Page 58 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

“Thank you,” he whispered into the air between us, and then he pulled away. By the time I opened my eyes, he was gone.

The woods near the ley line crossing closest to the hut were almost aggressively bright. It was late enough in the year now that most of the leaves had fallen, with a few yellow-brown stragglers still clinging stubbornly, and the cold autumn sunlight bore straight down to the forest floor. Damien and I stood in the center of a circle of weathered white stones, oblong and smooth-edged like river rock, all standing upright from the ground. The back of my neck prickled. Circles like these made me think of the stories about mushroom rings, and I didn’t like being in the middle of one. The stones only came up to about waist height, though, which lessened the air of menace pretty significantly.

I took the lead, and Damien followed behind me silently. It wasn’t hard to find a path. With the leaves down, you could see landmarks far in the distance, so we found our course pretty easily. We walked quietly for a while, and because Damien didn’t make any noise, I was hyperaware of it when I started breathing heavier. He noticed, too, much to my embarrassment, because he dug a water bottle out of his pack and handed it to me.

“Let’s take a break,” he said. If he’d asked if I wanted to take a break, I would’ve lied and said no, pushed on until I needed a rest instead of just wanting one. But he hadn’t asked.

There was a boulder nearby carpeted with moss, and I sat on it. The moss had begun to dry out, but it was still soft. I absently ran my fingers over. Damien leaned against a barren tree, keeping an eye on the forest around us. He looked more like himself now that he was in proper clothes, but Xarek had provided him with a denim jacket the exact same shade as the jeans, and Damien wasn’t the sort of man who could make a Canadian tuxedo look like an intentional fashion statement.

“You’re used to being around humans,” I said. His gaze flicked to me, and I held the water bottle up, shaking it enough to make the water slosh. “Not many vampires can tell when a human needs a break.”

Damien scanned the forest, looking for a distraction, then sighed when he came up empty-handed.

“If you’d rather talk about something else, you can tell me what you were doing in that cell,” I offered.

He huffed out a rueful laugh. “I do owe you an explanation, don’t I?”

I waited.

“I was in that cell because I was found out,” Damien said. “When you rescued Gabriel, I was at the citadel, too. I wanted to make sure I was ready if something went wrong, and…” He shook his head. “When you bungled your first jump out, alarms were raised. I rushed in, and I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been.

“I have wings,” he continued. “That’s my vampire party trick. It’s pretty rare, and pretty useful. Morgana decided she wanted wings, too, so…” He waved a hand. “She locked me up and took them. She needs to keep people alive to steal their power. That’s the only reason she didn’t kill me.”

“Shit,” I said sympathetically.

“Yeah. Shit.” He dug in the pack and pulled out a protein bar, which he tossed to me. I caught it and turned it over to scan the ingredients list.

“It doesn’t have cashews in it,” Damien said. “I already checked.”

I paused, staring down at the shiny wrapper. “How the fuck,” I said slowly, “do you know I hate cashews?”

Damien stared out into the trees. I climbed to my feet.

“And how do you know so much about humans? Why did you call me Evie?” Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. “And why do you keep looking at me like you can’t believe I’m real?”

Damien fidgeted, brushing his thumb over the base of one of his fingers. It was the spot where his signet ring used to be—the one he’d used to seal the letter that had sent me head-first into this mess.

“Answer me!”

“I don’t remember my birth parents,” he said. His voice had gone distant and level, like he was reciting a poem he knew by heart without bothering to put inflection into it. “Obviously, they were vampires, but that’s all I know about them. By the time I was ten, I was living in the woods, trying to find enough food to survive. I was too slow to catch rabbits, but I tried. I ate a lot of berries. Ate leaves. My fangs hadn’t come in yet, since we don’t turn until adulthood, which meant the abilities hadn’t come in either. One night, I found a pair of campers. I waited until they were asleep, then went to steal their food.

“It turned out that they were light sleepers. They heard me, and they ran out to save their food, and they saw this, this… grubby little kid trying to gather everything up and run. They calmed me down, heated up some food for me. They asked if I had anywhere to go. Someone else would’ve chased me off, but they were good people.” He looked at me, eyes blazing. “Miranda and Ewan were good people. It’s important that you know that.”

Miranda and Ewan. I stared at him, stunned. Miranda and Ewan, the couple who had crafted the ascendancy array to protect their daughter. To protect me.

“My birth parents,” I said numbly.

“And my adoptive ones,” Damien said. “They took me in, gave me a home. Gave me enough lessons to catch me up on the schooling I should’ve had, and then some. They didn’t care that I was a vampire, they just cared that I was a kid.”

“I had a vision of them when I put together the ascendancy array,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Miranda said ‘Find D—’, and then she got cut off. That was you?”

Damien gave a painful sort of smile and nodded. “When they told me they were going to have a baby, I had a meltdown. I figured they were going to kick me out. I packed up a bunch of stuff in a napkin on a stick, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do when you were running away from home. It took them a while to convince me that they wanted both of us. That they wanted me to be an older brother.”

I was pretty sure I’d stopped breathing.

“I took that job very seriously,” he said with a rough little laugh. “I did so much babyproofing. Cutting up pool noodles to put on table legs, crawling around to see what you’d be able to grab, the whole nine yards. I was so determined to look out for you.” His face fell. “I didn’t know about the Morgana situation. They didn’t tell me about the plan to send you away if she attacked. I mean, I was just a teenager, but I would’ve—” He turned away, bracing himself against a tree with one arm. I looked away, wanting to give him some shred of privacy.

“They told me to run,” he said after a moment. “I hadn’t turned yet, wouldn’t have been able to help in a fight. Morgana didn’t know about me. She didn’t see my face. After she… After, I went to Eldoria, I started asking around. I heard rumors that one of the high-ranking vampires was working with Morgana. As soon as my fangs came in, I went to the citadel to get myself a job, and I got damn good at it. Good enough that I kept getting promoted, making my way up until I was working for Roland directly.”

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