The woman seemed unaware of my inner struggle. “Everybody calls me Mona, though.”
“That’s not why they call you that,” the guy said.
“Shut up, Drake. God, you’re a pig.”
He snorted and went back to his stew.
The other girl placed a bowl in front of me. “You look like you’re half starving. I’m Jane.”
“Helene,” I said. They seemed fascinated by my presence and not at all worried about their own situation. I was sure that must mean they’d been here before tonight, and once again I was puzzled by how nobody in the city seemed to know about any of this.
Drake turned his attention back to me, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’d love to show you around the estate.”
Even I knew that was a line.
“Ignore him,” Mona said. “Gabriel doesn’t collar anyone for himself often, but when he does, he’s very possessive. Drake has plenty of women here to fraternize with.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” He winked at me, but I turned away and focused on my food.
“This is good,” I said. I’d half-expected it to be the human equivalent of pet food. If my captors didn’t eat regular food, why would they make the effort to feed us anything that tasted like anything?
“Mona made it.”
Oh. Well, that made sense—more sense than Gabriel or one of the others standing around in the kitchen with a wooden spoon over a big pot.
“What is he? Gabriel and the others?”
“You really don’t know?” Mona said. “They’re the gods.”
I wouldn’t let myself believe she meant what I thought she meant even though I’d already thought it myself.
“You know…the stories. They’re the gods.”
“None of that’s true. Who told you that?” Even in the myths, the gods weren’t described as having glowing eyes and fangs and drinking blood. Yes, they were said to be immortal and very strong, but that was all.
“They did,” she said.
So if someone proclaimed himself a god, we were just going with it now?
“I overheard a few of them talking about royals and saying Gabriel was the king,” I said.
“That’s who they are and how they’re organized to each other. To us, they’re the gods. You don’t have to like it, but we owe our continued existence to them.”
So there was someone for me to blame directly. No longer was it the nameless faceless “rules” that shifted between day and night—the totality of power behind curtains. It was real living beings.
I had nothing further to add to the conversation. But listening to them as I ate, I got the impression they considered it a great honor to serve the gods by prostituting themselves to them—as if this were a holy pilgrimage they made each time the dark came.
“Helene.”
I looked up, startled. “Yes?”
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Mona said, “but isn’t it better than being locked away in your house terrified for most of your life?”
I shrugged. If I thought that, I’d beg Gabriel to bring Simone here to protect her. Instead, I still hoped she could remain far from this place. This bargain didn’t seem as sweet to me as it did to them. And what would happen when “the gods” grew bored? What about when their dinner and playthings aged? When our blood wasn’t as sweet? It hadn’t escaped my notice that there were no old people here.
The gods seemed to have no interest in sparing the old or the unattractive, so it was hard to see things in the same altruistic light my co-prisoners saw them.
I suspected they were somewhat in love with the powerful beings that leeched off their life force. I remembered the brief euphoria when Gabriel bit me. If I didn’t feel so muted inside, I could imagine it seeming more exciting. I could imagine the addictive dopamine rush growing in strength each time it happened. I could envision a world in which I would have waited outside, begging for another chance to serve their appetites.
As it was, I just wanted to survive and please Gabriel until Simone got her pills.
When the three of them saw they were getting nowhere with me, they withdrew back into a conversation with each other. I took my bowl to the sink and poured water in it.
“Do I need to wash this?” I was sure the gods weren’t washing our dishes for us.
Jane waved me away. “We have a rotation, but Gabriel wouldn’t want his personal slave doing menial work.” She didn’t seem bitter. It was just the facts of life around here in this bizarre hierarchy we’d found ourselves in. I certainly didn’t mind washing a dish. I wasn’t that precious. But I also didn’t want to disrupt the social order or do anything that might make Gabriel go back on his word.
“Thanks, Mona. It was great.”
“I plan to expose you to my entire cooking repertoire while you’re here,” she said.
Even if I thought their acceptance of all this was deluded, I felt a twinge of jealousy toward their outlook and apparent happiness. I wished those feelings came so easily to me.
A feminine scream erupted through the house. “No! Let me go!”
So much for their fantasies about how wonderful everything was. But no one sitting at the table seemed bothered.
“Fresh meat!” Drake said with glee as a door slammed from another part of the house.
I slipped out of the kitchen and down the hallway, following the trail of the screaming and struggling woman who’d just been brought in.
I wasn’t sure if more eyes were on her or me. Both of us seemed to be of interest to those who’d gathered in Gabriel’s home. My master sat in the regal chair beside the fireplace where I’d met him. I tried to blend with the others in the room.
I looked down and realized no one was wearing shoes. It struck me as almost painfully funny that these snobby blood-drinking assholes were all dressed up while their footwear sat in some tangled pile. If I’d doubted Gabriel’s power before, for some reason, this alone put that doubt to rest. Anyone who could enforce his no-shoe rule among this group could probably do anything.
When Santo threw the girl down on the rug in front of Gabriel, she’d already been relieved of her shoes.
“You are my slave until morning. My name is Gabriel, but you will call me Master. You will address anyone I share you with by that title as well—or Mistress as the case may be.”
It was the same thing he’d said to me earlier in the evening—as if he’d said it hundreds or thousands of times before, so many times the words came out unchanged.
She trembled, terrified, her eyes darting around the room—as if seeking a savior in the gathering crowd. She had the look about her as if she were certain someone would begin throwing rocks in a moment. I couldn’t blame her.
“Well?” Gabriel said. “Address me.”
Her gaze dropped to the ground. “Y-yes, Master.”
The ease of her capitulation was unsettling. She’d screamed and fought, and yet all it had taken was a few calm words from Gabriel for her to accept herself as his slave.
He nodded and waved a hand to dismiss her. “The rooms in the main house are assigned. Take her to the last cottage on the end and get one of the girls to explain things to her and help her acclimate.”
“Yes, sir,” Santo said.
He hauled her up off the ground to carry out the order. She seemed calmer, as if all she’d ever needed was for someone to give her a purpose, no matter what that purpose was. Any would do.
“Santo?” Gabriel said.
He turned. “Yes, sir?”
“That will be enough. We have plenty for the night now. You can resume your normal duties.”
“Yes, sir.”
A few minutes later someone official-looking entered, and again, the room fell silent. The new stranger exuded some amount of authority on his own, but even he hadn’t been able to ignore Gabriel’s rules protecting the integrity of the floors. He handed Gabriel a thick, cream-colored envelope with a gold seal. The paper looked expensive.<
br />
“Her Majesty says I am to wait for a reply.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes. No one had called him by such a formal title, even though there had been murmurings that he was the king. Did he have a queen in exile? He opened the letter and stood to read it. It was several pages.
Every few lines he made an angry growling noise, which seemed out of character given how controlled I’d seen him since my arrival. With each growl, the room grew more tense. When he finished, he walked the few steps to the fireplace and tossed the letter into the flames. The pages curled in on themselves and whimpered into ashes.
“And what should I say to her?” the messenger asked.
“Report what you witnessed. She’s not an idiot. She needs no further commentary from me.”
The messenger bowed and excused himself from the party.
This was the point at which Gabriel either noticed my presence or decided to acknowledge it.
“Helene.”
The crowd parted, leaving nothing but a few yards of empty space between the two of us. I held my breath as his gaze roved over me. I didn’t know if I should kneel or bow or curtsy or address him or stay silent or…I was willing to do whatever he wanted no matter how stupid, humiliating, or painful as long as Simone would be safe. But I had no idea what was appropriate given the full set of circumstances.
Gabriel spared me further awkward embarrassment with an outstretched hand. I took it, and he turned back to his guests. “I’m sure I’ll see you all at various points throughout the night.” The guests inclined their heads or made a bow or curtsy. Then he led me from the room and out of the house into a night that was quickly becoming more relief than burden.
***
Adrenaline buzzed through me once we were outside. I was overwhelmed by the smells of the rare night-blooming flowers, the breeze, the smooth flat warmth of the stones in the driveway under my feet, and the soft cool grass. I didn’t know a single person with a lawn. The few grasses that were hardy and managed to stay alive through the nights had adapted and hibernated through the long dark periods.
But this grass was a soft, sensitive type that would require constant periods of light and feeding to be nurtured through the night. It was one more thing to add to the growing list of simple extravagance that I wouldn’t have even thought about trying to have in my life before.
At the bottom of a hill, another house rose into view. This house was larger and nicer than the many cottages we’d passed on the estate but not quite the size of the main house.
“These are my private chambers,” he said as we approached. Santo stood guard outside the front door as if he’d been there all night rather than leaving the house only a few minutes before we had. How had he taken that girl to her cottage and made it back already? How fast could they move?
Once inside and away from the furtive gazes of the guests, Gabriel took both of my hands and looked me over again. “How are you feeling? Have you eaten?”
These were the last things I expected him to say. “Fine, Master. Yes, I’ve eaten.”
I didn’t actually know what I was feeling besides off-balance. It was at this moment that I set up the game in my head, the question I’d ask myself each time things got sufficiently strange that I wasn’t sure if the malaise I’d lived with for an intractable length of time now had lifted or not. If he offered me death now, would I take it?
Yes.
No temporary distraction changed the base reality of the world in which I lived. There was no sense pretending that any of it was worth clawing and struggling to hold onto. If Gabriel truly thought he could bring me back to life, he had no idea the size of the mountain he would have to scale.
And yet.
When his warm hand rested against my cheek, I shifted toward him the tiniest amount. From a well somewhere deep inside me I felt that if his hand stayed there long enough, surely he could melt the block of ice around me, and I would awaken some new creature that saw the world in full color.
But without those sharp, protective edges, what would protect me?
I didn’t want to live, but I wanted to want to. Then I thought about Mona and Drake and Jane and the other deluded fools whose names I didn’t know here. I thought about how someday the rug would be ripped out from under them. Their charms would fade, and with it, the immortals would lose interest to the degree their repulsion for the weakness of human aging grew. Night would go back to being the same nightmare it had always been. Only this time, they would be without survival skills because of the long, easy detour they’d taken along the way.
It was all just a distraction from the inevitable. Suffering and fear and pain and death. The only escape was an unending silence. Erasure.
And Gabriel and his kind never had to worry about it. Young and beautiful and healthy and strong and rich and powerful and safe. Forever. Or at least that was how it seemed to me, given the small amount of information I’d been exposed to on the topic so far.
I think I just snapped—just broke completely with reality. It was as if I were a thin ribbon spiraling off the spool. Just one tiny slip in the winding, and I’d shifted somewhere else without boundaries or borders. I forgot about Simone and why I’d agreed to live for a while.
On a wall just behind Gabriel was a spear. It seemed primitive compared even to everything in his old-fashioned home. I darted around him and tore it off the wall, drunk on anger at the world.
But anger was something. It was an emotion. It wasn’t this dull foam wrapped around me.
I just wanted to make the anger last, because just like in the dungeon, it felt like something.
I don’t remember hauling my arm back or aiming at any one particular thing. I just remember the moment the sharp metal point pierced through Gabriel’s shoulder and the growl that ripped the silence of the room apart.
Santo rushed in, no doubt to kill me. And in the moment before I remembered Simone and what this might mean for her, the relief settled over me again.
Finally. Everything is over.
“Leave us,” Gabriel said as the spear clattered to the ground, staining a light gray carpet with his blood.
“But, sir…”
“Leave!”
Santo scurried out.
By this point, I’d scrambled to a corner, leaning against the wall. I couldn’t make the tears stop. I just kept thinking that once he’d killed me, he’d take it out on Simone. And even if he decided to spare her the overflow of his rage, she’d die from his neglect. There was no way he’d bother to take the pills to her now.
The buttons on the front of his shirt popped as he ripped the clothing apart and tossed it in the fire.
“I liked that shirt,” he said, his eyes glowing to match the flames as if he could burn me to ashes with his gaze alone.
I gasped when I saw his shoulder. There was a bit of blood, but it was as if it had spilled on him—not like he’d been bleeding himself. Rationally, if he could heal the gruesome horror of my back by licking it—a thought which still inspired revulsion—then, of course, he would heal fast on his own.
But it had seemed certain at the moment I’d taken the spear off the wall, that something that sharp and powerful could take down even a lion like Gabriel.
He stood over me, his arms crossed over his chest. Disappointment.
“Helene, I thought we’d made a deal. Do you or do you not have a sister whose life depends on the drugs in my possession?”
The question was rhetorical, but it was obvious he wanted me to say it anyway.
“I do, Master.” It seemed like a good time to offer titles and deference since I’d just ruined his shirt. That was the only real thing I’d managed, but I assumed the insult was that we both knew what my intent had been even if it had been a futile fantasy from the start.
“Then you should be happy I’m so hard to kill.”
Hard? Not impossible? But killing him wouldn’t solve anything even if I could figure out how. Though I resented him for the ease and pe
rfection of his life, I didn’t want him dead. Maybe stabbing him had been an expression of frustration that I couldn’t find it inside me to turn that spear on myself.
Simone had teased me about the long baths I used to take. She didn’t know they were so long because I spent a good portion of that time with a razor blade poised above my wrist. It was supposed to be one of the more painless ways to do it. But all I could ever do was stare at the gleaming blade until the water turned frigid.
I don’t know if I never did it because Simone needed me, or if I couldn’t bear the horror and pain she’d face when she saw glassy, lifeless eyes looking up from an overflowing pool of diluted red. Or maybe I was just a coward—too scared to face what was beyond the curtain of my life, or the blank black nothingness that might be the punchline of the joke.
In the dungeon, all I’d had to do was not try to stop the train that barreled down the track toward me. And how could I stop something so powerful as a train? I just had to let it happen. Simone wouldn’t find me or have to see it. I wouldn’t have to be the one that made the final choice.
But now, sitting here, awaiting whatever retribution Gabriel might mete out, I couldn’t work up an emotion about anything, except a vague fear for Simone. The anger had already dissipated. I couldn’t even maintain the energy for that anymore. I was slipping away. I felt I might explode into a burst of tiny fluttery winged creatures that would dissipate into the night, leaving no trace I’d ever been.
I looked up to see Gabriel sitting in a chair beside the fireplace, studying me. His eyes went back and forth from the glowing orange-red to his normal light green. He gripped the edge of the chair, his hand shaking almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t fear or some infirmity; it was anger—that feeling I couldn’t hold onto and he was trying to release. For my sake? For his own?
The bloody spear lay inert on the light gray rug between us. I couldn’t find the anger I’d just had, or any other strong emotion. I could barely grasp onto the energy to stand. But I grabbed the spear again, and this time I was aware of the moment I hauled it back, aiming it at his heart. I didn’t think it would kill him, but I thought it might kill me. In a round about way. If it became clear that I’d relentlessly stab him every opportunity I got, maybe…