Heir of Night by Emily Goodwin

Chapter 39

The door slowly creaks open, stirring me from my sleep. Everything comes crashing down on me.

Last night wasn’t just a nightmare.

It actually happened.

Julian is dead.

“How is she?” Evander asks in a hushed voice.

“As you can expect,” Lucas tells him.

Evander shuffles in the room and sets something on the dresser. The smell of bacon and maple syrup fills the room. My stomach grumbles. Physically, I’m starving. My body needs food, and I’m still recovering from blood loss and my injuries from last night. Mentally, I don’t have it in me to sit up and eat. They move into the hall so they can talk without disturbing me. I want to sink down into the covers and sleep until the pain is gone.

And I don’t mean the pain from my cuts and bruises.

Slowly sitting up, I listen and can hear Lucas and Evander still talking outside the door. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I’m more than aware of my physical needs, with the most pressing being the need to use the bathroom. I pee and quickly wash my hands and hurry to the hall in hopes that Evander is still there.

Both he and Lucas look a little startled when I open the door. The hallway is dark, with all the other doors to the empty guest rooms closed to keep Lucas protected from the sun.

“You’re awake,” Evander exclaims, not sure what else to say to me.

“I am.”

Lucas is dressed in his usual gray sweatpants and white t-shirt that I know Tabatha didn’t bring him. His eyes hold back a mixture of love and concern, and he reaches for me like it’s second nature. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Hungry, but I have no appetite.” I rub my eyes, which are irritated and still swollen from crying. “Did you astral project to the house?” I ask Evander.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And the demons and Horsemen were gone. I had three professors search for demonic activity before we went there.”

“You went there?” I echo. “Who’s ‘we’?”

Evander flicks his gaze to Lucas, and I swat my vampire in the chest. That’s how he got his clothes. He brought them from home. “You went without me?”

“Callie, you were in no position to go last night. You didn’t need to see our home in that condition.”

“Julian?” I rush out, chest tightening.

“We cast a preservation spell on his body,” Evander says softly. “We can bury him once you’re ready.”

The weight of his death pushes down on me again, and I choke back tears. “Thank you.” I swallow hard. “What about the kid?”

“Caleb was still tucked in bed sound asleep from the sleep spell.”

“Good,” I say, and Lucas moves his hand to the small of my back, rubbing my stiff muscles. “And the others?”

“I changed memories of all I could,” Lucas starts. “And sent anyone needing medical attention to the hospital.”

“And we cast a glamour on the house. If anyone steps foot on the property, they’ll see it in pristine condition.”

“What about the bodies?” I don’t want to know, but I have to ask.

“I took care of it,” Lucas tells me, which means everything from burying them deep in the woods or setting it up to look like some sort of animal attack, though that’s not very believable in Thorne Hill.

“I’m, um, going to lie down.” I blink away tears and go back into the room. Lucas follows, shutting the door behind him. He turned on the bathroom light for me at some point last night, lighting the room so I wouldn’t wake in the pitch black.

“You need to eat.” Lucas picks up the tray and brings it to the bed.

“So do you.”

“I’m not drinking your blood,” he says firmly. “I’ll be fine if I sleep for a few hours.”

“You lost a lot of blood, Lucas. Sleep isn’t going to replenish that.”

“I can manage. Vampires can go days or weeks without eating.”

“You need to eat,” I press. “We escaped last night, but the Horsemen and Paimon are still out there. This wasn’t a win for us, Lucas.”

He picks up a glass of orange juice but trades it for water, remembering I’m not a big orange juice fan. My mouth is dry, and my body begs for water. I down the whole glass at once and put it back on the tray.

“I still have you,” Lucas says.

“And I have you.” I pick up a blueberry muffin. Survivor’s guilt is a real thing, and paired with my heart being ripped right out of my chest and crushed into a million pieces, I don’t feel like I deserve anything right now. I force myself to take a bite of the muffin, doing it for my baby, not for me.

“Where do we go from here?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Lucas tries to assure me. “We always do.”

“And we always get out alive, but we didn’t this time.”

Lucas’s face tenses, and he sighs, getting up and taking the empty water glass into the bathroom to fill it up. I make myself eat the rest of the muffin and then lie back down, hugging a pillow to my chest. I don’t cry this time, and the numbness I was feeling earlier starts to eat away at me, making room for guilt.

“It should have been me,” I rasp.

“I will selfishly say I’m glad it wasn’t. And Julian felt the same. He loved you, Callie, and he believed in you. Before he even met you, he believed your life was worth living.”

My throat tightens, and just when I thought I had no tears left to cry, more spring to my eyes. Pressing my face into the pillow, I muffle my sobs. Lucas’s large hand lands on my back, lifting up the t-shirt so he can rub my back.

Binx shadows into the room and curls up with me. I wrap an arm around him, and my tears wet his sleek back fur. And I cry myself to sleep once again.

“Callie?”

A soft knock comes from the door. I sit up, and Lucas’s hand slides off of me. He’s dead asleep, not even stirring from whoever is knocking on the door. He says he’s fine, but I know better. He hadn’t had a lot of blood to drink before he got attacked, and he nearly bled out from being stabbed to the ground by War.

Binx is still wrapped in my arms, and he lazily rolls off my pillow, staying on the bed when I get up, quietly padding to the door. I twist the lock and open the door. Kristy stands in the hall, and her brows push together as soon as she sees me.

“Evander told me what happened,” she squeaks out. I step into the hall and close the door. “I’m so sorry.” Her arms wrap around me, and I lean into her embrace, silently sobbing as I hug my best friend.

“It should have been me,” I croak.

“Don’t say that, Callie.” She pulls away but keeps a hold on her hands. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through last night, but don’t say that. You’re my best friend, and that little girl needs you.”

“She needs to hurry up and be born.” I shakily inhale. “Paimon was going to use the little divinity she has to rule both Heaven and Hell.”

“What?” Kristy’s sky-blue eyes widen. “Would that even work?”

“From what he said.” I put my hand on my stomach, feeling the baby flip-flop around. “Oh, and that same old-as-fuck vampire who showed up that night Ruby was over helping me with demon research invited us to a swanky VC party last night. We were a no-show, of course.”

Kristy gapes at me, not sure what to say. “The one who wants you to join in on a war against humans?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Oh, and it turns out he and Lucas have history. Lucas was friends with Eamon’s brother, who was killed when a British Army dude organized a daylight attack. That’s why he turned Eliza. To avenge this friend.”

Kristy just blinks, at a loss for words. “M-maybe the demons got him.”

I let out a strangled snort of laughter that turns into a sob. “Maybe. If we’re lucky.”

“Hey. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Everyone keeps telling me that. How can I not? I got away, Kristy, but that’s all. We didn’t win. We didn’t stop Paimon or cause the slightest injury to the Horsemen. Julian burned through the ritual, and Lucas is fast. That’s all. We lost. Julian lost.”

“I know it feels that way right now, and I don’t want to try and convince you otherwise. What happened sucks so much, and I’m not here to tell you it’ll be okay and things happen for a reason. I’m just here for you. I love you, Cal.”

“I love you too.” We hug again, and Elena kicks when my stomach is pressed against Kristy.

“Oh! I felt that.”

We break apart, and I put my hands on my stomach. “I think she wants me to eat.”

“I can take you to the staff lounge. The students are still in the great hall. They have class today, but there’s no lingering in the halls,” she says, knowing I don’t want to run into any of my oddly adoring fans right now. “Or I can bring something up.”

“Evander brought me food, but biscuits and gravy sound really good for some reason.”

“Then let’s go to the kitchen and make some.” She squeezes my hand.

“I’m going to tell Lucas first. He’s sleeping. He, um, he lost a lot of blood last night and won’t drink from me.”

I can see the mental debate going on inside Kristy’s head by her facial expressions. “He can have mine.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know. I want to. Sister Celeste can fill a few vials. It’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing, right?”

“You’d really do that for him?”

“For you both. We could really use someone fast, strong, and immortal on our side right now. Let’s eat first. The last time I donated blood, I almost passed out.”

“And that,”Ruby says, voice ringing out through a large classroom of first-year students that we just passed by, “is why we don’t mix lavender with sandalwood.” The students all murmur in agreement, shocked to find out that mixing the two is a good way to accidentally summon something. Though if one or two of them in there is like me, they’re going to go back to their room and try it.

It’s nearing three p.m., and Ruby is finishing her last class of the day. After eating breakfast with Kristy in the staff lounge, I went outside to visit Scarlet with Binx, Freya, and Pandora. They get me, no questions asked, and I spent a good few hours outside on the school grounds crying and thinking about how fucked up everything is.

It still weighs on my mind as I make my way back to the room—to Lucas. Kristy, true to her word, went to the infirmary and had Sister Celeste take her blood for him. He looks better, not quite as pale as before, and the life is back in his eyes—so to speak, that is.

“Hi.” I close and lock the door. “Sorry I left you alone for so long.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Lucas says. He’s sitting at the little table near the window. The bathroom light is off, and it’s dark in the room. A tiny bit of light glows around the thick curtains, giving just enough light for me to see.

“You had to be bored up here.” I take my shoes off and go to the bed.

“I had Evander bring me a few books to look through.” The chair scoots out, and he stands, turning on the lamp on the dresser. “When I went to the house last night, I noticed something I hadn’t before.”

“More bodies?”

“No, those I had noticed. The books Julian had been looking at.” Lucas picks up a scroll of paper and brings it to me. “Look familiar?”

“No,” I say, scanning a copy of some sort of Ancient Egyptian drawing of a boat in a fuzzy-looking lake.

“Hieroglyphs were before my time,” Lucas goes on. “I’ve been translating a translation, which is tricky because words have different meanings when translated certain ways. Regardless, this is a lake of fire that guards a gate to the underworld.” I lean in, needing more light than what the small lamp on the dresser offers. I extend my hand to summon a string of light but stop.

Something in the drawing does look familiar. The water isn’t fuzzy. It’s the lake of fire.

Blue hellfire.