Of Light and Darkness (13 page)

Everything grew silent again as the group became painfully aware of Charlotte’s mortality. It was the warmest, most evident scent in the room. Valek saw a few of their thoughts as they glanced at her again. His jaw clenched.

“No one will touch her until she is well again. No one will even think about her until I say it is right. Is that understood?” he growled.

They all obliged without argument. Their thoughts told Valek that they kept all the blood they needed in a small freezer that sat against the wall for now. It would suffice until the girl had regained her strength.

“No one will touch her,” the blonde female repeated, assuring him with a soft smile.

Valek looked upon Francis, the concern forming creases in his forehead. “She was attacked by a group of us a little smaller than this one. She needs food and some sort of supplement. Her heart rate continues to decline. They would have drained her if the Regime guards didn’t rip those parasites off her.” His eyes welled up with the memory, the last of his words biting.

Francis only nodded before he looked to Sarah. She smiled, nodding, and flitted back toward the tunnel. She would concoct something to help Charlotte. Valek heard it in her mind when she nodded at him.

Valek turned to find the group still staring at him, some empathetic, some disgusted. But he accepted neither pity nor disapproval. He didn’t need any more friends, especially if they were Vampires. There was nothing he cared more about than what he was holding in his arms.

He walked over to the rows of coffins and turned on the group again, all of them still watching.

“Which is empty?” he asked, coolly.

“None,” the one called Lusian said just as evenly, though he pivoted to snicker with Jorge, the younger-looking male with blond hair pulled back behind his head.

Valek approached the group slowly again, eyeing the one that had just spoken. “We can do this the hard way.” He quickly pulled up his knee and shoved his boot right in the large Vampire’s chest, sending him flying backward, splintering a chair. “I am not here to make friends,” Valek murmured. He looked to the rows of crypts. “I will ask again. Which is empty?”

“The last three.” The female with the dark hair spoke this time as she helped Lusian to his feet.

Valek moved to the one in the center in the last row and kicked the lid off. The inside was superfluous with layers of red silk and lace. When Francis said he liked cliché, it had clearly not been in jest.

“Reckless behavior is not going to help your situation!” Francis sputtered frantically.

Valek ignored him. He crouched and gently placed Charlotte inside—something he did not particularly like doing. He tried to imagine it was just like any other bed. He watched her face, still peaceful, as he removed his torn overcoat and wrapped it around her.

He sat on the ground beside her, one hand holding tightly onto hers. He would continue to stay there until she woke up. He wanted to be the first thing she saw, so she would know she was safe. He thought back to the night the Lycan attacked the human farmer just outside of the Occult again. He thought about the way she’d looked at him with different eyes, as though he were the feared monster under her bed.

About half an hour passed, and Sarah soon returned with canteens of soup, bread, and other things the Witch found in the middle of the night to sustain the human girl. She placed a small chocolate bead in Valek’s hand.

“Have her swallow that. That will help her blood replenish,” she said, before flitting off.

Charlotte had not yet awoken from her sleep, and Valek continued to wait unabatedly by her side, while the others whispered things by the firelight. Valek could hear everything they were saying, and more. They might as well have screamed it out at the top of their lungs.

Disgusting
, he heard one of them think.
The way he lingers over her as though she were his dying lover
.

“I’ve seen this before,” Jorge whispered. “It becomes something like an obsession—the love between mortal and immortal. It’s compulsive—being obsessed with their human lover’s mortality. They fall in love with that which they lost. The warmth, the thriving, living, breathing feeling.” He was explaining to Sasha, a beautiful male with ebony skin. “It is not healthy. And it never ends well.”

“But I thought the girl was something like a
child
to him.” Sasha’s manicured brow furrowed.

Jorge cocked his head toward Valek. “Well, it certainly doesn’t appear that way anymore.” He murmured as though Valek
still
couldn’t hear, which made Valek burn even more.

Sasha went on pondering this. Valek snorted in contempt.
Idiot
, he thought in Jorge’s general direction.

After a while, the blonde came to sit next to him. He didn’t look up from Charlotte’s face. His features strained when he sensed the blonde draw nearer. The Vampire had a full glass in her hand as she lightly tapped Valek’s shoulder.

“What?” he said, without shifting his gaze.

“You’ve been sitting here for hours. The sun’s almost up. You’re thirsty.” She offered him the glass, her voice staying as airy and light as it was before.

Only then did he look at what she was handing him. He hadn’t realized the aching that had begun again in the back of his throat, or the burning he felt in his center until he smelled it in the glass. He gazed at her with completely enveloped irises. The truth was, he forgot completely about what he was, because for those hours he prayed for Charlotte, he was human.

“Take it. If she wakes before the morning, you don’t want her to see you like this.”

Valek apprehensively took the glass from her, searching through her mind, finding nothing cruel or judgmental about him. He sipped and winced as the cold ambrosia ran down his throat. He had never had it cold before. It almost did nothing to satiate him, and he finally understood what Francis had been talking about.

“I know it’s awful. But it’s the best we have right now, until—”

“Please,” he interrupted her. “Don’t mention it.”

There was a moment of silence as they both watched Charlotte’s face.

“She’ll be okay. She’s dreaming,” the blonde said.

“Oh.” Valek stroked Charlotte’s cheek. “That’s good.”

“Don’t you want to know what she’s dreaming about?”

“Yes. More than anything. But I promised her I’d stay out of her head,” he explained with a slight smile when his Lottie sighed.

“I see. I’m Andela.” She offered her hand to him.

“Valek.” He ignored the gesture.

Andela withdrew her hand. “Well, if you or Charlotte need anything, I’ll be here.” She smiled softly. “She
will
be safe, Valek,” she soothed, and walked back to join the rest of the group.

He studied Charlotte’s sweet face, wanting so much for her eyes to flutter open. He thought back just a couple of nights before, when she had crawled into bed with him—how her face looked then, the way she smiled when she dreamt. He wished he hadn’t reacted the way he did. He would give anything to go back and relive that night. But even with all of the inhumanity he possessed, he could never turn back the hands of time.

He lifted her hand to his face, just so he could feel her warmth again. He closed his eyes, inhaling her scent, allowing himself to be comforted by it, though the guilt continued to twist at his insides.

“Valek….” Her little voice rose from the box beside him.

His eyelids flew open to see her watching him. Valek felt the group of Vampires around the fire grow very still again.

“I’m here, Lottie,” he whispered. Everything else in the room seemed to disappear.

“Valek,” she repeated, her eyes closing and reopening like those of an antique doll.

“Are we safe?”

“For now.” He smiled.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

“For what?”

“For before. For when I stopped trusting you,” she said. “This is my fault.”

“No.” He hushed her. “No. I was very wrong about a lot of things. You had every right to be angry.”

“Not with you.” Her gaze moved from his face to her surroundings—the soft sides of the casket around her. “Am I dead?”

“No.” He chuckled. A few soft laughs resonated from the fireplace, too. “You’re fine. You’re my Lottie. You scared me a little, but you’re safe now.” He ran his fingers through pieces of her hair and began to hum her lullaby.

Chapter Thirteen

Rogues

Charlotte slowly sat up, her head still spinning. She clutched the sides of the coffin so she wouldn’t fall back again. Valek’s hand swiftly moved to the middle of her back to help her keep balance.

His eyebrows pulled together as he appraised her. “Perhaps you should not get up yet,” he warned. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You may need a transfusion.”

Charlotte blinked until the spinning went away. Her head still pounded, but nothing else seemed to hurt. She could see all of her flesh wounds had been healed. She only
felt
weak. She turned to see several luminescent eyes that matched Valek’s staring at her from one corner of the room. She stared back at them with the same curiosity.

“Who are they?” she asked, fighting to remember what had happened.

Valek rushed to explain. “We escaped from the Regime. We’re at a friend’s house. He’s harboring rogues. Nowhere else is safe.”

Charlotte turned her gaze back on him.

“The Regime?
That’s
where we were?” She was astonished as more questions invaded her mind. She recalled every detail of the guard’s face, who found her hiding in Valek’s bedroom, as though she had known it forever. She remembered feeling her mouth open to scream, but hearing nothing as they dragged her away, kicking and clawing through the mud and the cool, morning rain as it splashed onto her skin. Everything had gone hazy. Something heavy had come down on her head, making her world go black. The last thing she saw was Valek’s fearful, blazing eyes before she woke up in the dungeon.

“Do you remember?” Valek furrowed his eyebrows.

Charlotte saw him then.
Really
saw him. She analyzed his torn shirt and disheveled hair about his dirty beautiful face. She grabbed onto him with as much strength as she could muster and pulled him close, wrapping her arms around who she thought she had surely lost.

“You saved me!” she cried. She saw the large doors on fire, though the vision blurred in her mind. She heard the thunderous orders from the guards and felt the wind that pulsed by her when they were running through the night. It was all very distant.

“You saved me,” she whispered again.

Valek smiled.

“Your face….” His skin was cracked, like broken marble. “I tried to stop it.” She reached up to stroke the burn scars, but he met her fingers with his and pulled them gently away.

“I know. I will be all right, Lottie.”

“How do we heal it?”

“I don’t think we can.” He changed the subject. “It is not important at this moment.”

Charlotte gaped wide-eyed around the dark basement. The warm firelight danced off the hauntingly beautiful, macabre faces that gazed back at her, studying her, as she did them. There must have been ten or twelve of them, each having their own pair of crystal-colored eyes. She saw the ominous daggers gleaming in their mouths, tasting the scent she left in the air.

Various parts of her body started to prickle with the memory. She shut her eyes against the vision, feeling as though she were back in the dungeon of the Regime. She smelled the polluted smoke again and saw the sinister shadows that hissed at her. She knotted her fists in her hair, pushing the images away. When she felt something cool touch her hand, she looked to see Valek regarding her with worry.

“Lottie. They are safe.” He put her fingertips to his cool cheek again. “You are safe. I swear it to you.” He frowned.

Charlotte gaped at him, tears stinging the bridge of her nose. She knew she was safe, but there was something else—something she desperately needed to tell him. She felt it burn every time his gaze locked with hers.

“Charlotte….” Andela’s soft voice shattered the ice that seemed to form in the silence.

Charlotte looked at the other Vampire’s soft, scary smile.

“Charlotte, there is something very wrong happening. We were hoping you could perhaps help us.” She spoke carefully, as if she were speaking to a wild rabbit. “The Regime is sending their guards to different Occults across Europe, and it seems they are only seeking out our kind. Vampires. We need to understand why. Each of us escaped from a different Occult city, and as far as we know, there are very few of us left.” Andela’s eyes were just as frightened and teary as Charlotte’s.

Charlotte looked back at the group huddled by the fire, and this time she saw their faces. She saw the horrified expressions. The mortal emotions. They weren’t monsters anymore. They were people. A different kind of people. She looked back to Andela and nodded.

***

Soon Charlotte was cuddled up with a large wool blanket closest to the fire, nursing a canteen of soup, though she could barely hold her head up. Valek huddled tightly next to her, with the rest of the group crowding around in a large circle. They listened intently as Charlotte told them about how the Lycan guarding the Occult gates attacked her and Evangeline a few nights before, and about the list Aiden showed her. They watched the images in her head, analyzing every picture.

“Charlotte, could you imagine again the list Aiden showed you for a moment?” Jorge, the young, blond Vampire asked.

She did and they all saw it as she did, trying to clearly decipher the fuzzy pictures enough to read the names on the paper.

“So, the Regime hired that Lycan to guard the Occult?” The one called Dusana asked from her perch on a torn armrest. She and Lusian matched each other. A bit more frightening than the rest, with chopped, raven hair about an angular face, clad with metal piercings. Several tattoos snaked around Dusana’s arms from under her torn, black shirt.

“Yes,” Charlotte replied.

“But that’s odd, isn’t it?” Dusana looked at Francis. “It attacked even when she was with Danek’s boy.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lusian, the large Vampire, interjected from a dark corner. “If the dog was trained to sniff out magic, it would have attacked Aiden, no matter who he was. Lycans have absolutely no self-control.” He spat acid to the floor.

“Continue,” Francis told Charlotte.

“And when Meredith fixed my leg on the evening I was attacked, she said some very strange things,” she continued. “Racial slurs against Valek for what he is, like she was trying to warn me.” She glanced up at Valek’s hard face. “Or to
keep
me.”

“You said Aiden never spoke much about his father,” Andela said.

“Every time I asked, he just told me he was working. I assumed he was just another average Elf,” Charlotte admitted, fiddling with the canteen in her hand. She yawned, her coherency waning again. The soft light in the room seemed to blur behind her heavy eyes.

“And about his mother?” Jorge asked. “What was it she said that specifically bothered you?”

“Something about Valek being dangerous. In all the years they’ve known each other, she never spoke about him that way.” Charlotte frowned. “Valek and Meredith have been friends for years. Or so I thought.”

“It’s interesting that this is starting now,” Lusian said. The group got silent.

“What are you gibbering about, Lusian?” asked Francis.

“Do you remember that one crazy bastard? You know, the Vampire who attacked Vladislov a few years ago, when the Wizard’s Regime first began instituting their stupid laws?” He shrugged off the wall and walked to the center of the group.

“Right!” Dusana jumped up. “The Vampire who set out to assassinate the Regime.” She laughed. “You really had to have been crazy to try that one. It was splashed all over Occult presses.”

“Right. How many years ago would you estimate that was?” Lusian asked.

“I don’t know. At least twenty,” she said.

He stopped pacing. “Are two decades enough time to plot an entire genocide?” His eyes flashed. “A war, even?”

“If there was going to be a war, there would have to be an opposing side.” Francis rolled his eyes. “And we all know how one-sided the Regime is.”

“No, it isn’t. What kind of magic are the Elves and the Fae? Light. They are light magic. And what are we?”

“Dark,” Dusana mused.

Lusian lifted his hands like he had successfully proven something.

“Anyway, do you really think
one
Vampire was enough to scare the Regime enough into killing us all?” Jorge scoffed.

“Yes. Why not? They never found him. He escaped.” Lusian moved deeper into the circle, his features made more intense by the firelight. “Why not get rid of the lot of us just to make sure justice was indeed served? And there might be more of us out there, trying to get at Vladislov’s throat.
That’s
what the Regime is betting on.”

“Yes, but on what grounds do they stand? It would be considered mass murder. And I don’t care what society in which you live—light or dark. That is
completely
unjust.” Francis dismissed the idea with a lacey wave of the hand.

“Yes, Francis! But who cares when you’re sitting at the top of the chain? Who’s going to punish
them?
” Lusian’s voice was ecstatic. “Think about it. That one incident probably scared the old guy enough to conduct something this insane. The bottom line is, we
are
disappearing. There were many Vampires in my Occult. All were captured, except for me.”

The group thought for a moment. Charlotte was amazed as she watched them all work together as one collective brain. Their faces carried the same expression at the same time.

“‘We are the only things you will never defeat,’” Valek mused, chuckling darkly. All of them turned to look at him.

“You
know
those words scared Vladislov,” Lusian said.

Francis continued to argue. “Still, how would they justify this? They would lose the respect of all the Occult people for killing mercilessly. Creatures would revolt. This goes completely against the magic code, ‘Harm none, and do as you will’.”

“
We
kill mercilessly, don’t we? We hunt for our food.” Lusian glanced at Charlotte. They all glanced at Charlotte.

“We kill to survive. Most living things do,” Valek countered.

“But we kill mortals, Valek. Even
you
do. People just like
her
.” Lusian pointed his talon at Charlotte. “We are responsible for more human deaths than car accidents, and
that’s
the ground on which they stand.
That
is how they are justifying all of this. The thing is—we are the victims now!” Lusian walked over and crouched in front of Charlotte. “Thanks to your papa here, the hunters have become the hunted.”

“Step away from her,” Valek warned, swiftly moving between them.

“He is not my father,” Charlotte said quietly. Her flushed cheeks burned in a flurry of embarrassment and rage.

Lusian’s menacing gaze shifted to Valek. “I’m not the one who is the cause of all of this. It is
your
fault. We should just turn you in now!”

The rest of the coven gaped at Valek, completely and simultaneously frozen.

“You could do that,” Valek dismissed. “But do you really think this would all just go away in an instant? Vladislov rules the entire magical world, and he’s got them believing our kind is evil. My opinion is, instead of using your efforts to ‘out’ me, we focus on finishing what I started under two decades ago.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened at him. Was Valek the same Vampire who nearly killed Vladislov twenty years ago? She saw his eyes flicker toward her for a split second.

“How do you propose we do this?” Francis asked.

“We have to fight. This isn’t going to be some peaceful revolution—a simple argument. Clearly, they do not know how to reason.” Lusian turned to the rest of the group, making eye contact with every one of them. “We’ve got to form an army. As many of us as they can’t catch. We fight to the death.” He wheeled back to Valek, except this time, a flash of admiration lived in his eyes. “Because it’s true, isn’t it? We
are
the only things they will never defeat.”

Valek nodded once. Charlotte looked at him again.

“No,” Andela croaked from somewhere in the back of the group.

All heads jerked to look at her. One of her claws gripped the chair, her nails tearing holes in the leather, the other one, she clutched to her chest. The whites in her eyes were completely overtaken by black then.

“It is starting again.” Blood spilt over her lips as she choked.

Francis blanched. “What time is it?”

“Eight o’ clock,” Jorge said.

“Damn. Okay, we continue this tomorrow night,” Lusian instructed. He swiftly moved over to his coffin on the other side of the room and drew a long, silver dagger from his belt.

“Don’t look,” Valek whispered, burying Charlotte’s face in his chest. Lusian’s painful, garbled cry wrung out as he pulled himself into his tomb, his black shirt sticky and wet at the center. He reached out, yanking the lid overtop, choking until the coffin closed with a thump.

Charlotte looked up at Valek, seeing his eyes were dark as well. He frowned at her.

“Sometimes, it’s just easier to get it over with,” Valek explained, stroking her cheek. He lifted her off the ground into his arms.

Crying and moaning resonated from the others as they started like Lusian before them, dropping one by one. Some dragged it out, holding onto life as long as they could.

“Do not take your eyes off of me,” he whispered.

She obeyed as he carried her over to the coffin he had put her in earlier. Charlotte wound her fingers in the torn material of his shirt, hiding her face in his chest. There it was again, his most beautiful scent.

He knelt to the dirt floor, eyes still fixed on hers. “Everything will be fine. Do you remember the day you snuck into my bedroom?” His smile was strange and crooked, filled with an intense suffering. Charlotte gulped, nodding. “Well, this is going to be just like that. All right?”

She nodded again. “Okay.”

“No reason to be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

Someone shrieked from the other side of the room, and Charlotte jumped. Valek lowered her in first. When he let go of her his joints cracked, and he cried out in pain like the rest of them.