Vampire Vigilante by Elena Bryce

Author:Elena Bryce [Bryce, Elena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

18. Hawks are hell

“The Victorian era was one of repression. Perception was everything, and women had a particularly bad time of it. My parents were pretty old-fashioned anyway, what with both being over a thousand years old, and so I became a rather rebellious teenager.”

“What year was this?”

“I turned eighteen in 1856. That was the year I began to drive my parents totally crazy. I’d been hard work all through my teens, mainly because I felt trapped. We lived in a castle in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands of Scotland. No night life, no fun. I had friends, but their parents all worked for mine, and I always felt slightly apart.”

“A princess in an ivory tower?” Edrick teased.

“You can joke, but it did feel a bit that way sometimes.”

“Every now and then, my mother or father would take me to the nearest city for a bit of polish, to learn modern manners and be able to fit in with society, if I had to. I knew about the Grail, and I knew about vampires and werewolves.”

“Werewolves?” he interrupted.

“Yeah. When my father moved back to Scotland, he brought all the werewolves from Vale with him. The forests of England were all being cut back to make room for housing developments, and the towns and cities were growing, so there wasn’t a lot of places for them to hide anymore. But Castle Thorn, my home, was built next to a pine forest, and so my dad gave the werewolf pack a new place to make their base. Werewolves can live for hundreds of years, so it was great for them to have so much space and so few humans to worry about. Lots of them are still there now.”

Edrick nodded. “Sorry, go on with your story.”

“Sure, so I knew about the Grail, and I knew there was a chance I could become immortal, or in the worst-case scenario, like a fatal accident, it was possible for my parents to make me an undead vampire. But at that point, I was still mortal. Then one day, I was with both my parents in Edinburgh and we went to see a circus. Which is a bit like the fairgrounds of your day, but all in one tent, and then rides outside. It was run by a group of traveling gypsies. We watched fire-eating and bareback riding and trapeze acts and all sorts of things, and I totally fell in love with it. And I so envied the gypsies. They had so much freedom and so much life experience being out on the road and moving from town to town. I could talk of nothing else for days and days and, eventually, after a particularly bad fight with my parents, I ran away to join the circus.”

“Your parents must have been frantic.” Edrick frowned at her with disapproval.

Iona grinned. “Not so much as you’d think. My father is not without resources, and within a few days, he knew exactly where I was. He decided to let me do it, thinking it would get it out of my system.

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