When Arthie opened her eyes, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d closed them. She sat up and everything rushed back. Spindrift. Her home, her joy, her life—gone.
There was an armchair by her bed and an unlit hearth beside it. She knew this place. She recognized the illustrated ceiling and those ornate walls: the Athereum.
She slumped back into the pillows and ran her hands down her ribs, making sure everything was in place. She’d felt every crash and shatter of Spindrift as if it were her own body. As if she had been tethered to it by a thread, and the Ram had come and snipped it clean, leaving her bereft.
The emptiness was as loud as the hunger gnawing at her insides. She almost laughed. She almost gave in to the mayhem thrashing beneath the surface. She was tired of powering forward. She was tired of outsmarting the next hurdle.
Her pistol was on the bedside table. She holstered it, tucking a piece of herself back in place, and forced herself out of the bed. She needed to check on Jin and her crew. But she was an animal pacing in a cage. Something was rippling through her, begging to be unleashed.
Please, please, please. A sob tore out of her, draining the last of her will, forcing her down to her knees on the rug in the room’s center.
In this game between her and the Ram, she had lost.
Lost her home, lost her life, and worst of all, lost the control she had so carefully cultivated.
A whisper of a sound pulled her out of her thoughts. Something white drew her attention—a white orchid that symbolized missing someone. That hadn’t been there before. A figure drew near, silhouetted against the curtains. She recognized the shape of him, his scent that heightened her senses.
“Laith.”
That couldn’t be right—he couldn’t be alive. He couldn’t be roaming free in the Athereum of all places.
“Arthie.” He spoke her name on a twisted exhale, stepping into the lamplight. She shivered in anticipation and gritted her teeth against it.
It was him.
“You’re … you’re alive.”
She should have apologized, but the words refused to form on her tongue. She could barely form coherent thoughts.
A shaky laugh broke out of her instead. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you? After what I did to you.”
His gaze swept down her body, and he took a step closer. “If only that were true. I loathed you, Arthie. I hated you for the span of a heartache before I realized how much I craved you. And I know you yearn for me the same.”
Arthie did, she realized. She’d looked for him at every turn—when learning the truth about the Ram’s ledger, when the flames tore through Spindrift.
“And I understand why you did it,” he said. “I wasn’t as forthcoming as I should have been. I apologize.”
He spoke the words too quickly. He forgave her too quickly. If only Arthie could think clearly. There was a piece she was missing, and she only needed to rearrange the puzzle that was him for it all to click into place.
“I heard about Spindrift.”
“It’s gone,” she said, and her voice broke.
“I know,” he replied softly, too calm for her chaos. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“The others—”
“Safe,” he said. “Your crew is at Imperial Square. Jin, Flick, and Matteo are here. I learned about the ledger, too. It is safe to say I don’t work for the Ram any longer.”
She glanced at his breast pocket. Sure enough, his robes didn’t bear the badge of the Horned Guard.
“Why don’t you let go?” she asked suddenly. The words burst out of her. “Why live for the dead when you have a life of your own?”
Laith paused, taken aback. “The past cannot be forgotten.”
No, it could not. Only death would take her past from her. “But can it be forgiven?”
“My heart seeks a peace I may never know,” Laith said. “Until I find it, I do not know how to live any other way.”
“Lex talionis,” she murmured. She knew what peace he spoke of, even if she’d never considered it as more than a wound in her chest, a hole she could never fill. “How long can vengeance last?”
“An eternity. Until they suffer the same fate, until justice is struck.”
Her thoughts bled into one another. She needed to stuff all her broken edges back into a tailored suit and return to what she was. Nothing made sense but her hunger.
His clothes rustled in the silence, and then she felt the ghost of his fingers at her jaw, lifting her chin. He lifted his hand slowly, waiting for her to pull away. When the light from between the curtains dipped his fingers in gold, it held her in place. When it danced across the smooth curve of his cheek, she stared. He traced a swoop of her hair, curling it behind her ear, his gaze following the movement like a beast tracking its prey.
He pressed closer, and impossibly, her head tilted without her consent. “If there is anyone who can endure an eternity, it is you.”
When she felt the feather of his breath along her skin, she felt dangerously like giving in. His finger swiped her lip, and that hunger amplified. It wanted to ravage and destroy. It wanted, and she couldn’t stop it.
“I know what you are, Arthie,” he whispered. His voice held the barest of tremors. “I’ve known since the day I met you.”
She pulled away from him, freezing as she searched the planes of his face. How? How could he know?
Tell me, do you remember what it’s like to live?
He grazed his fingers down the side of her arm, depriving her of her ability to think. “Let me help you.”
She inhaled, devouring the scent of his blood, the fervor in his veins. It assaulted her. Drove her mad. She wanted to unleash her rage upon him. She wanted to crack open his rib cage and crawl inside of him.
He loosened the sash of his robes and let them fall to the rug with a soft hush. He undid the trio of buttons on the top of his linen shirt and bared the unmarred skin of his throat. His eyes were as dark as her heart, a sea at dusk.
“Let me bleed for you.”
When that healer in Ceylan had told Arthie’s mother that only a miracle could save her daughter, he had taken Arthie in his arms as if she weighed no more than a sack of rice and set her down in the back of his hut, with its coconut palm leaf–thatched roof and snaking wisps of incense smoke. He moved with impossible speed. One moment he was there, considering her. The next, he was striking himself like a viper. When she gasped, he pressed his wrist to her mouth.
She didn’t know what made her drink.
A fire started in her limbs, sweeping through her veins in invisible torrents, consuming her, draining her, filling her with hunger even though she had just eaten.
“What’s happening to me?” she had asked, voice rising.
“You must live for those who will not,” he said.
And then the darkness swallowed her up, only for an instant, an eternity, a minute or many, and when she opened her eyes, the healer was gone. Or maybe she had left his hut. She moved too quickly, every sound rang too loudly. Around her, people were screaming and running. Ettenian soldiers were coming, they said. Angry waves swallowed bobbing boats. A storm was coming, too.
“Arthie!”
She ran in the direction of her mother’s voice, feeling stronger than she could ever remember. She looked down at her black-stained hands and sticky fingers. She angled them toward the sunlight creeping through the smoky skies and realized they weren’t black, but the darkest shade of red.
Blood.
Hands gripped her, pulled her close. The embrace was warm, a feast to satisfy her hunger. No! She reprimanded herself. This was her mother, shouting at her to hurry, and her father, steering her in the direction of their boat.
Arthie ran for the crashing waves, unafraid because she loved the sea. But when the water lapped at her limbs now, she hissed at the way it burned her skin, like a thousand needles piercing into her. Still, Arthie powered forward. She reached the boat. There were two girls in it already, their eyes wide as saucers.
She turned back, her hand outstretched, but neither of her parents was behind her. They were back at the shore, and as Arthie watched, they died at the hands of the Ettenians.
Death bleeds red no matter the color of one’s skin.
They called her father kalu Asoka because there was another Asoka in their village who was lighter-skinned. They called her mother netta Dasaka because she was the tallest one of the three in the village. But when they lay on the sand, eyes glassy, riddled with holes large enough to see the glint of the bullets, it was all the same. A pool of red. A pool of injustice. A pool of death.
To this day, Arthie remembered her hunger at the sight of them. She did not mourn, she did not weep. That craving engulfed her. The villagers mistook her wild abandon for grief. They pinned her to the boat. Perhaps it was one of the girls, or the man who joined to turn the oars.
Arthie lashed out against them, angry tears rivaling the torrents pouring from the dark skies as they pushed out to sea. They couldn’t understand.
And then she stopped. The boat rocked on the waves in silence, her three companions looking grim and guilty at their own relief.
They didn’t know she’d come to realize something: She didn’t need her parents to feed her. No one could care for her now but herself.
Later, much later, once the skies had cleared and she’d put enough distance between her and Ceylan’s shores, an Ettenian ship found her.
One lone girl in a boat full of blood.
She was too small and too brown and too dirty, but she somehow found herself on the threshold of Penn’s mansion weeks after the Ettenians had found her bloody boat, where they’d nudge one another while spooning slop into their mouths and share quips she couldn’t understand but knew for certain were jibes at her.
At that point, she was oscillating between pain and anger, wishing her hunger hadn’t disappeared so that she could unleash the monster inside of her. Wishing she could stop reliving her final moments in Ceylan.
She remembered bits and pieces after that. Setting foot on the Ettenian pier. The damp cold she’d never known before. The carts and the horses and all those voices and buildings. She remembered the way her footsteps echoed in Penn’s foyer when she entered with her water-warped shoes. It sat behind a trim lawn carved with a winding path where a carriage had been parked, a pair of horses waiting patiently.
The housekeeper was telling her something. Arthie didn’t understand what until she demonstrated, getting to her knees and scrubbing at the floors. She didn’t see a single speck of dirt on the glossy floorboards, but she nodded. She didn’t know what else to do.
At home in Ceylan, her mother would only make her clean once she’d returned from school and had gotten some time to play in the sea with the other children. No one asked about her studies here. No one seemed to see her as a child, only another pair of hands meant for work.
The doors swung open for a pair of guards with rifles against their shoulders. Arthie shrank back with a strangled cry and squeezed her eyes shut.
The house fell silent.
Arthie remained very still as a shadow engulfed her.
“Open your eyes, little lion.”
It was a language she understood. A man was crouched in front of her. He was about her father’s age, but carried himself in a statelier fashion. Aristocratic, she would later learn. His hair was tied at the nape of his neck, and a brilliant red ruby sat in the ruffled knot of fabric under his throat.
He looked Ettenian white, but he spoke her language. That was why they brought her to him, he said. When he smiled, she saw something sharp, and she touched her tongue to those sharp thorns of her own.
He laughed. “Fangs.”
He lowered his voice, and it felt as if they were sharing a secret. “Draw them in and no one will know.”
He regarded her oddly and held a finger under her nose, where her breath came out in fearful, tiny sniffs.
“Fascinating,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You’re alive, but also a vampire. I’ve been trying to find someone like him.”
She still didn’t know of whom he spoke, and it would take her a long, long time to realize she’d been abandoned in an in-between state. Half here and now and alive, the other half lost at sea. Half human, half vampire. Her growth trickled to an end when she neared sixteen. Her heartbeat petered to a halt. She cast a shadow but not a reflection.
For she wasn’t near death when she was fed a vampire’s blood.
That was why she’d wreaked havoc on that little boat, eerily similar to what the Wolf of White Roaring had done years before her. Perhaps if she’d stayed with Penn, she would have learned all that and more.
He told the housekeeper that she wouldn’t be part of the staff. Instead, he gave her a room and a maid and care. But a man like Penn Arundel couldn’t always be home, and a growing girl could not always remain sated. Not long after she moved in with him in Imperial Square, that hunger returned, consuming Arthie’s consciousness until there was nothing else.
Penn found her that night in the bathroom, staring at her maid in a tub full of blood.
It was his reaction that scared her. His face scrunched in pain, and Arthie braced for a reprimanding, but he drew her against him, enveloping her in a wall of comfort and safety. It would be all right, he said. He would help her.
She only needed to trust him.
Months later, her hunger struck again, and he wasn’t there to stop it. Arthie stumbled into the kitchens, gripping the doorframe, claws digging into the wood. Everyone but the cook’s young daughter ran. She cornered her. It didn’t matter who the girl was, only that she was breathing, that blood pumped through her veins, frenzying at Arthie’s approach.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, please, please.”
Arthie spent hours shivering near the kitchen door. The cook screamed. Penn didn’t come. His household began whispering and whispering until she couldn’t take it anymore.
She ran.
Arthie spent days huddling in the alleys of White Roaring’s streets. She saw other vampires bewitching humans into baring their throats, just for a taste. She didn’t trust herself to hold that same restraint, and so she starved. She vowed never to drink another drop of blood again. She clung to the humanity she remembered, the remains of what had been stolen from her.
Some nights, she screamed into the darkness until her body felt numb. She found other ways to stay busy, other emotions to feel. The color bled from the world, and life became a curse.
Until she met a boy with a coconut.