A Shade of Kiev 2
Authors: Bella Forrest
34.
Epilogue
A
SHADE
OF VAMPIRE SERIES
Derek & Sofia’s story:
Rose & Caleb’s story:
A
SHADE
OF KIEV TRILOGY
B
EAUTIFUL MONSTER DUOLOGY
F
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C
opyright
© 2014 by Bella Forrest
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”
- Sir Walter Scott
M
y parents lay
on the bloodstained carpet, their faces shining with sweat, their trembling bodies wrapped in blankets. My mother gripped my right hand, my father my left. Each breathed heavily as they lay with eyes closed.
I broke away as my mother descended into another coughing fit. Reaching for a metal basin, I pulled her upright and held the vessel beneath her mouth in case she vomited. Once she had calmed down, I eased her back again. She looked weaker than ever.
I removed the damp towels covering both of my parents’ foreheads and replaced them with fresh ones from the ice bucket. Had it not been for those towels, the raging fever would have taken them already.
After adding more coal to the fireplace, I left the barn and walked barefoot out into the snow-covered garden, breathing in the sharp late-evening air. Bending down, I picked up a handful of snow from the ground and cleaned my bloody hands. Then I reached for the handkerchief covering my nose and mouth and pulled it away. I rubbed more snow against my face and sighed deeply. The crisp substance helped give me relief from the sickly-sweet stench of the barn.
“Are they going to die?” a soft voice called out from behind me.
I whirled around to see the front door of our cottage open, my younger sister making her way toward me. Her long black hair was wrapped around her neck and her green eyes glistened with tears. She was shivering as she approached me in her thin cotton nightgown.
“Helina!” I shouted. “How did you get out here?”
She ignored my question and continued walking.
“Stop! Don’t come near me. Get back in the house!”
Furious, I fastened the handkerchief back over my mouth and nose and ran toward her.
“I want to see them!” she cried, as I scooped her up in my arms.
I lowered her to the floor as soon as we reached the entrance of the small cottage and locked the door behind us. Still wailing, she banged against the door with her small hands. I stepped away from her and moved to the furthest corner of the room, checking that my handkerchief hadn’t budged from its place. I looked around our sitting room. The furniture consisted of three small oak cabinets and a threadbare chaise longue. The walls were bare and stained with dirt. Four lanterns hung from each corner of the low ceiling, and ragged carpets covered the rough wooden floorboards in the center of the room. Fading embers crackled in the fireplace. I hadn’t stepped into my home for five weeks.
I eyed the key in the door. “How did you get out?” I demanded.
“I want Mama,” she screamed.
She turned to face me, her eyes bloodshot and filled with tears. She moved away from the door and walked toward me, her arms outstretched.
“No. Helina. No. I’ve told you before. Don’t come near me.”
“Please, Kiev. I want to see Papa.”
“Stay away!” I bellowed.
My harsh tone seemed to scare her—or perhaps it was the desperation in my eyes—and she retreated. She curled up on the floor and continued sobbing. But there was only one possible answer, for there were only two keys. One was in my pocket; the other belonged to our brother.
“You stole this from Erik, didn’t you? Erik!” I yelled up the dim staircase.
Old floorboards creaked overhead and Erik appeared at the top of the stairs. His black hair was cropped short, like mine, his eyes chestnut brown, like our father’s.
“Damn fool. Is it so difficult to keep a key away from a child?”
Erik remained quiet as he descended the stairs. He had an ashen expression on his face.
“She didn’t steal it from me, Kiev. I gave it to her.”
My eyes widened with disbelief.
“You allowed her out?”
My younger brother averted his eyes to the ground and nodded. “I was going to pay a visit to our parents too.”
“Christ!” I grabbed a dusty vase from a cabinet and hurled it to the floor. “Have you lost your damn mind? Do you have any idea what I have sacrificed to keep you two safe?”
“I know what you’ve sacrificed,” Erik said grimly. “But I also know that our parents are dying.”
“You don’t know that,” I hissed.
“Stop playing me for a fool, brother. If you haven’t cured them by now, I know that they’re too far gone.”
I should have expected him to realize that my assurances of our parents’ recovery were lies. He was just as much the son of a physician as I. I hadn’t allowed him to see them, but he had witnessed enough of our father’s patients to realize the stage they must be at after so many weeks.
“If your assumption is correct,” I said, trying to steady my voice, “then that’s all the more reason for you to stay away.”
“This whole village is infected.” Erik scowled. “Sooner or later we’ll catch it. We can’t stay locked up within these walls forever.”
“Then you and Helina will leave this place,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“Kiev, we’ve had this conversation before.
How
will we leave? We barely have enough coins for a sack of barley.”
I looked down at my brother. He was right, of course. To be precise, we barely had enough coins for half a sack of barley, because I’d recently had to purchase some more blankets for our parents. We had a wealthy uncle living in the city, but he was a miser who never allowed anyone to stay without payment we couldn’t afford—be they family or not.
I didn’t know where I found the courage to look into my brother’s eyes and say: “I’ll find a way.”
I supposed afterwards that it wasn’t courage. It was sheer desperation.
But whatever it was, I couldn’t let him down. I couldn’t let anything happen to my siblings. I couldn’t break my last promise to my parents.
“Just… Just stay in here. And I swear, I will find a way to get you and our sister out of here.”
I fetched a knife from the kitchen and tucked it beneath my cloak. Then I walked back through the sitting room toward the front door, my brother’s and sister’s eyes following me. Withdrawing my brother’s key from the keyhole, I placed it into my pocket next to my own. Then I turned to my brother again and glared at him.
“Listen to me, Erik. Now you must make me a promise. Promise me that you will not, under any circumstances, try to leave this house and enter the barn while I’m gone.”
Erik looked up at me, then down at our sister.
“For Helina’s sake… I promise.”
With his assurance, I left the cottage, locked the front door, and headed back to the barn.
On entering, I was relieved to see that my parents hadn’t vomited more blood since I’d left them. I placed fresh cold towels over their foreheads, pulled on a pair of black leather boots and a woollen hat, and wrapped a long black cloak around me before heading out into the night.
As I passed through our neighborhood, moans of pain emanated from dimly lit windows. Sacks of dead bodies lay strewn at the sides of the roads.
I tried to block out the horrors that surrounded me and think. I didn’t know how or where I would get the money. Even if I had the money, our horses had already died of the sickness.
I won’t find money or a healthy horse in this Godforsaken village. That much I do know.
If there was to be any chance of saving my siblings, I had to reach the highway that ran through the woodland, about twelve miles north from here. It led to the city, and there were often coaches passing by.
I trekked for hours through the ice and by the time I arrived at the dark, tree-lined road, I was beginning to believe that I might develop frostbite before a coach ever came along. Crouching down behind a bush, I waited. And waited.
Finally hooves beat against gravel in the distance. I peered over the top of the bush. A shiny black coach with two large steeds raced toward me. A thin man sat in the rider’s seat, and the curtains of the carriage were drawn.
I pulled my woollen hat further down to cast a shadow over my eyes, and pushed up my collar to cover the rest of my face. As soon as the coach was about ten feet away, I emerged from the bushes, one hand tucked beneath my cloak, nervously tracing the edge of the knife with my finger. I ran into the horses’ path and held up my other hand, waving it in the air.
The alarmed horses screeched the carriage to a stop. Before the coachman could react, I launched forward, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked him out of his seat, holding the knife close to his throat.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whispered into his ear. “Just keep silent and do as I say, and nobody shall be harmed.”
“What’s going on, Ivan?” a female voice called out from inside the carriage. “Why have we stopped?”
I pressed the knife tighter against Ivan’s throat and said in a voice barely louder than a breath, “Tell her you’ve just stopped to check on one of the horses.”
The terrified man stammered, “I-I’m just checking on one of the horses, darling. Nothing to worry about.”
I turned Ivan round so that he was facing me, the steel still against his throat.
“I’m going to release you so you can untie one of the horses and give it to me. But I will be right here behind you. One wrong move and—make no mistake—I will slit your throat.”
Trembling, Ivan staggered forward and gripped the closest horse’s harness, working it loose. I winced as the animal whinnied.
“Release it gently,” I hissed. “So the lady doesn’t notice any bump.”
As soon as Ivan had untied the horse, he grabbed the reins and handed them over to me. I wrapped them securely around my arm before approaching Ivan again to once again hold the knife against his throat. But before I could grab him, in one sudden motion, he slapped the horse on the backside. The frightened animal galloped forward—knocking me to the ground and dragging my body after it.
By the time I managed to scramble to my feet, regain control over the horse, and rope it around a tree, the alarmed Ivan had already remounted the coach, which had started moving forward with just the one horse.
I reached the coach’s path just in time to fling myself at the driver’s seat, landing next to Ivan. He pulled out a knife of his own from beneath his seat and brandished it at me as the horse continued to gallop forward. Leaning back toward the edge of the seat, with one sharp thrust of my foot, I managed to knock the blade away from Ivan. Bone cracked as one of his fingers broke. He cried out in agony.
Grabbing the reins, I brought the horse to a stop.
“Now, let’s finish this,” I breathed, once again pointing my knife at his neck. “Hand over whatever supplies and coins you have. Don’t make me disturb the lady.”
“I know how filth like you work once you’ve finished robbing,” Ivan cried out, his eyes blazing. “I won’t let you lay a hand on my woman! You’ll have to kill me first.”
He ducked his head and threw all his weight against my midriff. As I fell back toward the ground, I instinctively grabbed him and pulled him with me. When he landed on top of me, I expected him to start punching me, but he went strangely limp. He lifted his head and looked down at me, eyes bulging. Then I felt it—blood seeping down the hilt of my knife.
The blade had buried itself deep into his stomach as we’d hit the gravel. He screamed as blood poured out of him, soaking through his clothes.
I rolled him off me and stood staring down at him, horror consuming me at what I’d just done.
At what I’d just become.
“Ivan!” A shrill voice pierced through the cold night air.
I turned around. A young woman in a blue silk cloak stood in the road, her face pale, her painted red lips parting in horror.
She screamed and ran back into the carriage. I thought she had run there for shelter, but she returned with a pistol in her hands, aimed directly at my chest.
“Drop the knife!” she cried out, tears welling in her eyes, her hands trembling.
I dropped the knife. She approached me cautiously, still pointing the gun at me, and picked it up. Then she ran over to Ivan and looked at his wound.
“You killed him!”
She whirled around in fury. This time she pulled the trigger. A bullet wedged itself into my shoulder. Warm blood spilled down my frozen chest.
I staggered back and fell to the ground. I began shaking uncontrollably, and I felt myself losing consciousness.
But then I remembered the promise I’d made to my brother earlier that evening. I remembered my parents’ tortured eyes looking up at me. I remembered Helina standing in the snow. And somehow I found the strength to turn myself over and slowly, steadily, quietly begin dragging myself toward the woman.
Her back was turned to me as she wept over Ivan. I reached out my uninjured arm and grabbed her. I knocked the pistol away from her hand. She kicked and screamed as I struggled to wrestle her to the ground. I grabbed the knife she had laid next to her and pushed it through her stomach.
Everything that I had ever identified myself with drifted away as that man and woman bled to death on the ground, tarnishing the white snow as their blood formed a crimson pool.
I was no longer a brother. No longer a son. No longer a physician’s apprentice.
At that moment, only one word circled in my mind for what I was.
Murderer.
“
K
iev
!”
Erik gasped as I stumbled into the cottage in the early morning hours.
“What happened to you?”
“Where’s Helina?” I panted.
“She… she’s sleeping. What is going on? Your shoulder—”
“Bring her, goddamn it!”
Erik sprinted up the staircase, casting worried glances at me. I’d managed to slow the blood flow by bunching up my cloak and holding it against the wound with one hand as I guided the horses and the carriage with the other. But it meant that I was now frozen numb from the cold.
I walked over to the warm fireplace and crumpled onto the carpet.
When Erik emerged, he was carrying a sleeping Helina.
“For God’s sake, brother,” Erik pleaded. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“It doesn’t matter… what happened,” I gasped. “Just listen to me. Carefully. I don’t have the strength to repeat myself. There’s a carriage with two horses waiting outside the house. In it, you’ll find enough food to last you a week and enough money to keep our uncle happy for at least five months.”
