“Help how? More blood?” I opened up every piece of gauze I had and moistened them with saline. We hadn’t broached the topic of Anna yet. I couldn’t leave her like this.
Sike smiled weakly. “I am feeling human again.”
I snorted. I folded up the wet pieces of gauze and wedged them into the flayed pieces of her neck. Then I found a roll of pressure tape and pulled off strips long enough to keep them there.
I did a serviceable job. By the time I was done, she looked all right. Even paler than usual, which was pretty damn pale, but instead of a victim she looked like an accident survivor.
“You could have woken me up, you know,” I said when I was through. When had this happened? Before Anna’d curled up against me, or after?
“I was a bit occupied, you know,” she said with my tone back at me.
“What, with all the bleeding?”
Sike pursed her lips, then reached up to the back of the couch and pulled herself upright. The towel tried to follow her until I yanked it off.
“Well,” I said, looking around my room. “She’s not in my oven, is she?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” If I had had my old dining room set, this was where I would have sat down, on one of the extra chairs it would have provided. I sat down, cross-legged, on the floor. “So where is she?”
“She went out.”
“Out … where?”
“You don’t know what it was like. You can’t possibly understand,” Sike began. “She has not been truly free for a century—”
“What?” I put my hands to my head. It felt like the wind was punched out of me. “Are you kidding? She left? Why?”
“It’s not for one such as I to question—”
“What. The. Hell.” I pointed at her neck. “Are you really going to feed me the party line?”
“You don’t understand—” She tried to look away, then gasped in pain at the movement.
“What’s there to understand? She almost killed you!”
Sike grimaced. Unfortunately for her, I liked my nursing license too much to steal narcotics.
“What happened at that garage today?”
“I saved you and your zombie boyfriend.”
“Don’t pretend that was altruism,” I said, and she snorted. “Why’d you even come to save me, if you were going to let her go?”
“Because—” Sike began, and her voice faltered.
“Because,” I began, to prompt her, but then I realized the truth. “Because it was never about me, was it.”
Sike closed her eyes. “I was sent to save her, to feed her the blood of the Rose Throne forefathers, so that she would feel indebted to us, as much as one such as she can.”
I could feel my brows furrow on my forehead. They’d sent Sike in like a human blood bag. I was revolted anew.
“But I chose to come,” she continued, and after a long pause she added, “Because I knew what it was like.”
“Tell me. I want to know.”
Sike finally opened her eyes, and stared me down. “Do you really think Sike’s my original name? And how old do you think I am?”
The pictures on Mr. November’s floor. The other girls he’d written “saved.” “You knew his name was Yuri,” I answered her.
Sike swallowed and nodded. The motion made her wince in pain. “Once upon a time, I had another name. Another life. I had a family, and a home. The Zver ruined that for me, kept me alive with the dregs of vampire blood long enough to break everything I knew inside. Yuri—the man you killed”—and here her stare hardened at me, and I realized why she’d hated me, from the beginning, when we’d first met—“Yuri saved me from them. It was accidental—he was looking for her. But when he found me, he rescued me, and others like me, and took us to the Rose Throne.”
I tensed. “Did they treat you well?”
“Well enough. He bartered for our safety. Said that if he ever found Anna, he’d give her to them.”
“So if the Rose Throne knew that the Zverskiye were…” I paused, unsure what to call what Anna and Sike had gone through—
“They would never act on their own. Yuri could be their tool, and they would sometimes give him blood, but they could never announce their interest in Anna until she was actually found. If they knew the Rose Thone was interested, they would have sent her even farther away.”
I couldn’t not ask any longer. “Why were they torturing you?”
“Why did they torture any of us?” She gave me a haunted smile. “To feed the things that protect them. The Tyeni.”
My mouth went dry. The Shadows had the hospital to feed on. Was that what the Zverskiye were feeding with the sorrows of little girls?
“Their ways are the old ways, some of the oldest among us. Their daytimers are bound through strict tradition. Each eldest child from a family will go on to become a full-blooded Zverskiye—they have so many violent internal skirmishes, they need to continually replenish their supply of soldiers,” she said with a snort. Was Anna’s trip to America with Yuri and her brother intended to avoid that?
Sike went on. “The second oldest is drowned in the Tyeni. Metaphorically. It didn’t feel like drowning at the time.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Then what … were the pictures for?”
“To create more despair. Even distant pain caused by the Zver was theirs to claim. Imagine pain trickling like water down a cave wall, until it joins other threads of itself, finally dripping into the river flowing underneath.”
“And I thought bookies and drug running was bad,” I murmured to myself.
“Oh, no. That’s just to get money. Power’s an entirely different thing.” She closed her eyes again, and seemed to be steeling herself to attempt to stand.
“Sike—why couldn’t you just get her to stay?”
Sike stopped in her progression and looked at me. “You mean you don’t know?”
The list of everything I currently did not know would fill a fucking library. Sike saw the look on my face, and took pity on my ignorance.
“The Zver call them
I pursed my lips, remembering imagining her heart beat the night before. Maybe I hadn’t known it—but I’d felt it.
“She’ll live forever until she chooses not to,” Sike continued. “And then when she dies, and rises again after three days … To vampires, she will be like unto a god.” She looked at me, her eyes daring me to challenge her. “One doesn’t tell a god when to stay, or when to go. She wanted to be free, and so she left.”
I didn’t think Sike would have stopped Anna, even if the Rose Throne had directly told her to. There was too much similar between them. She touched her bandaged wounds with curious fingers.
“She’s been so hungry, for so long. I am lucky that she let me live.”
And the thought that I might have come into my living room and found Sike’s corpse lying on my couch was the last straw. I almost shouted at her, “You would have let her kill you?”
“I would have died for her, and welcomed it.”
I shook my head. “You can’t mean that, Sike—”
A slow, true smile spread across her face. “I’ll never be powerful enough to exact vengeance for all that was done. But someday? She will be.”
