Heiress of Lies (7 page)

     The Master looked downright shaken. Connor knew that the Master had doted on Searon and looked the other way over his transgressions for years. But the truce with the Robarts required that the vampires stay hidden, and given the Master’s carefully laid plans, what Searon had done had put all of that in jeopardy for the last time.

     Connor saw that of the two, Searon looked far less concerned than his father. The man was still very young for a pureblood, only slightly older than Connor, but he had all the brash and swagger of one much more immature. Being a pureblood made Searon rare amongst the ranks of the vampires gathered in the hall. The legends said that before Alair Robart had made it his personal vendetta to exterminate their entire race, one in every two vampires in the Master’s coven was a pureblood. Of course, that had also been a time when there were multiple covens scattered across all of Altera. Now turned vampires like Connor outnumbered the purebloods fifty to one. And Searon was the only pureblood son of the Master and the only link left to the Master’s deceased wife, who had died giving birth to Searon. Searon had lived a pampered life.

     Searon had knelt down before his father and knuckled his hand to his forehead. Connor felt the gesture dripped with condescension.

     “Father, you have summoned me. And now I have come. How can I serve?” Searon’s tone carried no worry.

     “Searon, my son. My heir. You have caused great difficulty for the coven. You must answer for your crimes,” the Master said.

     “My crime was only in a zest for living the true vampire way, Father. I think it is time that we throw off the shackles of this so-called truce and we take back what was stolen from us. I offer my life in service to the task,” Searon said.

    
Clever
, Connor thought. So Searon understood that he had angered his father a great deal but was still trying to turn the tide in his favor. Everyone in the coven knew that Searon despised the shackles of the Robart truce. Searon had offered up a neatly thought-out angle for the Master to take that would save the Master face and further Searon’s pursuits against humans. If it was anyone other than Searon standing here, the Master would have already called for his head.

     Connor was bored and so he cast about looking for something interesting to pick out of the minds around him. If he got lucky he’d find a tidbit to give Monroe to work on. Monroe was the Master’s Chief Deputy, and over the years Connor had handed him some good leads on those who plotted against the Master.

     There were so many people in the room, though, that no one individual thought was distinguishable from the other. It was just a whole lot of noise—until he touched on a tendril of white hot anger that almost burned the inside of his skull. He was perplexed. He had never found something that intense in picking at minds. He started to gently reach out again to see if he could pinpoint who it was.

     At that moment the Master spoke again. “Many have told me that I have been overindulgent with you, Searon. How could I not be? You are my son and you are pureblood. But I cannot allow you to put this coven in jeopardy any longer.”

     Connor felt a mass sense of shock and surprise scuttle through the minds in the room. He kept poking and pushing these out of the way, looking for that one mind again.

     “BANISHMENT,” the Master’s voice boomed throughout the chamber.

     Astonishment now also joined surprise.

     “Searon, you are hereby stripped of all titles and heir rights. You will leave these coven walls and never return, or face death. You are dead to me now,” the Master said. He pulled up the cowl on his cloak and turned.

     At that moment Connor stumbled on to the mind he had been searching for and found the small tendril of anger had grown into a seething mass. There was heat and violence swirling. He looked anxiously around to see where it was coming from, and then his eyes locked on Searon’s in the high mirror. It was coming from Searon.
And Searon knew that Connor knew
.

     With a brief high yell, Searon sprang to his feet. He whipped off the royal cloak and threw it on the ground. He pointed at his father. “Coward! Cowards all of you! You think you can get rid of me that easily, think again!” The he turned on his heel and ran from the room. Coven law dictated that a banished vampire had mere moments to leave the coven walls before becoming fair game for the hunters.

     Connor could see that many of the coven members were shaken, and he wondered about the wisdom of the Master’s decision.

     Running as hard as he could against the tall grass, Connor remembered asking Monroe about the decision afterwards. He couldn’t fathom why setting a madman loose on the world had been a better plan than simply killing him.

     Monroe had clasped Connor on the shoulder and said, “It is difficult for anyone to lose a son, and you never want to be in the position where you are deciding between life and death for your child. The Master knows what he’s doing. Now that Searon’s been banished he’s none of our concern any longer unless he stirs up trouble for the coven.”

     And so it had been for years until now.

     Connor hadn’t been careful using his mind-reading abilities when he had scanned Searon or his companion, and he hoped that Searon had been too distracted by his recent kill to notice. He picked up the pace.

     Searon had found a way to get back into the good graces of both his father and the coven. Connor glanced down at the woman in his arms. News of the Master’s game had reached Searon’s ears, and Searon knew that all he had to do was win the game by bringing the princess to the Master. Connor pulled Angeline closer to him and ran.

     It felt like Connor had been running for hours and Angeline completely lost track of time. Initially she was surprised to hear the thud of a heartbeat,
his
heartbeat, against her ear, but eventually she tucked her face into Connor’s cloak and let the rhythm soothe her nerves. The night air was chilly and they seemed to be moving at an impossible pace.

     Angeline had just started to doze when Connor stopped and she was jarred awake. She was afraid they had already arrived at the coven, but realized that it was still full dark and the only light she could see was that of the moon. Conner carefully slid her down onto a small rock that sat on the edge of a clearing. They were surrounded by tall grasses on all sides, but in the center of the clearing stones had been laid out to form a small fire pit.

     “Why are we stopping?” she asked, although she was relieved. She didn’t know how long it would take to reach their destination, but the more stops they took the more opportunities she’d have to find a way to escape. “The sooner this detour is done the sooner I can be returned to my people.”

     “I thought you could use the break, Princess. Would you like something to eat?”

     Angeline’s stomach answered for her and she winced.

     Connor chuckled and dug into one of the pockets of his cloak. He pulled out a piece of hard jerky and handed it to her. She took it delicately, but bit into it with a force that she couldn’t control.

     “Tell me about your Master,” she said after several moments of silence.

     Connor started stalking the perimeter of the clearing. She knew what he was doing. He was simultaneously guarding anyone from sneaking up on them while at the same time staying close enough to guard her from running. Not that she would have known where to go in any case. The lands around them seemed completely barren of life. She had not even seen a house or farm since they had entered the Forgotten Lands. She had never felt so isolated.

     Connor was silent so long that she wondered if he was going to answer her or not. “What is it you’d like to know?”

     “I’d like to know why he sent you to accost me from my father’s deathbed,” she replied, crossing her arms. “I’d like to know what he hopes to gain from this meeting.”

     Connor didn’t reply and Angeline waited. Looking up at the stars, she felt like the sky was so big that it was closing in on her.

     “I’d like to know if I’m going to live long enough to see my father again,” she said softy. Tears sprung up in her eyes.

     Connor finally turned and his emerald eyes seemed to float in the heavy darkness. “I am a simple servant of my Master. But I know that he has matters of great importance to discuss with you, Princess. Matters that affect all of us. He has risked much by asking me to bring you to him. He knew that this would bring the legends back to life, and not in a good way. He is wise. He has ruled our coven here in the dark forgotten land since the days before we were banished here. He is a fair leader. I do not think you are in any immediate danger from him.”

     Angeline caught the hitch in his voice when he said “immediate.” That didn’t make her feel one bit better about her predicament.

     “You were banished here?” she asked. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that vampires existed. There was so much she didn’t know, and part of her was still angry at her father for putting her in this position. She should have been at his side for the last three years learning every bit of knowledge he could teach her about ruling Altera as well as everything there was to know about their mortal enemies, not astronomy or math from the Sisters of St. Abath. She should have been at his right hand, not Malin.

     Connor did another circle of the clearing before answering. “Yes. After your great-great- great-grandfather did a fine job of hunting down and killing all but a few remaining vampires, he offered them a choice. They could move to the farthest corner of the kingdom, by far the most remote, hostile place in all the land, and never come back, or he would kill them where they stood.” He knelt down in front of Angeline and sighed. “My Master was one of those survivors. So he came here, as far away as he could possibly get, and he gathered the survivors to him and they have lived here peaceably ever since.”

     Connor’s story added at least ten new questions to Angeline’s list. She wished she had a pen and paper to write it all down.

     “How many of you are there?” she asked.

     “Too many,” Connor said curtly and then he turned away.

     Angeline wondered if he could hear their pursuers and how far behind them they were. And she was also disturbed by Connor’s answer. A secret kingdom of vampires sitting quietly all the way out where no one could see what they were doing? Angeline smelled something very bad in all of that. She feared that this pseudo vampire king was amassing an army to wreak havoc on her people. They had been at peace for so long that she doubted most of them remembered what it was like to live in a time of war. Her father had campaigned against small upstarts far in the east near the ocean and had skirmishes along the boundaries of the Solera Valley, but there hadn’t been a full-scale war since…well, since the war that solidified that a Robart would sit on the throne of Altera until the end of time.

     Angeline, deep in her thoughts, wasn’t paying attention to what was happening around her. She still felt a bit lethargic from the journey so far. Then she felt a slight pinch of pain on the top of her hand. She looked down and gasped. A spider the size of her fist was crouched over her hand like it was claiming it. Its red beady eyes dared her to defy it.

     Then Connor was there and he grabbed the spider by its immense furry body and crushed it in his fist. Red blood squeezed through the folds between his fingers and dripped onto her hand. Angeline’s stomach turned. She hated blood.

     She turned away as Connor walked to the edge of the clearing and tossed the spider’s mangled body into the tall grass. Her hand was hurting, though. She examined it as best she could in the moonlight. There was a large bump and two angry red marks where its fangs had pierced her skin. It was warm to the touch and it tingled. She scratched it for just a second before Connor returned and took her hand in his, looking at it closely.

     “It bit you,” he said.

     “Yes,” she said. His touch was gentle as he probed the bump. She tried not to cry out. “That hurts. Is it bad?”

     Connor seemed to slip to the ground in front of her. He looked shocked, as though he had no idea what to do.