The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 3: Chapter 23

* * * * *

I did not make it far, because my body gave out on me. My arm had already healed and my body was almost unscathed, only a slight weakness from healing a few minor wounds.

But my strength did not care. It had given up.

He had been my downfall.

I would endure until I killed Ivan, and perhaps every other vampire who would dare to lay their violent hands on a human.

I would take up Jamie's mantle of the vampire slayer and I would have my revenge.

It was cold, and hollow, just like my existence. It could return nothing of what was lost. It would bring me no satisfaction. But it was one beacon in the dismal world, not of pure white light, but of dark crimson illumination.

Blood red, like Jamie's, all over the ground. I supposed I won my stupid stubborn little game with him. I had never drank his blood, even until the end. I laughed through my tears.

My games, my teasing, how I hated it all now as sobs wracked my body violently. I didn't even know that a vampire could hurt this much. Why had I wasted so much time messing with him?

I should have taken him from the slave cages in the council and told him everything from the first. I should have thrown away my pride, because how had wrapping myself in it served me?

What had I protected myself from? More time, more peace with him?

I was the mistress of folly, the queen of fools.

If a vampire possessed the capacity to love a human, I had loved him.

He who was gone.

Somehow, my dead heart was still able to break.

* * * * *

The ground beneath the trees was moist and smelled of mouldering earth. There I lay for a lifetime, although the sun barely moved as the centuries slipped by.

And then movement and Drak's voice broke my respite of stillness. He was not the one who I wanted to hear speak to me. I could not understand the sounds coming from his mouth, but it still forced me to face the fact that Jamie was lost to me, forever. "Leave me alone."

"I'm not just going to leave you to give up, Vienne."

I did not bother to meet his eyes. There was no point. "I'm not giving up. I'm taking a little break, and then I am going to destroy Ivan and every person he has ever looked upon kindly for the briefest moment and it will be incredibly sweet."

No longer would entertainment serve as the balm of my existence, revenge would be my new pleasure. It burned the edges of my grief, and the mild relief felt good.

Drak exhaled, sounding wearier than I had ever heard, but I just could not care. "You can't go running after revenge."

"Why not?" I asked, staring at the leaves around me.

"Because they need you."

"No one needs me."

"You started this thing."

I shrugged, most undignified considering I was lying curled up in the dirt, but I no longer cared about such things. "I'm perhaps a figurehead at best, perhaps I serve an advisory capacity. I'm tired of this whole thing. What did my decisions lead to but destruction? And not just...him...the other humans, also."

"You're more than one miscalculation. And you weren't wrong about Whitmore. Someone betrayed her, and she intends to find and destroy whoever it was. You're more than this."