She clearly wanted something from him. Information, perhaps, or maybe she just wanted conversation. And though he knew it could be dangerous for her, it seemed that conversing with this girl, and distracting his mind from Lilith’s recent attack on him, had helped him more than he could comprehend.
“I am sorry,” he whispered. “Please forgive me. I do not wish to harm nor scare you.”
The girl looked down to her wrist and then back to where he lay on the table, his guilt evident in his features as he closed his eyes and shook his head, dismayed.
“It pains me not,” she replied. “You shall have to do much more than that to scare me.”
At the sound of her small giggle, he peered over at the girl to find a small shadow twirling around a lock of her dark blonde hair, lifting it up and letting it fall across her face. Xander couldn’t help it as a small chuckle escaped him. He noticed the majority of the shadows had settled around the room, returning to their natural places once more, as his heartbeat became steadier, calmer. Only a few strands of darkness remained around him, familiar wisps that often followed him.
She grabbed for the shadow, letting it slither across her hand and weave between her fingers before it vanished like smoke before her eyes. Though she could no longer see it, Xander could still sense it. The darkness of the world was not always visible to others, and that particular shadow had been one of his longest companions since his rebirth, one that he knew belonged solely to him.
Xander had never seen his shadows take a liking to someone without him controlling them. It was as if the darkness had decided to ignore him completely and make sure the girl was alright, to entertain her. Or perhaps he had subconsciously asked them to do so.
“You are brave, girl. Braver than most I have met. You are not afraid of my shadows, either?”
“I see no reason to fear the darkness,” she shrugged. “Without darkness, you could not have the light. My father says I was destined to bring light to the world. I was born on the March Equinox…”
“The beginning of Spring,” Xander finished for her. “Perhaps your father was right, you certainly have brought some light to this long, dark night.”
Xander found his mind beginning to calm, finally being able to pay less attention to the burning of his veins and the pounding in his head. His fingers continued to twitch at his sides, a common mannerism of his whenever he was feeling anxious or stressed, but he was no longer convulsing on the table from the pain. It was still there, that insistent scratching and burning, but it was easier to cope with now.
“Your eyes are brown,” she said. “And your teeth look normal now. Are you feeling better?”
He smiled at the sweet question, feeling the genuine kindness in her words. It had been so long since a mortal had treated him as a human, as anything other than a monster. He wondered, in that moment, if it could be possible for Daemonium to still be seen as human by other mortals. This girl, young and innocent, had looked at him without fear and without disgust, and treated him as nothing more than a person that needed help.
He began to reply when a muffled voice sounded from above the hatch door. The girl rushed towards the stairs and, for the first time that night, bore a look of panic on her face. Clearly,she didn’t want to be caught down here. If she really was just a servant girl, he suspected she could be in great trouble for snooping around Amara House at night. She couldn’t afford to be caught, and he couldn’t afford for her to remember him if she were.
“Wait!” Xander called to her before she could run up the stairs. She paused on the bottom step, peering over her shoulder at him as his mind reached out to hers. “Girl, you must forget this happened. Do not tell anyone about finding me here.”
He spoke in a calm and soothing voice, one that made it hard not to listen to. His exhaustion of the night made it hard for him to connect to her consciousness, but as he pushed through the dizzying nausea of burning out from using too much magic, he finally felt his mind link with hers.
Go to your room and go straight to sleep, do not speak to anyone. When you wake tomorrow, you will have no memory of this. You will forget you met me.
His words echoed in his mind as he pushed them deep into hers, trying to flip through her recent memories and alter everything she had discovered that night. She would only remember hearing a noise from the cellar and wanting to investigate, but became too frightened to go all the way down the stairs alone in the dark and retreated to bed. She would not remember him—she would not remember meeting the man in the shadows.
He watched, a bittersweet satisfaction twisting within him as the carefully crafted reshaped memory slammed against the jagged edges of her true recollections. The collision was visible in the confusion in her eyes, the momentary disorientation before his Manipuli power fully took hold, painting the edges of her perception with a deep purple haze. But as she turned and fled up the creaking stairs, a sudden, violent backlash smacked into him.
His own magic snapped back, hitting him like a sharp slap across the face. He’d never experienced anything like it before, never felt his own power turn on him with such distaste, almost as if it possessed a will of its own that fiercely retaliated against his intrusion of the young girl’s mind. It was a strange feeling, one he presumed to be a new extent of burnout, and as her footsteps faded up the stairs and the old wooden door at the top softly clicked shut, he let out a sigh of relief.
She was gone. Whoever that strange girl was, with her unsettling curiosity and defiant bravery, was gone. Xander was alone once again.
Chapter four
Control
Xander
Xander laid still on the table, no longer struggling against the bindings, and slowly breathing through the smaller waves of pain that intermittently flowed through him. He filtered through his memories, replaying everything from the evening, seeing if he could have done anything differently. He should have known something terrible would happen. The chaos had begun well before the meeting took place.
He knew his brothers had created new Lamiae—their own individual descendents. He just hasn't expected any of them to cause such a disastrous issue.
Deion and Edward had only turned three young children, whom they had adopted into their own family; Lucien, Dreigo, and Ana. As mortals, they’d been too far along into their sicknessfor Deion to use his Medici abilities to heal them. Such young lives, almost lost to smallpox in a rundown hospital on the outskirts of London in 1776. And so Deion and Edward offered them their rebirth, and they had been welcomed as members of the Lamia Court.
Kadeem and Nicolai had turned a few mortals into Lamiae, though they had only turned their most trusted companions they had met over the years, often requesting permission from Xander before offering them the choice.
Iewan, Norman, and William had created many Lamiae, so many that Xander was sure he hadn’t even met them all. And he knew those Lamiae had also turned others. Their Lamia gift could be passed down through each generation by feeding the mortal their blood before they died. However, their power wielding those abilities was far weaker than that of the Purebloods—the first generation of Lamiae.
Xander, however, had not turned anyone. Like Thomas, he still resented what he had become and vowed his curse would die with him, whenever that time would come. And with his brothers’ descendants, as well as the growing number of Lupi families from the first Five Wolves and more Incantrices born within Divina’s family, he had enough Daemons to watch over as it was.
