Page 47 of Fallen Thorns
That was when I heard Ben mutter something along the lines of: “I sometimes play keyboard now though.”
I repressed the urge to laugh.
“Is this all a joke to you?” Mars piped up, head snapping towards Lawrence. Casper looked at me from across the table with a subtly amused expression on his face, as if to say, ‘here we go’.
“I don’t know, is it?” Lawrence bit back.
“People aredying.”
“People die every day.”
“Not like this.”
“Please!” I shouted, underestimating the power of my own voice as the people on the table beside us swivelled to face us. None of us spoke until the outside attention faded.
“I’m just making my point,” Lawrence said, getting in the last word before crossing his arms and turning away from Mars.
“So... am I mentally or physically punching?” Ben innocently tried to steer the conversation back to the rest of the group.
Mars took a pause for calm before answering. “Mental, mostly. Hopefully.”
Ben sat back and absorbed the answer; I watched his hands return to his necklace and he began to chew inside his mouth. Casper’s hand moved under the table to pat his boyfriend’s knee. Another sign of affection I wouldn’t understand outside the realms of platonic friendships.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Mars continued; all signs of the petty ex-lover persona had disintegrated. “And it’s only a precaution. We may never even need to actually put it into action. Marianne just wants us to be ready for every eventuality.”
“I saw your reaction in that room though.” I would no longer pretend to be naïve.
Mars looked at me and I watched their throat bob. “It won’t be like before.”
Before.
“The traitor,” I tried.
They nodded. The whole table paused as if waiting for the story to continue.Have they never discussed this?
“Isiah Dumont,” Mars sighed, leaning to prop both elbows on the table, tone darkening. “Marianne has travelled a lot in her lifetime, but at some point in the latter half of the last century, she picked up a companion. Isiah. She believed him young and impressionable but driven. Marianne saw his potential and they quickly became friends, close friends at that. They founded what became The Thorns and pulled together a carefully curated group of vampires who all seemingly had the same outlook on life after death — humans should never have to suffer. They mapped the country, establishing domains and removing threats where they could. They were a team that very soon became a family. Every time they left a city, a few were left behind to maintain the peace, and everyone proved their loyalty time and time again. They were unstoppable. Isiah was the one Marianne trusted the most; her right-hand man. Then, out of the blue, he Turned.”
Not a single one of us so much as breathed.
“It was just over a decade ago. They’d settled here in Durham and things had been quiet for several years. It was a matter of keeping things ticking over. I wish I could tell you this exactly as it happened, but Marianne will never explain that night fully, and I won’t press her. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of betrayal she felt.”
We all remained static while the buzz of life carried on around us.
Mars sat back. “He vanished one night, completely out of the blue. Marianne went out to look for him and found him with his teeth clamped around a dead woman’s thigh. The woman’s husband lay strewn across the bloodied carpet of their home, limbs mangled and face unrecognisable, seconds from his last breath. An eight-year-old girl was found hiding behind the TV in the corner of the room; she was unharmed physically but, well, you would be foolish to assume it didn’t have a mental impact on the poor kid.”
Oh Carmen. I’m so sorry.
“Now, I can’t remember if he directed her there in his final moments or whether she simply discovered it on her own accord, but she found hisstashunder the floorboards of an abandoned church. Bodies, at least a dozen of them, all in varying states of decay. He’d been collecting them during all those years of supposed peace. Still to this day, I have no idea how it was never suspected. I can only assume he must have been taking them from further afield and luring them back to that place as a decoy. But he’d been lying to her; maybe he’d always been lying to her, at least that’s what she believes.”
“She killed him, of course, right there on the spot of his final kill. She staged the scene as a premeditated murder and covered the tracks so investigators would be none the wiser. Then she took the kid and planned her next move. It should have been straight forward since the threat was supposedly eliminated, but as it turns out, others had Turned too, right under her nose.” Mars leaned forward once again and tapped their head. “He got into their minds and twisted them all. He made them lose their way. He’d been planning this for a long time, so killing him ultimately made no difference. The worst was yet to come.”
“The massacre,” Casper interjected. “I heard about this.”
Mars only nodded regretfully. Ben and I were clueless.
“She killed them all.”
My eyes widened.Surely, I misheard that.
