A Shade Of Vampire 5: A Blaze Of Sun (20 page)

I rolled over on the bed and stared at Derek’s sleeping form. I ran my fingers over his bare torso. I could feel a tear run down my cheek. I knew I was in deep trouble and I was aware that there was every possibility that the Elder would punish me by taking Derek away from me.

When the
Elder arrived in my bedroom, I felt it immediately. The bone-chilling fear always came with him and I began involuntarily shuddering.

“You have been such a disappointment, Emilia.”

“Master?”

A stinging pain whipped at my back and I fought the urge to scream in fear of waking Derek. I knew that this confrontation with my father was best done without him being aware of it. Physical assaults from the
Elder always meant one thing: I was to be silent as he spoke.

“Must I remind you, Emilia, that you will only have control over him for a week?
You only have a couple of days left. The deal he struck with us only gave us enough hold on him for the period of time he agreed to. Even with him in your full control, you still fail to make him fall in love with you.”

How am I going to make him fall in love with me? He can’t stop thinking about her! Sofia Claremont needs to die.

“You mustn’t acknowledge his thoughts, fool. He is attracted to you. He is professing love to you. The more you draw this side of him out, the more he will lose the part of him that loves the redhead, but you keep listening in on his thoughts to check if he is indeed in love with you when you are fully aware that he is not!”

I began to sob, which of course, irritated my father. I got another stripe on my back for that.

Derek began to stir on the bed, muttering something under his breath. As if I weren’t already in enough heartache after what my father had told me, he had to add to the pain by whispering
her
name.

“You have failed time and again, Emilia. You let your brother feed Derek the blood of an immune.
Even worse than that, you almost let Derek discover our secret. Do you have any idea what would have happened if Derek got any idea how to…” he cut his sentence off, hating even the mention of the one thing that could end him.

My father was furious and I knew that if I failed in this mission, I was never going to get back in
to his good graces.
If Derek doesn’t fall in love with me, it will literally be the end of me.

“Ingrid is dead, and with her passing,
I’ve lost control of my eyes in The Shade. I do know that they are very close to finding the cure. If they find it, it will be the end of us. I swear, Emilia, even if you are my daughter, if you fail to find a way to stop this, I
will
end you myself.”

My gut clenched. That only meant
the one thing that mattered to me. It meant that Ingrid had failed to kill Sofia. I knew that his going after Ingrid was an act of desperation. His threat to end Aiden should Ingrid fail to kill Sofia was the biggest bluff I’d ever heard him speak. I knew he couldn’t kill Aiden the way he ended Gregor. Aiden wasn’t given over to his darkness – even more so now that he was being influenced by his daughter.

I had no idea what kind of a relationship Aiden had with Sofia, but I couldn’t help but find myself jealous of what she had with him. She had a father.

I blinked my eyes several times, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Elder, supposedly my father. Of course, same as before, I never saw him with my own eyes. He was always just a shadow, a voice, veiled by darkness, a fearsome presence, a cruel master. I couldn’t help but wonder why I allowed myself to give in to his demands, to be part of a family who threatened punishment at every mistake, brothers and sisters who would betray me and stab me in the back the first chance they get.

Why did I do this to myself? Why did I allow Cora to ever turn into Emilia?
Then I remembered…

I stared at Derek’s sleeping form, my hear
t breaking when he had left me. He decided to abandon me. I loved him and I hoped for so long that he would one day return my love but he gave himself into the darkness and then when all was said and done, he found that he couldn’t live with himself so he came to me… the woman who would give anything on his behalf and he asked of me something that he knew would kill me to give him. He practically asked me to end his immortality, to give him an escape from his own conscience.

“Eternal sleep is the equivalent of death, Derek,” I told him, hoping that I wouldn’t choke on my words.

“I’ve lived more than a hundred years, Cora. I don’t mind dying…”

“Then why don’t you just ask me to kill you?”

“Would you?”

I drew a breath as I stared up into his stunning blue eyes,
so taken by his handsome face and masculine features. He already knew the answer to his question. I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I wanted to.

Despite my reservations, I pulled myself closer to him and crooned my neck up in order to put a kiss on his lips. I loved him and I knew that he knew this. I wanted him to respond. I wanted him to think about what we could be together. We’d already done so
much in The Shade as a duo. I knew that we had a lot more to accomplish and that we could be great together and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see that.

It tore me apart when he broke away from the kiss and shook his head.

“You are too good for me, Cora. There’s so much goodness in you and there’s so much darkness in me. That’s what keeps us apart.”

I wanted to object. I wanted to tell him that I saw goodness in him, but all I had to do was remind myself of all the things I’d seen him do under the control of darkness
. Even I couldn’t understand why I was still so enamored by him. Then it happened. Something clicked in me and I just stopped desiring to be good.

If goodness is the only thing that’s keeping me away from him, then I might as well go to the dark side.

When he told me those words, he couldn’t have understood how much he changed me, because that night, in my desire to be the woman for him, I gave myself over to the darkness. I wanted to be transformed into the woman who would belong to him.

The
Elder was quick to grant my request but he told me that it would take time. It would take hundreds of years, he said. So, I placed the spell upon Derek, but I didn’t grant him his request that it would be eternal.

In the eyes of
The Shade, I was a brokenhearted woman who eventually got married to one of the humans of The Shade, a man who I killed with a heart attack shortly after the birth of our son and daughter. He was kind, he was handsome, but he wasn’t Derek, and I was bored with him. 

I trained my daughter to become the witch of
The Shade. When she was ready, I asked Vivienne for permission for me and my son to once again return to the outside world. She didn’t withhold this from me.

“You’ve experi
enced so much heartbreak here in The Shade, Cora,” she told me. “I wouldn’t dream of keeping you here against your will. We owe you so much already.”

I smiled at her, but I hated that she could ever look at me like an object of pity. I wasn’t to be pitied. Not by her. Not by anyone. Still, I gave Vivienne a prophecy about Derek. “Your brother isn’t going to sleep forever, Vivienne. He will wake up and rule, but he will wake up only when the girl who w
ill help him bring your kind to true sanctuary, is ready to take her place beside him.”

I could never forget the hope that sparked in Vivienne’s eyes when I told her that she would have her brother back. I anticipated that day too, but I had to first make the arrangements in order to prepare for that day. I raised my son in the outside world, reminding him that at least one of the women in every generation must be trained to take up the task of keeping
The Shade safe. He was my apprentice in training. He knew what to do and he promised me that he would do it. When he was finally married and had a family of his own, I knew that it was time for my transformation.

Since I left
The Shade, I stopped putting upon myself the spell that was keeping me young and immortal. When I arrived at the Elder’s castle, I was an old, decrepit woman, ready to become whatever I needed in order to be Derek’s.

The deal was struck. The
Elder asked me what kind of woman Derek was attracted to. I described what I knew Derek’s ideal was, based on my observations, the women I saw him gravitate towards and the conversations I had with him. The Elder smiled. “I can do that,” he said, “but it will take time.”

He turned me into Emilia, his daughter, a vampire, that night. And since then, I slowly transformed from the old Cora to the beautiful, young and vibrant Emilia. I looked forward to the day Derek would be mine
. In the meantime, I had to follow my father’s every beck and call... and with every command that I followed, I lost a part of my soul.

I blinked back the tears as I set my eyes on Derek even as the
Elder’s presence hovered over me.

“You gave up your goodness in order to match his darkness only to find that you came too late. He woke up and discovered his goodness in the form of Sofia. Bring him back to the darkness, Emilia, or I will make sure that
you will never see Derek again. I
will
find a way to completely destroy him.”

I found a defense against Emilia and though I knew it was a weak one to the level of control she had
over me, I used it as much as I could. The night after that encounter with the young woman and the vampire at the labyrinth, I decided that I was going to focus all my energies on thinking about Sofia. One memory in particular kept running through my mind, because no matter what Emilia’s control was making me feel, my mind kept reminding me that I wanted to marry Sofia.

“Marry me, Sofia.”

I wasn’t expecting her to even respond, so when she wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face on my chest, before nodding and saying, “Yes,” it was definitely a taste of heaven on earth.

“What?” I asked her, stepping back, so that I could look at her and make sure that she wasn’t joking. “Did you just say what I thought you said?”

She laughed at my reaction. “I’m not sure…” She tilted her head to the side, her long auburn locks falling over her shoulders. “What did you think I said?”

“It sounded like you were agreeing to marry me.”

She paused and wrinkled her nose before shuffling on her feet. When she heaved an anxious sigh, I was already certain that I was just hearing things.

But then a huge smile appeared on her face. “Then you definitely heard right.”

I was so preoccupied reliving that moment in my
mind, I hadn’t even noticed how Emilia was glaring at me from across the table until she slapped my face with the back of her hand.

“I thought you said you loved me, Derek. You’re not even listening to me!”

That’s the point. I don’t love you.
“I’m sorry, Emilia…”

I got another blow and then another and then another. Every fiber of my being longed to fight back, longed to retaliate, but I could not. What she was doing was such a stark reminder that I wasn’t in control. I was losing my mind and I knew it. I could access memories of Sofia, but I couldn’t even think about anything that was going on at the castle. Everything was confusing. I knew that I’d only been there for
a few days, but it felt as if I’d been there for centuries. My mind was thinking of Sofia and mentally sending sarcastic quips and flat-out rejections Emilia’s way, but I was beginning to feel differently. I was beginning to feel like I was in love with Emilia.

I was losing the battle and I knew it, but I was clinging to
every last straw of hope that I could still overcome this, that I could get back to Sofia.

“You love me!” Emilia screamed before once again hitting me. She did it over and over again, screaming the same thing until
I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t know where the strength came from, but I hit her back so hard she went crashing to the ground.

And for some reason, I knew that she had won something over me based on the way she smirked as I lunged forward to attack her. I hit her and clawed at her. I watched her heal then I did it again. By the time I was done, a sick feeling came over me, because I found her snickering. I watched her heal before she fisted a clump of my hair and kissed me full on the mouth.

When our lips parted, she smirked, tilted her head to the side, and said, “Welcome to the darkness, Derek.”

I then realized why she was acting so triumphant. The act of violence was
me giving in to my dark side. She had provoked the part of me that would react with unbridled violence – a side of me Cora knew very well.

“She doesn’t know about this side of you… I’ll introduce it to her when I make you kill her, Derek.”

She kissed me again and I could feel it happen. It was almost as if every memory I had of Sofia faded into some sort of subconscious black hole. I couldn’t even remember Sofia’s face. All that remained was that one strong sense of conviction that told me that I was a man in love with Sofia.

I was under Emilia’s full control for the rest of the day and I couldn’t even think of anything apart from her, but in the back of my mind that thought remained:
I love Sofia Claremont. I love her. Not Emilia. I love Sofia.

Still, even that thought didn’t take long to disappear.

My stay at the Elder’s castle felt like an eternity I couldn’t escape from. I was falling in love with the woman I found myself so deeply attracted to from the moment I first laid eyes on her. Emilia was the girl for me and I had no doubt about it, but when it came to her, I was also consumed by another emotion apart from love: fear. Emilia terrified me. Everything about her – even the sweet, doting side of her – consumed me with utter fear.

One night, after we made love, I’d already drifted off to sleep and I had no clue how long I’d already been sleeping when she once again did something unexpected
... and rather agonizing.

I
had no idea why she was so furious with me, but the moment I woke up, I was introduced to Emilia’s claws scratching over my torso. I fought the urge to scream at the pain. Instead, I just stared at her, wondering what on earth I did to deserve the punishment. She quickly revealed what was bothering her so much that she would wake me up in such a violent manner.

“Say her name again, Derek, and I will kill you!”

I swallowed hard, wondering whose name I just said, but I knew better than to ask.

“You’re mine, do you understand
?!” she screamed. “Mine!”

The manic look i
n her eyes was terrifying, I couldn’t suppress a shudder. She must’ve noticed my fear, because she quickly mellowed down and tears began to drop from the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry… I just… I’m so in love with you, Derek.”

I sat up on the bed, relieved that my torso was beginning to heal from the wounds she had just inflicted on me. “I know that, Emilia. I’m in love with you too. Why do you still doubt this?”

“Because you still say the name of the woman I hate, instead of saying mine.”

That tugged at my heartstrings, but I couldn’t help but sense that something was different about this woman she was speaking of. I knew Emilia as a woman who harbored hatred for more people than just one, but I could tell that this woman was high up on her list. “What has she done to you that you would hate her so much, Emilia?”

“She tried to take you away from me.”

I sneered. “No one could ever do that, Emilia. We belong together.” Anger was beginning to build up inside of me as I contemplated the thought of anyone ever trying to take me away from Emilia. “Who is she?”

Emilia’s eyes widened with anger and suspicion. “Why do you want to know?”

I couldn’t understand her paranoia, but I knew that I had to quickly assure her. “Because I want to know who would bother you in such a way. I want to know how I can help.”

“Kill her. I want you to kill her. If you love me, you will end her life.”

I stared at her, knowing how consumed she was by her own darkness and I wondered to myself why I loved her, but all I knew was that I did and that I wanted to please
her. “If I do this, then will that prove my love for you?”

D
ark delight sparked in her eyes as she nodded and exclaimed, “Yes! Yes, Derek. Kill Sofia Claremont and we will be in love and happy forever.”

“Consider it done. The moment I first lay eyes on her, I will rip her heart out just for you.”

I couldn’t help but feel an agonizing void form within me when I thought about killing the stranger who was Sofia Claremont.