Chapter 11: Worry, Wait, and Repeat
I spent the next day (and night) waiting for Keel, waiting to see if he’d make good on his threat, but he never showed. Somehow that made it worse. It gave me time to pull at all those wayward threads and rattle each horrible possibility around in my head. I’d always been careful with him, even before his transition, never talking about my family or the location of my real home beyond the vaguest of vagaries, but Keel was smart, and after my return to New York the bond had seen to it that we’d spent no small amount of unwanted, non-consenting time in each other’s heads. So, there was no definitive way of telling what he knew or which of my secrets had been divulged. The more I thought about it, the more I became positive that whatever he’d learned during those strange, unsettling weeks would be the thing he’d use against me now.
Because if I were Keel that’s what I would do.
First, however, he’d draw this whole thing out. He’d make me wait and then wait some more. And suffer. He had to know I’d imagine every worst-case scenario, and he would take me apart piece by piece, just like that, if that’s what was necessary. If he broke me, I couldn’t be anything but obedient, right?
Coming to terms with what Keel had become and what he’d do to get what he wanted from me was a lot like going through the stages of grief: first denial, then anger, then the rest of it.
By the end of that first day, I’d made it all the way to depression. Bargaining, after all, proved useless. I could try to appeal to Keel’s regal responsibilities, which hadn’t proved as disastrous as other approaches, but His Majesty obviously wasn’t coming from a logical place when it came to me. If I pushed too hard, he might build new walls, new defenses, as opposed to lowering them. And to be honest, I didn’t trust myself any more than I trusted him, not with the bond getting in the way every time he touched me and not after that embarrassing blood-guzzling incident, which only became more horrifying once the potent infusion of pleasure and power wore off.
I wasn’t a vampire. It wasn’t possible for me to become a vampire. So why was I all hot and bothered for Keel’s blood? It didn’t make sense. Then again, nothing made sense since my return.
That question led to several hours of fretful, pointless pacing, and then a restless sleep which turned all my questions into hideous, pestilent, dream-time beasts that pursued me with glistening claws and knife-like teeth until I awoke crying and scared, my tear-soaked pillow cold and clammy and sticking to my cheek. No, I wouldn’t be able to win this battle of wills between Keel and me without losing something of myself in the process. The longer and harder I held on, the more he would take and more he would make it hurt. And he’d find joy in that hurt. It was the Nosferatu way.
As the first twenty-four hours of solitude bled into the next, I tried to scrape up enough optimism to concoct another plan, a different angle to work, one that didn’t require my suddenly wonky magic, but my nightmares had left me miserable, exhausted and hopeless. Worse, the clock kept on ticking. Keel wouldn’t stay away much longer. He wouldn’t deprive himself of my sorcerer’s blood any more than necessary, not when drinking it allowed him to continue to play his little vampire head games.
When my next meal arrived, I bounded across the room in an attempt to make small talk with the Nosferatu delivering the tray. I’d lost my old ally, but perhaps I could make a new one. My waiter was as rail-thin as Arthos, but he walked with an obvious hunch, as if trying to become smaller, less noticeable. He kept his gaze so rooted on my food that the sound of my approaching footsteps caused him to start. I’d managed all of three words in greeting before he dropped the plate onto the folding tray with a resonant crash and fled the suite, refusing to even glance in my direction. At least I still scared one vamp. Or did I? Maybe he feared Keel would execute him for communicating with “his sorcerer.” That thought did nothing to improve my mood.
I picked at my steak and potatoes half-heartedly, my appetite swallowed up by the ceaseless engines of worry. I didn’t even eat a third of it before I abandoned the meal for more pacing and a fresh burst of anger.
I hated feeling helpless. I hated Arthos for all the half-truths that brought me here. And I hated Keel for everything he’d become. In those long, lonely, waning hours of the second day I became so consumed by hatred, it felt as if it was rolling off me in fetid waves, tainting the air around me and turning it stale. Most of all I hated myself. Keel had never lied about the effects of the transition and yet I’d still chosen to kiss him. I was the one who’d bonded us. I was even the one who’d led him from the shower to the bedroom, giving him the most sacred part of myself. He might have shown up in my cell, starting all this, but I’d had more than a bit of a hand in leading us to this ruin.
When my legs grew sore from the relentless motion, I ran myself a hot bath and soaked. More than anything, I wanted to be clean and pure and innocent again. But I’d never be able to scrub off the taint of the supernatural. It lived in my blood before I was ever aware of it. It developed in the womb, long before Keel and compound. My ignorance to it didn’t change that.
Maybe I was destined to become tangled up in it even without Ephraim’s best intentions screwing things up. As I lay there in the cooling water, skin pruning while the vanishing bubbles lapped up against my legs and neck, I thought of Anna and Jenny and how much I wished things were like they once were. All about boys and dances and upcoming exams, and dreaming about cars and college and vacations I’d now never take. If I could go back there, I’d never complain about shopping or too much homework or chores or anything mundane like that ever again. The future used to seem so vast, open and full of possibilities, now it all looked a lot like these four walls and Keel’s blood-stained fangs.
Why had I loved him in the first place? Why had I figured we were bigger than the transition, bigger than a biological process that had been making Nosferatu for centuries? Why had I come back?
Because he’d threatened Lucia. The words popped into my head and all the invisible, dangling threads crashed down at once.
Oh god.
He was going to play the one card guaranteed to work. In that moment, I was as certain of that as I’d ever been certain of anything. My stomach lurched in abject panic and I leaned over the side of the tub and threw up all over the white marble floor.