Asylum (Causal Enchantment #2)(8)
Satisfied that I would not continue my magical assault, Mage looked to Viggo and Mortimer. “We know everything. We know about your venom issue. We know about Sofie’s sister in that tomb over there.” She pointed to the statue behind Mortimer. Viggo’s eyes bulged with panic, that the secrets he guarded so closely were thrown out into the open. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that we consider a truce. No more killing—anyone. No more of Sofie’s magic.” She looked at me to confirm that I heard her. “In return, Jonah stays inside and this group will behave as appreciative guests, accepting your asylum.”
Viggo and Mortimer exchanged the briefest look. “Though I am trustworthy,” Viggo began, earning an eye roll from me, “how do we know we can we trust this group?”
Mage offered Viggo a honey-sweet smile but when she spoke, her words were laced with deadly warning. “No one defies me. No one.”
“No one?” I mimicked, eyeing Rachel, whose vengeful snake eyes hadn’t left Caden and his friends.
Understanding my concern, Mage turned to Rachel. “No retaliation, right, Rachel?”
After a pause, a sneering Rachel nodded reluctantly.
“And,” Viggo added, his index finger swinging back and forth between Caden and me, “we have a truce as long as they stay away from each other.” Of course. He was afraid I’d form allegiances.
Caden chuckled in response. “No worries there. I want less to do with that witch than with psycho.” He gestured toward Rachel.
“You had better not be lying to me,” Viggo warned in a low tone, his blue eyes icy. Caden snorted.
If this is an act, you had better ease off. Though Viggo played the easygoing vampire, getting caught lying to him had disastrous consequences.
“Fine. We’re in agreement,” Mage said, assuming she had my agreement. “So now what?”
Viggo clapped his hands together, his typical false charm in full swing again. “How about a beverage?”
“Stand back!” Viggo sang out as Mortimer pushed a refrigerated cart along the cobblestone path, its metal frame rattling noisily over the uneven ground. They had insisted on bringing a batch of blood up from the cellar, afraid that exposing the Ratheus vamps to all that blood at once would send them into a crazed tailspin.
Now, though, asking a group of vampires who had waited seven hundred years for a drop of blood to stand back was too much. All forty vampires—I had rescued the ones from within the Merth-affected perimeter in an effort to gain favor—flocked toward the cart like starving, red-eyed peasants begging for the king’s rations. Arms outstretched, they groped eagerly at the metal box.
“You’ll all get some!” Viggo chirped as he tossed bags of blood out, adding for my benefit, “It would be faster if we had servants, of course.”
The vamps tore through the thick medical plastic with their teeth, desperate to get to the contents. Blood spilled over their hands and splashed onto the ground. Evangeline’s friends pushed forward to fill their fists with bags, then scurried to a far corner to feed quietly, whatever promises they’d made about refusing human blood clearly nonexistent. I felt another sharp pang of despair, my hope that they might be deceiving Viggo and Mortimer all but gone.
That much spilled blood proved difficult even for me; I felt the spidery web of veins creep into my eyes and knew I needed to get away. Turning from the crowd, I fled to the only place that offered some semblance of comfort in this asylum of blood-crazed vampires.
2. Exile
“Am I stupid?”
Leo jerked in his chair as if startled from sleep. My voice had likely done just that. He was past exhaustion, the heavy circles under his eyes so dark they could be mistaken for bruising. But the stubborn old man refused to go to bed. Instead, he slouched in the checkered-print wing chair beside the wood stove in my room, his hand resting lazily on Remington’s head. I think he was waiting for me to drift off.
That was the problem. I couldn’t drift off. Caden’s bloodthirsty red eyes met me every time I tried. Murderous eyes. And no matter how hard I concentrated, no matter how long I stared at the four by six photo of him that I held in my hand, I couldn’t call his beautiful jade eyes from my memory.
It had been a little after midnight when Leo escorted me to my second floor bedroom—a simple but cozy cedar-paneled nook with slanted ceilings and two tiny windows overlooking the mountains. A pair of pink flannel pajamas waited for me on a double bed. Just as Sofie had instructed, Leo informed me.
Now, two hours later, I lay under the plush white down duvet with my personal guard dog, Max, stretched out beside me, gazing out at a night sky speckled with brilliant stars, thinking about Caden and the others. Wondering if their previous morals and convictions still held. Wondering if Caden was mad at me for believing everything would be fine. Wondering if I was an idiot for believing in the first place.
“What’s that?” Leo murmured, his thick Irish accent as staggering now as it had been the first time I heard it only hours ago, when I learned he wasn’t merely a proper British butler, but Sofie’s warlock spy, planted in Viggo’s household fifteen years ago to keep tabs on his employer.
“Am I stupid? For believing them?”
He chuckled softly. “No, my dear Evangeline. You are far from stupid. Naïve, absolutely. But it’s born out of an enormous heart and an enduring need to believe the best of people. Not stupidity.”