But when we finally made it out of the mansion and into the car, I didn’t feel any measure of relief. Instead, an intense dread settled into my bones as Dorian spun the car out of the driveway, putting distance between us and the coven headquarters as fast as he could. Because even though we’d found the truth about Baker’s death and even though we’d escaped the vampire attack, this certainly didn’t feel like the end of anything.
I knew without a doubt that it was only the beginning.
When we pulled up in front of Dorian’s place, it became clear that some Enforcers didn’t enjoy the same privileges of the rest of the coven leaders. Only a few blocks away from my own apartment, he lived in a rundown squat of a building, graffiti decorating every surface of the exterior like some kind of urban art installation.
Dorian parked his car along the curb and fell silent when he turned off the ignition. The sounds of the city rose up around us. Honking horns, the rush of wheels on pavement, the ringing of laughter from an open window nearby. It certainly didn’t feel like we’d been battling with angry vampires only moments before. Images of the dead bodies flickered in my mind, but I wiped them aside. I couldn’t think about that right now. There was too much else to process.
For example, what the hell did we do now? The vampires had broken the treaty, and half the council was on the run. The other half….well, they were dead. And if the vampires knew who I was—which they most certainly did if they’d been framing me—was I still in danger now?
“I need to go home to check on my grandmother,” I said quietly, breaking the tense silence between us.
Dorian clenched his jaw before shaking his head. “Not yet. She’s safe there. Not only do you have wards around the apartment, but bloodsuckers can’t enter a home unless invited inside. She’s under double protection.”
“I just need to make sure she’s alright.” My voice cracked, and tears pooled in my eyes. “You saw her the other day. She isn’t capable of taking care of herself.”
A passing car highlighted the weariness on Dorian’s face. His lips were drawn into a tight line, his skin was pale, and his eyes looked as dark and deep as a cavernous hole in the Earth. He’d been part of the coven for longer than me, and he’d been an active one. The warlocks lost today were men he’d worked with, men he’d known, men who must have been his friends. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he felt.
“I need you to trust me, Zoe.” Dorian turned to face me. “I promise I will get you to your grandmother soon, but we need to stop and think things through before we go barreling into something dangerous without a plan. She’ll be safe inside your apartment, but the streets outside that building may be dangerous. If we go now, the bloodsuckers could be waiting for us.”
“We?” I couldn’t help but ask. After the way he’d spoken to the council, I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about being forced to have me around for a little bit longer. “Because you made it clear to your Lead Enforcer that you wanted there to be no we anymore.”
“Don’t take it so personally,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t like to sit on the sidelines. That’s all.”
“If this is what sitting on the sidelines is like, then I hope I never have to play the game.”
His lips quirked, and his eyes momentarily lost their hollow expression. “Hopefully you’ll never have to, Zoe.”
Once inside the building, Dorian spent several moments lowering his wards before inviting me inside, and then several more minutes replacing them with freshly-cast ones. There were about five in total, which felt obsessive to a ridiculous degree. At least, I could admit, I would be safe here, though my heart couldn’t really settle on that fact. I was far too worried about my grandmother to care about myself.
The streetlamps outside slanted through the thick blinds, casting slivers of yellow onto the concrete floor. Dorian’s place was utilitarian to say the least. His basement apartment consisted of a single room with an open archway leading to a tiny bedroom. A small bed was pushed up against one wall, holding just a thin blanket and a pillow. The rest of the place was pretty sparse. There was a desk covered in a mound of papers and a single lamp. In the corner, he’d shoved a tiny dorm-sized refrigerator.
And I thought my place needed some upgrades.
Dorian turned on the lamp, and a soft yellow haze filled the room. He stood there staring at me, his hands hanging heavy by his sides. For all the time I’d known him so far, he’d come across arrogant, confident, hard. But that wasn’t what he projected at me now. Instead, he seemed almost…nervous with the way his hands fidgeted with his dark jeans.
“I would offer you a seat, but…” He trailed off as his gaze drifted around the barren room. There were no seats. Unless you counted the bed in the room off to the side.
“It’s okay,” I said, shrugging my hands into my pockets. “It’s not like I could relax right now anyway.”
He nodded just as his eyes darted to the bed. “I should make some calls. I’ll see if I can get an update on the council and find out if the Magister got somewhere safe. And check what the official status is.”
“Official status?” I asked.
“On whether or not we are at war.” He clenched his hands, turning slightly away so that I couldn’t see the expression on his face. “I can’t believe the bloodsuckers have done this. They know better than anyone what this could cost us all. On both sides. There aren’t enough of us as it is. Why break the alliance now when we’re starting to regain our strength?”
“Well, maybe that’s why,” I said, my body instinctively moving toward him. “Things have finally started improving. A lot of us who were kids during the war have come into our powers now, so the coven is gaining in numbers. Maybe vampires are starting to see us as a threat again.”
“A threat?” He let out a hollow laugh. “They still outnumber us, Zoe. By quite a lot. They’re immortal, as long as they drink blood. They’re faster. They’re stronger. The only way we could be a threat is if we had some Shadows on our side.”
I blinked hard, heat rushing into my cheeks. “What? Why? I thought they dealt in dark magic.”
“Sometimes I forget that you haven’t had a decent education about the supernatural world.” He moved over to his desk and pulled an old leather-bound book out from beneath a towering stack of worn, faded papers. “Shadows can be dark but they don’t have to be. They’re a lot like the Daywalkers in that regard. If they tap into black magic, their power is stronger, of course. But there is one very important and distinctive strength they have, even without using black magic.” Dorian flipped the book open and stopped on a page that was filled with an illustration of a witch commanding the moonlit sky with her open palms. “Shadows don’t have to draw runes to cast a spell.”
“Wow,” I breathed the word, and my arms were consumed by chills. All of this was news to me, and the repercussions were mind-boggling. It made me wonder exactly what else I didn’t know. I’d learned more in the past twenty-four hours than I had in my entire twenty-one years of life, and that was just from Dorian alone. My fingers trailed across the page, feeling the bumps from the hand-dipped ink. “Can I borrow this? I’d like to do some research. I think it’s about time I understood exactly where I came from.”
“By all means,” Dorian said with a nod. “Take it for as long as you’d like, and feel free to take a look at it now. While you’re at it, I’m going to go make those calls.”
When Dorian disappeared into the hallway, I poked around on his desk a little more. What other life-altering information could I find in these tall stacks of letters and words? I flipped through a pile beside the book, but frowned when I found that most of it was written in some other language. Latin, maybe. Not very useful to someone who doesn’t know a word of it, but maybe I could ask Dorian to translate it later. He seemed like the kind of guy to know dead languages. There were a couple of other books, but they focused on the demonic origins of vampires, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood to read about blood-sucking c
reatures of darkness at the moment.
Not after what had happened in the mansion.
With a sigh, I turned from the desk and glanced at the refrigerator. Even after the food from the diner, I was starving. Maybe Dorian had a snack or some soda, anything to keep me going until we could grab something else to eat. Through the cracked door, I could still hear Dorian’s deep voice rumbling as he spoke on the phone. He might be awhile. I hated to grab something without asking, but I doubted he would mind. I’d found him rifling through my refrigerator yesterday after all.
I sunk onto the cold concrete, resting a knee on the ground while I pulled open the stiff refrigerator door. The light clicked on inside, and the engine hummed. For a moment, I just sat there staring at the contents, not fully comprehending what I saw. Because there were no snacks, at least of the human kind. And there was no soda. Instead, there were rows upon rows of blood bags.
Things began to click together in my mind, pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t even realized was there. Dorian’s intense reaction to blood. His dark sunglasses. His tinted windows. His insistence on doing everything at night. All this time, the evidence had been right before me, and I’d missed it all.
My heart trembled in my chest, and I gripped the refrigerator door so tight in my hand that it cracked under the pressure. Dorian Kostas was a vampire. And he’d lured me into his home.
Chapter 14
My vision went blurry as my mind raced. Dorian was a vampire. Did the coven know the truth about him? No, that was impossible. They wouldn’t let a vampire be an Enforcer, one who was clearly climbing high in the ranks. All this time when he’d been pretending to help me, had he really been on the enemy’s side? Keeping tabs on me? Feeding back details of our case? I stared into the blood-filled refrigerator and took two sharp breaths in through my nose. I needed to get out of here. I needed an excuse. A good one. Otherwise, I might not make it out of here alive.
My ears rang from the silence. Dorian’s voice no longer drifted in from the hallway. If he regularly fed—and it looked like he did—his senses would be amplified. Had he heard me open the refrigerator? Could he hear the way my heart galloped like a racehorse in my chest?
Quickly, I pushed the refrigerator door shut and stood, pressing sweaty palms against my black jeans. I just needed to act natural, wait for the right moment, and run faster than I ever had in my life. Of course, Dorian could run faster. And he had a car.
I could try to knock him out, but…
The apartment door cracked open, and his deep voice slithered into the room. “Well, I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news.”
Is the bad news that you’re a bloodsucking vampire who has been pretending to help me?
Steeling myself, I took a step closer to him as he eased inside the room despite my every urge to turn around and climb out of the window as fast as I could. He’d shown me the mark on his collarbone, though I knew those could be faked. What couldn’t be faked, though, was the ability to cast rune magic, and this guy had that talent in spades.
What was he?
“Is something wrong?” he asked when I didn’t respond to his earlier statement. His eyes searched my face, catching the tightly-held tension in my body.
“Yes, I’m worried about the vampires.” I watched him for a reaction to the word vampires, to see if he knew I meant him. But his face betrayed no sign of his thoughts, just like always. “Do you know why they’re attacking us now, after all this time? And why they were using me, specifically, to obscure what they were up to? I mean, I’m just an untrained witch, right?”
Dorian looked down at the phone in his hands, frowning. “We’re still not sure yet. The Daywalkers have made no statement of their intent.”
“So, you have no idea why a vampire would want us dead?” I sucked in a sharp breath when his chin jerked up, and his eyes narrowed. Suspicion flickered across his face, the lines in his forehead making him look much older than he really was. Actually, that probably wasn’t true. There was no telling how ancient he truly was.
“Why would I know, Zoe?” His tone was clipped. “The Daywalkers have their reasons, but they certainly haven’t shared them with me.”
Daywalkers. My mind snagged on the word. Every time we’d spoken of them, Dorian had used the term Daywalkers instead of vampires, almost as if he needed to qualify them for the type of bloodsuckers they were. Which suggested he wasn’t a Daywalker himself. Not to mention the fact that if Daywalkers kept up the blood intake, they had no sensitivity to sunlight. A piercing shiver went through me. That meant he could be Nosferatu, and if he was, Dorian was far more dangerous than any vampire I’d encountered in my life. It meant a demon resided inside him. One that would have no concept at all of right and wrong.
I needed to get out of here before he decided he’d be better off with my body in his fridge. My fingers itched for my dagger. Everything within me wanted to whip it out of its sheath and fight. But it was best to keep him talking for now. Distract him until the right moment came for me to stab and run.
“You just seem like a fairly astute warlock.” My lips screwed up around the lie, but I plowed ahead. “I thought you might have a theory. They aren’t attacking for no reason.”
“No, they aren’t.” He dropped the phone onto the desk and sighed. Out of the corner of my eye, a light flicked on. My body went stiff, blood pounding in my ears. In my rush to hide my discovery, I hadn’t fully shut the refrigerator, and the door had creaked open just enough to trigger the light. Somehow, I needed to get that door shut before he noticed. That or get the hell out of here first. “Luckily, the Magister, the Summoner, and some of the remaining council members are safe. They got out of headquarters and into a safe house before the Daywalkers got to them.”
“You said there was good news and bad news. So, what’s the bad news?” I asked as I made slow steps toward the refrigerator. If I could just keep him talking for a little longer, I might be able to knock my foot against the door when I reached that side of the room.
“The bad news is the bodies were taken.” Dorian sighed and closed his eyes. “And then they burned the building down. We had records in there. Some weapons, too. But the biggest losses are the grimoires. There was one book in particular I wish we could have saved.”
Dorian looked truly regretful. Acting at its finest. Nosferatu were known for their ability to deceive, and he was laying it on so thick I could practically taste his fake anguish swirling through his grungy home.
I got a few more inches around the room before I paused. “What book?”
“We found one of the lost grimoires last month.” Dorian shuffled a few papers aside before holding up a scanned image of a book that looked as ancient as dinosaur bones. “The council has been studying the runes inside. There were some pretty good discoveries in there. I didn’t see them myself, but the Magister was pretty excited about them. And now they’re gone.”
An old grimoire. That was interesting. I couldn’t help but wonder if this particular one had anything to do with the book that Professor Wagner was searching for. The timing was odd, to say the least, and while Dorian could be lying about this—since he’d lied about everything else—I didn’t think he was. What would be the point? Unfortunately, I might never know. If the books were destroyed, along with the registry of bone mages, I was back to square one on that case.
Not that I could do much about that anyway if I didn’t get away from Dorian alive.
“What kind of discoveries?” I’d finally reached the refrigerator, and I eased just close enough for my heel to connect with the door. I felt rather than heard the suction grasp onto the porcelain, sealing it shut just in time for Dorian to glance my way. My heart thundered in my ears, but I tried my best to act natural by leaning against the wall and slipping my hands into my jean pockets.
“Powerful spells, but for what, I don’t know.” His gaze traveled the length of my body, from my face all the way down to where my boot rested against the refrigerator
full of blood bags. “Why? What are you thinking?”
“These grimoires seem to be in pretty high demand right now. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Could they hold some spells that everyone wants to get their hands on?”
I swallowed hard as he continued to stare at my foot. My eyes darted to the front door. If I bolted at top speed, I might be able to slam the door on his face before he was able to stop me. Of course, then I’d have to make it up a flight of stairs, out another door, and down several blocks before I got home. Escape was beginning to feel less and less likely by the minute, but I wasn’t the kind of girl to give up.
“Perhaps, but I’m not sure I see how the vampire situation could be connected to a grimoire,” he said. “Why would they want to destroy a book?”
You tell me, I thought, but I didn’t dare voice that out loud.
“Maybe the coven found a spell that would destroy all vampires. The Daywalkers, the Nosferatu, all of them.” I pushed off the wall and lifted my chin, trying to make myself as tall as I could. “I’d be pretty happy about that. Wouldn’t you? As far as I’m concerned, they’re the scum of the earth, and they deserve to be taken down.”
Shadows danced on Dorian’s face, and a deep frown engulfed his lips. “Right. I thought you were acting strange. Take a look inside my refrigerator, did you?”
Shit. Maybe that last bit had been too much, but it was impossible to keep my cool when I knew what he was. When I knew he’d probably brought me here to rip open my neck and drink me dry.
Swallowing hard, I took a step toward the door. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Cut the shit, Zoe.” He matched my step, erasing the distance between us so that he could reach out and grab me if I so much as flinched toward the exit. “You’ve been acting spooked from the second I came back inside the apartment. That combined with the way you’ve been stalking around my refrigerator and the less-than-subtle hints about vampirism, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you’ve been up to in here.”
Witch's Curse (The Bone Coven Chronicles Book 1) Page 11
