[Author’s Note: Here we go, flying solo. So please, if you catch any typos, continuity errors, gaping plot holes, places where more info is needed – any of the usual editing stuff – please leave me a comment. From here on out my uploads will be more of a “work in progress,” so feedback is super appreciated.]
Chapter 9: Wants and Needs
The buzz of Keel’s blood faded after about an hour, lowering me from those sky-high heights back down to my new reality as all that roiling energy siphoned itself away bit by bit, taking with it any hopes of a new super-powered existence. One can only dream, I guess. As always, the bond proved itself more complicated than anyone could have predicted.
Yet even as the long-overdue weariness set into my bones with a dull, uncomfortable ache, I could not sleep.
Instead, I found myself hunted – and haunted – by more and more memories. It shouldn’t have been surprising given how much I used to look forward to sneaking away from my tiny, dreary, filthy cell below and coming here. But I thought they would run their course, or at least lose definition beneath the heavy wool blanket of exhaustion and waning hope. Alas, no, if anything their edges grew sharper, more cutting, more cruel. Turning the lights off did little to help, Keel’s room remained imprinted in my head, crystal clear.
Arthos had lied. Maybe not intentionally – it was possible he really believed what he told me – but it was a lie just the same. He had no control over Keel, his king, meaning he also had no real idea what it would be like for me here. He’d promised freedom, but that’s not what this looked like.
This room and its memories were my fancy new prison, and no matter which way I turned or how I positioned my head, arms, legs, body, I could not shut off the painful stimuli it fed me.
Sure, I could walk out – use my magic on anything and anyone that dared get in my way – but by agreeing to come here I’d gone all scorched earth on my former life, and if the League of Sorcerers didn’t already know I’d betrayed them and the contract I signed, they’d receive word soon. And as we’d had the misfortune of discovering during the siege at Lucia’s mom’s shop, I was no match for even a small faction of them, let alone an official extermination squad.
No, I’d made my bed – this bed – and I would have to sleep in it. But the Sandman continued holding out. Maybe because he too knew that sooner or later I’d have a visitor, or rather, one particular visitor.
That thought left a nauseating hurricane of anticipation and dread swirling in my gut. Keel had been so furious when the induction ritual had gone awry, madder than I’d ever seen him, and given that, a good outcome to our next encounter seemed a tad too hopeful.
But at least you have magic, right?
Unlike with his father, I’d be able to protect myself this time. I clung to that shaky idea of safety like a bobbing life raft, even though I knew he could hurt me in plenty of other ways that magic would do nothing to help with – like this room.
It wasn’t lost on me that I’d given myself over to a den of vipers, and the only thing well and truly off the table was killing me – if I could take Arthos at his word about that. In any case, I still had my trump card: the fact that Keel and me were irrevocably linked and by killing me he would only guarantee himself the same fate. I’d considered divulging that to Arthos, and perhaps I should have, but I intended to keep that one close to my chest for now, at least until I got some idea of how things were going to play out.
Regardless, we had a lot of dealing to do – that was one thing Arthos was right about – and a lot of it would likely be unpleasant, especially if the way Keel handled my entrance was any sign.
I’d come in peace and he’d already hurt me.
I nudged my fingers up against the gash in my neck, I’d almost healed it earlier, yet I’d held off. I didn’t want to give up the pain, not even when the blood rush wore off and it turned from a distant throb to a screeching howl. It might somehow be useful in confronting Keel. If the blood bond still worked as it did pre-transition, he’d soon start feeling the same things I was again, and he’d have to suffer this pain too. Fair’s fair.
Okay, that was childish, but so was almost throwing a tantrum in front of your council because something hadn’t gone exactly as expected.
Ugh.
Looks like Keel was back to bringing out the worst in me.
This is what ran through my head as I laid ensconced in that four-poster bed with the luxurious 600-thread-count sheets, listening to the faint rumble of the elevator going up and down, up and down.
Sleep still hadn’t arrived when I heard the elevator slide to a stop on my floor. My whole body tensed.
Relax, Mills, I told myself. They’re probably going to the museum or whatever else is on this level.
The sound of the elevator door swooshing open cut through the darkness. The phrase “everything is louder at night” popped into my head, just seconds ahead of the realization that whoever was here was most certainly here for me.
Shit.
While the elevator’s backlight robbed my visitor of his features, rendering him a chiaroscuro silhouette, the immediate bond-fuelled tug in my gut gave away his identity.
Keel did not hit the lights or announce himself before stepping clear of the elevator. The doors slid shut behind him with a muffled clunk, casting him and the rest of his former bedroom into darkness once more. I tried to blink back the night. It didn’t help. I didn’t have Nosferatu vision, and the shadows swallowed him as completely as if he were a shadow himself – one with fangs and two glowing red eyes. Those, I could see.
I shifted beneath the sheets, untangling myself from the bedding, and prodded inwards at my magic, careful not to stir the connection between us. Keel would feel it, and who knows how he’d read it. He was probably already picking up on everything else I was feeling: fear, annoyance, the alluring pull of the bond, which contradicted all my better instincts.
“You can stop with the stalker act, I know you’re there,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from wavering. He had to know he was unnerving me – even I could hear my heart pounding – and yet he did nothing to ease my fear. He just kept standing there like a creep.
His lack of reply only made the darkness deeper and more oppressive. I sat up, flinging my legs over the side of the bed, freeing them of the covers.
He’s enjoying this, I thought. Or he’s got me under a microscope.
As I mentally settled in for more standing and staring, Keel took a few slow, near-silent steps towards me, turning the vampirism up to eleven. I resisted the urge to scramble across the duvet and put the bedframe and mattress between us. For one, it hadn’t worked when he was a half-vampire, so it sure as hell wouldn’t cut it now that he’d transitioned. Never mind, I was a sorceress, a vampire killer; I should be brave and powerful – the hunter, not the hunted, and definitely not skittering for cover. One of me could annihilate an army of them. Heck, one of me had. But, of course, murdering Keel was off the table.
He continued his calculated approach – a jungle cat sizing up his prey, getting a sense for which way I’d dash, and how he’d counter. Not in any rush, until the moment came to overtake me, clench his jaws around my jugular, and… yeah, maybe that analogy was a bit too apt.
I shook it clear of my head, and tried to reach out and get a sense of what he was feeling, but the bond returned a great big wall of nothing. Guess that trick had gone with the rest of the superpowers.
With all that mystical energy dissipated, I only had two options left: dive for the lamp on the night table to my left or throw up my shield. Since going for the light meant turning my back to Keel and that was not happening, that left only one.
I let go of the sheets I’d been clutching in my sweaty fists, stood up and dug my nails into my palms, willing an impenetrable layer of protection to blossom up around me. As it solidified, I exhaled, not realizing until that moment that I’d been holding my breath.
Keel stopped just outside my barrier. His eyes burned in at me, unreadable.
They flung me back to that night on the roof in Buffalo when I was sure he was going to die and all the other times we’d invited this side of him out when we’d trained, and I wondered if I’d made a grave error in judgement by coming here. Keel’s Nosferatu side had always had it out for me, it’d never been my ally.
Now that he was mere inches away, I could make out the angular lines of his nose, mouth and cheekbones and the indistinct shape of his body, half hidden under the drape of his royal robes. A strange formality for such an informal encounter. Then again I never saw his father clothed in anything but his formal attire either.
Keel extended his hand toward my shield, tentative and cautious, stopping only a fraction of an inch from the invisible barrier. How had he known precisely where it was: a good guess or was the bond spilling other secrets now too? He held his clawed fingers there for several long seconds, flexing them in the air, then he thrust his palm forward, straight through my force field without so much as a flinch. Once the hand was in, he took two vampire-quick steps forward and closed the remaining distance between us.
Too stunned to drop my suddenly useless defenses, I stood frozen in place, continuing to project my spell around us both.
“Welcome back,” he said. His voice low and even, which made the greeting sound more like a veiled threat. “As you can see, some things have changed.”
I nodded numbly. No shit, some things have changed. How the hell did he walk through my protective barrier like it was nothing? Does this mean he’s immune to all my magic now? That I’m defenseless?
For the first time since I met him, Keel scared me more than his father ever had.
“How did yo–”
The rest of my words were stolen by his hand – around my throat, fingers pressing in, squeezing, choking. My hands flew up to tear at his. I clawed and pulled and yanked and dug between his digits, but they didn’t budge. He had Nosferatu strength, I had… nothing. Random flecks of light danced across my vision, chased here and there by the oncoming haze.
I stopped struggling, and Keel loosened his grip enough for me to inhale a few shallow, aching breaths, but not so much that I could speak or break free. I hauled myself back from the edge of unconsciousness one desperate gasp at a time.
“First lesson: you do not question your king.”
I swallowed hard, stomping down the urge to meet his violence with some of my own. However impotent it may be. No escalating, Mills – an old lesson, but one that still applied, especially if my magic was useless against him.
Instead, I closed my eyes, determined to shut it all for a moment, so I could clear my head and think straight. Keel had been here for five minutes and I was already sick of his shit. I used to hate the thought that someday he might turn into a Nosferatu leader like his father had been, and now that this was our new existence, it was downright depressing. How the hell am I supposed to fix this, Arthos? How?!
Keel must have read my tuning out as an act of deference, because he let go of me.
“Lessons? Really?” I rasped, rubbing my neck where his fingers had been. “That’s who you’ve become?”
He scowled, and the darkness of the room cast his pale angular face into a sharper, crueller configuration. For the briefest of seconds, I thought he might choke me again.
“What did you do up there?” Keel demanded.
“You mean the–”
“Who were you trying to signal your whereabouts to? Who’s on their way here?” He fired his questions at me like bullets from a gun, each one couched in a deep, abiding paranoia so unlike Keel it was jarring. Effect of the transition or something else?
“Keel, you’re wr–”
He grabbed me, lifted me off the ground and slammed me into the wall beside the night table like a rag doll, knocking the air from my lungs and rattling the nearby furniture. His clawed fingers dug into my shoulders pinning me there.
“That is not how you address your king!” he roared into my face.
I flinched back, expecting a wave of fetid breath to wash over me, but it didn’t. Interesting. I added it to my mental list of all the parts of Keel that were not-quite-Nosferatu. It must be hard to fight suspicion that’s rooted in undeniable physical evidence. Anyone could see – and smell – that Keel differed from those he ruled over. No wonder he had so much anger festering inside of him, but why was he blaming it all on me? I wasn’t the only consenting party and for large swathes of our time together I wasn’t consenting at all; certainly not when he’d drained me to the point of unconsciousness right before his transition.
He knew the risks! He was well aware that even one drop of my blood could screw with the ritual’s outcome, and yet he’d guzzled it down anyway.
But all that happened before the transition had reworked his body and brain, and there was no telling what this Keel thought of the things we’d once done. Judging by how tonight had gone thus far, it wasn’t all shiny happy reminiscences of prancing in the (concrete) fields of magic and first love.
Tread carefully, I warned myself, as my mind assaulted me with a montage of tortures I’d suffered at Keel’s father’s hands and my doppelganger had suffered at Keel’s. He’s capable of… well… – it wasn’t an easy thing to admit, even silently in my head – anything.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty.” His title fell out of my mouth more awkward than regal; those two words bore nothing but loathsome memories for me. Perhaps that’s why he insisted on them. Unlike his father he wouldn’t need fists and fangs and claws to wound me – he had our history. And our future.
“Better,” Keel said, releasing my shoulders. Bruises would bloom there before long. “Now, you were saying?”
Would he let me talk this time? And if he did, what would be the next thing that set him off? Verbal tiptoeing wasn’t exactly my forte, and he knew that.
“I didn’t cause the earthquake. I don’t know what caused it,” I said, deciding to keep things blunt and succinct, hoping to get through to him.
He studied my face as he considered this.
“Kee-” His eyes darkened. “I mean, Your Majesty,” I corrected myself. This would take some getting used to. “You used to be able to read me through the bond. If you can still do that, do it, and you’ll see if I’m lying or not.”
His expression remained stony and unyielding, but after fifteen or twenty seconds his shoulders relaxed. So this incarnation was not entirely incapable of seeing reason. Good to know.
“Why am I here?” I kept my voice quiet, even tilting my head in an inspired bit of faked subservience.
He said nothing.
“Gotcha. I don’t ask questions.”
I wondered what was running through his head, old Keel was never this brooding and walled off. He’d spilled Nosferatu secrets like headline news. And he smiled, all the time – just the thought that I’d never see that cocky, easygoing, head-sure grin again birthed an uncomfortable lump in my throat. I tried to swallow past it, but it didn’t dislodge. Just like this new reality of Keel.
His Majesty reached up and clasped my chin, his frosty fingers sending a chill through my face, making me blink. He tilted my head to the right, leaned in and inhaled. “You haven’t healed,” he said, his tone lower now, smoother, less confrontational, more…
Fresh terror bloomed in my chest.
Keel ran an overlong nail along the still-forming scar, the motion of it stung.
“Is this an invitation?” he asked, as his mouth moved closer to my ear. His hot breath danced across my lobe, in stark contrast to his preternaturally cold grip.
“No,” I whispered, scared anything louder would snap the proverbial tightrope he and I were balancing on. “I was just too tired to heal.”
“Wrong answer,” he rumbled, spinning me around so fast I had to thrust my arms out to stop my face from smashing into the wall. Keel’s hands fell in place over mine, trapping me there. Fight or flight kicked in, but giving in to either would only make things worse. I needed to play the game – or at least, learn the rules – before trying to subvert it. “Your king does not need an invitation, but you should never fail to give him one. Understand?” His head dipped towards the wound; his lips vibrating against my shoulder blade as he spoke.
I wanted to shrink away from his touch. I should have been repelled. Yet the bond had other plans. It shoved back against my terror and disgust and tried to drown it out with something else: desire. Raw, wanton, knee-quaking, stomach-churning need. It wanted me to give in. It wanted me to let him bite me. In fact, it wanted me to give him whatever he wanted.
I wondered if he felt it too. And I wondered if he was subtly – and intentionally – stoking its flames.
Keel slid his hands up my arms and across my shoulders, leaving my skin cold and clammy in their wake; mine remained pressed against the wall, preventing me from crashing into it face first, as the weight of his body pushed against me. He took his time, allowing his fingertips to linger here and there, daring me to try to shake him off. Every cell in my body that wasn’t being manipulated by the bond screamed “Danger!”
When his exploratory journey reached the base of my neck, a sudden jerk of motion yanked me backward. It was accompanied by a loud tearing sound, then cool air kissed my newly exposed skin.
He’d ripped the back of my sweatshirt wide open.
“You smell even better than I remember,” he murmured, mouth close to my skin. His fangs grazed my neck, probing and prodding it. I didn’t want this – not like this – but the bond kept sending tiny sparks of pleasure flaring through my body nonetheless. Or was Keel doing that? He’d drunk from me during the Induction Ceremony, so it was just as possible that he was manipulating me. How many times had he used that same trick to calm me after we’d fled the compound? Who’s to say he wasn’t making me want him, and compelling me not to fight back?
“Come on, sorceress, it’s your destiny,” Keel cajoled, as his right hand blazed a trail down to my hip and pulled me even tighter against him. It was just as cold as it had been a moment ago but all I felt was heat. Another unwanted explosion of desire tore through me, shaking my knees and threatening to crumble my already wavering resolve. This conversation had been about blood when it started, but at some point it had become about something else.
That realization finally pushed me past all the wanton, rapturous feelings that were not my mine.
“Not like this,” I said, trying to squirm free of his grip – and failing. “You promised. Remember?” Maybe those long-ago promises meant nothing to him anymore. Perhaps he’d even take pleasure in breaking them, breaking me.
Keel pulled away from my neck. “It’s not like you could stop me.”
“No, probably not,” I admitted, thankful for my rising anger and the way it boiled away my more problematic emotions. “But you can’t stay here forever and the second you leave, I’ll blast my way out of this place, I swear – or have you immunized the rest of your people against my magic too?” It wasn’t an empty threat. How was being hunted by tyrannical sorcerers out there any worse than being assaulted by Nosferatu in here?
“Very well,” he conceded, releasing his hold on my hip.
I quickly put some space between us. Robbed of his touch, the wanting faded to a dull background buzz – persistent but no longer overwhelming.
He’d agreed to that way too fast, though, so there had to be a catch, and he didn’t leave me waiting long.
“You may keep your virtue,” he said, “but your blood is mine. Understand?”
Of course, I understood. Every vampire coveted sorcerer blood and having a sorcerer under his command meant never having to be denied again. There was no question, he’d adopted his father’s game, though his version had different rules. The former king only punished with physical pain, Keel knew my weaknesses, my breaking points, and how threatening those was a million times more effective at gaining my cooperation.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, even though I knew where he stood on questions. If I didn’t find a way to get through to him, there would be no moving forward, no chance to do what I came here to do.
“Because I can,” Keel stated, “and because I want to.”
He stepped towards me, right back into my personal space, and buried his left hand in my hair, pulling my head forward as his fangs plunged into my neck, letting me know there’d be no more discussion, no more buying time. It wasn’t the same place he’d bitten me earlier, but rather the site of Harck’s old wound, now long healed. Deliberate, I’m sure. Another lesson, though I had no idea what it was intended to teach. The instantaneous wallop of pain forced a hiss of agony from between my lips, but unlike in throne room, Keel wasn’t doing anything to worsen it. This was just the standard-issue discomfort of teeth sinking into places they had no business being. I guessed I should be grateful for that. Perhaps we were making progress.
That didn’t stop me from fantasizing about fighting, kicking, biting, throwing myself to the floor and wailing obscenities at him, however. His compromise was not one I wanted to be complicit in. It wasn’t consent if he coerced my cooperation by promising something infinitely worse if I didn’t comply, but I couldn’t hold onto the outrage. All too soon the bond worked its magic again, and all those raw emotions evaporated as the pain gave way to that same heady bliss I’d experienced earlier. My body tingled from head to toe, compelling me – against my will and my better judgement – to bend my head forward even further to ease his access, to give him exactly what he wanted. I can’t remember ever hating myself – or him – as much as I did in that moment.
And yet I let him keep drinking. Even if the bond or Keel or whatever wasn’t running slipshod over my senses, even if my magic did work, nothing he’d done so far – including this – compared to the tortures and abuses I’d suffered at the claws and fangs of his father. Keel could have easily thrown me onto the bed, torn off the rest of my clothes and taken more than just my blood. I knew he craved that too; two bodies pressed together as ours were could keep no secrets. But he’d made his little deal just the same, and that told me that although he may loathe me and distrust me and blame me for much of what had transpired in his life, he didn’t want to make a mortal enemy of me. Not yet anyway. There was hope to be found in that too.
That’s why I left made my head bent and neck accessible even when his hand slid out of my hair and crept back down to my waist. His fingers danced briefly along the bare skin of my stomach before he enveloped me in his arms. The rational part of my brain recoiled at the fresh onslaught of pleasure and euphoric rightness the bond sent racing through me. A traitorous moan escaped my lips and I wished I had a needle and thread to sew them shut. A war of wants and needs was raging inside of me and, not for the first time tonight, I worried I might not emerge victorious.
Could I live with that? I wondered.
No! The answer shouted itself into my head, strong and defiant, like I used to be. It hadn’t taken Keel long to strip me of that, all it required was robbing me of my magic. How long had he known he could do that? How long had he been planning my fate?
I caught my lip between my teeth and bit down hard, attempting to break free of the bond’s fog of ecstasy. When my head cleared, I moved my right hand from the wall and pushed his arm away. His hand whipped back around as if it were spring-loaded and grabbed my elbow, forcing me to turn and face him, tearing his fangs out of my neck in the process. I yelped and my left hand flew up to clasp the wound. Blood trickled through my fingers, down my bare back.
“You do not touch me!” Keel shouted.
He’d abandoned the feed so fast, it left me blind-sided. He had a lot more self-control than I’d given him credit for, definitely more than he’d ever had as a half-vamp, when drinking my blood had left him languid and drunk.
I mumbled out an apology but failed to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
The faintest trace of a smile pulled at the corners of Keel’s mouth and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the exact reaction he’d been hoping for. He’d had a solid plan: Render my magic useless. Keep me off balance. Make me angry. Force me to be the one to do something foolish. And always, always, always retain the upper hand. Turning Nosferatu, it seemed, didn’t affect his skills at manipulation at all, except to turn them on me.
You have to be smarter than this, Mills, I told myself, but the doubts had already crept in. How was I supposed to outsmart someone who spent his entire life training to be a king? Keel’s job entailed outwitting his subjects, that’s how vampire rulers kept their thrones. Neither my pathetic human schooling nor the months I’d spent messing around with magic prepared me for this in any way.
All this ran through my head as we stood locked in place, Keel gripping my elbow in anger and me knowing better than to attempt to free myself from his clutches a second time. Submission wasn’t what he wanted though and when his tightening grasp resulted in nothing more than a pained grimace from me, he tried a different approach, releasing my arm and clasping my waist with both hands instead, pulling me roughly against him. The bones on his royal robes poked into my chest like accusing fingers. He wanted to goad me into a reaction, into laying hands on him again and, god, how I wanted to. I wished I could smack that self-satisfied smirk right off his face. With the bond – or whatever he was transmitting through it – now numbed by my fury, my feelings about him and this little power play of his solidified, becoming crystal clear. Keel and I weren’t exactly enemies, but we weren’t friends either. We were like two sovereign nations conducting military manoeuvres on our shared border, forever dangling on the precipice of war.
But this was just an extension of his latest test – another opportunity for him to exact a price and teach a lesson if I failed. So, I refused to. Instead, I stayed frozen, unmoving, and accepted the entirety of his awkward not-hug.
When he figured out that I would not give him the escalation he wanted, he released me for good. Without another word, he spun on his heel and stormed out of the room.
I watched in stunned silence as the elevator doors closed behind him.
Check, my brain interjected, as if this was just some chess game and not my life.
I hadn’t quite won, but I hadn’t lost the encounter either. He hadn’t slashed open my face or cracked any ribs, so all things considered, as awful as Keel’s visit had been, it was rather tame by Nosferatu standards. Of course, that offered no guarantee for the future, once the rules were nailed down and he finished gauging my reactions, who knew what he would do. It all depended on what Nosferatu Keel ultimately wanted and why he insisted on having me here. And none of that was clear yet. Aside from my blood. But he had always wanted my blood. Only now he wanted me to give it up on command, and not with a knife or anything else that would spare me the discomfort.
He wanted it the vampire way. No questions. No resisting. No touching. And no magic.
It was all problematic, but the no magic part proved the most troubling. Without sorcery, I was little better than human and down here that meant I was definitely in trouble. Big trouble.
I leaned over and flipped on the lamp on the night table. Light washed outwards from where I was standing; it didn’t quite illuminate the whole room, but it was enough to rob it of its ominousness. Not that I was safe here. Not anymore.
I plunked myself down on the edge of the bed, yanked off the torn hoodie and mopped up the blood streaming down my back with it. Heal, I thought at the wound, and that now-familiar warmth bloomed on my neck as if someone was pushing a heat pack against it. When the heat left, so did the pain. If I reached back and ran my fingers over my neck, I’d find only new, unmarked skin there. The other wound, the one from the ceremony, would have to wait, however. Keel had taken a lot of blood during his feedings and the first healing spell left me woozy.
At least, your magic still works on you. The voice in my head offered up that thought like some dumb consolation, unwanted prize.
I squished the torn, blood-stained sweatshirt into a ball and discarded it at my feet, where it promptly uncoiled. I swore, kicked it aside and looked for my backpack, which was…
Oh no…
I got up and strode across the room to the elevator, flipping on the overhead lights from the panel of switches on the wall to its right. A quick scan of the room cemented the fact that my backpack wasn’t anywhere inside its four walls. I thought back to our arrival. When I’d last seen it.
Ah hell, I’d left the damned thing in the van!
I glanced down at myself, taking in my purple bra and the pale expanse of flesh it did barely anything to cover. No, this would not do. Not when Keel could come back at any time. Not when I knew he’d ask if it was an invitation, just to see if I’d learned my lessons. I needed to find something else to put on, at least until I could ask Arthos – or hell, maybe even His Majesty himself – to get someone to retrieve my belongings from the garage.
I began my search in the bank of drawers facing the bed, yanking open the first one to reveal several rows of neatly folded boxer-briefs – grey, navy blue, black, darks were a theme here. Shutting that one, I moved on to the one below it. Socks, also impeccably organized. Sport socks on the left, woolies on the right. The drawer beneath that one yielded what I was looking for: T-shirts. There were a dozen or so of them, all black or grey. I guess there had been no point in taking his clothes with him to the king’s quarters, considering the transition sized him out of them. I snatched up a grey tee and pulled it over my head. It was big on me, hanging halfway to my knees, but I was much less exposed. I shut the drawer and cycled through the last two, just out of curiosity: black hoodies and black jeans. A second set of drawers contained more hoodies, some sweatpants (of which I helped myself to a pair), a surprisingly colourful selection of button-down dress shirts (red and emerald green both made appearances), a few ties, several pairs of pajamas (both cotton and flannel) and a single set of pewter cuff links.
I picked them up for a closer look. They were old, antiques for sure. Each one had a square black gem embedded in its face. It made sense why Keel had left the clothes, but why these?
And what else had he left behind?
I deposited the cuff links back in the drawer and turned towards the bed. Dropping to my hands and knees, I peered beneath it. It was jam-packed with boxes of various shapes and sizes. I crawled a little closer, slowly circling the four-poster monstrosity, hoping I wouldn’t spot what I was looking for, but there it was, half-hidden behind a pair of black shoeboxes: Keel’s box of human keepsakes. I moved the shoeboxes to the side and slid it out. It was heavy. Full. I didn’t need to open it to know that Keel had taken nothing from it with him.
Because none of this stuff meant anything to him anymore. Just like I didn’t.
I was literally just another thing from his childhood, discarded and then returned only because someone had stamped his name on me. And that person was me.
I put the boxes back where I found them and climbed up onto the bed.
This place was a mausoleum, a tomb for the old Keel and I was to spend my days here obeying the new one. That never got easier to swallow.
Nor did the rest of it.
I needed to talk to Arthos. I needed a plan. I needed to figure out how Keel had become immune to my magic. But first I needed rest.
It took a long time for my brain to shut up and let me sleep, and even then, I left all the lights blazing.