Daughter of the Night

The second the door clicked into place, Aerrinaekaiyan exhaled.

I turned to look at him. My patience was at its very end, and I was hungry. I needed to feed, and this was the last place I wanted to be. I doubted my ability to be civil, and I didn’t really care if maintaining my temper was beyond my abilities.

“You’d better make this short,” I said warningly, “and you’d better make this good.”

The faerie looked at me, trying to determine where to start. “I’ll try. The first thing you should know is that I’m sorry that you had to find out like this. I was going to tell you-”

My face was inches from his in less than a second. “You were, were you? When? When we were standing on the doorstep of the Summer Court? When we were surrounded by thirty Fae warriors? After you anaesthetized me but before I passed out?”

His face had gone stiff. “After we got off the train, actually, but then you left me.”

“Oh,” I said, “and you were bitter that I caught on to you so you rubbed it in my face when you finally did track me down.”

“No! Of course not!”

“This isn’t even important!” I seethed, mostly to myself. “What I really, really want to say is this; How DARE you??”

“Hear me out first,” he pleaded, holding up his hands in surrender. I realized that I had blindly pinned him against the wall with my bare fist. He hadn’t drawn his sword, which meant that he was doing his best to avoid violence. I should try for the same.

I released him and unclenched my teeth. I realized that my fangs had protruded in my anger, and I retracted them. I took a large step away from him, and then another, so that we were separated by several feet of empty space.

“I am, as you know, the Summer Knight,” he began. I crossed my arms and considered tapping my foot for effect, but refrained. “I was given this mission after the Fae’s… encounter with Dracula. Some of the Fae had heard rumors of a vampire that looked like Dracula around New York. They came to the Queen’s attention and she realized that a vampire of that stature with those kinds of know-how’s about Dracula and his court would be an invaluable ally. Morhiannara herself explained as much to you. What she didn’t mention was that we heard these rumors almost three years ago.”

My eyebrows rose. “Dracula insulted the Fae three whole years ago?”

He shrugged. “The Fae are as immortal as the vampires, remember. We take things more slowly, even insults. Our fury is slow to invoke, but implacable in its full strength.”

“That’s nice,” I said in a tone of voice that suggested I felt otherwise. “Now continue.”

He sighed. “So I was sent to investigate. At first I just asked around after you, at bars and gatherings of supernaturals like ourselves. There was little information to be gathered, except that this mysterious vampire notoriously famous for staying to himself. And I did assume you were a ‘him’, because the rumors said you looked like Dracula.”

“Sexist,” I growled. “Especially from someone who’s liege is a queen.”

“I know, I know,” he waved me off. “Anyway, I heard another rumor that you only preyed on criminals and the like, but you saved innocents. That’s where I got the idea to pose as an innocent. But I realized that I would never be able to do that as long as I was the Summer Knight, so I returned to court to ask them to seal my faerie form in my sword. That’s how I gained the appearance of a human. The guise would not release until I removed Wildfire from its sheathe, which is why I gave it up to the Queen.”

He swallowed. “Becoming human was… the most unpleasant experience I have ever had. Basically, it sucked. I had lost all magic, all ties with nature, part of who I was. It was like living in a shell.” A smile broke over his face, and I realized that he was pretty much reminiscing to himself. “But now, now, I’m free.”

I snapped my teeth. “I missed the part where I give a shit.”

He studied me intently, trying to see if my anger was merely a façade, but multiple decades of exercising absolute apathy had perfected my ability to appear emotionless. The sadistic part of me rejoiced at the hurt in his eyes, though.

Running a hand through his hair, he continued with his story. “Once I had my abilities… suppressed, I returned to the city. The queen was furious when I left because she was without a Summer Knight but couldn’t bestow the title on anyone else because of the seal on Wildfire, which must be wielded by the Summer Knight. Anyway, I got the job as a bartender, but it wasn’t the bar where you found me.”

He paused, waiting for me to make some sort of inquiry that would probe from him the rest of the story, but I stayed silent, relishing in the icy silence that stretched out.

“Anyway,” he finally said, “I worked there for a few weeks before I realized that the bar I was working at was too quiet. You would never show up there. So I relocated to a rougher tavern, and then to an even rougher one. That was when I started getting into bar fights.” He wagged his eyebrows at me. “You have no idea how much green eyes piss off belligerent drunk men. Well, I suppose I provoked quite a few of them. Most of them, actually. I guess I was bored of just filling tankards, and I missed the adrenaline rush I got from fighting, even though most of the fighting I had done before then was with swords. The fighting was infrequent at first, but the more fights I got into, the more belligerent drunks stumbled in through the doors. Usually it was only one at a time, rarely two. I must admit that my confidence grew too large. When you found me, I had bitten off far more than I could chew and I was cursing my stupidity for losing my life over something so reckless out of sheer boredom. You see,” he said with a small smile, “you really did save my life. I had myself chalked up for dead at that point.”

“You haven’t gotten to the part where you invaded my thoughts yet,” I hissed. “I wish I had just left you for dead in that alley. I could have saved myself so much trouble.”

The hurt in his eyes was apparent now. I relished in it. My fury would not abate so easily as that. He would discover that I was not someone to cross so lightly. He would discover that I was not someone to cross at all.

“Say what you want,” he responded to cover his pain. “Anyways, when I came to in the hospital, I realized that I had made several mistakes. First, that you were a woman, and second, that I should have been looking for you instead of waiting for you to come to me. There are only so many places a vampire can go. Which is how I found you at the library.”

I growled at him, the rumbling in my chest reminding me of how hungry I was. “Don’t lie. You used your faerie magic to track me down.”

“I didn’t!” he insisted. “I didn’t have any Fae powers at all, except my ability to sense emotions and to shape them, a little.”

I realized that every faerie at that court earlier had been able to feel my emotions. I had been read by hundreds of faeries. That only made me more furious.

“I never liked you,” I snarled at him. “I never enjoyed your company. The only reason I didn’t rip your head off was because you were toying with my emotions, like a puppeteer and his puppet.”

I had sunk into my familiar hunting crouch now, and I was very nearly at the end of my tether. Aerrinaekaiyan must have sensed this, because he took a step back.

“I swear to you, Cross, I didn’t.” I heard desperation in his voice. “I only kept you from suspecting me, because if you had I would have never seen you again, and I admit I did plant the idea of escape to Washington in your mind, but I swear to God, that was all.”

“I don’t believe in God,” I said. The mention of God had just thrown me off the deep end. I was too hungry, too betrayed, too furious, to put up with his lies. I told him so.

“They’re not lies, Cross, you have to believe me!” he pleaded. “You were a legend to me for so long, but when I met you, you became my friend! I never wanted to hurt you, and I waited so long to tell you about myself because I knew you’d react like this, and I didn’t want it to jeopardize our relationship!”

“Relationship?” I snarled. “Relationship? I have never once had a relationship with any of you filthy manipulative Fae! I only had what you bastards planted in my head!” I spat some of my vampire venom on the ground. It began eating through the beautifully woven tapestry on the ground, ruining the design. The venom was as deadly as wolf bane and as bad an insult as I could pull together, given the circumstances. “That’s what I think of your ‘relationship’!”

The faerie’s face had gone pale as he saw the venom. “Cross,” he begged, “I never, never manipulated your feelings beyond what I told you, I swear-“

I had had it with his lies, his false words. I was sick of being toyed with by these disgusting Fae. And I was so hungry that the monster in my mind was beginning to take over.

I launched myself at him, preparing for a killing blow to the heart. As fast as I moved, though, he moved with equal, if not greater, speed, and his sword, Wildfire, leaped out of its sheathe into his hand as if it was an extension of his arm.

I was forced to twist out of the way as Wildfire came towards my outstretched hand in a vicious arc, seeking my blood. I lined myself up with the sword and planted my foot on the flat of his blade, kicking off it and putting distance between him and myself, at the same time using my superior strength to shove it in the opposite direction of my leap. Aerrinaekaiyan was too experienced of a warrior to drop the blade, but he was pulled with his sword as Wildfire was driven at least eight inches into the marble floor below the carpet.

I turned again and clung to the ceiling so that I faced the floor, twenty-five feet above the Summer Knight. With an enormous heave he pulled Wildfire out of the floor and turned to face me, his blade resting limply at his side.

“Cross, I never meant for it to turn out like this. I never meant to draw my sword on you. Please, let us stop this useless violence-”

Just then the door burst open and several throwing knives were hurtled towards me, barely more than glints of light. One was aimed at my heart, another at my jugular, and two more at my eyes. I grimaced as I forced myself to use the final reserves of my strength and dropped from the ceiling, kicking off from it so as to dodge the knives. The second I hit the floor, I was on top of the guards, all of whom were still pulling out their weapons.

I couldn’t harm them if I wished for an alliance with the Fae, I knew, but that didn’t stop me from giving them a healthy dose of fear and minor injuries. I softened my form enough that I was a mere shadow among them, stripping them of their weapons before they could reach them and flinging them at the wall behind me. I had to dislocate a few arms, though, and crack a few ribs. I took a fiendish delight in tripping the pink-haired faerie that had tranquilized me earlier. As she fell, I slipped a tranquilizer from her pocket, removed the lid, and jammed it into the meat of her shoulder.

It was fortunate that the Summer Knight chose not to intervene as I hurled the last dagger at the far wall because I could not have held out on an extended battle.

As the last guard fell, though, he stepped forward. “Cross, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go-“

I stopped his words with my vermillion gaze, letting my bloodlust speak for me.

“Fuck you.”

I completely dissolved my form, so that I was nothing more than the whisper of my shadow. Aerrinaekaiyan’s eyes began skimming the surrounding area, so I knew I was invisible to him. A muttered curse confirmed it, and I exploded through the ceiling of the Faerie Court into the night, letting the monster guide me to the nearest criminal.

The palace of the Summer Fae fell away below me, its Summer Knight left to brood in a room filled with peach trees and injured guards and to admire an array of arrows, swords, knives, and daggers placed in the wall opposite the door in the distinct shape of a cross.