Ravenous

your judgment. Not now, with your throne under attack. You know it.'

'I know it.' Her voice was small. 'In all these centuries I've made only this one blunder of the heart. I know I am in the wrong. A queen's mistakes are the errors of a whole people.'

Alessandro sat in the tub chair next to hers, stretching out his long legs. They sat, sharing the view of the skyline. The moment was oddly companionable. The power balance between them had shifted, if only for that tiny slice of time.

'Is he involved?'

She sounded weary. 'He showed no mercy to the changeling, as you saw.'

Alessandro pondered that. 'Where do you think the changelings are coming from?'

'Maybe the portals,' Omara answered. 'The changelings disappeared from the earth, and then here they are again. It is one possible answer.'

He sat up straight. 'I thought only demons dwelled on the other side. Demons and the damned souls sent to keep them prisoner in their hell. In the Castle.'

'There is more to the Castle than that. It is a danger to all the supernatural species.'

Alessandro's shoulders tightened. 'How so?'

'It was meant as a prison for us all.'

'What?' Alessandro held his breath, shocked.

She sank further into the chair. 'The only nightmares I ever have are about getting trapped there.'

She stopped talking. A TV went on in the room next door, loud at first; then someone turned it down. After a minute or so Omara went on.

'When I was young, magic was commonplace. Demons and dragons prowled freely in the dark places. Humans were not the all-powerful species they are now.'

She stopped again and toed off her shoes.

'And?' prompted Alessandro.

'The human sorcerers banded together.' She sounded far away, her voice rising and falling in the rhythm of the old storytellers. 'They believed, in the beginning, that they would weave a great spell to help protect their people. In the end they built a monument to their own absolute power.'

'A prison for nonhumans?' He had never known where the Castle came from.

'Yes. They gathered together and raised a powerful force, the most fearsome since the birthing of the sky and the seas. They created their prison for the demons and the dragons, the hellhounds and the werebeasts, the vampires and the fey. They gave it existence outside the laws of time and place, and there they locked away any creature that possessed the merest whiff of magic.'

Alessandro saw the irony at once. 'Any creature excepting themselves, of course.'

'Indeed.'

'But they failed,' he put in. He didn't want to believe what she was telling him. 'The supernatural never left this world.'

'Not entirely, but it was close. What followed was genocide. A few, like me, managed to escape their armies. It took centuries before our numbers came back to even a fraction of what they once were. And only in these last few years have the supernatural races walked as we once walked, openly and in freedom.'

'So is that why you spearheaded the move to let the humans know we were here?'

She gave a small smile. 'That was part of it. I remembered what it was like not to hide. Some called me a visionary. Really, I was just bringing back a way of being that I had once taken for granted.'

A beat passed in silence. 'But if so many members of the supernatural races were hunted down and taken prisoner,' he said slowly, 'what happened to them all?'

Omara went very still. 'Those that were taken never returned. The sorcerers stole human men from their families, gave them unnatural powers, and forced them to guard the Castle for all eternity.'

'But… no one summons a vampire or a werewolf. Only demons. If those original prisoners survived, they're still trapped.'

Omara watched his face, her own carefully blank. 'No one who goes into the Castle ever comes out. Ever. And if the guardsmen come to our world to hunt, they capture any supernatural creature they find and drag it back to their hell.'

Alessandro felt a cold nausea. All those unfortunates are still trapped there, forgotten. In the next room the television murmured on.

She continued as if she had never paused. 'There are tales in the wind that the Castle is crumbling and disorder rules its halls. They say the guardsmen are dwindling and those who remain have gone mad with despair. They say the inmates have run amok. Perhaps, after all this time, the Castle's magic is fading. Even I don't remember the names of the self-proclaimed sorcerer kings who built it.'

Alessandro stared out the window, nursing a slow, welling anger. He remembered the portal behind Sinsation and the hellhounds that had scrambled through. What he had seen was a prison break.

'Why has there never been a rescue mission?' he asked.

'Why have I never heard that there were more than demons being held?'

Omara brushed the air, flicking away his outrage. 'It is kept a secret because there can be no rescue attempts. All the nonhuman leaders agree.'

'Why not?'

'Would you really want to share our world with powerful beings who have been locked up in the silent dark for thousands of years? They would be mad, warped things by now. Once you opened the floodgates, there would be no telling what horrors would come vomiting out of the breach.'

'So you let them all rot.' His voice was a razor.

Omara raised her hands in surrender. 'Tell me who has the resources to provide social services to an entire hell dimension! For centuries, those of us who had escaped capture had all we could do to survive.'

'But now?'

'Trust me when I say the rest of the vampire council is even less sympathetic than I am. No one wants a refugee problem. Not when we're still trying to earn rights for our own people.'

'How enormously practical.'

'What would the humans think if they found out? What if they learned there was a prison full of demons and deadly lunatics just beyond their back door? It would be disastrous.' She paused, breathing hard. 'And don't forget the guardsmen. They follow where portals have opened and look for escapees. That is one more reason we must return the demon to the hell it came from. They may not notice that a pack of hellhounds got loose, but they certainly won't let a master demon roam free. If they find our community in Fairview, we'll have to battle them, too. Some of us might be dragged into that hell.'

Alessandro clenched his teeth, sitting hard on his instinct to fight Omara's pragmatism, to ride to the rescue. As little as he liked it, she had valid points. Still, he wasn't letting this go.

'Is that how the changelings became imprisoned in the Castle?' he asked. 'They were captured by the guardsmen?'

'That's not the only possibility. A few modern sorcerers know how use the place as a cosmic garbage can for their troublesome enemies. Your witch's ancestor, Elaine Carver, used a portal to rid Fairview of a demon over a hundred years ago.'

A puzzle piece fell into place with a cynical snap. He finally saw Omara's plan. The bitch.

Alessandro turned in his chair. 'Of course. Witches do their magic by manipulating energy. You need Holly for more than necromancy. You need her help to control the portals!'

Omara smiled.

He felt his heart give a single, desperate thud. 'That portal killed Elaine Carver.'

All the vulnerability in Omara's expression was gone. Her eyes mocked him, because she knew she had struck his tender place. Dread—or perhaps it was a premonition—rolled over Alessandro. Hot fury rushed in behind it. He was starting to understand a great deal, or at least to make some good, ugly guesses.

'So you remember your history,' Omara said quietly.

No! There was no way he was going to let Holly start down a fatal path. His thoughts scrambled, seizing on one horrible realization, then another. He made one last leap of logic.