Chomp

I hadn’t changed anyone before, and part of me worried that my inexperience could cause irreversible damage. Visiting her as often as possible, I kept as close an eye on her as I could, researching what was to be expected when I couldn’t be there.

From my research, mostly word of mouth, I gathered that the change was generally a slow process. It was an odd thing to learn, especially when considering the legends that people had come up with. Two weeks seemed to be the average window which would allow the virus to infect them and have someone completely transition from human to vampire.

But Agnes didn’t have two weeks.

Darius still saw her every day—a far cry from the behaviour he exhibited when she was in the hospital before—but it was clear his reasoning wasn’t from concern. Whatever he was poisoning her with took time, and he was there to see the effects, to monitor what it did to her body.

The fact that he was monitoring her vitals every day was quite concerning; it was hard enough to feed her fresh blood at that time without him stepping in through the door. I had resorted to changing my face and body into a nurse’s to slip by him, undetected, feeding her what he could only assume was tomato soup and tea.

After Agnes finished another few sips, I tucked the blanket around her. She had still yet to open her eyes, but her fever had gone down significantly.

“She seems to be doing a lot better today,” I remarked. I didn’t change into women very often, and it was extremely awkward to feign a higher voice consistently.

Darius surveyed me, his eyes darting back and forth to each one of mine. “She has.”

His tone was stiff, making it difficult to know whether or not the news was good.

“Normally, I hate to butt into other people’s business, sir,” I began, tucking a strand of straight black hair behind my ear. “But Doctor Lyon isn’t… isn’t the most competent fellow here, and I wanted to get a better understanding of the results you want. Maybe I can help you… achieve them better?”

Darius wasn’t such a complicated guy when it came down to it. Progress-oriented and analytical, if something could benefit him, he would be on-board. The only problem I could foresee was his guarded nature.

“And what makes you think I’d trust you with that information?” he asked lazily, cocking an eyebrow. “Who exactly do you think you are?”

What would he want to hear? I looked down at my painted fingernails, trying to think of a decent answer.

“Someone who believes in progress and in the Organization,” I whispered softly before looking back up at him. Save for his cold blue eyes, his expression had returned to a more neutral expression. “Someone who believes that what you’re doing matters to those who want the world to go back to better than it was before these… things came about.”

He studied my face a little while longer before huffing. “I obviously can’t release details to a mere civilian,” he replied casually, crossing his arms. “But she wasn’t supposed to get as sick as she did or recover as quickly as she seems to be. Then again, we can’t say for certain what the exact outcome would have been as she’s the first human test subject.”

His words were certainly unexpected.

Despite my initial suspicion of him wanting to just kill her off in some sort of accident, Darius actually wanted—expected—Agnes to get better. It caught me off-guard for only a few seconds. “Could her quick recovery have anything to do with our care? I don’t want to over-do anything, if that’s the case,” I continued, stepping away from her bed.

Darius didn’t answer.

Instead, he inspected Agnes’ scalp, pulling on a few hairs and handing them over to me. I took the orange strands from him slowly, unsure of what he really meant by the action. “Give those to Lyon for another toxin test,” he murmured, still looking down at her. “She had started to lose her hair about a week ago… I wonder if there’s any additional chemical that her body’s giving off that might be interfering.”

“Sir?”

His eyes snapped over to look at me. “It’s nothing the nurses have done here before. The only thing that really comes to mind is the second night she was here.”

The night I changed her.

But Darius wouldn’t—and couldn’t—know about that yet. The change was still coursing through her, not quite fully developed; it was a toss-up as to whether or not blood scanners would pick it up.

“What happened?” I dared, my voice barely a whisper.

“Nothing serious,” he replied, sounding more bored than anything. He straightened up and fixed the front of his suit. “Just an incident with the dosage. I suspect Doctor Lyon was a bit careless; he said the bag had somehow ripped and spilled onto the floor in the middle of the night.”

I had completely forgotten about the drip bag. Lyon had hardly been the careless one; I should have just made it look like some sort of accident.

“Hardly something that happens at random, wouldn’t you say?”

Darius’ pulse was steady in his neck, calm as he always was, yet something seemed completely off about him. He watched me in a way that reminded me of a cat, with me being the mouse.

It was an unfamiliar sensation.

“Definitely. Did you need me to give her another dose?” It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I hoped if he saw the initiative, Darius wouldn’t see me as the potential saboteur.

Realistically, he had no reason for it; if there was anyone to suspect, it was Adrian Bordeaux, who had been in the room with Agnes when the drip had been stabbed open and ripped from her arm. But right now, I wasn’t Adrian. I was Miss Shelly Gates, RN.

“If I need anything, I’ll be sure to call on you.”

I nodded, smiling.

It took everything I had not to deck the guy in the face.

I shut the front door behind me, eager to finally get home. There had been many stupid things that I had imagined myself doing, but blooding and helping transition a vampire in front of a government official had never been one.

“Who—oh. Dad?”

I glanced around to see Izzie looking frazzled, a butcher’s knife in her hands.

“What’s with the knife?” I asked, bewildered.

As soon as the words left my throat, I knew why she had been a little concerned. My features morphed back to their original form, changing from a starkly feminine look to a masculine one in mere seconds. “Sorry. Guess I forgot to change before I headed home.”

Taking the knife carefully from her hands, I walked back to the kitchen and put it back in its block before collapsing into a chair. “How are you, Noodle?”

“I’m okay,” she replied, climbing into the chair beside me.

“Exciting day at school?”

Izzie gave me the look any child would when their parent tried to force the idea of school being fun. “We learned about… about ecosystems. The science stuff is fun. But I don’t like the other stuff.”

I tussled her hair making her tiny pigtails sway back and forth. “What did you learn about ecosystems?”

“We learned about herbivores and carnivores and om… ommy-vores? Omnimnimvores? And what they eat and how it helps the environment. The herbivores—I remember it because it’s spelled like herbs—eat plants and stuff, like a sheep does,” she began, her eyes lighting up.

And she claimed school wasn’t exciting.

“Really?” I asked, feigning surprise. “What about carnivores and omnivores? What do they eat?”

“Carnivores are predators like wolves, who eat the sheep. They don’t eat anything besides other animals, like a tiger. And ommy—omni—the other ones are animals like dogs that eat meat and plants.”

The excitement in her voice was genuine, as was her smile. “Did your teacher ask about people? What group they fit into?”

Izzie’s smile fell slightly, and she nodded. “She said that humans… they’re ’secondary-apex predators,’ but I don’t really know what that means.”

Large words for such a small mouth. I stared long and hard at her confused expression, not sure how to take or explain the information. My nails dug into the palm of my hand. Yet another reason this arrangement was disgusting.

“It means people are the second top from the food chain,” I explained hesitantly, phrasing it as gently as I could.

“Because we’re better than humans?”

It was exactly what I didn’t want the school at the Compound teaching her. For years, other vampires had asked me why I refused to live in the safe haven that was the Compound; it would provide the perfect security for both myself and my daughter.

In reality, it was the worst thing for the vampiric people.

I picked Izzie up and placed her on my lap. She stared up at me, her large gold orbs twinkling, waiting for a sign of approval. “You have to understand something, Noodle. What they tell you in school about humans… It’s not always true.”

She tilted her head slightly. “But… but it’s school.”

“I know. But—”

My words were cut short by the shrill sound of the doorbell. My body tensed; we weren’t expecting any guests, and, at this hour, it certainly wasn’t going to be Jehovah’s Witnesses. Slowly, I got to my feet and made my way to the door with Izzie padding behind me. I sniffed the air, hoping it was just some random, lost stranger out in the middle of the night.

The scent of human blood hung about the people behind the door; vampires who had just fed, and, from the amount, had done so extensively.

“Go upstairs,” I ordered, my voice barely a breath.

Izzie blinked, lowering her own head from having smelled the visitor’s scent. “But—”

“Go.”

I waited until I heard her footsteps stop above my head. She had picked my room to sit and wait. Finally, I reached forward and pulled the door open.

Three rather burly vampires stood on the stoop. The first two were rotund twins with matching goatees and stupid grins on their faces, as if they had just heard a sick joke they found hilarious. The other of the three looked like he might have had to duck to get in; he must have been at least seven feet tall.

I stared. “Duke?”

“G-Good evening, Sa—Adrian,” he replied, looking rather nervous. He still wore his token red plaid lumberjack shirt, though at this point, I suspected he might have just bought several of the same shirt.

The twins exchanged glances at the remark but didn’t say anything beyond that.

“What can I help you with?” I asked. Duke had joined the Compound even before Izzie was born, though I hadn’t seen him in years. His sudden appearance would have been greeted far more warmly if he wasn’t flanked by men who looked as though they killed people for sport.

Duke shifted awkwardly in his boots. “Yacob wants to see you.”

I smirked and made to close the door again. “Have a good night, boys.”

“Wait, please hear him out.”

“I think I’ll pass,” I replied, grimacing. “In case you’ve not been filled in, our civility is based upon not having to see one another. So I’m sure you can understand my polite refusal. It was nice seeing you though, Duke.”

The ginger man opened his mouth but one of the twins interrupted him. “I think Dukey here says wrong,” he began in what sounded like a Czech accent. “Yacob is not man you refuse.”

“Neither am I.”

His brother chuckled. “Look, Milos. Do you feel threatened?”

The two Czechs laughed heartily, but Duke didn’t join in. “Adrian, please hear us out,” he whispered. It was the lack of volume in his voice that really hit me. Duke wasn’t someone who could be intimidated—in memory, at least.

Where did this submissive behaviour come from?

“Fine. Explain what Yacob wants, and then I’ll politely decline.”

Milos rolled his eyes, making it look like an exhausting and daunting task that simply had to be done. “Listen here, Fancy Baker Boy. We come to deliver message from Yacob, yes? We also come to take something if you refuse. Encouraged, I think.”

I stared them down blankly. “And what, exactly, would you take?”

He reached down into his pocket and pulled out his cell. Hitting a few buttons, it began to ring on speaker phone. A high-pitched wavelength ran through the house, as if the phone was trying to connect to something too close.

It stopped when the person on the other end picked up. “Ah, Petyr,” Milos crooned into the phone. “Seems Fancy Baker Boy wants be difficult. Do you have girl?”

My heart pounded in my chest, my nails drawing blood from my hands.

No. They couldn’t have.

“Yes,” came another, deeper Czech voice from the other end. “Tell him I have knife to girl’s brain. Even special vampire can’t stay alive if brain is not in tact, yes?”

My first instinct was to kill three of them where they stood; it would be easy, and I knew I could probably do it before any of them had time to draw a weapon. But it wouldn’t be the case for the man with a knife to Izzie.

“Fine.”

The Compound had changed quite a bit since I had last been there. The few tiny houses on a single acre of cottage country had turned into at least a hundred acres with a large concrete wall surrounding it. Like a castle, many guards stood watch along the top, pacing back and forth, ready to report any sign of Organization workers.

Our two cars pulled up to the nearest gate and were greeted by a woman with sharp, hawk-like features.

“Who’s the guest?” she demanded.

“Beautiful, beautiful Bridgette,” Milos crooned, ducking his head outside the window.

She looked about as pleased as could be expected; her lips curled slightly, and she pushed his head back into the car.

“I don’t date triplets,” she snapped. “Now answer.”

Milos’ grin fell slightly, no doubt put out by the well-deserved rejection. He turned around in his seat and eyed me up and down before glancing at Duke. “What is his name?”

Duke opened his mouth to reply, but I interrupted. “Adrian Bordeaux. And the other guest following behind is Isobel Bordeaux.”

Instantly, Bridgette’s expression changed from stiff and unwelcoming to wide-eyed and respectful. “G-Good evening, sir! Yes—you may go straight through; please pull up on the far right side of Sir Yacob’s house. Specialty parking, you see.”

Milos didn’t pull forward right away; instead, he sat wordlessly in the driver’s seat, staring forward. Finally, he turned around and looked me up and down.

“You?” he asked, brow cocked. “You are—?”

“Yes. Now go and park so I can get this over with and go home.”

He pulled forward and Bridgette allowed Izzie’s car to follow suit. There were many things that could go wrong here—especially given that there were so many vampires here loyal to Yacob’s cause—but there was at least one safeguard. As a Bordeaux, most people would be far too afraid to lay their hands on Izzie.

Most.

There were very few Cainist branch families in existence, but we certainly weren’t the only ones. The Osgoode, Qureshi, and Allegra families—and their branch families—all supported Yacob in his endeavours. All of them wholeheartedly believed in his dream to create a vampire-dominated world, never questioning anything he said.

How he had ended up tracking them down and managed their allegiance was beyond me.

“Adrian!” Yacob boomed, a large smile plastered on his old face. He swung his arm in a grandeur fashion, welcoming me into what looked like the dining hall of a castle. “I was beginning to think you had rejected my invitation to the family reunion.”

The table he sat at was lined with a few disdainfully familiar faces of distant cousins of ours; Sarah and Maryanna Osgoode, Fiore Allegra with her husband whose name I had never learned, and Syreeta, Amir, and Hafsa Qureshi all sat at the table with Yacob in the centre.

Other than a coy wave from a flirtatious Syreeta, their faces were stony.

“I’m sure I was well-missed,” I replied darkly, eying him as I crossed my arms. “Now what did you want from me?”

Sarah got to her feet. “You would do well to show my husband some respect in his own house,” she warned, her voice an icy chill.

“I think I’d be more inclined to do so if I wasn’t forced here against my will,” I replied smoothly. “Did he tell you he was willing to kill my daughter—a Cainist—to get me here?”

It was clear by her expression that he hadn’t told his wife about giving the okay to harm Izzie. Her cheeks rouged, and she snapped her head over to look at him. “Is… Is this true?”

All eyes made their way to Yacob, though expressions were a balanced mixture between shock and curiosity. Fiore’s smirk looked like she was watching some nervous comedian commit career-suicide, and Syreeta stared up at her host in horror.

Yacob’s smile faltered only slightly from his wife’s accusation. “While I can understand how it might appear from your perspective,” he began softly, his blue eyes twinkling, “I can assure you that no harm would have ever come to my grand-niece. You see, she is precisely what I wished to speak to you about.”

Another quick glance around the room told me she still hadn’t been brought in with or before me. My eyes flicked back over to Yacob. “Where is she?”

He waved a hand lazily before gesturing to the empty chair to his right. “Come, take a seat. I believe—”

“No.”

Midway through taking a sip of his wine, Amir had to spit his drink back into the goblet, choking. Meanwhile, Fiore gave me a curt, approving nod, her sharp collar bone poking through her ruffled dress.

Yacob didn’t seem to find the defiance as tasteful as she did. His lips formed into a flat line, and a vein popped in his aged forehead.

“Adrian,” he began in a warning tone, “Countless years, you have been unassimilable, and I’ve put up with quite a bit because you’ve been laissez faire about the whole thing—save for the odd time. As I recall, when it comes down to it, you will side with me.”

Syreeta and Fiore exchanged a few hushed and rapid whispers, but I didn’t pay them any mind.

“Well, let me clear something up for you. I side with the people—not with you. I didn’t steal the Organization’s work because you asked me to. I stole it because it was in all of our best interest not to have vampires die in the streets and in their own homes,” I replied curtly. “Now if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like my daught—”

“Call it what you would, then. Masked vigilantism born from a midlife crisis, if you will. Despite all your hostility, I have done quite a bit for you as well,” he continued, unfazed. “And while we might not agree on every single… issue, I am quite sure you could see why you owe a lot to me.”

What was this all about? Maybe it was my building frustration, but I couldn’t seem to piece together what he wanted.

There was always something he wanted.

He took my silence as a sign to continue. “Let’s see… You owe me for teaching you about your powers…” With a flick of his wrist, he changed his hand into some sort of dog paw, and then back again to prove his point. “Family traits that would otherwise be lost; it breaks my heart to think of my own flesh and blood losing that which makes us special.”

I rolled my eyes. A power trip—that’s all this was for him. Publicly shaming me in front of the branch families in some sort of attempt to show that he was still top dog. Some people bought enormous trucks, others had to host shaming dinner parties.

“And speaking of flesh and blood… Why, Adrian. Did you ever tell Isobel what happened to her mother?” he whispered, a smile creeping onto his face.

I froze.

“Is that a no?”

Glaring up at him, I wanted nothing more than to rip his throat out. The other vampires at the table exchanged colourful glances. They had no way of knowing, not a single one of them.

The only person who could have known was Yacob himself.

Suddenly, the doors opened behind me. I whipped around to see Izzie being marched into the room with two guards at her side. A quick survey of her body said not a single hair on her head had been harmed, but that was only a physical assessment; there was no telling what was done beyond that.

“Daddy!” she squeaked, her large eyes fearful. As she took a step forward, a guard put out his hand to block her way. I made to meet the guard’s eyes, but he averted them, choosing to look at Izzie instead.

“Well, isn’t that just convenient?” Yacob asked mirthfully, holding his goblet out in a sort of cheers. “Speak of the little devil, and she shall appear. How are you, dear sweet Isobel?”

She turned her head to look at him suspiciously, not answering. Instead, she met my eyes, waiting for an answer.

“Well? Didn’t you hear me?”

“She was taught not to talk to strange men,” I replied curtly, eyes narrowed. “After all, you never know what could happen. You might be kidnapped at knifepoint.”

It was clear by the expression on his face that Yacob didn’t find the comment very funny. He placed the goblet down onto the table and took a seat. “Toulouse never was one for teaching manners to his children. I see now that the next generation is cursed with the same, barbaric habits. Pity. But it’s why you were brought here in the first place.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve decided it’s in Isobel’s best interest she remain here with her peers. She will be given a more formal education, more in-depth about the way things will be. It’s clear the one she’s been given is a far cry from what it should be.”

I snorted. He must have lost it; did he honestly think it would just be a matter of announcing that and being done with it all?

“What makes you think I’d agree to that?” I scoffed. This clearly wasn’t his intent; the demand was far too high.

“Oh Isobel, dear. Do you miss your mom?” he asked, popping far too much happiness into his tone.

So that was his game.

“M-My mom?” she asked, cocking her head.

“Yes, my sweet. Such a tragic tale, isn’t it? Do you ever think it’s because she didn’t want you, that you were a burden to her?”

Izzie squeaked a little, and her eyes became a little red. “B-Burden?”

“People can be very cruel in your family, Isobel darling. Your father, for instance.”

“That’s enough,” I snapped, stepping toward her. Her guard whipped a gun from his pocket and placed the barrel against her temple; a warning to not come any closer.

“I-Is that true?” she whispered softly, catching my eyes.

“No, no, not at all, Noodle,” I whispered softly. “Don’t listen to him.”

Yacob cleared his throat, drawing our attention back to him once more. “Should she also not listen to me when I tell her that her mother didn’t walk out on her?”

Izzie’s eyes had welled with tears, and she sniffled at his comment. “W-What?”

“Don’t you dare,” I breathed, whipping back to him. “What would telling her accomplish, anyway? It’s not going to change my mind!”

“Really?” Yacob asked in an annoying, condescending baby voice. “I would have thought telling poor Isobel here the fact that her doting mother was murdered in cold blood by her seemingly innocent father would most certainly change something. Maybe I’m mistaken, though? If memory serves me right, it was pretty gruesome, too. Brain-matter everywhere. Signs of torture. But no; if you think that won’t change things, I’m sure you’re probably right, Adrian.”

The entire hall was dead silent.

“Dad… I-I-Is that… true? Did you…?”

Her voice trembled fervently, her words barely a whisper leaving her lips.

In that instant, every face in the hall was drawn to me. This time, everyone but Yacob held the same, horrified expression; they all waited for me to defend myself, to rip Yacob a new one about lying in front of my daughter.

But as I locked eyes with Izzie, I knew I couldn’t lie to her any longer. I took a deep breath and exhaled heavily.

“…Yes.”