Deathless (The Vein Chronicles Book 2)

  Again, silence. “It creeps me out, coming to kill someone and not even exchanging names first,” I continued. “It’s fine if you’re sleeping with someone to not catch their name—in fact, it’s preferred—but I think taking someone to their eternal sleep at least requires a first-name basis. I feel rather uncouth otherwise.”

  The vampire moved. And it was in such a way like those old dinosaur lizards moved, slowly and purposefully and super creepily. He moved so he could rest his elbows on his knees and lean forward slightly.

  “You come into my resting place deigning to kill me?” he asked, his voice grating and almost painful to hear, the substance wrong somehow. Devoid of it all. Every single drop of whatever it meant to be human was drained from him.

  I wondered if it was something I could hire someone to do for me.

  “Your resting place?” I repeated, once again looking around the room that wasn’t a room. It was a cave, in the bowels of an old decrepit apartment building in Manhattan that had stood empty for years despite its grandeur.

  I knew why it was empty now. This man owned it all.

  If not with money, then with the evil and wretched energy of the room, turning it into something different than what it was.

  “No, it’s not very restful in here, if you ask me. Which of course you didn’t, but I’m here, so I’ll offer you an opinion anyway. You can’t rest in a place that doesn’t have a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets. Just not okay. And you don’t even have a mini fridge or a TV.”

  The bones scattered around the place—human in nature, of course—were the only décor. “I know you’re snacking on humans to survive, but you’ve got to thrive. And it’s with the help of beers or wine that you’d do that.”

  “Are you quite done?” His voice echoed through the chamber, the simple words dragging out beyond anything I’d ever experienced.

  “Done?” I repeated. “Oh, I’m never done.”

  His eyes followed my movements with the sword, as if he was expecting me to use it then and there.

  “You are like her in many ways,” he said finally, after yet another staring match.

  “Like who?” I demanded. “I like to think I’m original, and if you’re going to compare me to Amy Adams for like the three hundredth time, I’m not like her. She’s like me.”

  “Her. Selene.” The cold emptiness of his voice communicated no feeling, nothing. Perhaps the ghost of something or someone.

  The name ricocheted through my mind and I realized something. Something that could not be true. That no way in anything would be true.

  His eyes continued to rove over me, the milky film seeming to fall away as he looked the past and the present in the eye at the same time. “Yes, you are very much like her. Yet you come here to kill me. Interesting. Woman, a human one at that, she already did your job for you, a few thousand years ago.”

  He scrutinized me in such a way that I realized he wasn’t seeing me, but the ghost a dead thing.

  Beyond the dead thing that was already in front of him.

  The power of such a stare did things to me. And not good things like Thorne’s stare. No, the evilest of things. Things that made my skin crawl like insects were writhing underneath it.

  “Okay, I’m really hoping you’re actually batshit or at the very least talking about the singer that JLo played in a movie and you’re just confused about the ‘thousand year’ part,” I said, tightening my grip on the sword.

  He didn’t move. “You know who I am, child. Your blood responds to the call of its origin, after all. It’s origin of death. And death has created spawn of depravity and evil and the wretchedness of this world that began with the wretchedness of love.”

  His words were flat and even and lifeless. Yet the bitterness of it all turned the air into something toxic that curled into those little crevices of doubt that I’d been fostering.

  He clasped his hands together. “You know this. The end of things that come with this emotion. This human emotion. For it was humanity that birthed us, and it will be humanity that will end us.”

  I tilted my head. “If you are who you say you are—big if, by the way—I would argue that, according to the books and history, you’re kind of wrong. The emotion was actually the beginning of something. Of our entire race, in fact.”

  He regarded me, and it was something akin to being stabbed with the enchanted blade in my belt. Or worse. An ancient thing was staring at me with eyes that had seen centuries pass like seconds and had seen destruction, Caused it. Birthed it, if you believed that.

  And I did.

  I believed that was what I was staring at.

  No one could fake that. You could fake your tan, eyelashes, hair, and even orgasms, but you couldn’t fake something like that. Never.

  In the darkness is where I meet my creator. For it is in darkness that I was created.

  I felt some kind of strong reaction once my body fully recognized I was standing in front of the creature responsible for my existence.

  For Thorne’s.

  Then I had the gross kind of feeling that it made Thorne and me kind of like brother and sister if this was our technical daddy sitting in front of us. And that grossed me out.

  “The beginning of the race of vampires, and then the Praseates, the binary opposition created out of the blood of my brother,” he said. “Yes, this was the beginning. But every beginning is an end. Don’t you know that more than most?” he asked as though he’d been some sort of spectator to the death I’d been living.

  “No, I don’t know that. All I know is that for some reason I found myself here chasing a lead. Chasing vengeance. And color me surprised that my trail of body parts brought me to the creator of all vampires. Or at least the first vampire himself. Sequestered in this dank cave among the rats and the shadows and filth beneath Manhattan. You’d think you’d be somewhere a little more… opulent.”

  His eyes flickered to his surroundings, as if he was only seeing them for the first time. “And where is it that I belong? Amongst the humans who I once was? The vampires my death created? That her death created? I think the shadows are the only place for a creature such as me. The sunlight was lost to me the moment I was cursed, despite it being given back to me, for what is walking in the sunlight if you’ve only your own shadow for company?”

  I swallowed. “Peaceful?” I offered.

  He laughed. The sound was ugly and harsh in his chest, like the muscles of his throat had forgotten how to do such a thing. “You do not believe in such a thing, child. There is no peace, even in death. If it does exist, it’s in war. For the most blessed of peace is to be found amongst chaos and death. And chaos and death are the main characteristics of war.”

  I cocked my brow. “And that’s why you’re involved in this one? In the pursuit of peace?”

  It took a long time for his answer to come. Or long for me. For him, maybe time moved differently. It must have been a fluid concept, down there in the shadows, where centuries passed like moments.

  His eyes found mine and I struggled against everything inside me to keep his gaze.

  “At the dawn of time, the humans were created to be the monsters they are. Natural monsters, capable of all depravity as vampires, in mind yet not in body. Just because they do not have fangs does not mean they cannot make people bleed, no?”

  He sighed, trailing a long nail along the rock of his throne.

  “We were created out of the depravity of that humankind yet given the fangs and the strength to do the things humans would not find the technology to do until later times. Until this world we live in now. We were born in the crack between light and dark, between life and death, between eternity and the end of all things. It is now that I wish for another end to this wretched life that has stretched on without change, without the darkness or even the true night. She is the moon, yet my night is never black enough for the moon to shine its light. So I feel the darkness in my soul, which is already in the underworld, damning me to be invisible
to her for all time. And now we have another love which the world of these depraved humans relies on.”

  He stared at me, the moments moving like seconds, or years or minutes. I couldn’t be sure; I was lost in this new version of time and space that had been created.

  “Divine flesh, when severed, becomes immortal,” he proclaimed, the words bouncing off the damp walls. “And divine not by the gods was cut. No, for the most divine of all flesh is a human heart, cursed with the most depraved of all emotions—love. It is that, the severing of my own flesh by the severing of her life, which turned me truly immortal.”

  He regarded me.

  “Do you wish to submit, to sentence yourself to the darkness of that chasm? For the humans who deserve nothing less? For the fate of monsters is due to the monsters themselves. The reign of the night is needed for the preservation of death.”

  I stared at him. And continued to stare.

  “You done?” I asked finally.

  “Done?” he repeated.

  I nodded. “Wrapped up the quick ‘philosophy of vampires’ seminar that you’ve decided to treat little old me to?” I took his silence as an affirmative. “Good, because I like where you went with that. All good stuff. Really valuable insights to both the human and inhuman condition,” I praised, circling the room before I stopped, turning. “But you see, it’s the attitude that you seem to have adopted that is startlingly like the very god who created or cursed you in the first place that I can’t get right with. You watched empires rise and fall. The dawn of ages of the earth that were stained in blood. The horrors of humanity.

  “Then, by logical conclusion—and it’s a first for me, coming to such a thing,” I informed him with a smile, “you’ve also seen the triumphs of humankind. They’re idiotic, for sure, with nothing much to offer about life that vampires couldn’t observe. But then vampires only get to observe. Because in death we do not get to live as humans do. Or love as humans do, because we love as angels do and sin as devils do.” I paused. “No, wait. Maybe we love as devils do and sin as angels do. That sounds more correct. One of them I heard somewhere and one of them I made up myself, but either way, it’s the truth. The latter, anyway, because the sins of saints are so much more depraved than those of sinners.”

  I gave him a look.

  “I don’t really know where I was going with that,” I admitted. “But I am curious as to why you haven’t killed me if you’re so intent on being involved in this war, for whatever reason. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, but still curious. And also not stupid enough to think that I’m getting out of this undead,” I added.

  The stench of death inside the tomb was catching.

  “You seek the witches?” he surmised instead of answering. I wondered whether his mind worked the same way mine did. To be that ancient, to have created an entire race through love and death, your mind must be unhinged in a pivotal way. After all, being mentally unhinged was the only way to survive with a broken heart.

  “I do,” I replied. “Among other things, like the end of this war. For selfish reasons, like a good day’s sleep and a manicure that lasts more than one day.” I frowned down at my nails. “If I wasn’t involved, the war could rage around me for centuries and I wouldn’t care much as long as it didn’t affect my day.”

  He tilted his head. “So much effort put into the act of becoming the soulless creature Hades turned me into,” he observed. “It is the very nature of our kind that the years do not touch us. Though it is not in our nature that we become those soulless creatures, but in our need to survive on the death of others. It is the very truth of immortality that urges a disconnection from the human part of ourselves in order to remain.

  “So what has you part of this war, then? I imagine there’s been more than a few of them that have passed you by, yet you decide to throw your lot in with the one that just happens to be the end of whatever you created.”

  “I didn’t create it,” he hissed, his voice losing that flat and disconnected quality and turning into something else. “That emotion ruined everything that created it. It was her,” he spat. “She was my destruction. Lilith may have birthed you all, but Selene is the mother of all vampires. And now you are she.”

  I stared at him. “I’m not anyone but myself. Nor is my future anyone’s but mine.”

  He sat atop his fashioned throne with his eyes on me.

  Mine were on him.

  I stared into the abyss and the abyss stared back at me.

  “You are anyone’s but yours. You are his. And the future is written. As it will be.” He sighed, rising from the throne in an effortless gesture that was fluid and easy but somehow etched with all the effort in the world.

  I held the sword and had been prepared for attack, but my body was not my own. I had no control over anything as he moved to me in a blur of motion, quick even to my eyes.

  Up close he was even more terrifyingly beautiful. His eyes were not merely eyes; they were chasms, the irises almost completely white yet enshrouded with so much darkness it was a wonder the blackness didn’t swallow me up.

  His unlined skin was smooth, like marble, while somehow keeping that paperlike quality.

  He stared at me in a way that told me it would be less than a flex of a muscle for him to end the existence he was responsible for creating.

  Never would one feel so small as when presented with their creator.

  Or so big when those eyes were focused on you.

  “The child of the night wishes to walk in the light, fight in a war that is both hers alone and the world’s at the same time.” His voice was thick and heavy. “So be it. You will see where they are. Your fate will be death, in victory and in defeat.”

  And then the abyss didn’t just stare at me. It swallowed me whole.

  Chapter 18

  “Hello. Yes, only me,” I called into the phone as I ascended the stairs onto the jet I’d just chartered. “Just checking in before I head out.”

  “Isla? Where the fuck are you?” Sophie hissed. “You’ve been missing for three days.”

  I screwed up my nose. I didn’t realize that much time had passed underground. That was rather vexing. But whatever.

  It had felt like seconds, and then I’d found myself up top in the smog-filled and dirty street without much memory of how I came to be there.

  I had felt death encircling me, its touch still failing to release me. But I’d also known where I had to go next. I had the location drawn in my head, so I focused on that and not the fact that I had just met the origin for all life, and death.

  If I focused on that too much, then I might just descend fully into the ocean of crazy I was treading water in.

  And I had shit to do.

  “Around,” I said vaguely, winking at the male flight attendant who was more than a little yummy.

  “Is that Isla? Give me the fucking phone,” a raspy voice demanded. Or more like roared. There was a slight struggle and swearing from both Sophie and Thorne.

  I was interested to see who would win and whether Sophie would do something fun like give him a pig’s tail or something.

  “Isla, are you okay?” Thorne’s raspy voice filled the phone and my skin tingled at the sound of it. I welcomed it at the same time I yearned for him in the flesh to chase away that death I’d come so close to. That I’d welcomed inside me.

  I smiled at the human who handed me a glass of champagne. “A man who knows a way to my heart,” I told him, taking the glass. “You and I are going to get along great.”

  “Isla,” Thorne hissed. “Who the fuck are you talking to? And answer the goddamn question. Are you okay? And where are you?”

  I sipped the drink. “That’s actually three questions, so I’ll just pick my favorite one. Which will most likely be your least favorite one. Isn’t it great when things work out that way? I was talking to….” I looked up. “What’s your name?” I asked the young human.

  “Brent, ma’am,” he replied.

  I screwed up m
y nose. “First, don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel horribly old, and I’m not even at half a millennium yet, I’m still youthful and fun. Secondly, Brent? Dude, that’s not a good name.”

  The young human’s face contorted in puzzlement before he gave a mischievous grin. “Well then, Isla, what would you like my name to be?”

  I was thinking of options, but the man on the other side of the phone obviously didn’t appreciate it.

  “Isla,” he snapped.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Rain check, Derek,” I said with a wink.

  “You disappear for three days and now you’re talking to some man—”

  “I can talk to whatever man I want,” I cut in.

  “Sure. As long as you don’t mind me killing him,” Thorne bit back.

  I grinned. “You wouldn’t. He’s human. And I know how much killing humans goes against your nature.”

  “What goes against my nature is you disappearing to do God knows what and then sounding like you’re getting on a fucking plane. It feels most natural to be killing the man who sounds a fuck of a lot like he’s flirting with you. Human or not.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”

  “You tell me where you are this fucking instant.”

  “Sorry, Dad, they don’t allow phones in operation during takeoff. The plane might blow up or something, and that would just fuck up my day. It was all going so well. I’m going witch hunting. Hopefully that means on the way back I’ll snack on Brent without the vomiting blood thing and I’ll never have to rely on you for survival again. Toodles.”

  I hung up before he could spout more profanities that were most likely filled with “fuck,” growling, “Isla,” “mine,” “I alpha,” “protect,” “control,” etc.

  I settled back into my plush leather seat and sipped my wine as the plane hurtled into the air towards the other side of the world that apparently housed a thousand-year-old witch who was in control of my life.

  And death.

  Or maybe I was escaping from the human-slayer-vampire thing that was in control of my life.