staring into the fire, vision shrouded by the horrible scene playing out before her. There was no masking it. It was.
Garin nodded, clutching his hair with the hand he leaned upon. “Foolishly, selfishly, I tried to help her clean up, tried to explain, apologize, but she wouldn’t hear me over her screams and the shattering glass. As if anything I’d had to say would matter to her in the moment.” He laughed darkly. “She threw everything within her reach until I finally tried to grab her—she finally looked me in the eye and shoved her father’s stake into me, a hair off from my heart. She told me to leave from this cursed place, that, if I ever tried to find her, she would do worse. Like a coward, I left. It wasn’t her threat I feared, but I could no longer face her.”
“How did she curse you?” Lilac thought about her own affliction—her ability to speak to monsters. She didn’t even know how curses worked.
He shrugged, unbothered by her straightforwardness. “Your guess is good as mine. As far as I know, she didn’t utter a single incantation, not a word. Like I said in the Low Forest, I wasn’t aware of my limitation until I tried to hunt again. I wasted a few lives, testing my ability to bit, killing them with my bare hands in frustration once my entrancements had grown less and less effective.
“However, I don’t blame her. All of it is justified. I was—am a murderer. I took what was most important to her in one, fleeting moment.” He groaned and rubbed his eyes. “Fickle things like forgiveness become oddly important when one realizes they’ve got forever to go.”
She knew too well what Garin meant. As the vampire grew quiet, Lilac thought of Freya and Piper. When—and if—her former handmaiden ever wanted to speak to her again, she would tell her everything. How she was sorry, how she’d been selfish. How she planned to make things better for humans and Darklings alike—that what had started as an empty promise to the korrigan chief had blossomed into a tiny glimmer of hope. It was an ideal reality, a first step in the right direction to ultimately draw Accords beneficial to both preternatural and mortal beings. Such an understanding seemed like the least she could do to make it up to Freya, who had died not only at her hands, but in the midst of prejudice.
“Well,” she offered, sighing. “When I’m queen, I can send out a search note for her? Not anything too big, obviously, but I could offer a reward for information on her whereabouts, that the town crier will—”
She froze. Her hand had gone to her neck as she mulled this over—a habit she’d formed since meeting Garin. There, her fingers brushed against the ragged, crusted teeth marks Piper had left. Almost automatically, her hand next sought out the spot on her chest where Garin had torn her brocade; heart sinking, her fingers traced the puffed edges of the scratches he’d inflicted. They were deeper than she’d previously thought.
“Ophelia had better have something for these, too,” she groaned. “I can’t show up at my own coronation with these. My mother will want a thorough look at me when I’ve returned, and when she finds them she’ll kill me herself.”
Garin soundlessly sat up. Lilac swallowed hard when he curiously reached out to trace a finger along the wounds on her bosom. He cocked an inquiring brow at her, and she nodded breathlessly. His hands were hesitant—his touch, feather-soft.
“She might have something stashed away, but nothing heals a vampire wound as quickly a vampire’s saliva. Not even the most powerful witch’s salve.”
Lilac looked at him shrewdly. “Really?”
“Piper was—is new, so she didn’t know. But to heal our victims after feeding—if we haven’t killed them, that is—all a vampire has to do is lick the wound a few times over.” A trace of humor touched his eyes, along with something else Lilac couldn’t place.
“All you have to do? Isn’t that… I mean, it doesn’t sound so simple.”
“It isn’t. Even for older, seasoned vampires, it presents a struggle.” He pulled the tunic back up over her cleavage. “And that, my dear, would be nature’s catch. As always.”
With a slight shiver, she thought of Garin’s lips. Up against hers, then slicked with her own blood, drawn by Kestrel. The too-fresh image of Garin losing control in Cinderfell, if even for a short moment, made her arm hairs stand up on