A Shade of Doubt (A Shade of Vampire #12)(11)

I wasn’t sure what Silas was so interested in. I didn’t know who this man and woman were. It looked like the woman was a witch, but I didn’t recognize her. As for the vampire, I wasn’t sure who he was. But neither of these people were our targets, so I didn’t understand why Silas was bothering to linger so long in this room.

“Why doesn’t he leave?” I whispered.

My mother leaned forward, watching intently, as I did. To my surprise, he reached out his gnarled hands and their solidity began to fade until they became almost invisible. His black nails made it easier to locate their shape as they lowered toward the man’s head. I shivered as his ghostly hands sank right into the vampire’s skull. The vampire didn’t stir at all. Of course, he wouldn’t feel a thing—perhaps a faint breeze, a chill around his head. For Silas’ hands were now transparent, thin and light as air.

Silas was leaving his mark in this vampire’s mind, and I didn’t understand why. It seemed to me like he was wasting time tagging others when he should have been focusing on our targets.

My mother didn’t answer for several moments as she stared, her lips parted, barely breathing. Then they formed a small, knowing smile. “Silas is just having some fun.”

“What do you mean?”

My mother looked at me, now smiling more fully. “It’s harmless. As long as he doesn’t wait too long to reach our targets, we have nothing to worry about.”

Two minutes later, Silas lifted his hands away from the vampire—still sleeping—and exited the room. We headed straight out of the apartment and rushed back down to the forest ground. Even though I was sitting solidly in my seat, my stomach lurched at the thought of traveling that fast down those enormous trees.

I was expecting him to immediately move onto the next treehouse, a few meters away, and continue his search. Instead he hurtled forward along the forest path, whipping through the trees, now in his subtle form again. I wanted to ask my mother what he was doing now, but she seemed to have had enough of my incessant questioning so I remained silent.

It was only once the trees disappeared and a clearing came into view that I couldn’t hold in my gasp. I didn’t need to have lived in The Shade to realize that he had strayed away from the vampires’ residential quarters and entered the humans’.

“He’s straying from his course already?” I couldn’t believe my eyes. He’d only just exited the jewelry box and already he was straying from my mother’s explicit orders.

My mother ignored me, her face serious as she focused all her attention on the window. Her face was expressionless—it was impossible to tell whether she was disturbed by Silas’ conduct or approved of it.

Silas headed straight for the nearest townhouse. No windows were open, but none were needed. There was blackness suddenly as he seeped through the stone wall and emerged again on the inside of the building. A spacious hallway, decorated with soft carpets and paintings on the walls. A cozy home—and so typically human.

The stairs flew away beneath Silas as he ascended the staircase. Once again he drifted through a wall and appeared in another bedroom. A human couple slept in a bed. As Silas passed a long mirror fixed to a closet, he stopped and stared into it. I shivered. Even though I’d seen him before in the flesh, catching this unexpected glimpse of him in the darkness—his amber eyes glowing—made my heart hammer against my chest. His skeletal body was covered with thin, translucent skin that revealed the cold blue veins beneath it. He had jagged, shark-like teeth and tufts of long black hair hung from the base of his otherwise bald skull.

As he left the mirror and continued moving through the room, I wasn’t sure I could stomach the scene I was about to witness. But, like watching a trainwreck, I found my eyes glued to the scene.

Gliding around the edge of the bed, he extended his hands toward the man and woman. They barely had a chance to open their eyes, much less scream, as the ghoul’s black nails dug into their throats and punctured their arteries. As blood began to ooze from their necks, soaking the bedsheets, and Silas pulled away the sheets covering them, I could no longer look. I knew what was coming next.

Human flesh was a sweet delicacy ghouls didn’t often have the opportunity to taste. My mother had often tasked me with feeding Silas back in The Sanctuary. He devoured all humans the same way—after tearing their throats out, he dug into their stomachs and ate their guts, swallowing the intestines whole, last. Instead of witnessing this nightmarish scene, I fixed my eyes on my mother who remained watching, still unflinching.

It seemed unlike my mother. I had seen how harsh she could be with Silas during training. She wouldn’t let him stray even an inch from her instructions. To watch her so calmly witnessing Silas violating the very first rule we gave him was bewildering to me.

“Mother, what are you thinking? Didn’t we feed him enough before we left? I thought the plan was to fill his stomach to last him at least a few days, so he wouldn’t have to risk killing.”

She didn’t answer me for several more moments as she continued watching Silas’ gruesome feast. Finally, she cleared her throat. “I’m not happy with the attention this is going to cause. If he was here with me now, I would punish him. But it seems he couldn’t help himself. He knows once he has completed his task, he will be closer to freedom and there’s no saying when he will taste human flesh again after that. As long as he’s careful to hide his tracks, we have nothing to fear.” She looked at me pointedly. “You can look now, he’s finished his meal.”