Flick was still getting over the fact that they’d broken into the Athereum and lost one of their crew. And now she had to wrap her head around the idea of vampires being the cargo listed on that ledger. As if they could be fitted into crates like weapons and sent across the sea—by her mother’s company, no less.
“Why?” Jin asked, his arms crossed. Flick could tell he had his emotions on a leash.
“At its most distilled level, hatred. Because fear unchecked too often festers into loathing. It’s easy to look at the errors of a few and blame an entire kind,” Penn replied. “But why destroy when you can utilize? Place a starved vampire in a battlefield, and what choice do they have but to feed? Their only concern is staving off that hunger—they’ll attack anything with a pulse.”
“What is a monster if not a man pushed to the brink?” Matteo murmured.
Arthie looked grave. “Weapons on a mass scale with none of the cost.”
“Much like the peakies forcefully enlisting Jeevani and Ceylani to fight against their own in Ettenian wars,” Jin said.
Penn tilted his head. “If the reason for the Ettenians’ animosity toward any minority in this country could be compared to vampires, then yes. But those are people. Vampires are predators.”
“So this is why vampires have been going missing. None of this could be possible without help from the inside,” Jin said. “From the vampires themselves.”
Penn nodded. “From the Athereum as well. For many, aiding the Ram and the EJC is their only security against being taken, while others are simply looking for a cut. I can’t fully blame them, for I’ve lost some of my best vampires.”
Arthie laughed bitterly. “If the EJC is transporting them to the battlefields, then it’s making a cut itself.”
Flick sat down in one of the armchairs by the hearth, letting the warmth of the fire sink into her bones. As frightening as vampires were, Flick didn’t think they ought to be drugged and used. Even in the throes of hunger, when whatever innate, vampiric instincts took over like with Matteo on his porch, they were still conscious of their actions. She tried to imagine being driven by a blinding hunger, trapped inside her own body as she tore through masses of people.
No one deserved such horror.
Matteo turned to her. “Mommy’s been a very bad lady.”
Flick sank deeper into her chair. She knew the EJC wasn’t entirely clean, but this was beyond acceptable. And as she sat there, she felt like a kettle left too long on the stove. All her insides were roiling, raging, and bubbling out, hot and angry.
Jin tossed his jacket on the back of the other chair. His exhale was heavy with a decision. “Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Starting with how you, Mister Penn, know everything, and why we should trust you. You might have taken Arthie in a decade ago, but that’s plenty of time for a man to go dirty.”
“The beginning?” Penn asked with a laugh. “Very well. It began with an expedition. My father was Ettenian, but my mother was Arawiyan and an adventurer, more so after his passing. She was eager to join the voyage to Ettenia, and so I accompanied her on the trade ship that was carrying artifacts of immense value—and not the monetary kind.”
“Sentimental then?” Flick suggested.
“Not quite. Arawiya is a kingdom of enchantment. There is magic in the very land beneath their feet, fueling conjurers of flame, hunters capable of finding anything they set their hearts to, dreamwalkers, healers who can stitch wounds with a touch.”
Penn continued wistfully. “The kingdom was cursed to isolation in recent years, but even before that, magic was limited to Arawiya alone. Stand on enchanted land and you may borrow a bit of its magic. Leave Arawiyan soil, and any affinity you have will no longer work, except in the case of hilya, artifacts charged with magic and memory, capable of immense, immeasurable power.”
Flick saw Arthie’s gaze light up in recognition.
“They can be used anywhere, with the right words,” Penn said. “Creation has since been forbidden, but in the old days, when Arawiya was at its cusp, they were traded to the kingdom’s advantage.”
Flick sensed an until somewhere in his story. Jin and Arthie listened keenly, albeit warily. Matteo, on the other hand, looked as if he’d heard the story before and poured himself a glass of blood from a decanter opposite Penn’s fireplace.
“My mother and I boarded that ship along with several of the ruling Sisters’ trusted immortals.”
“Were they vampires?” Arthie asked.
Matteo waved a hand. “They’re elven. Immortal, vain, think they’re better because they’ve seen it all.”
“Sounds familiar,” she said pointedly.
He lifted his glass at her.
“Can we go back to our bedtime story, please?” Jin asked.
“I should like that,” Penn said, amused. “Our ship docked here in White Roaring, and I remember thinking it fitting that the skies were so wan and gray in a way Arawiya’s were not, for my mother was frailer than ever. The days crawled by and her condition worsened. Hygiene was not commonplace here, soap almost impossible to procure. Not long later, she passed.”
Flick noted the way he spoke the words, unaffected and unafflicted. There were days when she missed her mother as if they had been parted by death, not a wing of their estate.
“I buried her myself. The same evening, we learned one of the Arawiyan elves hadn’t been so trustworthy. One of the hilya was a glass heart filled with what was argued to be blood. He thought he could make a profit of his own, and in the midst of trading the piece, it shattered. Without the right incantation, a hilya cannot be used, but no one knew the procedure for one that broke, disappearing into the land itself, too far from the one that birthed it.”
“Let me guess, the immortals said it would be fine,” Arthie said.
Penn nodded. “It created some twisted mutation of magic. We were by the graveyard when it happened. Corpses started rising from the dirt. To be a vampire, one must be turned within seconds after death, before the heart and brain cease to fully function. These weren’t vampires, but ghouls. The same concept, but they were heartless and brainless, possessing nothing but an endless hunger.”
He looked down at his desk as if he could see his past in the smoke from his cigar.
“My mother was one of them. She attacked me, and what sort of son would injure his own mother in turn? Before I knew it, darkness was tipping into my vision. The others were shouting, the ghouls were letting loose terrible, throaty growls.
“They pried her away from me, but I couldn’t move. I was so overcome with emotion at the sight of what she had become that I wished for physical pain. More of it. Anything to distract from the pain of having to see her die again.
“Another corpse attacked from behind. Squeezed my windpipe. I was dying. And at some point in those few seconds before my death, I drank blood. I don’t know whose, or how they even had blood when they’d been dead so long, but when a hilya was involved, anything was possible.
“I woke up a vampire. I hadn’t known what I was, only that I hadn’t been dead long enough to become a ghoul. I was as terrified as the others were, and to this day I cannot fault them for attacking me in turn. And no one can fault a body for its innate sense of self-defense.
“You’ve heard of vampires that wake with powers, yes? I had the power to make others feel pain with nothing but my mind. It was an illusion. In the midst of their screams, I realized they were imagining pain, that their bones were breaking, or their spine was snapping.”
Flick stared at Penn, the crinkles by his eyes from an eternity of smiling, the compassion in his gaze from an age of understanding. More and more, it seemed that every person she met had something terrible in their past. Whether they’d seen it or inflicted it, everyone walked with a burden.
“That very power has seen me through the decades. Not the use of it, because I’m no monster, but the rumor alone,” Penn said, then laughed. “When the Wolf of White Roaring went on his rampage, I was asked to establish the Athereum and helped craft the vampire-human laws we have in place.
“It did little to appease the public’s fear of vampires, and the monarch was too busy scrambling. Not long after, we had a new one, who knew exactly what the people wanted.”
“What are you getting at?” Arthie asked.
“The Wolf of White Roaring attack was fabricated in order to instill fear,” Penn said. “Vampires had lived in relative secrecy. For decades. Until the Ram decided otherwise, forcefully turning the Wolf of White Roaring into a half vampire and unleashing him upon the city so that the Ram could sweep in and save it. But no one knew that was only the beginning.”