“If anyone would save us, it would be you,” his mother said, sitting down on a chair and gesturing for Jin to do the same. “We’d long wondered if anyone even knew where we were. We had hoped Penn would come for us. Do you remember him?”
Jin rubbed at his chafed wrists and sat. He tried to, anyway. He appeared to have forgotten how to do the simplest of things, struck with the surrealness of this moment. His fangs had finally slipped away but threatened to come out in full force again.
He toyed with the clove rock in his pocket, remembering Penn’s visits when he would toss them his way.
“He’s how I learned you were here. He’s… dead now,” Jin said. Whatever plans Penn had wanted to enact, aid or otherwise, had died with him.
His father’s eyes widened in surprise before his face fell.
Jin glanced at the mostly empty room, immediately suspicious again. “Can we sit like this? Won’t the captain or someone come in?”
Jin’s father looked at the unconscious guards and shook his head. “The doors are locked, but they rarely come in here, particularly when we’re working.” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “They’re afraid.”
Washeafraid ofJin?
He thought of the captain likening him to not being human. Jin had worked with vampires for a good portion of his life—not counting Arthie herself, of course—and he’d never seen them as anythingbuthuman. He might have held them to different standards and understood that standing before one was always a risk, but wasn’t that the case with a human too? He had simply fancied himself stronger than most of the living then, or at the very least, skilled enough to outsmart one.
Jin glanced at the locked doors. They had time for an interrogation. Good. Especially with Arthie and Matteo safely locked away in a cell. Jin didn’t want to risk taking his parents to them, not yet.
“I can’t believe Penn is dead,” his father whispered. “He was a good man. A good leader. Is the Athereum still standing?”
It was promising to hear his father refer to Penn as a good man. How much of Ettenian affairs did his parents know? Not much, he supposed, if his father was asking about the Athereum.
“It is. One of his closest friends has taken up the mantle,” Jin said.
“You know quite a bit about all of this,” his father said, tilting his head.
Because at some point in time, he and Arthie had wriggled their way into the center of everything, but Jin said nothing. He was keeping his answers to a minimum, holding back any information that could be used against him and Arthie and everything they aimed to do: like destroy the pillars holding up his parents’ boss.
He winced at that.
They sat in silence. Jin could almost hear thetick, tick, tick, of the seconds passing by. He was torn between wanting to tell his parents he needed to rescue Arthie and Matteo from the cells and not knowing if mentioning them was a death sentence. Was stunning two guards unconscious enough reason to trust his parents?
He was encased in ice, numb to feeling.
“When you were a boy, you would fold into yourself when something was amiss and you didn’t want to speak your mind,” his father said. “You’re doing that now, Jin.”
“H—how can I trust you?” Jin blurted out. He wished he had his umbrella, for comfort, but that only made him scoff because he’d carried it around for the comfort of his father. “That captain said you wanted more vampires to test on. What would you have done to me if I wasn’t your son?”
His mother opened her mouth to answer, but Jin cut her off. “From the beginning. Unless we have to worry about your guards coming in to check on us.”
She nodded. “No, no. We don’t. From the beginning, of course. Unlike many, our work involved the welfare of both humans and vampires. We weren’t strangers to criticism and angry folk, but when Penn warned us that the Ram had eyes on us, I almost want to say that we didn’t believe it. And then a decade ago, we discovered that liquid silver could be formulated and used in vaccines and other protections against viruses and the like.”
“For humans, mind you,” Jin’s father added.
“Yes,” his mother said. “Shortly after, the Ram came to us promising more duvin than we’d ever seen. Silver has long been known to be detrimental to vampires. ‘If the silver can help humans, it can do the opposite on vampires, yes?’ but the question itself left us little room for escape. If we answered yes, the Ram would demand our services. If we answered no, we knew the Ram wouldn’t let us or you live.”
You. Jin had always known his parents had been stolen from their home, but he couldn’t bask in the satisfaction of being right, not when their words brought a lingering question to the forefront of Jin’s mind: Had his parents become traitors to protect him?
“When we wavered, the Ram burned down the estate.”
The Ram had done the same to him and Arthie when they had wavered, too, hadn’t she? When they’d kept the ledger one day too long, she had burned down Spindrift. The woman wasn’t very creative.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Jin asked.
“Who would we tell?” his mother asked. “We were imprisoned, shuffled from place to place with such randomness that we dared to hope we were close to being found. The Ram wanted the inoculation refined for use on vampires, and it was a back-and-forth battle with us losing a little more every time. Sometimes tortured, sometimes starved. We had no way of ensuring you were safe, no way of reaching any of our contacts. Even if we did have a soul to speak to that wasn’t a part of the Ram’s cohort, who would trust the word of a pair of scientists, albeit with high standing, against the monarch’s?”
“That must have persisted for—what, three years, perhaps?” his father asked.
