Crimson Daggers- The Complete Trilogy

by Emma Savant

  “She won’t be safe unless you leave,” Sienna said.

  The threat was impossible to miss, and, after a moment of exchanging glances and barely perceptible shrugs, Brendan scoffed.

  “Fine,” he said, like he’d never wanted to be there in the first place. “I’m done with you witches after this. Remember what I said. You leave my pack alone.”

  “Oh, for sure,” Sienna cooed, then rolled her eyes.

  I’d known this could happen, but seeing it happen—seeing them walk away and leave Rowan to Sienna’s mercy, seeing the door open and the cool elegance of the mesmer parlor get replaced by the strobing lights of the club—that was almost too much. I held tightly to my phone and did my best to ignore the silent screaming in my head.

  25

  Alec slipped into the shadows of the alley and walked silently toward me. A moment later, Brendan and Cate entered from the other side. They crouched in the darkness next to me, and I shifted my glamour so it would cover them, too.

  “They’re moving her,” Cate said in a low voice. “I saw her get into a car out back.”

  “I should have had Rowan wear the camera,” I said.

  “Yeah, and what if they’d found it?” she said. “Don’t give up now. I popped one of those good old Humdrum trackers under the rear bumper.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “It should be enough to tell us where she ends up,” Brendan said. “We can follow after they’ve stopped looking for anyone tailing them. We need someone watching the Dagger house just in case, though. If Sienna’s crew did see us, I don’t want her taking it out on them. Cate?”

  “On it.” She stood and, after a moment of listening, headed out the back alley and disappeared around a corner.

  Waiting was the hardest thing we’d done yet. The feeling reminded me too much of waiting for Mom and Grandma to come home, and it was a constant battle to shove back the knowledge that they never had—that the outcome of waiting was always a gaping hole that would never close.

  Finally, when the crawling of my skin and the screaming inside my head had become almost unbearable, long after the tiny dot on my phone tracking the car had come to rest, Alec put a hand on my knee.

  “I think we’ve waited long enough.” He looked up at Brendan, whose eyes were fixed on Alec’s hand, and I kicked Brendan gently to get his attention.

  He nodded. “I’ll check the ends of the alleys. Keep me covered.”

  I held up my hands and strengthened the glamour of darkness that cloaked us. He crept to the back end of the alley, glanced both ways, and then checked the front. Both times, he sniffed the air, his powerful werewolf nose telling him more about the environment than his eyes.

  “Vampires reek,” Alec whispered to me as we watched Brendan. “The blood stench is hard to miss.”

  It was comforting, sort of. Brendan waved, giving us the all-clear, and I let the glamour lapse. We walked quickly down the dark street, hoods up, heads down. A slight drizzle had started; we seemed like ordinary Portlanders with our hoodies drawn against the rain.

  I unlocked Mom’s car, and we climbed inside, Brendan in the passenger seat next to me and Alec in the back. The car still smelled like Mom, like coconut sunscreen and warm coffee, and I immediately cracked the window to diffuse the fragrance with the scent of the rain.

  “We can’t take the car,” I said, buckling in. “Sienna knows all the Dagger vehicles. And my broom won’t support all three of us.”

  I wasn’t that good at flying anyways. It took mental control, and I was prone to distraction at the best of times. Now, with the weight of the coven and all the deaths pressing in on me, I didn’t trust myself to get an inch off the ground.

  “How far is it?” Alec asked.

  I handed him my phone, and he examined the map with its little flashing red dot. He wiped a couple of raindrops from the screen and handed it back.

  “I know the neighborhood,” he said. “I think Heir Olivia’s family lives near there. Lots of old fancy mansions. If we park a little outside the area, we can go in on foot. Might be fastest if you ride me.”

  I cringed a little at his phrasing, and his eyes widened. Brendan froze for a second, then laughed.

  “Wow, dude,” he said.

  “Not like that,” Alec said, face red. “I mean, I’ll shift, and you can, you know, I can carry you on my back.”

  Brendan kept laughing. “No way, man, too late.”

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of my lips. The movement was like dry earth or old paint cracking in the heat, like this was something my face had forgotten how to do.

  “Keep it in your pants,” I said, mimicking Cate, and put my key in the ignition.

  I followed Alec’s directions to the edge of the neighborhood, and then we parked under an overgrown tree on a street lined with houses with equally overgrown gardens. Brendan jumped out first, ready to punch anyone who tried to attack us, but the street was dark and quiet. Alec raised his eyebrows at me via the rearview mirror, and then we climbed out, too.

  While Brendan and Alec sniffed the air and checked the map on my phone for the fifteenth time, I glamoured the car to make it look like a different vehicle. With any luck, the unkempt tree and garbage bins on either side would keep it from catching anyone’s notice.

  “She’s still there,” Alec said quietly, handing me back my phone.

  I quickly clicked off the screen to keep the light from illuminating my face.

  “We’ll hide better if we cut through backyards. Can you keep people’s floodlights from turning on?” Alec said.

  “Sure. You positive a couple of werewolves in private backyards won’t stand out more than three people on the sidewalk?”

  “We’ll stand out if people see us,” Brendan said. “So let’s be fast and quiet and not catch attention. With any luck, most people will have their blinds closed at this hour.”

  I shrugged; it felt to me like every path was just as dangerous as the next.

  “If we get caught, just make sure it’s after Rowan’s safe and not before,” I muttered.

  Alec gave me a sidelong look, his eyebrows knit in concern, but Brendan shook his shoulders out and nodded. He shifted, his form changing from broad-shouldered man to broad-shouldered wolf in an instant. Alec put a hand on my shoulder, like he wanted to say something but didn’t think we had time, and then his wiry frame had grown and hunched over, too, and he was nudging me with his wet nose.

  I climbed onto his back and settled in, making sure I had my hands free for spell casting. I leaned forward, and he took off.

  26

  It wasn’t like the time we’d gone running in the forest. Then, Alec had shifted for the joy of it, and we’d streaked through the trees with the speed and ease of a strong wind. Now, he was cautious. He darted down the street, then stopped under the shadow of a willow tree. Brendan darted ahead of us, nose to the ground, and Alec followed him in a series of bursts. Each time we came to rest, it was under concealment—behind a bush, in the shadow of a minivan, in the narrow gap between houses. I kept my hands up, directing darkness glamours toward every motion-activated floodlight or inconveniently placed streetlamp we came across.

  Cloaked in shadow, we moved deeper into the neighborhood. I was amazed at how well the wolves could conceal themselves. Brendan was large, even for a werewolf, and yet he seemed to slink low enough to the ground that he almost disappeared at times. They were subtle and elegant, both of them; they’d been right to travel this way.

  Eventually, off the end of a twisting road lined with houses set back from the street, deep in a thick stand of trees, Brendan stopped. In front of us, the forest opened to a small lawn surrounded by dark, heavy pines whose needles whispered against one another in the nighttime breeze.

  The building in the middle was clichéd enough that I cringed. It was a castle—a mansion, technically, but one covered in stone façades and featuring not one but three separate towers w
ith spiky caps that just about punctured the sky. In the darkness, with the black sky and sharp trees surrounding its hard angles and weather-beaten walls, the place was like something off a dollar-store Halloween card.

  “Classy joint,” Brendan said the instant he’d shifted back to human form.

  I got the impression he’d shifted back just so he could make this comment, and Alec shook his shaggy head in warning.

  I climbed down, and Alec shifted back, too. We all stared at the ominous house, and I scanned it for weaknesses—a low window here, a side door that looked like it could be forced there. Above the house, small bats dove through the sky. I couldn’t tell whether they were hunting for insects or guarding the property against people like us. I knew vampires didn’t shift into bats nearly as much as movies would have one believe, but the possibility still had me on guard.

  I opened my hands and clenched them again as magic pooled across my skin. If we needed a darkness glamour or jet of fire, I’d be ready.

  Alec drew back farther under the cover of the trees. “Maybe we should come back in the daytime.”

  I shook my head. Rowan was in there now.

  “We’re going in,” I whispered. “This house is old. There are probably back staircases that don’t get used much.”

  “Unless they do,” Brendan said. “Sounded like she had a lot of vamps in the Orbs arena. Maybe they all live here.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  We were silent for a moment, watching the house. Most of the curtains were drawn, but there were enough lights behind them to let me know more than a few people were home. Someone passed by a window, casting their shadow on it for a moment.

  “We just have to get Rowan out. Then we go get the Daggers and the pack.”

  “Or we could just get them now and grab Rowan when we come in for the attack,” Alec suggested.

  It was a better idea. I knew it was a better idea, and I rejected it instantly.

  “I don’t trust Sienna with her for a second.”

  I turned to Alec, waiting for his next argument, but he only nodded.

  “I’m going in through that side door,” I said. “There’s a window right beside it, and the room’s most likely empty. I’ll crack the curtains so you can see in, and if the coast is clear, you follow.”

  I waved a hand over each of them, and the gossamer weight of an illusion settled over their bodies. “I can’t keep you invisible,” I said. “It’s too much to maintain. But this will keep anyone’s eyes from settling on you too quickly. It should be enough to let you hide if someone comes into the room.”

  “Cool,” Brendan said, holding up his arm, which appeared exactly the same to me as it had before. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t rely on it.”

  I tossed the same glamour onto myself and crept out from the cover of the trees. The bats overhead continued to dart and dive, unaware of—or unconcerned by—my presence.

  The grass on this lawn was just as soggy as the grass back home had been lately, and I silently prayed that it was too dark for anyone to see my footprints. I unlocked the side door with a spell, and it was easy—maybe too easy. But then, Sienna could hardly be expected to cover this house with the kinds of fresh security spells we coated the Dagger mansion in every few months. Keeping a whole house protected took the work of several witches. I wasn’t sure I’d bother, either, if I had an army of bloodthirsty minions at my command, ready to devour anyone who dared break in.

  The interior of the castle—I couldn’t think of it as anything else—was just as dark and foreboding as the outside. Most vampires lived ordinary lives in ordinary houses; the only things that made them truly different from the rest of us were their tendency to sunburn and the bottles of blood in their fridges. The blood thing kind of turned my stomach, but then, Grandma had once pointed out, they probably thought drizzling honey over tuna fish sandwiches was gross, too, and that had never stopped me.

  I missed her. My whole soul ached in a way I couldn’t afford.

  The first room on the other side of the door was small, lined with shelves full of muddy boots and jackets. Its one small window was covered with a thick curtain, and I pushed that aside so Brendan and Alec could see in—fat lot of good it would do them.

  The mudroom led into a sort of maintenance space filled with tools and rakes and buckets and all the little objects necessary to keep a mansion like this in good shape. I could make out their silhouettes in the dim lights from a power tool charging station on one wall and a nightlight that someone had plugged into a dark corner.

  I wondered, as I felt my way through the room, whether the vampires performed castle upkeep themselves or if they had hired help. Or maybe it was all done by slaves. I wouldn’t put it past Sienna to kidnap Humdrums and enchant them into servitude. My arms prickled with goosebumps.

  I cracked the door leading from the room open and could make out a dim corridor. The lights were off, but voices murmured from elsewhere in the house. I made sure my glamour was still strong, then crept out of the maintenance room, leaving the door just barely open behind me.

  Most of the doors in this hallway were closed. The walls were decorated with old-fashioned tapestries featuring gloomy scenes of ancient vampires and shadowy landscapes. Thick carpets covered the hardwood floors and muffled my steps.

  One room I passed seemed to be a kind of sitting room or parlor; the door was open, and furniture sat in front of an empty fireplace. A few used wine glasses cluttered side tables. Another room was filled with books on shelves that stretched to the high ceilings, and the hair on my arms prickled again as I caught sight of the dark, leather-bound tomes. I didn’t want to know what was in those pages.

  The voices led me down the corridor and around a corner that opened into a small vestibule flanked with a giant pair of double doors. I stopped dead, my heart pounding, and pressed myself back into the shadows. A young vampire woman passed through the vestibule and disappeared into the ballroom beyond.

  It looked like a ballroom, anyway, or maybe a banquet hall. I could only see a sliver of the room from my place in the corridor, but it was clear that the space was enormous and the ceilings were high and shadowed. Classical music in a minor key was playing from within, mingled with the sound of voices, and everything inside was lit with the dim red glow of candles.

  Footsteps padded behind me. I spun around, but it was only Brendan and Alec, creeping along in my wake. I held a finger to my lips. Alec peered over my shoulder, squinted, and then crouched and tilted his head. I had no idea what he was doing, but then he turned back to Brendan and me. He put two fingers on his other palm and walked them like legs, and then mimed them stepping up an invisible staircase. I shook my head in confusion, but Brendan waved his hands to catch our attention and beckoned us back down the hallway.

  He led us into a small alcove I hadn’t noticed before. It was dark, and I’d assumed it led to another room with a closed door. But the shadows gave way to a narrow staircase, one I had missed without his werewolf senses of sight and smell.

  We darted up it as quickly as we could without risking noisy footfalls and stepped out into another corridor. I immediately understood what Alec had been staring at. To the right, closed black doors lined the hallway. But to the left, stone lattice windows looked down and onto the grand hall. The gloomy red light from the hall filtered through the lattice, casting eerie red patterns on the opposite wall.

  Brendan took a few steps forward and dropped to a crouch. He tilted his head, listened, and then sniffed the air. When he was sure the coast was clear, he waved us forward.

  “There’s no one up here,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  Alec was already standing up against one of the windows, watching the scene below.

  “She has a throne room?” he whispered, sounding somewhere between incredulous and disturbed.

  The idea was cringeworthy and sounded exactly like Sienna. She’d always been a little too eager to remind me of her role as the a
ppointed future Stiletto. For her, it hadn’t been about following a family legacy or emulating our incredible grandmother. It had been about power, and I wondered if things would be different if Grandma or Mom or somebody had realized her motivations sooner.

  I could only imagine how thrilled Sienna was with her position now. Below us, in a hall lined with long tables and filled with vampires talking in small groups, Sienna was the queen. She had a literal throne, a giant sculpture of a thing carved of black-stained wood and deep-crimson velvet. Attendants stood on either side of her. She held out a hand. and one of them gave her a glass of something that might have been wine and might have been blood.

  Then I tensed as I realized that Rowan was standing in front of the throne. Her hands were bound behind her back, and Sienna was ignoring her completely and talking to a woman off to one side instead. And then the woman stepped up onto the dais and clapped.

  The musicians in the corner brought their notes to a close, and the dozens of conversations in the room died down. The vampires turned to face the dais, and I bit my lip and strained to listen.

  “The last of the clan has gathered,” the woman said. She had the kind of voice that could fill a room like that, and her ringing words seemed to reach every corner. “Close the doors.”

  Someone did, and the click of the heavy latches echoed through the hall.

  “Bring out the queen’s trophies,” she said.

  Another, smaller door opened on the other side of the room. A tall vampire with broad shoulders entered, followed by a string of people bound together with steel shackles.

  The woman at the front of the group glared daggers at the guard as they passed. My knees turned to pudding, and my blood ran ice cold and then hot and then cold again. I pressed my face up against the lattice and blinked, hard, trying to force the image to fade.

  But it stayed solid.

  Grandma.

  27