one to be tied down to one person. She was his companion, but he also had others. She was the jealous sort. It created a lot of tension."
"I thought it was an exclusive relationship," I said.
"It's exclusive one way. The vampire partner doesn't have the same restrictions. Some vampires see humans as little more than pets. You can feel affection for your pet, but they often won't let themselves feel more." He eyed a picture of a young Catherine with her friends in a pink, glittery frame with a hint of distaste.
"Sounds charming," I said, my voice sarcastic.
"Hm. Yeah. When you live as long as we do, it grows wearying to watch people die. After a while, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to get close only to have their light blink out in a flicker of a moment," he said. There was a hint of sadness in his voice, lingering behind his eyes that made me think the observation was a personal one. "Most of our families have long since died. A few of us track our descendants, check in on them from time to time. Even that becomes difficult after a while."
"Sounds like a lonely existence." One I would share in a few decades. It was something I tried not to think about. What would this world be like without my parents in it? My sister? My niece? How would I bear it when every person I'd known had gone into death's embrace? It was enough to keep me up at night, which was why I tried to live in the moment. If I was lucky, I wouldn't share that fate for several decades.
"It is. Why do you think Liam has been so insistent you cut ties?" he asked, spearing me with a hard glance. "The longer you hold on, the harder it will be when they go. We've all experienced it."
"You gave up possibly decades of knowing your family to spare yourself a little pain?" I asked.
"I know we seem cold to you," Nathan said, the humor that was normally in his voice absent. "It's not true. We experience things more deeply, more vividly. The deeper the connection, the greater the possibility of insanity when that connection is cut."
I looked away from his piercing eyes. I was willing to take the chance. You didn't walk away just because you knew it was going to hurt someday. As a human, I knew my days could be cut short at any moment. That's why you had to live to the fullest, because one day there wouldn't be any more sunrises and you'd be left staring into the dark wondering if you did everything you could to enjoy the short time you had. I think these vampires had forgotten that. Maybe I would too, eventually. Maybe they were right, and I was courting insanity by clinging to my human family. Some risks were worth taking.
I stepped close to her makeup table and started riffling through the drawers.
"What are you doing?"
"Person like this, I'm betting she had a diary of some kind." It would fit with the woman who had put her stamp on this room.
I opened the last drawer and felt around it, coming up with nothing. Reaching further into the space, I patted along the back and felt along the top. My fingers brushed against a hard ridge. There was something there—something taped against the wood. I pulled it free and stood up.
A journal, a little bigger than my hand, rested in my hands. It had yellow stars on the front and one of those key latches.
I opened it, flipping to the last couple of entries. If there was anything useful in here, it would be towards the end.
He visited me again last night. I worry sometimes that we're letting our feelings get in the way of what's important. Once we have the kiss, there will be no reason to sneak around. He keeps saying it won't be long now, that he has a plan. I hope so. This charade is becoming tiring.
Two days later, there was another entry.
He's asked me to lie for him. I couldn't deny him, even as my doubts are creeping in. What if my patron finds out? What if the rest of the enforcers are onto us? I don't like how the head enforcer, Liam, questioned me—like he knew I was lying.
This started as a game, but now it's so much more. I don't know what I would do if I lost him, even as I realize my patron would turn me out if he figures out I've been sneaking around behind his back. I must have faith in my love and his promises of eternal life, but sometimes I fear he's lost sight of that in the desire to punish the bitch who continually rejects the gift she's been given.
I was guessing I was the bitch in that entry.
A few pages later.
We've found a way to hurt her. It's the perfect plan, and after we'll take her place in eternity. We're going out again tonight, and this time I won't lose courage at the last minute.
The last entry was dated the night she died. Guess we all knew how that ended. I sat down on the bed and looked around. The journal had been helpful in confirming my suspicion there was more to her and Theo's death than was immediately evident. But, I still didn't have the full picture.
For starters, who was this ‘he’ she wrote of? Theo? He was dead too, so if he was a part of this, it was only as a bit player. Someone else was pulling her strings. I needed to find out who.
"Let's head to Theo's room," I said, closing the journal and standing with it.
His room was one floor down in the section Nathan told me belonged to the male companions. The two genders were separated by floor. Those who served high-ranking vampires had bigger rooms on one end of the hallway versus those whose vampires had a lower rank.
Hierarchy even here. Why was I not surprised?
"This should be Theo's room," Nathan said.
I didn't question him as I followed him into the dark room. Nathan flicked on the light to quarters that were as different from the one upstairs as a butterfly was to a hawk. Both flew but the manner in which they traveled was night and day.
Theo's room was done in neutral colors, his furniture strong blocky pieces. It was a nice room and utterly devoid of personality—nothing on the walls and no items around the room pointing to who he was as a person, nothing that said what kind of life he led. It was as impersonal as a guest room or something found in a hotel—a pretty picture but almost sterile in its beauty.
I walked around the space, looking everything over carefully. When I completed the circuit, I could have told you no more about the occupant's personality than before exploring, besides the fact that he liked brown. Maybe. Or perhaps he'd picked that color because of how neutral it was. The room wasn't overly masculine.
I opened an old, wooden armoire, the only thing in the room that seemed out of place. It was empty. Of course, it was. I closed the doors and frowned.
"Does this place seem weird to you?" I asked, not sure if it was just my imagination.
"What do you mean?" Nathan set down a coffee coaster he'd picked up.
"There aren't any personal items."
Nathan shrugged. "There're books."
"Every one of them old or a dictionary. No thrillers or mysteries or sci-fi. Just leather-bound books. Nobody reads that kind of stuff. They're the books you pick up in antique shops so you can stage your public bookshelves so people think you're worldly and smart." I knew this because my mother did it. She staged the shelves with old-looking books and items she'd collected through years of life. My father and sister had always teased her about it.
"Perhaps he just likes old books." Nathan drifted over to the bookshelf in question.
Maybe. It still seemed weird.
This place felt like a dead end. I settled on the bed, staring around the room.
"Are you done now?" Nathan asked.
I didn't answer. Perhaps it had been arrogant to think I could find a clue when I was sure the vampires had examined these rooms as well.
My eyes fell on the floor before the armoire. There were scuff marks on the wood, as if the heavy piece of furniture had been dragged into place. I got off the bed and bent in front of the piece, touching the floor gently. It looked like only one of the legs had left a mark, probably because the felt under it had worn down. The rest of the legs were protected against scratching the floor.
"I think I found something," I said.
"What?" Nathan asked from the door.
I didn't answer, too busy moving the armoire. With my increased strength, it was easy to shift the piece of furniture out of the way to reveal the wall behind it, covered in paper and notes and photos.
"What's that?" Nathan asked from the other side of the room.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
I stepped closer to the wall and the papers the armoire had hidden. Smart of Theo to use the furniture to cover whatever this was. Smarter than most. It's easy to find things stuffed in books or furniture—but behind it? Few people think to check there. I certainly wouldn't have. Not without the markings on the floor as a hint.
Nathan examined the papers next to me, a frown on his face. "Why would he want to hide this?"
"That is the question," I said.
"It's a list of names and places." He pointed to one of the photocopies. "This looks like the type of thing found in old family bibles. I remember my father recording births and deaths in ours. This looks like the same thing."
I pulled that piece of paper off the wall, looking closely at the names. "I recognize some of these."
"From where?"
"From when I was researching Thomas’s descendants. These names are the same."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Yeah. I mean, a few are new, but Thomas, Martha and Elijah Bennet—all of these names popped up in my research." I looked up from the paper and gazed at the rest of the documents. "Why would Theo have all this?"
"Maybe he planned on helping Thomas find his descendants." Nathan sounded just as troubled at this revelation as I was.
"How would he have known about Thomas’s curse and its fix?" I asked.
"It’s no big secret. Most of us realized something was wrong. You don't become a vampire of Thomas’s power and standing and not have yearlings to shore up your power base. Maybe he talked to a witch and came up with a solution in the hopes that Thomas would offer him the kiss," Nathan proposed, not sounding entirely convinced of his reasoning.
"He wanted to be a vampire?" I asked.
Nathan rolled his eyes. "They all want to be vampires. They enjoy the pleasure of the bite and the perks of our lifestyle, but make no mistake, they're here for their chance at the kiss."
"I thought one of the perks of being your companion was an extended life."
"Extended, not eternal—or as close to one as a human is going to get. Not to mention a companion is always a second-class citizen, even under the most attentive of masters." He looked over at me with a quirked eyebrow. "How many of your generation are satisfied with such a classification?"
Fair enough.
"Wait, hold on. Baby vampires have as little power or status as companions." And do for a long time from what I can gather. "Why would they sign up for that?"
"I doubt they realize that. All they see are the big players and think they can be that after the change."
"Even if it means their death?" I asked, because that was the most likely outcome given how much difficulty the vamps had in turning one of their yearlings.
"They all think they're the ones to beat the odds," Nathan said. "They're actually kind of vicious competing for the slots. Anything goes."
"Their masters don't stop it?" I asked.
Nathan lifted one shoulder. "No reason to and many believe you need a certain level of grit to survive the change."
I pulled a face before turning back to the wall. The companion relationship sounded kind of depressing—for both parties. Not exactly what they'd tried to sell me when I first turned up in the mansion.
A pair of names near the bottom caught my eye. They were half-hidden behind another page. I bent and pulled both pieces off the wall.
"Are you sure you should be doing that?" Nathan asked.
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. Maybe there was a rhyme and reason to the way he had this arranged." Nathan moved one hand in a circle encompassing all the chaos.
I looked back at the wall. He had a point, but I didn't understand the method to Theo's madness. That made all this organization pointless. Might as well look at it in a way that made sense to me.
I turned my attention back to the two pieces of paper I held, one a drawing of some type of sigil. The other two names with photos under them.
"That's Theo," Nathan said, pointing at the photo on the left. He was right. Theo was younger, his eyes almost feral and his hair a different color, but it was definitely him.
"And this is Lisa," I said in a soft voice, looking at the photo on the right. Again, it was a younger version with different hair and a fierce expression at odds with the cheery bubble-head I'd interviewed earlier, but it was her. "Her name's different here."
Alissa Benedict. Theo's last name on this was the same. Looking closer, the two seemed to share a resemblance. It was there around the eyes and mouth. Sister and brother, maybe? Cousins?
"I think they're related," I said. The wall held Thomas’s descendants. The upper half paralleled my own research as far as I'd been able to track them. That must mean the lower half contained the missing link—the one Caroline said she'd found shortly before her abduction. It made sense that they would change their last name Bennet to Benedict if they thought someone was hunting them.
I looked back down at the papers in my hand. "That would mean these are Thomas’s descendants. Caroline said they were in Columbus."
What sort of coincidence would have led Theo here right under Thomas’s nose when he most needed him? Too big of one. There was more to this.
There was a thump next to me as Nathan slumped to the floor, blood flowing out from a wound on his back. Theo stood over his body, his head tilted and a sinister smile on his face. "Good job. You put it all together. I'd say congratulations were in order."
I took a step back. How? What? Dead man walking. Why did these things always happen to me?
I started to shout for help. He raised his hand, an unrecognizable object in it. Black flooded out then I dropped to the ground too.