Page 29 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

Well.

I’d meant to get a better handle on this new power before I broke into the citadel, but the wild magic had had other plans.

I stared up at a painting of a stoic-looking Gabriel and slid down into the tangled web of ley lines again. Iskra said there were a lot of intersections in the citadel, and I would search them all until I found the one that brought me to Gabriel.

11

GABRIEL

Time had become something that happened to other people. My bedroom—no, the bedroom, it wasn’t mine—had heavy velvet drapes pulled shut to keep the outside world away. Even the faintest sliver of sky would’ve given me something to track the time with, but my father—or, more likely, whoever he’d ordered to do the preparations—had been thorough. The room was so sealed-off and timeless, I might as well be anywhere in any time.

In my dazed, fitful state, I imagined the room was in a submarine, maybe on a spaceship. That I was adrift somewhere dark and huge that didn’t care whether I lived or died.

Damien had been right about my father’s plan. No humans had entered the room since Damien left, and I’d dozed a little, unable to relax enough to actually rest. Every sound from the hallway snapped me into high alert, and I tried to brace myself for the fresh new horrors. But nobody came, and I was left there, immobile, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

I would have killed for a shower.

And I didn’t mean that as a figure of speech.

A few times, I managed to drift off enough to dream—or maybe they were hallucinations. Either way, the images my mind threw at me were hot, slick, wet things. They were full of blood-slippery flesh beneath my mouth, a warm body pressed close against me, and undulating movements. More than once I snapped out of the dreams with my cock hard and insistent against my thigh, which made me feel like even more of a monster than the blood drinking.

When I was younger—much, much younger—I was a very different man. I was raised with the innate knowledge that I was powerful twice-over: not just a vampire, a superior being, but royalty, created to rule over the best of the best. After my transformation, when the blood-hunger had first hit me, I had…

Well.

It was a generous lie to say I had lost control. In truth, I’d known exactly what I was doing. Back then, hunting was easy. You didn’t even have to go to the effort of making someone disappear, you could just leave them with the other corpses. The Byzantine empire was crumbling before our eyes, and the Normans were sweeping through Europe. Even in the glittering, jewel-like cities I had always preferred, death was sudden and cheap.

I’d thrown my money around, buying the finest of everything, furnishing my tables with meals I wouldn’t eat just for the joy of looking at them, then left the food to rot while starving people begged for scraps in the streets. I’d fucked my way through half the courts on the continent and killed casually. Throughout it all, I drank my fill.

There had been no great revelation that made me change my ways. No momentous turning point. I had simply grown up. As the world changed, so did I. I grew tired of constant travel, and if I wanted to stay in place I’d have to stop picking quite so many fights. I still moved around, but I would stay in an area for a decade or more before leaving. I learned from those around me, vampire or otherwise. Over time, my habits had changed, and my tastes had grown simpler, until one day, I looked back on what I used be and felt revolted with myself.

The younger Gabriel had once drunkenly joined in with a band of mercenaries for a few weeks before growing bored. The older Gabriel had once stuck around a court for seventy years to watch the monks in a monastery complete a huge, glittering, illuminated manuscript, just for the joy of being adjacent to excellence.

In the submarine-spaceship-bedroom that wasn’t mine, I fought to keep hold of myself. I wanted to be the man who had looked down at that finished book in reverence and sought out the abbot’s permission before reaching out to turn the gilded, jewel-bright pages. I didn’t want to be the version of myself who had swung a borrowed sword without caring who it hit.

The weight of the portal stone helped. It was barely noticeable on my chest, but whenever I found myself slipping, I focused on it. I wished, absurdly, that my heart still beat, so at least some part of me could reach closer to Evangeline’s token.

In grand vaulted courts, I had seen ladies give knights gifts before tourneys—petal-thin pieces of silk that fluttered in the wind as they were tied onto well-maintained armor. In wooden halls thick with smoke and the smell of people, I had seen lords give their favored thanes rings as reminders of who and what they were fighting for. In banner-strewn town squares on festival days I had seen people carving apart the best food they would get to eat all year so they could slip the perfect morsel onto their loved one’s plate.

I inhaled deeply, letting my shirt pull taut and press the stone against my chest.

I was hungry.

How long had it been since I was fed? Years. I thought of the feasts I’d left to rot on golden plates. If my father led another into the room for me to drink from, would he still have to force my mouth open? Or would I devour their life blood willingly?

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply again, feeling the cool weight of the stone against my skin.

An odd sound came from the hallway, and I flinched. Some new victim of my father’s? A new way for him to torment me? It was hard to picture the soft thwumph I’d heard being from something torturous. If anything, it sounded like someone shaking out a thick down blanket.

Footsteps approached the door, quiet but rushed. Too loud to be a vampire. The humans my father sent in walked slowly and heavily, plodding like sleepwalkers. I opened my eyes and frowned at the ceiling. This was different. Good different or bad different?

Then the door opened, and I knew. Even over the stench of old blood, I could pick out the delicate scent of old paper and jasmine.

“You came,” I murmured, my voice rusty from disuse. I had the distant feeling that if I was more with it, I would be upset, concerned. Evangeline should be safe, somewhere far away from here. I was pathetically relieved that she wasn’t.

“Of course I came,” Evangeline said, rushing over to the bed. I wanted to cry just from hearing her voice. She brushed my matted hair back from my face with gentle, shaking hands, her eyes flicking over me worriedly. “Somebody’s gotta rescue you.”

Evangeline was a smart woman. The room smelled like an abattoir, and I was caked with blood that had hit my face and trickled down to dry on my body. I could see in her eyes that she had already put two and two together. She looked grimly furious, as if she wanted to go find my father right now and tear him apart with her bare hands.

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