House of Pawns Read online

  “You have done extraordinary things as a human, Alivia Ryan,” Raheem says quietly as his grip on me tightens just slightly. “But just as a caterpillar, you are about to go through a metamorphosis, and turn into something astonishing.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I ask, so very desperately wanting someone to believe that of me.

  “With every fiber in me.”

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE KING makes me nervous, but I can’t say it scares me.

  But that sky? The swirling clouds? The thunder that ripples through the sky without a trace of lightning?

  Curses. These things that can happen, things that I, and no one as far as I know, can understand?

  Curses scare me.

  What have I done?

  Because from what I understand, the curses are given out as punishment.

  King Cyrus was cursed with craving the blood of his own former kind for messing with nature and science. He and his wife were cursed with her repeated death for him forcing vampirism on her. The Hanging Tree was cursed for what the people of Silent Bend did to my uncle over a century ago, as well as his land.

  What have I done?

  And what is to come?

  The fear of the sky is profound throughout my House. Come dark, which comes earlier due to the cloud-swirled skies, when everyone wakes, no one says much of anything. And when they do, it’s in hushed tones. The feeling that we are being watched by a giant eye is wicked and terrifying.

  So, everyone works to distract themselves. The staff is gone, so someone has to keep things running.

  I cook. My vampires survive off of blood, but they still eat. So I will feed them.

  Samuel, Nial, and Cameron work on the pipes, insulating them and thawing areas that have started to freeze. Anna and Markov chop wood and tend to the many fireplaces spread throughout the house, attempting to fight back the cold.

  It’s nearly impossible to keep the house warm with the almost negative temperatures and those fierce winds.

  There’s an empty box sitting on the dining table. Inside it was a pair of light-blocking goggles for each of my House members, as well as a pair for me, which I will probably need in a few days. I handed them out, and they were received with excitement.

  They’ve worked through the daylight hours without issue since.

  Forty-eight hours. And, with each passing minute, I feel the weight on my shoulders growing heavier and heavier. My heart breaks into random sprints. Over and over.

  My cell phone dings as I put some rolls in the oven and I find a text from Luke.

  Town is fifty-two percent evacuated. Assuming it will be more by mid-afternoon.

  It’s six in the morning, he must have just started driving around town.

  Thanks for the update, I text him back.

  “The Sheriff?” Lillian asks. She sits at the counter, watching me work.

  I nod as I turn to the green beans I’m slicing. “People are leaving, slowly.”

  “There’s nothing more you can do about this, Alivia,” she says, that warmth and caring so specific to her coming through in her voice. “You couldn’t have stopped the danger that is coming, no matter what you did.”

  I nod, though I don’t really take her words in.

  Just as I finish slicing the last few beans, my hand slips, and I nick my thumb.

  Red oozes quickly to the surface. I pull it toward me and a heavy drop of it splatters to the countertop.

  I glance up at Lillian. Her eyes widen slightly, her nostrils flaring. She bites her lower lip and closes her eyes for just a moment.

  But she looks up at me quickly, and I swear I see a hint of fear in her eyes. She’s thirsty, but she won’t risk having to be punished like Samuel was. She won’t drink of my blood again, nor will any of my other House members.

  “I’ll go get you a bandage,” she says, quickly leaving the kitchen.

  And once again, I’m alone.

  With every passing day that I gain more control over my House, the more respect and the more like a royal I feel I am seen as, the more lonely I get. Because Ian’s words echo in my head. Loyalty. How true is their loyalty to me? Am I no different than Jasmine? Do they follow me out of fear? Because I hold the most power?

  Will I ever have another genuine relationship again in my life?

  The loneliness squeezes my chest.

  And for a moment, I feel as if I’m suffocating.

  I can’t do this.

  I can’t be a leader.

  I cannot stand up to a King.

  I cannot live the rest of what will be an eternal life manipulating and planning and strategizing.

  I can’t do this.

  My breath starts coming in and out of my chest far too fast. My skin feels too tight, my throat too small to breathe.

  I stumble out of the kitchen. I break through the ballroom and my body isn’t sure which direction to flee.

  So without thinking, I walk out one of the back doors. I stumble through the snow. It’s nearly a foot deep now, but I trudge through it, sucking in the cold air harder, deeper, faster.

  My vision tunnels and something hot and sharp bites the back of my eyes.

  I can’t do this.

  I’m going to be alone the rest of my life.

  I don’t want this.

  Further and further down the property I trudge. I have to leave. I have to get away. I need to go back to Colorado. I can hide there. I can just keep being a baker there. With my few friends who’ve never once called me since I left. With my old crappy apartment. I can go back and be normal there. I can live out a mundane life and then…

  And then I can die an old woman. Only to resurrect four days later, and live an eternal life as an old, wrinkled woman.

  I can’t ever, ever run away from this life.

  I collapse in front of the small fence that surrounds the three-person graveyard.

  My uncle. My mother. My father. They’re all here. I need them. So very much.

  “Henry,” I cry out into the empty, still air as I collapse into the snow on my knees. Tears overtake me and I let them come out in sobs. “Henry. Why? Why did this have to happen to us? Why aren’t you here? I need someone to tell me how to do this, because I can’t. I just…” I suck in air as the tears continue to roll down my face and I let the monster of the panic attack eat me alive. “This is too much.”

  I fall forward, barely catching myself on my hands as I sob, my hot tears dropping into the snow and melting it. My face begins to numb and I can’t feel my knees or hands as the snow and the temperatures freeze them.

  Minutes, hours. I don’t know how long passes, but it’s all just one long circle of self-loathing and pain and uncertainty.

  And I just cry all the harder when a semi-warm hand rests on my back. I don’t turn to see who it is. I don’t want it to be anyone because someone’s presence means I have to be Alivia Conrath again, and I have to be strong and lead and I just can’t do it this second.

  But the owner of the warm hand doesn’t say anything. No words of concern or comfort come. The hand just stays there as I continue to cry. My shoulders shake and my nose runs and soon I’ve got hiccups.

  Slowly, the hand pulls more and more of me to them until I’m cradled against a warm body. I don’t open my eyes, though, because as soon as I do, I’m going to have to feel shame that one of my House has seen me weak. I’m going to have to return to the reality I cannot run from.

  So I keep them closed. Even as I feel us stand. Even as I feel us start walking back for the House.

  Even when we walk back inside, and up the stairs.

  And I keep them shut when I’m laid on the bed, and someone pulls my boots off. When that someone crawls back in the bed with me, tucks their arms around my trembling frame, and pulls me close.

  I keep my eyes shut and pretend I’m nothing at all.

  A LOW HUMMING PULLS ME from sleep. It’s deep and reverberates from a large chest through my own. It’s exotic and foreign and comp
letely beautiful.

  I lay on my side, facing the window that looks out over the river. The curtains are pulled back just slightly, letting in a small sliver of gray light. Warm arms still encircle me, holding me firm, but gently. I’m tucked in tight, warm all the way through.

  The humming once again pulls my focus to the person spooned against me.

  I roll toward them, my heart picking up speed.

  Raheem’s black as night eyes stare down at me. But where there has been so much danger in them since we met, now there is softness. They are open, and they do not judge me.

  “Welcome back,” he says with that beautiful accent.

  I stare at him, analyzing this moment.

  He did not ask what caused my break. Or if I’m feeling better. He didn’t criticize me for having a mental shutdown.

  Welcome back.

  He just accepts.

  “Thank you,” I say. My eyes drop from his momentarily, embarrassed by our closeness. As if sensing this, he readjusts his position so our bodies are no longer fused together.

  Neither of us says anything for a long moment. Raheem studies me and I look at the ceiling. Finally, I sit up, pushing my wild hair out of my face.

  There’s something shifting in the air here. It’s dangerous and beautiful and something about it feels so wrong and so right. And I’m terrified of every implication of everything in this room.

  “I want you to know that you’ve prepared as well as you can for the King’s arrival,” Raheem says quietly. I can’t see him, sitting to his side, with him still lying on the bed. But there’s so much tenderness in his voice, I don’t know what to do with that. “Never before has a House been lead by a human. Houses around the world have been driven into chaos and exposure by leaders who have been resurrected for centuries. You’ve been in this life for mere weeks, and you’re doing amazing things.”

  My eyes are locked on the painting, the one I know hides a hidden passage. But I’m not really seeing anything. Every fiber of my being is aware of the small distance between us, of every breath he takes.

  “As much as I hope you are not the Queen, you possess the qualities she had. You truly are born to do this, Alivia.”

  His very honest words pull a little string in my chest. “And why do you hope I am not her?” I breathe.

  He does not answer my question immediately. Instead, I feel heat hovering over my shoulder, as if his hand is poised there, just about to touch me. But it doesn’t dare. “If I answer that question, it will cost me my life.”

  And suddenly, I feel the bed move just slightly, and when I look over my shoulder back at Raheem, he is gone.

  I feel slightly breathless. That was as honest of a confession as I think Raheem is capable of. This man has only known me for a little while, and he’s just told me he doesn’t want me to be another man’s queen.

  Raheem wants me.

  It can’t be love. It just can’t.

  But I’ve seen the look in his eyes more than once. What he did for me last night, it means more than simple words and weighs heavier than lustful glances.

  Raheem accepts me for who I am. He admires my ability to lead, to make others do the things that need to be done. He loves what I am able to do in my current state, but knows what I will soon become.

  It’s a human need. The need to be accepted for who we are.

  And it makes my heart break, because I never had that with the man I gave my heart to.

  There was always resentment there. There was always regret for the things neither of us could control. There was always an end to us because of my DNA.

  I take two deep breaths as I fight back the angry, forsaken desperation that rises up in me, and breathe out the longing for something that was never to be.

  Ian was my brief past. A short-lived comet of light. But it has become apparent, over and over again, that he was never to be my future.

  Let him go, Alivia.

  So I climb out of bed. I make myself ready for the day. I will prepare for the arrival of a King.

  And if I am a Queen, I will be a Queen.

  THE SNOW IS OVER A foot and a half deep now. As darkness blankets the town of Silent Bend, the ominous clouds overhead continue to circle. The thunder ripples through the sky. The flakes continue to fall.

  The gauge on the front porch reads two degrees.

  The last text I received from Luke said roughly ninety percent of the population had evacuated.

  I breathe just a little easier.

  Samuel drives the tractor I didn’t know we had, clearing the snow from the driveway. He’s also worked at clearing the snow from the roads leading to our House from the main highway.

  He comes back with reports that the snow trickles off immediately outside the borders of Silent Bend.

  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 m
ind’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.

  By morning she returns, somber faced at being unsuccessful in finding her yet again.

  We have just hours until the King arrives.

  Yet I find myself leaving the Estate.

  This may be my last chance to venture out into the daylight world without experiencing pain.

  I climb into the Jeep and drive down my long driveway. The snow is once again a few inches deep where Samuel plowed. But the tires on this vehicle handle it with no problem.