Page 25 of Veradel
“Not often. They can request a name, but the Guardians would have to approve it. Usually, baby names are chosen from a random approved list right after birth.”
I clamp down on my bottom lip, wondering, for the first time, if my mother requested my name for me or not. Just another thing I won’t be able to ask her now that she’s a stone statue in Arad’s garden. Blood wells in my mouth before I realize how hard I’m biting down to keep from crying, and I swallow it, my throat somehow drier than before.
“What about your last name?” someone else calls out. “How are those chosen?”
“Last name?” I repeat, swallowing again.
“Yeah. Your family name?”
I blink. “I… I don’t have one. It’s just Saskia.”
A grumble emits from behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know that Lucan isn’t pleased with the phrase “just Saskia.” But it’s the truth.
“Wait. Soyouhave a family name?” I ask, turning to frown at him.
The room goes quiet, as if I’ve just asked the most obvious question in the world. Something I can’t quite place sparks in Lucan’s eyes, but he recovers with smooth precision, the spark gone before I can truly make sense of it.
“Yes. It’s Veradel,” he answers evenly.
“Lucan Veradel,” I whisper. “So your father and mother had the same last name?”
He nods. I didn’t know family names even existed. I’ve never been more than a random citizen to the Guardians, and I never will be. Arad might have developed some kind of weird obsession in his efforts to get me to bend to him, but even that’s just a game to him. A fleeting chase. To the vampires, we are nothing more than resources for them to cultivate, consume, and destroy.
I wish I could change that.
I need to change that.
And maybe the only way to do that is to ask some more questions of my own.
“What I don’t understand,” I begin, “is the nature of the Wall itself. How come none of you can touch it but I can?”
“We don’t know,” Taika says, and even though his voice is on the quieter side, everyone gives him respectful silence and attention—even the children. “There was already a wooden wall around the capital of the kingdom before the war, but when the vampires invaded, it… changed. Now, it causes us excruciating pain when we touch it, so we can’t climb it, and it’s too strong for any weapon or tool to so much as make a dent in it.”
Something about his tone makes me wonder if he knows more than he’s letting on, but Vivian speaks up before I can fully analyze it.
“A few hundred years ago, we tried to build a scaffold that would be tall enough to jump off onto the ledge, but the Guardians spotted us and shot it down with flaming arrows until it disintegrated. So I doubt that would work again.”
“Maybe we can build another scaffold more discreetly,” a werewolf near Gabriel suggests.
“That would take months,” Vivian says. “The citizens need our helpnow.”
“We could try to tempt the vampires into coming out so that we can just kill them out here,” Soren muses.
“Tempt them with what, though?” Merrick asks.
“My perfect naked body dancing in the moonlight, of course.” Soren winks at me, and a growl rises up from Lucan’s chest.
A few of the children giggle, and a smile pulls at the corner of my mouth, but another frown pulls it right back down.
“What about other people?” I ask, glancing at the wall of the town hall as if I can peer through it, to the rest of the world I’ve never seen. “Is anyone else out there to help?”
“Not other werewolves. We are the last of our kind on this continent as far as we know, and the vampires attacked most of the other human villages before they invaded the palace, leaving them dead or injured until they all died out.” It’s Taika who answers this one, his face crumpled with grief and shame, as if he blames himself for not saving them all. “It’s up to us.”
My heart burns at the enormity of the Guardians’ cruelty—destroying countless lives except for the ones they could contain, control, and benefit from. Still, I feel a puzzle brewing beneath all these words, as if several pieces are floating just beyond my grasp of comprehension as the rest of the pack bursts out with more ideas that all come down to the same grim facts.
We don’t have the key, so we can’t unlock the doors of the Wall. It’s too strong for weapons to knock it down, and the werewolves can’t climb. If we try to build something, the vampires will see us coming. What other options are there? Surely, the answer lies in the nature of the Wall itself. In what made it change.
Just then, the doors to the room burst open, and a few middle-aged werewolves barge in with platters of food: smoking slices of what’s surely elk meat—the same one Vivian, Merrick, and Soren killed earlier—more bowls of sparkling berries, and freshly-baked bread with steam dancing from the slits in the centers.
