by Cate Corvin
“Oh, Càel.” Thraustila shook his head. My muscles clenched up, automatically trying to curl in on myself so Thraustila’s long fangs wouldn’t be so close to my throat. “She’s your blood-bag.”
“What’s the benefit of running this shithole if I don’t get something out of it?” Càel sounded bored and cold. “I doubt she’s a spy. All these slayer students want to fuck the vampires, don’t they, Father? You keep your own pet.”
As terrible as it was to hear Càel sound so callous, it was better than showing Thraustila how much he cared. I held my breath, hoping the king didn’t see right through it. He’d just take joy in hurting me if he knew.
Thraustila finally removed his face from the crook of my neck, to my entire body’s relief. His eyes, dark, fathomless pits of age in a young face, glared at Càel over my shoulder. “If you’re going to keep a slayer as a pet, you need to keep them on a tighter leash.” His hands tightened around my wrists. I bit back a shriek as the bones in my arms ground together. The blood drained from my face in a dizzying rush.
“Allow me to rectify it. Nothing a few days under my fangs won’t fix.”
Thraustila raised an eyebrow. A sickening gush of hope rose in me, edged with terror. If he thought Càel would savage me into submission, I stood a chance at freedom…
“This one is ruined. She wasn’t broken to heel early enough.”
He released my wrists, and before I could take a breath, before I could so much as understand what was happening, his hands clamped down on my chin and the back of my skull.
The last thing I heard as he wrenched my head backwards was a sharp crack that filled the world.
24
Càel
My Maker released her. Victoria’s body collapsed to the ground, a tangle of limp, nerveless limbs with her head facing the wrong direction. Her expression, slowly slackening, was still frozen in shock, tinged with fear.
The bloodsong, an omnipresent thundering in the back of my mind, faded to a thready whisper.
The blood in my stomach threatened to rise again, the taste of copper filling my throat. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He was supposed to release her.
“You know better, my son,” Thraustila said. He brushed his hands off on his kilt and stepped over Victoria’s body, striding past me and Rhianwen. My younger sister was frozen in place. “They’re replaceable. No mortal is worth the success of our family. Our blood.”
He looked up at me. Millennia of cruelty shone out of his eyes. “Break your blood-bag early next time. That one saw too much. If you don’t discipline them, I will.”
The king continued on his way without a care. Of course, he didn’t know that he’d just shattered my world along with Victoria’s spine.
It seemed impossible that the earth was still spinning as her body cooled. Everything should be crumbling now.
Rhianwen shot forward and knelt by Victoria’s side. A flicker of rage cut through the numbness that had filled my mind.
A second later, I was gripping Rhianwen’s hands. “Don’t touch her!”
I carefully slid my hand under Victoria’s head, easing it back around so she looked almost whole again. Dark bruising mottled the skin of her neck, turning it a deep violet in places.
My eyes were burning with a strange heat. I didn’t care, until crimson drops spattered over Victoria’s chest, sliding along her collarbone. Tears.
Never had I cried before. Is this what Rhianwen felt when she shed pink-tinged tears? The hot liquid painted my face like warpaint.
Air rasped through Victoria’s parted lips. “There’s still time, Càel,” Rhianwen said urgently. “She breathes. Her heart beats.”
I slid my hand over her breast. There; a thin, faint pulse that grew weaker with every beat. If I Made her…
“Open her mouth.” The Moonfawn was cold and hard, with no invitation to argue. Like I watched my own body from a distance, I cradled Victoria in my lap and pressed my fingers and thumb into the hinge of her jaw, forcing her mouth open.
“Tori?” The whispered word barely registered in my consciousness, but a tiny thread of fury rose to meet it. “Is she-”
Rhianwen raised her arm to her mouth and sank her fangs into her radial artery. A hot, wet gush of dark blood pumped out, splattering over Victoria’s open lips. She just stared at the sky, her eyes empty.
My sister held the open wound against Victoria’s mouth, stroking my singer’s throat to make her swallow. “You. Come here.”
A pair of boots entered the periphery of my vision. The slayer- her not-brother, one of the two bastards who’d humiliated her- sank to his knees at Rhianwen’s side, pale as snow, unable to tear his gaze from Victoria’s still body.
“He killed her.” His name was Will. That fact penetrated my conscious from a thousand miles away. He breathed the words like he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
Rhianwen kept at her grisly work. Victoria’s face was painted with her Maker’s blood now. “Get one of your vehicles, slayer, and take this knife. Prepare to bleed yourself if you want her to live.”
The distant part of my mind noted that Will didn’t hesitate. He took the iron knife from Rhianwen’s thigh sheath without so much as a whisper of protest, touched Victoria’s stiffening arm, and disappeared again.
An angry voice met him at the entrance to the alley.
“This will be enough,” Rhianwen muttered. She removed her arm from my singer’s mouth and quickly drew her tongue over the open wound, sealing it. “It has to be enough.”
She looked up at me with a bleak expression. “If you take her, you can’t come back. He’ll destroy you for betraying him.”
“Loving someone is not a betrayal.” I scooped Victoria into my arms. Her head flopped limply over one of my arms.
“He won’t see it that way.” Rhianwen touched my hand. “She’ll need all the blood they can spare. Morgrainne and I will send word as soon as we can.”
I nodded. Victoria’s bloodsong was so faint, my skull was almost empty of her music again. “Thank you,” I rasped.
The Moonfawn kissed Victoria’s forehead and wiped away a smudge of my bloodied tears. “Keep my daughter alive. Go now.”
I carried Victoria out of the alley. The slayer had done one thing right in his life; one of the Libra Academy taxis waited at the curb. He held the door open, lips drawn back in a grimace. I carried Victoria inside, snarling when another pair of hands reached for her.
He wore the glamour of a human, a slayer, but he was the incubus. I’d smelled him on her when she came to me earlier that night.
The only thing that stopped me from ripping his throat out now and bleeding him into her veins was that she’d claimed them as her own. I wouldn’t disrespect my singer’s choices now, not while she was straddling the thin line between death and eternal life.
I allowed him to cup her head so more damage couldn’t interrupt the healing process. Will yanked the door shut.
“Drive!” he snapped at the empty front seat. A whiff of brimstone filled the air, and the car slid into traffic.
He held Rhianwen’s dagger in a white-knuckled grip. “How much does she need?”
“All of it. Rhianwen’s blood will hold her in stasis for a while, but she needs much more to be fully Made.” My arms refused to relax, refused to release Victoria even an iota. Her body was stiffening, and I held my breath. It was a good sign.
The rigor of death, where her hurts would be healed as Lilith’s Gift Made her into something new.
Will slid the tip of the dagger into his wrist, his expression unwavering despite the pain he was surely feeling. Blood welled up and soaked his sleeve. He got on the floor in front of us and held the wound to her mouth, same as Rhianwen had.
My heart lurched as Victoria’s jaws locked around his arm, an automatic reflex as the Gift’s instincts took over her body.
“She’s changing,” the incubus whispered. “It worked.”
Victoria pulled hard, and Will�
�s nostrils flared as he struggled against the hurt.
“Don’t fight her,” I growled. “It hasn’t worked yet. She’s going to need a lot more than that to cross over.”
Pale green eyes flashed up to my face, his jaw stubborn and set. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Victoria’s swallow reflexes worked without her conscious mind to guide them, settling into a steady rhythm as the taxi tore through the streets. Will’s skin had gone a pasty gray before we were halfway there, but a hint of color touched Victoria’s cheeks.
A crackling sound filled the air of the cab as her spine knit itself back together.
“She needs more,” I gritted out. “This will heal her, but it’s not enough to force the full change.”
“Can she drink infernal blood?” Sura demanded. “Will it help Make her?”
Truth was, I didn’t have the slightest fucking clue. I’d never drunk demon blood. But there was a light shining at the end of this dark, bleak tunnel of hopelessness, and if it drained both of them to bring her through it, so be it.
“Try it, when he’s given all he can.”
If infernal blood was unpalatable to her, her body’s reflexes would reject him.
And if that happened, I’d grab the first human I saw off the street and cut his throat over her open mouth.
Will’s eyes rolled back in his head. He collapsed to the floor of the cab, his breath shallow as he passed out.
Sura grabbed the knife, jammed it into his wrist with a shaking hand, and held it to her lips. Black blood, shimmering with different colors like an oil spill, dripped onto her tongue.
I half-expected her to reject him, to have to stop this chariot and hunt for her.
But her head snapped forward. Ivory flashed- she spat out her human incisors as new ones slid forth to take their place- and she sank her teeth into his flesh with a little growl.
Sura’s features rippled and there was suddenly a demon sitting in front of us. “I demand you stay with me,” he snapped, his fiery gaze focused on Victoria’s subtly changing face. “The Fates can’t have you.”
She drank deeply. All fledgling vampires’ bodies had reflexive signals; they made sounds as they changed, their consciousnesses melding with their new forms. Victoria made little moaning sounds as she drank her fill.
Under the terror that she was gone, that everything was lost, a new, guilty emotion was rising within me and displacing everything else: euphoria.
The Gift was taking. The blood was enough. She was being Made, her body healed and immortalized forever.
The bloodsong’s beat grew stronger, filling my mind, growing louder with each drop of blood she sucked down.
The demon growled low in his throat. “Take more, Tori. Take more.” He squeezed his wrist, sending blood gushing over corners of her mouth.
The taxi screeched to a halt and the warm lights of the Caitland-Moore Museum, old slayer territory, washed through the taxi’s windows. Several young slayers- Victoria’s classmates- had paused on the steps at the sight of the cab hauling ass into place by the curb.
The demon hissed, straining with effort, and pulled the human mask back over his face.
One of the slayers, a young woman Victoria’s age with long black hair, approached the cab, frowning.
I didn’t relinquish Victoria even when she opened the door and gasped, her body tensing.
“Get Burns and Knightley, Aislin,” Sura rapped out, with Victoria still clamped on his wrist. “Will’s bled out, Tori’s dying. Go.”
But she wasn’t dying. She was perfect.
She released Sura’s arm with a sigh, her tongue flicking out to swipe his dark blood off her lips and revealing the tips of those brand-new fangs. Her eyes had closed. For all appearances, she was a sleeping woman. Blood spattered us, the floors, the seats. Two human teeth clattered to the floor.
Sura bound his arm and gathered Will. I lifted Victoria and climbed out of the taxi, meeting the slayers on the steps of the museum.
A lanky older slayer, a dark-skinned man with a limp, and a tiny woman with short gray hair didn’t waste time with stupid questions. They took Will’s limp body. The crippled man supported Sura.
I followed with Victoria, but the ebony door leading to Libra Academy proper repelled me. It was lined with pure silver set in the wood.
Victoria needed to be inside those walls. When my Maker got wind of her second life, that his daughter had created her first daughter, there would be no safety on the outside.
I gritted my teeth and pushed through. Victoria groaned in my arms, still too human to register the silver as anything other than mild discomfort, but to me, it felt like passing through an inferno. My skin charred where I drew too close to the door frame.
Not even the sight of an angel’s bones could distract me. There were Fae. Moonspawn. The fangs of my own kind, the vampires, the strigoi.
Finally, we broached a much larger door. This time I felt the pain down to my bones.
The small, gray-haired slayer had a hooded, cloaked woman at her side. As soon as I crossed under the archway, I realized she was one of those rare slayers with inherent magic, and she’d been casting a charm to shield me from the worst of the agony.
“Thank you.” My voice came out in a rasp. The hooded slayer nodded and beckoned me forth.
There was an infirmary. A bed to lay Victoria in. Will was placed near her, still unconscious and white as death as one of the slayers hooked up an IV drip of donated blood.
I sat next to her, adrenaline rushing through me, replacing the terror. She’d had enough. A Maker, a human, and a demon had given her what she needed to change.
The third of the Morrígna was about to be reborn.
Victoria went into a deep stasis as the blood went to work. It took three days.
I didn’t move from her side in those three days, not to feed nor to check on my sisters. I knew that my father knew I was gone by now. He might’ve turned his rage on them.
The Moonfawn and Crowfoot were smart enough to cut loose if they needed to. We’d separated from our Maker at times before. They could do it again if necessary.
But there was no one else here to protect Victoria’s changing form.
All it would take was walking away once, and one of the slayers could plunge a silver stake into her heart, destroying her second life before it’d even begun.
I couldn’t take that chance. Trust none of them, even if one had drained his life to the very edge to preserve hers.
He’d been moved from the infirmary two days ago, and they’d refused to allow him back in. The only slayer who dared enter was the hooded one, who I’d learned was known as Mater Dolorum.
She only came close enough to examine Victoria’s progress, and left again.
I grew thirstier and thirstier. Once or twice, it was tempting to grip the healer’s arm and take a pull of blood, but I couldn’t defend my singer if Libra brought its wrath down on my head.
Finally, Victoria moved.
She was flawless. Vampirism smoothed out imperfections, but there had been none to begin with. Now a pair of tiny fangs just barely indented the plush skin of her lower lip. I’d wiped away the blood from her face and neck as she slept. The bruises had healed.
The only mark on her body that had remained, besides her tattoos, were my bite marks. They were there forever, just the way I’d wanted them.
I touched them and she shivered. Her eyes opened, and she promptly squeezed them shut again against the bright light, making a noise of protest.
“Shh. Keep them shut.” I zipped across the room and shut them off, leaving nothing but a dim corner lamp on.
She tried again, cracking one eyelid. “Càel. You’re here.” Then she groaned and clutched her head. “What is- what is all that noise?”
I frowned, reaching out to stroke her soft skin. The bloodsong had solidified into a perfect rhythm in my mind as she was Made, stronger than ever before. “What does it sound like?”
“A beating heart,” she whispered, and I couldn’t stop the grin that spread across my face.
“You hear the bloodsong, too,” I said, taking her hands. “Do you feel it?”
Victoria nodded, a hint of her distress leaving her expression. “I feel like I’m connected to you, but…” She frowned and broke off, taking a sip of air and tasting it. “I can smell everything. Holy fuck.”
Her hands found her little fangs next. “I’m a vampire,” she whispered to herself. “A Shadowed Worlder. I’m… them.”
“Us.” There was no stopping myself anymore. She was mine forever. I climbed halfway over the bed and kissed her. Now I didn’t need to be careful. My teeth wouldn’t pierce her flesh as easily, and she gasped against my mouth when my tongue flickered over hers. “Us.”
She stopped me with her hands on my shoulders, eyes wide. “Your Maker killed me. Oh god, I felt it when I died.”
Anger ripped through my gut, hot and fierce. I couldn’t think about it without wanting to go back to the Clouded Court to rip his guts out and yank each limb from its socket. “He did.” My voice came out in a fierce snarl I couldn’t hold back. “But you’re here now. You have a second chance to live. Thanks to Will and the dem… Sura.”
“Will gave his blood for me?”
Luckily, he’d done it of his own free will. I wouldn’t have hesitated to force his throat to her lips if he hadn’t. “Almost completely drained himself to make it happen.” Victoria’s eyes widened.
“So... who is my Maker?” That was apprehension on her face.
I realized what she feared: that I was her Maker, that she’d be forced to obey my whims by the strength of the blood that had Made her. “Rhianwen Moonfawn. You are her daughter now.”
The relief that shone out of her eyes was palpable. “Oh, good. Morgrainne said it’d be gross if you were my Maker.”
“It would be, yes.” I kissed her again, drinking in that relief, allowing my happiness to mix with it. The only thing I regretted was that she wasn’t brought to this life in the gentle, loving way I’d envisioned, but no matter, as long as she was alive. She was here now, forever mine.
