A Call of Vampires (A Shade of Vampire #51)

“Taken?” I asked.

“Nine days, milady,” Hera replied, staring ahead at no one in particular, her hands behind her back. “Nine days since our mother vanished. And yes, you are right. I shouldn’t have let Cynara back to work so soon, but she was getting restless at home. I was hoping that work at the inn would keep her busy.”

“Taken?” I asked again, raising my voice.

It earned me a brief glare from Jax, who leaned forward and took another sip from his blood cup.

“Imen have gone missing too?” he asked.

“Plenty, yes,” Emilian replied, his fingers gently tapping the table.

“How many?” Jax continued his interview in a tense but neutral tone.

“We’ve lost count, to be honest.”

“But they’re not included in the two hundred and fifty-seven Exiled Maras,” Jax concluded. None of the Lords replied, save for a collective shake of their heads. “And why weren’t they mentioned up until now?”

“We’ve been preoccupied with our two hundred and fifty-seven, including my daughter,” Rowan replied, visibly irritated.

“So, your two hundred and fifty-seven are more important than the countless Imen who have also become victims of this… whatever this is?” Jax continued, unyielding. His hands rested on the table, fingers spread out.

“The Imen are not our concern!” Rowan shot back. “They chose to stay here on the mountain with us—they know the risks! Our people, however, do not deserve this! It’s bad enough we were banished here. So please excuse us if we worry more about our own than we do about the natives.”

A heavy silence fell between us, while I gave Hera a sideways glance. She seemed surprised by Jax’s questions and underlying tone, which we all felt.

“Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to worry about the Imen, too,” Hansa intervened. “You may not care about them beyond how well they wash your shirts or serve your food or trim your gardens, but we, as GASP operatives, care. So we will need a full list of all those who have disappeared among the Imen as well. Do a roll call if you have to. I don’t care.”

“We would like that list tomorrow,” Jax nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching.

The Five Lords looked uncomfortable, with Caspian downright shooting arrows from his eyes, but eventually nodded. Their reaction seemed to surprise Hera even more, from what I could tell.

“That is fine,” Emilian replied, his voice lower than usual. “We will arrange for a census first thing in the morning, and have our archives checked as well. It may take more than a day, though, as there are many Imen living among us.”

“Day after tomorrow, then,” Jax replied, then put on a half-smile. “Thank you.”

“I’d like to speak to Cynara,” I said, still worried about the Iman girl’s wellbeing. She’d seemed so scared of having made a simple, harmless mistake. It just didn’t feel like a natural reaction.

“She is resting now, milady,” Hera replied politely. “But I’d be more than happy to bring her to the inn tomorrow, for you to speak to her at your leisure.”

“That would be great, thanks,” I muttered, then gulped down the rest of my blood.

“You seem worried,” Vincent said, looking at me.

I felt cold and naked in front of him. I took a deep breath, then shrugged, unable to look away. There was something attractive, almost hypnotic about him, and it clearly wasn’t his mind-bending skill. That didn’t work on vampires.

“Cynara is simply being looked after,” he said gently. “Surely, we must come across as pretentious, enlisting the services of the natives like this, but the Imen prefer living and working here. Most of them get to retire with a couple of bags of gold, which they can enjoy through retirement on other, more exotic parts of the continent.”

“Milord is truthful in his depiction, milady,” Hera added from the sideline.

“We are the elite; that is also true. We are stronger, faster, and live longer than the Imen. We were blessed with eternal life, after all. Of course, there is a particular social order here. But that is how we choose to live, and the Imen accepted that many years ago.”

“You don’t live here,” Darius added, while a servant refilled his blood cup. “I’m not surprised you don’t understand. But each society has different rules, its own customs that it abides by. It is the same wherever you go in the universe. No exception.”

I exhaled, processing the argument and trying to accommodate myself to this form of reasoning. The Imen didn’t seem oppressed. We didn’t have to speak or intervene on their behalf unless their freedom and their safety were in peril. I understood then that it was best if I focused on the disappearances first. We needed both the Exiled Maras and the Imen to cooperate.

Judging by the reassuring nod that Jax gave me, he’d reached a similar conclusion. But I still looked forward to speaking to Cynara. I needed to remove all doubt before I could let go of this completely.





Harper





(Daughter of Hazel & Tejus)





I tried my best to focus on all the creatures in the dining room, Maras and Imen alike, but no matter what I did, my gaze always shifted back to Caspian. And whenever that happened, I found him glaring at me for a second before he looked somewhere else.

“Where did the Imen disappear from?” Jax asked.

“Most of them vanished around or in the Valley of Screams, as did most of our people,” Emilian replied.

“What’s in there that warrants such an ominous name?” I asked, then made the mistake of looking at Caspian, unable to control my curiosity. His gaze caught mine and held it, unyielding and intense, once again sending shivers down my spine. Danger lurked around him like a cloak of shadows.

“It’s because of the blood-chilling screams that come out of it at night,” Caspian said, his voice low and cold. “Whatever is out in those gorges does horrible things to whomever it captures. We can all hear the victims’ screams when the moons are up. We never saw much in there during our earlier explorations, but it’s gotten particularly dangerous over the last couple of years. We’ve stopped venturing through the Valley even during the day. People just… go missing.”

“What about those who vanished from here?” Jax asked.

“We suspect it could be the same thing that dwells or hunts in the Valley of Screams. These are more recent disappearances, though,” Emilian explained.