Page 5 of A Steeping of Blood
It turned out, her magical pistol known as Calibore—the one Laith had shot her with—was far more lethal than she’d imagined. Unlike a regular weapon, Calibore could harm vampires—killvampires. She knew that, but she didn’t know it affected one’s recovery too.
Where a newly turned vampire would be up and walking in moments, it had taken Arthie days before she could think straight. That fateful night echoed in her ears. The slaughter, the screams. The loss. She haddied, and somehow, that was the least of her concerns.
Because she had failed.
She didn’t know how to feel. She could summon so little of her pain, so little of her rage. She rubbed her knuckles over her heart, where the skin was still stitching over the wound left by Calibore’s bullet, and sank deeper into the covers. The red silk of her sari had unraveled in the dark sheets, undulating like wisps of blood in the sea.
It reminded Arthie of when she’d fled Ceylan on her own, leaving her parents bloody and lifeless at the shore. She had been helpless. Hopeless.
She could all but hear Jin’s voice sayingUntil you found me, of course. He wasn’t wrong.
He still wasn’t wrong. Because she’d lost him now, and she felt it. Deeply. She’d kept a fundamental truth from him, throwing it at himwhen he was breathing his last, when she was extending her fangs and turninghiminto a vampire.
The sari felt right at the time, when she and Jin and Flick were on the cusp of changing the future of Ettenia. She’d felt powerful, wearing an echo of the traditional gown her mother wore proudly to her death. In the end, Arthie had done the same.
And now she felt ridiculous.
She had failed Spindrift, she had failed her crew, but more than anything else, she had failed her past.
Matteo lit the lamp by her bedside table, then the other. The light glided over his tongue as he ran it across the points of his fangs, his eyes crimson from just having fed.
She was a full vampire now. The parts of herself that she’d refused to accept for a decade had overtaken the humanity she’d clung to for those ten years. A decade of refusing blood, subsisting on dwindling stores of coconut. It was Laith’s fault. He’d shot her.
“I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” Matteo said. He set down the book he was carrying on the bedside table, barely restraining a growl at a sudden uproar outside.
Thatwas what she was feeling: frustration. At Laith for killing her, and if she was being honest, frustration at Matteo for saving her—even if she was the one who had asked it of him.
“I’m not thinking. I’m tired,” Arthie lied.
Matteo tilted his head and drew closer to the bed, the intensity in his eyes making her feel as though he were sorting through her thoughts. She looked away.
“No, you’re not,” Matteo said. “You’re a newborn vampire—you’re not tired. I almost want to assume you’re angry, but something about that emotion is different on you too.”
Because that anger wasn’t directed at the world anymore. She closed her eyes.
She’d kept the truth from Jin only to see his distrust as she turned him, worse than any of the destruction they’d seen that day.
She’d sent Flick to summon her mother, unaware that Lady Linden of the EJC was the very same masked monarch of the country.
She’d assumed she had a handle on Laith before he’d killed Penn and then her.
The Athereum had lost their leader. The country had lost scores of their press. The crew had lost their home. They’d failed jobs before. It was the nature of a con. Sometimes one was conned right back. But this—this had failed on every level, and Arthie could only blame herself.
The mattress dipped with Matteo’s weight, and Arthie opened her eyes. He was framed in the crimson drapes of the canopied bed, as distinguished as one of his paintings, and she was reminded of the night he turned her.
He hadn’t thought she would remember, and rightfully so, as vampires rarely recalled those tumultuous moments before and after the shift from life to undeath. But when had Arthie ever fit into a mold? She couldn’t rememberallof her turning, but she remembered enough—bits and pieces that made her neck feel hot.
Perhaps that was why her hand moved before she could stop it. Her fingers brushed his, stealing his attention. His gaze softened and slowly, carefully, as if she were a cat poised to run, he intertwined his fingers with hers. It sent a thrill through her arm, sharp and charged. She had touched his hand countless times before, but this was different. Everything between them was different now.
“You were my first,” he said distantly.
“First what?” she asked, and as she asked the question, something inside her seemed to settle, giving him her full attention. As if she’d been running her entire life only to realize she’d been going nowhere.
He wore a freshly pressed shirt, and when he shifted to face herbetter, the vee of white framing the smooth lines of his chest spread wider. A hazy memory rose to her mind: her hands running up the plains of his chest, her nails digging in, her back arching.
“I’d never turned anyone before,” he said, pulling her back to the present. “It was a cruel joke, having it be you. I didn’t—I didn’t like seeing you dead.”
This was the perfect moment to thank him for saving her, but she couldn’t summon the words, not when she wasn’t particularly happy to be alive. Or undead. Fully undead. She cinched her jaw tight.
