by Cate Corvin
All of Tenebris were blasted on the pixie’s dust, having a great time. Tori was in the arms of the Morrígna and I couldn’t do anything to save her. She didn’t even want saving.
There was a gaping hole in my chest where she’d been. I could’ve had sunshine and happiness, something I’d had in short supply these last five years. Now all I had was empty bitterness.
Nothing could fill a void like that.
10
Tori
Every muscle in my body felt like stone, pulled painfully taut. Not even Morgrainne’s joke took the edge off my reality: the motherfucking Morrígna had hemmed me in tight between them.
Not even watching Will’s face go stark white with agony as Rhianwen pinched a sensitive pressure point was worth this level of stress.
They herded me to the upper bar, where Càel had spilled the beans to his younger sister, but he wasn’t there. The bartender in the Edwardian gown, Euphemia, greeted her mistress with a glass of scarlet blood… and a Viking horn of it for Morgrainne.
“A Manhattan for our guest, Euphemia.” Rhianwen settled herself on the stool with all the gravity of a queen, adjusting today’s designer cocktail dress around her legs.
The Crowfoot plopped me onto a bar stool and ordered me mead. “None of the frou-frou pansy shit they drink downstairs,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “A true warrior basks in the mead of her homeland.”
“Nothing is frou-frou about whisky.” Rhianwen took a dainty sip of her blood. “When in Rome.”
Euphemia slid two glasses across the bar to me. Mead and Manhattan.
I decided against pointing out that Club Bathory wasn’t actually in Manhattan, so the saying didn’t really apply here, and took a tentative sip of my mead. Morgrainne watched me with an intensity that sent my heart into my throat and I choked.
“I’m not going to kill you, slayer,” she said, pounding my back when I coughed. “My siblings have explained all.”
Her smile was not reassuring. Especially not when she topped off my glass of tooth-rottingly sweet mead. I wasn’t so sure the mead was going to mix with whisky without my stomach rebelling. “Modern brewing technology beats a twelfth-century abbey any day. Let us raise a glass.”
Rhianwen silently lifted her wine glass, her gray eyes watching me. Seeing no other choice, I raised my mead.
Even though the three vampires and myself were the only souls in the bar, Morgrainne lowered her voice for the toast, so quiet I barely heard her myself.
“Strike hands with me, the glasses brim, the dew is on the heather. For love is good, and life is long, and sisters best together.”
She and Rhianwen both swigged their blood, eyes grave, and I took a deep swallow of mead, my nerves jangling.
Càel’s words were very clear in my mind: without Rhianwen’s understanding and intervention, Morgrainne would’ve killed me without a second thought. Now, unless I was totally offbase, she was toasting her commitment to a new sister.
The magnitude of the shit I was in was really starting to become clear.
“Now, on to the next order of business.” Morgrainne held out her drinking horn, and Euphemia poured blood from a pitcher. I watched in horrified fascination, wondering if they used an anticoagulant to keep it from congealing. “You have to be Made, of course.”
I choked, spraying whisky across the bar. “Sorry,” I whispered to Euphemia, who wordlessly wiped it up. “Um. No thanks. I’m not looking to lose my mortality anytime soon.”
Morgrainne stared at me. “But you must. You are one of us.”
“Look, I can’t- okay. I have zero interest in being Made a vampire. I’m a slayer, born and bred, and I’ll never be anything else. End of story.”
Morgrainne sucked her teeth, making the kind of face that told me she really wasn’t listening at all. “The question is who gets to do it. You don’t want Càel to be your Maker, trust me. It’d be like screwing your parent or something. Gross.”
My lungs had totally frozen. They wanted me to be a vampire. They called me sister.
A knight I’d never spoken to before was openly acknowledging that I was sleeping with her brother.
A light touch brushed my arm, and Rhianwen leaned forward. “You don’t have to make your choice tonight, dear one,” she said, brushing my hair back from my face. “But we’ve consulted the bones and the oracle. There is no doubt in the matter: Badb Catha has chosen you to be one of us. Fate and the hand of the Lady of Phantoms led you to Eluned that night.”
“It was nothing but a coincidence,” I insisted.
“Coincidence, Fate, same thing.” Morgrainne quaffed the rest of her blood. “Whether it was your own feet or my Lady’s hand who guided you to her, you were there either way. What’s done is done.”
Not for the first time, I regretted encountering Eluned at all.
“Okay, so I was there. But there is absolutely no way in hell I’m becoming a vampire. Nope. I decline, thanks.”
Morgrainne leaned on the counter and the wood creaked. “You can resist… for now. But you’ll want to make up your mind before you get all old and decrepit, or you’ll end up like Jericho: ninety-seven years old for the rest of your eternal existence.”
I had a sudden vision of myself standing next to Càel, him still in the prime of his eternal life, and me a mortal. My back stooped, my skin wrinkled and marked with a lifetime of battle scars, and hair as white as bone…
An involuntary shiver ran down my spine. I hated everything about that mental image.
And I hated that I hated it.
“Don’t hold your breath,” I said, and Morgrainne laughed. Vampires didn’t technically have to breathe. “Speaking of guys who I don’t want to Make me, where is Càel?”
The two Morrígna- it was impossible to think of myself as one of them- might’ve waylaid me on my way upstairs to meet him, but there was no sign of the only person I’d come here to see.
“He’s handling our King’s business.” Rhianwen squeezed my hand, and I tried to picture this soft-edged, gentle-voiced vampire ripping through full-grown men. She presented a strange, unnerving dichotomy at the best of times. “We will not push you now, sister, but there will come a day when a choice must be made. You will always have a shield in us. Badb has brought us together as three once more, and that call must be answered with blood, as she intended.”
There was a gentleness in her tone that had a lump rising in my throat, embarrassingly enough. Something about the Moonfawn was like being wrapped in a warm, bracing hug when she spoke to me, the way I wish my Mom could’ve been for me when I’d needed her love the most. But, unlike my mother, Rhianwen wanted to take my mortal life.
That horrible feeling was compounded when Rhianwen planted a gentle kiss on my forehead before she slid off her seat. “Go forth and be at peace, sister. Our brother will find you before the night is through.”
Morgrainne’s armor clinked as she shifted. “The rule still stands,” she said gruffly. “Say nothing to anyone outside the safety of this room. Least of all our Maker, unless you want to wind up his blood-slave.”
“He sounds testerical,” I muttered, and Morgrainne thumped my back with an amiable hand.
“Càel has something for you. Make your new sister proud and don’t turn it down.”
God, what was with this family’s penchant for guilt-tripping and blackmailing people?
I left Morgrainne and drifted down the stairs, feeling like the world was shifting under my feet. The idea of curling up in a dark corner somewhere and contemplating where the fuck I’d gone wrong had a strong allure, but as the pixie club’s music grew louder, hot pink letters caught my eye.
I hadn’t searched Seventh Heaven yet. Korso might be a better lead than the human apothecaries, if I could convince him to talk.
The smoke that billowed out of Seventh Heaven tonight was a light amethyst, spangled with twinkling lights. My nose itched as I stepped into the fog. Shadowy shapes danced around me, beyond reach and clear si
ght. There was no way of knowing if they were real people, or just illusions.
This time no cambions accosted me, and the ritual dance was slower, more sensual. I squeezed my way past several couples, my cheeks red with second-hand embarrassment by the time I saw the soft, beckoning lights of Korso’s bar.
Looked like clothes were extremely optional for most dancers tonight.
Korso was there, the lights glinting off his deep green skin, a stray pixie clinging to the base of one of his shattered horns. As I watched, she fluttered to one of the patrons, whose head was tilted all the way back, his mouth open.
The pixie perched on his lower lip and shook her ass over his open mouth, sending a stream of sparkling dust down his throat. When she was done, she fluttered to the man’s finger, and he pursed his lips and raised her to his mouth, planting a kiss on her that covered half the pixie’s body.
She fluttered away, taking refuge on Korso’s horns again, wiping the man’s kiss off herself with tiny, exaggerated gestures.
I shook my head, but the patron slapped a stack of cash on the counter and stumbled away from the bar into the throng of sensually grinding dancers.
With most of my focus on Korso, I almost missed the dark shadow at the end of the bar. Sura. He glared at his drink… and judging by the several empty glasses piling up next to him, it wasn’t his first.
He slurred something to Korso, who shook his head. I ducked behind a large, hairy demon, trying my best to overhear without being seen.
“I think you’ve had enough for tonight, Mr. Enver.” Korso’s deep, precisely accented voice cut through the music.
Sura raised a glass to his lips, draining the rest of the sticky black fluid. “Nothing’s enough. There’s a hole in me, Korso. It eats everything and nothing fills it.”
The Legionnaire bartender nodded sympathetically, but he didn’t pour another. “Most people have a hole in them. It’s the nature of our existence.” He said it with resignation, like he’d been giving Sura a circular pep-talk for several hours now and none of it was sinking in.
Sura nudged the empty glass his way, a not-so-subtle hint. “But that’s the problem. I had something there. It wasn’t always empty. Once you know what something feels like, you can never go back to the way you were before.”
My stomach twisted. I was sure he couldn’t possibly be talking about me.
“Before them, being empty was fine, because I didn’t know I was empty.” Sura’s voice was a little slurred, growing louder and angrier. “But that’s not all it is. There’s so much more than that! Look at everything he hid from me-”
“Quiet.” Korso’s command, while quiet, was pure steel. Sura stopped talking, but his hands were braced on the table, half out of his seat. “That is not a discussion for here.”
“Sure it is,” Sura growled. “Who cares anymore? When I go home, I’ll be empty again. Why not just burn it all down now?”
Korso leaned over the bar, his chiseled face dead-serious, and said something to Sura in a voice so low I couldn’t even hear his murmur.
I was like Alice looking down the rabbit hole, driven by a burning curiosity, but there was no way to get closer without tipping off Sura or Korso that I was here.
He was one of the last people I wanted to talk to right now. All I saw was his dark, jewel-like eyes, cold as ice when he called me a hypocrite. I couldn’t question Korso while I was seething over the asshole sitting at his bar. Better to find Càel now and come back later, when Sura was gone.
I pushed back through Seventh Heaven the way I came, taking a deep breath when the door shut behind me. So, Korso was a bust for now. I could always annoy him later… and dig for whoever this ‘he’ was who Sura was so pissed at.
Their entire conversation had left me feeling unsettled, the subtext disturbing in a way I couldn’t quite pin my finger on.
I ducked through the pixie club, managing to avoid Will, and ran into the one I was looking for in the first-floor cocktail bar. Literally. One minute the stairwell was clear, and the next moment my nose was mashed against Càel’s chest.
“Do you ever move at the speed of a normal person?” I asked, rubbing my nose.
“That was the speed of normal people. You move abnormally slow.” My heart jumped into overdrive as Càel kissed me without preamble, both hands cupping my face and pulling me in close.
It wasn’t fair that it was a vampire, of all people, who kissed me like I was all he’d wanted for over a thousand years.
Even while his lips moved against mine, the image of myself as an old woman and Càel forever young flashed back in my mind, an unwelcome neon sign refusing to be ignored. Càel would always be this. Always strong, always handsome, always kissing with this same enthusiasm.
I didn’t have that long. A thirteenth of his current lifespan, at the most, and that was only if I was very, very lucky. Miraculously lucky, even.
Most slayers weren’t even plain old regular lucky. Reaching eighty was about as ancient as we got. All it took was the slightest hint of age to touch our vitality and the Shadowed Worlders immediately had an advantage over us.
I kissed him back, wishing he was as human as I was as I fought to push those terrible thoughts away. I should just be happy for the life I did have, however long it lasted.
When he finally allowed me to draw in a breath, he didn’t move far, resting his forehead against mine. Tension limned his body tonight. “Your sist-” I started to say, but his hand slid over my mouth before I could finish the words.
“Only on the tenth floor,” he said, so low the words were barely audible. “Never down here.”
I nodded. As long as he was aware of what the Morrígna were doing alone with me - stuffing me with too many kinds of booze at once, recruiting me to their ranks, and telling me to kiss my mortality goodbye- I was good. Hell, he’d probably put them up to it, trying to soften me up to the idea.
“My King has dedicated tonight to blood sports,” he said. His pale eyes were shadowed in a way I didn’t like. What could stress out Càel? It didn’t seem possible that anything could faze him. “I need you to leave, mo shíorghrá, and get as far from Clouded Court territory as possible.”
My skin seemed to ice over. “Why? Who’s he hunting, Càel?”
“Any slayer who catches his eye.” He was already pulling me down the stairs after him, the glowing moment of basking under the feel of his lips gone.
I dug in my heels at the entrance to Bathory. It was already closed, blocking further entry. Thraustila already had all the guests he could possibly want for this evening’s entertainment. “He can’t do that, Càel. It’s against our laws.”
He wrapped his huge hands around my upper arms, like he fully intended to pick me up and move me, but he ducked in close instead, mouth moving against my ear. “We don’t change, Victoria. We stay the same as we were when we were Made.” My skin prickled, both from the feeling of his lips against me, and the urgency in his voice. “Thraustila didn’t change. He’s always done as he wants. Take an ancient teenage vampire without restraint or a care for the law and place him in the modern age… what do you get?”
“A bloodbath,” I whispered, and Càel nodded, his blond curls brushing my cheek.
Thraustila didn’t give a flying fuck about his Law or ours. He was frozen in time, and while the others had adapted and overcome, he clearly had no intention of doing the same.
They’d learned to work within the rules. Thraustila would plow right through them. I remembered the woman in the silver-spangled dress in his throne room and wondered if she’d even made it out alive.
Sickness settled in the pit of my stomach. “Why haven’t you done something?” I growled through gritted teeth.
Càel gave me a half-smile as he straightened up. “One of us tried.”
The sickness grew as understanding clicked for me. Eluned Ravensbane, oldest of the Morrígna, had made a bid to depose her own Maker. He’d staked his still-living daughter to the roof to cook
in the sun.
Now I understood what Morgrainne meant as well. Their Maker was more than just a creator, passing on the virus… they were almost symbiotic. As dangerous as Càel was on his own, Thraustila would still have a measure of control over his child.
An eternally-teenage boy with weapons of mass murder on his hands, ruling in New York.
I couldn’t do anything about that now, but I could help someone else. “What about the others? There are slayers from the academy up there.”
Càel’s look was grim. “You are the most important.”
I stared up at him. The single sentence drove home the core differences between us. He’d claimed me, so I was worth saving.
None of the others meant anything to him. They were collateral damage for his father’s appetites.
“I’m not leaving.” I planted my feet firmly on the floor, glaring up at him. “They’re important to me.”
Well, some of them were, in the abstract sense. Truth be told, I utterly despised most of Tenebris.
But I wasn’t going to stand back and let a slayer be chosen for death. Especially when four of them were mine to destroy.
“You are leaving.” Càel picked me up easily, carrying me the last several feet to Club Bathory’s crimson door. I braced my hands against his chest, fruitlessly trying to push him away.
A din echoed down the stairs, and the vampire who looked like a 1930s silver screen starlet- Chloe- came striding down the concrete hallway with Iskandar at her side.
Thraustila came striding down the stairs, a limp body tossed over his shoulder like a potato sack. What seemed like half the pixie club was on his heels, moonspawn, vampires, and demons, all collectively cheering for blood.
My stomach flipped as Thraustila’s dark eyes found me and Càel by the door, and the Viking at my side tugged me against him, his mouth finding my neck with a careless violence. I froze with my hands on his chest, half-expecting the sting of fangs in flesh, but nothing happened as Thraustila slapped the ass of his poor victim and jostled her on his shoulder. “Bring your blood-bag, Càel!”
