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“I’m not sure that’s possible now that it’s been discovered, even if we tried to hide it again with more runework,” Abaddon says, and I hear the regret in his voice.
“I might have a possible fix.”
Abaddon rolls his eyes. “Let me guess. Magic.”
“You’ve witnessed Phoenix’s mage at work.”
Reluctantly, Abaddon nods. “I found us a villa in the city for the time being.”
“I’ll start working on it with Sabra immediately. She’s in the city, too.”
He nods and cuffs me on the shoulder, his face softening. “Good night last night?” His eyebrow arches up.
“As if I’d tell you,” I glare, and he laughs good-naturedly. I turn away before he can read anything else on my face and almost run straight into Phoenix. We both pull back before colliding, and her eyes widen before she composes her face into its usual mask. “Come on. If we don’t hurry, I’ll be late.”
“Right.” I blink. “Your lecture.”
We just witnessed the sort of complete control Vlad exercises over his family. I’ve never seen him willing to sacrifice any members of it before, but then, they’re unkillable. All that nonsense about stakes and beheadings is just lore to make humans feel more in control in the face of the unthinkable. Vlad and his sons are immortal in the true sense of the word, like my brothers and I. Slice us and dice us, and still, we continue on.
I learned this the hard way, climbing out of my grave after I’d painfully regenerated.
Vlad has learned more creative means of controlling his family over the centuries. Phoenix told me he locked one son in a pit for three hundred years for disrespecting him. Mostly, his methods involve breaking them from childhood while they were still human, a process he got to repeat every twenty-five years.
He experimented with making blood slaves of his own progeny until they became vampires themselves, but apparently, it made them dullards when they came of age and turned into vampires, not the killing machines he was looking for.
So, I can’t imagine how Phoenix possibly “came to an understanding” with him. He’s intractable and ruthless.
After learning the lengths he’s willing to go, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the strength it took Phoenix to become the woman she is today. She survived him with not just a scrap of humanity but an ocean of it.
She’s the kind of person who sees a suffering creature in the woods and stops to help it even though she has plenty of her own problems to worry about. Who does that? She helped me believe that goodness was possible anywhere in this or any other plane, and she grew up with an evil to rival my father.
As she strides confidently down the hallway in front of me, I have to fight the surge of emotion in my chest. She’s built a life for herself here apart from his control.
And I vow silently to not allow myself to be a means of his manipulation. He’s trying to tighten his leash on her and bring her back in; that’s obvious to anyone with eyes.
But unlike ten years ago, maybe the solution isn’t leaving.
Maybe it’s staying and fighting at her side.
Or is that my hunger talking? Look how strong she became without me.
* * *
Phoenix is quiet as she drives us into the city, and I follow her lead, keeping to myself. I hate this awkwardness between us when I once felt closer to her than I ever had to any being in the universe.
And there’s the fact that I’m busy gripping the handle on the door with white knuckles. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to these motorized vehicles, even though we used them all the time when I first lived at Vlad’s compound with Phoenix. I have more of an affinity with human transportation devices like planes and helicopters. Probably because flying comes naturally to me as I spent the first two thousand years of my life in the air. The dip and sway of the metal beast in the different air pockets and changing air pressures were familiar since I navigated it with my bare body and wings for so long. It felt like second nature.
But this? Wheeled vehicles flying down the road with so many other vehicles jostling for space? The lines on the road are treated as mere suggestions in this country, and a three-lane highway can be choked four cars abreast. Occasionally, cars even jump on the sidewalks when it gets a little too tight, and honking is the music of the highway.
Phoenix is adept at it, and she leans on the horn as she slips into a pocket that opens up between two other cars before zooming into a parking lot and hauling the car up onto the sidewalk—the usual way of parking here.
“Come on, we’ve got to hurry.”
“Right behind you,” I say as she all but leaps out of the car.
She jogs across campus, shouldering a backpack, and I keep at her heels. We don’t slow down after sprinting up a mountain of steps to one of the bigger buildings. Phoenix shoves through the doors to a big, circular glass atrium in the center of the open foyer with stairs leading up to each floor. Behind the glass is a model of an early religious temple to scale, about the size of a car.
Phoenix shoulders her way past students as she takes the stairs two at a time. She only seems to take a breath once she slides into a seat at the back of a huge auditorium-like room that is packed with students and faculty alike.
