I watched as he drank. Already, it seemed commonplace, not that I’d seen him drink from someone. It was right. Expected. The vampire king drinking from a slave. I’d be a fool to suppose anything else.
I had been a fool.
The merman hadn’t even flinched. He’d known it was coming before I had.
Gwala didn’t drink for long, and he licked the wound clean as he pulled away. His words were whispered and had the tone of a lover as he continued addressing the creature. “Yes, my prized bull. You have been the best breeder I’ve had. Your offspring have been the purest of any we’ve had in centuries.”
My mind played catch-up entirely too late. Offspring. Offspring. The merman’s children. I’d known what offspring meant, but giving it the correct label made it all the more horrific. The merman was having children to be devoured by the vampires.
The chains around the merman’s wrists sparkled in the light. The merman was being forced to mate in order to have children that would be killed by his captors.
I couldn’t hold my questions inside. “Do you kill the chil—the offspring, or do you only eat from them?” Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as I assumed. Not that the idea of Gwala using them as a living buffet was any sort of pleasure.
Gwala looked over at me, as if only just remembering I was there. “No, the entire mer must be drained to have effect. It matters not if they are young or adult.” His hand ran down the length of the red hair, the strands falling in a fan from Gwala’s fingers.
The merman’s eyes met mine. I saw no hate. No pain. Just fathomless emptiness.
Twenty-Two
FINN DE MORISCO
“For thethousandth time, it’s fine. Truly.”
I stretched out my hand and lightly traced the costal veins of Schwint’s injured wing. He really did seem okay. I couldn’t see any fractures. The stained-glass-like segments were crystalline and whole. If I hadn’t seen the wing in its crumpled form, I never would have believed it had been damaged. “I just wish your leg was better.”
Schwint shrugged. “If I had to choose, this is what I’d pick. Wings over legs. Always. Between Newton and Caitlin, I came off a lot better than I might have. A little pain and limp aren’t too big a deal.”
“I know. I just hate I wasn’t able to stop Omar. Even with how much we’ve been working and how much my magic’s grown, it didn’t do any good.”
“We’ve been practicing like crazy, and you’ve increased your magic quicker than I would have thought possible. Besides, it’s not as if I wasn’t there and don’t have my own magic as well.” He leaned back on the bed, supporting his weight on his arms as he stretched out his right leg, his face scrunching slightly at the effort. “He caught us unaware. Even though I was nervous about him in the beginning, he’d become nothing more than a pain-in-the-ass old man. We won’t make that mistake with Gwala or any of the vampires.”
“I still can’t believe that Gwala actually had you taken to Caitlin and Newton.”
“No joke. What’s even more surprising is that he let them stay where they are. I mean, we knew that he was aware they were there, he had to be. It’s another thing to think he’s just going to let them stay there without taking action. I can’t fathom his motives.”
“I don’t think we can trust that Gwala won’t do something.”
A short laugh burst from him. “You think! As soon as we can figure something else out, we need to try. Not that I think we can get anything past Gwala in his country, let alone here on the peninsula.”
“Considering we weren’t able to get anything by him when we were in San Diego, I’d say that’s a safe bet.”
The ironic humor faded. “And maybe that’s the whole point. Why bother with them until he needs to? He’s got plenty to hold you to him the way it is. No reason to use all his leverage at once.”
“He didn’t seem to know Omar wasn’t helping me strengthen my power. So he’s not omniscient or anything. I just don’t know how to determine when we’re safe and when we’re not.”
“I think we have to assume we’re not. Always.”
We sat on our bed in silence, fingers intertwined as our hands pressed down into the soft bedspread. Schwint kept extending and flexing his leg, the entire time keeping a slow and steady beat of his wings, as if fearing that stopping might reverse the healing process.
I stared out the window, not that I could see much from the angle of where we were positioned on the bed. It seemed impossible that it had only been a few hours ago that Sonia had been standing there, strangely linking my past life to this new, darker version.
A warm breeze swept through the room offering relief from the heat. When we’d first gotten to Costa Rica, I’d used my power to stay cool, but it was such a constant that I’d been too drained to do much else. The little of the sky I could see showed a rather gray sunset. Just a hint of diffused white light cut through the heavy clouds that gathered. Even as I mentally predicted an intense storm for the evening, thunder grumbled off in the distance.
The howler monkeys would be screeching when the sun went down.
“You know, I can’t blame him.”
Schwint’s words cut through my thoughts, bringing me abruptly back to the moment. “Who?”
