I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm myself as my eyes continued to adjust to the darkness. Several of Evelaena’s child companions were scattered about the room, too, standing against the wall or curled up on the broken furniture. I jumped as I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head to see one of the youngest-looking ones crawling on the ground near my feet, lapping at drips of blood falling from my wings.
“Get the fuck away from me,” I spat, kicking at the girl like a stray cat, and she gave me an appropriate hiss before skittering away.
“Don’t speak to my children that way.” Evelaena moved swiftly, with all of Vincent’s smooth grace. She still wore the bloody dress from our fight. She was close enough now that I could see the burns on her hand. When she carried the sword, she did so with a wad of fabric around it, now stained black with her blood. She couldn’t wield it, either.
Her lip curled as she glanced down at it. “I wondered where this had gone. If the usurper had taken it or managed to destroy it. Turns out, he just gave it to his wife.”
Something glinted in the darkness as she leaned closer to me—the pendant, now dangling around her neck. Her dress was open low, the mottled scar tissue forming a grotesque halo around the moon.
Her head cocked, eyes predator-sharp. “Can you wield it, cousin?”
“No one can wield it but him. You know that.”
Evelaena laughed, high and manic. She leapt closer still, her free hand coming to my throat, then sliding down—over the bare skin of my upper chest, where she’d opened up my leathers to reveal my Heir Mark.
“I had to see if this was real,” she said. “Tried to scrub it off you while you were out.”
If only it was so fucking easy.
“Get off of me,” I hissed, but she only pressed harder against my chest, making the nails tug at the delicate skin of my wings.
“I thought it would be me,” she said. “I was Vincent’s closest living relative. I spent my whole life training to be queen one day. Do you think it’s easy? Learning how to rule all by yourself?” She thrust the sword behind her, wildly gesturing to her child soldiers. “I needed subjects to rule! Do you know how hard it was to bring this damned place back from the dead? And I was all alone! All alone!”
Her voice cracked. The scent of something burning hit my nostrils. The dim cold light hit Evelaena’s chest, revealing that the pendant was burning her, too, where it lay against her skin. Every time it swung back against her, she winced.
“But then there was you. You, who he kept alive. You, who smell so—so human.” Her nostrils flared. She leaned closer still, our bodies now nearly flush.
Every muscle stiffened.
Too close. Too fucking close.
“Get off of me,” I snarled.
Nightfire. There was Nightfire in this room. I just had to reach for it, call to it. Even if my own refused to come to me. I’d done it before. I— “Why do you deserve this? You, a human?”
And then the next thing I knew, Evelaena’s mouth was at my throat.
Pain, as her teeth dug into my skin.
A wave of sickening dizziness as her venom hit my veins.
I gasped, flailing out against her, my knee coming up to strike her and failing to make contact. Her grip on me was impossibly strong. With every gulp of blood she took from me, my vision blurred.
It was Evelaena’s mouth on my skin.
The Ministaer’s.
My old lover’s.
Panic set in, artificially dimmed by the venom. I was trapped. Helpless. Heir Mark or no. Wings or no.
Evelaena released me, throwing her head back and licking blood from the side of her mouth.
“You taste human,” she hissed. “You look human. You smell human.”
My head lolled. I forced myself back to consciousness through the fog of the venom.
Think. I had to think.
“And it was you.” She laughed, hoarse and raw. She straightened, and the pendant fell against her chest, and again, she flinched.
She froze, going abruptly still. Her eyes gleamed with tears.
“I always thought he meant to leave me alive,” she said, barely louder than a whisper. “Always thought it was his plan. That he chose me. But—”
Her hand clutched the pendant, white-knuckle tight, blood bubbling between her fingers.
Suddenly, I understood.
She didn’t just flinch because of the pain of the burns. But she had experienced what I did when she touched that thing. Pieces of Vincent. Distant shards of his memory.
His memory of the night he had tried to kill her, a five-year-old child. And had failed. Not because he intended to. Not because he meant to spare her. But because he had killed so many children that night that he was a little sloppy, and she wasn’t important enough to risk going back for.
And for an odd moment, I understood her so completely that it twisted a knife in my heart. She was obsessed with Vincent. She loved him because he was her only tenuous connection to power and hated him because of what he had put her through. She survived for centuries by building up fairy tales around him, around Lahor, around a crown she might wear one day.
And now she was realizing that she had meant nothing to him.
There was no plan. No secret. No fate.
Just a careless, bloodthirsty man and motives that did not make sense.
I saw myself in Evelaena as clearly as if I was looking into a mirror. Both of us built and broken by the same man. She had prayed for fate and gotten feckless luck. I had hinged my life on luck and gotten secrets.
I got power. She got nothing.
But at least she could get revenge.
You are not like them.
Vincent’s words echoed in my head. I hated him for them. And yet, in this moment, I latched onto them with ugly certainty.
He was right. I wasn’t.
I was one of the most powerful vampires in the House of Night. In all of Obitraes. I had that power, even if I didn’t know how to access it. It was in me.
This bitch did not get to be the one to kill me.
An idea solidified in this understanding—a risky one.
“You’re still his blood,” I whispered. “Whether he recognized that or not.”
She scoffed, but I went on, “I don’t want bad blood between us, cousin. You deserved more. And I—I would give you the sword. If you want it.”
She hesitated. One of the children, a little girl, stood, interest piqued, her fair gaze spearing me—like she saw what I was doing.
“You’re owed that much, don’t you think?” I said. “For what he did to you?”
Evelaena’s eyes fell to me, then the sword in her hands. And then back to me again.
They shone with lust. Evelaena was a creature driven wild with starvation—for blood, for power, for love, for validation. The only reason I was alive right now was because she had so gorged herself the night before, but the hint of blood lust still visible in her face right now was due to a much deeper hunger, one that had been following her, I suspected, for two hundred years.
She didn’t even know what she wanted to do with me. Love me, hate me, eat me, fuck me, kill me. Hell, all of those things, maybe.
This seemed like a revelation.
I’d spent my entire life fixated on all the ways vampires were different than me. I’d been so certain that all my confusion and frustration was because of my fragile human nature.
But Raihn was right. Vampires were every bit as fucked up.
I didn’t even need to be that good of an actress. Evelaena was desperate to believe me.