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All of the dream-memories I had of who I could only guess as my mother cleared of their fog.
It was her life I had been dreaming of—of a human girl who’d been abused, driven to her last wit, and died horribly in childbirth.
As a bystander in the memories rather than through her eyes, in the mirror, I saw her face, her brown hair, and her light blue eyes filled with rage and fear. In the strange barn, I saw her struggle with Koen and Sloan. In the forest by the river, I saw her as raw as a person could be as she started to die giving birth. I saw her in the Gladiator arena fighting almost every day just to stay alive. I saw her speaking with Cirillo—heard her speaking to the monster who took advantage of her and led her to her death.
“I realize I have done wrong—” Cirillo began, but she cut him off,
“You have.”
“—so I ask once more what I can do to make you love me the same way I love you.”
“You don’t love me,” she spat. “You’re infatuated with me! And I still have no idea why! You betrayed my trust, Cirillo. Both races value promises. You broke yours to me. I can never, ever forgive you, much less feel anything but hatred.”
They had been standing on an unmarred street of Sanlow, clean and filled with casual passersby. It looked nothing like it did now, dark and destroyed.
The scene shifted. Now, the swept-clean street was littered with dead bodies and running with a river of blood.
Cirillo was on the ground, begging for his life from the vampire who loomed over him, drenched in so much red her features were obscured, but now I knew exactly what she looked like. “I realize I have done wrong—”
“You have already spoken this sentence. I dare you to speak it again.”
“—so I ask once more what I can do to make you love me the same way I love you.”
When I first saw the memory, I hadn’t understood what Amate, a pureblood vampire, had been specifically referring to. But then I remembered her saying, “This is the night that I have freed myself and my former people.”
Now I understood that Amate wasn’t a pureblood. She was Turned. Her former people were humans.
Maer Whisler hadn’t died giving birth to me, as Koen and Sloan and Rhetta and Leysa and Zaria had all led me to believe.
She had been Turned by Cirillo Kaladin, the Moros leader who claimed he loved her. Maer would have rather died than become what enslaved her and countless others. But she wasn’t given that choice.
So when she discovered her own liberation in the prowess of vampire strength—and her ability to produce blue fire—she took the sweetest kind of revenge to kill her abuser.
Maer and Amate were one and the same.
“Spread the name Amate, who burned the city of Sanlow and named this night the Bloody Liberation.”
My mother was Maer Whisler and Amate, the monster who all monsters feared, who ruled a city of ruins after killing so many within it. Almost singlehandedly destroying the human cattle system. In the eyes of vampires, she was the villain who disrupted a vital way of life. In the eyes of humans, she was seen as a hero.
No wonder I thought her paradoxical. She killed vampires to save humans. She wanted to dismantle the world the immortals had built in the name of her loss of humanity.
“He’s the reason for the Bloody Liberation in the first place.”
Agana was right.
I killed Maer, and so she became Amate. She was getting revenge for herself, but if it hadn’t been for the half-breed spawn she was forced to carry within her, it wouldn’t have led her to become the one thing she hated most—a vampire.
Leysa was right, too. “You are the key to either ending the war or starting a new one.”
Well, I already started a new one. There was no way of doing both.
Amate—or Maer. I didn’t know what to call her—eyed me unfeelingly. She had no idea who I was—or cared. If she even recognized the name, she didn’t acknowledge it.
Behind me, Agana sighed in exasperation. “Finally he knows.”
A realization crashed down on me like an unmovable weight. They knew.
Everyone knew.
Koen, Sloan, Rhetta, Wren, Leysa and Vidar, Aspen—Piroska, Agana, Aeros, Tanith, Thana, and Rish, and Illias and who knew who else—heck, the vampire at Hollowgrave who took one whiff of me and fled. Everyone who scented me and reacted negatively... It wasn’t just because I was Cirillo’s son.
It was because I was Amate’s son.
The only son of the Bloody Liberator.
“Today will be the day the tides are turned,” Piroska had warned. “It is up to how you act to the events occurring or will occur in the next few minutes.”
Couldn’t she have just said, How you react to finding out who your mother is?
But the discoveries didn’t end there.
No, of course I had to be dragged into Koen’s memory back in Aspen’s library.
“Bas is the only one who can stop—”
The name he said wasn’t Amate.
“Bas is the only one who can stop Maer.”
Was that how I was going to stop the war?
Agana cleared her throat for attention. “He is our peace offering.”
Amate’s sharp-as-silver eyes snapped to the coven leaders and spat, “What kind of peace offering is some half-breed idiot gaping at me like I’ve grown a second head?”
The grin spread across Aeros’s bloody face was nothing short of evil. “He’s your son.”
“Did you really come all this way, go through this much effort, this much death, to mock me with lies?” Amate asked coolly, raising one judgmental eyebrow.
Aeros spoke conversationally despite his coven members being killed by Amate’s forces. “Have you truly abandoned your humanity that deeply? It’s only been seventeen years. A blink of an eye, really.”
If Amate was Maer, and Maer was my mother, then the coven leaders had it right: I was their bargaining chip they could use against her. They were banking on her humanity to recognize me as her child and make a deal with them so she could spare me from the former Sanlow leaders.
But it was immediately clear that Amate had no interest in “some half-breed idiot.”
Things could go very wrong now.
Terrifyingly, Amate smiled as she looked around at her army desecrating the intruders, and then up at the eclipse. “The planning, scheming, researching, and all the killing it must have taken to get here. You did catch me off guard, I admit.” Her smile faded. “But what a poor execution. Seventeen years clearly wasn’t enough.”
Aeros snarled and shoved me forward. I caught my balance before stumbling right into Amate. She curled her lip at my clumsiness. “Look at him,” the Rhidian leader snarled. “Smell him. All of Sanlow knows your and Cirillo’s scents. They’re mingled on him like the stench of rotting meat. He’s undeniably your bastard offspring, half the reason you were Turned—”
“Don’t remind her of that, you reckless fool!”
To escalate things further, of course Ciel and Gideon had to reveal themselves. They appeared across the Square at a safe distance away from the Liberator, who vowed to viciously murder Ciel in revenge. But Amate didn’t move or even react.
“You did have a child,” Ciel continued. She looked and sounded completely sane. There wasn’t a hint of her usual unhinged behavior. She was merely revealing the truth. “And I tricked you into thinking he was stillborn. Clearly, throwing him down a waterfall and into the river did not kill him.”
Amate stared Ciel down with a look I swore could set the Moros heir on fire—and she probably could. I didn’t know the extent of her fire abilities. If she could set up a wall around an entire city, then there was no telling what else she was capable of.
But she still didn’t move to attack. Instead, she raised a hand. Ciel flinched and hid behind Gideon, whose outrage at being used as a shield made him create a bubble ward around them.
It was a signal. Her army ceased fighting, but their battling turned to a unified shout. The word rang into the air. “Penagrum!” Any vampires left alive were captured within the glowing-blue circle and the invisible wall. Agana and Aeros were left free. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw their fear.
Yes, things had gone very wrong for them.
Overhead, the sun was still blocked, but I could tell sunlight was beginning to peek through. The silver ring was fading. Before long, the eclipse would be over, and any vampire unable to flee would burn away.
Tension rose from the new crowd that gathered on the outskirts of the Square. All eyes were on Amate and Ciel. I knew they were all waiting for a battle of the ages to break out between them. Amate was a resolute statue. Ciel was expressionless, too, but she was cowering.
“Have you come to reclaim your ‘throne,’ Ciel?” Amate asked. “Tacking onto the army instead of leading it? Jealous little heir. Jealous, selfish brat who didn’t want to share her daddy because of a hotheaded, helpless human Gladiator.”
The first emotion flashed in Ciel’s gray and black eyes: rage. “A brat?” she screeched in disbelief.
Amate took a step forward. “An entitled, manipulative, paranoid lunatic.”
“I’m not—”
“A coward,” Amate continued in a purr, setting a stalking pace, her fingers crooked and ending in the longest nails I had seen on a vampire. Did she intend to claw Ciel to shreds until she reached her heart? “So scared of facing me because you feel guilty. All these years, I have tracked you, watching your every move, shielded every moment—”
“Guilty?”
I didn’t understand why neither Agana nor Aeros—or Tanith, wherever she was—were making a move on Amate. Her back was to them, leaving her completely vulnerable to an attack. All they’ve done is gloat about being the one to kill her, and now they were just cowering as they clearly hoped Ciel was Amate’s only target.
“You did nothing,” Amate hissed with a wicked grin in her voice, “to truly take revenge. Or any of you!” She whirled on Agana and Aeros, completely ignoring me in front of them. “Seven covens who underestimated the eclipse and my army! Did you really think I would not know about it? Have any of you kept track of its path? There is no time left.” Her laugh was a wheeze, her eyes wide with crazed delight. “You lost. I won. Again.”
Just as quickly as she was wound up, Amate settled. Her gaze turned scolding as she addressed the former leaders. “To think any of you were so great. You stood on pedestals too long to know poverty. None of your power was real. Me? My power was earned. You wanted power for the sake of it. I wielded mine for justice. For the liberation of mortals. I grew my army on cultivated spells and loyalty to a just cause.” Her eyes flicked to me, just for the briefest of moments. “I had to become a monster to do so. If that is what I must be to destroy worse monsters, then so be it. And I enjoy it—blood.”
Ciel, despite still hiding behind Gideon, still wanted to instigate. “Spilling it! You don’t drink it! What a waste!”
“No,” Amate answered calmly, turning to her. “Doesn’t that make me scarier? Doesn’t it scare you? Knowing I am this powerful on animal blood alone?” Looking over her shoulder, she said to the coven leaders, “I believe you went through all this trouble to kill me. Why haven’t you done so yet? I have given you every opportunity. I talk, I drawl, I insult. I’m nothing but vulnerable, and yet all you two do is stand and gawk. What do you want? Why did you really bring this half-blood?”
I felt everyone’s stare turn to me. The attention felt hotter than sunlight baking down on my back. “I...I really am your son. My name is—”
The sound of several pairs of feet hitting the cobblestone made attention shift again. On another side of the Square, newcomers had arrived. More tension crackled as anyone not trapped in a penagrum took fighting stances.
But it wasn’t a second wave of vampires.
It was Koen, Sloan, Tess, and Em—along with several other members of the Kairos.
I didn’t let my heart soar in relief. I could only watch Amate turn slowly to them. Expressionless, her gaze lingered on Koen. “You are an idiot for coming back here.”
