Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Closing her eyes, she dematerialized inside. And as she re-formed in the snowpack, she had to make sure she was not—
“Wait, where are the apple trees?” She frowned and looked around. “What the fuck?”
There should have been a ring of hundreds of McIntosh, Braeburn, and Fuji apple trees, and she immediately shifted position to a quarter mile farther along the wall, just in case she was mistaken about where she was.
She wasn’t.
The orchard was gone. All of the craggy trunks with their contorted branches had disappeared.
Someone had cut them down. When?
Casting herself deeper into the Territory, she re-formed in the midst of the clusters of domed, round houses that marked the outer rim of residences. She’d always thought these single-storied homes were like mushroom caps on the earth, and she had a sudden worry that, like the apple trees, the people who had lived in them were gone.
There were no lights glowing, no smoke wisping out of the venting at the apex of the smooth roofs. Had the Shadows out here relocated somewhere else within the Territory? Shouldn’t she have known if they had? Maybe that was what the new buildings that had been erected a couple of years ago were about.
Shouldn’t she know that?
As she continued along on foot, she reassured herself that she had walked the interior halls of the palace, and run into crowds of Shadows. So there hadn’t been some radical population decline. How could there have been. Her mother was a benevolent ruler who had protected and fed and defended the s’Hisbe through countless eras of human intervention and complication. And there had been so much of it: Questions about land ownership. Taxes owed. Rights to privacy challenged.
And t’On was helping her deal with the new issue raised about the data centers—
Abruptly, Denne had to stop again, her breathing so hard that she wheezed in the cold. When she felt like she could finally go on, she lifted the hem of the robing and resumed the slow plodding toward the fancier abodes of the courtiers. These three-story structures did glow with interior lights, their white stucco walls and ornate corners and cornices making her think of birthday cakes. No humble hunkering down for the wealthier members of court—and she wondered whether they still had the walkways that connected everything.
The ones that were bracketed by beds of flowers, in the spring and summer.
She should know that, too. And she’d used to, thanks to those strolls that her father and her had taken at sunset for years.
She couldn’t remember deciding they wouldn’t do that anymore. It must have happened when she started going to the restaurant. Right?
The palace came into looming presence, but it wasn’t a Disney castle with gargoyles on the eaves and sets of steps that rolled up to unfurled royal standards and guards at attention. Nope. The black and silver glass structure looked like a vast, upscale office or classroom building, all clean lines and dark mirrored panes reflecting the snowy landscape and the countless shades of blue created by the moonbeams.
It was a most un-royal facility, and the two floors underground where she and her parents stayed were equally modest and modern.
According to whispered lore she’d overheard when she was young, the palace was nothing like what her grandmother had lived in. But when her mother had taken over, everything associated with the previous Queen had been destroyed, burned to the ground, or torn down.
She’d never asked why.
On that note, did she like living here? she wondered as she made her way around to the front. For sure, it wasn’t bad digs. But she should have a better connection to her home, shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t she care?
“Of course I do,” she huffed between panting inhales. “This is where I am from.”
All of this was where Shadows lived and had always lived. Where their traditions were upheld, where the constellations were observed and interpreted, just as they had been for generations. Where humans did not tread and vampires were not encouraged to attend, as the saying went.
And no lessers had ever ventured, thanks to the Black Dagger Brotherhood keeping the war with the Lessening Society in downtown Caldwell.
As she arrived at the palace’s utterly nondescript entrance, the pair of double doors with push bars opened wide.
She expected it to be a guard, one of s’Ex’s males.
It wasn’t. And abruptly, Denne felt an absurd urge to cry.
“Hi,” she said to her father.
As with the Territory she had just trudged through, she felt as though she hadn’t seen iAm for years, and she searched his face. She had always taken after his side of things, their features eerily similar, especially in the arch of the brows and their deeply set eyes. But she was clearly her mother’s daughter, too. She got her long, curling hair from Catra, and her voice was so much like the Queen’s. She’d also been told that they shared the same rare smile.