Mere mortals, p.18
Mere Mortals, page 18
The Bone Clan invested in all kinds of property—penthouses, estates, villas, even a few private islands—so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn they owned some fields in Iowa too.
I flashed on an image from earlier in the day: a sign, mounted on the side of a barn.
“Morgana Farms,” I said. “They own the orchard. And Dex’s old farm too.”
“That’s the one,” Sal said. “Morgana. Vampire shell corp. No business except buying up land around town. And sometimes in town too. Keeping Nowhere small. Back when the land grab started, my kind didn’t have the same loot, so all they could do was claim one of the small patches of land that vamps hadn’t already peed all over to mark their territory. They built this cottage and vowed that it would always be home to a slayer.”
Looking around the stone walls of the kitchen, I saw them now in a different light—built by hands made for healing, to keep an eye on creatures made for killing.
“Neither side wanted to draw too much attention to this place,” Sal went on. “So this became neutral ground. No hunting from either side.”
“It’s impossible that we’ve never heard of this,” Reg said.
Sal lifted one side of his mouth in a half smile. “Not everyone understands neutral ground. This history, this place, is kept quiet on both sides, to prevent all-out war.”
It seemed unfair to keep such a special place a secret, but I couldn’t disagree that a place that drew both vampire and slayer would inevitably become a battleground.
“There are a few who know,” Sal said. “The members of the Elder Seat, though sworn to secrecy, and a good deal of slayers who identify as healers, like myself.”
“There are more like you?” I asked. “And more places like this?”
“I don’t think there’s anywhere quite like Nowhere, but there are a fair number of slayers who have turned in their stakes.”
“Is that how you came to be in your current line of work?” Reg asked.
“This work existed long before me. It’s amazing what can happen when we stop trying to kill each other and find time to talk to each other. Vampires were just getting organized back then, developing the council and clans and houses. They were interested in more civilized solutions than smoking bad vamps. It became practice to pay slayers handsomely for carrying out this mortal punishment. Some families—like the Sicarius line—saw it as a disgrace.”
“And what about Salvador Sicarius?” I asked, pointing to the old guy. “What did he think?”
“Who, Sal?” he played along. “He was one of the ones in the dark. His family never told him any of this, but he would have agreed it was a disgrace.”
“What changed?”
“Oh, you know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl turns out to be a vampire. Boy changes his entire worldview. Girl dumps him anyway. Etcetera.”
I thought of my own boy, of the way he’d tasted like apple when he kissed me, and I wondered if, given a little more time, he would change my entire worldview too. Would I end up like Lina, still stuck in Nowhere, watching over her human love? I shivered, suddenly grateful our hearing was just a few nights away.
Twenty-Seven
Silent Night
The night of the hearing seemed to rush up on us. One week, we were anathema to all vampire-kind, and the next week, we had a priority appeal before the Elder Seat, with the backing of an Ancient. I should have been preparing a statement along the lines of In your face, old folks! But as I sat at the carved kitchen table, in the dim light of the slayer’s cottage, I found myself at a rare loss for words. The three of us sat in virtual silence, waiting for Lina to arrive. The fact that she was picking us up had Sal all twitchy, which, it turned out, was an even worse state than grumpy.
“She’s late,” he said, checking his phone against a clock on the wall. It was exactly thirty seconds past 10:00 p.m.
I rolled my eyes. “She’s barely late. And we have tons of time.”
Our hearing was set for midnight, and Nowhere was in northern Iowa, just south of the Minnesota state line. It wouldn’t take us long to reach Minneapolis.
“Late is late.” Sal scratched at his beard, then ran a smoothing hand over it. “Just shows her lack of consideration. Not that I’m surprised.”
Reg frowned, which had been his general expression all week, since his tiff with Poe, but I was vaguely surprised to see him directing his scowl toward Sal. “If you dislike Lina so much, why maintain this retirement? You gave up slaying for her. You could just as easily take up the stake again.”
Sal thought a moment, then said, “It wasn’t only for her. She was the . . . catalyst. Once I knew her, I knew vampires had souls, and that’s the sort of thing you can’t unknow. Takes the fun out of the hunt, knowing your prey has a heart that feels, even if it doesn’t beat.”
We all fell silent at that, but the quiet didn’t last long, as a car horn blared through the night.
Reg and I both started at the sound, and Sal jumped all the way to his feet, bellowing, “Hearts and souls, but NO MANNERS!”
He threw open the front door, glaring at the black car with tinted windows idling on the road alongside the white picket fence.
I pushed past him, yanking a black beanie over my hair and bracing against the cold. “What’s she supposed to do? Come to the door? You know she can’t walk through the gate.”
The car window slid down, and Lina’s voice sliced out. “I wouldn’t darken that doorstep again even if he tore down the whole damn fence!”
“I’ll never take it down!” he shouted back, unnecessarily. Lina could have heard him at a whisper, and he knew it. I think it just felt good to shout.
Reg followed me onto the porch, wrapping something around the collar of his shirt as he walked. When he pulled his hands away, I saw it was a bow tie.
“Oh my God, what are you wearing? You’re so embarrassing.”
“I’m much more concerned about the words that will come out of your mouth than the ornament around my neck,” he said, gliding out to the car.
I looked once more at Sal. A part of me wanted to ask the old guy if he was okay, but I knew Lina would hear, and it felt like some kind of betrayal to womankind.
“Last chance to stay out of the wolves’ den,” he said.
“Gross,” I scoffed. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in the lair of a wolf. Filthy beasts.”
One side of Sal’s mouth ticked up. “They’re not so bad after a bath.”
“I do not want to know how you know that.”
I started down the steps, but Sal called me back.
“Charlie.”
I turned, waiting.
“Be careful tonight.”
I feigned annoyance. “Don’t talk like you’re the grown-up and I’m the kid. Your gray hair doesn’t actually make you older.”
“Only wiser.”
I started to retort, but I could see his half smile was strained and his eyes downcast. I decided to let him have the last word for once and simply gave him a goodbye salute before jogging out to the waiting car.
“They’re meeting here?” I asked with disdain.
When Lina had told us the location was a theater, I’d pictured a grand space and a dramatically lit stage. Instead, we were standing in the basement of the building, surrounded by mildewing concrete walls with the steady, echoing drip drip of water.
Reg was at my elbow, wearing a similar sneer of disapproval. “It’s not at all befitting of the governing body of the most advanced species on the planet, is it?”
“The Elder Seat never meets in the same place twice,” Lina said.
She guided us to a door at the far end of the basement. “After a few millennia, that gets pretty difficult.”
She threw the door open without waiting for a response and ushered us into a very different environment.
It was still the basement, but the concrete was bathed in the glow of a hundred candles, perched on pipes and tucked into wall nooks, filling every available space. Either this place had no power, or someone went to a lot of trouble to set a mood. The drip drip was still audible, but it seemed in harmony with the soft hum of voices on this side of the door. The murmuring only grew when Lina stepped into the room, and one by one, the Elders backed away to clear a space for the Ancient in their midst.
My chest puffed up a little. They thought they’d had us beat, forcing all the clans to turn us away, but they hadn’t counted on us playing this card.
As the crowd parted for Lina, it became clear that there was a hierarchy in the room. A few dozen Elders lined the space, a representative for every house in every clan. They milled around on foot, while five stood together on a small platform at one end of the room, slightly elevated above the rest. I recognized Elder Adante among them and felt a small current of shock to realize he was among the council’s highest-ranking members.
“Adelina,” Elder Adante’s voice floated out over the room. “Always a pleasure to be in your presence. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our honored guest, Adelina la Prima.”
The whispers in the room rose to applause, and Lina nodded politely in response.
Adante’s gaze slid from Lina to me and Reg, hovering by the door. “And, of course, our human guests.”
I gritted my teeth at the way he emphasized “human,” followed by a little cluck of his tongue, taunting us with his mock pity for our sad circumstances. Or maybe he did it to scare us, to remind us we were prey for the rest of the room. A quick ripple of fear threatened to wash over me, but I steeled myself against it. I would not give them the satisfaction.
The door slammed shut behind us, causing the hundreds of candle flames to flicker in a wave around the room. Not so long ago, a rolling fire in a room full of Elders clad in black robes would have been exactly my kind of drama. But something had shifted in me in the last couple of months, and after letting a little color into my life, this scene now seemed more drab than dramatic.
In fact, as I looked around the room at all of the bloodless skin, faded like river rocks worn down by an endless flow of water, and all topped by the same dark eyes and shiny black hair, it struck me how one-note and boring it all seemed. The guests were as much of a letdown as the venue. Lina shone like a diamond in a bowl of ashes, and I half wondered if the Elders were keeping their distance from her out of reverence or out of fear they would catch her blondness.
If you asked me, this crew could benefit from a few highlights.
“Thank you for the kind introductions,” Lina said, warm but formal. “If only we could stay until dawn, catching up, but we have a journey home to make yet tonight, at mortal speed, so the sooner we get started, the better.”
“Yes, of course,” Adante said. “Let us begin.”
Twenty-Eight
A Bunch of Old Folks . . . Really, Really Old
“By Blood and Bone, by Starlight and Shadow, I call this conclave to order.”
The voice that spoke the pronouncement was clear and melodic, and belonged to an Elder girl who looked barely older than us in human years. She, Adante, and the other ranking elders had formed a line on their makeshift dais, while Reg and I stood before them in the center of the room, Elders circled around us.
I narrowed my eyes at the Elder girl. With her doe eyes and slick black ponytail, she could practically pass as a teenager. I wondered if she had voted against us when the Elder Seat decided to cast us back to mortality.
Hypocrite.
“Well?” she asked.
It took a beat for me to realize that they were waiting on us to speak.
“Oh,” I said. “Was that it?”
The Elder girl looked offended.
“I just meant . . . it was so . . .”
“So efficient,” Reg supplied. “How refreshing to be back among kindred who waste no time getting right to business.”
“Kind of you to say,” the Elder girl answered. “But, of course, we are no longer kindred.”
Reg did not miss a beat. “A matter we hope to rectify here this evening.”
He had the charm on full volume.
“As you can imagine,” he went on, “humans take a painfully long time to do anything. It’s almost as if they don’t realize their time is limited.”
A twitter of appreciation went around the room, and I’m almost certain I saw Reg wink.
There was no sign of the Reg who had warmed up to humans and even had a mortal boyfriend. He just seemed his old self. He really was a talented actor.
Elder Adante stepped to the edge of the platform, looking down at us. “Well then, since your limited human hours are so precious, I suggest you not waste time with any further comedy.”
I don’t know if it was his condescending tone or the way he stood deliberately towering over us . . . or if it was simply that seeing his face again took me back to that night outside Sal’s fence, but something in me snapped.
“You’re right that this is no comedy,” I seethed. “It’s a tragedy. And the time that’s been wasted is ours. All the hours we spent drafting letters to the clans, seeking a sponsor for an appeal, only to discover we’d been . . . blackballed. It should not have taken an Ancient for us to earn our place before this council.”
“Charlie.”
I heard Reg’s words, felt his hand on my shoulder, but both seemed very far away. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted two Elder women whispering to each other and giggling. At me. At us. We were a joke to them. I knew now, with certainty, what I’d felt the moment we’d stepped into the chamber—that this whole thing was a farce. Lina could get us in the door, but she couldn’t give us our immortality. She had said as much, hadn’t she? I should have listened.
Well, if I wasn’t going to get my life back, at least I would say my piece.
“What a sham,” I whispered. Then, raising my voice: “It’s so clear to me that this isn’t about what we did to that boy.”
The words came out in a shuddered breath. It felt so good to release them, to speak that truth, but it also coated me with dread, because now that they were out, I couldn’t take them back. I could only charge forward.
“You’ve all done as much or worse.” I shot my accusation around the room, and where Reg had earned laughter, I got only bared fangs. “This is about the treaty.”
Adante feigned ignorance. “Which treaty is that? There are so many.”
“The Treaty of Annis. You are just waiting for young vampires to make mistakes so you can cast them out, whether they . . . whether we deserve it or not!”
The doe-eyed Elder glided forward to stand next to Adante. “Were that true, I would be there beside you.”
Her voice had the rhythm of youth, but the way she carried herself was far more mature. Annoyingly so. I briefly, begrudgingly wondered if maybe they were only chasing out the immortals who acted like teenagers.
Adante tilted his head in a patronizing way. “While it is true that we are wary of the actions of immortals turned before they achieve emotional maturity, it is also true that we fiercely guard our own. Your penalty had everything to do with your actions and nothing at all to do with your age.”
“Bullsh—”
“Charlie!”
This time Reg’s hand was not on my shoulder but slapped over my mouth, protecting me from making a fatal mistake, even if that mistake meant he could spend more time with Poe, with the humans. I still suspected that’s what he wanted, deep down. But he was my brother, and he took my side even when it meant not taking his own. Lina was right. We were family, and human or vampire, we loved each other.
So, because—and only because—I loved my brother, I managed to shut my trap.
“We understand the treaty to be only another layer that protects vampires from exposure,” Reg said, his hands now pressed together instead of covering my mouth. “But I beseech the Elder Seat to consider whether it is possible that these new age limits have biased you unfairly against the actions of young immortals?”
“On the contrary. Age limits are for the benefit of the young, to protect children,” the Elder girl said.
“Protect,” Lina blurted out with a snort. She was scowling at the edge of the open circle, the nearest Elders still providing her an invisible buffer. “More like control.”
“Something to add, Adelina?” Adante asked.
He gestured to the platform, offering Lina a stage, but she held her ground. She did not need to look down on others to command their attention.
“Only that the Elder Seat has not changed. As always, you take the law and manipulate it to your advantage. The treaty protects mortal children from being turned before they are of age, but where is the law to protect the immortal children? Your alleged passion for the rights of children only extends to humans, while you turn your own kind mortal without a second thought.”
“They violated the treaty,” Adante demurred. “Surely you don’t suggest we allow young vampires to disregard our laws. If children were immune from repercussions, chaos would reign.”
“I’m suggesting only that the punishment does not fit the crime. What these two did was an accident. What was done to them in return was more than an injustice. It was a cruelty.”
My heart swelled with gratitude and— Damn it, here come the tears.
I quickly swiped at my eyes, nodding once at Lina in thanks before facing forward again.
Adante bowed to Lina in a bored way. “Thank you, Adelina, for your wisdom. May we always seek the counsel of our Ancients.”
The other four Elder leaders also bowed.
“However,” Adante said as he straightened. “While Ancients may counsel, it is the Elders who govern. And so, our decision has already been made.”
I knew it.
“That’s not fair,” I said, though it hardly mattered.
“No, it is likely not,” he said. “And I see now that it would have been better to wait to hear all you had to say tonight.”
Was that sarcasm? I felt my cheeks pink, knowing I had not impressed. Even if they had heard us out before making a decision, I was sure I had done very little to help our case.
