Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1)

by Megan Blackwood

  Roisin sighed. "I wish I didn't believe you, Lady. Those records are certainly a lie. The magic guarding your gates is too strong for witchery. And if the scent on those remnants is correct.... Your so-called hedge witch is still alive."

  "Mags?" Seamus jogged to the motorcycle. Roisin stiffened beneath me, and I realized that I'd let my head drop against her shoulder. I made myself straighten as he approached and put on something like a smile. He flicked a frown at me and offered his hand.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I'm whole," I said, which was more or less true. I didn't think he'd like to hear the caveat that I'd lost a few mouthful-sized chunks to hungry remnants.

  I took his hand and heaved myself to my feet. Pain sliced through me, and I swayed. Seamus moved, as if in slow motion to my eyes, to reach for me, but Roisin was there before his brain had even finished sending the requisite signals to his muscles. She looped an arm around my shoulder and propped me up. Seamus's eyes widened with surprise—Roisin had moved too fast for him to register—but he did not step back.

  "She needs rest," Seamus told Roisin.

  "She needs sunlight and blood. Our kind don't rest."

  "Seamus," DeShawn said, a warning edge in his voice. "Let them handle their business. They know it better than we do."

  I almost laughed. For all his bluster, Inspector Culver feared us, while pale-faced Seamus faced down Roisin and did not flinch.

  Adelia cleared her throat. "There is a rose garden to the west side of the house. It gets the most light this time of day. Bring her there to recover, I will send Emeline along with restoratives shortly." Adelia met Roisin's fiery stare and held it. "I do not know what is going on, Miss Quinn, but you are welcome in my home, and I pray it serves as a suitable shelter to us all."

  Roisin inclined her head, accepting the formal invitation. "We swords of the sun accept your guard."

  The ritual words rang ponderously through my body, resonating with the pull of the oath I'd sworn. In all that had happened, I had failed to exchange the same vow with Adelia. Roisin, always a stickler for protocol, had bridged that gap on my behalf. A combination of shame and relief trickled through me. Things were clicking into place once more. I was back on familiar footing, with another member of my order to watch my back.

  Roisin threw a glance at the caskets being unloaded, and I watched her lip curl with disdain, stripping away my small, fragile moment of peace.

  "Treat them well," she said, "they stink of the same magic."

  Her arm across my shoulders, we turned, and left the staring mortals to see to our kin while we sought the respite of the rose garden.

  Twenty-Five: Strange Light

  The air was heavy with the scent spicy-sweet of heirloom roses, blotting out the remaining taint of magic and blood. Roisin guided me to a bench in the center of the garden, overlooking a brook that hissed against smooth, decorative stones, and set me down. I tipped my head back, letting the warm light of the sun wash over my face and restore my spirit, if not yet my body.

  "Tell me what you know," Roisin said.

  She paced the gravel path in front of me, her footsteps silent over the gritty stones. I knelt by the brook, using the cool water to wash the blood and remnant saliva from my arms and face. I was in desperate need of a shower, but this would have to do for now.

  As I washed, I told her everything. From the moment I woke alone in the sewers to the day I sprinted across the rooftops of London.

  I told her of Lucien, and told myself my voice did not break.

  Her hand pressed against the space between my shoulder blades, unspoken comfort. Creatures such as we no longer needed words to share the burden of our pain. She knew what I would ask now, there was no other question, and the simple fact that she did not volunteer the answer told me what I needed to know. But I asked all the same. Some motions must be gone through to be made real.

  "You were the last of us to sleep, Roisin. Do you know who turned him?"

  "When I went to my rest, I understood there to be no nightwalker left alive in all the world." She would not have been able to sleep, otherwise. The oath would not have let her.

  Mortal footsteps approached us, impossibly loud to our ears. I'd expected Emeline, or a servant with a glass of her blood in his hands. I hadn't counted on Seamus.

  Hands shoved in his pockets, he stopped a few feet away from us. Heavy, black bees buzzed near his head, drifting through the shaft of sunlight that fell across him. Eyes as green as the oak leaves surrounding him regarded Roisin and me, a little frown teasing at the corners of his lips.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

  "You didn't," I said, and shrugged Roisin's hand off my back as I stood. "Is everything all right?"

  "The team finished unloading the caskets. Adelia had them moved to her wine cellar. She said she didn't like putting them down there, but it's the most easily defensible part of the estate. The walls are carved out of the bedrock, and there's only two ways in."

  "Is it well lit?" I asked, remembering my own awakening in the dark.

  He nodded. "Electric for us, but candelabras with fire in case they wake up. I know it's not sunlight, but it's the best we can do."

  "It helps," Roisin said. "Waking in the dark is not a good look for a sunstrider, and many of those have been asleep centuries." She gave me a sidelong look. "It can confuse us, make us cranky."

  "Especially with the nightwalker pull as strong as it is."

  Roisin frowned at me. "I don't feel it. But then, you've always been more sensitive to the oath than me."

  Seamus leaned forward, intent. "You have different strengths?"

  We both raised our brows at him. "Just as humans do," I confirmed. "Roisin has always had a stronger affinity for sorcerous powers, I have a stronger bond to the oath."

  "You gave too much blood when you took it," Roisin said.

  I snorted. "You hardly gave enough."

  We grinned at each other, the old jabs a familiar blanket wrapped around us.

  "How did you gain your affinity, then, Miss Quinn?"

  "Roisin," she corrected, "and I was born to it. My mother was a sorceress, and it's carried through the blood. Lucky for Magdalene, or I wouldn't have felt the mists enshrouding the remnants and come looking."

  Seeing the confusion on Seamus's face, Roisin launched into the story of how she'd woken up in her descendant's cottage, rescued from kidnapping by the GPS chip embedded in her skin. Seamus's eyes lit up.

  "That's brilliant. We should tag all of them."

  "Whoa," Roisin said, "we're not moggies. You can't go around chipping us all without permission. It could easily be used against us, sure. I did it because I was the last to go down, and I knew my sister's line would continue to keep an eye on me. The others have to make their own choices. Any sign of them perking up?"

  Seamus shook his head. "They haven't so much as drawn a breath. A week ago I would have sworn they were all dead, but, well..." He scratched the back of his head. "Turns out the world's bigger than I thought."

  "It always is," Roisin said.

  I sat heavily on the bench, letting my arms drape across my knees. The sun beat down on my back, a perfect ray ripping through the otherwise overcast day, and I began to wonder if this garden were enchanted to always be in the daylight.

  "When will Emeline be here?" I asked, surprised at the soft weakness in my voice.

  "About that," Seamus said, "I told her not to worry about it. I'd handle it." He met my eye, just as steadily as he'd met Roisin's.

  "It's not a chore like scrubbing the sink, Seamus. Did she explain it to you?"

  He swallowed, but nodded. "Lady Adelia did."

  Probably as thoroughly as she'd explained matters to Emeline. Which was to say, briefly and without a care for the very real human cost she was offering on a platter to me.

  "With respect," he pressed on, consciously pushing his shoulders back and straightening his spine. "Roisin is here now, and we want to
wake fifteen more of you. Emeline alone cannot see to all your needs. I volunteered to take the pressure off. And, because—no offense, Roisin—I know you, Mags. I saw you fight for us. I saw you wade into those remnants without a thought for your own safety."

  "That is my duty."

  "It would have been no violation of your duty to rush back to safety. Instead you stayed until they were all dispatched, knowing the cost to yourself would be high."

  Roisin clapped him on the shoulder. "I've been arguing with her about where duty ends and martyrdom begins for a couple hundred years. Good luck. I'm going to go have a sniff around those caskets, see if I can figure anything out about the magic on them."

  Her steps were silent as she disappeared into the roses, hints of her copper curls visible between the petals as she wound her way back toward the estate. Closing my eyes, I could still sense her presence, vibrant in the shadow of the sleeping sunstriders secreted away in the cellar. Seamus sat next to me on the bench, and I opened my eyes.

  "I was serious," Seamus said. He rubbed his kneecaps through his jeans with open palms, leaving smudges of sweat behind. "You need blood. I've given to blood banks before. It's not much different, right? I'm just giving at the office."

  He flashed me an anxious smile. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to smile back, to assuage his fears with gentle human platitudes. But I had to be certain he understood the seriousness of what he offered.

  "It is painful, and it will make you weak for a time. And once your blood has been given to me, I can find you. Anywhere in the world. Emeline now is in the wine cellar. That is a thread that cannot be broken. It fades, the further away you get from me, but it does not take long to narrow down your location."

  "I understand."

  There was such solemnity in his voice that I believed him. Something about the last few days had changed the man I'd first met, bent over a glowing screen, his face pale from seeing only the false light of indoors for time on end.

  I regarded him with care, the slight sunburn across the apples of his cheeks, the haggard but determined set of his eyes. His short, dark hair was twisted as if he'd done nothing more to it than brush and shove it out of his way, his collar rumpled against the firm lines of his neck. He'd been the first of the Sun Guard I'd seen in centuries, and though I had frightened him through to the core, he had treated me with careful respect from the first moment we met.

  Maybe he hadn't changed, so much, as awakened to something within himself. Something that'd been pressed down beneath the daily grind of working for the guard and seeing to his studies. He'd said he was a grad student. And while I only had vague ideas of what being a student meant, I knew it didn't involve rushing into blood-soaked strongholds in search of clues.

  But he'd done those things. He'd stood when I entered and hadn't backed away. He'd taken my hand when it was sticky with a ghoul's blood, and taken control of a situation that would have sent most mortals running screaming. He hadn't flinched away, even when he needed to move the limp, dead hand of his old colleague to examine the computer that lead us to Chatham House.

  Seamus met my gaze and held it, steady as always, one of the few of the guard who could look me in the eye for any length of time. His eyes, as green as the spring-fresh rose bushes that surrounded us, hinted at being bloodshot.

  "You're thinking too much," he said.

  "I've had a lot of time to indulge my thoughts."

  "Not right now, you don't."

  He rolled back the navy cotton of his shirtsleeve and offered his arm to me, wrist up, his fingers curled lightly against the palm of his hand. The offer was implicit, the sullen thump of his heart visible to me in the teal-tinted vein running beneath his skin.

  "Seamus..." I began, by voice clotted from a surge of hunger. "You could walk away from this right now. Go back to your mortal life, your studies."

  His smile was slow and sad. "No. I couldn't. Do you know how I came to work for the Sun Guard?"

  "Work-study," I repeated the words he'd told me without ever understanding them, but happy for the delay while I mastered my instincts. The way he held his arm in front of me was like dangling a string in front of a cat.

  "After the fact, sure. But I was... drawn to that part of Somerset House. I used to set up on the grass outside the door with my laptop to catch up on work. Most of the people in my class thought it was weird, no one would join me there. They all got a creepy vibe from it." He laughed a little, shaking his head. I averted my gaze as his jugular pulsed. "Maybe it was all those ghost stories my mom told me as a kid. Banshees in the fields and that kind of thing. But the house never put me off. I felt safe there, like it was another home. Adelia caught me skulking around, and after she told me off a couple of times but I kept coming back, asked me if I'd like a job. I jumped at the chance.

  "I'm not afraid of you, Mags, but I'm not fearless either. I understand the stakes we're dealing with. I want to help. I can't walk away any more than you can."

  He lifted his arm, the flesh a hand's width from my lips. I believed him, and my body was desperate for renewal. Why was I so hesitant? What was the hook in my heart pulling me back, urging me to let this gift pass me by?

  Hunger overwhelmed my hesitation. I bent my head to his arm and took it carefully in my hands, holding him steady as my lips brushed over the soft skin of his forearm. His pulse struck me like thunder, racing in anticipation. Before I could do so consciously, my fangs extended, the sharp points denting his skin in two small craters. I could feel his eyes on me.

  This was the balance between mortal and immortal. For our lives to continue, we required the spark of their blood, the liveliness that could exist only in a finite soul. The delicate bond between sunstrider and human required us to take only with permission, to borrow their essence so we could better defend them against our darker counterparts who would take without asking. This moment was the primal heart of our bond. The origin of my oath.

  His skin gave way, parting without resistance beneath my bite. He gasped a soft, startled sound filled with more wonder than pain. Iron-laced blood, warm and salty, rushed over my tongue as I drank in careful, controlled swallows, measuring the amount I took with each sip.

  Something else pulled at me. A hint of power, deep and strange, threaded through his veins. The cold tastes of iron and salt mingled with something else—something cinnamon, exotic to me and heavy with heat. Tension coiled in my body, a primal instinct urged me to gulp, to devour, to tip Seamus like a chalice and drain all he had to offer.

  I snapped back to myself, retracted my fangs and pulled away, licking the wound closed. I dropped his arm as if it were a weight grown too heavy, my muscles trembling from fatigue left over from the spiritual war I had waged to not take too much.

  Seamus drew his arm back, panting softly, and stared at the unmarred skin in naked wonder. "Are you all right?"

  I didn't know how to answer that. The mortal blood that pounded through me now resonated with something deeper, some mirror or sliver of my power that I didn't understand. Seamus was mortal. His blood and his scent were proof enough of that. But his blood sang to me as my own had sang to the remnants.

  "Yes," I managed, not wanting to alarm him until I had a chance to consult with Roisin. "It has... been awhile since I've had it fresh."

  He smiled, shyly, and tugged his sleeve back down over his arm, slowly redoing the cuff buttons. "You looked... different, there, for a moment. Glowing."

  "Mister Canavan!" Adelia's voice cut across the garden. "This security system won't wait!"

  "Guess we'd better head back." Seamus shook his head and stood, then offered me a hand. As I grasped his hand and pulled myself to my feet, the warm sunlight in the garden shimmered, growing hazy at the edges. Seamus said nothing, and so I pretended not to notice.

  Twenty-Six: Power Forgotten

  We gathered in the cellar with the other members of the Sun Guard, and I tried to ignore their fixed gazes upon me. All in the convoy
had seen my battle against the remnants, all had seen me fall to their hungry hands and mouths and come back to them, whole.

  I did not know what the culture was at the other compounds, but if the reception I'd received from Talia and Seamus was anything to go by, then these people very well might have thought I was a myth until this moment.

  Roisin paced the line of coffins in the cellar, her fingertips trailing over the foot of each, her long coat flaring out behind her. As a sunstrider, sorcerous energies should have shunned her, but Roisin's bloodline was so long and thick that tendrils of pale, gleaming smoke twisted around her fingertips, responding to the stunted promise of her lineage.

  "The magic is old," Roisin said, "but the spell was recent, and insidious. It draws upon the power of a sunstrider's oath and inverts it, lies to it, makes it believe that there are not enough nightwalkers in the world to wake for. Ever, if I'm reading this right."

  "How do we break it?" I asked.

  Roisin frowned and dropped her hands. "I don't know. My niece might have some ideas. Once it's daylight again, I'll bring her here. None of us should leave this place in the dark."

  "This is my fault," Seamus said. "Our fault." He shot a look at a few others in the crowd I didn't know. "We relied too much on cameras, on the digital security measures we put in place. We forgot what we were dealing with, or, I guess, never really understood it. Every last one of us has been infiltrated at least twice without our knowing. Some of us are dead because of that mistake."

  "Why twice?" One of the women who'd flinched under Seamus's glance asked. "They came into all of our compounds, laid the spell, then came back later to pick us off and harvest the sunstriders. Why not do it all at once? Why risk the spell being discovered in the meantime?"

  "Easy," DeShawn said. "They weren't ready for 'em yet. They were laying the groundwork. Professional thieves often do that. They'll case a place and stage things the way they'll need them, if they can manage it."