Chapter 1

CHAPTER1

When you’re a vampire, emotions aren’t just feelings that live trapped in your chest. They have scents. Colors. They have flavors.

Betrayal tastes like copper. Like blood in your mouth.

Like a coin for the ferryman.

I know what you’re thinking. But, vampire, blood technically tastes like iron, not copper. Maybe to your limited human senses it does. And you’re right, there is a difference. A subtle nuance. But I don’t just taste the blood. I taste the meaning behind it too.

Iron is the symbol of strength, like the bars that hold me in this cage.

Copper is the symbol of love.

And nothing in any realm is more dangerous or corruptible than love. Nothing is more lethal. Nothing cuts deeper.

No betrayal is worse than when it’s delivered by the hand of someone you love.

Like the Reaper and me.

I close my eyes and that moment is so clear. Struggling to stay up on my feet, hoping that I’d live long enough to just tell him. I wanted him to know I was in love. I expected him to fight for me.

Except he didn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Turns out, my love belonged to me alone. And it was used against me. It lured me right into this fucking cell. And even worse, it clings to me, unwilling to let me go. I remember every whispered word in the dark. Every long and heated look. I can still feel every touch. And I just can’t seem to convince myself that it was all an illusion, even though every day in this place shows me otherwise.

“You’re thinking about him,” Ediye warns. Her dark eyes shred me with a suspicious, all-knowing glare. When you’ve been friends for over three centuries, it’s hard to get away with hiding your thoughts.

The Reaper’s voice floats back to me from the time we sat in the restaurant on the way to Ediye’s house. You have a very expressive face, he’d said. Which had almost sounded like a compliment, at least until he opened his mouth again. It is a disadvantage for a vampire. You should work on that.

What a dick. Or, as Ediye and I have dubbed him, ThatAsshat Reaper Motherfucker.

I roll my eyes at myself. I’ve spent the last hour vacillating between thoughts of how shitty life is and thoughts of the Reaper, and neither are the kinds of thoughts I want to be wallowing in. Not that I have much choice, really. It’s not like the Shadow Realm has furnished us with comfort or entertainment in our threadbare stone cell.

So, I refocus my attention on the only positive thing left to cling onto. Ediye.

There’s one thing that will take my mind off everything, I say in sign language. Ediye gives me a dead-eyed glare; she already knows what I’m going to say. Sing it again.

Ediye shakes her head, her expression resolute. “God no.”

Please.

“Why? You’ve already heard it sixty thousand times.”

Only seventy-eight.

“That’s seventy-seven too many.”

I’m sad. Cheer me up.

There’s a long silence. I give Ediye my most innocent doe eyes from where I rest my head in her lap. It’s not a challenge for me to look pathetic either. I haven’t eaten in days. My face is puffy and swollen from torture and tears. A fever rages through my body. Sweat mists my brow no matter how many times Ediye sweeps it away with the rag she’s torn from the edge of her shirt.

And worst of all, I’m fucking broken-hearted.

“Look on the bright side, babe. At least you didn’t mate with him,” Ediye says, her eyes darting down to my torn shirt where a scar would now live above my heart if I had.

I heave a heavy sigh and look away. Because the truth is, the idea of mating with That Asshat Reaper Motherfucker had crept up on me. And, like a dumbass, I was considering it. I was even starting to long for it.

The thing is, I was just so lonely. It had been centuries since the last of my sisters was stolen from me. Centuries of hiding, centuries of living a transitory existence among humans, their lives so fleeting. So, when I had no choice but to be attached to the first immortal aside from Ediye in three hundred years, it didn’t take much convincing for me to let my guard down.

Fucking idiot.

And now I am alone. And hurt. And exhausted, and sore, and sick, and starving, and a thousand other horrible things. Yet, I’m still longing for it.

Like a dumbass.

“I love you dearly, but your choice in men is fucking appalling,” Ediye says, stroking my hair away from my bruised skin. “He is truly the worst of the lot.”

I narrow my eyes to slits and try to hiss, but no sound comes out. Another swell of sadness threatens to drown me in the absence of my voice. Not even a hiss. My voice that once steered ships onto rocks, that brought the most powerful men and women to their knees. It gave me joy, even when I had to hide the sound of it just to stay alive. It became something precious and rare and exquisite. Now it just… doesn’t exist. It’s been erased, even though I still hear the faint echo of it in my mind. But, like ink corrupted by water on a page, the edges are blurred and warped. The memory is not the same as the real thing.

Tears crest the edges of my eyes and I look away to the iron bars of the door.

“Oh babe. I am sorry. I’m so sorry.” Ediye casts her worried gaze across my forlorn, bruised face.

Without regular blood to feed on, the injuries from my super fun daily sessions with Gallus, torturer extraordinaire of the Shadow Realm, are no longer healing. Not that they do heal much anyway on the rare occasions when the Shadow Realm sees fit to toss me a bag of blood that’s been sitting around somewhere when it should be in a fucking fridge. If it wasn’t for Ediye’s limited spells, I’d be little more than a fragile human on the brink of death. And even then, the magic-laden necklace the Reapers have locked around her throat gives her only enough power to keep me alive so Gallus can mete out more of his daily punishments.

“You do still love that Reaper of yours, don’t you,” Ediye says, her voice soft with kindness.

The crevice in my heart cracks open. Fresh pain seeps to the surface. I look further away from Ediye, trying to swallow the fire that closes my throat. Between the damage from Semyon’s silver injection, the ever-present hunger, and the swell of emotion, my throat seems to always be sore here. A headache blossoms, scratching at my skull. I rub my fingers along my temple, careful to avoid putting pressure on a crooked ring finger that still hasn’t healed from yesterday’s visit to Gallus.

He’s not my Reaper, Ediye. Not anymore.

Ediye leans down and places a kiss to the sheen of sweat that coats my brow. She wraps my pounding head in her embrace and rocks me gently, whispering a spell to ease the pain that scorches my brain like lightning.

“You’re the absolute worst in a breakup, you know that, right?

I nod.

She sighs.

Finally, Ediye takes pity on me. She clears her throat the same way she always does before she’s about to sing.

“When I was young, I never needed anyone, and making love was just for fun. Those days are gone...”

I hear the feet of our guard shift in irritation from outside the fortified door of our cage. The corners of my lips turn up ever so slightly.

“Living alone, I think of all the friends I’ve known, but when I dial the telephone, nobody’s home...”

The guard heaves an exasperated sigh.

Belt it out, you bad bitch. Give it all you’ve got, I sign, my little smile growing wider. Ediye’s eyes dance above me and she takes in a gulp of air that fills to the bottom of her lungs.

“ALL BY MYSELFFFFFF, DON’T WANNA BE, ALL BY MYSELFFFF, ANYMOOOOORE.”

“Stop that infernal singing!” the guard shouts.

“Make me, motherfucker!” she yells back. She sucks in another lungful of air as I quake with laughter on her lap. “ALLLLLLL BYYYYYY MYSELFFFF, DON’T WANNA BE, ALLLLLLL BYYYY MYSELFFFF, ANYMOOOOORE!!!”

The guard smashes his sword against the bars of the door in an off-beat percussion. But Ediye doesn’t stop. Not as her voice warbles around her fit of giggles, not as she veers purposely off-key. We laugh like disobedient children until tears stream down our faces. Ediye finishes the song and still we laugh, and when it finally dies away, we sit with fading smiles lingering in our faces.

You know you’re my best friend and I love you more than anyone, right? I sign, watching as her eyes glow with warmth.

“I know,” she says. “I love you too.”

When our smiles finally die away, Ediye whispers a spell into my skin and presses a kiss to my forehead. If I had a third eye, that’s where her lips would land. But my intuition clearly died somewhere along the way. That eye is blind. Or maybe it sees just fine, and I chose instead to stare into the shadows and convince myself that no harm ever came from the dark.

I was wrong.

As my thoughts descend into the abyss of my bleak reality and all the wrong choices that led me here, Ediye moves on to other songs, dabbing my sweaty skin with her disgusting rag. She runs her finger across my eyebrows and her voice softens until it’s a lullaby. And before long, I fall asleep.

I know this dream. I’ve dreamed this dream so many times. But it’s not just a dream, it’s a memory. And like so many vampire memories, it’s one that likes to surface when it’s hungry for a piece of my soul, rising like a creature from the great unfathomable depths of the sea.

I see a cabin ahead, a lantern flickering within. I followed a man back here, a man I overheard in the tavern boasting about how he’d caught a witch and he planned to make her suffer. He was loud, brazen. Seeking attention. He roamed from the bar to several tables, telling his tale to disinterested patrons. No one believed him. He could barely hold his pint of ale upright, so who would?

But I did.

Something about the gleam in his eyes… the scent of him. The way his heart thrummed faster with his words. I smelled it. Adrenaline. Anticipation.

I smelled truth.

And now, at the cabin set back far from the road, I watch him climb the steps, each thud of his feet on the groaning, uneven planks cutting through the still air. He means for the sound to be heard. He means to terrify whoever is locked inside.

The man thumps his way further into the shadow of the moon with every step he ascends. But I have liquid patience in my blood, don’t forget. I have time to spare. So, I wait. I stand unmoving until he makes it to the landing of the porch. When he finally thunks his heavy boot onto the last step, wavering on his bowed legs, I bend and throw a pinecone against the side of the house. It hits far to the left of the door, obscured by the dark.

The man lurches to a halt and looks in the direction of the sound. He sways a little on his feet.

I throw another to the same spot.

“Who’s there?” he calls into the night, staggering a few steps toward the sound.

He never sees me leap from the dark, clearing the steps like a phantom. He never hears me land behind him, silent on my bare feet. I creep right up to him, so close I could count every wiry hair on the back of his neck. He smells of whiskey and sweat. Unwashed linen. And a woman, her scent a mix of sage and starlight.

I feel the anger bubble in my chest. It’s always struck me as ironic that a man like this can be so disgusting and yet so delicious. And he fits all the criteria to become one of my meals. Not that there are many.

I lean toward the back of his neck and blow a thin stream of air across his skin from pursed lips. His hand darts to the sensation and he ducks, spinning.

“Boo.”

I clip the human in the temple with my fist and he crashes onto the porch. It takes only two unconscious breaths before his thick, floppy throat starts rumbling an ungodly snore into the night.

I roll my eyes, then I bend to pick up his ankle and drag him into the cottage.

The single-room cabin is lit with lanterns, the light flickering across the thick planks of a table and the quilts that cover the chairs and the bed. I hear a scuttling noise in the shadow of the corner and see the witch trying to melt into its sharp angles. She’s tied with magical bonds, looking fierce and suspicious, like a trapped and vicious creature about to bite off a limb. I hear the blood quicken through the chambers of her heart. I can smell the bruises beneath her skin, the sweat and grime on her clothes. She glares at me with ebony eyes, daring me to come closer.

“Hello,” I say.

She says nothing, only narrows her eyes at me. I like her already.

“I’m Leucosia. And you are?..”

She looks at me for a long moment, unsure of whether to trust me with something as important as a name. She must see something worthy because her eyes soften just a little.

“Ediye,” she finally replies.

“Do you happen to know this piece of shit?” I ask, tugging the man’s ankle up to the height of my shoulder and waving it around.

“He’s the one who caught me.”

I look down at the man and back to the witch again. Her midnight skin glistens in the flickering lantern light. I can sense the power of magic in her, and I wonder how an idiot drunkard like this could have captured someone like Ediye. But when I look more deeply into her eyes, I see pain and loss beneath the fear and rage. There is grief. There is a well of it so deep that its waters are heated by the core of the earth.

Humans may be weak, but there are still ways to catch an immortal, even ones that contain immense power. A bait that could not be refused. An exchange to save someone she loved, perhaps. Something horrible held over her as an incentive. Something he likely still stole from her even when she promised to comply. A sin for which he should suffer.

“Want to have some fun?” I say, trying to keep my smile from growing too wide.

The witch looks at the man. Rage and disgust are fierce in her eyes. Her gaze collides with mine in a wicked grin. “I do.”

“We will be great friends, Ediye. I just know it.”

Ediye... Ediye…I move my lips but the sound never comes. For a moment, I’m confused. Why can’t I hear my voice?

“I’m right here, Lu,” she whispers, taking my hand.

Recent memories start to overtake the centuries-old images. Memories of the silver injection burning my voice away. Memories of Ashen descending the dais to embrace the resurrected soul of another woman. Memories of suffering and sickness, and the cage we now live in.

I hear footsteps and the clank, clank, clank of keys approaching from down the hall. I already know it’s the guards, coming to drag me to Gallus so he can hollow out more of my heart.

Stop fixing me, I sign, casting a weary gaze to Ediye. I should be afraid. I know what’s in store. I know what will come when the footsteps stop at the door. But I’m just too tired for fear anymore. I just want a promise from Ediye instead.

Stop fixing me, I sign again, but she shakes her head.

The key slots into the lock.

Stop fixing me, please Ediye.

The hot, calloused hands of the guards grip my arms and pull me from Ediye’s lap. I land on the stone floor and slide toward the door between their unrelenting grip. They slam it shut behind us and drag me to my feet.

I give one last, pleading look to Ediye through the bars of our cage before they pull me into the dark.

And so begins another day as a prisoner of the Shadow Realm.