House of Ravens (22 page)

“
You recreated what Cyrus
made to turn himself,” I breathe in realization.

Henry nods. “It wasn’t easy to test—it’s
taken me years of research, and the ultimate test subject was
myself. I wasn’t really even sure if it truly worked until that
night the Bitten broke into my home.”

“
So you really might have
died?” I ask in horror that he would take such a risk.

“
I’d done other tests,”
Henry says, attempting to sound reassuring. “None to that scale
yet, but I was fairly certain it would work.”

“
Fairly,” I grumble under
my breath, shaking my head.

“
In science, sometimes
that’s all you can ask for,” he says, raising an eyebrow. I find
myself mirroring the action.

“
I have to say, you don’t
strike me as the scientific type,” I say. “When and why did you get
into all of this?”

Something instantly darkens
in his eyes, and it’s a fearful and sad thing. “The
why
is not an answer you
want to hear. Some secrets need to be kept to myself, I’m afraid.
But the
when
is a
simple answer of: a long time ago.”

It makes me sad, knowing that Henry will
never tell me all of his secrets. Parts of him will always be a
stranger to me. But we are all individuals, and we have to keep our
identities.

“
Okay,” I accept, because I
have to.

I slide my hand into my back pocket and pull
out the picture of Rath. I study it for a moment, trying to make
out the grainy details, drawing so many conclusions; only none of
them make sense to me.

“
Can you tell me this one?”
I ask, turning the image around for him to see.

His eyes narrow and he reaches out to take
the photograph. As he studies it, I see the many years flash across
his eyes. There’s a big, great story here. One I’ve been dying to
know since I stepped foot in this house.

“
I see you found all of
Rath’s old photographs,” Henry says as he takes a seat at one of
the tables, continuing to stare at the picture. “He was so
fascinated when I brought the huge, bulky thing home. He took so
many pictures for me. He was so timid when he asked me to take a
picture of him.”

A small smile begins to form on his lips,
but he keeps it carefully controlled.

“
Henry, that picture had to
be taken before 1875,” I say quietly as I roll another chair over
to sit in front of my father. “I know Rath isn’t a Born, but how is
he still alive?”

Henry’s eyes finally rise to meet mine, and
I see the hesitance there. The conflict. The regret.

He lets out a deep breath and lays the
picture on the tabletop beside the microscope. “You know our
country was a very different place in the seventeen hundreds. I
built this House at the end of the eighteenth century, and with the
start of the plantation, slaves were just an accepted reality,
however much I hated the concept.”

I’m not sure I want to hear the truth of
this story. To hear Rath’s past that is suddenly becoming too real
and uncomfortable.

“
In 1823, there was a slave
auction and I attended. There was a young man there, not quite
twenty years old. He was brought forth a bloody mess. He’d been
whipped brutally, to the point I wasn’t sure how he was still
standing.”

“
I’ve seen his scars,” I
suddenly recall. On a morning where I needed to speak to him
immediately, I stormed into his room, and he’d nearly killed me on
startled instinct. He’d climbed from his bed with no shirt on, to
reveal a crisscross mess of pale scar tissue on his chest and
back.

Henry nods. “He was in bad shape. But the
look in his eyes. I’ve not seen that kind of darkness and
hopelessness in a very long time. It was apparent in them that he
was giving up hope, and I could not blame him.”

Emotion thickens Henry’s words; his eyes
grow distant and foggy. “I bought him and brought him home to the
plantation. With the other workers’ help, we nursed him back to
health. I asked him his name every day for two weeks, but he
wouldn’t say a word to me. He would only stare up at the ceiling in
anger, as if he was willing himself to die.”

Tears spring into my eyes and my own throat
chokes up. It’s so hard to imagine. My father’s strong, rock-solid
right hand man, giving up on living.

“
But he healed,” Henry
continues. “He wouldn’t ever say a word to me, but he did work.
Harder than anyone I’d ever had. He went home to the workers’ house
every night, and for a while, I did not see him much because of our
alternating schedules.”

It’s hard to imagine, how my father managed
to run a plantation when back then, he didn’t have any sun
goggles.

“
I asked him his name,
every time I saw him, for months,” my father says, touching his
fingers to the image. “And I talked to him. He would never respond
, but it didn’t matter. I just told him stories. Of my short time
in Boston. Of my life in England. My travels. I talked to him about
my brother. Never telling him of my night patterns, what I was. But
I just talked.”

I lean an elbow on the table, resting my
head in my hand, so engrossed in this story I’ve been dying to
hear.

“
I wasn’t even sure he was
listening for a long time.” Henry does that little, nearly
soundless chuckle. “I thought perhaps he was just…tuning me out.
But something changed, slowly. He wasn’t so stiff whenever he was
around me. He didn’t always look at me like he wanted to kill
me.”

Henry’s eyes fall and he grows quiet for
quite some time. He grabs a pen from the table and twirls it
between his thumb and forefinger. It’s so very apparent. This is
not an easy story for my father to tell.

“
Then one day, he did
something, that, were I human, would have saved my life. He didn’t
know it at the time, but I would have survived. But he risked his
own life to save mine.” The emotion once more grows thick in his
voice. “He didn’t even hesitate.”

Henry suddenly smacks the pen back down on
the table and I jump, so enraptured in his story that I didn’t see
it coming.

“
The next day when I asked
him his name, he replied that it was Rath,” Henry says as he looks
up and finally meets my eyes. “Nothing more. No explanation. Not at
the time. But I didn’t miss it. Rath of the Conrath
plantation.”

As I always suspected, Rath’s name is indeed
a formation of my father’s surname.

“
Over the next few years,
Rath would become more and more valuable to me, both in business
and friendship. He helped me run the plantation. He was smart.
Organized. He grew into himself as a man, as my most trusted
friend, rivaling Elijah. He was so much more to me than a slave. He
was essential to the success of the plantation.”

Henry swivels in his chair, facing the
refrigerators, crossing his arms over his chest. “He had no idea
this lab was built with the house,” he continues. “He had no idea
that I was researching anything, where I disappeared to for hours
during the day when I could not go outside into the light.”

Hard lines form on his face, and I feel his
anger rising like it is a tangible thing that just leaked into the
room.

“
When Rath was
approximately twenty-eight years old, a mob showed up at the house,
in the bright daylight of the afternoon.” He clenches his teeth
tight, his words coming out as a hiss. Henry suddenly stands,
shoving his hands into his pockets, standing with his back to me.
“They came up with a lie that he’d forced himself upon one of the
young ladies in town. But it had been brewing for weeks. They
didn’t like the freedoms I granted him and the other workers. They
said Rath needed to be put back in his place.”

A cold sick settles into the pit of my
stomach. The reality of the South’s history is so bleak. Too
difficult to swallow.

“
They dragged him into the
middle of a field while I was down here in the lab. I couldn’t hear
a thing. There were a dozen of them. They beat Rath within an inch
of his life.”

Henry suddenly grabs an empty beaker from a
shelf and hurls it across the lab, where it shatters against a
wall, glass spraying to the floor.

“
I found him over an hour
after they’d all left,” he says, his voice low and even. “The
blood… There was too much of it. It was obvious—my best friend, my
brother, he was going to die.”

Henry sinks into his chair once more, his
head hanging in his hands. “I couldn’t stand to lose him. So, I did
the only thing I could to save his life.”

“
You bit him,” I say. “You
turned him.”

Henry nods his head, and the way his
shoulders sag, it is as if it is a physical weight upon them.
“Yes,” he confirms.

Several long moments pass and I let my
father have his silence.

“
He recovered,” Henry
continues. “Hours later, he woke up, thirsty, his eyes yellow. So
utterly confused. He fed, and I told him everything. The truth that
I had been hiding from him for nearly a decade.”

Poor Rath. Awakening with a thirst he could
not understand.

And a Debt he would do anything to
honor.

“
He tried to forgive me. To
adapt to his new state of being,” Henry says as he looks up. His
eyes are bloodshot, and I swear they’ve aged twenty years just in
the last few minutes. “But it was there in his eyes. He hated
everything he was. That he had been given no choice in it. And that
he no longer truly had any free will.”

I lay a hand on my father’s shoulder, trying
to comfort him, knowing I will fail. But still. This is my family,
and his pain is so obvious.

“
For the next five years, I
worked on a cure,” Henry says. His voice is rough, angry.
Frustrated. “I tested so many different serums. I turned over a
dozen innocent people, all in the quest to find a cure for my
friend.”

Henry stands and walks to the fridge. He
opens a door, and reaches for the vials labeled BC COMPLETE.

“
Bitten cure,” I
whisper.

Henry nods, turning the vial over in his
hands, over and over. “But I was selfish. The dose I gave Rath
contained not just the cure, but what I thought was the key to the
Born’s immortality. I couldn’t stand to lose him again.”

I find myself on my feet, my brain racing a
million miles an hour. “But he’s still aging,” I fill in. “Very,
very slowly, but that’s why he looks younger in the picture than he
does now.”

I grab it off the table and study it again.
In the image, he looks to be in his younger thirties, it’s a little
hard to tell. But now, Rath looks like he’s around forty.

“
Yes,” Henry confirms. “He
is no longer a vampire. He does not thirst for blood. But he is
stronger, faster, more aware than your average human. And twenty
years to him is like one to a human.”

“
That’s amazing,” I say
breathlessly as I look over at Henry. “Cyrus said he was a unique
being, but I had no idea.”

He nods, his eyes sad. “Rath eventually
forgave me, and the wounds healed. Though, I will say I have not
forgiven myself.”

Something settles into the back of my mind,
and one more puzzle piece falls into place.

When Cyrus was here, in my House, he made me
play a game. He presented two people who he said had betrayed me,
and said someone had to die.

While I was still getting my thirst under
control, I accidentally created a Bitten named Danielle. Instead of
killing Trinity or Luke like Cyrus tried to manipulate me into
doing, I killed her.

An innocent girl, turned because of me.

Just moments later, Rath told me he was
resigning and leaving me.

He had seen the monster I had become. Me
killing someone who was turned against her will and knowledge, just
as he had been, was the last straw for him.

“
We all make mistakes,”
Henry whispers, drawing me back into the lab.

“
Yes, we do.” I’ve made so,
so many of them.

I bite my lower lip, pushing down the bad
memories that I cannot change. “If Rath never knew about the lab,
about all of your work down here, how did he think you cured
him?”

Henry folds his arms across his chest, his
eyes dropping away. “I told him I procured it from Court, that
Cyrus had people working on all kinds of things in that castle of
his. Which isn’t a full lie.”

I can imagine, now that I’ve been witness to
the truth of the castle’s underbelly.

I lay the picture back down, so saddened by
Rath’s tragic story, but also so satisfied to finally know the
truth. The mystery of Rath solved.

“
You said your life was in
danger,” I move on. “Because of your work. Why?”

Henry looks up at me, and the relief is
evident on his face at getting to move on from such an emotional
topic. He goes to the last bins, the last vials. He reaches in,
grabbing one and holding it up, its acid green color reflecting in
the dim light.

“
Because of this,” he says
as he hands me the vial.

“
What is it?” I ask.
There’s something that crawls under my skin. A very real and
instinctual reaction in my body knows—this stuff is dangerous. I
hand it back to Henry immediately, glad to be rid of it.

“
It’s a cure,” he says,
replacing it in the fridge. He turns back to me and removes his
gloves. “For any kind of vampirism. Even mine. Even King
Cyrus’.”

The lab grows very quiet and cold.
Electricity sparks in the air and my heart begins to race.