by Melissa Marr
“We could kill you,” Eli said mildly. “Them, too. All that happened here was that the old man must have had some experimental drug before dying. That’s what happened.”
“No.” Tres glared at him. “St. Geneviève—”
“Oh, hell no.” I stepped back. “Your vow, Tres. Swear you won’t tell anyone what you think happened.”
“My kind take vows seriously, Chaddock. You do not want to face the consequences of breaking a vow.” Eli tugged off his glove and flicked the steel sword in my hand. The sizzle of his flesh made my stomach turn, but Eli was lowering his own defenses to the fae-deadly metal to make a point about what he was.
I kept my worry to myself. I wouldn’t undo his point.
“There are consequences,” Eli said. “And I have vows of my own.” He stepped forward, so he was between me and the still-kneeling Tres. “I would slaughter the whole city to protect Geneviève.”
I was startled at that revelation, but Eli wasn’t done.
“Swear that you protect her secret unless you would prefer the grave,” Eli demanded.
Tres stared at me as he swore, “I will never betray Geneviève.” He stood finally and glanced into the room. “Neither will they. I’ll see to it.”
“Good. Your vow is accepted in exchange for your life. Should you break this trust, I will kill you slowly.”
“Understood,” Tres said. He sounded a bit frightened, but then he met my gaze briefly. His voice softened as he said, “I hope to see you tomorrow, Geneviève. I’ve cleared my entire weekend in hopes . . .” Tres bowed his head to me and returned to the room.
I stared at Eli for several moments. “What the fuck was that?”
Eli shrugged. “We are in accord that this new skill is one that ought to be held in secret. The young Mr. Chaddock was given incentive to protect your secret.”
“But . . . he’s . . . what’s going on with him?” I glanced back. “That was fucking drunk monkeyballs levels of weird, right?”
“It was.” Eli held my gaze. “If he becomes a threat . . .I do not enjoy killing, Geneviève, but I will do so to protect you.”
I nodded and then let out a deep sigh. “Putting a pin in the zealot businessman. I need to figure out what the fuck I just did with Odem.”
“Healed him, I think,” Eli said. “Are there solutions other than eliminating the dead or binding them to you?”
I looked away. Short of killing them, there truly was no other solution with a draugr.
“What if it’s temporary, though?” I asked. “What if he just . . . goes back to a normal draugr? Like the dead do when I’m out of range?”
“Then I will not need to kill the young Mr. Chaddock to keep his silence.” Eli shrugged.
I knew he was not a heartless person, but he was fae. Perhaps telling me so bluntly meant that he wasn’t hiding that anymore. The fae were coldly practical. And as I looked at him, I understood the chilly practicality of his words; he would kill for my safety, as I did with the draugr. A part of me was warmed at the thought of being held in such regard, but another part of me whispered that the feelings I was so afraid of were already deeper than I’d realized.
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t deal with that right now. First, I had to figure out what to do with Odem. Walking away seemed irresponsible, and I wasn’t going to take the suddenly sentient draugr to my home.
But I really didn’t want blood on my hands because of my mistake—which is why I was about to do what might be the stupidest thing I’d done in years.
And that was saying something.
I was as sober as a judge when Eli and I walked to the door where we’d entered the morgue. I guess either I needed more of Eli’s touch to stay drunk or my magic had burned the drunk out of me. Either way, I was painfully clear-headed as I said, “I need you to get into the car first.”
I escorted him to the driver’s side rather than stopping on the passenger side. “Please?”
He unlocked and opened the door, but that was it. “Talk to me.”
“I have to tell someone about Odem,” I said as I shoved him backward into the car. “I’m not even sure she’ll come, but I need to try.”
“Tell who? Tell her what?”
“Beatrice. Just give me ten minutes.” I smiled, trying to appear reassuring. “It’s probably not the best plan.”
“I’m shocked,” he said drolly.
“If you need to leave, I—”
“Two minutes.” Eli reached out to me. “Don’t be reckless.”
“Who me?” I pushed the door shut and leaned against the car. To get out, Eli would need to slam his door into my back. He cared about me and his very expensive car enough not to do that unless it was truly urgent.
Cautiously, I sent my magic out like a net and thought her name, “Beatrice.”
I could hear Eli through the haze that was over me. Too much magic. Too often. I’d resurrected a man tonight. Oh, he was still dead as nails, but he had his mind. That ought not be the case. It had never happened before—and I was damned if I wanted to take all the blame. Maybe it was the injection.
“Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice,” I chanted.
The draugr’s name made me wish to be elsewhere. It made me want to be the sort of cold bitch I tried to be, but even if I didn’t care about the three men here at the morgue, I knew Odem had grandkids. A widow. Staff. A dozen humans would be there, innocents in most cases, and all I could think of was getting a call because children died.
“Geneviève.” Her voice was there before Beatrice was. This time, she was wearing the equivalent of an early Victorian formal dress. Her skirt was full, bodice fitted, and the whole thing seemed to be sewn of some kind of blue shimmering material. Darker blue lace trimmed the edges of the overskirt, the décolletage, and hem. A full dark lace waterfall draped from the sleeve edge and over her wrists and hands. A hat with a feather and a cameo necklace were her only accessories.
I nodded at the scary dead lady. My choice. My idea. Damn, I had some lousy ideas. I’d never met anyone as old or as scary as her, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could trust her. My aversion to draugr meant that I did not trust her fundamentally, but someone needed to know about Odem.
“Thank you for responding.” I tried to sound calm, but my sword was in my right hand and my gun was in my left.
“Have you invited me to a beheading?” Beatrice glanced at my weapons. “Perhaps a duel?”
I scowled. “I’m not sure I could behead you, and I’m not intending to try tonight.”
Her laughter was musical, and I liked being laughed at about as much as I liked being sucker punched.
“Did you bring me a snack all wrapped up in a pretty box?” Beatrice glanced at the car, raised her brow, and peered inside.
The windows were darkly tinted, but I still prickled at her words. “If you ever—”
“Yours are all safe from mine, at least those who obey me. I know your nest’s names and faces. They are marked as protected,” she said in a tone that reminded me far too much of my mother when she was exasperated with me.
“My nest? Protected?” I goggled at the thought. Why would they be protected? And who was Beatrice in their world that people obeyed her that way? I had more questions the more she spoke—although she said everything as if I should already know it.
But Beatrice frowned, and she sniffed delicately. Whatever she sensed about Eli was enough for her to add, “That one, however, would be safe either way.”
I resisted the urge to look at Eli. I couldn’t see through the glass anyhow, but I wanted to stare. I wanted to ask what she smelled and if I smelled it, too, but didn’t register it to identify it.
“There are things older than I am,” Beatrice said mildly.
“Fae.”
“Lovely for other indulgences. Not for snacking, sadly.” She stared into the car as if seeing an animal in an enclosure. Her lips parted as if hoping for a kiss, and my irritation increased. Eli might not be my lover, bu
t I wasn’t keen on a dead woman trying to get into his bed. “He was at that tavern you frequent. He doesn’t carry your scent, but you smell angry now. Is he unattached? Or yours?”
I swallowed my tangle of feelings. Possessive. Protective. Fearful. I had no idea what to do with it other than say, “He’s mine.”
She nodded once. “He is a fitting choice for your status. Beware the consequences, Daughter of Mine.”
“Not your daughter.” I bit off the words. My mother might be as flighty as a dragonfly, but she was my mother. I would have no other call me theirs. “Not even the monster that impregnated my mother was foolish enough to call me his daughter.”
Instead of answering me, Beatrice stared into Eli’s car and announced, “I have no quarrel with those who speak to earth and stone.”
I rolled my eyes. I was way past whatever mood I’d need to be in to parse the situation, and from the way she’d looked at Eli, even with glass between them, there was a meaning in the words beyond the obvious bit about no quarrel. My theory was that she was offering a ritual statement of some sort or another.
“How old are you?” I asked bluntly. My magic pushed toward her, as if I would pet her and read her with my grave knowledge. It wasn’t exactly carbon-dating, but there was a process akin to scientific dating when I let myself lean into it. Tonight, I knew I could read more than I ever had before in my life. Beatrice’s attire was Victorian, but there was no way she was younger than four-hundred-years.
Again, she laughed. “I danced with kings whose bones are dust, and watched men burn women like us alive over plagues and cattle.”
I revised my stance to five hundred.
“Helpful.” I obviously wasn’t getting a clear answer tonight, so I pointed at the building with my gun. “Dead guy in there.”
Beatrice followed my gaze. “It is the morgue, Geneviève. One would hope that the dead were in there.”
I nodded. “Usually my preference, as a matter of fact. I’d prefer the dead don’t walk.”
This time, Beatrice merely smiled. “And yet you have invited me here to speak . . .”
I sighed, looked around the lot, and wondered if this was the worst idea ever. There was no easy way to confess this to a draugr, especially this one, but I needed to know the Odem family wasn’t going to be dead by dawn.
I met her gaze. “Dead guy who should be muttering and rocking. Biting at flies.”
“Flies? Truly, Geneviève?” Her voice held all the laughter she didn’t show in her expression.
I shrugged. “I was here to investigate him. Saw the venom.” I swallowed louder than I meant to and admitted, “And when I saw it in his skin, I did as with rotting corpses. He was going to wake soon, but I pulled and he woke, and now, he speaks like he’s been out of the grave at least two or three decades.”
“That’s not possible. The venom, yes, but such alertness . . . no.” Beatrice pressed her pale lips together.
“Maybe it was the venom,” I offered hopefully. Please, let it be the venom. Not me.
She opened her mouth, and I expected a question.
Beatrice whipped her head to the side to glance at the building, and I knew without another word when she felt Mr. Odem’s presence. As her shock made her energy flash out, I felt echoes of her age and revised my assessment of her age to earlier than the Elizabethan era. I was guessing the early Renaissance, perhaps even earlier. It sent a wave of fear through me.
In a blink, Beatrice flowed toward the morgue. I could typically track the motion of a draugr, but she moved so swiftly it was as if she’d teleported. She hadn’t, obviously. Whatever she’d done, however, meant that the door to the morgue opened in the next moment after she’d arrived at the top of the steps.
Mr. Odem, clad in suit jacket and pair of jeans I assumed the men had stolen from a locker, looked like a spry graduate student rather than wealthy businessman. Dead or not, he moved with a grace that old humans lacked. He flowed and was up the steps, staring at Beatrice in an instant.
“Where did you get the venom?” Beatrice demanded. She had a hold of Odem, lifting him to her face as if he weighed nothing. His legs dangled as he was held in front of her like an oversized doll held by a child.
The suits exited the morgue in a run, and behind them was Tres. I wasn’t sure what Beatrice intended, but she was the oldest, strongest monster I’d ever met. It didn’t give me a lot of hope that this would go well.
“Fuck,” I muttered as I flowed toward the angry draugr lady, the far-too-agile Odem, and three vulnerable humans.
Chapter Nineteen
Beatrice was holding Odem aloft and staring at him with the kind of intensity that made me sure that there was a magic to draugr that I hadn’t known until this moment. Behind her the three human men looked various sorts of shocked. I couldn’t blame them. I was betting that not many suits had up-close contact with again-walkers, and even if they had, the two here were the most unusual I’d ever met—unless I counted myself, which I didn’t. Draugr ancestry or not, I was very much alive.
And I truly did want to stay that way, but I’d clearly underestimated Beatrice’s reaction, and since my reason for calling her was to prevent deaths, I felt like I kind of had to intervene. With a sigh, I moved behind her so I could put myself between the humans and the two draugr.
“Not his fault. He was injected against his will,” I told her in the most soothe-the-predator voice I could muster. “Murdered, just like another man I recently sent back to death.”
Odem was silently staring at Beatrice. He did not behave like a sentient man, nor did he rage like a new draugr. I realized then that Beatrice was reading him, much as I did with the truly dead and with her kind.
“He’s yours,” Beatrice said softly.
“What? My what? My problem, my—”
“Yours,” Beatrice repeated as she turned to face me. Her eyes had slipped from human to narrow slits as mine often did. It was unsettling to see my eyes in her face. Most draugr didn’t do that, and as much as I’d thought it was a trait that I’d inherited from the dead jackass who impregnated my mother, I’d not seen it in other draugr. Why did Beatrice have snake eyes? Why did I?
“You bound him to you, Geneviève,” she added mildly.
“Dick waffles.” I tried to think of how I had done that and offered, “Not on purpose.”
Beatrice stared at me in silence, and then, she dropped Odem to the ground, where he sat and looked around. Something about Beatrice made him opt to stay there rather than standing. I couldn’t blame him. My knees felt weak, but I think that was a mix of shock and terror. Okay, admittedly, that was probably exactly what he felt, too.
Eli joined us. I felt him crossing the lot and stopping behind Beatrice. I wasn’t sure whether to move so I was between him and the monsters or stay where I was, so the humans were behind me. My logic said to defend the weak, but my instinct was to protect Eli.
I glanced at him where he stood behind Beatrice. The glittering night sky that he usually hid was shining in every strand of hair. He glimmered. There was no polite way to tell him to tone it down, not without drawing her attention to him. I wanted to ask why, to tell him not here, to get him out of here.
But then Beatrice sighed and folded her arms. It was disconcerting how maternal—or grandmotherly, perhaps—the terrifying dead lady was. Oddly, it made me like her a little bit more. Intense, powerful women made up an easy ninety percent of my idols. Maybe Mama Lauren wasn’t the cookie-baking maternal prototype for most people, but she was my template, which meant that deadly women made me relax a bit.
“You truly had no idea you could bind,” Beatrice said, continuing the weary-mom-who-could-flay-you schtick she had going on.
I shuffled awkwardly. No one really loved being called stupid, and aloud or implied, that was what she was saying. In my defense, I’d been kissing a hot mostly-fae man and dealing with some complicated feelings about my own magic. I wasn’t exactly at peak clarity.
“I
knew I could with the ones I put together and pull from the soil,” I said, my words slipping out in a voice quieter than I meant to be. “The truly dead will obey me. Follow me. That’s why I tuck them back into their graves. If not, it’s like this combo of surprise army and needy kids all in one.”
“I bind my subjects to me,” Beatrice said mildly. She stared down at Odem with a strange expression. “The new are unpredictable, and once I bind them, they are not wandering off gnawing on the peasants.”
“Peasants?” Eli echoed. He’d taken another step, so he was closer still.
Seriously, I could’ve smacked him for drawing Beatrice’s gaze to him. She looked him up and down, not like he was a food source but like he was a beautiful man. Her gaze was pure predator, but less like the lion looking at the gazelle and more like the lioness picking a lion for a romp.
“Mine,” I growled, staring at both of them.
“Always,” he replied with a smile just for me, and I decided that particular smile of his needed to be patented as a panty-dropping weapon.
Beatrice shot that vaguely amused look at me again and stroked her chin lightly with one hand. “You would fight me over”—she motioned at Eli—“this?”
“Mine,” I repeated, moving between them. My back was to him, defending him. A rational part of my brain screamed not to attack the scary dead lady, but another part saw only that she was looking at someone I could not sacrifice.
My sword was suddenly out and raised.
“Geneviève?” Eli touched my shoulder. “Bonbon, I do not think she means me ill.”
“I recognize you now, Son of Stonecroft.” Beatrice sighed and then gave a moderately deep bow in Eli’s direction, not taking her gaze from us as she did so. When she straightened, she said, “I knew your grandfather. The earth mourned his loss.”
Eli looked pained, but I didn’t know enough about his family or his culture to understand why. “You speak in words that I would not expect to find on this side. Draugr are not typically so eloquent.”
“Those who walk among the peasants are not,” Beatrice corrected. “We are not all the same. Much like your father’s kin. Much like humans.”
