Anathema (Causal Enchantment #1)(40)
Rachel glowered at her. “You’re lucky Caden feels an odd sense of obligation to you, otherwise I’d—”
“Look who’s back!” Caden said, pointing in my direction.
Rachel turned to glance at me, her smile falling short of genuine, before turning to bestow a loving gaze on Caden. “It seems your scheme with the statue switch worked,” she purred, forcing him onto the bench and climbing onto his lap. She planted an inappropriately long kiss on his lips.
I averted my gaze, not because of the uncomfortable public show of affection but because the twinge of jealousy pained me a thousand times more than my injured hand or even the bite from the night before.
It went on, even as Bishop cleared his throat loudly and Amelie let out an exasperated sigh. I had to find some way to peel Rachel off Caden. “Sofie said the pendant is magical,” I blurted, ignoring Sofie’s warnings. “It gets me here and it protects my human traits, like the scent of my blood and my heartbeat. It takes time to adjust sometimes, though.”
It worked. Rachel stopped mauling Caden. “Like when you get all flustered and red near my Caden?” she asked sweetly. My face felt like it had burst into flames as a renewed surge of humiliation struck. “Seems it hasn’t adjusted yet.” She giggled viciously.
“How does it work?” Amelie quickly asked.
“Um … I don’t know. Every night my necklace begins to burn and I fall asleep. Then I wake up the next morning back in my bed.”
“The time in between your visits is weeks here,” Fiona commented, frowning.
“And if one of us were to put that necklace on, I wonder what would happen,” Rachel murmured, eyeing my pendant keenly.
Memories of excruciating pain had me shaking my head with panic. “No, I’m sorry. It can’t come off, not even for a second, or I’ll die.”
“Only the quickest of seconds …” Rachel said, off Caden’s lap and standing over me in an instant, a hand clamped over the chain.
“Leave it alone,” Caden said, appearing beside her. His hand closed over hers, stopping her from yanking the chain off and killing me.
Her left eyebrow arched severely. He replied with a hard stare of his own.
I turned to look at Amelie. Her eyes were locked on the two of them; she looked ready to spring.
After a few tense seconds, Caden’s shoulders visibly relaxed. He wrapped his free arm affectionately around Rachel. “If she dies, we’ll have to wait for this sorceress to send another one.”
I flinched. I was replaceable, like a goldfish.
But his callous words worked. Rachel’s icy glare melted into adoring eyes and a childlike giggle. Then those snake eyes turned to me. “So you can bring us back with you?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Sofie’s warning rang loudly in my mind: Don’t trust our kind. My instincts told me to heed the warning and, though those instincts had proven to be equivalent to those of a lobotomy patient, I decided to listen. I looked straight into those yellow eyes and I shook my head. It was easy to lie to her. Enjoyable, actually.
My lie prompted crestfallen expressions, which didn’t make sense. I looked around at their faces. “Why would you want to come back with me?”
Something unspoken passed between them, conveyed only with a look.
“Because you’re the only one left,” Fiona answered quietly.
I frowned. “Only what left?”
“Human.”
My jaw dropped.
Amelie sighed heavily. “Where do we begin? In our world—Ratheus—humans are extinct. You have been for seven hundred years.”
I swallowed hard, unable to blink. “Why? … How?”
“We caused it,” Caden answered coldly, having moved away from me to stand on the other side of the fire. “We killed them, every last one.”
12. Extinction
A shiver ran down my spine. That’s why Jethro reacted the way he did when he saw me. Now it made sense.
“Not us, specifically. Our species—vampires,” Bishop clarified, the last word coming softly.
“We did our share, though,” Caden said, turning to pace, head lowered.
“Why?” I heard myself croak.
“Vampires were no more than a myth for thousands of years, characters in horror movies. But then drained bodies with bite marks started showing up, left out for display. There was a new generation of our kind—one that didn’t care, that wanted people to be afraid. The humans fought back in the only way they knew how: war. One that escalated so quickly, it was too late to reverse the effects, by the time we found out. Vampires converted humans by the hundreds to build their army. Humans killed any vampire they could catch. They even killed other humans, if there was any doubt as to what they were.”
“So your kind can be killed?” I asked, my folklore facts not yet up to speed.
“It’s hard, but yes. With nuclear warfare, everything within the blast radius will die, including vampires. The radiation did nothing to us, but it was deadly to the humans. Between the blasts and the radiation, few humans survived; most of the world was destroyed within a few months.”
I asked into the silence, “How did you get away?”
“There was this large island in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from anything else. It was inhabited by people, but not overly developed—a Third World country; under the radar, so to speak. Many of us fled here, betting that it would survive. We were right. We brought humans with us, to breed. But humans take too long to reproduce and their blood is too tempting. They didn’t last long.”