Chapter 13 13
ARIA'S POV
It was pitch black, I could actually feel the darkness on my eyes if that makes any sense. I couldn't see my hand inches from my face, none of the training chamber insides which the Night Palace was located.
"This is stupid," I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “How am I going to learn if I can’t see?”
"Your enemies won't be marching around brightly wearing torches," Draven spoke from somewhere near, sounding distorted with darkness so I couldn't locate him. "The Fifth King doesn't play fair. His messengers won't shoot you a text before they hit you. You have to learn not to trust only your eyes.”
"Easy for you to say. You probably see in here just fine.’
"I can," he acknowledged, and he was certainly closer now. “Which means I’m in the driver’s seat. Just as your adversaries will have advantages you do not. The question is, are you going to allow that to paralyze you, or will you pivot?”
Before I had a chance to answer, something hit me in the back. Not hard enough to do any serious damage, but hard enough to send me staggering forward. I staggered, and my hands struck something rough that felt like a stone pillar.
"Lesson number two," Draven's voice came from nowhere in the dark. “Stay engaged with your environment all the time. You left your back exposed."
The frustration boiled inside me, blended up with fear and fatigue. We’d been doing this for what felt like hours and I had only bruises and my own humiliation to show for it.
“I can’t do this,” I said, hating how defeatist I sounded. "I'm just a human. I don’t have superhuman senses or a few centuries of combat on my belt. I’m never going to be able to fight the way that you do.”
Then silence, long enough that I wondered if he had left. And then I could feel him behind me, close enough to sense the cold emanating from his own body.
“You’re right,” he murmured, his hands on my shoulders. "You can't fight like I do. But you're not meant to. You have something I don’t — none of us do. You contain divine power that could unmake reality itself."
His hands ran down my arms and placed them at his sides. "Close your eyes."
"They're already useless in here."
"Close them anyway. Stop looking with your eyes, and start feeling with the rest of you.
I did as he told, allowing my eyelids to fall. All at once, I noticed other things. The freezing feeling of the air on my skin. Hearing only my own breath and not his. The slightly stirring of the air in the room. The cold place where Draven had been standing behind me, a vacuum of heat.
"Good," Draven whispered, his breath chilly against my ear. “Now start to sense a space around you. Not with your hands, but through your mindfulness. The air circulates differently when something is moving through it. Different surfaces lead to sound reflecting in various ways. "The temperature of even something can tell you where things are."
I attempted to concentrate, to feel what he was talking about. At first, there was nothing. Only darkness and my own racing heart. But slowly, over time, I began to feel it. A whisper of movement in the air to my right. A soft echo that indicated a wall was close by. The cold spot where Draven had been.
“I feel it,” I whispered, concerned that a louder voice might shatter whatever tentative consciousness I had cobbled together.
“Then back it up,” said Draven, and walked out.
I followed the movement of air, with the sensation of his passing through only a small rustle of sound. He was orbiting me, checking in on whether I could be vigilant without falling apart.
When he attacked, this time from the left, I was ready. I ducked under where I felt his arm would be and rolled away, coming up in a crouch.
“Good boy,” he said, and there was approval in his voice. "Again."
We kept going for hours, Draven coming at me from all angles while I learned to anticipate and dodge. I didn't succeed every time. My body sucked up more bruises with every fall, my muscles shrieking in defiance. But gradually, I got better. Faster. Trusting senses I didn’t know I had, to a degree that’s come as something of a surprise to me.
At last, Draven called for a break. Suddenly the room flooded with light and I flinched, covering my eyes. After I could see a little bit again, the room around us was circular with stone walls and pillars arranged in a way that hinted at passages through it for dark navigation.
Draven was next to the door, pristine like always despite hours of our training. I meantime was drenched with sweat and dust, my clothes here and there torn, and I could feel bruises collecting everywhere on me.
“You hesitated,” I said, looking at him.
"Of course I did. If I hadn't, you'd be dead." He walked to a table I hadn't seen, where two glasses and a dark bottle stood. “And yet you held on longer than I thought you would. The first hour, most humans would have given up.”
“I’m not most humans,” I said, hobbling over to sit with him on legs like rubber.
He filled both glasses with the dark blood-red liquid. Blood wine, I realized. The same thing he had been drinking that disastrous morning, which felt like a lifetime ago.
“Drink,” he said, handing me one. “It will ease up the bruising and fatigue.”
I paused and looked at the glass. "Is it actually blood?"
“Mixed with wine and herbs, yes. But the blood is given freely, not extracted by force. We’re not the monsters you human fairy tales make us.” His lips twitched as if in a half-smile. “Well, not all of us, at least.”
I accepted the glass and sipped it again carefully. It tasted odd but not unpleasant, a combination of copper and sweetness. It didn’t take long before I felt the warmth radiating throughout my body, and a bit of the muscle ache had subsided.
"Better?" And you care about any of that because? Draven asked, his cold blue eyes watching me.
"Actually, yes." I sipped again, and then put the glass down. "Thank you. For the training, I mean. And for not murdering me when I was bad at it.”
"You weren't terrible. Untrained, yes. But you have instincts and you never back down. Characteristics like that matter more than raw talent.” He sat down in one of the chairs by the table, indicating me to do likewise. "Share with me your human days."
The question made me stop and think for a moment. "Why do you want to know?"
"Curiosity. You’re the only other one of us who’s recycled lately. Who remembers what it is like to be truly vulnerable, to know death is on its way.” He swirled the blood wine around in his glass. "What was it like? Your life before all this?"
I lowered myself into the chair opposite him and steeled my thoughts. "Simple. Quiet. I worked at a bookstore, lived in a small apartment with the woman who had adopted me, Stevie Rae. We were not rich, but we were happy. I mean, at least I thought we were."
"You dreamed of something more?"
"Sometimes. ”Nothing fancy, just … I wanted to travel and see things beyond New York. It’s something you’d like to do and maybe meet someone, fall in love in that simple, uncomplicated way people fall for each other in movies. I laughed bitterly. “And like I said, guess I should have thought more about what I was wishing for.”
Draven was silent for several moments, his face unreadable. Then he said something I didn’t see coming. "I envy you."
"What?"
"You knew peace, however briefly. You knew what it was to be normal, have your normal dreams, your normal fears. To wake up every morning and just live, without the burden of kingdoms and immortality weighing on your shoulders.” He looked up at me, and for the first time, there was a chink in his armor. "Immortality is a fine idea until you've experienced it. It's not eternal life, Aria. It's endless hunger. Blood-hunger, power-hunger, anything but this — living dead.”
I looked at him and now I know him in an entirely different light. Not as the cold, calculating Vampire King, but genuinely in all his loneliness and need. Someone who had lived so long he’d forgotten what living really felt like.
"Is that why you want me?" I asked quietly. “Because I make you feel alive?”
I don’t know,” he said, and I was surprised that there was something so honest in his voice. “The blood bond muddles the water by blurring lines between true emotion and a magical push. But - when you turn that stare on me, when you demand rather than simply obey, and when you refuse to be cowed… yes. I feel something. Whether it be love or the ghost of what I felt a thousand years ago, I cannot tell you.”
We were silent for a while, drinking blood wine and dwelling in this odd little bubble of honesty that seemed delicate.
Finally, Draven stood. "Come. I'll see that you're returned to your chambers. You’ll need to rest before your next training session.”
I stepped out of the training room and navigated through the twisting corridors of the Night Palace behind him. We walked down a long corridor with pictures on the walls. I stopped, my curiosity about the paintings overpowering my fatigue.
Then I saw it. A picture near the end of the gallery that stopped my heart.
It was me. Except — Celeste, except it was wearing my face. She was side-by-side with a youthful Draven (both human, and both genuinely happy. He had his arm around her waist, and she leaned in to him as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
I came to a halt before the picture and could not remove my eyes. "When was this?"
"What feels like a lifetime," Draven replied in muted tone. “Before we were what we are today. Before everything went wrong."
I lunged for the painting without even considering what I was doing. I didn't have to reach out; Draven caught my hand.
My wrist’s mark pulsed into life, the four sigils all aglow. An electric shock rode through my entire system. Draven felt it too. I watched that control slip, saw his eyes widen.
He drew me to him and I came willingly. We were paralyzed, poised between decision and action.
Then he kissed me.
It was tender, almost desperate. I kissed him in return, feeling his elation through the bond. A yearning, a regret, a fear — perhaps love that could have been.
When we stopped, he was no longer looking like Uncle Chilly. They burned with intensity.
"I remember," he whispered. "I remember everything. And I remember losing you."
But the temperature dropped dramatically. Frost formed on the walls. The pictures started bleeding.
"What's happening?" I gasped.
A voice that reverberated, not masculine or feminine. "The king of the vampires is running out of time. Three of four shall remain. My blood moon needs one to fall.”
The lights went out. I caught the sound of Draven in pain. His hand slipped from mine.
The lights came back on. Draven was on his knees, black blood oozing out of his mouth and hitting the stone beneath us.
"No!" I dropped beside him. "What's wrong?"
Through the bond, I felt it. The curse setting off, devouring him from the inside.
"Help!" I screamed. "Someone help us!"
Footsteps thundered toward us. Ronan appeared, half shifted. Kael materialized. Lucien stepped through shadows.
They saw the black blood.
"The curse," Kael whispered. "It's beginning."