Bitter Bloodlines

Chapter Twelve

The weight of the dead strigan landed on me - a tiny, starved little thing, really. Strong but already dying, long before my final blow.

I shifted and stood, still staring at the dead girl as the room moved around me. I was aware, vaguely, of the commotion: the sounds of shouts and whispers, the banquet hall doors being opened, the scrambling and shuffling of feet as guests fled. I was aware, too, of my posture, holding myself rigid and straight. I knew what my mother wanted to convey with this spectacle. The contrast between a strigan and myself, the training, the control. And the way that I could kill anyone who I was told to kill.

My eyes did not leave her throat - the crooked, unnatural angle of her neck, and the perfect scar there. I stared until one of my mother's guards came to take her away.

"Take the body to the dungeon," I told him, looking up to meet his gaze and seeing the fear that I expected. "Leave it there for me."

"Yes, your highness," he said, nodding.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and knew before I turned that it was my mother. She beamed at me as I turned to face her, her smile as bright and painful as the sun.

"That was truly stunning," she said. "I am so proud of you, my daughter."

Two of her guards stood just behind her, and behind them, James and Senka were watching. Her knuckles were white on the handles of his chair, and I could hear his heartbeat from here, rapid and terrified.

"Thank you, Mother," I said.

"I am going to my quarters, with the guards," she said. "I'll be well-protected until morning, if you need to go and get yourself tended to." She nodded at my scrapes, the small tears in my dress.

"I will," I told her.

As she swept out of the now nearly-empty room, I stayed put, my spine rigid. James gave me a look that I did not recognize, and as my mother and her guards left, his heartbeat slowed.

"Goodnight, sister," he said.

*****

I went to the only place I knew my mother would not think to go.

Lady Carmen looked startled when I threw open the door to her cell, faster and more carelessly than my previous visits. She stood suddenly, as if she were expecting someone else. For the half-second that I stood in the doorway, I saw her eyes widen as they looked me up and down - taking in my dress, my scars, the grime of the fight I was just in.

"You are from the North, near the border with Peria," I said.

She frowned and nodded slowly, still staring.

"You told me, before, that I had more control than a strigan."

"Yes?" Her voice came out timid and unsure, an inflection I'd never heard from her before.

"Have you seen them?" I asked.

"What?"

"Strigans. You have dealt with them before?"

Carmen nodded again, her expression hardening. "Yes."

I stepped back into the hall, making space in the doorway for her to follow. "I need you to come with me."

She took a single step forward. "Where?"

"Come. Quickly."

I heard the soft sound of her footsteps following me down the stone hallway, soft and fast on bare feet. At the end of the hall I opened another door, to the empty cell where the guards had left the strigan girl's body, and slipped inside.

Carmen stepped up beside me, and though we both stared down at the corpse and avoided each other's eyes, I felt the warmth of her presence like a hot stove. The last time we were this close, I was drinking her.

"Is this what they look like?" I asked.

She stepped forward and knelt down next to the body, inspecting the crooked neck. She looked back at me, frowning curiously.

"Did you do this?" she asked.

I nodded. She turned back to the strigan, prodding at its mouth to see the distended fangs, opening the eyelids to see the deep red irises.

"They're supposed to be monsters," I told her. "In the books, they were bigger. They had fur."

"They are monsters. They look like this." Her eyes darted down to the long scratch on my leg, visible through the slit in my dress. "You're - can you bleed?"

I glanced down at the dripping black liquid slowly pooling around my ankle. "It's ichor. Venom. What they replaced my blood with, when I was turned." I stepped forward and knelt beside her, looking at the body again, holding my breath.

"I was told that strigans are wild things," I said. "Mindless. And they are born that way. But a thing like that..." I tapped softly on the dead girl's skin, the scar on her neck and the near-hidden ones on the inside of her arms. "A thing like that would not have scars like these."

"What are they from?"

"Transformation."

I pulled my eyes away from the corpse between us and met Carmen's gaze. Some part of me hoped that she would find my vulnerabilities before I could say them, the way she had been doing since the day she dared me to choke on her blood.

"The villagers in the north say they're made by a curse," she said, after a moment, and her gaze slipped down to my throat. "Is it really so surprising that you are cursed, too?"

I stood up, and she stood with me. A guard stood behind her in the doorway, casting a shadow across her form - dirty, delicate, defiant.

I was not the same as this creature at my feet. I was a princess, a noble nasferata, a product of history and tradition. If the heritage of my station was being twisted to create thirsty, feral things like the girl I had killed, I would stop it.

I stepped around Carmen, addressing the guard at the door.

"I have chosen Lady Carmen Van Mear as my lady in waiting," I told him. "See that she is washed, dressed, fed, and given a room beside mine."