Джули Кагава – The Eternity Cure (страница 3)

His hand skims the top of the table to the very end, picking up the item on the corner. It isn’t bright like the others—shiny metal polished to a gleaming edge. It is long, wooden, and comes to a crude, whittled point at the end.

I shiver, every instinct telling me to back away, to put distance between myself and that sharp wooden point. But I can’t move, and Sarren approaches slowly, the stake held before him like a cross. He is smiling again, a demonic grin that stretches his entire ravaged face and makes his fangs gleam.

“I can’t kill you, yet,” he says, touching my chest with the very tip of the stake, right over my heart. “No, not yet. That would spoil the ending, and I have a glorious song in mind. Oh, yes, it will be magnificent. And you … you will be the instrument on which I compose this symphony.” He steps forward and pushes the tip of the stake into my chest, slowly, twisting it as it sinks beneath my skin. I throw back my head, clenching my jaw to keep the scream contained, as Sarren continues. “No, old friend. Death is still too good for you. We’re just going to send you to sleep for a while.” The stake continues to slide into my flesh, parting muscle and scraping against my breastbone, creeping closer to my heart. The wood becomes a bright strip of fire, searing me from the inside. My body convulses and starts to shut down. Darkness hovers at the edge of my vision—hibernation pulling me under, a last effort at self-preservation. Sarren smiles.

“Sleep now, old friend,” he whispers, his scarred face fading rapidly as my vision goes dark. “But not for long. I have something special planned.” He chuckles, the empty sound following me down into blackness. “You won’t want to miss it.”

The vision had ended there. And I hadn’t had any more dreams since.

I shifted on the bed, bringing the sword close to my chest, thinking. I’d tracked Sarren to one place he had been: a rotted-out ruin of a house in an empty suburb, a long flight of steps leading down to the basement. The scent of Kanin’s blood had hit me like a hammer as soon as I’d opened the door. It had been everywhere—on the walls, on the chains that hung from the ceiling, on the instruments spread over the table. A dark stain had marred the floor right below the metal links, making my stomach turn. It didn’t seem possible that Kanin had survived, that anything could have survived that macabre dungeon. But I had to believe that he was still alive, that Sarren wasn’t finished with him just yet.

My hunch had been confirmed when, as I’d explored further, I’d discovered the stiff, decaying bodies of several humans tossed casually in a closet upstairs. They had been drained of blood, their throats cut open instead of bitten, a stained pitcher sitting on a table nearby. Sarren had been feeding Kanin, letting him heal between sessions. Closing the door on the pile of corpses, I’d felt a deep stab of sympathy and fear for my mentor. Kanin had made mistakes, but no one deserved that. I had to rescue him from Sarren’s sick insanity, before he drove my sire completely over the edge.

Gray light was beginning to filter through the holes in the blanket over the window, and I grew evermore sluggish in response. Hang in there, Kanin, I thought. I’ll find you, I swear. I’m catching up.

Although, if I was honest with myself, the thought of facing Sarren again, seeing that blank, empty smile, the fevered intensity of his gaze, terrified me more then I cared to admit. I remembered his face through Kanin’s eyes, and though I hadn’t noticed it in the dream, I’d later recalled the film across his left eye, pale and cloudy. He’d been blinded there, and recently. I knew, because the pocketknife that had been jammed into his pupil the last time I saw him … was mine.

And I knew he hadn’t forgotten me, either.

CHAPTER 2

Four months ago, I walked away from Eden.

Or, more accurately, I was forced out. Much like Adam and Eve getting kicked out of their infamous garden, I had reached Eden with a small group of pilgrims only to be turned away at the gates. Eden was a city under human rule, the only one of its kind, a walled-in paradise with no monsters or demons to prey on its unsuspecting citizens. And I was the monster they feared most. I had no place there.

Not that I would’ve stayed, regardless. I had a promise to keep. I had to find someone, help him, before his time ran out.

So, I’d left Eden and the company of the humans I’d protected all the way there. The group I’d left was smaller than the group I’d first joined; the journey had been hard and dangerous, and we’d lost several along the way. But I was glad for the ones who’d made it. They were safe, now. They no longer had to worry about starvation or cold, being chased by raiders or stalked by vampires. They no longer had to fear the rabids, the vicious, mindless creatures that roamed the land after dark, killing anything they came across. No, the humans who’d made it to Eden had found their sanctuary. I was happy for them.

Though, there was … one … I regretted leaving behind.

The sky was clear the following night, spotted with stars, a frozen half-moon lighting the way. The wind and the crunch of my boots in the snow were the only sounds keeping me company. As always, while walking alone through this quiet, empty landscape, my mind drifted to places I wished it wouldn’t.

I thought of my old life, my human one, when I was simply Allie the street rat, Allie the Fringer, scraping out a meager existence with my old crew, facing starvation and exposure and a million other deaths, just to declare that we were “free.” Until the night we’d tempted fate a bit more than usual and had paid for it with our lives.

New Covington. That was the name of the vampire city where I was born, grew up and ultimately died. In my seventeen years, I hadn’t known anything else. I’d known nothing of the world beyond the Outer Wall that kept out the rabids, or of the Inner City, where the vampires lived in their dark, gleaming towers, looking down on all of us. My whole existence had consisted of the Fringe, the outer ring of New Covington where the human cattle were kept, herded in by fences and branded with tattoos. The rules were simple: if you were branded—Registered to the masters—you were fed and somewhat taken care of, but the catch was, you were owned. Property. And that meant you had to donate blood on a regular basis. If you were Unregistered, you were left to fend for yourself in a city with no food and no supplies except the ones the masters allotted; but at least the vamps couldn’t take your blood unless they caught you themselves.

Of course, you still had to worry about starving to death.

Back when I was human, I’d struggled with hunger every day. My life had revolved around finding food and little else. There had been four of us in my small gang—me, Lucas, Rat and Stick. We had all been Unregistered; street rats, beggars and thieves, living together in an abandoned school and barely scraping by. Until one stormy night when we’d ventured beyond the Outer Wall to find food … and became the hunted ourselves. It had been stupid to step outside the protection of New Covington, but I’d insisted, and my stubbornness had cost us everything. Lucas and Rat had been killed, and I’d been pulled down and torn apart by a pack of rabids. My life should’ve ended that night in the rain.

In a way, I guess it had. I’d died that night in Kanin’s arms. And now that I was a monster, I could never go back to the life I’d known. I’d tried, once, to contact a friend from my old life, the boy named Stick whom I’d looked after for years. But Stick, seeing what I’d become, had screamed and fled from me in terror, confirming what Kanin had always told me. There was no going back. Not to New Covington, not to my old life, not to anything that was human. Kanin had been right all along. He was always right.

I thought of him often, of the nights we’d spent in the secret lab beneath the vampire city where I was born. His lessons, teaching me what it meant to be a vampire, how to hunt and fight and kill. The humans I’d preyed on, their screams, the warm blood in my mouth, intoxicating and terrible. And Kanin himself, who’d taught me, in no uncertain terms, what I was—a vampire and a demon—but also that my path was my own; that I had a choice.

You are a monster. His voice was always so clear in my head, as if he was standing right next to me, his dark eyes boring into my skull. You will always be a monster—there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become is entirely up to you. That was the lesson I clung to most, the one I swore I’d never forget.

But Kanin had another rule as well, one I hadn’t remembered so clearly as the first. The one about humans, and becoming attached …

And just like that, my traitor mind shifted to a lean figure with jagged blond hair and solemn blue eyes. I remembered his smile, that lopsided grin meant only for me. I remembered his touch, the heat that radiated from him when we were close. His fingers sliding over my skin, the warmth of his lips on mine …