Prophecy: Child of Light (10 page)

But she had seen things in his eyes and his actions that said it wasn’t just about duty. There had to be a part of him that wanted to help her or he wouldn’t have risked everything to save her from death.

When they began to speak again, she blocked out the sound of it, not wanting to hear any more. It had been wrong of her to listen in on their private conversation. She snuck back to the stairs and pressed her foot down hard on the bottom step, making it creak.

The room went quiet.

She waited a few seconds and then walked to the door. She couldn’t get past what Valentine had said. She hoped that Mathias was right and that it was fear talking.

Walking into the room, she didn’t know how to act when they both looked at her. They had been sitting by the fireplace, but as she entered, Mathias stood and placed a hand on Valentine’s shoulder before walking over to his books.

She let her eyes meet Valentine’s. He stood and gave her an indefinable look before turning to face the fire.

“Valentine... this isn’t the time,” Mathias said.

She didn’t take her eyes off Valentine. He growled and dug his fingertips into the mantelpiece, his head hung so she couldn’t see it. He didn’t look at her when he pushed off and walked over to the books that littered the table by Mathias.

Her eyes lowered to the small table beside one of the armchairs and she saw a half-full decanter of golden liquid and a used glass. He had been drinking.

“Come here, child.” Mathias beckoned her and she resisted telling him not to call her a child. She supposed in his eyes she was. She was so used to having a high standing amongst vampires and hadn’t realised that another bloodline wouldn’t treat her according to her rank. Both Valentine and Mathias treated her like a child.

Her gaze strayed to Valentine. He was leafing through a book and looked as though he was still struggling with whatever was plaguing him. She kept her distance, not wanting to make him feel uncomfortable, and looked down at the stack of books nearest her.

“Let me get a look at you,” Mathias said.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Valentine raise his head.

She held her head high, letting the scribe look her over and feeling as though she had gone from being treated as though she was a child to a prized thoroughbred as he prodded and poked her. She frowned into his dark eyes and mused that he wasn’t much taller than her and he was almost as slim. She could probably take him in a fight. She growled when he grabbed hold of her wrists, turning her hands over and gazing at her palms.

“Ouch,” she said when he caught hold of her jaw and forced her to face Valentine.

Her eyes met Valentine’s green ones.

“Mathias,” Valentine said in a venomous tone and a dark look knitted his brows. “Let her go.”

She felt fingers run over the marks on her neck and saw Valentine’s expression darken.

“I said let her go.” He started to move around the table but stopped when Mathias released her.

“No other marks or signs of a sire?” Mathias didn’t look at her, he was holding Valentine’s gaze, giving him a look that made it clear that he wasn’t impressed by the fact that Valentine had commanded him to let her go.

She placed her hand over the marks on her neck and took a step backwards.

“None,” Valentine said and visibly relaxed. “Just as I told you before.”

She wondered how long they’d been talking before she’d listened in on them.

“You were right not to kill her.” Mathias looked at her as he spoke to Valentine. “There is more to the prophecy than they tell the children.”

“There is?” Valentine gave him a look of disbelief.

“The elders made sure that only a chosen few were told the true meaning of the prophecy. The rest have been told that the vampire will destroy the world. The prophecy hasn’t been translated in over a thousand years and now even those manuscripts are lost. They split the original scroll into two and hid each part in a place deemed safe.”

“Why?” She couldn’t help asking the question. The elders had to have had a reason for not wanting everyone to know the real prophecy.

“I’m not certain. It is possible that one of the elders would know. When I was a youngling, they altered the status of the prophecy to that of a sacred text. It is now illegal to translate it, which raises suspicion in my mind that there is vital information contained within it that the elders wished to keep hidden. I have never seen it myself, but I will translate it if you can bring it to me. I do not fear the Law Keepers. To understand the true extent of the prophecy you’re involved in, we need to study the scroll in its entirety,” Mathias said and her eyes dropped to rest on the books before coming up to meet Valentine’s.

“You said that I would destroy all demons, but that you didn’t believe it because of the vision you saw from my blood.”

He nodded.

She looked at Mathias. “What do you remember of the prophecy? What were you told?”

“We will know the child of the prophecy because they were born during a great eclipse. In their lifetime, another will come, but this one will signal the end. Nine of the translators believed that the child of the prophecy would damn our kind, but one amongst them believed differently. She believed that the child would be a saviour. Not just of demons, but of the world.”

Prophecy didn’t know what to say. She was either supposed to kill all demons or save the world. How was she meant to react to that? When Valentine had told her that she would kill everything, she’d wished that he’d killed her. She couldn’t bear the thought that she would do such a thing and she’d felt powerless to stop it. Now Mathias was telling her that there was a chance that she was supposed to save everyone, but it was only one person in ten that had thought so. It was all too much. How could she save the world? In her eyes, it seemed easier to destroy it. To save it seemed impossible.

She looked at Valentine when he moved towards her and then she turned away from him, heading for the door. She glanced back at him when she reached it and found he was standing where she had been. She felt even more confused when she noticed he looked concerned.

“I’m just... I need some air,” she said and walked out of the room.

She went through the house, letting her instincts guide her while she remained heavy in thought. Her head ached as she tried to make sense of everything. When she’d come downstairs, she’d thought that she was ready to deal with the things that Mathias would have to tell her, but obviously she wasn’t.

A weight pressed down on her chest as she thought about what he’d said.

Save the world.

Not just her species, or demonkind, but the world and everything in it.

Pushing a pair of doors open, she felt relieved when the cool night air washed over her, enveloping her like a comforting blanket and soothing her. She raised her eyes to the sky and stared at the stars and the crescent moon.

She felt so small, so insignificant.

She wasn’t strong enough to save the world. It was asking too much of her. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. If she didn’t save it, then she would destroy it. Maybe that’s what it meant. If she didn’t succeed, then her kind would die. Everyone would die.

Maybe she really was supposed to be the end of everything.

She found her fingers tracing the raised design on the star around her neck and stared at one of the constellations twinkling above her. It was the hunter, Orion. She frowned as a flicker of a memory surfaced and disappeared before she had time to catch it. It all seemed so familiar. Had she been here before and looked at this scene above her in the past? She had looked out of the window of her room so many times back at the mansion, but she couldn’t remember ever really stopping to look at the stars as she was now.

Her heart felt heavy when she thought about her home and realised that she would probably never see it again, at least not under good circumstances. She didn’t want to miss it, told herself that her years there hadn’t been as happy as her memories seemed to make them now, but she couldn’t help herself. Everything was happening so fast and every time she thought she was coping, something else came up to make things worse.

She wrapped her fingers tighter around the star and looked at the moon as she sat down on the little bench behind her. To think, she still could have been unaware of everything had she obeyed her mother’s rules and remained in the mansion. Part of her wished that she had. She wished that she could go back to being in the dark and locked in the house. But how long could they have kept her hidden? Mathias had said that another eclipse would come, like the one that had apparently happened when she was born. When she was born? Born as a human, or turned into a vampire? Either way she couldn’t remember it.

Her thumb came to rest against the back of the silver star, running over the holes that marked it and the protrusions.

It seemed so calming, as though it was carrying away all her heavy thoughts and leaving her mind clear.

She tensed when she felt someone nearby.

Her sense of calm disappeared, replaced by one of confusion when Valentine came to stand not five foot from her. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes fixed on the heavens and continued to stroke the star, wishing it would calm her again now. Everything was so much more bewildering when he was near to her. She wanted to talk to him, but didn’t want to, not after the things he’d said about her. He didn’t want to be near her. He didn’t care about her.

So why had he looked so concerned when she’d left the room, and why was he here now?

Was Mathias right? Was Valentine merely frightened of the things that were happening? Was that why he wanted to distance himself from her?

“May I sit?” His voice sounded uncertain and he ventured a step closer.

She just sighed. He would sit if he really wanted to, of that she was sure, but it wouldn’t help clarify things about him in her head. It would only make them more confusing.

He sat at the other end of the bench, leaving some space between them. She was thankful for it. If he’d sat closer, he would have only made everything worse.

She wished that she could make sense of him, at least then she’d have one less thing on her mind.

She traced the constellations above her, occupying her mind by trying to picture what they had looked like in the books she’d read. They’d always had images drawn over the top of them, pictures of mystical beasts and people from ancient myths. She’d never been able to see them like that. When she looked at the stars, she saw different images overlaying them. They were pictures of the constellations that she’d never seen, and she had to wonder why they were etched in her memory so deeply that she could only recall them and not the ones she remembered seeing.

The moon was beautiful, nothing more than a thin crescent in the deep blue sky.

“We shall discover more about the prophecy in due time.” His voice cut the silence and a frown flickered on her brow before she relaxed again.

“You mean more about me,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the stars.

His silence told her that he didn’t know what to say in response to that.

“I feel...” She trailed off. She felt self-conscious, unsure of whether she should be saying such things to him when she wasn’t sure if he cared about her at all.

“Go on,” he said in a gentle tone.

She brought her eyes down from the stars to rest on him. He was sitting at an angle facing her. One of his arms was resting against his knee and he leaned forwards. There was a look in his eyes that said he wanted to know what she had been about to say.

Did he really?

She wanted to believe that he did, but it was all too much to deal with. She had to speak though. The words weren’t going to stay inside her and she had to say them in order to make herself feel better. A part of her hoped that he would say something comforting. It would be easy to fool herself into believing he cared if he responded to what she was going to say with something reassuring.

“I feel like everything has been a lie. My whole life has been one big lie. I’ve spent it pretending that everything was okay, and that the little things that constantly raised questions in my head didn’t exist. I did have a sire. I did have marks once but now they’re gone. That was it. I wasn’t abnormal. The reason people weren’t allowed to speak to me was because of my standing within my family, not because I was different in some way. The looks they gave me were because of who I was, not because they feared me for some unknown reason. I’ve fooled myself for so long and now I can’t.” She closed her eyes and let her head fall backwards so she was facing the sky. “Now I realise that I’ve been living a lie all these years, and the questions I’ve held at the back of my mind won’t leave me be.”

“What questions?”

She smiled at the way his voice had maintained its gentleness.

“Valentine?”

“Prophecy?” He shifted closer to her and she opened her eyes.

“Do you remember daylight, sunrise... sunsets?” She didn’t dare look at him, not until she had control over her feelings. She forced herself to remain as calm as she appeared, even though there was a dark vortex of pain growing inside of her, consuming every shred of peace she had felt and leaving her hurting worse than she’d ever done. Now that she’d begun to remember all the times she’d fooled herself into thinking everything was okay, she couldn’t stop the questions and the sense of fear that was creeping in.

“Vaguely,” he said. “Why?”

She looked at him. “I don’t. I don’t remember anything about my human life.”

He raised a brow and inclined his head, giving her a curious look. “You don’t? Why not?”

“I don’t know... Arkalus tries to help me. Every death day of mine, he takes me to the vault where it’s quiet and he tries to help me remember. I never do.”

His expression had darkened when she’d mentioned her brother and he looked pensive. “Some vampires can repress the memory.”

It had sounded as though he was talking to himself more than to her, but she hadn’t missed what he’d said and it had raised more questions in her head, questions that she now realised she should have asked long ago. Was there a reason why all her years in the mansion had seemingly been spent in the same way?