Eternal (21 page)

“What’s wrong?” she asks. Her fingers go to her lips. “Did I do it wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have . . .”

She stands. “It’s because of what I am, isn’t it? Don’t you understand? You can join me, if you want to, but I can’t go back.”

“Miranda, it’s not your fault. This wasn’t your choice. I know you’ve done terrible things. Just, have you considered that you could still be —”

“Saved?” she asks like it’s ridiculous.

I CAN’T BELIEVE
we’re having this conversation. Why did he interview at the castle? What did he think it was, Gymboree? I hoped Zachary would be mine forever. When he kissed me, I was ready to offer him forever. “Pick someone else to proselytize.”

He’s not going to work out, and it’s not an option for him not to work out. Servants to eternals can’t simply quit. They can run and hide and spend their lives haunted by termination orders, or they’re sucked dry before they make it off the property. I have to get him out of here. I show him the face of a gargoyle. “Leave!”

“Miranda, please, let’s just —”

I shove him, and he flies into the hotel-room door. “Open it.”

“You’re overreacting. We —”

“If you’re not out of here in two seconds, I’ll kill you myself.”

Perhaps it’s shock, but when he doesn’t react, I reach behind him, rip the doorknob out of its socket, let it drop from my hand, and toss Zachary into the hall.

“Why did you ever come to me?” I demand. “Why apply for PA in the first place? Why did you kiss me? Why?”

He shakes his head, climbs back to his feet, and turns to walk away.

After Zachary is gone, I sob, hard and ugly, until it feels like something breaks inside. I bend over, take staggering steps, and catch myself against a wall. My fingernails curl into the ornate gold-and-red wallpaper.

I reach with the other hand, higher. Blinking back tears, I’m intrigued. It’s as if my body is weightless. I try another hold farther up.

A second later, I’m skittering across the ceiling, down another wall headfirst, navigating my way around the framed print of the Old Water Tower.

It’s wickedly unnatural. Like Spider-Man, only much,
much
creepier. I’m not a real girl. Until now, tonight was a lie. This is what I am.

“Hello? Hello?” the room-service employee calls, knocking on the knobless door. She pushes it open to enter with a tray of buttered popcorn and a bottle of Shiraz. There’s a white robe draped over her arm.

Hanging from a corner of the ceiling, I tilt my head, spiderlike.

She looks to be in her late teens. I admire her hoop-shaped earrings with floating hearts. She’s tall, long-legged. I wish I had legs like that.

The girl sets the tray on the desk. Slowly, she looks up at me, like she already sensed a predator.

She’s a shifter. A weredeer. Perhaps an Antelope.

It’s that deer-in-the-headlights look that tips me off.

The thirst rolls, cascades through my body. Insistent, entitled.

I recall what my minister said back home. They’re not people. They’re animals in people skin. I wonder what it would feel like to pierce hers. What could it hurt? I’ll enthrall her like I did Geoff, and she’ll never remember.

I flex, releasing my grip on the ceiling, falling to seize the girl’s neck as I land, covering her mouth.

Downy light brown fur ripples across her body. Her ears extend, fold. Her hands and feet collapse into hooves. She tries to buck me off, but I’m stronger and needier.

I don’t realize in time that I’ve drunk too much.

As she dies, the Deer reverts to human form. With my bearing down on her, she hadn’t been able to concentrate enough to lock in her shift.

I sink beside her. “I didn’t mean to. I thought I could stop.”

Popcorn is scattered. Red wine stains the thick beige carpeting. The room smells of both and a hint of meadow.

My cell phone rings, and I grab it, half hoping for Zachary’s voice.

“How is my sugar?” Father wants to know. “I haven’t heard from you lately.”

I glance at the dead Deer. Like me, a vampire took her life. To think, I used to be afraid of people like her. Lucy was right. I was prejudiced.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “I tried to call a few days ago, but there was no answer.”

“Hmm. And how is your new personal assistant?”

Did I tell him about Zachary? I can hardly remember. Maybe Harrison did, before his elevation. Or maybe Father simply assumes I must’ve found someone by now.

I can’t simply pretend that Zachary never held the position. Too many people have seen him. I could say I killed him, but what if we cross paths again? I feign confusion at the rules. “I gave him a brief tryout, but his references never called back. He’s nice to look at, but the world is full of attractive toys.”

It’s delivered with the attitude Father has been trying to cultivate.

“We don’t engage in ‘tryouts,’” Father replies. “He’s a loose end.”

“Not to worry,” I say. “I wiped his short-term memory.”

I bask in Father’s praise of my growing abilities and distract him with news that Harrison is one of us now. “I didn’t know you’d chosen to elevate him.”

“I didn’t,” Father confirms.

“HERE YOU GO, HON,”
Nora says, sliding a fresh champagne glass across the stainless-steel counter toward where I’m seated on a kitchen stool. “It’s pig juice and Cabernet.”

I take a sip and set aside today’s newspaper. I try not to think about how much more satisfying the Deer, Tamara, tasted.

Hotel management covered up my crime. An efficient man with a thin mustache apologized for the mess and switched me to the presidential suite overlooking the lake and Buckingham Fountain. I crawled into the king-size bed in the new room and stayed there until sundown tonight.

When thirst conquered the grief and guilt, when I felt like I might claw through the hotel wall to get at the nearest beating heart, I called Laurie. I asked her to stay put and send a sentry (with a bottle of pig’s blood) in one of the limos to pick me up and then drop off one of his cohorts at the Hancock Center garage to drive the Impaler home.

I’ve been back at the castle for less than an hour.

“You want to talk about it?” Nora asks, resting her elbows on the counter.

I shake my head. She’s the only human servant I’ve seen since I arrived. I’m not even sure I should be here with her. I’m developing a pattern of picking food-service professionals as my fatality victims.

I can’t get Tamara out of my mind. I flip to the first page on shifters in
The Blood Drinker’s Guide.
It says they’re natural, children of God. Tamara was a Deer, but she also was an artist and engaged to be married. She had a grandma Peggy, like I do.

Nora nods at my glass. “More where that came from.”

THE BLACK-AND-BLUE BUTTERFLY
emerges like magic from the dense fog and lights on my palm. “Aren’t you early?”

It raises and lowers fringed wings. The answer is no. Spring is overdue.

After a moment, it flies away, and I watch it go from my seat in the lookout tower. I’m not sure what I’m looking for up here — answers, forgiveness, a second chance? I can’t see anything tonight.

The castle feels empty. With Father overseas, Gus dead, Harrison undead and AWOL, two maids and the handyman on the run, the security guard recently eaten, and Zachary . . . I have no idea what’s become of him.

He’s been gone five nights. He hasn’t used his cell. There have been no charges on the credit card I gave him. I don’t know how much cash he had left in his pocket.

It’s strange. I’d grown accustomed to this existence, accepted it more and more with each passing night. No, more than that. I embraced the power. At moments, I even relished it.

Zachary changed that. The longer that I was with him, the harder it was to face the reality of being an eternal. I was starting to act and think like the girl he wanted me to be, like the girl I
was
before Father killed me.

When Zachary left, though, it was like I spiraled into relapse. It was Tamara’s bad luck to cross my path just then. I haven’t felt bloodlust like that since my first hunt, when I drank that waiter in Greek Town.

“If it isn’t a princess in a tower,” Nora says by way of greeting. Breathing heavily, she joins me on the hard stone bench and hands me a glass of pig-blood wine. The castle has elevators, but they don’t open on the roof. It takes another staircase from the third floor to reach it and then one more, topside, to arrive at this circular outdoor room.

Nora’s bundled in the rose-pattered cashmere shawl I gave her for Solstice.

With two of the maids gone, she and Laurie have been helping to deliver food to the dungeon. I haven’t said anything to the chef about how she’s upgraded the prisoners’ menus. No more hamburger gravy. Tonight Father’s bleeding stock was served quiche Lorraine.

I take a sip. Nora is keeping me well fed, too. “May I ask you a question?”

She waves her hand through the fog, frowning at it. “You can ask.”

I choose my words carefully. I’m not judging. I have no right. “I understand Harrison. He never hid his ambition to become an eternal. He knew what it meant and seemed to crave all it implied. I didn’t know Gus well, but . . .”

“He was wacky in the head.”

She said it. “Why are
you
here?” I ask. “You and Laurie and the maids?”

“As for the maids, I don’t know. They kept to themselves, even before . . .” It’s kind of her not to say it. “The other two are gone now, too.”

An echoing howl rises up, one of the sentries.

“Good for them,” I say, waiting for the rest of the answer.

“They appear to have taken Jonathan Harker’s kukri knife,” Nora adds.

I suppress a sigh. All it’ll buy them is more of Father’s vengeance.

We share an uncomfortable silence. Half the contents of my glass are gone before Nora speaks again. “I didn’t have a choice, or at least I didn’t see a choice at the time. The master read about my catering business in
Southern Living
and decided to acquire me, like he would one of his knives or antiques or properties.”

Like he acquired me.

“I’d been a teen mom. My parents threw me out of the house, and Toby’s father, he had other things to do. That didn’t stop me none. Over the years, I built up my reputation as a chef. Then the master decided I would come here. He showed me what he was. He knew my Toby was a sophomore at Boston College. He knew Toby’s street address. That was over twelve years ago, and the master reminds me now and then that he keeps tabs on my boy.”