“Yuri,” I called. “Are you and Alana alone?”
“For the time being,” he replied. “But you must hurry. The Queen is angry with us.” His voice sounded strong and sure, nothing like before.
And he seemed to be waiting for us.
Rourke and I edged farther into the darkness, moving carefully, trying to sense if this was a trap. “The spell breaks here,” Rourke said, reaching out to grab my wrist and guide me around a corner.
Once my hand skimmed over a doorjamb, the haze immediately lifted.
We were in some sort of storage room. It was covered in cobwebs and dust, more than a few inches thick in some places. A single lightbulb illuminated the far corner, shedding some weak light, but everything else was etched in shadows.
Alana hissed.
I glanced around Rourke’s shoulder. She sat in the middle of the room. Her head wound was more or less healed, if you called a gaping scar with a partial indent healed, but at least she was awake and it wasn’t oozing. The most alarming thing, however, were her eyes. They were pulsing a pewter color and she seemed to be leaking bloody tears.
“What the hell is this?” Rourke said. “What is she doing?” He’d come to a full stop ten feet from where she was bound and hadn’t moved.
Alana rocked in place, and was mumble-hissing over and over again in what was likely Russian, but it was too garbled to tell.
“Yuri,” I asked. “Did you bind her to that crate?” I pointed to the chains he’d obviously brought with him from the cell, which were strung around her body and hooked to some kind of wooden storage box to keep her in place.
Instead of stating the obvious, he said, “We could’ve stayed well hidden from you, but Alana knew you were coming and bid me to find you. Tying her was the safest thing, as she is … unpredictable.”
My eyes flicked back to Alana, who appeared to be out of her ever-loving mind. “Unpredictable” was a quaint way to say she would rip our faces off if she had the chance.
I found it hard to believe she could form a coherent thought and speak to Yuri. She caught my eye and started waving a yellowed fingernail around in a circle, chanting something while sniffing the air in front of her like a dog.
Jesus.
“Yuri.” I slid out from behind Rourke and moved into the room. “What’s going on here? How did Alana know we would be coming? And was that your spell out there? The one that tastes like crab apple?”
“Alana grows stronger out of the cell,” he responded. “But we must vacate this place soon. Danger is coming quickly and they must not find her here. If they do, things will not be as they should. We have waited too long for our freedom and we grow impatient.”
Okay, what?
“Why have you been kept prisoner here?” Rourke demanded. “If you are indeed the Queen’s blood-kin, she has broken a law by jailing you. It’s a high crime to harm your relatives according to vamp laws. That I do know.”
Yuri appraised Rourke, a reserved expression on his face. “It was necessary. She had no choice in the matter. Alana could not be contained … any other way.”
“What do you mean necessary?” I asked. “You willingly chose that lifestyle? Starved and rotting in a dirty cell? You can’t make us believe that was your only option. There had to be another way.”
Yuri sighed. “Alana is a seer. Eudoxia had no knowledge of us for many years. Our existence was kept from her on purpose. Once she found us, the damage was already too great. We had no other choice.”
“Seer?” My mouth fell open. I glanced over at Alana, who was still chanting and drawing circles in the air. Oracles and seers were of the same ilk. My first thought was poor little Maggie. Her future was looking bleaker by the second. My second thought was holy shit. “It was Valdov, wasn’t it? He turned you for some kind of gain of his own. Maybe for the throne?”
“Yes,” Yuri answered. “He turned me into a vampire because he wanted the throne. He saw that Vlad would not succeed and was determined to gain his own power.” He glanced lovingly at his wife. “But he did not turn Alana.”
Rourke’s face was stoic. “You turned her.”
“Of course.” Yuri sighed as he sat on the edge of the crate next to his wife. “I kept her turning a secret as long as I could, but I was a fledgling and we were both very weak. I should not have been able to turn her so young and I blame myself for her insanity. We had no guidance and craved the teachings of a true Master. Valdov punished us soundly for my interference. He took away all our wealth, our status, and closeted us away. Until…”
“He found out what your wife was truly capable of,” Rourke finished. “Seers are very rare in any Sect, but vampires especially. I’ve never even heard a whisper of one.”
A pained expression crossed the old vampire’s face. “Yes.” He bowed his head. “Turning my wife was the biggest mistake I ever made. She deserved a happy life and I made it a horror instead.” Misery etched his features. I glanced at Rourke. His face didn’t need to tell me what I already knew.
We would’ve each made the same choice, given the same circumstances. Living without the other now was unthinkable. We couldn’t blame Yuri at all.
“How long did Valdov keep your existence quiet from the Queen?” I asked.
“Four hundred years.”
I sucked in a breath. “How could he do such a thing? It should’ve been an impossible task. If the Queen was the ruler—”
“At the time of our making, she was not our Queen,” Yuri said firmly. There was respect in his voice for her. It surprised me. Why would he have love for a Queen who had forced them to live like rats? “Eudoxia had been turned by Vlad only a single year before, in the hopes he could gain power through the family. My brother, Ivan, was terrible indeed and had committed many atrocities by that time. Vlad had hoped to marry Eudoxia to put himself in power, but she … resisted … and things fell apart. They were forced to flee the country—”
“Life force … she craves it…” Alana’s voice sounded shrill and a lot more precise than anything she should be capable of uttering. “But … she will not get it,” she continued. “They will come … those who wake … from those below … they take much…” As she spoke nonsense, blood tears coursed from the corners of her pewter eyes, etching trails of red down her white face. Her hair was wiry and askew, her features sunken and bleak.