A Violet Fire (Vampires in Avignon #1) - Kelsey Quick Page 0,2
shoulders. It blasts its way down into my soul, threatening to obliterate every ounce of resolve that has landed me here, along these steadfast bricks, amidst my escape from the Stratocracy of Cain—amidst my escape from the vampires.
“A red tunic? She must belong to Zein! It’ll be our heads if we lose her!” One shouts from afar—but not too terribly far, if even my human ears can sense it. Unlucky for them, I did belong to Zein, but not anymore. My mind clears as dark anger replaces fear.
In mere seconds the vampires would be upon me. With their inexplicable speed and inhuman reflexes, I will be dead if I don’t drop now.
I step out.
The hardest breath I have ever taken escapes my lips as I push off and spiral into oblivion.
To hell with this life, I decide.
I would rather die of a broken neck from this fall than be forced to sit prim and proper as a docile host.
The shrubberies below get ever closer in my spiraling plummet—a family of mesmerizing pinwheels spinning faster and faster within my vision, hypnotizing and fearless.
Suddenly, a sharp pain on my abdomen—the rope going taut—and a vicious sounding crack!
The rope is loose.
The branch didn’t hold.
I’m falling to my death.
“Wavorly…” my mother’s soft and celestial cries cradle me in my descent.
Even here, I remember?
“Wavorly, you must go,” she said to me, crying and writhing from pain. “I can’t hold it back much longer. Run.”
As the brights of my eyes fade to black, I relive it. My consciousness slips and I’m there again, watching my mother suffer. Still, I wouldn’t move. I wouldn’t run. I wouldn’t drag her down to the catacombs with me to try and save her; wouldn’t turn and pick up a bloody knife to end the agony that she was to endure.
At eight years old, it was all I could do to watch without the saltiness of tears destroying the last, perfect vision of her shining blue eyes, apple-blond hair, and her body, blanketed by a bloody shawl pinned at her breast. I watched her demise so innocently—back before I knew the wrath and ferocity of the vampires. Back before I knew, truly, what they could do to us humans. But even though I since have grown much older and wiser to their existence, much better at handling my past, it is still difficult to turn away from my mother’s pleading gaze. I always try to find something different within her eyes—a new pathway into her soul, a new wrinkle to prove that she is aging with me. An elongated search for novelty to make me feel like I never lost her.
My younger self clings to her selfishness, always. Always. Never listening, never moving to aid the last loved one she would forever lose. After that moment, my mother roars a sound like the monsters from nightmares, her skin fading to the color of yellowed sickness. Then, and only then, do I run for the connecting basement. The catacombs.
The half terrified, half monstrous screams of her transformation into the fallen, fade behind thick, oak doors as I move farther and farther away. Her bellows are soon accompanied by the guttural laughter of the attacking vampires, and then all that’s left is my ragged breaths. I knew it then, she was gone.
I find the door to the outside, like I always do, and for a brief moment all that I am is pure relief; a raw hope that rids the ice from my bones like hot water on a snowy day.
However, little do I mind the other side of the door where a lurking vampire waits for me. He grabs me after I naively open it, he shakes me, laughs at my terror as he muses how he will get my ligaments out of his teeth once he has finished draining me of blood. Everything in those moments is a blur. A disastrous blur of adrenaline and repression until my younger self is on the ground, unharmed. The decapitated head of my attacker—rolling across the dirt—beside me.
I turn, hoping to see human soldiers, Sorgan, Castrel, and the Guard of Avignon, standing victoriously over the bodies of a dozen dead vampires, only for that hope to be quickly shattered.
Another, much younger vampire stands over me. This one regally dressed in crimson robes—embellished with armor and chains, and steel fleur de lis.
“You think you can hide your dissent from a pureblood?” He speaks to the heap of flesh and guts now strewn on the ground