Chapter 16 Escape Attempt
It was mid-afternoon. Klaus had left an hour ago, summoned by the Emperor for a tactical briefing regarding the coastline. He hadn't wanted to go, I had seen the hesitation in his stride, the way his hand lingered on the doorknob but the command of the Crown was important.
He had locked the door, of course. He always did.
But he had left Rook behind to scrub the soot from the fireplace.
The little goblin was currently halfway up the chimney, his legs dangling, scrubbing furiously while muttering a stream of curses that would have made a sailor blush.
"Stupid soot. Sticky soot. Lord F–Falkenstein wants it clean. Wants it pristine. As if fire doesn't make a mess. As if ash respects authority."
I sat at the table, watching him. On the heavy oak surface, sitting right next to a bowl of untouched fruit, lay a ring of iron keys.
Rook had taken them off his belt because the jangling annoyed Klaus. He had forgotten to put them back on before diving into the hearth.
My heart began to hammer against my ribs. It was a slow, heavy thudding that I felt in my throat.
Do it, a voice whispered in my head. It sounded like my father. Do it, or rot here.
I stood up. My chair scraped against the stone floor.
Rook’s legs froze. "Mistress? You need something?"
"Just water," I said, my voice steady despite the adrenaline flooding my veins. "I'm thirsty."
"Pitcher is on the sideboard!" Rook shouted from the chimney, his voice echoing. "Don't spill it! The Lord will have my ears if there are water spots on the velvet!"
He went back to scrubbing.
I walked to the sideboard. I poured a glass of water. I took a sip, my eyes fixed on the keys.
They were heavy. Iron. Cold. One of them opened the main door. I had watched Klaus use a similar one a dozen times.
I moved.
I didn't run. I drifted, silent as a current, moving with the predatory grace that my new legs were finally beginning to master. I reached the table.
Rook sneezed violently in the chimney. "Achoo! Blast this dust!"
In that second of noise, I snatched the keys.
I didn't put them in my pocket; the dress Vespera had mocked didn't have pockets. I shoved them down the front of my bodice, the cold metal biting into my skin, right between my breasts.
I grabbed an apple from the bowl to cover the empty space on the table.
"Are you almost done, Rook?" I called out, taking a loud, crunchy bite of the apple.
Rook slid down from the chimney in a cloud of black dust. He landed on the hearth, coughing and hacking, covered in soot from his large ears to his oversized feet.
"Done! Done!" he wheezed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Horrible job. Terrible job."
He patted his belt. He froze.
My heart stopped.
He patted his belt again. Then he looked at the floor. Then he looked at the table.
"My... my ring," he stammered, his yellow eyes going wide with panic. "Where is...?"
He looked at the bowl of fruit. He looked at me.
I took another bite of the apple, looking bored. "What are you looking for?"
"Nothing!" Rook squeaked. "Nothing at all! Just... forgot my duster!"
He grabbed a feather duster from the floor. He was terrified. If he admitted he lost the keys, Klaus would skin him. If he asked me and I denied it, he would have to accuse a guest of the Emperor.
He chose self-preservation.
"I must go!" Rook announced, backing toward the service tunnel. "Laundry! Yes! Very urgent laundry! Goodbye, mistress!"
He scrambled into the small tunnel and slid the panel shut.
I waited.
I spat the apple into my hand and threw it into the fire.
I fished the keys out of my dress. My hands were shaking so hard I almost dropped them.
Focus, Nerissa.
I ran to the heavy oak door. I sorted through the keys until I found the one with the hawk crest. I jammed it into the lock.
It stuck.
"No, no, no," I whispered, twisting it.
It wouldn't turn. It needed strength. It needed the leverage of a vampire lord.
I grit my teeth. I placed both hands on the key. I thought of Vespera’s smirk. I thought of the boiling water. I thought of the ocean.
I turned it.
The sound was the sweetest melody I had ever heard.
I pushed the door open. The hallway was empty.
The air out here was different. It was colder, draftier, carrying the scent of damp stone and the metallic tang of the city below.
I didn't look back. I stepped out, closing the door softly behind me.
I ran.
My bare feet made no sound on the stone runner. I remembered the path Klaus had taken me. Down the spiral stairs. Past the armory. There was a side door near the East Wing that led to the "Royal Gardens."
I needed to get outside. I needed to see the sky without glass in the way. I needed to find a wall I could climb, a cliff I could jump from. If I could hit the water, I could survive. The fall wouldn't kill me; the impact would just break the surface, and I would shift. I would be free.
I descended the stairs, hugging the shadows. Every creak of the building sounded like a footstep. Every shadow looked like a guard.
I reached the bottom of the tower. A long corridor stretched out before me, lined with suits of armor that looked like they were watching me.
I sprinted. My lungs burned. My legs ached.
I saw it. A set of double doors made of glass and iron, leading out onto a terrace.
I reached the doors. They were unlocked.
I pushed them open and stumbled out into the grey afternoon light.
I gasped, the air hitting my face. It smelled of sulfur and smog, choking and thick, but it was outside.
I was standing on a wide terrace that overlooked a sprawling, enclosed courtyard.
"The Garden," I breathed, walking to the stone railing.
From the tower window, I had only seen grey shapes. But down here...
It was white.
The entire garden was a landscape of stark, blinding white.
Trees with twisting, gnarled branches reached up toward the smoggy sky. Bushes of intricate, lacy fronds lined the pathways. jagged, spired rocks rose from the ground like cathedral towers.
It was beautiful.
But there was no green. No leaves. No grass.
I frowned. It looked like... coral.
Massive, bleached coral reefs, transplanted onto dry land.
I walked down the stone steps, drawn to it. Why would vampires have a coral garden? Coral needed water. It needed life. This was dead, dry, and brittle.
I reached the bottom of the steps. The path was lined with crushed white shells that crunched under my feet.
I walked up to one of the trees. It was taller than me, its branches spreading out in a fan shape. It looked like a Gorgon fan, a species of coral that only grew in the deepest parts of the rift.
I reached out to touch it.
It was cold and rough.
I ran my hand down the stalk.
My fingers snagged on something.
I leaned closer, squinting in the dim light.
Embedded in the calcified structure of the coral wasn't just rock. It was... smooth. Curved.
A rib.
I recoiled, my heart skipping a beat.
I looked closer. The "trunk" of the coral tree wasn't coral at all. It was fused bone. Vertebrae. The long, delicate bones of a tail.
I spun around, looking at the "bushes."
They weren't bushes. They were skulls.
Hundreds of them. Piled together, fused by alchemy or time, bleached white by the sun and the salt, arranged artfully to look like hydrangeas.
The breath left my lungs in a silent whoosh.
I stumbled back, my hand flying to my mouth to stifle a scream.
This wasn't a garden.
It was a graveyard.
I looked at the "rock formations." They were rib cages. Massive ones. Whales? No. Too slender.
Sirens.
"Oh gods," I whispered, the tears welling up instantly, hot and stinging.
Klaus had told me. We hunted them all. You are the last one.
I hadn't understood. I thought he meant they killed them in battle. I thought they died in the water.
I didn't know they brought them here.
I didn't know they turned my people into landscaping.
I backed away, terrified to touch anything. The ground beneath my feet I looked down.
They weren't shells. They were finger bones. Teeth. Fragments of jewel-toned scales that had lost their color.
I was standing on the remains of a genocide.
The horror was a physical blow. It buckled my knees. I fell onto the path, my hands landing on the sharp, crunching gravel of bones.
"No," I sobbed, the sound tearing out of my throat. "No, no, no."
This was the Nocturnal Empire. This was the civilization Klaus protected. They didn't just eat us. They didn't just use our blood to walk in the sun. They mocked us. They built their leisure grounds out of our corpses.
I saw a fountain in the center of the garden.
I crawled toward it, needing to wash the dust of the bones off my hands.
The fountain was made of a single, massive skull. A Kraken? No.
It was a Sea King.
The crown was still fused to the bone, rusted and green with age. Water trickled from the empty eye sockets, running down into a basin made of...
I couldn't look.
I sat back on my heels, surrounded by the white, silent horror. The smog swirled above me, trapping me in this bowl of death.
I had wanted to escape. I had wanted to find nature.
Instead, I had found the truth.
This wasn't a war. This was a harvest. And I was the last crop.
A wind picked up, whistling through the holes in the coral trees. It made a low, mournful sound. A flute made of dead bones.
It sounded like they were singing.
I covered my ears, curling into a ball on the path. I wanted to go back to the tower.
I heard a crunch on the path behind me.
Not the light, skittering crunch of a goblin.
The heavy, rhythmic crunch of boots.
I stopped crying. I stopped breathing.
I didn't turn around. I knew who it was. I could feel the cold radiating from him, a wall of ice pressing against my back. I could smell the ozone and the rain.
I waited for the anger. I waited for him to drag me back by my hair. I waited for the punishment for stealing the keys.
But he didn't grab me.
He stopped a few feet away.
"I told you," his voice said, low and devoid of its usual arrogance. It sounded tired. Hollow. "I told you the outside world wants to mount you on a wall."
He took a step closer.
I slowly lowered my hands from my ears. I turned my head.
Klaus was standing there. He was wearing his military greatcoat, the collar turned up against the wind. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the garden.
He looked sick.
His jaw was clenched so tight the skin was white. His hands, gloved in black leather, were fists at his sides.
"Why?" I whispered, my voice breaking. "Why bring them here? Why not just let them sink?"
"Because vampires are sentimental creatures," Klaus said, his voice dripping with self-loathing. "We like to keep souvenirs of the things we destroy. It makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel... permanent."
He looked down at me then. His sapphire eyes were dim, shadowed by the smog.
"I tried to keep you in the tower," he said softly. "I tried to keep you from seeing the bone orchard."
"You knew," I accused him, shaking. "You knew what this was."
"I grew up playing in this garden," Klaus admitted. The confession hung in the air, heavy and grotesque. "I learned to walk on these paths. I thought they were just stones. Until I heard one of them scream."
He reached out a hand.
"Come," he said. "Get up. You are shivering."
I looked at his hand. The hand of the Grand Admiral. The hand of the man who commanded the fleet that built this graveyard.
I looked at the garden. The white, silent accusation of my ancestors.
I realized then why he was so obsessed with control. Why he starved himself. Why he locked me away.
He wasn't protecting the world from me.
He was hiding the evidence.
And he was terrified that one day, I would end up just another white branch in his twisted family tree.
I didn't take his hand.
I pushed myself up, my knees bleeding from the sharp bones on the path. I stood before him, barefoot and broken, surrounded by the dead.
"Take me back," I whispered. "Take me back to the cage."
Klaus looked at me, and for a second, I saw the horror reflected in his own eyes.
"As you wish," he said.
He didn't touch me. He just turned and walked back toward the castle, a black silhouette against the white ruin.
I followed him.
But as I walked, I didn't step on the path. I walked on the grass verge, refusing to crush the bones of my people.
And with every step, the fear in my heart turned into something else. Something that felt a lot like the iron key I still had tucked against my skin.
Hatred.