“How are you doing, champ? Foot throbbing?”
He garbles something through the tape. Even gagged, I can recognize a sincere “fuck you.”
Koralin perches on the sofa opposite me, barely resting her ass on the edge. She holds her knife upright, the point between her breasts.
“Since we seem to have struck a bargain, I’ll put down my knife if you lay down all of your weapons.”
I take out the Smith & Wesson and put it on the table. I set the black blade and athame next to it. I put the na’at at the end, where she can get a good look at it.
“So what was it between you and Eleanor? She must have really hated you to run off with your secret weapon.”
“She was a troubled child.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it because the moment you bring her into your story, it doesn’t add up. You Geistwalds are Death Born. But Eleanor was bitten by a vampire and turned. That means she had to be alive.”
“Eleanor wasn’t Der Todes Geboren.”
“I thought so. Was your husband?”
“Of course. He was the patriarch. And Rainier. Eleanor, however, was like you. The family grotesque.”
“She was Daddy’s girl, wasn’t she? It’s his fault Eleanor wasn’t dead like Mommy.”
Koralin doesn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Just stares at Aki. I wait. I count the molecules that make up the pearls in the necklace.
Finally, she says, “Not being alive ourselves, we can’t produce our own children. Jan conceived Eleanor with a living woman.”
“Was she pretty? Was she nice? Did he fall in love with her?”
A slight smile plays around her mouth likes she’s found a pleasant memory.
“Tell me about your father,” she says.
“Which one? I seem to have a lot.”
“The human one.”
I shrug.
“He was all right. I wasn’t an easy kid. He tried his best, but he never really took a shine to me.”
“What a surprise. And your other father?”
“Until an hour ago, I thought it was Lucifer.”
“That would be almost as good a family secret as ours.”
“So, Jan was in love with a pretty human and they had a girl. Then what?”
She looks at her hands and then starts.
“Jan was a romantic. He loved the woman and didn’t want their daughter to be Death Born. The Geistwald children receive the death bite at birth when the head of the family removes the umbilical with his teeth. Jan refused. He stole the child, and by the time he brought her back, it was too late for her to be reborn.”
“So you tortured and tormented Eleanor and her father every day of her life.”
“They deserved worse. I would have killed her, but she was still a Geistwald and there would have been talk.”
“Rainier was born right, though. And you weren’t going to let him get away.”