I didn’t kill.
Hours later, the lock on my cell clanged and the door opened to admit my sister, Laurice.
“Finally!” I stood, my hands still shackled, wanting to embrace her but being unable. “I thought no one from the family would come to my rescue.”
She came to me, her hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eye. Her expression said everything. She thought I was guilty as well.
“I’m not here to rescue you, brother,” she said softly. “Just to say goodbye.”
“What?” I looked deep in her eyes, unable to accept that she’d believe I could kill. “I haven’t killed a mortal for hundreds of years. How can you even think it?”
She sighed and sat down on the bench. I sat beside her, my chest heavy with sadness that she believed me a killer.
“There was evidence,” she said softly. “Your possessions left in the room where the girls were found. After you escaped, the bodies of the men you killed… There were no other registered vampires in the area. Just you.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said, a sinking feeling overtaking me. “I didn’t kill any of them. I swear to you on my family’s memory — on my sons’ memory — that I never killed them. I never touched the girls. The vagrants I drank from were all alive when I left. They had enough blood to survive, although they’d be weak.”
She looked deeply in my eyes once more. “You swear to me? On your sons’ memory? On our father’s memory?”
“I do swear to you on all of it. My sons. Our father’s name. On our family’s honor.”
She exhaled, and leaned back. “I’ll talk to Evan, but he’s determined to put you in prison.”
“What about my right to a trial? What about waking Father?”
She reached out and touched me. “You don’t know?”
I shook my head, a feeling of dread seeping into my very bones.
Then of course, it hit me. “He’s dead?”
She nodded. “Soon after you were imprisoned. There was a battle… The Spencers attacked the mansion and it was taken. Father’s crypt was opened. He was staked, his body exposed.”
Grief gripped my heart. “Mother?”
“She survived, escaping with Evan and the rest of the family.”
“How did they get into the crypt?”
“Dynamite,” she said, her voice low. “They blasted through the walls.”
I covered my face and tried to comprehend the reality that now, my brother Evan was the Prince of The City. It would have been me, but I had been imprisoned for all this time…
“Evan won’t even see me?”
She shook her head. “He says you’re a traitor. That you arranged the attack with the Spencers before you left and it’s because of you that Father’s dead. He thought it was suspicious that you went when you did instead of sending someone else to set up the new offices. He said it was too convenient.”
“So he thinks I’m a parricide as well as an ordinary murderer…”
She gave me a sad smile.
“Laurice, I went to San Francisco because I love to build. You know that. I went to every new office when the locations were being selected and during the build. I hired the staff…”
“I know that, but Evan said the timing was so suspicious. Your encouragement of our alliance with the Spencers just added to the suspicion. Then, you killed those young girls… It seemed you went rogue.”
“Impossible.”
I sat and passed the whole business over in my mind, trying to determine who my true enemy was — the Spencer family or my own brother.