It showed her lying in her bed. One of the witches started whispering a strange spell. I’d never heard it before, but I could tell just by the sound of it that it was a chant forbidden to ever be uttered in The Sanctuary.
“Stop,” I muttered.
“What?” Rhys looked at me. “Just keep quiet and watch.”
Our teacher’s body soon began to writhe until she screamed out in pain as our fellow classmates continued to cast their spell.
The teacher shook violently until blood started streaming from every orifice in her body. She writhed for several more minutes until she became still.
I gasped.
“Rhys!”
He turned on me. “You’re a coward, Mona.”
“I am not!”
“Then prove it.”
The river and everyone around me disappeared. The next moment I was wrapped up in something heavy and dark. A cocoon. Just as I felt that I was suffocating, a knife slit through the thick substance directly in front of me, and a face appeared through the hole. Rhys, older—now a man—his eyes blacker than I’d ever seen them.
“Return to me, Mona,” he whispered. He was so close, I could feel his cool breath. “I only want what’s best for you…”
“No!” I panted, sitting bolt upright. “I can’t. Not again…”
It took me a few seconds to remember that I was on my boat. It was a nightmare. My hands were still shaking from the terror that dream had evoked in me. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead. I pulled the blanket tighter against my shivering body. Breathing deeply, I tried to calm my nerves.
“Calm down, Mona. It was just a dream.”
My heart shot into my throat as I whirled around.
A tall silhouette of a man stood at the stern of my boat a few feet away from me.
The man of my nightmare.
The man who’d cursed my life.
Chapter 11: Kiev
“Kiev?”
The Lord and Lady walked closer to me until they were but a step away. I looked at one. Then the other. Then back again. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, expecting the apparitions to disappear. Expecting to wake up.
But the two figures remained. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t wake myself up. I just continued looking from the green pair of eyes—matching exactly my natural eye color—to the chestnut-brown pair.
“Is… is it really you?” The vampire with brown eyes placed a hand on my shoulder and scrutinized my face.
The young woman with green eyes walked forward, pushing him aside, and ran the back of her cold hand against my face.
“Brother?”
“Helina,” I choked, reaching out to touch a strand of her long black hair. I turned to face the young man beside her. “Erik? No… No… It can’t be.”
I fell to my knees. And they knelt with me. Minutes passed in silence, just staring at each other. Before finally, the bubble shattered.
Emotions I hadn’t known still existed within my charred heart flooded out all at once, drowning me. I gripped their heads, holding them close to my chest, as if I was afraid they would vanish any moment and I had to hold on while I could.
I had imagined a reunion between us many times in the past. Until the point came when they would have been a hundred years old. After that, I’d let go of them. They would be dead, and there was no chance I would ever see them again. I stopped even thinking about them.
But whenever I had fantasized about a reunion, never in a million years would I have pictured it like this. And while I was horrified to find them in this state—to discover that they had become vampires—the joy that filled my heart on holding them in my arms was almost impossible to contain.
I kissed their foreheads so hard I grazed their skin with my teeth. But they responded with abandon, squeezing me in their embraces so tightly it was a struggle to breathe.
I studied their faces. Except for his brown eyes, Erik’s features were similar to mine. I’d also seen him when he was an adolescent, so he was much more easily recognizable. It was Helina who was a shock. The last I’d seen of her, she’d still been a child. Now she had blossomed into a young woman. It tore at my heart how much her beauty reminded me of our mother. I wondered exactly how old they’d been when they had been… turned. The words sounded so crazy to me.
My siblings. Vampires.
The crowd of vampires who had come with them—and Celice too—had all dispersed by the time we stood up.
“H-how?” I stuttered, my voice still hoarse, my throat feeling sore. It was as if that was the only word in my vocabulary at that moment.
Erik cleared his throat as Helina dried her face with her sleeve. They both looked at me with their wet, bloodshot eyes.
“I was twenty-one, Helina seventeen, when we were turned… I’ll start from the beginning.” Erik exhaled and chuckled, rubbing his forehead with his hand. “God, this is bizarre. Hundreds of years ago, yet it still feels like yesterday that we left you dying on the carpet.”
I gripped Erik’s arms.
“Please. Continue,” I breathed.
“A-after we rode away, we managed to make it to the city. Though that in itself was a feat—we almost got hijacked on the road—we did make it without being robbed. Uncle was there when we arrived. I offered him payment for five months. He took the money and then showed us upstairs. Early the next morning, Helina and I were woken by the police banging on the door. They accused us of being homeless people who broke into the house to take shelter in the bedroom. We begged Uncle to explain the truth to them. Uncle disowned us. He took the money and kicked us out in the worst possible way.”
I swore.
Helina’s face contorted at the memory.
“So there we were,” Erik continued. “Penniless, possessionless, and on the streets during the coldest time of the year. I tried to get work, but nobody would employ a homeless boy. And Helina was far too young to work. We resorted to stealing. We had no other choice. It paid some of the bills, but we had to scrounge to piece together any kind of decent meal. This went on for years. We couldn’t even return to the village because we had no means to.”
“We both grew sick,” Helina said, her voice trembling. “And more and more desperate each day that went by… Once Erik was older, he got into the company of a band of highway robbers. The loot that he got from those trips was always far more than pickpocketing.”
“Helina started accompanying me as soon as she was old enough,” Erik continued. “She’d wait behind a tree with backup weapons in case I needed them. We started going to the roads at night regularly, often thrice a week. I rarely had to harm anyone—most just threw me a sack of coins rather than fight. Then one night was… different. I still remember it. A black carriage drawn by two dark steeds drew up in front of me. A woman, a beautiful woman, stepped out. She took pity on me standing out there in the cold, and invited me back home for a warm meal. I agreed, and called Helina to come out of her hiding place and join us. We had unknowingly stepped into a carriage with a vampire… Clara.”