by Kari Gregg
Blood Oath:
What Rough Beast
Kari Gregg
www.loose-id.com
Blood Oath: What Rough Beast
Copyright © January 2011 by Kari Gregg
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Dedication
For Judi, who believed in me first, and to Rory, with thanks, for seeing me through.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre does not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexes to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
(First published in The Dial, Nov. 1920)
Prologue
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Southern France
AD 1727
Blood is life.
The flicker of lanterns lining both sides of the center lane cast eerie shadows in the stable Master Nathaniel had converted to slave quarters half a century ago. Garrick lurched down the corridor on unsteady legs. His stomach clenched at the jangle of keys dangling from his fingertips. The screaming edge of hunger spiked into the base of his skull.
But his father’s words echoed in his mind.
For once, the cacophony of bloody horror that Nathaniel forced on him every day with his streaming wrist hadn’t drowned out the memory.
Tonight, Garrick had come to the stables thirsty.
He ignored the other rooms, empty and silent, to stagger to the last converted stall on the left. One corner of his mouth curved. “Blood is life,” he said under his breath and fit the key into the lock. He pushed the door open.
Squinting against the brightness within, his gaze sought out Luc. Same scarred walls. Same ring bolted to the floor. His glance trailed the heavy links of the chain strung through it to—
“Jésus,” the slave gasped when Garrick’s attention finally found him. “What in the hell happened to you?”
Garrick snorted a laugh.
Several days without blood had hollowed his cheeks and sapped the color from his skin. His fair hair stuck out at his temples from the fists he’d clenched in it. His fingers had gouged crescent-shaped grooves into both palms, and without blood to speed his healing, the marks remained. As the temptation to turn built, Garrick had cared less about what he wore too, so his cravat hung in a tangled mess from the gaping collar of his shirt, and his breeches bore gritty stains at the knees from hours spent in prayer at the chapel.
Luc was right.
He looked like hell.
No.
He looked like a slave.
His mouth bowed to a pleased smile. “Nathaniel happened to me.”
Luc’s jaw dropped.
Garrick chuckled in spite of the weariness that weighed down his shoulders. “I’m to have no blood until I obey him.”
When Luc shifted on the floor, his manacles clinked. The slave ignored the grating sound. Instead, his dark eyes narrowed to study Garrick. “How long since you fed?”
Too long.
Garrick’s mouth watered as the young vampyr, eyebrow arched in quiet concern, awaited his answer.
Too easy to reach for Luc.
So seductively easy.
The chains wouldn’t matter. Not now. Garrick’s powers had three hundred years of strengthening. At a stingy three decades, Luc was an infant among their kind. Helpless. Weak. While Garrick had been forbidden blood these past days, fledgling slaves were given only enough to keep them alive and position them under Nathaniel’s booted heel.
Luc would never escape him.
Robbed of blood, Garrick felt his vampyr instincts prod his control. Every minute was a struggle; his every breath another skirmish against the brutality bred into the marrow of his bones.
“Garrick?” Luc crept toward him, on his knees since his chains tethered him closely to the floor.
So powerless.
So deliciously vulnerable.
“How long since you last fed?” Luc persisted.
Garrick’s mouth thinned to a grim line.
He wouldn’t become this vile thing grappling for possession of him. “Five days.”
Luc cursed under his breath, the lilt of his southern French accent lending his oaths an elegance that finally gave Garrick the strength to rein in the desperate impulses his thirst provoked.
Luc glared at him.
Garrick swallowed his bloodlust and mustered a self-deprecating grin.
“I have no choice in what he does to me, but you do.” The young vampyr shook his chains in frustration. “Is bending your proud neck a hardship if it means not starving into a desiccated husk, as I have?”
Garrick met his livid stare. “I’m to kill you, Luc.”
The slave stiffened to cordwood. His dark eyes rounded.
“He supplied you with more blood this week than you normally see in a year.” Garrick’s shoulders jerked to a shrug. “Didn’t you wonder why?”
Chains clanging, Luc shoved a shaking hand through his unkempt dark hair. “Who knows why he does what he does.”
Who, indeed?
Inhaling a determined breath, Garrick rolled his shirtsleeve up his forearm. “My only regret is I won’t make as fine a meal for you.”
Luc frowned. “What?”
“Nathaniel won’t relent. If I don’t kill you, he’ll watch me die and kill you anyway.” Garrick raised his hand and bit into the meat of his wrist. Thick coppery blood filled his mouth. He bent to Luc on the hard stone floor. “Drink,” he said, offering the wound to him.
The other vampyr gaped at him.
Foul temper coiled in Garrick’s belly when hot scarlet spattered, wasted. “Drink!”
“He’ll kill you for this.” Luc shook his head in stunned denial. “He’ll kill us both.”
“He’s killing us already.” He pushed his dripping wrist forward. “You know it’s the only way.”
Luc’s pupils dilated. He shifted his gaze away, but his nostrils flared at the rich metallic scent. “You’ve had five days without his blood, five days to ease his influence over you. You could break free—”
“Nathaniel’s called the other masters to bear witness.” He grabbed the slave by his nape and pulled his mouth to the wound. “Because he senses how near my vampyr is to draining you. Drink, for God’s sake. There is no time.”
Luc struggled against his grip, but salty, slippery wet slid between his gritted teeth.
Garrick’s eyes snapped shut. He focused his flagging energy inward—There. Luc. The only spark of warmth in centuries of cold, cursed darkness. “Too much of Nathaniel’s blood pollutes me. I cannot lift my hand against him. You can.”
“I don’t stand a chance against an elder.” Luc’s fingers tore into Garrick’s biceps—no longer to push him away, but to pull him in. “He’ll slaughter me.”
Garrick sucked in a breath at the first brush of the slave’s mind with his. He’d tasted other vampyr. Nathaniel. His father. So the mental connection opening between him and Luc didn’t shake him. But he’d never before felt this…
Familiarity.
This casual intimacy.
With every greedy draw of Luc’s mouth, the link building between them intensified and with it, the crushing relief that his prayers had been answered. For once, God had smiled on him. Garrick had waited more than a century for the right moment, the right man.
He’d chosen well.
“Alone, we cannot hope to defeat Nathaniel.” Garrick settled to the stone floor, fingers sliding from Luc’s nape to his shoulder, urging him on. “But working together? With my blood to fuel you?” His mouth curved as the chill of the stable seeped into his flesh through the fine clothes Nathaniel had provided him. His mind spun at the blood loss, the depleted shell of his body tiring.
Too soon.
He closed his eyes, willing his heart to beat and his lungs to fill. Garrick was strong, but days spent without blood had leeched his vitality from him.
It didn’t matter.
If he must die to destroy Nathaniel, then he would die.
Garrick’s muscles loosened as Luc fed. His discomfort at the hard cool stone faded. Everything faded except Luc and readying him for battle. “You can defeat him, but you must drink deeply.”
Luc’s teeth bit into his flesh. “You’ve little to spare.”
Too weak to maintain his hold, Garrick’s fingers slid away. “As long as I’m free of him, I’ll count my death as the better bargain.”
Luc’s melodic curses filled his head. “And leave me alone to these heathens? I think not.” He fed, though, until he shook with the roiling strength of Garrick’s vampyr pulsing in his veins.
Garrick’s breath shallowed to a thin rasp.
Luc slowly lifted his mouth from the wound.
“No.” Garrick’s heart stuttered. “Take more.”
Luc unbuckled the sheath of the sword Garrick had strapped to his bulky waist. The blade slid free with a whispery metallic grate that rang tinny in Garrick’s ears. “If the other masters are coming, the stronghold will be in an uproar of preparations.” He patted down Garrick’s clothes. “Key?”
“Front pocket.”
Luc unlocked the manacles that had bound him for thirty years. “He’ll have hired men and women from the village to ready the guest quarters. I’ll be able to slip in and out without drawing attention.”
Garrick had counted on that. “His overseer is organizing villagers and the other slaves in the great hall. Take the stairs in the kitchen instead. Use the servant’s entrance to the master suite. Nathaniel retired there to await me.” Garrick’s stomach pitched at the sick anticipation that emanated from the dark vampyr master. “Surprise will buy you moments, but not enough to finish him. You need more blood.”
“Then I’ll take it from villagers inside the keep.”
Alarm fought boneless lethargy, but Garrick could only seethe at the unease birthing to life within him. “Human blood lacks—”
“Shut up.” Luc strapped Garrick’s sheath to his own waist. “I won’t kill you, even to take that whoreson’s head. I won’t trade your life for his. So just shut up.”
Dread shivered down his spine.
They must kill Nathaniel, no matter the cost. Not that Garrick wanted to die. He didn’t. But he’d give anything—gladly—to gain Nathaniel’s destruction.
Luc tested the balance of Garrick’s sword by swinging the blade in a graceful arc, oblivious to Garrick’s mounting panic.
He’d prepared to die.
He was meant to die!
“You’re meant to show me how to stay alive. You’re meant to keep others like Master Nathaniel from recapturing me. You’re meant,” Luc said, shifting his hard gaze to Garrick, “to repay them for every man they’ve corrupted.”
The sword swung.
The tip bit into Garrick’s neck, where his pulse struggled to beat. Feral satisfaction burst inside him.
Finally!
It’d be over.
The madness, the pain, the torture and degradation. Countless months and years of it, his own and the horror visited upon the slaves who hated him.
Ended.
Merciful God, he needed it to end.
But the weight of the sword lifted from his neck.
Thick, hot wet trickled down the column of his throat.
Luc bent to his ear. “You’re meant,” he murmured, the heat of his breath washing over Garrick’s skin, “to atone.”
The young vampyr traced the thin white line that bisected Garrick’s cheek with one finger. Then he delivered a mocking slap.
Rage exploded.
White-hot.
Soulless.
Innervating.
In spite of his blood loss, Garrick’s fingers twitched. Fury clawed inside him so rabidly that if he’d had the blood to feed life to it, the slave’s head would already dangle from his fist. Garrick would tear his arrogant heart from his rib cage and—
Luc chuckled, the egotistical bastard. “That’s the Garrick I know and love.”
He sucked in a sharp breath.
Love?
Everything inside Garrick halted. Just stopped.
“If plotting my protracted and no doubt painful death gives you the will to survive this, so be it. Far better to focus your bloodthirsty schemes on those who’ve earned it, though. Devise a few to destroy more masters.” With a fond tap to Garrick’s cheek, Luc heaved to his feet. “The rebels won’t accept you, but I will. We’ve work to do, you and I.”
Luc slipped from the stables and into the predawn shadows.
Garrick lay motionless in the crude prison cell while his mind reeled.
Luc loved him.
With his blood inside the young vampyr, Garrick knew it was true. He felt Luc’s affection every time the slave diverted a slice of his attention through their shared link to confirm that Garrick was okay. He sensed Luc’s underlying worry that he had taken too much blood—he hadn’t. He recognized Luc’s faith in him in the knowledge that the young vampyr hadn’t once suspected that Garrick might’ve obeyed Nathaniel�
��s command.
Luc loved him. Not the warped illusion of love that Nathaniel forced on him—he truly cared for Garrick. As a brother and friend.
No matter who he was or what the masters had chosen for him.
And the young vampyr needed him.
Too young to hunt, an easy target for any rogue vampyr who’d slipped his master’s leash, Luc wouldn’t last on his own. Few escaped slaves did. The masters wouldn’t let him slip away, either. Blaming Luc for Garrick’s death, masters would pursue Luc relentlessly and when they found him?
Dizzy with blood loss, Garrick nonetheless shuddered.
He wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone.
But Garrick needed Luc too.
He wouldn’t yield to the temptation to turn with the young vampyr to steady him. Tending and training Luc would force him to endure the madness that gripped him tighter with each passing day. Luc would comfort him during his wait for a mate too, ease Garrick’s loneliness and despair.
He might last centuries.
Awe streaked through the deadweight of his body at the opportunities opening before him, the possibilities of what could be.
Luc was right. The rebels would never accept him, but with the other vampyr as his partner, they’d let him fight. His heart struggled to quicken with his zeal to destroy the masters who journeyed to this damned and forgotten place, drawing nearer by the moment. Masters like Nathaniel who callously killed and discarded the youngest and weakest of their kind.
He’d have vengeance. More, he’d have justice.
If he lived.
Chapter One
Carbondale, Illinois
Present Day
Lucien kicked the dead vampyr’s head and cursed.
Two.
He’d killed two so far and had lost track of Malachi, his new partner, twenty minutes ago when he’d chased a third.
How many of the damned creatures had infested this scrap of southern Illinois? And since when did dark masters ally together? The third Malachi hunted belonged to Krystiyan. The Russian vampyr’s unmistakable stench permeated the stable, tickled Lucien’s nostrils. “Mal?”
