CHAPTER 8

"Level with me, Doc, how many needles am I looking at?" Sofia asked as the Doctor came over, donning a fresh pair of gloves. She chuckled. "Just a few draws for the blood purity test. But the new arcane tech is great. You will hardly notice it. Somehow Sofia doubted that, but her fear of needles was nothing compared to the anxiety of not knowing if she had some rare disorder that kept nobles from manifesting their gifts or something. She was already a bit of a hypochondriac after her mother’s illness, even though the doctors had assured her it wasn't hereditary.

Rosa was one of the few unfortunate Elder vampires whose accelerated regenerative abilities couldn't outpace the progression of her blood-borne disease, and once her symptoms had started to appear, it'd been a matter of moments before things went downhill. In that time, Sofia had lost her best friend, and often her only confidant, even though there were still things about all this she would've been afraid to tell even her. Feelings that were practically a betrayal for the future Lady of the Covenant to harbor. A female noble's life was not her own. From the lowest ranking Fledgling member of the Covenant who worked among humans to the Lord and his family, they all belonged to each other.

They belonged to a system. In a way, a Vampire Covenant was like a complex, ancient organism made up of living parts rather than a simple family or community, although it certainly had some elements in common with all three. The truth was, it didn't matter whether she was happy or not. All that mattered was that it was her duty to unite the triad and continue the pure family line, which meant continuing the future of the Covenant in turn. It was an honor, even if it didn't always feel like it. She just had to keep telling herself that. She did love the Covenant.

She wanted to be a part of it, even if she had grown pessimistic about her ability to do so. Her whole life, she had felt different from the others in a way she couldn't quite define. It made her peers think she saw herself as above them somehow, the Lord's daughter, too stuck up to be around the others. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth that she had always known, deep down, long before the ceremony, that she wasn't like the others. She was in perpetual fear that if she got too close to anyone, they would end up learning the truth: that there was something fundamentally wrong with her.

She had confessed as much to her mother once, but while Rosa was usually a fount of encouragement and reassurance, she'd always gotten quiet during those moments. Especially the day Sofia came home from the estate grounds, crying, because the other noble children wouldn't let her play with them.

“What’s wrong with me, Mama?” she had asked as Rosa held her on her lap in her sitting room. “There’s nothing wrong with you, sweetheart,” her mother had insisted, as usual. “I don’t fit in,” Sofia told her, her voice punctuated with gasps and whimpers as she cried into her mother’s shoulder.

“I’m different. Why am I different?” To this day, Sofia didn't even know what she meant by that. She would've just brushed it off as the irrational fears of a small child, and the Blood-Mother only knew she had plenty of those, if not for the way Rosa reacted. The way her mother’s gaze had darkened and grown troubled, and she had fallen into a long, heavy silence. “It’s nothing, baby.” Three little words, and yet they had left a big impression on Sofia’s young mind. What did she mean, it’s nothing? Not,

"There's nothing wrong with you," or, "You're just imagining it." Sofia went back and forth between telling herself she was paranoid and reading into things and thinking maybe there really was something to it after all. Maybe Rosa had known the truth all along, the truth everyone else somehow inherently suspected, even if their sharp instincts couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. That she was different, and it wasn't in a good way. That she was inferior. Broken.