the Council head when Stephen’s treachery had come to light, had harshly commanded her to stay alive, to endure. His thunderous Russian baritone had penetrated the nightmares, and her training had done the rest. She was an Inherited Servant. She would obey, would serve with every ounce of will she had.
Before she’d been conceived, she’d been promised to the InhServ program. The intense indoctrination had begun at age six, the last time she’d sat at a table with her birth family. Her parents taught her to kneel behind her father’s chair and wait silently while they ate dinner, talked to their other children and each other. It had been confusing, but when she understood she was being prepared for the great honor of serving a vampire, she’d embraced the idea. Her one desire, her one goal in life, had been to exceed even the high expectations of that honor.
Yet, in the end, she’d come to this.
Lord Brian, the Council scientist and doctor, had experimented with a variety of blockers, things that would stop Stephen’s interference with her mind, but each one failed. As Stephen’s torment of her mind persisted for weeks, Lord Belizar’s command wasn’t enough to override her Master’s power over her soul. She had to be strapped down to keep her from taking her own life, because Stephen was doing everything in his power to make her do just that.
“I will find a way to block him, Alanna. But you must help me. You must hold on.”
When he said that, Lord Brian didn’t know he looked like a giant spider to her, with snapping mandibles and hairy legs reaching for her, but even as she was screaming and writhing against her bonds, soiling herself with her fear, the inexorable command penetrated.
There was a gentle firmness in Lord Brian’s directive that made her want to try harder, keep struggling, though she didn’t know why it bolstered her will more than Lord Belizar’s harsh, impersonal command. There was no room in her mind for asking such questions. She did hear snippets of conversation, voices in the storm.
Could try more aggressive methods . . . but it will kill her. Only one shot, and if it doesn’t work, we lose our chance.
They should do it. She was useless otherwise. She couldn’t keep her Master from unbalancing her mind long enough for them to get a fix on him. If they could pin the butterfly to the board and, in those few moments while her wings were still twitching, get a bead on him, then her last act would be one of service.
“Please . . .” She must have said something to that effect, because it was the only time she remembered Lord Brian touching her, a brief whisper of fingertips over her forehead that Stephen turned into worms crawling into her eyes, sending her screaming down another blood-soaked tunnel. But then something else had happened. Even now, she didn’t know whether her mind had created something to help her obey the Council’s will, or if it had been real. Since Lord Brian’s blockers had started to work, she’d had difficulty parsing the reality from the nightmares she’d experienced during those terrible days.
She’d been too exhausted to fight anymore, deaf and dumb to everything but those hallucinations. The significant thing had happened while she was staring at a group of rats, perched on her ripped-open belly, feeding on her exposed insides. Blood on their muzzles.
Dead . . . better off dead . . . kill yourself. Serve your Master. Make up for your betrayal. It’s the only way to make it right.
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” The calm, confident tone brought the rats to an abrupt stop. They stood on their haunches, looked through the wall of flames surrounding her. “That’s a quote from Frida Kahlo. Easy, yekirati. We’ll see what pictures we can paint together.”
She couldn’t see anything, but that voice . . . A vampire male for certain, but just like Lord Brian’s voice, his had something . . . more to it. Something that made her want to please, to obey, and not just because of her natural desire to serve, honed by her training. His hand settled on her abdomen. Long, elegant fingers, pale skin. Ragged nails, rough cuticles. Odd. Most vampires had well-manicured hands.
The rats fizzled away into scattered ash, her flesh reknitting over her concave stomach. Her ribs protruded over it like the lip of a cave. They’d tried feeding