“Yes,” Henry answers him with a tiny, somewhat smug smile.
“Awesome,” Lexington laughs, a look of awe upon his face.
Almost immediately, everyone scrambles, heading for a mirror to attempt to put them in.
“Henry,” I say as I walk to the mirror in the foyer to put my own in. “This is incredible. I mean, it makes sense, how else could you have done what you did, but…” I struggle with the lenses, which are somewhat thicker than a regular contact lens, and watch my eye in the mirror. Carefully, I place it. Instantly the foyer grows darker, and it’s disorienting when the lens automatically adjusts, constricting at first, and then widening to let in more light in the dark house.
“These that I’ve given you and the House are just the prototype,” he explains. “I had just completed a fully implantable version before I faked my death. Once this is over, I will let you discern whom you want to give that permanent freedom to. The lens versions will only last for about a week before the toxins in our bodies will destroy them.”
“Still,” I say as I finish inserting the second one. “This is incredible.”
I blink several times, letting my eyes adjust. They’re irritating, I’ve never worn contacts before, but they aren’t unbearable. Cautiously, I walk to the front door, pulling it open.
Taking five hesitant steps, I stop at the edge of the porch, hovering in the little protection the shade gives me. A smile curls on my lips. And I step out into the full sunlight.
My eyes catch the movement of the lens as it constricts, blocking out the harsh sun rays. The darkness of the actual lens catches the worst of the light.
My eyes don’t burn. My brain isn’t exploding. I’m not in pain.
All I feel is the warm, comforting sunlight.
A laugh bubbles up from my chest. It gains, until I’m nearly hysterical. Slowly, the House members walk outside, too. Each of them cautious and unsure. And then laughing, spinning in circles in the sun.
This changes things.
This will be our advantage.
This will help us win.
“SOMEONE IS COMING,” ANNA SAYS, suddenly looking over her shoulder to the gates of the property.
I turn away from the beautiful sunlight, my eyes searching the horizon. I hear every one of the House members drop into a crouch, ready to spring and attack. Ready to kill.
The sound of shuffling feet travels to my ears first. Slowly, a head of gray hair comes into view. Followed by the most wrinkled face I’ve ever seen.
“Lula?”
I’m down the drive in an instant. I wrap my arm under hers, helping to support her as she struggles to walk up the drive. She wears a nightgown, her hair in a messy, frayed braid down her back. Her feet are covered in filthy, nearly worn-out slippers.
“Lula, what are you doing here?” I ask as I just bend down and pick her right up, carrying her back to the house. “Nial, help!” I yell.
I carry her across the threshold and set her in a chair in the library. Anna darts inside and drags Francesca’s body out, leaving a small smear of blood.
“Damn vampires ruinin’ everything in sight,” Lula mumbles, barely comprehensible as Nial checks her over. “Shoulda’ run…” she struggles to breathe, but her eyes rise up past my shoulder, “you right outta town…long ago.”
I look back to see Henry standing behind me. His serious eyes burn into Lula, but there’s an expression on his face that I can’t place and one I can’t quite understand. Terror. Regret. Realization, maybe.
“None of this woulda’ happened if you hadn’t saved…” Lula again struggles for breath. “Her.”
“Henry,” I say, looking over my shoulder. “What is she talking about?”
But he doesn’t get a chance to answer because suddenly, Elle comes running down the stairs. “Lula?” she says, frantic. She instantly drops to her knees before her grandmother, taking her hands in hers. “Lula, what are you doin’ here?”
Lula places her hands on either side of her granddaughter’s face. While she’s been nothing but cold and cruel to me, the look of love on her face is undeniable when she looks at Elle.
“None of it would have happened,” Lula mutters again, but with conflict.
“Henry, what-” I try to ask again, but suddenly, the phone in the foyer rings. We all look at one another for a moment, and something in my heart grows still as I walk over to answer it.
Please be Ian.
Please be Ian.
“Hello?” I say cautiously into the telephone.
“Alivia,” a voice comes through on the other end, cheerful and excited. “It’s so good to hear your voice again.”
“Daphne?” I say, confusion furrowing my brows.
And the moment I say her name, Henry perks up. Lula’s eyes darken, glaring at me.
“Of course! How have you been?” she says cheerily.
“Um, not the greatest,” I say, scrambling to catch up to such a casual phone call when there’s so many other things going on. “Now actually isn’t a great time. Can I call you back?”
“But it’s been such a long time since our private morning talks,” she says, rushing forward, almost as if she didn’t hear me. “I’ve just been dying to tell you about my travels as of late. Did you enjoy my postcards?”
“Yeah, they were lovely,” I say, feeling more confused by the moment. “But really, I-”
“Oh, I just met the most wonderful people while I was out and about,” she says, still overly cheerful. Overly excited. “I told you once, I have friends all around. I’ve made so many new ones in the past few months. But I just wanted to let you know that I’m back in town.”
“That’s great, Daphne,” I say, itching to get off the phone and back to the new problem at hand. “But I-”
“I got to see my son again last night,” she interrupts me, and something in me chills. Her voice grows harder, more serious. “After all these years, I thought he’d be more excited to see his mother, but he didn’t seem too thrilled at our reunion.”
All the blood in my body grows cold. I freeze in place, staring at a drop of blood on the marble floor. A tick of thoughts flashes through my brain, running in rapid succession.
“I hear he got engaged while I’ve been gone, though I must say, I have conflicted feelings toward his fiancée.” Daphne continues rambling, the conversation growing more serious and sinister by the moment. “See, I was promised she would never exist. Yet there you stand, in your beautiful home, with your birthright and title. While we are left with nothing.”
The breath rips in and out of my chest, my vision swims.
“Your silence tells me your apparently not dead father has not told you many stories yet. About his relationship with a young girl who admired him so. About a young girl who wished he were her father, so very badly.”
Daphne’s breathing grows heavy on the other line. She speaks slowly, her voice quivering in anger and excitement.
“You’ve been so ignorant to so much your entire life, Alivia Ryan,” she says quietly. “You’ve been blind to so much. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to end this. It’s time for the revolution.”
The line goes dead. I stand there, still holding the phone to my ear, statue still. Unable to move. Unable to process what has just happened.
“My daughter, Cora Daphne Ward, is not dead,” Lula says in a ragged, rough voice, though the name comes through, clear as day.
“Mom…” Elle nearly whispers. “Mom isn’t dead?”
“Cora is still alive?” Henry growls in Lula’s direction. “Cora… Cora is…” He shakes his head, looking down at his hands. “It makes so much sense now.”
“How did you know my mom?” Elle demands, her voice accusatory. “And how… How…” Her voice trails off into a breath.
My movements stiff and slow, I hang the phone up, looking at those that surround us. The entire House stands there, watching me. Not breathing, no words.
Just in need of answers.
“Please,” I say, fixing my eyes on Henry, trying not to be angry. “Tell us a story.”
He stands there, in the doorway to the library, half in the foyer. His eyes dart from one face to another. It’s such a difficult balance, sharing information with just those that need to know, and the entire house. But considering I’m about to ask them to go to war, they have a right to know.
And Henry must come to this same conclusion. He stands straight and tall, looking directly at me. “Years ago, I was standing beside my brother’s grave late at night when I heard a scream. Sometimes you can just tell, you know, when it stems from something supernatural.” He slides his hands into his pockets, swallowing once. “I ran on instinct. Down by the river, by the Hanging Tree, I found two young girls, thirteen years old, being attacked by a Bitten. It was too late for one girl, she was already dead, but I got there in time to save the other and dispose of the Bitten.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, likely feeling the weight of every eye that watches him, finally getting the answers to so many questions. “I took her home, told her to forget everything she’d seen, but in saving her, I exposed myself. The eyes, the fangs, she saw it all.”
“My daughter asked many questions,” Lula suddenly speaks up, her mind granting more clarity than I think it’s had in quite some time. “I had answers, but there was no way I was going to open the door into that world for her.”
Henry nods, looking from Lula back to me. “She showed up at my house, months later, demanding to know more. I turned her away, told her she needed to forget what happened. She left.”
He clears his throat, looking over at Rath. “But she came back, just a week later. Again I refused her, but this time she told me that if I didn’t give her the answers, that she would go looking for them in the dark. I couldn’t let her get herself hurt, killed, or turned, so we went for a walk.”
He looks away from Rath. And the answers are clear: Henry has kept many secrets from Rath and me. Rath never knew about the relationship between Henry and Cora Ward.
“Every time she came back, I would only tell her the minimal amount of information, send her away saying I would tell her no more. But she always came back, saying she would find information elsewhere,” Henry continues. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this little girl getting hurt.”
The way he says it, it’s so apparent. Henry cared for Cora. And the sting of jealousy hits me in the chest. Ian’s mother had the kind of relationship with my father that I was robbed of.
“Over the years, she continued to visit me. Most of the time she had questions about our kind, but other times, she simply seemed to want someone to talk to.”
I look over at Lula, but her expression is unreadable. But I can imagine. Lula has always hated the vampires, despised them. I can only imagine what her daughter becoming obsessed with them did to their relationship.
“After Cora turned sixteen, she truly became obsessed with the monarchy system. She wanted to learn everything about it. Who all the Royals were. How the Houses were created. The politics. The prestige of Court.” Henry closes his eyes, as if he’s reliving painful memories. He pauses for a while, shaking his head. Taking two deep breaths. “She wanted, very, very badly to be a Born. To join a House.”
“But she wasn’t a Born,” I say quietly.
Henry shakes his head. “It tortured her that there was nothing she could do about it. So she fixated on the Bitten, knowing that was her only way to come even close to a Born. But their lowly status, the Debt, she was so angry about it. She wanted things to be different.”
Shaky pieces of this complicated puzzle begin shifting into their place, giving me a clearer view of the big picture.
“Cora begged for my help to change the system,” Henry says, his jaw tight, his words stiff. “She envisioned a new order where Born or Bitten could rule. She wanted to show everyone that Bitten could be just as good as the Born. She wanted me to help her start a revolution.”
Daphne’s—Cora’s parting words echo in the back of my mind. It’s time for the revolution.
“I told her that my opinions on the monarchy had not changed,” Henry says, sadness creeping into his tone. “It had caused me enough pain. I had told her that I would never even have children of my own because I would never inflict this system upon them.”
Henry looks up at me, and there are so many conflicted emotions there. But not regret.
“I told Cora to leave and not come back. I told her she needed to walk away from all of this before it was too late. Before she wrecked her life chasing a species that never should have existed. I said my final goodbye to her twenty-six years ago.”
“My daughter respected Henry, wanted him to be her father,” Lula says, her voice quiet and regretful. “So for a time, she tried to take his advice and focus on creating a normal life. She graduated high school. Soon after, she met George and they married a year later.”
Lula’s crooked fingers curl into fists and her expression hardens. “But she could never accept his very human DNA when she vied for something so much more. She said he was so mundane. The fights…” Lula closes her eyes, shaking her head.
I glance over at Elle, and I’ve never seen so much emotion on her face. Her eyes are red, welled heavy with tears, two of them leaking out onto her cheek.
“She met a man,” Lula continues. “A liar who claimed to be a Conrath cousin, a Born Royal. She saw her opportunity. She had an affair, became pregnant with Ian, and pretended it was George’s child. Just before he was born, the liar returned, and she found out the truth. She’d done what she did, only to not carry a Royal, but just another Born.”
Emotion cracks in Lula’s voice, and it’s so obvious how much she loves the grandson she had to raise. “Cora regretted she was not successful in creating a Royal child, but there was nothing she could do, except hide the lie she’d created. Ian was born, she and her husband raised him, continued to fight, and then they created a child together.”
Elle. She told me once that there was no mistaking that she was George Ward’s child. She looked just like him.
“But not long after Elle was born, Cora met yet another man,” Lula closes her eyes once more. She clenches her teeth, anger rising on her wrinkled face. “A Bitten, finally free of his Debt. He filled her head with ideas of grandeur. Of possibilities. She talked about everything they could accomplish.”
The space around us is silent. So much history. So much anger and hatred.
“When my grandson showed up at my house, holding his tiny sister, telling me his parents were dead, I suspected what had happened, and confirmed it when my daughter’s body was nowhere to be found.” Lula’s voice is a hollow grave under a full moon. Full of secrets and bad mojo. “For their safety, I had to let them believe what everyone said happened to their mother. She needed to stay dead. Because if she could just walk away from them to start her revolution, she didn’t deserve to be their mother.”
Tears freely flow down Elle’s face now. She bites her lower lip, attempting to hold the emotions in, and failing.
“So, for fourteen years now, my daughter has been dead to me,” Lula says hardly. “My child died long ago, somewhere between being attacked, and learning too many secrets.”
The message is clear: she blames Henry for much of this.
Nobody says a word for a long time. There’s too much to process, too many pieces to continue to place.
“At least now we know,” Elle says quietly.
“WE NEED TO LEAVE—NOW,” I say. It’s as if I instantly wake up, shake out of my numb and shocked state. I head for the armory. “Before they have time to gather the rest of their numbers. We have the advantage of being able to see in the day now. If we strike now, we have a chance of taking her down. We don’t have time to wait for the Himura House any longer.”
Others jump to life behind me—Anna, Obasi, Lexington, Danny, Leigh all following me and immediately packing up. Slowly, the others trickle in
.
“We’ve been looking for them for months,” Lillian says. “Nothing has changed.”
I shake my head in disagreement. “Everything has changed. Even if we can’t take all of her Bitten out, we can at least cut off the head. I know where Cora has been living.”
“Are you sure about this, Alivia?” Henry asks, grabbing my arm as I walk out of the room. “Once you step foot into the battle front of war, there’s no going back.”
I meet his eyes, absolutely sure about this. “There’s already no going back. She has my future husband. I plan to get him back.”
He studies me for a moment, and gives a short, curt nod.
“Elle, you’re to stay here and take care of Lula,” I say, going into queen mode. “Don’t you dare try and argue with me. She needs you, and I need to keep you safe.”
She looks at me with mixed emotions. But thankfully, she just nods in agreement.
Twenty minutes later, we file out of the Conrath mansion. One by one, together as a united House, ready to end this.
A family of eighteen.
The day shines bright, late afternoon. The air is humid, summer in the South. A beautiful day to fight a war.
As we walk through the gate, three Bitten rush at us, their glowing yellow eyes hidden behind sunshades. In a few swift movements, Rath, Danny, and Trinity take them out.
We pass neighborhoods, housewives stopping in their windows to stare at the legends who have hidden in the dark. Children stop playing in their yards and run back into their homes. Cars stop in the streets, letting us by.
When we reach Main Street, I look down the road.
By nightfall, this town will either be safe from the terrorism it has suffered for nearly a year, or it’s going to fall into chaos, the Bitten taking charge.
Things will change by tonight.
Halfway between the Main Street tee and the turn off for Cora’s house, half a dozen Bitten jump out from the shadows, stakes and blades slashing through the air. As a united cell, collected and ready, they are no match against us.
Their bodies are hidden in the shadows of the trees.