Page 78 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

Dread like I’d never known before welled up in my chest and choked me. Sobs racked my insides, for there was only one kind of berry that, in its ripe state, was almost identical to a blueberry. “Gods. I made… I made…”

“You made a fine juniper wine for us, Thea. And now, you’re going to sit here like a good girl and let us enjoy it. Don’t worry, I’ll find some excuse to tell Hector. Perhaps you forgot to drink your water again.”

A white-hot blade of fury cut through my despair, and when he aimed for the door, I cast myself upon him like a curse, brandishing the blade. The image of what he was planning to do rose to the surface of my consciousness, stark and horribly familiar. I had already seen it happen in a dream that was not a dream. Everyone—dead. Gathered around the dining table with their mouths stained purple, their bodies limp.

“Why?” I snarled through clenched teeth, tightening my precarious hold on the sword. “Why would you want to kill your own people?”

The words ignited a burning rage in his eyes. A rage that had him right before me in an instant, sucking the air out of the room.

I wielded the blade, slashing the air, but Arawn was too fast, his hands a mere diaphanous blur. He stole the weapon for me only to throw it far across the room, metal clattering on marble. Then he lunged at me, banding an arm around my waist and closing a fist around my jaw, his fingers digging painfully into the hollows of my cheeks. “We are notpeople,” he growled in my face. “When are you going to understand it? We are curses. We are the darkness of this world, and we need to be vanquished.”

The opposing forces of what he’d done and what he was still planning to do assailed me all at once. He didn’t just want tokill them. He wanted to die with them. Whether the ceremony would happen for Hector or Dain did not matter to him, only the outcome, the seizure of this opportunity.

We’ll find accommodations in the city. After you’ve settled somewhere safe, I’ll return to the Castle.

Yes, he would have returned to the Castle, not to stand by Hector but to finish what he started. He just wanted me out of the way so he didn’t have to do to me what he’d done to Margaret.

Margaret’s sweet face hovered as a true ghost over the edge of my memories. Her blonde curls, her kind brown eyes, the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile. A quiet girl. A nice girl. A girl who trusted easily.

The grief in my chest was raw, primitive, her name growing into a sickened prayer in my mind.

“You bit her,” I cried, writhing in the narrowing prison of his arms. Swift gusts of pain swept through me. I felt my flesh bruising, my bones groaning beneath. “You didn’t mean to kill her. You lost control, didn’t you?”

His rage peaked, peeling back the last shreds of his composure. “Of course I did!” he roared, spinning me around so fast that for a second everything around the room became dazzlingly white.

When the rapid movement stopped, we were standing before the full-length mirror, its glossy facade trickling with water. Arawn loomed behind me, twisting my wrists at the base of my spine. His face came up next to mine, wild and demonic in the unsteady glass, his eyes as red as the blood in my veins. “Look at me,” he hissed, and the more I resisted, the closer his mouth seemed to draw to my throat. I could feel the burn of his fangs already. “Look atthis.This is what I really am, what vampires really are. An urge. An appetite. And your dear Hector is no different. He doesn’t love you. He’s not devoted to you. He’sobsessedwith you.” He tilted his head, burying his face in my neck. “Your scent. Your taste.”

“Stop,” I snarled, taking advantage of his hunger-dazed state to wrench myself free.

A look of despair glazed over his face as he dashed forward to recapture my wrists. “Listen to me, Thea. You are blood to him. Nothing more. I’m not your enemy here. I’m trying to save you. I’m trying to save everyone from us. If I do this, no one will fall victim to our curse again. No one will suffer as she did.”

Everyone, he said, and a sinking feeling stole over the whole of me.Everyone.

With a pang of horror, I realized just how far his agony and self-loathing had ventured. He’d done a terrible, irreversible evil to the person he loved the most, and now everyone was going to pay the price of that sin, his revenge so tremendously complete that the entire world would stand altered. That was what he was really after. The eradication of the vampire curse, starting with its leading pillars.

“Arawn,” I wheezed, calling on a reasonable tone unfit to the unreason of his mind. “Think of the children. The children are innocent. They’ve lost their aunt already—”

“No one is innocent! None of them!” he exploded, squeezing me so tightly against him I could no longer breathe inside the cage of my corset. “They are nothing but monsters in the making. Why can’t you see that?”

He spiraled on and on, less a creature of a frayed sanity than a man who truly believed he was about to do the honorable thing. I stopped listening. My eyes darted to the door, my thoughts racing faster than my galloping heart.

I wasn’t sure how far his conviction ran. He was planning to die tonight, so there was nothing he was afraid to lose. If I screamed for help, would he kill me in an instant, consequences be damned? If I tried to escape through the mirror, would hesimply drag me back, snap my neck, and go downstairs to finish what he started?

I knew I had to be careful. I knew I had to manipulate my way out of here. But he wasArawn. He was Arawn, and my heart still hoped to find the words that would reach through him.

“Please,” I beseeched, shaking all over. “Arawn, please, you won’t achieve anything by doing this. There arethousandsof vampires out there.”

“But everyone who keeps them in order is within these walls,” he said steadily, the gleam of calculation the only lucid spark in his eyes.

“You want vampires to fall into anarchy, revert to their old ways,” I understood with a fresh rush of horror. “You want the vampire hunters to go after them again. Until they’re all gone.”

“They should have never allowed us to come out of the darkness to begin with,” said Arawn in a quiet, controlled voice as if to soothe me, as ifIwas being the irrational one. “There is a reason we can’t survive the light, why the goddess cursed us so. But you see, Esperida spun this pretty little fairytale that we’re not all evil because we canlove. Isn’t that, after all, the only thing that redeems evil?” He laughed bitterly. “We do not love, Thea. We obsess. We lust. We hunger. And we wait. And when our victim is vulnerable enough, we do what vampires do best. We take.”

“Gods,” I sobbed as one terrible realization struck me after the other. “Your parents… they’re not on vacation, are they?”

“It would be hypocritical of me to let them live, don’t you think?” Arawn muttered, his fair lashes falling heavy upon the network of purple veins below his eyes.

And finally—finally—I understood.

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