Page 66 of House of Pawns
When there is little more we can do to prepare for the King’s arrival tomorrow night, I stand in the library, next to the fire. My eyes fix outside the window, though it’s pitch black and my human eyes can’t see a thing.
“What do you know about curses?” I ask quietly.
Markov sets his bourbon on the side table and crosses an ankle over a knee. “Very little.”
“Please, tell me what you do know,” I encourage.
He takes a moment to collect his thoughts. All two hundred years of them. “I knew my father was a vampire. He could barely be called a man, himself having resurrected at just fifteen years old. My mother was a woman he raped in the local village and kept in captivity until she gave birth to me.”
And even just these short statements he’s shared are enough to make me understand why Markov is the way he is.
“As soon as I was old enough to be weaned from her breast, he drained her dry, and he told me the story as I grew up of how he threw her body into the frozen river. How she broke through the thin ice, and slipped under the surface. He watched her body slowly float down the river, beneath the sheet of ice.” He grabs his glass again and takes a sip.
My eyes slide over to his face. His eyes stay fixed on his glass, and while his expression is eerily calm as he tells this terrible story, there’s something different there. In the slight tightening around his eyes. In the downturn of his lips.
“She floated away, down the river, never to cross his mind again,” he continues as he sets his drink on the coaster again. “But from that day forward, my father would never be warm again. His skin was ever as cold as the ice water he threw her into.”
I find myself rubbing my hands over my arms, attempting to warm my own flesh.
“We as a species aren’t the warmest creatures,” Markov says as he looks up at me. “But he was frigid. There was nothing natural about it. My father cursed himself.”
“What happened after that?” I ask, morbidly curious about the toddler Markov and his demented, young father.
“He raised me as a vampire, though I was still human,” he says, and when he does, he looks away from me. “Taught me to hunt. Not animals as the rest of the few people I knew did. No, we hunted those like me. Beings with heartbeats and two legs to run on. Beings with lungs and vocal cords with which to scream. And he made me drink their blood.”
My stomach rolls. I feel my face pale.
“I became so good, I could hunt anyone by the time I was eleven. He taught me well. Trained me to be the most deadly vampire there ever would be when I reached a prime age to resurrect. But my father, he made a mistake.”
“What was that?” I hardly dare ask. My hands shake just slightly and I lace my fingers together to attempt to calm them.
“He taught me too well,” Markov says as he stares into the flames. “I grew bored with such easy prey. They moved too slow. They didn’t fight back. So one night, I set out after new prey. A challenge.”
I feel my stomach drop. “Your father.”
Markov gives the smallest of nods. “Yes.”
He does not say more for a long minute. He stares into the flames, and I can only imagine the carnage he’s seeing in his mind’s eye. The blood. The ice-cold flesh.
“I know very little about curses, my dear Queen, but I lived with one for the first eleven years of my life. So you understand, being what I was, I felt no rush to resurrect and become like him.”
Yet I know something had to have changed in the last two hundred years he’s been a Born. Because Markov loves being a vampire.
There is so much history to the members of my House.
Anna, who pretended to be a boy and fought in the Revolutionary War. Samuel who was bred and groomed to be a vampire. Lillian, a fashion designer, mugged and murdered in the streets. Nial with a simple slip on the ice. Cameron, so very human, making such a human mistake with drugs.
And Rath. Who was devoted to my father, but whom I know almost nothing about.
Another jolt of thunder rips through the sky.
“Why does it look like I am about to receive my own curse?” I breathe quietly into the night. “What have I done, Markov?”
And he doesn’t have an answer for me.
NO ONE SLEEPS THAT NIGHT, or rather, day. Most of my House members stay in the ballroom where Cameron is attempting to keep everyone entertained with a game of Charades. Lillian cuts out a beautiful fabric, not using a pattern, just creating it from her head. Nial humors Cameron and plays along absentmindedly.
Anna is not here. She’s out looking for Jasmine.
