Veils Of Eternity

Chapter 22

​The plastic tasted of stagnant water and old pennies. Cassius flung the empty IV bag across the room, watching it hit the floral wallpaper of their Manchester flat with a wet thwack.

​"It is not enough," he spat, his voice a jagged rasp. "I am a shadow of myself, Chloe. My limbs feel as though they are filled with wet sand. This... this filtered refuse is for the dying, not the living."

​Chloe didn't look up from her laptop, though her typing had slowed. It was a Saturday in late August, the kind of heavy, humid afternoon where the air felt like a damp wool blanket. "It’s safe, Cassius. Safe doesn't always taste good. If you go out there and take from someone, you leave a trail. A trail leads to a body, and a body leads to Beatrice."

​"Beatrice is a ghost across an ocean!" Cassius roared, his sudden movement so fast it was a blur. He was standing over her now, his eyes no longer the warm brown of a "sibling," but a burning, predatory gold. The lapis lazuli on his finger seemed to pulse with a dark light. "I am a knight of the Carcassonne. I was not meant to skulk in a brick box drinking the dregs of a hospital’s waste."

​"Sit down, Cassius," Chloe said, her voice steady despite the hammer of her heart.

​He didn't sit. Instead, he turned and vanished into the hallway. The front door clicked shut before she could even stand up.

​Three hours passed. The sun dipped below the jagged horizon of Manchester’s chimneys, and the Saturday night revelry began to bleed into the streets—the distant sirens, the shouts of drunks, the thrum of bass from passing cars.

​When the door finally opened again, the air in the flat changed instantly. It smelled of ozone, rain, and the unmistakable, metallic tang of fresh, hot copper.

​Cassius stepped into the kitchen light. He looked... magnificent. The grey fatigue had vanished from his skin, replaced by a terrifying, porcelain glow. His hair was windblown, and his eyes were dark and satiated. But there was a smear of crimson on the collar of his charcoal sweater.

​"You did it," Chloe said, standing up, her hands trembling. "You went out. You hunted."

​"I took what was required," he said, his English smoother, fueled by the potency of the kill. "A man in an alleyway. A thief who was busy accosting another. I did not kill him, Chloe of the Blue. I merely took my tithe."

​"You risked everything for a 'tithe'?" Chloe’s voice rose, the fear she’d been suppressed for hours exploding into anger. "We are supposed to be invisible! Do you think the police here won't notice a man found drained of half his blood? You’re not in the 13th century anymore! There are cameras, Cassius! There are DNA samples!"

​"Then let them come!" Cassius stepped toward her, his presence overwhelming the small room. "I am tired of hiding like a rat! I am tired of being 'Caspian,' the sickly brother. Do you know who I was? Do you have any inkling of the blood that actually flows in these veins?"

​"I know you’re a vampire who’s going to get us caught!"

​"I was a man of the House of Valois!" he bellowed, the force of his voice rattling the dishes in the sink. He stopped, his chest heaving, the anger suddenly curdling into a bitter, ancient grief. He sank into the wooden chair, the modern world seeming to shrink around him.

​Chloe stayed silent, the air between them thick and electric. She watched him, waiting for the storm to pass, but the look in his eyes wasn't rage anymore. It was memory.

​"I was twenty-two," he began, his voice dropping to a haunting, melodic cadence. He wasn't looking at her; he was looking through the walls of the flat, back across eight hundred years of dust. "The year was 1214. The sun was different then, Chloe. It was a golden fire that didn't just light the world—it blessed it. My father, Count Robert, held the lands near the Aude river. We were not kings, but we were the pillars upon which the south stood."

​He leaned back, his long fingers tracing the edge of the table as if feeling the grain of a long-lost shield.

​"I remember my youth as a fever of green and blue. My brother, Julian, and I would ride through the vineyards at dawn, the grapes still heavy with the night’s mist. I was the second son, the one meant for the sword while Julian was meant for the seat of power. My mother... she smelled of lavender and expensive oils brought from the East. She would sit in the solar, weaving tapestries of battles she hoped we would never fight."

​Cassius smiled, a ghost of a real, human expression. "I was vain. I loved the weight of my armor. I loved the way the village girls would whisper when we rode through the gates after a hunt. My life was a straight line—I would serve my brother, I would marry a daughter of a neighboring house, and I would die with my honors intact and my soul in the hands of the Church. I had a betrothed... Elodie. Her hair was the color of wheat in July."

​Chloe sat across from him, her anger forgotten, drawn into the gravity of his words. This wasn't the "Asset." This was a boy who had lost the sun.

​"But the world began to rot," Cassius continued, his eyes darkening. "The Crusade against the Albigensians... the Pope’s men came with fire and cross. They didn't care who was a heretic and who was a believer; they only cared for the land. My father refused to open the gates to the crusaders. He said our people were our own, regardless of how they prayed. That was the beginning of the end for the House of Valois."

​He looked at his hands—the hands that had just fed on a man in a Manchester alley.

​"The night of the siege, the air was thick with the smell of burning wood and horse sweat. We were winning. We were holding the walls. I was on the ramparts, my sword notched and heavy, when I saw him. He wasn't a soldier. He moved like a shadow through the chaos, wearing the white robes of a monk, but his eyes... they were the eyes I have now."

​Cassius shivered, a violent tremor that shook his broad shoulders.

​"He didn't attack the soldiers. He came for the blood of the lineage. He found me in the courtyard, near the well where the lilies grew. I thought I could strike him down. I thought my training, my strength, my 'noble' blood would matter."

​He stopped, his voice catching. He reached out and gripped Chloe’s hand, his hold almost painfully tight. The fresh blood he had consumed made his skin feel unnaturally warm, a terrifying mimicry of life.

​"He didn't kill me, Chloe. He knelt over me while the castle burned, and he whispered that the world was too small for a soul like mine to simply rot in the dirt. He told me I was being 'elevated.' And then... then the teeth came."

​Cassius’s eyes snapped to hers, the gold light within them flaring.

​"But you must understand something," he whispered, his face inches from hers. "The monk didn't just turn me. He left me in that burning courtyard to watch my family die. I lay there, my body screaming as it died and rebuilt itself, and I watched Julian be run through by a spear. I watched my mother... I watched the fire take the lavender and the silk. I was twenty-two, and I was the only thing left of my name. But I wasn't a man anymore. I was a scream wrapped in a new, cold skin."

​He went silent, the weight of the story hanging in the air like a shroud. Chloe went to speak, to offer some comfort, but Cassius held up a finger, his head tilting toward the window.

​The sound was faint—a high-pitched, rhythmic whirring.

​Chloe frowned. "What is that? A drone?"

​"No," Cassius said, his voice turning ice-cold as he stood up, his senses sharpened to a lethal edge by the fresh blood. "Drones have a pulse. This... this is a signal. A frequency."

​He walked to the kitchen counter and picked up the small, plastic trash bag Chloe had used for the grocery scraps. He tore it open, searching through the wrappers and receipts.

​From the bottom of the bag, he pulled out a small, translucent blue sticker—the kind used for pricing at the city-center chemist where Chloe had gone to buy her hair dye that morning.

​Hidden on the underside of the sticker was a microscopic, silver thread. It was pulsing.

​"They didn't need the coin, Chloe," Cassius whispered, his face pale despite the blood. "They have been waiting for you to touch something they owned."

​Outside, the streetlights flickered and died. The silence of the Manchester night was suddenly broken by the heavy, synchronized thud of boots hitting the pavement.