Chapter 1
Sophia
My head pounded as I peeled my eyes open, immediately closing them again, the room too bright to handle. I swallowed dryly, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. After a few minutes, I tried again and sat up with a groan, a damp cloth falling into my lap.
I looked around the room, panic surging through me, not recognizing the room I woke up in. Where was I? Dizziness made my head spin, and I leaned back on the sofa, placing my head on the backrest. I closed my eyes and tried to think about the events that happened before I ended up here. Slowly, it all came back to me. Adam’s and my plan didn’t work out as planned. Which didn’t surprise me too much, but seeing Samuel there did.
I jolted upright, ignoring the searing pain in my head. Did he kidnap me? Was I somewhere in Samuel’s compound, and what happened to Adam?
“Good to see you awake again,” a deep voice said from behind. I jumped up and whirled around, a small fireball dancing on the palm of my hand, ready to shoot at whoever kidnapped me. But the pain shooting from my head through the rest of my body almost made me blackout again, and I stumbled, the flame vanishing.
“I would stay as still as possible if I were you. You depleted your magic and exhausted yourself.”
I glanced up, finally recognizing the voice. “Carlos? Is that you?”
“Yes, now lie down before you collapse again.”
I listened and lay down. Bright light danced in front of my eyes, and I tasted iron in my mouth. Running my tongue over the insides of my cheeks, I realized I had bitten the left side, causing it to bleed.
“I don’t think I have to tell you that what you did today was the stupidest thing you could have done.”
I groaned. “Why were you there?”
“I followed you, of course.”
Rolling my head to the side, I smirked at him. “What? I can’t believe you didn’t trust me to return within thirty minutes.”
“Don’t act cocky. Anyone would have seen you were up to no good. A hike, really? You couldn’t have come up with a better excuse?”
I shrugged. “In my defense, I didn’t expect you to be there. Why did you let me leave if you knew I wouldn’t return?”
He crossed his legs and folded his hands above his knees. I realized he was wearing less formal clothes than his usual attire. A black sweater and gray trousers, making him look a lot younger.
“I wanted to know what you were up to.”
I arched my brows. “Is that so? I didn’t realize you were following me. Did you turn yourself invisible?”
He smirked. “I stayed on your left side.”
I rolled my eyes. “Quite unfair to use my deafness against me, but clever nonetheless.”
“At least a lot cleverer than what you tried to pull there. Whatever that was. If I hadn’t followed you, who knows what would have happened to you?”
A shiver crawled down my spine. I didn’t even want to imagine it. “I’m sure I could have escaped somehow, even without you rescuing me like a white knight.”
The last thing I wanted was to be in his debt. But now I felt like I had to make it up to him somehow. And what bothered me the most was that he was right. I would have been doomed.
“Now, princess, don’t be so ungrateful. We both know you wouldn’t have made it out there alone. Don’t be too proud to accept that. It’s okay to need help, even if you had to accept mine.”
“Honestly, I’m more surprised you didn’t let me die there,” I said.
He blinked at me. “Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. Forget I even said that. It’s too bad all the trouble was for nothing.”
Carlos pressed his lips into a thin line, and I turned away from his gaze. I didn’t want to speak about him hating me for some reason, not now. Not when I felt so defeated.
He let out a puff of air. “What was your plan, anyway? Why did you go there?”
I bit my lip, unsure if I could trust him. Could I tell him about Adam?
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. If anything, I’m part of whatever you planned, too.”
I turned back to him, expecting him to look at me like he always did. Like he was somewhat above me, with a sneer on his face. But he had a soft smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled with interest. He might be part of it now, too, at least partly, but that didn’t mean he had to be my ally.
“I thought Claire was in the tower.”
“Oh? How come?”
I sighed. “I have contact with someone in the compound, and they told me about hearing a female voice in the tower. They assumed it might have been Claire.”
His eyes widened. “And only based on that, you ran into action?”
“It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. No one else in the community seems to care where Claire is, and we wanted to find out if she really was there. Besides, the timing seemed good. We expected Samuel to be away for a meeting, but he returned earlier than expected.”
Carlos furrowed his eyebrows and scratched his chin. “I can understand your desperation, but you should have waited until you had more information. Now that he knows you suspect your sister in the tower, he will probably relocate her.”
I nodded. “It wasn’t Claire, though. There might be someone up there, but it wasn’t her.”
He tensed as he leaned closer to me. “What do you mean? How can you be so sure?”
Fiddling with the cloth in my hand, I wasn’t sure if I should share even more secrets with him. But what did I have to lose at this point?
“I don’t know how to explain this properly, but my sister and I have a very deep connection.”
“Everyone knows you loved your sister dearly.”
I nodded. “Yes, but that’s not all there is to it.”
“I haven’t heard of anyone mentioning more.”
A bitter laugh escaped me. “Of course not. We never told anyone. I didn’t want to add another thing to my crazy list, especially not when it involved Claire. She shouldn’t have to suffer under those weird looks I receive all the time.”
“I wouldn’t look at you weirdly.”
I laughed again, but the laughter died in my throat when I saw the honesty in his eyes. It made him look even younger. Now that I think about it, he wasn’t much older than me. A few years, maybe? But for some reason, it always felt as if he had lived so much longer already.
“No, you wouldn’t look at me weirdly, you would only make fun of me and throw mean words at my head, left and right.”
I couldn’t stop my voice from cracking, as much as I didn’t want to show him how much his behavior was hurting me. I wish I didn’t care, but I did. His eyes grew wide as he stared at me, pain hushing over his face. “I know it won’t mean much to you, but I’m truly sorry for all the things I said to you.”
I sat up, ignoring the dizziness that came along with it. “Do you think a simple ‘sorry’ can fix this? You have been a complete jerk to me from the day we first met.”
Rubbing his chest, he avoided his gaze. “I wish I could explain everything to you, but it’s not the right time yet.”
“When will ever be the right time for anything?”
He sighed heavily. “What is it you and your sister share?”
I bit the inside of my cheek again, irritated by the change of topic. Yet, a small voice in the back of my head was glad not to dwell longer on it. Maybe I didn’t actually want to know why he disliked me so much. “We can communicate with each other without actually speaking. For this plan tonight, I got handed this communication bug. Do you know those?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I have heard of them.”
“Well, yeah, like this. Claire always opened up to me, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could communicate with her. So, if she had been there, I would have known.”
Carlos furrowed his brows. “If it only works when she opens up to you, how would you know then? She wouldn’t have known you were there.”
“I’m pretty sure she would have realized I was there. Considering the massive wall of flames, fireballs, and screaming scholars. If such a commotion started, she would at least try to reach out to me, even if it’s by chance. And even if she didn’t realize or was out cold, if she was close by, there was always a tingling sensation in the back of my head. I always had it when she was sleeping at home, too.”
“Okay, assuming she wasn’t there. Someone else must have been up there instead, then?”
I pulled my legs to my chest and rested my head on top of my knees. “I don’t know, maybe. If my contact person heard someone inside the tower, it must be. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Samuel held someone hostage there. Would fit his personality.”
“But now you know that your sister is somewhere else, and whoever was up there might be going there, too.”
“You sound very interested in this all of a sudden. I didn’t think rescuing my sister was high on your priority list. Honestly, I didn’t think caring about me was anywhere on your list either,” I said, sounding a lot more bitter than I wanted.
Carlos’ eyes darkened. “I never said I didn’t care about Claire or you. I rescued you, so it’s not that I don’t care.”
“Carlos, what is your agenda? Why did you come back to train me?” I stared at him, hoping for some sort of explanation as to why he reappeared in my life after leaving so suddenly. I knew I wasn’t the best student, but was I that bad that he had to leave overnight?
He ran a hand through his shimmering, blonde hair. “You need any help you can get at this point. And now you even attacked a neutral party on his property. I doubt the council will be amused about that.”
“I’m well aware that they will disown me. But that was the case even before I attacked Samuel for kidnapping my sister.”
“They won’t necessarily disown you.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to relieve some of the pain I felt between my eyes, but it didn’t help much. “What do you mean?”
“If someone else vouches for you, you will be off the hook.”
I gaped at him, unsure if he was serious right now. “Are you mocking me? I have no one to vouch for me. My family is dead, the council hates me, and the community doesn’t care about me. The only person I could consider a friend is addicted to fairy powder while being pregnant. Not to mention my contact person, who might be in big trouble because of everything now, too!”
He leaned forward, a small smile spreading over his lips. “You forgot one person.”
“Mary? Ottfried? Those two have little power or say in anything.”
He shook his head. “No, you still have me.”
“So, are we back to the point where you tell me why you are back then? Do you think I can trust you to vouch for me? You can’t even be honest with me!” My loud voice hammered in my head, and I gritted my teeth. Being angry made the headache only worse.
I saw a muscle ticking in his jaw, and I expected him to shout back at me. But instead, he let out a sigh and nodded. “I can understand your mistrust. I really can. I wish I could tell you everything, but I can’t risk it yet. Just believe me when I say that everything about you frustrated me. When we had our first training lesson, you hated to be there. You hated your magic and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. You even hated me, because you didn't want to take me seriously at all, simply because I was only a few years older than you and possibly couldn't be good enough to be a mentor yet. I saw a waste of talent. Not to mention your attitude. A snap of your fingers and everything got handed to you on a silver platter, while you constantly complained.”
I felt a pang in my chest, and my cheeks turned red. Is that how he portrayed me? Was that his first impression of me?
“It only got worse after you lost your hearing and had that fire accident. At that point, you not only hated your magic but were terrified by it. Nothing I said or tried helped. The only time I could bring the magic out of you was when I riled you up. Do you think I felt good teaching someone that way? I helped several young mages find their magic, but none of them forced me to be a jerk, as you like to call it, on purpose.”
My chest tightened, tears prickling in the corner of my eyes. Embarrassment rushed through me like a flood for behaving the way I did, and yet I couldn’t see a reason why I shouldn’t have. I felt mistreated, and I was truly terrified by my magic. No one seemed to understand me. I thought I was abandoned and alone, but was I really?
“When I came back, I expected you had grown with your magic. And while I knew you had just gone through something traumatizing, you still greeted me with the same attitude. You neglected your magic like it wasn’t worth your attention. And most importantly, you never gave me a chance.”
“Why do you want to help me now? What changed?” I asked, still avoiding looking at him.
“You.”
I glanced up. His eyes were warm, and his lips slightly tucked upwards as he sat on the very edge of his chair, leaning towards me. My heart skipped a beat, and I quickly dropped my gaze.
“For the first time, I started to see a change in you. You started fighting for something on your own, and you didn’t snap your fingers and order people around. You accepted your magic and connected with it. The incident, as horrible as it was, made you grow into a person I could respect. I have no reason to refuse to help you.”
I pulled in a deep breath and enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment, warming me from the inside out. I couldn’t believe my hard work paid off. That someone wanted to support me. Respect me even.
“Thank you,” I said.
He leaned back again and crossed one leg over the other. “You still have to change your view in the community, though. The council needs to be on your side.”
I grimaced. “That’s almost impossible. I self-destructed everything with my last uproar during the council meeting. And now the failed attack on his compound. Samuel is on the winning side.”
“You don’t know that yet. Samuel is binding his time, too. I’m sure he didn’t expect you to be alive still, and whatever he planned was probably disturbed by that. He probably also expected you would try something reckless soon.”
My shoulders slumped. “How can you help me?”
He tilted his head to the side, strands of hair falling into his face. He pushed them away and sat up straight. “You can become my scholar.”
“I’m not sure if I understand what you mean.”
“Technically, you are partly a mage. You might be a vampire, but you have a magical core. That qualifies you to learn and use magic.”
“But mentors and scholars are a mage thing,” I argued.
He shook his head. “No, this is something people think today. In the past, it wasn’t at all like that. When the kings and queens still ruled, they also had a mentor in court. Vampires with a magical core were scholars alongside the mages.”
It was the first time I had heard about this. I couldn’t even remember any book mentioning anything remotely close about this, either. “And how did that work out?”
“Good. Vampires offered the human mages strength and immortality with their blood, and the mages, in return, shared their blood with them. Together they were the knights, protecting the kingdom.”
“But vampire blood is highly addictive, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but not always. Certain conditions stop that from happening. A strong bond protected the mages from such a thing,” he said.
The books weren’t completely wrong then.
“Why did they stop working together? The mages and vampires?” I imagined a world where we worked together, instead of against each other. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
“Because the kingdoms got overthrown. Hatred spread between the communities, and everything started to crumble. Samuel tries to reconnect the communities, but not because he believes in the system, but because he wants to be in power,” he spat.
He didn’t seem to think so highly of Samuel, either. But who would, after everything he did?
A horrifying thought made my stomach turn. “Do you think he uses Claire for her blood?”
His face darkened. “I’m suspecting he uses vampire blood to boost his power. But I don’t know if it’s Claire’s blood or not.”
“I can’t let that happen!” I bounced up from the sofa, seeing stars from the sudden movement. I groaned and fell back on my spot. “Are you sure being your scholar would help? Are you even a mentor?”
A smirk spread over his face. “You don’t have to worry about my mentor status. But I can promise you, after you enter a blood bond with me and I vouch for you, the rest will fall into place.”
“A blood bond?” A shiver went down my spine. Hearing that. What I heard from Adam made me terrified. I would never agree with such a thing.
“Calm down, you look like you are about to pass out. I know what you are thinking, and it won’t be the same as what you might have heard. Some mentors use trances, but originally, that’s not meant to be used. That is abuse. I won’t ever abuse or manipulate you to do anything you don’t want to do."
My heart raced. “You could potentially do that!”
He winced. “Just because I can, doesn’t mean I will. And I won’t! If I wanted to, I could do it right now. Do you think I need some sort of connection to manipulate you? You are underestimating me.”
That had the exact opposite effect, and I pulled my legs to my chest again, shivering.
A pained expression hushed over his face. “Sophia, I won’t harm you. I would never do that. Believe me. Being in a blood bond with me will automatically remove Pascal from the picture. I will promise to help you find your sister. We can work this out together.”
I believe this was the first time I had seen Carlos so vulnerable. I knew he was telling the truth. Deep inside me, I never feared he would do anything to me. And yet, I hesitated. “I have to think about it.”
He nodded. “Of course, you have a few hours before Pascal will come for you. As long as you’re under his care, I can’t do anything to stop him. Rest for now.”
I watched him leave the room. He stopped in the door frame and looked over his shoulder back at me. “And don’t worry about your scholar friend. He is safe, too.”
I gasped. “You know who it is?”
He chuckled. “I sure do. And now sleep.”
I heard the door close, and I lay back on the sofa, trying to get into a more comfortable position. Carlos knew more than I would have expected, and I had to ask him more why that was. But for now, I needed all the rest I could get. That much was clear.
Adam
“Scholars!” Samuel’s voice boomed around us, bouncing off the buildings. “You immediately forget his incident!”
His command weighed me down. I winced, and a collective groan went through the crowd of scholars. This probably wiped everyone’s memory, except mine, and relief rushed through me, realizing that. While I still felt the power of his command, it didn’t have the desired effect on me. I could never forget what happened. Sophia got taken by a stranger, and I had to find her. What if they hurt her?
“Adam!”
I turned to him, trying to look as confused as possible. “What happened?”
His eyes softened, and a sigh escaped him. He helped me to my feet, patting my shoulder. “You might not remember what you did, but you did a perfect job!”
I felt nauseous hearing praise like that. How could I protect a person like him?
“Make sure to rest a lot today. I will send dinner to your room tonight. You have to sleep and recharge your energy.”
I nodded. “Okay, Samuel.”
Every step to my room was painful. It felt like I had sucked all my energy out of my body by withstanding Sophia’s fire. She will burn me to the ground when she gets hold of her magic properly. I had to make sure to keep up with her. Starting tomorrow.
“Adam! What happened?” Lucas rushed to me when I stumbled into the room. He grabbed me and pulled me onto my bed.
I groaned. “I don’t know.”
Why didn’t our plan work? Why was Samuel back so soon? This could have worked out so well.
“I heard a loud explosion, but we were told to remain in our rooms. Is there something I can do for you?”
I rolled my head to the side and looked at him. There was concern written all over his face. I smiled to ease his mind. “It’s all good, don’t worry. I just used a little too much magic. I will be fine after I get some sleep.”
He nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. “At least let me help you get those clothes off. You smell like you got roasted alive.”
I sniffed my shirt and frowned, accepting Lucas’ help to undress me, but I wouldn’t let him shower with me. That was a line I wouldn’t cross. But since I couldn’t stand for a long time, I agreed to let him wash my hair over the sink. He even pulled a chair over, so I could sit, while he eagerly massaged shampoo into my hair.
He chattered about all the things that happened while I was away, but I couldn’t follow the conversation. My mind was racing. I had to find a way to contact Sophia. I had to know if she was fine or not. And that fast!
