Twenty Nine

Twenty Nine
KAYLA'S POV

The vampire who strolled into my plush prison cell was a gothic fever dream version of Alexander. He was tall and ridiculously pale with long, black hair that looked as if it had been cut from a Harlequin romance. He had a cape — an actual cape! — and he moved like the sort of poseur who’d been practicing grand entrances in front of mirrors for decades.

“Ah, my love,” he spoke, with an accent barely discernible except for the one that would have been Transylvanian if there was still such a place, “I am Prince Darius and I come to claim your heart.”

I blinked at him, taking this in. "I'm sorry, what now?"

“Fate has thrown us together— across the gulf of species and suspicion,” he went on, not seeming to hear my question. “You are the werewolf maiden, foretold to bring our races together through holy mating that will hopefully end in eternal love.”

“I’m quite sure this is a mistake,” I said cautiously. “I’m only here because your queen abducted me.”

"Kidnapped?" Darius looked genuinely offended. “My sweet, dear Kayla you have been saved from the stupid savagery of werewolf life and brought here for me so we would get married.”

This was becoming absurd by the second. "Right. And you know this because...?"

“The old prophesies told of the auburn-haired beauty with the eyes like forest pools who’d steal the heart of vampire royalty.” He gestured dramatically toward me. ”Fate has quite obviously brought you to me.”

I ran my hand through my curly auburn hair, and marveled just how many prophecies of theirs could be construed to mean whatever the hell they wanted. What if I don’t want to be fated with you?

“But you will,” Darius said most cockily. “After you get a taste of the deepest kisses a vampire has to offer, you will never be able to resist.”

What ensued could have been the silliest come-on I'd ever seen. It seemed that Darius had been planning for this moment with the subtlety of a Broadway musical. He made blood roses — real roses that had been somehow blended with red ooze — and began to recite the kind of poetry that would make Twilight seem eloquent.

“You are as beautiful as moonlight on new-sprung scarlet,” he said, extending the roses to me.
"...My soul cries out to ye, Theodule, across the black abysses of eternal night."

"That's... words,” I said finally, doing my best not to laugh.

"Tonight, I will sing for you the sacred songs of my ancestors," he went on; taking my stunned silence as an indication that he hadn't put me off yet. “The haunted music of the beings who have loved and lost over time.”

The image of this handsome vampire prince serenading me beneath my window like some love-stricken Romeo made me bite the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh. "That sounds very... special."

"You make fun of me," Darius burst out, with hurt pride in his dark eyes. “But you will learn the gravity of my longing, in time.”

For all his clown-show theatrics, there was something almost charming about how earnestly he believed in big, grand romantic gestures. He was like a puppy who had learned about romance from gothic novels and vampire movies.

One evening, when Darius had gone to set up his midnight serenade, Tessa arrived and claimed she had come to help me with “dinner preparations,” which was obviously a lie because we’d left directly from lunch.

“So,” she said, casual as could be, lining up blood oranges in a crystal bowl, “how do you find Prince Darius?”

"Honestly? He’s Alexander’s melodramatic little brother who read too much vampire poetry and made it a life decision.”

Tessa snorted with laughter. "That's actually pretty accurate. There's not much for him, Darius takes his 'incredibly old vampire nobility' bit real serious. He demands to speak in the archaic formal dialect during court."

“There are court trials where vampires debate in Shakespearean English,” Tessa said with a smile. "Earlier this month, Lord Pemberton challenged Lord Blackwood to a duel over allegations of 'excessively modern conjugations' during a turf war.

This was all coming together nicely. "What happened?"

“They battled with bronze age swords and declaimed death sonnets. Pemberton won”

I stared at her. "You're making this up."

"I wish I were. Vampire politicking is ninety percent theater and ten percent real killing. In fact the queen enjoys it because she believes that helps us keep our cultural traditions.”

“And you’re all fine with this?”

Tessa's expression grew more serious. "The older vampires are. They are described as remembering a time when ceremony and tradition served not just human culture but humanity itself — the only defense against mere predation. But some of us younger people kind of think maybe we’ve gone a little bit too far.”

Before I could even formulate a reply, an alarm started to scream through the palace—not some peaceful chime like what sleek vampires would have but good honest klaxons that wouldn’t be out of place in a sub movie.

“That’s the intruder alert,” Tessa said with wide panicky eyes. "Someone's trying to break in."

"Laura?"

"Maybe. Or it may be —” She stopped abruptly, and through her enhanced senses heard something I could not. "Oh no. I believe we set off the security system in the wine cellar.

"We? I didn't trigger anything. I’ve been sitting around in this room listening to Prince Darius write vampire haikus about my eyelashes.

"No motion, no video," he said. "No, I set it off before when I was attempting to map egress routes for you. I thought I’d discovered a secret passage, but it was the queen’s personal wine cellar.”

The absurdity of our predicament struck me all at once. Yeah, here we were planning a serious escape from vampire royalty and we got stopped by a wine cellar.

"Show me," I said.

The result was probably the least stealthy of covert operations in supernatural history. Tessa guided me back through halls that must have been unguarded, since every vampire in the house was answering intruder alerts we’d accidentally set off. We got to the wine cellar without a hitch, but there we ran out of luck.

The so-called “secret passage” Tessa had discovered was in fact a climate-controlled storage room that held bottles that were likely older than most countries. Then, in our scramble to escape out and find an actual exit, we knocked over a rack of what looked like priceless vintage vampire wine.

"Is this blood wine?" I demanded, my eyes locked on the deep crimson liquid dribbling across the stone floor.

"Probably. The queen is a very discerning consumer.” Tessa looked mortified. “We really ought to go over this before —”

A second alarm marched up to the first, and we both stood stock still catching movement on the footfalls coming from more than one direction.

"Get down," Tessa whispered as she ducked me behind a large wine rack.

Thing was, the wine rack, destabilized as it had been by that first collision from us only moments ago, decided this would be a good time to completely surrender. We stood in a pile of ancient alcohol that had survived centuries of care and had been destroyed by two scared girls with stealth skill issues.

“Well,” I said, the wine soaking through my designer dress as we reclined in the ruins of vampire enology, “this is a lot worse.”

"How?" Tessa asked.

"We could be sober."

And that was when we both began to laugh — hysterically, inappropriately, the kind of laughter that is partly madness and panic and partly giddiness at finding oneself drunk on pilfered beverages while hiding from vampire royalty. We were still laughing when someone walked up to our disaster area.

"Kayla?" A familiar voice called out. "Are you in here?"

Alexander showed up at the turn of our demolished hiding place, as if he had just walked off a movie. His eyes swept over the scene—two women splattered with expensive wine, standing in broken glass, and obviously tipsy.

“This is not how I pictured saving you,” he said.

″Your sense of timing is lousy,″ I told him with all due seriousness. "We were just interpreting vampire politics for you guys in interpretive dance. "Tessa was playing the Crimson Council."

"I was not," Tessa protested.

"Ladies, we have to go Alexander explained patiently. Now."

“But we have not gotten to the aspect of your dramatic entrance that was so critiquable,” I said, attempting to stand and swaying as fast as I did. “You could have had a little more cape swirling. I believe Darius would have had cape swirling.”
Alexander appeared to be torn between amusement and irritation as he picked me up from the floor. "You're drunk."

"Only a little. Mostly we're educational. Vampires also have a system of formal dueling for poetry criticism, did you know that?"

"I did not know that."

"Well, now you do. You're welcome."

For all the mayhem and for the fact that I was three sheets in my cups, but just the sight of Alexander made this warm little ball of gratitude unravel in my chest. He had risked his life just to rescue me even though I’d been nothing but a headache for him.

"Alexander," I said, the wine serious from one side all of a sudden, "you came."

"Yes, I came," he answered, his voice low. “I wasn’t going to leave you here.”

Before I could answer, the wine cellar was filled with a slow clapping. Prince Darius stepped out of the shadows looking less like a moody poet and more like a predator that had caught his prey.

"How sweet," he replied, accent heavier. "The half breed comes to take my bride to be, the one I'm destined for."

“She ain’t your nothing,” replied Alexander, his voice ominously low.
"I dare you to a duel!" daryus boomed. "The winner wins the hand of the fair Kayla."

Before I could open my mouth to tell him that I was no man's prize possession, Alexander's reply silenced me.

"Fine," he said. “But it is as the challenged party; I have the selection of weapons.”

Darius smiled with predatory satisfaction. "Name them."

Alexander's grin was pure mischief. "Competitive baking."