Page 46 of Dark Master's Redemption

Even though I’m feeling fuzzy now from our libations.

“I wanted to speak with you both tonight, not just because I need to know more about my real Fae family,” I say now, “but because I also want to unravel why the Gold Eyes Made me that night. And has been searching for me, waiting for the right moment to push me to open my power, all these years.”

“Yes, all secrets must out now.” My father watches me. He takes my mother’s hand where she sits on her dining chair beside him. “You must know, that night was one of the most horrible of our entire lives, Ariana, and we have been carrying that terror all this time. We confronted the Gold Eyes that night, just like I once faced off with the creature to save Prince Valerio and Lucca. As with them, the damage was already done to you, however. All your mother and I could do was spirit you away someplace there was no magic—to keep you from whatever the creature wanted of you. And King Bellari, as well.”

“Archivolio Bellari wanted something from me? After I was turned Dark Fae?” I blink now as I sip my wine, frowning.

“The King had never hunted your mother and I, previously,” my father says now, dire. “It was as if he knew we were involved in the Dark Fae operations but turned a blind eye to us, perhaps from our distinguished service among the Summer Fae. But he raked our names through the Fae rumor mill after that night. He made it seem as if we had gone mad… and removed our names from all titles of valor we had received in the War. He didn’t want his royals and nobles at the Palace to know what was really going on—that something terrible was hunting the Summer Fae, to turn them Dark, as it searched for the perfect Animante it could control to its aims. It was something too powerful to stop—even by the King himself.”

As my father sits back in his chair, holding my mother’s hand, she nods, confirming his tale. With a dark frown, foreboding filling me, I lean forward in my chair.

“The Gold Eyes was hunting Summer Fae. But what do you mean, it was searching for the perfect Animante, and couldn’t be stopped by the King?” I breathe, watching my father.

“You were not the only infant Summer Fae child the creature tried to Make Dark, at the time,” my mother says now, taking up the tale. “Twelve other infants had been drained to death, in the same manner as you, on the full moon under which you were born. You are aware House Altvie is one of the thirteen Royal Houses of the Summer Fae, one of the strongest throughout history. But far more infants than you were killed—all from various branches of the Royal Houses, upon that dire harvest moon. We had gone to the Altvie house that night not just to congratulate your family at your birth, but to offer our protection. For Adicus knew it was the Gold Eyes causing all those deaths—trying to Make those infants Dark Fae and failing.”

“You knew?” I am shocked as I face my father. “You knew it was the Gold Eyes killing those babies?”

“I did.” He nods, intense as he watches me. “Battle a demon like that, and its taint never leaves you. I felt the creature’s madness upon every crime scene we evaluated back then. We were searching for any left alive who might be Dark Fae, in the carnage that creature wrecked upon all twelve houses. None survived in those families’ branches, however, save you. We came too late to save your parents; but it was not us who fought the creature off when we found you, Ariana. It was you. The Gold Eyes did not leave voluntarily that night, not like it did when I saved Valerio and Lucca. It snarled as it fled—as if it had tried to take you with it—and failed.”

“You think it was taking me to the King?” I glance at my mother, a strange sinking feeling filling me.

“For why else would he impugn us so badly,” my mother asks now, “than if he wanted you for something, and we thwarted his plans?”

“Unless it was the Gold Eyes himself who wanted me.” Something goes dark inside me then. “Perhaps it put pressure on the King to punish you, so you’d flee to the human world and do exactly as it wanted. So it could find me later and open my magics when I was unguarded… at the precise right moment for me to meet Quinn and Lucca, and for our trio’s bond.”

“My gods.” My father’s voice is quiet as he watches me with a shocked intensity. “You believe the Gold Eyes orchestrated all this… from the very beginning?”

“In all our histories about Revenants, there is no record of them ever being sane enough to plot and plan like this.” My mother cuts in now with an incredulous look. “They simply torture their prey and endlessly drain them… until they tire of the game and slay them, or those Fae survive somehow as Dark. Revenants are not thinking creatures, they are animals of passion and Night, Ariana—they could not plan so far ahead with something as complex and diabolical as this.”

“But the Gold Eyes is different, Illyria.” My father glances at my mother. “Ancient stories talk of it as a creature with a cunning mind, and planning behind its too-bright golden gaze. As if the Master Vampire it once was never lost its sanity—or perhaps only lost the part of its sanity that kept it in its human shape, and tethered it to reason.”

“It’s not a Master Vampire,” I say now as I drop the bomb on my parents. “It’s a god. An ancient Ascendant of the otherworld… who cut its own heart out when it Fell in Florence. And became what it is today. The Descendant Staphylogenes.”

“Staphylogenes!” My mother pales, as if she knows this story. “Demon of Passion, Glorifier of Destruction, Dissonance in the Music of the Spheres. That is what’s after you, cara mia?”

I blink in shock at my mother as she says these things.

Then lean in, intent, as I pin her with an unforgiving gaze.

“Tell me what you know about it. Now.”

19

FAMILY

My mother heaves a deep sigh as I tell her to come clean with me on everything she knows about the Descendant Staphylogenes. Her fierce eyes pin me from across the table, as if asking me whether I really want to hear all this. I nod, knowing it’s time. All secrets must out between us.

No holding back anymore.

“In my youth, long before I went into the Summer Fae military and exhibited strong magic for war,” my mother says, “I had a relentless interest in herbs. I thought my true calling would be healing; before my family put pressure on me to make something of myself, I traveled far and wide, researching herbs in ancient Summer Fae annals. Rediscovering lost recipes was my obsession. I can’t even tell you how many forgotten troves of knowledge I searched through at Summer Fae monasteries, or how many lost codices I dug up in forgotten tombs, just because they were rumored to have some healing salve or draught fabled to keep death at bay. Most of it was horseshit, but upon my travels, I became an unofficial student of arcane history. And I learned of the Descendant Staphylogenes. Nothing good.”

“What did you learn?” My father leans into this conversation with a deep frown now, all of this new to him.

“Much of what you already know.” My mother sips her wine with a nod. “I learned it was an Ascendant at first, one of our long-lost progenitors, and that it Fell to Earth and became Descendant, living in lust and passion and glorifying in the pleasures of the flesh as it spawned a notorious Vampire line in Florence. I heard the tale that it cut its heart out and bound it to the area that is now Florence, somehow, and that it changed and went mad after that. How it went mad, the stories did not say—only that it did so, abandoning its Florentine Vampire line to travel the world. Never to return.”

“So it left Florence and abandoned the Vampires it had Sired to their own devices?” I frown now, wondering why the Gold Eyes would have done that, and if it had already gone Revenant at the time.

“Apparently.” My mother nods, though her look is dire. “Rumors and whispers said Staphylogenes haunted kings and paupers alike, bringing either great ruin or vast fortune. I never connected those tales to the similar tales of the Gold Eyes…until now.”

---