I awoke to my gut turning itself inside out, a hundred million grasping claws trying to make my insides my outsides. I groped at my stomach, feeling for the bullet wound. Had something gone wrong with the spell? Had my stomach opened itself back up again? I shoved my hands up under my dress and they came back clean and dry. What was happening? The invisible chainsaw tore through my mid-section again, and a choked cry slipped through my lips. I fumbled in the sheets for the little red pager. Where had I left the damned thing? On my second frantic dive through the bedding, I caught sight of it near the pillow. I scooped it up, pressing the button at the same time.
I closed my eyes, pager still clenched in my hand. Please hurry, I thought, please.
If the bond was supposed to save me, why wasn't it calling out to Keel? Why was I alone?
The door to the royal chambers swung open, but the pain radiating out from my centre had turned my muscles to stone so I couldn't even crane my head to see who had come to my rescue.
"Mildred, what happened? Are you okay?" It was Arthos. His vampire speed put him at my side in milliseconds.
"Help." The word little more than a whisper.
Arthos' gaze drifted down to where my hands were clutching my stomach as if all my innards were in danger of falling out, which is exactly what it felt like.
"I think I should get His Majesty," he said.
I shook my head. Keel was the last person I wanted to see right now. I was still a long from making peace with what he and my father had done, and the fact that it was now attempting to tear me apart piece by piece wasn't helping.
"No, you help me."
Arthos looked at me, then the door, his face awash with uncertainly.
"Arthos, please," I begged.
He raised his wrist, unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt and tactical jacket and slid it up his elbow. Then he bit into his forearm and offered it to me. The dusky but unexpectedly aromatic scent of his blood turned the pain in my gut into a focused, hungry force. "No," I said, realizing what he expected of me. "No."
"I can get the king if that would make this easier."
I shook my head again, harder. A migraine detonated a series of blastbeats between my temples. No, Keel wouldn't make anything easy.
I shoved my face into my pillow, attempting to block out the scent of Arthos' blood, but it crept in anyway, and my stomach roared and turned two more vicious somersaults before settling back into a grumbling ache.
"Mildred, you have to eat. The discomfort will only grow worse if you don't."
"Nooooo." It came out as a long drawn-out moan into the pillow.
"That's enough now." Arthos' words became stern, but I detected no anger or impatience in them, simply a switch in tactics. "They didn't save you and risk a war just so you could starve yourself to death." Arthos tugged at my shoulder, encouraging me to turn and face my new reality and find a way to embrace it.
"They shouldn't have saved me at all."
"Is that what you would have done if His Majesty had been shot?"
I thought of the way the bond had compelled me down from the surveillance room the day Keel had been ambushed. It was an ample enough reminder that these weren't necessarily the king's heroics, they were informed by our unique connection, which would have demanded he do everything possible to save my life - and his.
I shoved myself out of the pillow and looked at Arthos. He ran his thumb through the dark red blood on his arm and brought it to my lips. The moment the first drop found its way to my tongue, the violent assault on my insides abated. The hunger was still everything, but I was able to unfold myself on the bed and sit up.
"I don't want to drink from you," I told Arthos.
"Mildred-"
"Wait, you didn't let me finish. I'll drink your blood, but please don't make me take it like that." I gestured at the ragged, smeared slash on his arm. "It's too much. Put it in a cup or something."
Arthos looked at me, not comprehending.
"Allow me the fantasy of one normal thing on this very abnormal day," I implored, not caring how pathetic I sounded.
"I'm not sure I'll ever understand humans," he said, and moved to the dining room cabinet. I watched as he rooted through the shelves. The pain was ratcheting up again. One taste hadn't been enough, would never be enough now. Saving my life had turned me into the supernatural equivalent of a junkie.
"I'm not human," I said, bitterly. "Not anymore."
"Well, you still sound like one if it makes you feel any better." Arthos was back at my side with a mug in hand.
I peered into it. The contents looked like wet red mud. Utterly unappetizing.
"Drink," Arthos said, pressing mug into my hand.
I frowned, closed my eyes, and swallowed the vampire blood, hoping it would wash my newfound self-loathing down with it. Consuming Arthos' life force had nothing on the ambrosia of drinking from Keel but nevertheless a curative, re-energizing heat spread down my throat into my stomach and then flared outwards into the rest of my torso and limbs. Upon draining the mug and handing it back to Arthos, I felt warm, full, alive and contented. Not empowered like His Majesty's blood made me, but satiated.
I sagged back on the mattress.
"Better?" Arthos asked.
I looked down at the knotted bedsheets, which now bore some new dark dots where Arthos' blood had dripped onto them. "Not sure you can call it that."
"It's easier if you don't allow the hunger to get so bad."
"Oh, really?" The churning need in my stomach might have lifted, but exasperation was quick to take its place. "So tell me, what exactly am I supposed to do? Walk around here biting vampires? You don't think that's going to be a wee bit problematic?"
Arthos' voice stayed calm and even. It only made me madder. "Nothing formal has been discussed," he said, "but I suspect you'll be assigned a bleeder, as the rest of us are. Yours will just be a little different."
"And what Nosferatu is going to sign up for that and not eat me in the process?"
A troubled look swept across Arthos' face, and it had a pacifying effect on my anger.
"What is it? What haven't you told me?" I asked.
"I think your fears are irrational."
"Oh yeah, why is that?"
There was a weighty pause and I got the impression that I wasn't going to like whatever Arthos said next. "You smell different now. There is still some of that magical sweetness, but you also smell like one of us."
"I know," I said, remembering how my blood had smelled when I'd cut my finger on my tooth, then I realized exactly what had been off since Arthos' arrival. I no longer registered his telltale stink. I inhaled deeply, even leaning towards him while I did so - nothing. My horror grew. "Wait, I smell like musty, decaying dirt?"
Arthos laughed, but it was a flat sound. "No, not to the same degree, but our refined noses can tell."
"Can humans tell? Can my father tell?" Worry pitched my voice up half an octave and the questions came out shotgun fast.
"I don't think so."
I exhaled. That was something, at least. "It's like I woke up in bizarro-land and I can't wrap my head around any of it."
"No one expects you to," he said.
"Really? That doesn't sound very Nosferatu to me. Patience? Not exactly big with you guys."
"It's been less than twenty-four hours since you woke up, and while you were coalescing, several of our lessons and history books have been rendered obsolete. You are not the only one playing catch-up."
"What are you talking about?" I said. "Is this part of the stuff that Keel and my father didn't want to tell me?"
"It's not that they didn't want to tell you, Mildred, they want to give you time to process things."
"Well, you can't just say history has changed, and then leave it at that," I said. "Tell me, Arthos. Help me understand. Please."
He gave me an assessing look, which I met head on. Then he shifted himself into a more comfortable position on the edge of Keel's bed, and started talking. "A Nosferatu king has wielded magic. It is no longer the stuff of myth and legend, no longer a matter of hypothesis and failed experimentation, and it has happened here in our compound." Something flickered in my memory, a freeze-frame of Keel standing over me, arm outstretched, my shield - our shield - blazing and rippling out in a fireball before him.
"He killed them."
"Yes, and if he hadn't I'm not sure any of us would be here today to have this conversation. Nosferatu can survive gunshot wounds that would kill humans, but if we're shot in the head or the heart, there's no recovering from that."
"And no one expected or prepared for guns, because they are forbidden, even to royals."
"Exactly," Arthos said. "It's good to see that you remember your studies. But you don't have to worry about that anymore. There won't be any further attempts on His Majesty's life. In fact, the Grand Council has made a case for our king's elevation to their ranks, but he's thus far refused their offers. And justly so, he's got the full, unconditional support of enclaves as far abroad as Asia and Eastern Europe. He could make a claim for the Grand Chancellor position and probably obtain it. Simply put, what Keel did in that hallway has made him the most powerful vampire in modern history."
I could hear Garstatt's voice in my head, all his warnings about how the bond gifts power and how we must be careful how we use it. Through me, Keel was acquiring everything his father always wanted, and I wondered what that would do to him. And even as I did, I felt guilty, because I was fearing the worst about the one who had just saved my life.
"Are you okay?" Arthos asked.
He'd been waiting for me to say something, but I wasn't sure there were any words to respond to what he had just told me. Keel was the most powerful vampire in the world? Keel? The same Keel who had been in bed with me and placed that fluffy black robe around my shoulders? That Keel? What did that even mean: most powerful vampire in the world? Is that why my father had agreed to come? My brain refused to make sense of any of it.
"Sorry," I said, "I have so many questions."
"Understandable, but I think the rest of them should wait. I'm not the one who should be answering them."
"I get it," I said, letting him off the hook. It was best delayed until my worldview had righted a bit anyway. Its drunken sailor antics had left me with a throbbing headache that had nothing to do with hunger.
"Is Bruce, my father's assistant, here?" I asked.
"He is," Arthos said.
"Can you get him for me?"