Blood Melody

by Val St. Crowe

  “What happened?” said someone. “Which of them got the woman?”

  “Oh, they both have nothing to do with her anymore,” said Ondine. “No one wants to be with a woman who’s sleeping with a father and son at the same time. No, father and son have made peace, and the woman is yesterday’s news. At least, so I hear. She never comes to my parties at all anymore.” She chuckled, taking a sip of her drink. Then she locked eyes with Landon. She raised her eyebrows. “Well, well. That’s quite a costume.”

  Landon pushed forward, through the crowd, to get closer to her. He pulled me along with him. “Hi, there, Ms. Gammon. We were hoping you’d give us your bloodstone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ondine stared at us for a moment, her lips parted, her eyebrows furrowed.

  And then she burst out laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed, and the people around her seemed to think that they were missing out on a joke they should have gotten, so they started to laugh too, and soon everyone was laughing.

  Landon and I didn’t laugh.

  Ondine finally quieted, and those around her slowly did too. She winked at us. “Hilarious. You need to come to my parties every night.”

  “It’s not a joke,” said Landon. “We can use it to get in and hurt Viggo. Seeing as we doubt you like him very much, we thought you might loan it to us.”

  Ondine laughed again. “Really, I am entertained.” She gestured above her head, a sort of half wave. And then she moved on from us, gathering up her skirts.

  Landon started after her.

  But two burly men in black t-shirts and black jeans grabbed onto us and stopped us.

  Landon gave the men a tight smile. “Listen,” he said in a low voice, “if you think you’re stronger than me—”

  “Ms. Gannon has indicated she wants to speak to you further,” said one of the men. “Come with us and she will join you shortly.”

  Landon glanced at me questioningly. Should we trust this guy?

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. I supposed that if we followed them and they tried to throw us out, it could be a problem, but we could also fight them just as easily at the back door as right here. Maybe more easily, because we wouldn’t have the eyes of everyone in the party on us. I nodded at Landon.

  He wrenched his arm out of the man’s grasp. “Lead the way,” he said.

  We were taken down the hallway we’d been down before, and one of the bouncers unlocked a door down from the restroom. It was a sitting room, elaborately decorated, all in whites and lavenders.

  We sat down on a plush white couch.

  The bouncers left us there, shutting the door.

  I listened to see if they’d locked it, but it didn’t seem like they had. I couldn’t be sure, of course. Maybe they had and it had been silent. I was debating getting up to go and check to see if we were locked in when the door opened and Ondine swept into the room.

  It seemed like the right thing to do to stand up, so I did, and so did Landon.

  Ondine moved across the room to sit down in a tall, upholstered chair. She peered at Landon and me.

  Landon and I sat down again. We both fidgeted a little, under her gaze.

  “Well,” said Ondine.

  “Well,” said Landon.

  “I’ve been thinking it through,” said Ondine. “My first thought was that what you said must be part of some elaborate trap for me, because everyone knows that bloodhounds can’t disobey the rulers in the capital. They are reliant entirely on their makers. But then I thought that it would be a pisspoor trap, then, because no one would send a bloodhound to spring a trap on me. They’d know that I wouldn’t buy it. So, I have to admit, at this point, I’m unsure of what to believe.”

  “It’s no trap,” said Landon. “I’m a free bloodhound. The chip at the back of my neck was removed.”

  “And how, pray tell, did you accomplish such a feat?” said Ondine.

  “I was a favorite of one of the king’s favorites,” said Landon. “Perhaps you know of Desta?”

  Ondine pressed her lips together and nodded.

  “She was the one who arranged for the chip to be removed. She did it without Viggo’s knowledge, because people in the city are inclined to do her favors when she asks. They often think she is asking on behalf of the king, whether that is the case or not,” said Landon. “Desta is Camber’s sister.”

  I raised my hand, feeling a little like I was in school. I wondered why I was letting Landon do all the talking. I should say something. “She means well,” I said. “She can’t help it that Viggo is obsessed with her.”

  “I don’t understand how a bloodhound came to be Desta’s favorite,” said Ondine.

  “Well, I wasn’t a bloodhound. I was a blood slave,” said Landon. “Desta wanted to set me free, but I wasn’t able to escape. I was badly injured and almost died. Turning me into a bloodhound saved my life.”

  Ondine made a tent with her fingers and pressed them to her lips. “So, it’s all very complicated.”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “You think I would simply hand over my bloodstone to two people with a complicated story?”

  “Well,” I said, “I had my doubts, but we figured we should ask nicely first before resorting to other tactics.”

  Ondine laughed. “And now you’re threatening me? Do you truly think you could hurt me?”

  “Bloodhounds are pretty strong,” said Landon, with a hint of a growl beneath his tone.

  “Yes,” said Ondine. “Indeed. But I have an entire staff here, willing to protect me. It’s dangerous in Pattos, you realize. Hired guards are absolutely necessary. I wouldn’t advise threatening me.”

  “We need that bloodstone,” I said. “We’ll have to get it one way or the other. Why don’t you just give it to us? We’ll be careful with it and we’ll give it back when we’re done.”

  “And what is it that you want to do with the stone?” said Ondine.

  I chewed on my lip. Should I tell her the truth? Oh, why not? It wasn’t as though I could come up with an acceptable lie at a moment’s notice. “Well, we have a spell that can turn us invisible, and so we’ll use that to sneak into the city and steal away my sister.” I decided to leave out the part about Aston Waterfield. What did that matter to her?

  Landon spoke up. “It will vex Viggo to no end losing Desta. He dotes on her. He is enchanted with her. If you want to hurt Viggo—”

  “That’s the thing,” said Ondine. “I don’t really want anything as petty as revenge, not when it comes to Viggo.”

  “No?” I said, feeling my heart sink. “Because you never seemed to like him very much.”

  She laughed again. “No, indeed.”

  Landon and I exchanged a glance. So, what was it that she was saying?

  “I don’t want revenge,” she said. “I want to overthrow him. He’s a terrible ruler. As a matter of fact, I’ve been planning and plotting just that for a very long time. It’s an expensive venture, which is why I throw these parties.”

  “Overthrow Viggo?” I said. “But he’s so powerful.” Of course, he wasn’t that powerful. We had managed to get him drunk and escape him. If there was a coordinated effort on the part of several vampires to take him down, it might be very possible to incapacitate him.

  “Well, up until now,” she said, “our problem has been how we would infiltrate the place. But now, you say you have an invisibility spell, and that it requires an ingredient I already have. The bloodstone. So, I propose that we help each other. You share invisibility with me and my fighters, and I let you use the bloodstone. Then we’ll go in together. You can get your sister, and we’ll take down Viggo and take over the city.”

  “Uh, I also have to capture Aston Waterfield,” I said.

  “Who?” said Ondine. Then waved it away. “He’s in the city?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I’m sure the hullabaloo of a coup will make it easy to capture anyone that you choose. Do we have a deal?”

 
“Can we talk it over?” I said.

  She looked back and forth between the two of us. “But of course.”

  * * *

  “You think she’s got the room bugged?” Landon was wandering around the room, picking up knick knacks, candles, and lamps, apparently looking for bugs.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “We should go in the bathroom and run the water.”

  “Does it matter if she can hear us? It’s not like we’re hiding anything.”

  “Well, she’ll know if we decide not to help her, and I think she might take a dim view of that.”

  I was still sitting on the couch. “You don’t think we should help her?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Landon. “I’m not saying anything, one way or the other. Not yet. What do you think?”

  “Well…” I spread my hands. “She’s not wrong about Viggo. He’s a terrible ruler. He doesn’t care about anyone. He’s petty and bored and old. I don’t see any reason to preserve his reign.”

  “But can she do it?” said Landon. “Because if we all sneak in there together, and we’re all invisible, then we all might go down together. If she fails, then we’ll be captured again. I don’t think Viggo’s going to keep us in a plush apartment together again.”

  “We won’t get captured again. We’ll get out as fast as we can. If she doesn’t succeed in toppling Viggo, that’s her business. But she has the bloodstone. If we don’t get it, it’s going to be twenty times harder to get into the city.”

  “True,” he said.

  “So, I guess what I’m saying is that I think we should help her.”

  “You and your deals,” he said. “First making deals with the bloods, now deals with this Ondine woman. I hope it all works out.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “What if she takes over for Viggo and she’s a worse ruler than he ever was?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I would say that it couldn’t be worse, but I know that things can always be worse.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Landon sighed. He came back over and sat down on the couch. “Okay. When she comes back, we’ll tell her that we’re in.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We waited.

  No one came back.

  “If it were bugged, she would have come back in, right?” I said.

  “Maybe not,” said Landon. “Not if she didn’t want us to think it was bugged.”

  “So, how long you think we’ll have to wait for her?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  * * *

  We had to wait about three hours. By then, when she came back, she had a glass of some very blue liquor, and she seemed looser and freer. She’d obviously been off at the party while we were deliberating.

  She was overjoyed to hear the news that we’d team up with her, however, and she sat down on her chair, set down her drink and began to talk to us. “I’ve managed to procure a private plane precisely for this purpose. Do you think you can make the plane invisible?”

  “Uh, I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t think so. The potion has to be drunk by whoever wants to be invisible. The instructions don’t say anything about, um, machines.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “We should be able to land far enough away that we won’t be spotted. I have planned for that eventuality. We’ll land the plane, and there will be friends there, waiting with cars to take us into the city. We’ll take the invisibility potion on the way. About how long does it last?”

  “I…” I got the piece of paper with the spell out of my pocket. “Uh, it says about two hours.”

  “That’s not a lot of time,” she said. “But we should be able to make it work.” She smiled brightly. “I think this is the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m so excited to get started. When can we do this?”

  “Well, I need to prepare the potion under the light of the moon,” I said.

  She got up and strode across the room and pulled aside the curtains. “The moon’s still shining. Can you do it now?”

  “Uh, is it past midnight? I’m supposed to do it at midnight.”

  She checked her watch. “We’ve got exactly forty-five minutes, then.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Forty minutes later, I was on Ondine’s roof, surrounded by various bottles and bags of herbs which she’d assembled according to my instructions from the spell. The bloodstone, a red stone with little purple veins running through it, was connected to a silver chain like a necklace and draped out in front of the earthenware bowl where I would be creating the potion.

  Now that I was standing here, the moon bearing down on me, looking at all the assembled ingredients, I was not sure why I was the one doing this potion.

  I wasn’t a witch. I had no experience with magic. I didn’t know how to do any of this.

  For all we knew, this wouldn’t even work. Maybe a person needed to be somewhat magic to do a potion. Maybe it wasn’t so simple as just following the directions and mixing the right ingredients.

  If it didn’t work, though, we were screwed. And I wasn’t sure what Ondine would do to us. Maybe she’d go back to her previous idea, which was that this was a trap. In which case, she’d probably kill us.

  Landon bounced on the balls of his feet behind me. His voice was quick, a little breathless. “So, you got everything?”

  “I think so,” I said. Damn it, he was nervous too. I really hoped this would work. I wondered how things would have gone if Landon hadn’t come with me at all. Would I even have been able to get Ondine’s attention without a bloodhound? It was a good thing he was here. I reached out and grabbed his hand. I squeezed it.

  He jumped. “What’s that for?”

  “Just… thanks,” I said. “For everything. I don’t know if I would have gotten this far without you.”

  “Sure you would.” He squeezed my hand back. “You’re pretty amazing, Camber.”

  I got shivers.

  He tore his gaze away from mine and his hand too. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “It’s practically midnight,” rang out Ondine’s voice. “What’s the holdup, hmm?”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, well, I guess I could start it now.”

  “Yeah, you got this,” said Landon.

  I nodded. I reached out and began picking up bottles. I measured out amounts of the ingredients and plopped them into the bowl. I stirred twice, counterclockwise, as the spell instructed. Then I picked up the bloodstone.

  I held it aloft over the potion and I began to read out the words of the spell.

  They were in some other language, and I didn’t know what I was saying. I made out a few things like, obscur-something and inconspic-something. I was fairly sure I was mangling the pronunciation, which was just another way that everything could go wrong. But I pressed on and got to the end of it.

  And then I dropped the bloodstone into the potion.

  Immediately, the potion turned bright, glowing red, and it started to bubble.

  I cried out, backing up.

  Steam rose from the potion, heading toward the moon. And not just rising straight up in the air, either, angling itself unnaturally toward the moonlight.

  I was seriously creeped out.

  Landon was behind me. He put his arm around me.

  I looked up at him.

  He looked creeped out too.

  Abruptly, the bubbling stopped as soon as it had begun. The potion was still glowing, though, as if it was creating its own light. It was seriously weird looking.

  Tentatively, I reached for the silver chain connected to the bloodstone.

  Ouch.

  Hot.

  I winced and popped my finger into my mouth.

  And I immediately disappeared.

  I screamed.

  “Well,” said Ondine. “I guess the potion works.”

  * * *

  Because it was only a small amount that I had
ingested, I turned back visible within the next ten minutes. We waited for the potion to cool, and then we portioned it out into small stoppered bottles the size that the spell had recommended. Ondine theorized that if someone took a double dose, they’d be invisible for double the time, considering only a drop of the potion had lasted a short time. But I wasn’t sure if that was true. I didn’t think we should be messing with magic we didn’t understand. I figured if Ondine wanted to take a double dose, good on her. But I was going to stick with what I knew would work and not do anything else.

  By the time we were finished, it was quite late.

  Ondine gave us a room to sleep in.

  That’s right. Only one room. With one bed. She must have read something into Landon putting his arm around me or the way we squeezed each other’s hands or something.

  We talked about whether or not we should ask her for separate rooms, but decided against bothering her.

  Landon volunteered to sleep on the floor, but it was a big bed, and we were both exhausted, especially since we hadn’t slept properly the night before. I said we could easily sleep there without even touching each other.

  So, that was what we did. We climbed onto the opposite sides of the bed and pulled the covers around us and stayed to the edges. We were both asleep in minutes.

  I woke to sunlight streaming in the windows. It was afternoon.

  Landon was already up. He was coming out of the shower and he was wrapped in a towel. I eyed him with interest, because his chest was bare, and it usually wasn’t. His chest was covered in fur, just like the rest of him, but it was finer there. I could see the ripples of his stomach muscles and his defined pectorals. And there was no hair on his nipples.

  Which made me grin and flush.

  Landon looked up and saw me staring at him. “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to stifle my grin. He’d taken a shower at my place after what had happened with Vivia, but he had taken care to dress before I saw him again. This was the first time I’d seen him so uncovered.

  He gestured to a table across from the bed. It was spread out with a tray that I hadn’t noticed. Fruit and toast and jams and sausages. “They brought brunch.”