He cocked his head, the smile fading from his hard features into muted sadness. "You would kill me?"
"You know what I am."
"Yes, your oath."
He began to pace, a small, deliberate pattern of steps circling the thick trunk of an alder tree. His fingertips trailed across the rough bark. Always just out of striking distance.
"Did you know that nightwalkers are bound by no such spell? We are free, Magdalene. We take what we like and spare what we please. I feel no compulsion to slaughter you now." He paused, standing to the side of the tree, the flat of his palm against the bark, and scraped those silver eyes over me from head-to-toe. "Quite the contrary."
This was not Lucien, I told myself, even as my body tingled in response to his lingering gaze. The man who had been my lover was dead. Two hundred years dead, at the least. The spirit animating his body was a perversion of that man, an entity twisted beyond recognition by the poison pounding through his blood. He had his memories—his voice and body—but not his heart. That was still as the grave.
"Who did this to you?"
A flicker of pain wrinkled the corners of his eyes as he glanced away. "An old friend of yours." He returned his gaze to me, tilting his head to the side. "You don't remember, do you? You woke early, but the oubliette... It did enough damage. It did its job."
I swallowed. "You know what I did to deserve the oubliette?"
His smile, his real smile, quick and brilliant, slammed me in the chest.
"Lover, you did it for me."
I delved into the dark halls of my memory, using every ounce of strength I could muster to push aside the thick curtains that my long rest had drawn across my crimes. It was no use. The oubliette sleep was as bound to my blood as the oath. I had agreed to forget, when I had lain down, and in return arise from my sleep in the far-flung future, my crimes and guilt both erased so that I could better do my job.
But in the time I rested, my family was supposed to fill in the gaps I left behind, to keep the eternal balance in check and mend whatever cuts I had made in the world. I needed them more than ever now, and they were not here, and I did not know why and I feared—oh, the fear burned through me to the core—that their absence was somehow my doing.
"Lucien." I let my fear and my pain seep into my voice, saw him shudder with the force of it, and pressed on. "Please. I need my family. Where are they? Where are Roisin and Sebastian? Tell me they live."
"None of us live," he snapped, and pushed the hair back from his eyes. "I did what I could for you."
He looked away, closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the tree trunk as if he needed its support. A sudden weakness flickered through him—he was fighting something, some internal battle waged as deep as mine against my oath. "You should not have awakened. Not yet. It's not ready."
"What's not ready?" I demanded, fearing the answer more than I feared my own death.
He straightened, tipped his head back to gaze at the faint light of an early moonrise filtering through the trees, and in that moment I understood how deeply I was in trouble. He was my Lucien, yes, but he was nightwalker through to the bone, and as the moon mounted the vault of the sky and chased away my brilliant sun, his power rose as mine ebbed.
With my shoulder dislocated, my hip ripped open, my body singing for blood to repair itself, I was no match for a nightwalker in its full strength. Never mind that this one had loved me once. Our blood was the poison between us.
"Magdalene," he said, the name a question as he lowered his gaze to me, sharp and predatory. The tips of fangs slipped below the horizon of his lips. "If you ever loved me: Run."
Fifteen: Silver and Gold
Light forgive me, I fled. Even as my oath screamed at me to stay, to hold firm and destroy this perversion of humanity, I turned and ran. I told myself it was so I could fight another day. That the night sapped my strength and fueled Lucien's. That, if I were to stay and destroy him, I would surely fail, leaving the mystery of what had happened to my family unsolved and the mortals vulnerable to the nightwalker surge.
Such thoughts were logical enough to take the edge off the burning anger of my oath, but they were not the truth, and one cannot lie to their own blood.
Despite the rubber of my boots, my feet slipped on the loose gravel. I stumbled, but caught myself on a tree before I went full over. The bark scraped my already abused hand, sending a shock of pain up my aching arm. The oath that bound my blood burned, making my head spin. It did not agree that fleeing was the best option here.
I was flattered by its faith that I would survive the encounter with Lucien, but I knew better. Not only was night coming on fast, but it looked like it was going to be a full moon. Even if I had wanted to battle Lucien, I knew better than to do so when he was at his full power and I was already weakened.
Unfortunately for me, it looked like the choice was out of my hands. I didn't know this part of London, I had no idea where the streets would take me, and I was certain Lucien was well aware of every route.
For a brief moment I was tempted to press the device in my ear and call for Seamus's aid, but there was nothing he or any of the other mortals of the Sun Guard could do against Lucien. I wanted to believe Lucien wouldn't harm them, but I also wanted to believe he wouldn't harm me, and that was clearly a load of bullshit. Even if he didn't want to personally, he was a nightwalker. Though he believed he was free, his blood wouldn't let me survive this encounter any more than my oath would let him survive it.
The things we bind ourselves to, when we agree to live for an eternity.
The main road was a few yards ahead, just out of reach. If I funneled all my strength into my legs, I might make it to the street before Lucien got me. But to do so would risk unconsciousness. I needed every scrap of strength I had just to stay on my feet.
And if I did reach that road, what then? Lucien would catch me. It would be better for everyone involved if he didn't catch me where mortals could see. It wasn't that I was worried about the veil—that law inflicted upon my family after I went to sleep didn't feel binding to me—but if there were mortals around, Lucien might use them against me. He knew, better than anyone, how much I can love the mortals of this world.
Better then, to stand my ground and fight.
Once the decision was made, my oath pounded approval through my veins. That surge of strength was enough to give me hope.
I stopped hard, grabbing one of the trees to use as a pivot as I swung around to face him. My blade was in my hand in an instant, the long stretch of steel hissing as it scraped the nylon sheath. Lucien halted, his eyes wide with fear. He tried to dig his heels into the gravel, but he was moving too fast. Supernatural speed was no good for stopping.
His hesitation gave me an opening. I darted in, letting the tip of my blade kiss the edge of the coat covering his waist. I didn't want to kill him. I didn't even want to wound him. But the oath couldn't tell the difference between those two sentiments. It only cared if I fought or fled. In this case, at least, the lack of nuance was working for me.
Lucien danced out of my reach, the thick wool of his coat snagging on the tip of my blade. I jerked back, splitting the fabric, and fell into a guarded stance, once again trying to hide that my other arm was injured. He regarded me and took a hesitant step backward. His expression contorted, pain mingling with rage and drifting back toward rage again. He didn't want to do this anymore than I did. But just as I did, he had to.
"Who is your maker?" I demanded.
He scowled and jerked his head to the side as if it were on a puppet string that had just been yanked. "You're asking the wrong question."
Clearly, I wasn't going to get any solid information from him tonight. He had never been anything but cryptic when he was mortal. It was foolish of me to hope that he had become more forthright after his death.
The Lucien I had known and loved had never been a fighter in life. He eyed me now, assessing my stance, and my heart thumped heavily in my chest as I real
ized that he had been forced to learn how to do battle.
It wasn't his fault. I couldn't blame him for this. Nightwalkers never asked their victims if they wanted to become a nightwalker. It wasn't in their nature to ask consent for anything at all, let alone the darkest gift they could offer. Whoever had done this to Lucien had done this against his will. And in doing so, forced him to learn how to fight. No one made it very long as an immortal without a few battle skills under their belt.
As much as it pained me to see him assessing me like a warrior, I realized I had a slim chance of winning this. He knew I preferred the sword, but he had never bothered to learn the basics of my skills. I didn't know what kind of weapon he would use, but my techniques would be alien to him. Especially if he had trained against modern foes.
Maybe my age was about to become useful after all.
Lucien mirrored my stance, and from within the folds of his coat pulled out two long, lean daggers. Crap. Maybe he hadn't trained specifically to take me down, but that was irrelevant at this point. Even though I had some reach on him with my sword, those two daggers could get under my guard very, very quickly. With my left arm out of commission for the time being, there was little I could do to keep those flashing blades away from me.
I took a step back, putting more distance and half of the tree between us. It probably wouldn't help much, but I was hoping that because he didn't want to fight me any more than I wanted to fight him, that he might take that extra distance as an excuse to run away.
Yeah, that was never going to happen.
I could see the nightwalker madness swirling in his eyes. Silvery smoke wisped over his irises and his whole body thrummed with the energy the moon gave him. This was going to happen. And neither one of us was going to like it.
He sprang at me. Any other assailant wouldn't have given me pause, but this one... Well, my usual aggressive style didn't seem to fit. He came in low and fast, cutting under my guard with one hand while the other sliced at my cheek. The move left the whole middle section of his body open to my attack. In other words: a blatant trick.
Instead of going for the bulk of his body, I swept away the dagger aimed at my cheek and turned into the swipe, bringing my sword around to guard my middle. Sure enough, his other hand lashed up, seeking my stomach. But I wasn't where he expected me to be, and so the strike went wide.
I circled, keeping an overgrown aspen between us. It wasn't much of a defense, but I needed to keep something flanking my left, and it would have to do. His eyes tracked me, though they were not Lucien's eyes anymore. He carried himself with the predatory grace of a tiger, the absolute lethality of a jaguar. If he got within striking distance, if I let my guard down for even a second, I was dead.
He darted in with both arms extended, an obvious line straight for my throat. I parried, trying to turn it around into a strike, but I was too weak and too slow. If I were still mortal, I'd be panting and sweating straight through my clothes by now.
I backed away again, hating to do this stupid cat-and-mouse thing, but knowing it was the only way to keep my skin intact while Lucien stalked me with those two glittering blades. If I stalled long enough, maybe help would arrive, or I would find an opening for escape.
A low growl started in his chest, growing into a deep rumble. That sound, I had heard it many, many times before, but never in this context. Usually he only made it when I was wearing something a little more revealing than usual.
Adrenaline sent a thrill through me, and I rode the wave of energy forward, stepping into him with my right leg as I brought my blade across his center. A bold move, and probably a sloppy one, but at this point bold sloppy moves were all I had left.
He parried me easily, and I wasn't quick enough to bring my blade around in time to stop his strike. The dagger in his offhand lashed out, catching me in the upper arm. My bicep split open, dribbling brackish blood across my new leather jacket. Talia would be pissed about that. I was a lot less worried about the fashion than my own skin.
The wound itself wasn't deep enough to cause serious damage. At least, not to somebody like me. I might be weakened, but I had enough strength in me to withstand the pain of a little nick. What I didn't have, what I would've never expected to have needed, was the strength to withstand the poison of silver.
I screamed, I admit it, and staggered backward. Pain exploded through my arm, unlike anything I had felt in centuries, and not just because I slept through the last two. I dropped my blade, forgetting all pretense of defense, and clutched the open wound. The blood seeping through my fingers was nothing, but the touch of silver… The silver was raw pain.
Somewhere along the years, humans got their mythology a little mixed up. Werewolves and shifters of all kinds are real. They're scarce, and we sunstriders rarely come across them, but something about them enchanted the human imagination. There are a lot more stories about shifters than their numbers warrant, and all those stories say one thing: Silver is what it takes to kill a werewolf.
I don't know where those stories started, but in my more cynical moments I think the nightwalkers crafted them to do us harm. Silver hurts, but it doesn't just hurt shifters.
When the Sun Guard was first being formed, we discovered that the two blessed metals of night and day were a lot more than pretty in a ceremonial context.
Silver was blessed of the moon, and it could do a lot of damage to those who were blessed by the sun. The moon has always been a jealous mistress, and she really has a hate-on for the servants of the day. Gold could do some serious damage to the denizens of the night, but it's expensive and too soft to craft weapons out of. I've seen arrowheads tipped with stuff, and some swords engraved with golden grooves, but whole weapons made of gold or silver were rare.
At least, they had been when I'd gone to sleep.
If the descent of the sun hadn't been enough to make me weak, the silver finished the job. All of the strength I had taken from Emeline's blood dissolved in an instant. I dropped to my knees, pitching forward against the rough blanket of dead leaves covering the ground. I could hear the crunch of Lucien's boots approaching. Never before had I felt like a convict awaiting the axe, but in that moment, I knew that every steady step he took heralded my death.
He was stalling. He must have been. There was no way it should take so long for him to reach me. I didn't dare look up, I didn't want to see the struggle on his face. He had begged me to run, and I had failed him, just as I had failed my order by falling down here in the dirt, rocked by pain and blinded by agony.
Though my head was bowed, I could see the toe of his black boot eclipsing the horizon of my vision. I wondered if nightwalkers could weep. I had never seen it before. Sunstriders could, if we were pressed to, and I felt that hot need for release welling up through me now.
As his other boot came into view, I wanted to look up. I needed to look up. Even if it killed me to see the pain on his face, I couldn't die without looking into those eyes one last time. The eyes of my Lucien had been blue, but the silver taint didn't take all that away from me. I had my memory of that, at the very least, even though the oubliette had stolen so much more from me.
A screech of sirens broke through the London night, red and blue light reflecting off the fog that enshrouded us both. The sound of the sirens might have hurt, if I had not been so very close to the brink of collapsing from pain. Lucien retreated, his boots crunching back across the gravel. His shadow lifted and then, in a breath, he was gone.
I forced myself to look up. A long black car drove up on the sidewalk not far from the gravel road. The door flung open and out strode DeShawn. His angry face was the last thing I saw before I fainted.
Sixteen: Trapped in Metal
I awoke to warmth on my chest, and a low rumble. I cracked my eyes open, squinting against the faint light. I lay on a cool grey sheet. The light seeping through the window was faint, and dust motes danced in the gauzy haze.
My fingers quested over my body, seeking the wounds Lucien h
ad left me. Faint scars peppered my arms and legs, and a knot of flesh puckered my left hip. The poisoned slash on my bicep had been wrapped in gauze, sticky-wet and still leaking. I didn't know how long I had slept, but judging by the aches radiating throughout my body it wasn't long enough.
As my hands reached up my body, they ran into a large furry lump.
I blinked, forcing my eyes wide open. A large cat with tuxedo coloring curled on my chest, the tip of his fluffy tail flicking over the end of his pink nose. Sensing that I was awake, he cracked an eye at me, the golden orb almost the same color as my own. I reached up and scratched behind his ear, and he rewarded me with a deep, hearty purr.
"Do you know where I am, little guy?"
He looked at me as if to say, you're my lap now, and that's really the only place that matters. I couldn't argue with that logic. I gave him another scratch under the chin. He stood up, pushing his two front paws forward and arching his back in a languorous stretch. I only wish I could be that relaxed.
The door opened, hinges creaking, and the cat grumbled deep in its chest. DeShawn stepped into the room, looking like he hadn't slept a minute. His face was slack, a fine dusting of stubble shadowing his chin. He wore a tight-cut gray T-shirt, and loose black athletic trousers bagged around his ankles. He carried with him the scent of human, warm and grass-like, and also the astringent bite of antiseptic. DeShawn rubbed his face with both hands, then looked at me and scowled.
"Mr. Pips, I thought I told you to leave the lady alone?"
The cat turned its ears toward DeShawn's voice, recognizing the sound of its name. He looked at me, yawned, and then curled right back up on my chest. I laughed and gave him another scratch.
"It's all right," I said. "He's helping me heal."
DeShawn gave me a skeptical glance, stepped across the room and leaned over to pick up Mr. Pips. The cat went limp, making DeShawn work to gather him up into his arms. But once he had him safely tucked into the crook of his elbow, the little creature curled its paws and purred so loudly I could hear it from the bed. Despite DeShawn's obvious annoyance, he smiled and scratched the cat's tummy.
Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1) Page 8
