by Cate Corvin
Bad Blood
Bonds of Blood 2: Victoria’s Trilogy
Cate Corvin
Bad Blood
BONDS OF BLOOD BOOK 2
CATE CORVIN
All Rights Reserved © 2019 Cate Corvin. First Printing: 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Cover Design by Melody Simmons
Author's Note: All characters in this story are 18 years of age and older, and all sexual acts are consensual. This book is a work of fiction and liberties may be taken with people, places, and historical events.
Created with Vellum
Contents
1. Tori
2. Tori
3. Càel
4. Tori
5. Sura
6. Tori
7. Tori
8. Tori
9. Will
10. Tori
11. Tori
12. Tori
13. Tori
14. Tori
15. Will
16. Tori
17. Tori
18. Sura
19. Tori
20. Tori
21. Tori
22. Tori
23. Tori
24. Càel
Also By The Author
1
Tori
“Hi there. Have you seen any demons around here lately? Sold any spit, by chance?”
The hedgewitch, a self-styled Madame Lobelia, stared at me through kohl-rimmed eyes, her mouth set in a wrinkled frown. A glittering purple turban larger than my skull was perched on top of her head, and she was draped in enough fake gold coins to make a leprechaun envious. “No. Why would a nice girl like you want demon spit, anyway?”
I leaned on the counter, giving her my most winning grin. “I’m not a nice girl, and it’s none of your business. All I need to know is whether or not you carry incubus saliva.”
Her eyes widened a little at that. “Demons aren’t welcome in my shop, slayer, and I don’t appreciate you coming into my place of business to interrogate me-”
I held up a hand, cutting her off mid-sentence. “If they’re not welcome in your shop, why is there an urn of fresh Berith eyeballs up there? Got a permit for that?” I nodded to the apothecary wall behind the hedgewitch’s counter, lined with countless jars, vials, and boxes. The urn in question stared at me accusingly.
Madame Lobelia’s lips twitched.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You know as well as I do what trafficking infernal organs without a license means, but I’m willing to look the other way… for the low price of a single answer.” I pulled my dagger from my hip in one smooth motion, allowing it to drop point-first into the polished wooden countertop. It sank into the wood like a hot knife through butter. “Last time I’ll ask nicely. Incubus saliva. Have you sold any recently?”
The hedgewitch clucked her tongue. “Ah, I see.”
A flicker of white-hot rage licked through me, temporarily displacing some of the blackness painting the inside of my skull for a hotter emotion. The way she looked at me, pity in her eyes… I didn’t want her pity. Didn’t need it.
All I needed was answers.
My fist clenched around the dagger’s handle. “Last chance.”
The shop’s doorbell tinkled, and a dark shadow loomed behind me, a warm hand landing on my shoulder and squeezing gently. Madame Lobelia went pale and stared up into Càel’s face, her mouth slack.
“I believe my woman asked you a question.”
His woman. Please.
Still, that didn’t stop a flicker of happiness from bursting to life in my stomach. I put a damper on it immediately.
“I haven’t sold any incubus saliva,” she said, almost tripping on her words in her haste to get them out. “Hell, I would if I could, Artemis knows incubus spit’s worth its weight in gold, but I haven’t been that lucky lately.” Madame Lobelia quailed under Càel’s unblinking gaze. “I swear! Goddess’s honest truth! I haven’t seen, smelled, or touched the stuff!”
Càel hadn’t moved a muscle, but I sighed. “Have you heard of anyone who has? Any hedgewitch, any dealer you can think of.”
She was gripping the edge of the counter on her side now with white knuckles. If she didn’t already have gray hair under that turban, she would by the time Càel was done staring her down. “I swear. No one I know sells it- they can’t get ahold of it. But!” She held up her hands pleadingly as I lifted the dagger. “Try Mister Thornton, he runs Pennywick Apothecary. And Gwendoline is a street dealer. She specializes in Fae product, but she might know an infernal tradesman.”
I smiled and slipped the dagger back in its sheath. “Thank you so much for your cooperation, Madame Lobelia. Where can I find this Gwendoline?”
She eyed Càel and licked her lips. “She’s usually under the Brooklyn Bridge, but she’ll know she’s got a client if you go looking for her.”
We left poor Lobelia quaking in her Birkenstocks as we left the Blade & Leaf Apothecary, the bell tinkling cheerfully overhead. Outside, the moon was already full. Instead of the pungent scent of herbs and candles, my nose was suddenly full of smog and grime.
I rested my hand on the hilt of my dagger as we walked back out into the city. Blade & Leaf vanished behind us, swallowed by a human-repelling glamour. “She was an easy nut to crack.”
“It was all me. Women find me irresistibly charming.”
“Right. I’m sure it had nothing to do with your widespread reputation for disemboweling and flaying.”
“Are you telling me you don’t find me irresistibly charming, Victoria?”
“Oh, and gizzard-stringing. Can’t forget that.”
Càel gripped my arm and halted, pulling me back with him. “Let me do this for you.” He was so old and strong it would’ve been almost impossible for me to break away from him- one of the fun tidbits I’d learned while at Libra Academy. The older the vampire, the more powerful they tended to be. He’d once kicked my ass thoroughly, driving that point home. “My people can find every dealer in this city. Whoever sold those cunts the saliva will be found and dragged into the light, but I will save the disemboweling for you, mo shíorghrá.”
It was impossible not to smile up at him, even with the widening awkward rift between us. Every time I’d stepped out of Libra Academy in the last week to make the most of my after-class hours, Càel had been with me, intent on tracking down every apothecary across New York and ripping the truth from them.
So far, my luck had been pretty miserable. Incubi were miserly bastards with their saliva, it turned out. Which begged the question: how the fuck had two student slayers acquired such a huge dose?
Then, despite my insistence on maintaining a wall between myself and the Shadowed World, there was the unspoken night between us.
I was sure that Càel knew the saliva’s influence had worn off halfway through and I’d ended it by fucking his brains out while perfectly lucid, but he hadn’t mentioned it. Yet. I’d wanted him with a hunger that had shocked me. Still wanted him.
But he knew exactly how I felt about vampires. And I knew how I was supposed to feel about them.
“Pretty sure disemboweling someone without a very good reason would get me expelled.” Against my better judgment, I reached up and touched his face, running my thumbs along his jawline. He was eternally frozen in time as a thirty-year-old V
iking, dark blond hair curling around his ears and the nape of his neck. Eyes the pale blue of an Arctic sky were framed with long lashes and the slightest hint of crow’s feet, and there was a tiny crook in the bridge of his nose, an imperfection that made him all the more appealing.
He leaned into my touch. It wasn’t lost on me that I was cupping the face of one of the most notorious vampiric murderers in history, like a woman stroking a tiger because it purred like a house cat.
“What happens in Bathory, stays in Bathory,” he murmured, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s not Vegas, Càel. Come on.” But a cloud of butterflies burst to life in my stomach when his hands slid down my arms and over my shoulders, one sliding around to grip the back of my neck.
He leaned down, only a breath away from a kiss, and smiled when my heart rate sped up, the tips of his fangs just showing.
“I have to do this myself,” I said, gazing into his eyes. “You can come with me, but in the end, it’s my mission. My purpose. I will not let them make me a victim.”
So what if all the high-ranking slayer families had seen me sucking dick in high-definition? I already knew I was nothing but podunk trash to them.
But I wasn’t going to sit back and let some vamp do this for me. I wanted to find the motherfucker who’d sold my undoing to William Godalming and Sura Enver and make them pay.
“You’re no victim, Victoria Holmwood.” Càel exerted a tiny bit of pressure on my neck, closing that last gap between us. His lips were warm and soft, and he tasted inexplicably delicious. The old Tori would’ve shrieked with disgust at the thought of opening her mouth for a vampire, but the new me had found that I liked the way Càel’s tongue ran over mine, slowly teasing until I was breathless against him. I held back a disappointed sigh when he pulled away. “Unless you’re my victim.”
That didn’t sound half-bad. I leaned into him, running my hands over the broad expanse of his chest and fanning my fingers out. Goddamn, but he was huge. “Are we back to threatening flaying? And I thought you liked me.”
I’d meant to make a light-hearted joke out of it, but somehow the words came out heavier, weighted with an unknown expectation.
Càel pressed his fingers against the pulse humming next to my throat as he gave me a considering look.
“Forget I said that.” It took a surprising effort to peel my hands away from his chest, wishing the entire time that I could peel his shirt away, too. I already knew from good, hard experience what he looked like naked.
He was pretty damn glorious, which made keeping this wall up so much harder than it should’ve been.
“I think you know how I feel about you, shíorghrá.” Càel gripped my hands. I was no longer pressed up against him, but I couldn’t turn away, either.
I looked down, unwilling to meet that gaze. There was something in it I couldn’t accept. Wouldn’t accept. Sex was fun and all, but there were some things that just couldn’t be. “No, I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. We barely know each other. You’re blackmailing me into coming to you, for fuck’s sake.”
Càel’s smile widened. “If you didn’t make it so difficult to pin you down, maybe I wouldn’t need to resort to dirty tricks.”
I didn’t miss the innuendo there. Filthy, gorgeous bastard. “Maybe if you didn’t use dirty tricks, I wouldn’t make it so difficult.”
“Ah, the endless circle. If you’re trying to make me feel guilty for blackmail, it won’t work, Victoria.”
I knew it wouldn’t. In Càel’s eyes, blackmail probably didn’t even register as being a morally bankrupt tactic. It was just a convenient and perfectly acceptable means to an end.
And if I needed any further indication that we were worlds apart, there was the leverage he held over my head: I’d murdered one of his sisters, Eluned Ravensbane, one of the trio of vampiric female knights known rather infamously as the Morrígna.
Now, thanks to me, she was nothing but ash, but instead of murdering me on the spot in retaliation, Càel had decided that made me worthy of his attention.
And oh, what attention it was.
Unlike Càel, if I ever got my hands on the Sathanas demon that had brutally murdered my brother James, I wouldn’t hesitate to settle the score. Càel’s ability to not only forgive what I’d done to Eluned, but hold me in esteem because of it, was utterly alien to me.
Vampires and slayers were entirely different cultures… and yet, he was the only one who seemed to be able to look into me and see what was broken.
I tried to tug my hands out of his grip, and he took pity and released me. “I know you don’t feel guilty, and I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s not your nature.” My tone came out sharper than I’d intended, but the point stood.
He was at my side before I’d taken one step down the sidewalk. “Is this one of your little ‘vampires aren’t capable of empathy’ tirades?” He was suddenly in front of me, and I stopped just short of smashing into his chest again. “I will make one thing clear to you, shíorghrá, whether you want to hear it or not.”
Càel gripped my chin, forcing me to look up at him. His eyes were cold as ice, and a shiver that wasn’t entirely unpleasant ran down my spine. “We are quite capable of experiencing the entire range of emotions. I was human before I was Made. Everything I was then is exactly the same as I am now… down to what I feel. I don’t feel guilty for blackmailing you into gracing me with your presence, or for gutting vampires who’ve broken our Laws, because we don’t possess the same ethics. It has nothing to do with my nature or what I feel.”
My heart had picked up into a steady hammering drumbeat. “Regardless of your ability to feel emotions, the ethics are also a major part of our divide. They matter to me, too.”
Càel cocked an eyebrow. “You’ve traversed half the city looking for apothecaries to shake down and interrogate. Your ethics and mine have aligned thus far.”
“Well, mine usually stop at flaying-”
“If you found the one who sold the saliva to the bastards, would you let them go?” His blue eyes bored into me. “How will you punish them when you find them, Victoria? Will you peel their flesh from their muscles? Will you saw their fingers down to the bone?”
I was silent, my words caught in my throat.
“I’m offering to find them so you don’t have their blood on your hands, so your ethics remain intact. Mine have long since vanished.”
I took a shallow breath, feeling frozen inside. He’d accompanied me to every major apothecary I’d visited so far. I’d thought it was to protect his investment in having a slayer under his thumb, or to snake his way back into my pants.
I never once thought it was because he wanted to protect me from myself… in truth, I didn’t know what I’d do when I found them. That part of my plans was still a gray area fogged with rage. My knife had five names on it, but there was an unknown out there, someone who had, possibly unknowingly, facilitated their plan. I didn’t yet know if I’d need to add a sixth name to that list.
Most of me voted for revenge. They’d sold the saliva without thinking about the consequences to someone else.
There was a small part of me that knew once I murdered someone in vengeance, there would be no return from that dark threshold.
But at the end of the day, I was the only one who was going to look out for me. My humiliation, my downfall, and my job to take care of business. “I wouldn’t ask you to do my dirty work for me, Càel. I’ve decided my path.”
His fingers tightened and my breath hitched. “Then our ethics continue to align, Victoria Holmwood… and I feel emotions as strongly as you do, so there is clearly not as great a divide between us as you seem to believe. Right now, my emotions tell me that someone fucked with my woman, and I have slayers to flay.”
“Flaying aside, you drink blood,” I whispered. I couldn’t even hate how warm and fuzzy I felt over the primal declarations that I was his woman. “Your kind kills mine. We kill yours.”
“Does it look like I�
�m killing you?” He raked his fingers through my hair and my skin tingled where he touched. “I haven’t asked for your blood.”
“Yet. There’s a first time for everything.”
“Exactly.” Càel’s satisfied purr rumbled through me. “So, it must be possible for a vampire and a slayer to be together if they wanted it enough.”
Okay, so I’d walked right into that one.
“I would ask you to come back to Bathory with me…”
I swallowed hard, my heart fluttering. The invitation was clear… and so very appealing. I’d already fucked Càel once, and he hadn’t taken my blood against my will… so why not do it again? Vampires couldn’t biologically procreate, so I had nothing to fear on that front. Then there was the fact that he was downright some of the best sex I’d ever had.
I pushed the other best sex to the back of my mind, where it wouldn’t send me into a blind rage.
“I can’t. I’ve still got class tomorrow, and Knightley’s really on about demons this week.” I tried to convince myself that there wasn’t disappointment in my voice, but I was a shitty liar, even to myself. “Which is really important, because I have a Sathanas demon to hunt down someday. Oh, and I need to destroy Will’s grades.”
Càel’s lips twisted in a frown, but he didn’t press me. Maybe that was why I liked the vampire so much; he somehow knew exactly when to press, and when to back off.
Who the fuck was I kidding? I liked him for a hell of a lot more than that.
But… vein-lickers. Ugh.
“You will come tomorrow.” He said it decisively, like he was the boss of my plans.
