“You were never traitors,” Jin whispered. “You—you were prisoners.”
His parents said nothing. His father shifted, ever so slightly, and Jin could smell him. He could smell thememories, which was the strangest feeling he’d ever experienced. He smelled like comfort and coconuts. He smelled like Spindrift, a connection Jin had never made before.
His father exhaled long and slow. “No, Jin. The vampires are prisoners. Outside of our imprisonment, we’ve lived with somesemblance of freedom within these walls the past several years, but given the chance, we can’t—we couldn’t leave them behind. Even without you to protect, we would have undertaken this project. For them. The Ram made plenty of threats. You were the first, yes, but after a while, it became clear to the monarch that we”—he stopped and looked away again—“we would risk our son in order to save the lives of countless vampires and the humans they’d kill. Then the threats moved to other things, our notes being shared to other scientists who would do better, our in-progress theories tested as rigorously as the Ram wished.”
He stopped with a sob.
“In order to prevent one evil, we committed our own,” he whispered.
What?Jin wanted to ask. There was something weighing on him, something he wasn’t telling Jin, and Jin couldn’t bring himself to ask. How had he expected a ten-year ordeal to be clear-cut, black-and-white, bad and not?
His parents spoke with care for the vampires—they always had. His father’s work had involved bettering life for both the living and the undead, even when Jin was a boy. The coconuts scattered throughout their house had been proof of that. He couldn’t believe that had changed, despite everything else that might have. He had worried they had, after the numerous changes he himself had gone through, but some things remained, didn’t they?
Jin rose to his feet, wishing he wasn’t so numb, so strangely hollow.
The image of his parents the morning before the fire was still seared so vividly into his mind that it was odd to see them like this. Older, wearier, the world weighing on their shoulders. He felt like he’d walked into a fortune teller’s tent and stared into her glass ball. Only he wouldn’t walk out of here snorting at her con. This was real.
He swallowed everything: his emotions, his questions, his thoughts. “Grab your keys.”
His father blinked up at him, his eyes wet, confusion furrowing his brow. “Whatever for?”
Jin nudged the still-unconscious guards with the toe of his shoe. “To meet my sister.”
23ARTHIE
Arthie tensed when Matteo gripped her arm as footsteps echoed down the quiet hall, but when she pulled her dagger back through the cell bars and listened, she recognized that gait. That cocksure stride.
Jin came into view in the dim light, and Arthie scoured his face, looking for blood-streaked skin, carnage-bright eyes, fisted hands. Instead, he looked calm and collected. Safe.
And he was holding a key.
“Did you hit your head?” she asked.
Jin flashed a grin, and if she closed her eyes on that sight, she could have imagined she was back in Spindrift, but then she saw his gaze. Haunted.
“Hello, sister,” he said quietly.
He shoved the key into the lock and turned it. He didn’t look to see if guards were present, he didn’t look ready to mutilate anyone in sight, and as the cell door swung open, Arthie saw two figures behind him.
The man was tall, trim, his dark hair streaked in white. Everything about him was exactly like Jin, but older. It was a surreal sight. But when Arthie looked at the woman, she saw where Jin got his crooked smile, the clever sparkle in his eyes, the jokester in his blood.
His parents.
Arthie stepped into the hall, Matteo right behind her, setting a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t know what it was about the touchthat calmed her—any other time, she would have shaken it off and hissed at him for patronizing her.
His parents looked at her, and she at them.
“This isn’t the place,” Jin said in the expectant silence. Arthie couldn’t read him, and it sent a lash of fear through her. What had he learned?
He led the four of them to a room that was wide and looming, with a certain hollowness that echoed like a tomb. Jin’s father closed the doors behind them, and Arthie tensed when the lock fell shut.
“Jin,” she hissed.
“It’s all right,” he said. “This is where they brought me in.”
She turned to face the approaching footsteps.
“A Ceylani girl with fairy-floss hair. You’re the Casimir girl,” Jin’s father said in a voice that was both elegant and inquisitive, altogether a combination that made it one people would want to listen to.
