Page 52 of Claiming Starlight
It was her first memory of Katya. Her face full of disgust, like she had stepped in something bad as she stood behind her archon and the magic caster.
“Don’t brand these two. They are valuable,” the long-faced sorcerer had said.
Katya sniffed, her flat nostrils flaring open like gills. “Not brand them? How will we tell them apart? How will we know which is the male and which is the female?”
Cyril quieted Katya with a glance. “You grow less intelligent every time you open your mouth.”
Had Sophie seen hate in the vampir’s eyes that day? Her animosity and indifference had always been there, she guessed.
Like the rest of Hyde, the vampir used forced labor, chosen from the captured red-bloods, to reinvigorate the entire area to appear as it had in its finest years before Apocalypse Day. Walking distance from the brood house, Sophie’s street and sidewalks were clean, swept daily, the trees pruned for the best appearance. Under the day management of unseelie fae and the night guard of vampir, crews chased every loose, flying leaf.
But Sophie didn’t want to be in this building.
Crowded with memories, every room in the house held the petty meanness inflicted by Katya over the years of her careless guardianship. But if she didn’t go in, she’d not get the photo album and other little scraps of the past left behind by her parents and brother.
The door wasn’t locked. No one dared cross any threshold in vampir territory uninvited.
Sophie hurried through the front rooms that had served as Katya’s living space. The big front windows, once with insets of beveled stained glass, were painted black to keep out the sun. The rooms smelled like a warmer, nastier version of Cyril’s court.
Two steps at a time, she rushed up to her room. Even the air was painful in this place. Micah followed, his shadow a comfort on the skin of her exposed arms.
At the landing, she walked blindly to her doorway, not sure what to do with herself. She felt tears drip on her chest but didn’t know when they had started.
Her bed had a pink blanket worn to threads and gray sheets no chemist could ever turn white again. This was her stuff; all she’d ever had. She wanted it, but she wanted Alexi back more. The photo album was in a place of reverence on overturned freight. This room horrified her now. She didn’t want to be here, facing the reality of her life. The vampir shaped and programed her like a witch’s golem, a clay puppet from her childhood. But this was all she knew, and she wanted to crawl beneath that pink blanket, clutching her old wolf toy to her chest, and hide until Katya came back and told her what she should think and what she should do.
Micah put his hands on her shoulders, his powerful shape lining up behind hers, “What a crap house. Mattress on the floor. A dresser. Boxes. That vampir live high and mighty with the nice shit and you live like this. Get what you want, Sophie. You are done with this life,” Micah said.
Unable to do what he told her, Sophie turned in his hands, wrapped her arms around his waist, and clung. That first time he held her; he made a new shape of her being. With heat, skin, muscle and bone, he wrapped her up and made her feel alive, wanted—not alone.
“I can’t do this. I don’t know what I am doing. If I leave here with you, Alexi is never coming back.”
Cupping her head in one hand, Micah curved his body around hers. “And if you stay here, your brother is never coming back. You’ll just have the dust of his memories. That’s how it works. Come with me. We’ll make new ones.”
“I did everything they told me to do, and still, he’s dead.”
“Yes, baby. It’s not fucking fair and I can’t fix that for you. But if your brother hadn’t disappeared, you would not have come to my territory.”
“The fates went west somewhere in the mountains,” she told him absently.
“What?”
“I heard the sorcerers saying that. The Fate sisters aren’t in Old City. So it couldn’t be fate that brought us together. Because they aren’t here. It was Katya. She hated us from the start. And the archon. I think he ate my mother. I did what he said, everything. But I am sure he was the one who drank her dry. She tried to escape with us too many times after they maimed my dad.”
He worked his hand through her hair. “Sophie.”
“They are not alive, are they? The vampir have no soul, no heart?”
“Don’t know what they are. They are not from my world, and they smell… wrong. Like a sickness that has become sentient.”
“Yes, just like that,” she agreed. Rubbing her nose back and forth on his t-shirt, she tried to breathe him in. Maybe if she couldn’t hide away in her bed, she could crawl deeper inside of him. It was safe there and she wouldn’t be alone. His arms were a cage of iron protection, his body a wall of defense.
“Are you going to hurt me, Micah?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation.
“Yes.” The disappointment of his admission was more crushing than she could have expected.
“This sweet little body is mine, Sophie. And sometimes my loving is gonna hurt you. Make you cry out. Definitely make you wet.”
