A Violet Fire (Vampires in Avignon #1) - Kelsey Quick Page 0,54

size of a pea... I was eight years old when everything happened. Not eight months.

“I remember a lot of everyday life before that night. Like the language, and my family and…” my heart breaks in my chest as I recall the fresh memory from before, “...and Castrel.”

“Castrel?” Zein asks.

“He was a friend of mine. Well, the only friend I was allowed to have,” I reply. “I never saw him before we left. I… have no idea if he made it out or not.”

Zein doesn’t immediately respond, and I’m not sure if I want him to. My emotions are a hair trigger away from unleashing their vulnerable grit, and I can’t allow him to see that part of me.

“I happened upon that slaughter in Avignon,” Zein finally says. “It was careless, the attack. A complete waste of blood.”

My heart seizes in my chest.

“I was leading a military expedition that night, gathering more humans for Saya’s refinery. Far past the mountains, the air became saturated with the stench of rotten, human blood. I changed course, altering the mission to salvage what we could.

When we reached the blockade to the inner city, all of the humans in sight were dead. None had even managed to make it past the city walls. However, I could still scent life at the heart, both vampire and human. Concerning you, I happened to arrive at the right time.”

It dawns on me how low of a chance Castrel and the rest had to escape.

“So, the vampires that you rescued me from, who were they?” My voice shakes violently.

“Thoughtless scavengers. The low of the low who pay no heed to the blood shortage.”

“Were there any other survivors? Near the heart of it?” I fumble with the clumps of my thin and greasy hair. Castrel fills the gaps of every strand. At the time of the massacre he had been with his parents, choosing supper with them that night instead of mine. But they were still reasonably close to the cathedral. He could have been there.

Zein’s face softens to something I would never expect from a general of Cain, but it brings me no comfort.

“If your parents were still alive, we would have brought them with us,” he says in a voice deathly close to a whisper.

His reply is a jumbled mess in my head. I know my parents didn’t survive. I watched my father, mouth sputtering blood-infested gurgles, getting eaten alive. I remember my mother’s ferocious, transformation cries and how they stopped so abruptly as I escaped down the basement. If she somehow was still out there, she would kill me on sight. The fallen don’t discriminate. But hearing their fate said out loud from someone who experienced that same night somehow reopens the wound that years of countless nightmares could not. Streams dabble down my face, but I wipe them, refusing to sob.

“Yeah, I know they are dead,” I say in a tougher-than-I-currently-look voice. “I meant anyone else, if you paid any attention, that is.” The bitterness finds reprieve on my tongue.

“Castrel, you mean?” Zein responds rather gently to the bitterness, and I nod.

“If he were, I would have taken him as well. We searched the city and you were the only one we found.”

They’re all dead.

My lungs twist into knots and my hands fall to my lap. All the freshly opened wounds now bright red and victim to the chilled air. My vision skirts the bed before resting on Zein’s form, then his eyes—which have started to oddly welcome mine.

“Why wouldn’t you have taken me if my parents were alive? Weren’t you on a mission for your slaughter-house?”

He scowls and I correct myself. “Sorry. Saya. Slaughter-house. Both can be easily confused for us inferior humans.”

He surprisingly lets it go. “It would be a bit morbid, wouldn’t it? Sending a child to Saya. They would have started breeding you after your first cycle.”

That’s a horrible thought but I stick to my guns. “That didn’t answer my question. Because why would you care what happens to human children? To me?”

“A very good question, at that,” he commends, turning to stand from the bed. I notice the gait of his shoulders—primitive and predatory—loosely covered by his leather robes. He finishes. “I like your hair.”

The joke catches me off-guard but I quickly recover.

“You’re lying. It’s obvious,” I retort.

He chuckles when he looks back at me, and I fight off a smile of my own.

Zein walks to a line of bookshelves surrounding a simple, ivory desk illuminated by the deep blue lanterns