Page 3 of Loreblood
My smile returns. “Alas, it isn’t your decision to make, bloodsucker.”
“A pity, that.”
We pause, eyes locked. The quietness in the stuffy chamber becomes stifling as tension rides between us.
She quirks a brow, smirking. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll have my man bring another bottle.”
My eyes light up, as if liquor and the dulling of my senses is the first and last thing on my mind.As if.
She angles her quill, ready to write. “We can start with your name,” she says.
“You already know it.”
Her reed taps the paper. “For the record.”
“Right.” I clamp my jaw. “Sephania Lock.”
Her quill scratches, elegant handwriting flowing across the parchment. She looks up with a small smile. “Now then. Wherever you decide to start, Lady Lock, let it lead to the place we’re alldyingto hear about.”
“Of course.” It only makes sense Madame Kleora and Overseer Verant would want to know about the thing that brought me to this ten-story hellhole to begin with. My loosely kept “secret.”
I lean forward to get more comfortable, elbows on the carved armrests, threaded hands on the table. “You wish to hear about the Loreblood . . .”
Chapter 1
I wasn’t always a bad bitch with a bad temper. Honestly. I used to like pretty things. Things that made proper girls squeal with excitement.
That didn’t last long. It all got stripped away from me, quickly. Truth be told, some of it was my doing.
One of my earliest memories was opening my eyes and staring up into the affable face of Father Cullard. I didn’t know who he was at the time since I was only a bundle of a babe at his doorstep. He looked like a god in my whelp eyes as he lifted the wool-sack bundle I lay in, crying my eyes out.
He cradled me, gently rocking me to sleep. When I awoke, I found myself in a sparse, cold room with other wailing babies. There had to be fifteen of us, all screaming like wild typhoons. Locked away underground where no one would hear us and where we couldn’t disrupt the studies and chores aboveground.
It was funny the first place I lived wasliterallyunder the Floorboards. Humans endearingly called our city of Nuhav the “Floorboards” because of our proximity to our vampire overlords, who congregated above us in the ancient sister city called Olhav.
The first time I ever laid eyes on the glorious skyline of Olhav, reaching up like dragon’s teeth spread across the apex of the mountain range, was a memory worth keeping. I found it odd the bloodsuckers opted to keep their human pets and fodder stashed away in the shadows of the mountains, whentheywere the shadowwalkers. I eventually discovered there was a reasonthe Olhavian buildings were so tall and scrunched together: They shielded the vampires from the sun.
Alas, it would be many years before I first saw that skyline. For the first few years of my life, I never saw daylight. I suppose, as a baby, I was a shadowwalker myself. I just never knew it.
Every so often, one of Father Cullard’s vowagers would come to nurse us babies and keep us quiet. The least rambunctious of us were soon given rooms aboveground, once we proved we could keep our fussing to a minimum.
It was a cold existence, being locked away like that. The vowagers were priestly women in drab beige gowns, headdresses that covered their mouths, and no other ornamentation. They never spoke—as was their lot in life and their agreement to their faith—and never bared their skin unless it was to bare a breast to feed us in quiet.
I was a clever whelp, staying mum when the vowagers would come. That was how I became one of the first of my group to get the royal treatment of an upstairs chamber. Shared with five other children, of course, it was much better than the darkness of the basement.
Seeing the sun for the first time was a transformative moment. It shone through the window in slats, bathing me in warmth I’d never known. In this room, Father Cullard would occasionally make an appearance. His smile would fill my vision and I’d giggle, pawing at him because I wanted to see more of him.
Cullard was an old man when I was an infant. Though he wasn’t a vampire, he never seemed to age. In the eyes of a child, no one ever seemed to age when they were already old to begin with.
He had a hairless pate with a ring of gray hair at the temples. I used to snicker at the way the sunlight reflected off his shiny bald head when he’d bend over my cradle and smile down at me.
He would say some words to the mute vowagers I didn’t understand, they would nod at each other, and then I wouldn’t see him again for another week. At that point in my young life, it felt like eons.
Once I could walk and speak Nuhavian like other children, I finally got to talk to Father Cullard for the first time. That was when I learned he was a “Father,” though not in the traditional sense.
“Sephania, come here,” he told me one day.
I was perhaps five summers old, with big mischievous eyes he always chastised me for, but in a genial way. He would say, “Those eyes will get you in trouble one day, staring like you do, young lady,” and, “Close those peepers before sin gets in.”
