I stiffen, pulling my hands out of her hold. “Clearly I’m not.”
She tilts her head, confusion dancing across her features. “It’s me, Talyria. Don’t you remember me?”
Talyria.
The name feels like it should have some familiarity, but it just doesn’t. She must see the answer in my eyes before I am able to speak it out loud because I watch her face crumble.
Suddenly the husband is there. He glances back to the others in the room before leaning closer. “Perhaps we should take this conversation somewhere more private?”
Talyria reaches up, swiping a rogue tear that streaks across her face. She gives her head a sharp shake. “No need, Victor. Clearly, I was mistaken. I thought for once the gods might show me some favor, but that was silly of me.”
I watch her straighten her shoulders as she turns away from me. Does she genuinely believe that I’m not the person she knew? If not, then how would she know my name?
I want to grab her, demand that she tells me who Corallin is to her. Ask why she thought I was dead. Find out about my past, but I’m trapped here immobile.
My present wars with my past. What if I don’t like the person that I was? I’m fine as I am now, why should I seek to change that for a past that was obviously not worth remembering?
And yet I cannot escape the curiosity either.
I’m left feeling torn in two entirely different directions. And being double minded like this is dangerous. It’s distracting me from my true purpose for being here, a purpose named Valentine.
The remaining guardsman narrows his eyes as he looks at us. “I think we are all straying from the matter at hand, namely my murdered associate.”
I work my jaw. There is that as well. Another distraction, but this one is dangerous. I can’t afford scrutiny. The vampiricsorceress and assassin is an easy scapegoat to pin the crime on. Even if I wasn’t in the building when it happened.
Nothing is going to stop me from returning to my father with Valentine’s spellbook in hand. Not a murder, not a group of individuals who could lynch me, and not this Talyria who claims to know me.
I turn my glare to the Highlander who is watching me closely. And certainly not Lief and the distraction he is.
Chapter Eight
Talyria
This cell has been my only abode for longer than I’d care to know. Fourteen paces to the right and then fourteen paces right back to where I’d been before. There is a small window that lets in a scant amount of sunlight.
The sunlight is an unfamiliar sight, I’m a stone elf, I spent most of my life underground in our cities deep within the mountains not to mention that I spent so much time as a vampire. I think he was trying to do me a kindness, allowing me to occasionally glimpse the birds in the sky.
As much of a kindness that someone like this Creed is capable of.
Still, as far as cells go, I suppose I could have done worse. I have mobility, I have some loose straw. I even have a cot raised from the ground, so the rats don’t chew on me in my sleep. Not that I’ve seen many rats here. My cell is connected to Creed’s laboratory, and he keeps a clean room.
The door to the laboratory opens and Creed strides through, his long robes disguising his form as he seems to almost glide across the floor.
He stops in front of my cell. “It’s been an interesting twenty years with you as my specimen, vampire,” he says as he folds his hands behind his back. “But I’m afraid I have no more use for you. This is where we part ways.”
His face is stained black as the night, but his eyes are white. He did not always look like that. When I was first his prisoner, he looked unassuming enough, a Lowlander man with blue black hair, but now he looks monstrous, like one of the dead that he reanimates.
The transformation came after he absorbed my vampiric powers in a necromantic ritual. However, that did not turn him into a vampire himself. Instead, it seemed to give him my nightly powers with none of the faults of vampirism. He claims that he absorbed the energy of my vampirism and that my powers extended his lifespan for as long as I was a vampire. I’m not even sure how he managed to do that, I was not aware that such a thing was even possible, but then necromancy was always so feared even amongst my people who did not fear to worship the demigods.
However, if this necromancer’s words are to be believed my people are gone.
A thousand years… that’s how long he said I was trapped in the stone before he found me and locked me in this cell.
So, for a thousand and twenty years, I’ve been trapped. I’m fortunate not to age, even with my vampirism gone or else I’d be an old woman by now.
But I’m still young. Young enough to plot my escape.
I will not die this man’s prisoner.
