Unfinished Business
Rise returned to a world of silence and grey. Shadows and hints of other places, perhaps dreamscapes or one-walked halls, plagued his gaze when he opened his eyes. He lay shackled in manacles upon a dilapidated wooden floor, wearing nondescript, navy clothes. A protection spell hummed faintly along a far-flung boundary of many acres. Dust thick on the air. The ceiling arched into an elegant point of dull wood. The world lay silent.
Rise strove to listen, to hear anything, the hunger for human blood noticeably absent from his veins. Gone also was the brute bite to his neck. Had the blasts at Owl Court damaged his hearing? Had that zombie bite awoken him a changed creature, like Ogrim? Rise gingerly sat up. His eyes betrayed him again, making him think he was in a great hall before a sandstone dais. Rise shook his head, bothered, until he took proper stock of his surroundings: he sat upon a ragged army blanket on the highest floor of a stone tower. Grey sky hung beyond the tower’s window opposite him, the day not even casting a glum shadow. The roots of this tower, its walls, they held no salt. Flashes came of Owl Court’s red bricks. Not a plant in sight, Rise noted of his narrow, circular prison. Cypriot’s greenery, the sheer lack of it, for Rise to see only lifeless grey clawed at his heart. Rattled by such despair, his eyes begged to take him to new places. His bones felt like they housed ghosts.
“Cypriot!” he called into the dim room. “Cypriot?” Rise strained his ears. When nothing came in return, nothing at all, Rise sent his hearing abroad. Nothing. Whatever talent Rise once possessed in hearing others from afar, it was utterly gone. All of his physical wounds were healed, sure, and his soul felt oddly solid: an upright thing, as if he stood in a river, never allowed to cross or continue downstream. He realized now the great, profound emptiness that Ogrim hid until his bitter end.
Rise made it to his feet, staggered towards the window until his shackles strained. Used to nothing holding him back, Rise pulled at his bonds, then harder, harder, until he struggled against the metal like a drowning creature. As he gasped in frustration, he wanted to hear again with that effortless skill: earthworms beneath the soil, the soft shuffle of a nesting bird, anything. Not this deafness. Not this grey solitude.
The tower door opened with an unexpected clang. Rise leapt with fright.
“Where’s Cypriot?” he shouted at the petite, waifish woman who entered, dressed in simple black trousers and shirt, crisp and orderly against the dourness of the cell. Her long, straight hair—equally black—spun into a plain braid against her shoulders. She blinked in surprise at Rise.
“He’s awake.” She relayed this news to someone just outside the door. A large leather-bound book was tucked under her arm. Her sensible black boots clicked on the floor.
Rise startled at the book and for a moment thought that she held his coven’s chronicle. But no, this woman—this human woman, he discerned—only carried an empty notebook, large as it was. She pulled a chest-high table from the far wall. Rise hadn’t even noticed his room’s furniture. A chair also sat opposite, just beneath the sole window. He felt no hunger towards her, not even an inkling to sip her blood.
“Ah, so he is indeed awake. Awakened to our great plan,” Catabar chuckled as she, in swathes of deep red velvet contrasting against her pale skin, entered and slammed the tower door. She crossed the room in a cloud of confidence and rich perfume and sat opposite him.
The slam barely registered in his ears. “Where is Cypriot?” Rise lunged until his taught chains nearly yanked him to the ground. He stumbled, pulled his chains again, drawing upon his deep well of strength ... only to find that empty, too. Straining against his bonds, Rise eventually crumpled to the floor in a heap of quaking limbs and sheer embarrassment. When Ogrim first awakened after being bitten by a zombie brute, were his senses also this dulled? Rise hadn’t asked. Ogrim had acted like everything was fine, until it wasn’t.
“I am Dr. Tseng.” The woman calmly laid her notebook on the high table and pressed the binding open until the spine cracked.
“Rise already knows who I am.” Catabar smirked. “Look at his big, bright eyes. As if seeing the world for the first time.” She nodded to Tseng and, as the doctor noted something at the top of the page, Catabar leaned forward. Still smirking, the room was so gloomy that her vampire stripes slept unseen beneath her skin.
“Yes,” Rise managed to say through gritted teeth as he shuffled into a sitting position, trying not to show how much Catabar’s words annoyed him. Ogrim had been just like that when he’d awoken from his brute bite stupor: all bright eyed. What a lie that’d been. Something danced at the corner of his gaze, but when Rise turned his head, the shadow danced away. Isn’t it all so hopeless? A voice inside him asked. Rise froze at the shadows and voices. He listened, watched for them, but they did not return.
It took a lot, surprisingly a lot, for Rise to drag his senses back to the conversation. He sat up straighter, folding his legs beneath him as he pushed away the weird echoes inside his body. “Yes,” he repeated, concentrating. “And what you did to Owl-”
“Rise?” Dr. Tseng interrupted him in a clear, calm voice. A pen in her small hand to record each and every word. “Can you tell me about your origins, please? About your family, where you were born, the country you grew up in? How were you turned? Into a vampire, I mean. We already know how you came to be ... what you are now.” Tseng glanced to Catabar in hesitation and no small amount of fear.
He glowered at such questions as his heart hammered at their sheer audacity. Rise lifted his chin. “If you think I’ll answer anything … Where’s Cypriot? Salter, Iskar, Annette?”
When neither answered, Rise felt the floor grow cold beneath him. Was Cypriot already dead? His heart thudded deep against his ribs. Rise had always been so confident that he could tell if his love drew breath, but now he could barely sense night from day. Rise swallowed a lump in his throat. The loss of Cypriot would be too great. “Tell me, please-” his voice cracked. He felt like a ship askew after a storm, its damaged hull now a delicacy for the ocean to froth through and drown.
“Rise, where were you born?” Tseng repeated, an edge coming into her voice. She looked at him with a mixture of sternness but also fear. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
Rise stared at the distance between Tseng’s pen nib and her page. He thought the voice in his head might come again, but it remained silent. No shadows either.
“Fuck off,” he managed.
“But you know who sired you?” Tseng said as she glanced to Catabar again, another flash of hesitation across her features.
