House of Ravens (27 page)

My eyes catch the movement of the lens as it
constricts, blocking out the harsh sun rays. The darkness of the
actual lens catches the worst of the light.

My eyes don’t burn. My brain isn’t
exploding. I’m not in pain.

All I feel is the warm, comforting
sunlight.

A laugh bubbles up from my chest. It gains,
until I’m nearly hysterical. Slowly, the House members walk
outside, too. Each of them cautious and unsure. And then laughing,
spinning in circles in the sun.

This changes things.

This will be our advantage.

This will help us win.

“
SOMEONE IS COMING,” ANNA
SAYS, suddenly looking over her shoulder to the gates of the
property.

I turn away from the beautiful sunlight, my
eyes searching the horizon. I hear every one of the House members
drop into a crouch, ready to spring and attack. Ready to kill.

The sound of shuffling feet travels to my
ears first. Slowly, a head of gray hair comes into view. Followed
by the most wrinkled face I’ve ever seen.

“
Lula?”

I’m down the drive in an instant. I wrap my
arm under hers, helping to support her as she struggles to walk up
the drive. She wears a nightgown, her hair in a messy, frayed braid
down her back. Her feet are covered in filthy, nearly worn-out
slippers.

“
Lula, what are you doing
here?” I ask as I just bend down and pick her right up, carrying
her back to the house. “Nial, help!” I yell.

I carry her across the threshold and set her
in a chair in the library. Anna darts inside and drags Francesca’s
body out, leaving a small smear of blood.

“
Damn vampires ruinin’
everything in sight,” Lula mumbles, barely comprehensible as Nial
checks her over. “Shoulda’ run…” she struggles to breathe, but her
eyes rise up past my shoulder, “you right outta town…long
ago.”

I look back to see Henry standing behind me.
His serious eyes burn into Lula, but there’s an expression on his
face that I can’t place and one I can’t quite understand. Terror.
Regret. Realization, maybe.

“
None of this woulda’
happened if you hadn’t saved…” Lula again struggles for breath.
“Her.”

“
Henry,” I say, looking
over my shoulder. “What is she talking about?”

But he doesn’t get a chance to answer
because suddenly, Elle comes running down the stairs. “Lula?” she
says, frantic. She instantly drops to her knees before her
grandmother, taking her hands in hers. “Lula, what are you doin’
here?”

Lula places her hands on either side of her
granddaughter’s face. While she’s been nothing but cold and cruel
to me, the look of love on her face is undeniable when she looks at
Elle.

“
None of it would have
happened,” Lula mutters again, but with conflict.

“
Henry, what-” I try to ask
again, but suddenly, the phone in the foyer rings. We all look at
one another for a moment, and something in my heart grows still as
I walk over to answer it.

Please be Ian.

Please be Ian.

“
Hello?” I say cautiously
into the telephone.

“
Alivia,” a voice comes
through on the other end, cheerful and excited. “It’s so good to
hear your voice again.”

“
Daphne?” I say, confusion
furrowing my brows.

And the moment I say her name, Henry perks
up. Lula’s eyes darken, glaring at me.

“
Of course! How have you
been?” she says cheerily.

“
Um, not the greatest,” I
say, scrambling to catch up to such a casual phone call when
there’s so many other things going on. “Now actually isn’t a great
time. Can I call you back?”

“
But it’s been such a long
time since our private morning talks,” she says, rushing forward,
almost as if she didn’t hear me. “I’ve just been dying to tell you
about my travels as of late. Did you enjoy my
postcards?”

“
Yeah, they were lovely,” I
say, feeling more confused by the moment. “But really,
I-”

“
Oh, I just met the most
wonderful people while I was out and about,” she says, still overly
cheerful. Overly excited. “I told you once, I have friends all
around. I’ve made so many new ones in the past few months. But I
just wanted to let you know that I’m back in town.”

“
That’s great, Daphne,” I
say, itching to get off the phone and back to the new problem at
hand. “But I-”

“
I got to see my son again
last night,” she interrupts me, and something in me chills. Her
voice grows harder, more serious. “After all these years, I thought
he’d be more excited to see his mother, but he didn’t seem too
thrilled at our reunion.”

All the blood in my body grows cold. I
freeze in place, staring at a drop of blood on the marble floor. A
tick of thoughts flashes through my brain, running in rapid
succession.

“
I hear he got engaged
while I’ve been gone, though I must say, I have conflicted feelings
toward his fiancée.” Daphne continues rambling, the conversation
growing more serious and sinister by the moment. “See, I was
promised she would never exist. Yet there you stand, in your
beautiful home, with your birthright and title. While
we
are left with
nothing.”

The breath rips in and out of my chest, my
vision swims.

“
Your silence tells me your
apparently
not
dead father has not told you many stories yet. About his
relationship with a young girl who admired him so. About a young
girl who wished he were her father, so very badly.”

Daphne’s breathing grows heavy on the other
line. She speaks slowly, her voice quivering in anger and
excitement.

“
You’ve been so ignorant to
so much your entire life, Alivia Ryan,” she says quietly. “You’ve
been blind to so much. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to end this.
It’s time for the revolution.”

The line goes dead. I stand there, still
holding the phone to my ear, statue still. Unable to move. Unable
to process what has just happened.

“
My daughter, Cora Daphne
Ward, is not dead,” Lula says in a ragged, rough voice, though the
name comes through, clear as day.

“
Mom…” Elle nearly
whispers. “Mom isn’t dead?”

“
Cora is still alive?”
Henry growls in Lula’s direction. “Cora… Cora is…” He shakes his
head, looking down at his hands. “It makes so much sense
now.”

“
How did you know my mom?”
Elle demands, her voice accusatory. “And how… How…” Her voice
trails off into a breath.

My movements stiff and slow, I hang the
phone up, looking at those that surround us. The entire House
stands there, watching me. Not breathing, no words.

Just in need of answers.

“
Please,” I say, fixing my
eyes on Henry, trying not to be angry. “Tell us a
story.”

He stands there, in the doorway to the
library, half in the foyer. His eyes dart from one face to another.
It’s such a difficult balance, sharing information with just those
that need to know, and the entire house. But considering I’m about
to ask them to go to war, they have a right to know.

And Henry must come to this same conclusion.
He stands straight and tall, looking directly at me. “Years ago, I
was standing beside my brother’s grave late at night when I heard a
scream. Sometimes you can just tell, you know, when it stems from
something supernatural.” He slides his hands into his pockets,
swallowing once. “I ran on instinct. Down by the river, by the
Hanging Tree, I found two young girls, thirteen years old, being
attacked by a Bitten. It was too late for one girl, she was already
dead, but I got there in time to save the other and dispose of the
Bitten.”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the
other, likely feeling the weight of every eye that watches him,
finally getting the answers to so many questions. “I took her home,
told her to forget everything she’d seen, but in saving her, I
exposed myself. The eyes, the fangs, she saw it all.”

“
My daughter asked many
questions,” Lula suddenly speaks up, her mind granting more clarity
than I think it’s had in quite some time. “I had answers, but there
was no way I was going to open the door into that world for
her.”

Henry nods, looking from Lula back to me.
“She showed up at my house, months later, demanding to know more. I
turned her away, told her she needed to forget what happened. She
left.”

He clears his throat, looking over at Rath.
“But she came back, just a week later. Again I refused her, but
this time she told me that if I didn’t give her the answers, that
she would go looking for them in the dark. I couldn’t let her get
herself hurt, killed, or turned, so we went for a walk.”

He looks away from Rath. And the answers are
clear: Henry has kept many secrets from Rath and me. Rath never
knew about the relationship between Henry and Cora Ward.

“
Every time she came back,
I would only tell her the minimal amount of information, send her
away saying I would tell her no more. But she always came back,
saying she would find information elsewhere,” Henry continues. “I
couldn’t stand the thought of this little girl getting
hurt.”

The way he says it, it’s so apparent. Henry
cared for Cora. And the sting of jealousy hits me in the chest.
Ian’s mother had the kind of relationship with my father that I was
robbed of.

“
Over the years, she
continued to visit me. Most of the time she had questions about our
kind, but other times, she simply seemed to want someone to talk
to.”

I look over at Lula, but her expression is
unreadable. But I can imagine. Lula has always hated the vampires,
despised them. I can only imagine what her daughter becoming
obsessed with them did to their relationship.

“
After Cora turned sixteen,
she truly became obsessed with the monarchy system. She wanted to
learn everything about it. Who all the Royals were. How the Houses
were created. The politics. The prestige of Court.” Henry closes
his eyes, as if he’s reliving painful memories. He pauses for a
while, shaking his head. Taking two deep breaths. “She wanted,
very, very badly to be a Born. To join a House.”

“
But she wasn’t a Born,” I
say quietly.

Henry shakes his head. “It tortured her that
there was nothing she could do about it. So she fixated on the
Bitten, knowing that was her only way to come even close to a Born.
But their lowly status, the Debt, she was so angry about it. She
wanted things to be different.”

Shaky pieces of this complicated puzzle
begin shifting into their place, giving me a clearer view of the
big picture.

“
Cora begged for my help to
change the system,” Henry says, his jaw tight, his words stiff.
“She envisioned a new order where Born or Bitten could rule. She
wanted to show everyone that Bitten could be just as good as the
Born. She wanted me to help her start a revolution.”

Daphne’s—Cora’s parting
words echo in the back of my mind.
It’s
time for the revolution.

“
I told her that my
opinions on the monarchy had not changed,” Henry says, sadness
creeping into his tone. “It had caused me enough pain. I had told
her that I would never even have children of my own because I would
never inflict this system upon them.”

Henry looks up at me, and there are so many
conflicted emotions there. But not regret.

“
I told Cora to leave and
not come back. I told her she needed to walk away from all of this
before it was too late. Before she wrecked her life chasing a
species that never should have existed. I said my final goodbye to
her twenty-six years ago.”

“
My daughter respected
Henry, wanted him to be her father,” Lula says, her voice quiet and
regretful. “So for a time, she tried to take his advice and focus
on creating a normal life. She graduated high school. Soon after,
she met George and they married a year later.”

Lula’s crooked fingers curl into fists and
her expression hardens. “But she could never accept his very human
DNA when she vied for something so much more. She said he was so
mundane. The fights…” Lula closes her eyes, shaking her head.

I glance over at Elle, and I’ve never seen
so much emotion on her face. Her eyes are red, welled heavy with
tears, two of them leaking out onto her cheek.

“
She met a man,” Lula
continues. “A liar who claimed to be a Conrath cousin, a Born
Royal. She saw her opportunity. She had an affair, became pregnant
with Ian, and pretended it was George’s child. Just before he was
born, the liar returned, and she found out the truth. She’d done
what she did, only to not carry a Royal, but just another
Born.”