Cursed (19 page)

“You don’t know that,” Sienna argued, unable to imagine Jacob killing anyone. But then, Katarina probably hadn’t been able to imagine Greyvian killing anyone either. A sudden thought occurred to her. “He doesn’t rampage now, does he? I think I would have heard about dozens of people being drained of their blood. Especially in this day and age of television and the media.”

“Maybe,” Katarina conceded, “but he’s still killing. He even admitted it.”

Sienna acknowledged that with a tip of her head and had to wonder, “When did he stop killing everyone in sight?”

Katarina shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. For a long time Father and his warriors chased him all over the world, following stories of entire villages being drained of their blood, but when they finally caught up with him, Greyvian always managed to outfight or outrun them. Finally, after about a century, the reports started to dry up and he just seemed to… vanish.”

Knox frowned, his expression thoughtful. “He just stopped? Just like that? Any idea as to why?”

The female snorted a derisive laugh. “How the hell should I know? Maybe he finally had his fill?”

“What then?” Sienna asked, curious. “Where did he go? What did he do? When did he resurface?”

“Well, I can answer the last part,” Knox said, looking at Lucas with affection. “I found him in a cave about a century ago after following rumours and idle gossip for a good twenty-five years after Lucas came into the world. I went through my transition alone and it almost killed me. I didn’t want that for my son, so I went looking for an answer. I finally found it in Greyvian.”

“So you’re the reason he’s helping half-breeds transition?” Katarina asked, eyeing the two males thoughtfully. “How did you manage that? What did you have to promise him?”

The blonde smiled crookedly and shrugged. “Nothing. I simply asked him to help and he agreed.”

“Just like that?” Katarina didn’t look convinced.

“Just like that,” Knox replied.

Silence descended as everyone became lost in thought for a while. Using the break in conversation to grab some snacks, Sienna headed over to the fridge and stared into the depths for a while, mulling over everything that she had learnt about Greyvian so far, and everything more she wanted to know, putting the items into a mental list, bullet points and all.

• Thrived as a child, but started to go downhill in adolescence. Any particular significance in this? Why was he able to stomach vampire blood as a child, but not as he grew older?
  
• Starved for at least six to eight years?
  
• By the sounds of it, pretty close to Katarina before everything changed. What kind of a person was he before he started killing? What kind of temperament did he have?
  
• Wiped out whole villages, seemed to feel pretty good about it. Was he high, or was it a sign of his true personality?
  
• Hunted by his own father across multiple continents for over a century.
  
• Stopped cold turkey one day and disappeared off the face of the earth. Why? What changed?
  
• Did who-knew-what, and fed who-knew-how-often, for another century until Knox found him in a cave.
  
• Has been helping half-breeds to transition ever since—because he wanted to make amends? Balance out the killing he did? Or as Katarina had questioned—because he had a God complex or wanted to get back at his father and all those who’d hunted him?
  
• Killing people on a fairly regular basis, but not as many as previous—has more control now, or thirst not as strong?
  

And somewhere along the lines, he’d turned into an emotionally repressed male who thought feeling emotions was a bad thing. Didn’t that point in the direction of feeling emotions that made him feel bad? Like, remorse, perhaps? Guilt, or horror, at what he’d done? At what he had to do to keep his hunger at bay?

Grabbing a yoghurt from the fridge, she shut the door and thought it over while she got a spoon from the kitchen drawer and headed back to her chair. All signs pointed in that direction, but then, she had the hots for the guy so it could just be wishful thinking.

“What was Greyvian like as a boy?” she asked Katarina, plonking herself down into the armchair and tearing off the lid of the yoghurt.

The female smiled slightly, as if the memory of Greyvian as a boy was a pleasant thing. Sienna licked the yoghurt off the flimsy bit of paper that had covered the container as Katarina reminisced. “Adorable, really. As a baby, he had a good temperament. I was only sixteen years old at that point with fifteen brothers and sisters, older and younger, but when Greyvian came along, he seemed to light up the room with his smile. It was like I’d never truly had a sibling until he came along. I love my family, don’t get me wrong, but with Greyvian, it was something different. We had a connection. I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved him.”

Her smile turned sad; as if she were thinking of all that she’d lost and it took her a moment to continue. “As a boy, his good temperament remained. There was always a smile ready to come to life, always a giggle at the ready. I remember he used to chase butterflies around the meadow, laughing the whole time. At around seven years of age he started to grow weaker and the laughter didn’t come as often. He became too tired to chase butterflies and soon became bedridden. He never once complained though. Never once cried ‘Why me?’. Not even when the rest of the family stopped coming to visit him.

“They couldn’t take it, seeing him lying there so frail and weak. Father and I were the only ones who went to see him, but even Father tended to space his visits to when he thought he’d come up with the next cure.” The female lapsed into silence and shook her head as if she couldn’t bear to go on. Her eyes were sightless for the longest time as she became lost in memory.

Looking up suddenly, she met Sienna’s eyes. “And then he changed. Human blood turned him into a stranger. No longer the sweet boy who accepted his fate, he came in ranting that he now decided who lived and who died, that the gods had cursed him, justifying his right to murder. I’d never seen him angry before that night. Seeing that hurt more than anything…”

“Before yesterday I had never seen him display even the slightest bit of emotion,” Knox confessed. “Was beginning to think he wasn’t capable…” The blonde’s gaze drifted to Sienna’s, his expression thoughtful.

“Anybody else notice that he seemed drunk after feeding on Sienna?” Lucas mused, finally putting words to the unacknowledged behaviour they’d seen before Greyvian and Jacob had departed.

“Oh, I noticed,” Knox said dryly.

“Kind of hard not to,” Sienna seconded.

“Come to think of it,” Katarina said, eyeing her speculatively, “I felt a little strange after I had some of your blood. Kind of… happy.”

All three vampires looked at her then, expressions curious. Too curious. She held up her hands, yoghurt container dangling between thumb and forefinger of one hand, a spoon in the other. “Don’t even think about it. I’m probably anaemic enough without you lot wanting to try a shot. Besides, my scent’s gone. I doubt I have any of my own blood left to affect you anyway.”

Reluctantly, it seemed, they all agreed, but it didn’t stop them looking at her with those curious expressions. So much so, that a surprising possibility occurred to her. “Are vampires affected by alcohol?”

“Nope,” Knox replied, confirming her suspicion. “For some reason, it can’t enter our blood stream.”

Holy crap, no wonder they were looking at her like that. She must seem like a keg of beer to some college newbies wanting to get drunk for the first time. She had a strong suspicion that this was not a good discovery.

*  *  *

Greyvian kept his expression neutral as Jacob glared at him, waiting for an answer.

This wasn’t what he’d wanted. The fact that Jacob hadn’t seen what Greyvian had seen in the man he’d just killed had given him hope that Jacob would never have to worry about the true depth of their affliction. Yet, there was no guarantee that his son would never develop it, just as he had centuries ago.

He supposed if that were the case, then his son had a right to know what to expect in the future. The right to know just what was waiting for him around the corner so that he wasn’t caught off guard as Greyvian had been that fateful night so long ago.

Looking into his son’s eyes, eyes that were so like his there were times he couldn’t bear to look into them, he let the male in on the dirty little secret he’d carried around with him for the past two centuries.

“The human was evil.”

Jacob stared at him for a long moment as if wondering if he’d heard that right, then asked for clarification. “Did you say evil?”

Greyvian nodded and allowed that to sink in without further comment. It was a lot to take in.

To this day, he would never forget the first time he’d discovered his little affliction. How he’d been staring off into the distance, trying to beat back the desire to reduce the entire village he’d stopped at into an empty shell of buildings and corpses, when suddenly he’d noticed a sooty red glow surrounding one of the human males. The instant his eyes fell on the man, he’d seen things that still haunted him to this day. He might have killed thousands of humans in his lifetime, but that was out of hunger. The Morality of that aside, the things that human had done…

“How could you know that?” Jacob asked finally, his voice subdued.

“Because I can see it.”

“How the hell can you
see
evil?”

How, indeed. It was a question Greyvian had been asking himself ever since it had manifested and not one easily answered. Especially for someone who wasn’t used to explaining himself. But he tried, for Jacob’s sake.

“The best I can explain it to you, is that when my eyes lose focus and I look at a human who has committed an act of evil, I can see it. At first, it’s a red glow surrounding the human, but if I look deeper, I can actually see it. Like a movie playing in my head.”

Jacob glanced down at the dead man on the ground, then back at him. “You’re joking, right?”

He shook his head slowly. If only. Most, if not all, of the things he’d seen were enough to wake him from sleep with irritating consistency. It had been a very long time since he’d had a full eight hours and he often wondered just what that was doing to his mental state.

His son seemed to struggle with the concept for a while, and then finally asked, “So what did this guy do?”

Images flashed through his mind before he could stop them: depraved acts done against innocent people. Like flipping a switch, he quickly erected a wall of diffidence, separating his emotions from the vision. The only defence he had against the assault.

When he spoke, his voice was flat. “At his worst: raped, tortured and then finally murdered numerous men and women. In general, nothing good with his life.”

Jacob looked at him, expression hard to read. “And you saw all that?”

“In technicolour.” As if he had been the one doing it.

The first time it had happened to him, he had thought the visions were his own desires, but the utter revulsion he felt at the daydreams had quickly led him to believe that the mental scenes weren’t anything to do with him. Especially when he managed to focus on the hands that had been doing the dirty work: long, thin, delicate fingers instead of the thicker, broader lengths he knew to be his own.

Jacob blew out a long breath. “Man,” he said, shaking his head. “No wonder you’re so fucked up.”

Surprisingly, Greyvian’s mood lightened and the corners of his mouth twitched. It was probably due to some leftover mood alteration caused by drinking Sienna’s blood, but it felt good and he couldn’t help wishing that he hadn’t drunk from evil and ruined the happy spell he’d been under. He hadn’t felt that carefree in centuries.

It was a dangerous side effect. If only because it served to remind him what life had been like as a child when he’d been naïve and innocent. When he hadn’t known that evil existed. When he had been free of the ever-present horror lurking in the back of his mind. And further, because he would now cling to the feeling for as long as possible and mourn its passing when the feel-good substance was completely out of his system.

“What do we do about the body?” Jacob asked, eyeing the dead man with misgivings.

Long practiced at covering up the true nature of a death, Greyvian got to work healing the bite marks and making other, more logical wounds for law enforcement to discover. Once done, he could see Jacob eyeing the body, looking slightly sceptical.

“That’s all it takes?” his son asked doubtfully. “A few knife wounds and you’re done? Won’t the cops get suspicious that there’s no blood around?”

“Not really. They’ll assume the body was dumped afterwards.” Jacob still looked doubtful. “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Jacob. It doesn’t really matter what they think. I could leave the body with the bite mark and no blood and the humans could drive themselves into a frenzy about vampires in their midst if I wanted. We’re invisible, remember? Even if they started to hunt us, it wouldn’t matter because they’d never find us.”

Jacob looked up at him, eyebrow cocked. “So why don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Humans, in general, are pretty irritating. Humans in a frenzy are more than annoying and completely irrational. No, thank you.”