Chapter 10

There"s a gnawing pit inside me. I remember mortal hunger—an empty belly, the growling, the crankiness. This is nothing like that. This is like a deep depression—everything inside me is vacant and vacuous, subsuming my higher faculties, drowning my being. I become hunger itself.

The fae in me is buried—I am purely vampire, right now. Hard skin, like iron and stone and ice. It glints in the light, pale white like sun-bleached bone.

I cannot touch the hastaxI I brought with me—I have a scar on my palm from when I tried.

I cannot touch my vitality—it"s there, but beneath a glass dome.

Caspian is the same, but he"s had centuries to learn how to deal with it.

He has to hurry me from the car to the motel room—I came too close to a mortal once, in a gas station bathroom—because apparently despite being a vampire, I'm still fae enough to have to pee. Which is…kind of stupid—I nearly pounced on the poor girl and drained her. Only Caspian"s voice in my mind gave me enough awareness of myself that I was able to force my body out of the bathroom before I did anything horrible.

We"ve been on the road for three days—we are taking the long, circuitous, back roads route to Manhattan, hoping to avoid any further encounters with Elites. We ditched the "borrowed" SUV and bought a rusted-out shit-brown old Buick with no A/C and no radio for a thousand dollars somewhere in Ohio. I haven"t used magic since the last encounter, and we pay with cash and have long since ditched our cell phones, carrying pre-paid non-smart phones with the important numbers programmed in. Of course, I don"t need a phone to talk to the others in my coven, but they all seem busy, distracted and terse.

Except Alistair.

Alistair is…unfailingly kind and patient. A bit distant, sometimes, but he always answers when I reach out to his mind.

Like now. It"s the middle of the night, and I can"t sleep. I don"t seem to need it or even want it. And without a radio, I"m going nuts.

Alistair?

Yes, Maeve?

Why do I require blood? I mean, why am I hungry? I fed from Caspian, and he from me. Just a few hours ago, but it only lasted for like an hour.

It"s called parasitic starvation. You feed from him, and he feeds from you. So basically, you"re just recycling the same blood, passing it back and forth. It loses its nutrients after a while, and can no longer sustain you.

But I'm half fae—I produce my own blood.

That part I'm less clear on, honestly. But I think the vampire part of you somehow cancels out the fae, when it comes to blood requirements. I think you still require fresh blood from an outside source. I think Capian can survive entirely on your blood, but you cannot then feed from him, because you"re only getting your own blood back after it"s passed through his system. That"s my guess, at least. It won"t hurt you to feed from him when you"re mating, but it won"t sate your need for blood, or at least not long-term.

I was hoping that wasn"t going to be the case. I don"t want to feed from someone else.

I comprehend your reticence, dear one, but unfortunately, there is simply no way around it. The biological requirement for blood will win, one way or another. Your bloodlust will, at some point, overpower your self-control. My advice to you is to choose your host, your time, and your place while you still have the capacity to do so. Better that than to find yourself feeding from a hapless, innocent mortal in an inopportune situation.

Caspian glances at me then. "Who are you talking to?"

I frown his way. "How"d you know I was talking to someone?"

"You get all…I don"t know. Glassy-eyed and vacant. Like you"re listening to something I can"t hear. Not a big jump in logic to assume you"re talking to someone. Alistair?"

I nod. "Yeah. About why I"m feeling such powerful bloodlust."

"And?"

I explain Alistair"s theory, ending with a ragged sigh and a shake of my head. "The thought of feeding on a random person…" I shudder. "I don"t know if I can do it, Caspian. It"s so…personal. Intimate."

He smiles at me. "I know exactly how that feels. After Alistair brought me out of the forest and…re-civilized me, basically, I had an aversion to feeding on mortals. After what happened with that girl when I first came into my bloodlust, I was too scared of it happening again. I refused to feed on a mortal for weeks. Alistair had to bring me buckets of fresh pig blood to keep me alive. But even that will only work for so long. Eventually, the biological imperative to get the nutrients directly from the source, meaning a living being, will take over. You will not have a choice. Your body will not obey your mind."

"What did you do?" I ask.

He sighs, staring out the windshield with a distant expression. "Alistair accompanied me to a slum. He paid a prostitute and I…" he glances at me apologetically. "I fed. He made sure I was able to control myself, so I didn"t drain her. Once he was certain I was in control, he left me alone."

"The pheromone response…how do you suppress it?"

He grimaces. "You likely will not be able to, not at first." He rolls a shoulder. "I mean, you are capable of things, as a fae, that should be beyond your abilities, though, so you never know. You might be able to control the pheromone release. I can"t explain it, though. It"s like being able to isolate a muscle, like pec popping, you know? Or wiggling your ears. You just…figure it out, or you don"t. It"s hard. It"s unnatural. It"s like…sort of like if you temporarily developed gills and had to learn how to breathe underwater—every instinct and biological urge goes against it."

"But I…" I close my eyes and breathe out slowly. "I have no qualms being with you and the others, with Stirling and Fin. Alistair is still not quite there, and he may never get there. I love you. I love them, too, in a different way. I like being physical with you guys, which is kind of weird if I"m being honest. I had boyfriends before you. Hookups. I liked sex, a lot. But I never even thought about being with more than one guy at a time. And then I started coming into being a vampire, or a vaer or whatever, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world, especially at the moment, you know?" Caspian glances at me, to show he"s listening but remains silent. "I just…I don"t know how I feel about being physical with someone else. Even just the act of feeding, let alone the sexual urges that come with it."

Caspian takes my hand, threading our fingers together, and squeezes. "One, I"ll be with you. Two, the urges, when you"re feeding, tend to be limited. What mortals of your generation consider "messing around" at most. Three, our bloodmate bond will prevent you from wanting true intercourse, to be clinical about it, with anyone but me. The same way you"re comfortable with certain things, up to a certain point, with Stirling and Fin, but seem to instinctively draw the line? It"s the same with feeding." He bobs his head to the side. "You"re different, however, so that"s only my experience and that of the other vampires I"ve ever known. But so far, your vampire nature has run true. It"s just complicated by also having fae nature."

"It kind of seems like in some ways, I"m fully both, and a weird mix. Like, I need blood, but I don"t know if I ever truly go into being fully unblooded. I"m fae, and I require vitality." I huff. "One side or another will also take over at times. I don"t know." I grin at him. "I"m glad you can shut off the pheromone response if you have to feed from someone other than me. I think I"m still mortal enough in my mind that I don"t entirely like the idea of you getting frisky with some cute little mortal girl."

"Even in vampire culture, it is largely taboo for someone bloodmated to engage in that kind of feeding behavior unless your bloodmate is present and participating as well. We do feel jealousy, just in a different way from mortals, and in a more limited capacity." He lifts my hand and kisses the back of it. "I promise you, Maeve, I will never feed from another mortal without your knowledge and consent, and if I simply must feed and you aren"t available, I will suppress the pheromone response."

I smile at him. "Thank you, Caspian."

"We"re navigating this together."

"Together," I echo.

We lapse into an easy silence, the rush of the wind through the open windows accompanied by the noisy rattling groan of the aged, infirm engine of the Buick.

I don"t doze off, exactly. It"s more of a kind of trance state. My body shuts down and goes utterly still. My eyes are open, and I see the road ahead, the blur of the white and yellow lines and the endless ribbon of the blacktop, yet my mind is quiet. The questions fade into the background. It"s most similar to the feeling of being on the verge of napping—laying on a hammock in the sun, eyes closed, nowhere to go and nothing to do, warm and content and sleepy; you"re not quite asleep, but also not entirely awake.

Even when I feel the car stop, and hear the door open and close as Caspian gets out to refuel, I don"t entirely rouse.

I feel them first. Smell them.

I hear a faint, muffled, thumping.

Maeve? We have company.

I get out of the car—the door hinges squeal like a scared pig. We"re at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, an island of light in a sea of darkness. Beyond the ring of light cast by the station, there is nothing. No stars, no street lamps, no houses; miles away, I see a single yellow dot that could be a house.

The station is little more than two pumps and a small convenience store; the light is sulfuric amber, flickering intermittently. The store is barely big enough for a counter shielded by thick plexiglass, a single glass-front refrigerator containing PepsI products, and a stand with assorted junk food and pulp magazines.

We"re the only ones here, save for the young man behind the counter, who wears large over-the-ear headphones as he plays a game on his phone, ignoring us.

The thumping grows louder, but is oddly directionless, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. I look up, but I can see nothing, only a vague impression of low, heavy, dark clouds scudding overhead—the wind is stiff and warm, plastering my shirt to my torso and whipping my hair into a frenzy.

Caspian finishes pumping gas and replaces the handle. He"s bristling, tense. Angry.

"Caspian?" I touch his shoulder. "What is it?"

"Enforcers. I know the smell."

As he speaks, I hear a thud behind me; I whirl and see a figure in black armor rising from a crouch. The armor absorbs light, refracting shadows, blurring his outline—or her, actually, since I can scent her femininity. She carries a metal staff about five feet long with two short, blunt metal spikes three inches long at the top. She wears a full helmet, military rather than motorsports, and has a pistol strapped to her side, low on her thigh. She spins the staff and slams the butt into the concrete, once, and bluish-white light erupts from the spikes, radiating out to become a shield, oval in shape and big enough to hide her entire body.

She remains motionless.

Another thud, and another. Two more in quick succession. Each one performs the same movement, spinning the staff, slamming it into the ground, and engaging the shield. None says anything.

"Those shields are glamoured to repulse magic, I"ve heard," Caspian mutters to me. "The staff can also be a huge, glorified taser, except they can kill you."

"Super," I mutter back.

The circle of Enforcers closes in around us.

"Stay back!" I shout. "Don"t make me hurt you."

No response.

Another series of thuds—the thumping has remained constant, overhead. A helicopter, cloaked and quiet—although that"s only a guess.

Behind the ring of Enforcers with the shields is another ring, and these, five more, wield their staffs as weapons—electricity arcs bright white-blue between the prongs. They advance until they"re slotted between the shield-wielders.

"Please. I don"t want to hurt anyone. Just leave us alone."

No response.

The circle tightens.

Caspian"s anger is a palpable force, emanating from him like a sour miasma.

"These aren"t the same ones who murdered your mom, are they?" I ask.

"It doesn"t matter. They"re all the same. Who knows who else they"ve murdered? Your mother? Someone else"s loved one?" He sniffs. Pivots in a slow circle. Points at one, a shield-wielder. "You. You smell familiar."

"Caspian." I reach for him, but it"s like grabbing a statue. He ignores me.

"I know your scent, fae." His voice darkens. I can"t see his eyes, but I know they"re black voids. "You were there."

"Caspian!" I shout. "Don"t!"

Too late.

He lunges, too fast for my sight to track—he slams into a shield, resulting in a loud crackling and a burst of light. Caspian is flung backward—with his target gripped by the wrist. They land in the center of the circle in a heap, the fae Enforcer moaning. Caspian reaches his feet first, snarling. His fist crashes down on the fae"s helmet, splintering it with a deafening crack. Another strike, and another, and then the mage-armor helmet disintegrates, leaving a fae male with a bare head. Middle-aged in appearance, making him several hundred years old. Well old enough to have been present at Caspian"s mother"s execution.

"HALT." A voice echoes from above. "Violence against Tribunal authority is punishable by death."

Caspian seizes the fae by the throat and lifts him effortlessly to his feet. Stares upward in the direction of the voice and the thudding of the rotors.

"Caspian, don"t." I stand behind my bloodmate. "It won"t bring her back."

"He was there." His voice is cold, vicious. "He murdered her. She was was innocent."

"She broke the law," the fae gasps. "Produced a whelp after the Treaty."

"She didn"t know about the treaty!" Caspian roars. "She lived alone in the forest! It was an accident! A mortal stumbled across her hut and she got carried away. He didn"t even die! She let him go. She didn"t deserve execution."

"That…is not…your…decision…to make." The fae"s face is darkening, going purple as Caspian"s claws tighten.

"They"re already after me," I whisper. "You don"t need them after you too."

"I"m your mate," he growls. "I"m marked anyway."

The circle closes in. Electricity crackles. I spin slowly, trying to keep my eyes on everyone at once.

I"m honestly more impressed by these Enforcers than I have been by the so-called Elites. At least these Enforcers have a strategy and something like teamwork.

The circle closes yet more—electricity crackles in every direction.

I have to do something.

I close my eyes and open my mind, reach down into the cauldron of boiling power…

Only to be halted by the glass dome covering the well of vitality. I can"t reach it—my vampire nature has taken over and won"t release me until I"ve fed.

Fuck.

The only way out is through, it seems.

Except…I"m no fighter. I"ve never been in a fight. A girl tried to start a fight with me in my junior year, but I just stared at her until she walked away, cursing me out.

Magic is different.

"I remember…you," the fae in Caspian"s grip rasps. "Vampire…whelp."

"Caspian." I touch his shoulder. "Not like this."

A momentary hesitation. And then Caspian throws the fae into the circle of shield-bearers. He slams into his compatriots with the force of a wrecking ball, bowling them over. Caspian grabs me by the waist and flings me next, sending me soaring over their heads. I focus on lightness, and weightlessness—the wind buffets me, carries me.

All is chaos, then.

I hear crackling as my feet hit dirt and I skid across gravel on the shoulder of the highway. A prickling on the back of my neck has me ducking, pivoting, just in time. A staff pierces the air above me.

Too little, too late.

Something seizes me, a force slamming through me like I"ve been hit by a semi, paralyzing me. I can"t breathe, can"t see.

I hear yelling. Cursing. Cracking of armor, bones breaking.

The pain hits me, then. Agony unlike anything I"ve ever felt before. And with it?

Rage.

Pure primal rage. A snarl rips from my throat, and the paralytic effect of the shock stick fades, buried under the rage.

This isn"t instinct driving me, now, but uncontrollable anger. Red hazes my vision.

The pain, god, the pain.

Behind the pain and the rage, there"s a seed of my mortal self, and she is horrified.

I can"t stop myself.

I am an observer as I fly into violence.

I grab the shock stick, wrest it from his grasp, and jab him with it—nothing happens. It doesn"t burn me like the Hastaxi, but I can"t make it work without vitality.

No matter—it"s still a five-foot-long metal staff, and I was the star hitter on my softball team last year—Mom made me try out, hoping I"d make friends. I didn"t. I sucked at catching, throwing, grounding, everything. But good lord could I hit the ball.

I have no staff training, so I don"t try. I just…hit.

Snarling, screaming, I slam the staff against a body, another. A shield blocks it, and the shock of it spins me around, nearly tearing the staff from my grip.

I hear Caspian to my left. Crackling behind me—I feel my body respond with vampiric speed, twisting me out of the way. I use my staff to block the attack and then counter, slamming the prongs into my attacker"s thigh—he shouts in pain as the armor splinters and the prongs pierce flesh.

I hear the rotors overhead. Feel the downwash.

I don"t know what possesses me—the rage that has driven me in the fight so far, I suppose—but I take a running leap and hurl the staff like a spear toward the rotor noise.

There"s a crash of metal and a whine of an engine, an interruption of the rotors.

I feel hands pull me back, yanking me so hard the rage dissipates.

A moment later, there"s a deafening crunching crash and metal shrapnel screaming past and dirt and wind and fire.

When the dust clears, the remains of a helicopter lay crumpled where I"d been standing.

The rotors hang limp and broken. It was once a sleek, expensive, futuristic machine, I think, but now so much wreckage and no more.

My thrown staff pierces the craft a few feet below the rotor assembly—a miraculous feat I couldn"t have done on purpose in a million years.

I march over to the downed helicopter—the pilot is alive, albeit bleeding profusely. The blood—fuck. I steel myself against the smell, the pangs of hunger, the ravaging need to feed—rip open the door as if it"s made of cardboard. Snatch the headset off the pilot.

"Hello?"

"Captain Delifray, this is base. Come in, over."

"Captain Delifray is unavailable. This is Maeve Sparrow. Put me through to someone in charge."

A pause. "Hold please."

Static crackles. Silence.

"This is Commander Paris Callistae of the Tribunal Enforcement Authority. You claim to be Maeve Sparrow?"

"What is it with fae and the weird ass names?" I say. "I"m not claiming anything. I am."

"I take it my men are dead?"

I pivot and glance at Caspian. "The fae, are they all dead or what?"

Caspian scans the scene—and so do I: bodies litter the gas station tarmac. Most writhe in pain, groaning and gasping. I scent the air and taste the truth in Caspian"s answer as he speaks it.

"None are dead. Wounded and in need of a healer, but not dead." His voice is tense, and I know he"s fighting the urge, as I am, to pounce on the nearest fae and sate my hunger, slake my thirst. "We need to get out of here, Maeve. Now."

"One second," I say to him, and the key the mic again. "None of your men are dead. I"ve told them, and I'll tell you—I have no quarrel with the men you"re sending after me. Or, men and women. I do not want this. I didn"t ask to be born what I am—no more than my mother asked to be raped for months on end, and forcibly bred to a vampire. Or murdered in cold blood by you selfish power-hungry fucking bastards. Leave me alone. Please."

"I can"t do that, I"m afraid. There are larger issues at play here, Miss Sparrow. Larger than you."

"I recognize that, Commander Callistae. But you have no right to me. You have no right to my body or my blood or any part of me. And you"re right—this is much larger than me, or my mother. It"s the fate of all immortals, all three races. But you and your ilk care more about power and control than the good of immortal kind. You don"t want me, and word of who and what I am, let alone how I came to be, to get out to the larger immortal public. You dare not. They may not like it. They may decide that maybe the Tribunal isn"t actually looking out for their wellbeing, but only your own ends."

"A pretty speech, Miss Sparrow. But woefully misguided. I understand where you"re coming from, truly I do. But you"re wrong. On so many counts. I don"t have the time or inclination to correct you, however. I appreciate your… restraint…in not killing my fae."

"I don"t want to hurt anyone, but I will not be your pawn or lab rat. I will not allow you to control the future of all immortals. We deserve to choose. They deserve to choose—not have the future determined for them by a bunch of scared old fucks sitting in an underground bunker somewhere."

"You grew up a mortal, Miss Sparrow, and your ignorance shows. My men are under instructions to bring you in alive, but that doesn"t mean unharmed."

"I don"t understand what you want from me."

"It isn"t my place to say. I"m an authority in this, but I"m not the finall authority. I urge you to come with us peacefully."

"If I did so, can you give me a written and magically binding contract stating that I"ll be free to come and go as I choose and that Caspian and everyone else connected to me will be let alone, unharmed and free?"

A very long pause follows. "You know very well I cannot provide such a contract, Miss Sparrow."

"Then we have nothing else to talk about."

I don"t give him a chance to respond, but yank the headset off off my head and rip it violently away from the helicopter, tossing it aside with a snarl of frustration.

My vampiric nature seems to feed—pun intended—off of my negative emotions. The angrier I am, the hungrier I feel—and the more challenging it is to control that hunger. Right now, for example, my mouth is quite literally salivating at the overwhelming scent of fae blood in the air. So much blood. Sunlight and honey—fuck.

I feel hands gripping me with iron strength, hustling me away from the bodies to the busted old Buick. The velvet cushion seat is soft under me. The air is warm and redolent with fae blood.

"Need to feed," I snarl, my words tangled up by the lengthening of my fangs. "So much blood."

"Not them. Not now," I hear Caspian say. "Trust me when I say that fae blood is…addictive."

I wish I could laugh, or say something witty, but I can"t. I grip Caspian"s hand and squeeze with all that I have until I hear him grunt with pain—even in his mostly unblooded state.

Wind howls, bring faint strains of blood through the open window—I roll it closed.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Crack one eye open and peer out the window: starlight winks through holes in the clouds. Focus on the points of light, the shreds of cloud.

There"s nothing to say.

Miles pass, and so do the hours, and I wonder what I'm running from, and where I"m running to, and what I"m hoping to accomplish.

The night holds no answers—only hunger and silence.