What Kills Me (30 page)
Authors: Wynne Channing
He stopped as if the information
chilled him.
The Empress stared at Uther. “What you
are saying is…”
“What I’m saying is that she is the
incarnation of the first vampires. So she should be considered the
first. If she is the first, when she dies, every single one of us
dies with her.”
What?
“Impossible,” the Empress
whispered.
“What if it is possible?” Uther
asked.
A tremor rippled through the crowd.
Everyone was muttering. Suddenly the Empress crushed the wood
railing under the weight of her hands, sending fragments
everywhere. The vampires gasped.
“Impossible!” she shouted. She pointed
at Uther. “Aramatta, seize the cleric!”
I put myself between the soldiers and
Uther. I didn’t understand but I trusted that he was trying to
rescue me. They aimed their swords at my throat.
“No! Stop! You’ll kill us all!” Uther
screamed at them, clawing at my arms to pull me back. The soldiers
exchanged glances.
“Insolence!” the Empress
roared.
“Wait!” Uther yelled. “What if we
could somehow prove it?”
How?
The Empress pressed her shoulders
back, reassuming her regal posture. “What are you proposing,
Cleric?”
Uther put one hand out to steady the
soldiers and then he reached inside his robe. He pulled out a gold
dagger and turned toward me.
“Cleric,” Lucas warned.
“Uther, what are you doing?” I asked,
alarmed. I searched his brown eyes for malice and then for
desperation, which can turn anyone into a monster. I found nothing
but resolve.
He walked to me, and for a second I
imagined having to hit him. Extending his hand, he offered me the
handle of the dagger. When I didn’t move, he gestured for me to
take it. I wrapped my fingers around its ornate handle and slid it
out of his hands.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
I asked.
“Cut yourself.”
“What?”
“Zee, you don’t have to do anything he
says,” Lucas said. “Come here.”
Lucas held his hand out to me. Uther
stood in between us, and I stared into his face. It was the first
face that my new eyes had seen. He was the first vampire that I’d
trusted. And he had done nothing to break that trust.
“Uther, why do I have to cut
myself?”
“You may be the only one strong enough
to break your own skin,” he said. “Please.”
I swallowed. “Okay, I’ll do
it.”
“Zee,” Lucas said.
“It’s okay. Just a nick,” I said,
looking at Uther, who nodded. He clasped his hands against his
stomach.
I flipped my left hand over
and put the edge of the blade to my palm, half an inch below my
index finger, where my life line started. My palm was pink and my
flesh whitened under the pressure of the knife. In that moment I
realized that I had not bled a single drop of blood since becoming
a vampire. Not in the car accident. Not in a fight. And for some
reason, the notion that I might not bleed, that inside, I might be
ash, made me more nervous than the fear of the pain. If I did not
bleed, then that would make me more different than Lucas, than
everyone. I glanced at Lucas. He was frowning and shaking his
head.
He doesn’t care if I bleed or not.
He simply cares.
I squeeze my fingers around
the blade and clenched my teeth.
This is
going to hurt.
Yelping, I yanked the dagger out and I
dropped it. I gripped my wrist and sucked air through my teeth. I
heard others gasp and voices filled the room. I opened my left hand
and the burning slit across my palm gaped like a mouth. It slowly
filled with blood. And I was relieved.
Lucas was suddenly at my
side.
“I’m bleeding,” I said to him. When I
looked at him, he wasn’t looking at me. He looked
horrified.
“What’s wrong…?”
He raised his left hand in front of
his face. He was bleeding from a horizontal cut, identical to
mine.
“How did you…” I started. But my voice
disappeared when I saw Uther hold up his bleeding hand.
“Impossible,” the Empress whispered. I
snapped my head toward her. She trembled on the balcony, holding
her left fist against her chest. A single bead of blood dropped off
her knuckle. Soldiers were tearing off their gloves and staring
into their hands; in fact, all the vampires in the room were
looking at their hands and talking and gesturing toward me. They
were all bleeding from the same wounds.
“You see?” Uther said. “She sheds our
blood. She bleeds. We bleed. She dies. We all die.”
The Empress shook her head.
I die. Everyone
dies.
“Uther, what does this mean?” I
asked.
He gave me a gentle smile. “Within you
flows the blood of creation. It means, Lady Axelia, that we are all
connected to you. We all belong to you.”
Before I could speak, he lowered
himself onto one knee.
“Uther,” I exclaimed.
Suddenly the soldiers dropped to their
knees. It was like a ripple throughout the room. My mouth fell open
as every vampire kneeled until only Lucas and I were left
standing.
Stunned, I stared over their lowered
heads at the Empress. She stepped to the edge of the balcony, the
click of her heels on the floor the only sound in the hall. Her
eyes bore into mine. I was frozen, petrified that she would launch
herself at me and devour me.
The Empress raised her hand and placed
it over her heart. Then, slowly, mechanically, she bowed her
head.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Lucas?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think this
means?”
He rested his sword on his shoulder.
“I think it means that we can stop fighting. For now.”
My left hand tingled. I turned it over
and wiped the blood away with my thumb. The skin underneath was
perfect. Lucas took my hand in his and gave it a squeeze. I looked
into his brilliant eyes, and when I saw confidence and courage, I
thought that maybe they were reflecting what he saw in
me.
Hand in hand we turned to face the
vampires bowing before me. I gazed at the tops of their heads,
their closed eyes, their hands pressed to their chests, and I no
longer dreaded the end. Instead, I was desperate to know what was
to come and determined to survive it.
There are many people whose friendship
and support have been essential to the creation of this
book.
A humble writer should always thank
her editor first. Thank you to Marie-Lynn Hammond, who so
thoughtfully and thoroughly sifted out the impurities from my
manuscript. I am grateful for her sensitivity, her attention to
detail, and her flair for fiction.
A long list of cherished friends and
family read the book in various stages: Lesley Bradshaw (my beta
reader extraordinaire), Tiffany Leong, Jeyanthy Jeyaratnam, Roopa
Ramiah, Duong Ramon, Uresha Salgado, Kerry LaiFatt, Darlene Wang De
Martinez, Helen Martha, and Vicki So. Girl power
forever.
Everyone should have co-workers and
editors as cool and generous as the gang at the National Post.
Their encouragement gave me the push to put my book out there for
strangers to read.
Designer Liliana Sanches Davis created
the best cover I could imagine, and photographer Chris Bedlington
took the best author photo my face could muster. Michael Mandarano
rescued me from the agony of formatting my book.
Last but never least, my partner in
everything, Sean Damien, whose love and support keeps me sane. He
also built me a kick-ass website.
Thank you.
Wynne Channing is a national newspaper
reporter and young adult novelist.
She started writing horror/fantasy
tales as a girl. She still has the first novel that she wrote when
she was 10. It’s (unintentionally) hilarious.
Wynne loves telling stories and as a
journalist, she has interviewed everyone from Daniel Radcliffe and
Hugh Jackman to the President of the Maldives and Duchess Sarah
Ferguson. The closest she has come to interviewing a vampire is
sitting down with True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgard (he didn’t
bite).
She briefly considered calling her
debut novel “Well” so then everyone would say: “Well written by
Wynne Channing.”
Connect with her online: