Deadwire by A K Blake

Author:A K Blake [Blake, A K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-05T22:00:00+00:00

Part V

Chapter 13

It was a grand party, but somehow Iona was bored.

She had been in the palace only a few weeks, but already she was growing restless. The great hall no longer felt large but claustrophobic, the same four walls hemming her in night after night, the same food, the same wine. Conversation began to seem catty, the laugher forced. The only people really having a good time were the drunks, and even their high spirits were fleeting.

The Queen rarely made an appearance, and when she did it was brief. She was inevitably at the far end of the hall from Iona, her back regally rigid and unbending, everything but her profile hidden from view by her swarming retinue of security and assistants. Occasionally, her assistant would come over to procure a cup of blood to take back to the Queen. He always conveyed her “thanks” in a brusque, obligatory way that made it clear Her Majesty had considered nothing of the sort.

Iona had learned quickly that being a companion giver to the Queen, as desirable as it might sound, had some drawbacks. Precisely because it was so exclusive, it separated her from the other givers in a way that was at once subtle and impossible to bridge. Her only purpose was to linger near the bar in an attempt socialize, something she was particularly ill suited for, and watch with a strange almost-longing as the staff givers offered blood. Lux would always speak to her, but her clientele base was growing nightly, so that Iona was often left to her own devices. She hadn’t realized when she agreed to this that it would require so much small talk, the same conversations over and over about nothing, so much lounging and fawning, neither of which she had ever developed the tact for.

Every encounter was much the same, a snide comment about her skin or her hair (“It certainly is striking,” “One could catch you out in a crowd,” “Thank Dieda for night vision, or I might have missed you!”), an inquiry into her origins that she was never able to answer to their satisfaction (“Oh, but surely you’re not from the Rasuk Woods. What country is your family from? No, no, dear, your ancestors?”), and knowing jealousy when they realized she was the Queen’s (“Well just look at her husband. She does like them dark.”). She had now posed for more photographs in the span of a few weeks than she had ever before taken in her life, her face splashed all across social media, despite her not having an account of her own. She’d also lost count of the times a vampire had touched her hair without asking or asked if her blood had some special “southie” spice.

It might have been flattering, if she had enjoyed being the center of attention more or if their motivations had bothered her less. It was a double sided coin, to be visibly different, at once a celebrity but also an oddity, reduced to something to be catalogued and photographed, added to their collections like a mounted butterfly.

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