Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“I thought this was my home.”
She turns, heads back to her desk chair, all ice, no feeling, and returns to her work, typing away.
Elias watches her for a while. He can’t seem to figure out whether she’s bluffing, serious, or scared. Did he strike a nerve? Should he not have named them? Most likely she’s reacting this way to prevent herself from becoming soft or emotional. She’s had to play the role of an iron fist for years. It’s all she knows, even when her instinct is to do nothing but love on her son. Elias is old enough to see that complexity now, even if the child inside him refuses to understand, feeling hurt and conflicted.
So Elias uses the one and only tool he has left. “Dad … he would have done something about them.”
Her typing stops.
“He … H-He would have spat in their faces,” he goes on. “Laughed at their threats. Made sure they knew he held just as much power. I may not have known much until recently, but I can see it now … all the clues and little signs … The vampires, they handed you a leash, and you put it around your own neck.”
“Stop.”
“And you expect me to wear one, too.”
“I said stop.”
Elias comes right up to the desk, his hands gripping the edge. She lifts her face, startled. “Whatever you’ve got in that vault,” he says, and now it’s his own voice that carries the ice of his mother’s, “I hope it’s doing you real good, along with all of your other riches and treasures and useless collections that go to waste in storage someplace. In the end, it isn’t any gold or money these vampires want. It’s blood. And they’ll come after mine next when they’re through with you … if we don’t take a stand now and use every bit of leverage we’ve got.”
His mother closes her eyes again, remaining still. After a while, it finally occurs to Elias that he has hit a wall with her. No amount of words will help. She won’t budge. Coming here was a waste of time. Elias nods, accepting that fact, then moves away from the desk, heading for the door, prepared to leave behind his mother and her cold eyes for good.
Until she says: “It isn’t a weapon.”
Elias stops, glances back at her, waits.
She takes a breath, then meets his eyes. “It’s … a book.” She cradles her head in her hands, mutters something to herself, perhaps about throwing caution to the arid desert wind, then rises from her chair once again, this time more pensively, gently. “I had my suspicions about them for a long time. I once thought they were mafia. Or a dangerous organized gang unit. I could never imagine what I was up against was …” She shakes her head and perhaps decides not to finish that sentence. “They are very dangerous, Elias. They don’t make threats. They make promises. I have seen … disturbing things. I am convinced they control the police, too. It would be a terrible mistake to underestimate their reach. They can eliminate any one of us in the blink of an eye. The only power I hold over them, if any, is my standing, my reputation, and my diplomacy. But fear can truly cripple even the bravest of us. I have fought for what we have. Fought tirelessly. But what does any of it mean if it can be so easily taken away? How can we stay standing when there is always a more terrible force standing over us? A force that is literally invulnerable? A force I can never hope to defeat?”
It’s then that she clutches her silver choker necklace, as if it brings her peace of mind to touch it. Perhaps it’s only now that Elias remembers his mother always used to wear gold jewelry. But these past few years since the Scarlet Sands was built, only silver adorns her neck, silver on her wrists, on her fingers.
Suddenly it seems quite deliberate.
Has Elias not been paying attention?
“Son …” She keeps twisting her fingers around the silver choker. “Son … if you could only pay witness to the bizarre conversations I used to have with myself every night before I attempted yet another restless night of sleep … I believed I was going insane. The things I considered doing … I considered checking myself into a hospital, leave the hotel and casino, run away to Mexico … I was losing myself.”
“I remember,” says Elias quietly.
“Yes,” she then says, “I work with them … but perhaps not in the way you think. Our relationship is merely to keep peace. I am a pawn in their game. And I foolishly thought they could become a pawn in mine … if all went to plan. Did you wonder how we got on that list of Protected Blood in the first place?”