'Who ordered books?' Kristina cries as she flings open the cell door.
Merle sits up, rubbing her eyes. 'What?'
Kristina is pushing a small trolley. 'Books. I've brought your books. Oh, and some muesli and some orange juice. And a newspaper. It's today's paper. God knows where it came from. Someone must have gone out this morning before it got light.'
I can read these things in you as easily as you can read a newspaper.
Merle gets up and walks over to the trolley. She picks up the paper. That day's copy of The Times. She turns the pages, forgetting the chains on her wrists for a moment. One hits the orange juice and sends it flying.
'Oh yeah,' says Kristina, 'that reminds me.' She produces a large iron key and grabs Merle's left wrist.
Merle watches in a daze as the manacles fall away one after another, leaving red raw skin behind.
She rubs it, feeling a kind of conflicted gratitude. She wants to thank Kristina, but at the same time, she knows she's one of them. Part of the problem. She rubs the damaged skin on her wrists harder, to remind her of what's happening. 'You can tell Darius, I mean, you can tell Cole, that orange juice and newspapers don't make this comfortable. I'm still locked in a cell.'
After Kristina has gone, Merle finishes her breakfast and looks through the books. They clearly all come from the castle library. They're history books – a complete vam-piric history series. A history she knows well. The stuff she was raised on. Her bedtime stories.
It begins with the twelve Vampire Clans and the forming of the Clan Council. Detailing the peace pact to stop killing humans 250 years ago. The law about not converting humans into vampires without unanimous Council approval. The eventual withdrawal of the vampires entirely from any contact with human society. The self-imposed seclusion in their hidden castles that lasted more than a century.
Had lasted until the rise of Darius Cole.
But even reading these familiar stories is better than staring at four dark walls. She ends up reading all day.
When she finishes the book that ends with the beginning of Cole's rise to power, she notices she still has two more volumes of the series to go. Strange. This is where most history series ended. Cole is usually thought of as too recent to be included in vampire history yet. Too unresolved. She picks up the last two volumes one at a time and skims through the pages. They're all about Darius Cole. The rise and fall of Cole and his Righteous Power movement. Neither of these books had been in her parents' library. She'd never read anything about Cole. She only ever knew what her parents had told her about him. Evil. Tried to turn vamps against humans again. Too strong for vamps to control themselves.
The books follow that same story. Cole came from nowhere. A vampire with extraordinarily strong psych-powers and an agenda. Righteous Power – the notion that vampires were a superior race, that they should use their psychic abilities to enslave and control humans. RP wasn't a new idea, but Cole brought this dangerous rhetoric back. Seductive and smooth and with those damned psych-powers, the fact that he had no clan and no lineage hadn't seemed to matter. Cole had quickly converted three of the vampire Clans to his dangerous way of thinking.
That was when the Clan Council had decided they needed help to contain him. Vampires, it seemed, were helpless against Cole powers and so the Council turned to humans.
Merle turns the page. The next chapter in the book is titled 'Cobalt'. On the facing page is a black and white picture of her parents. Her mother. The same tall elegant creature, but much younger, without a single grey hair. In the monochrome of the picture her shiny dark brown locks look jet black. Next to her stands Merle's father. A shade taller, with the slightly flared nose that Merle inherited, too much pale hair and a crooked grin that looks slightly untrustworthy.
Merle stares at the picture for a long time thinking of her father in his hospital bed and her mother crying herself to sleep in the armchair beside him.