Page 55 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

“I am the law! You are in Aventine Castle!I am the law!” My voice reverberated through the hollow of their silence. They all looked at me, frozen as statues, disbelief in their glowing eyes. They had not believed my love deep enough for this. Of course they hadn’t. Worship was a human thing.

“You have until dusk to come forward,” I declared, storming toward the entrance. “If you fail to do so, the blame will befall you all.” I paused but didn’t turn to see the rise of terror in their eyes. Still, I smelled it in their blood, and I was glad for it.Now you know how it feels.

“No need to fret,” I said venomously. “I will be merciful. Death, after all, always is.”

21

Thea

How long could a single night last? As I opened my eyes to the same somber, thunderstruck sky, the answer seemed to be forever. The clock atop the mantel claimed I’d only slept for a handful of minutes, but in my exhausted, muddle-headed state it felt as though a lifetime had passed.

I had that peculiar dream again. Not last night’s nightmare but the sequence of seemingly arbitrary objects. The fashionable cravat. The curious silver vial. The vampire hunter’s sword. The image of them floated glowingly in the forefront of my consciousness; everything else was haze and shock.

I could not believe it. I got poisoned. Here. In the Castle.

I wasn’t very familiar with the workings of sentience, but I had seen the Castle act on its own volition plenty of times. So why had it not intervened before I drank the poison? I knew the Castle had its limits and could not see everything that was happening within its walls all at once. Perhaps it couldn’t have stopped it from being spiked in the first place, but it could have knocked the cup out of my hand or flared an odd light in my direction—something to indicate danger to me.

“Maybe this is all just a bad dream,” I mumbled to myself, lowering my heavy lashes.

Unfortunately, one could not wake up from reality, so with a resigned sigh, I opened my eyes again, threw my weight on my palms, and pushed myself to a sitting position. It was then I noticed that the roses on the windowsill had withered. In the flickering orange light of the fireplace, the rosebuds looked black and frail like balls of burned paper.

Was this Hector’s manifestation or the Castle’s? Was there a difference between the two at all?

Suddenly, the door banged open, and a gust of glacial wind whipped into the room, making the flames quiver upon the hearth, ash scattering across the rug.

In the eventful decade I’d known Hector, I’d seen him angry, betrayed, heartbroken, but I’d never, not once, seen him look so…murderous.

The door shut behind him with a resonantclick,and our gazes collided like planets out of orbit. Something of his ruthless resolve seemed to falter. His face turned soft, his eyes shifting from rage-red to melancholy-grey.

My lips parted for words my mind had yet to conjure. Then, in a blink, Hector was kneeling on the floor next to the bed. His hand clutched mine, his forehead dropping on the small space next to my hip. “Forgive me,” he choked out. “This is all my fault.”

For a moment, I was too stunned to say or do anything but stare at the black sweeps of his hair as they spilled over the snow-white sheets. I was almost afraid to speak. I felt like anything above a whisper could break him. But as he raised his head again and looked at me with his brows pinched in agony, I could no longer stay still. I slipped to the edge of the bed so I could take his face between my palms. He followed the movement, his arms closing around my calves, his chin falling atop my bent knees, where the hem of my nightdress had gathered. I could feel the heat rising from his shoulders. In themirror across the room, he looked like a supplicant kneeling before his priestess.

“Please forgive me,” he rasped again.

My fingers shook as I threaded them through his hair. “I asked to stay here, Hector. It was my choice alone.”

He shook his head, the motion nearly manic. “I shouldn’t have let you stay.”

I summoned a smile to my lips. I did not have the heart for smiles right now, but in his presence, I had the tenderness for it. “Very bold of you to presume you can tell me what I can and cannot do, Lord Aventine.”

His brows lowered, something of determination piercing through the wall of his sorrow. “I cannot lose you again. I won’t survive it this time.”

“You never lost me to begin with,” I said gently. “My heart was always with you. My heart is always, always with you.”

Slowly, like coming out of a dream, Hector blinked the tears from his eyes and got himself off the floor, pulling the covers over me in a manner that felt more dismissive than caring.

I pushed them away, launching to my feet with enough fury that a wave of dizziness washed over me. But there was no sickness in this world worse than a broken heart, and I could hear mine cracking already.

The words left me with a wounded gasp. “You don’t believe me, do you? Not anymore.”

I knew him so well, he didn’t have to say it. I could see it in his defensive gaze, his clenched jaw, his body that drew inward, steeling itself against me.

He had not forgiven me, I realized with a twinge of anger.Anger,for I, too, had struggled. I, too, had been abandoned and forced into an unrecognizable version of myself. Everybody always tells you how hard it is to be left behind, but no one ever tells you how devastating it is to be the one who has to leave.

I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes, shaking all over. “Do you even know me, Hector?”

“You did not just ask me that,” he hissed, his expression as severe as the roaring in my blood.

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