The Venefica, however, looked exactly the same.
She stood with her hands folded before her belly, as if her interlaced fingers were a chalice meant for offering. Torchlight danced across her olive skin, skittered light across her garnet eyes. Made them look as if they were laughing.
"Where is Lucien?" I demanded, still on my hands and knees, ignoring the boulder of dread weighing down my stomach.
"Where he's always been," the Venefica said, her voice sing-song. "Waiting on the sidelines while those with real power play. Waiting for you, my dear."
You must run, Lucien had said. Ragnar only wants you.
But there was little wanting in Ragnar's eyes now. He regarded me with empty sockets, all the conviction he'd once held scooped out. Hollowed. If he'd been anyone else, I might have felt a pang of sympathy. Instead, I felt only grim satisfaction.
It was not Ragnar who'd wanted me, not after that first night. In the years I'd slept the Venefica had enhanced him, empowered him, and in doing so shaped him completely to her will. He was little more than a puppet, jumping to strings he'd tied on himself.
The stink of nightwalker overwhelmed me. They filed into the cavern, young-blooded creatures, wary as they paced through the narrow hallways that branched into the dark somewhere behind Ragnar. Bleary-eyed, they suffered under the light of day, as the sun had not yet set. I doubted any of them had been made more than a month ago, each still new to their powers. Children, by my reckoning. But powerful children, and in high numbers.
Lucien entered last. His head bowed, his hands clasped behind his back. He would not meet my eye, though I silently begged him to look up. To offer some... some guidance. Some reassurance. Even hatred would have been better than this shy indifference.
He was not the last. Behind him stalked DeShawn, his rifle slung easy at his side, a determined set to his shoulders. His gaze skittered to me, then darted away, as his squad followed him down the steps. Their eyes were huge, the whites reflecting orange torchlight, their weapons held tight and ready. Despite their obvious fear, they fanned out around the back wall, hemming me in the center of the room and, at DeShawn's signal, pointed their weapons at me.
My heart lurched, as if it were trying to beat again. Slowly, I raised my palms to the sky, staying on my knees. Ragnar flashed me a grin as he strolled up to DeShawn's side and clasped a hand on his shoulder.
"We had a chat after the debacle at Adelia's estate," Ragnar said, his words ringing in my head like a bell. "No more servitude for the nightwalkers, no more second-class creatures of the night. You've failed, Magdalene. You and your order stood by while we flourished, let us run rampant. But even I, with all my hungers understand the value of balance between two peoples. If we are to be hunters, then we must not wipe out that which we hunt."
DeShawn's jaw twitched. "They're going to ask consent. Start being careful about who they take."
"They won't," I rasped.
"Now, now." Ragnar grinned at me. "We're civilized creatures. We only want a few luxuries—necessities, really—and with our upcoming dominion, it's time to strike a new deal."
"Dominion?" I asked.
The Venefica cracked a smile. "I've been working very hard on what you asked of me, child of my blood. My preparations are almost complete."
"What?" Ragnar raised his brows at me. "You didn't think I'd let just Lucien be changed to walk in the daylight?"
"That wasn't the deal."
The Venefica fluttered a hand. "But I must make sure the process works, mustn't I? It wouldn't do for me to accidentally kill the man."
Something twisted, deep in my chest. Lucien met my eye then, his otherworldly gaze peering deep into me, as if stripping off the layers I'd used to defend my husk of a core. And I realized. Lucien was the thread. The thread I must pull to send the Venefica back to her watery hell. If Lucien were to die, she would have no purpose. No promise left to fulfill.
If she answered my call, if she saved Lucien, she would be free.
If she failed, it was only the waves for her.
Jars of children, withered and malformed. Experimentations. Tests. Crates and crates of her making sure.
And all I had to do. All it would take to end it all. Was to kill Lucien.
"I have it now," the Venefica said, and curled one long-nailed finger at Ragnar. Beckoning. "And you are here just in time to witness the first full transformation."
Ragnar, his face a mask of raw elation, stepped into the stone circle in which Roisin was bound. The Venefica began to chant.
Forty-Six: Trigger Discipline
Panic constricted me. Roisin rocked back to her haunches, the most mobility she could manage with the chains binding her to the floor, and hissed up at Ragnar. He was oblivious, his rapturous gaze only for the Venefica and her venomous lips.
This was what he'd wanted. From the moment he'd discovered I was of the Venefica's lineage—a distant memory, trickling back to me—he'd vied to force me to command her to make him a creature free of constraints. A nightwalker who could rule the day and feel no lack of power.
When I'd bade her fix Lucien, to bring him back to me, I had not considered that it might require the blood of a sunstrider to do so. The grooves in the floor began to glow with a flickering, amber light, gaining in intensity until both Roisin and Ragnar were bathed in it, looking as if they had been drenched in honey.
What could I do? DeShawn's guns were trained upon me, Ragnar's nightwalkers arranged against me. Lucien's gaze was locked on the ritual, a slow horror blossoming across his face. The mirror of that horror ached in my chest. My hand. My hand had wrought all of this.
And it was up to me to atone.
Slowly, painfully, I lurched to my feet. DeShawn's gun tracked me, his brows drawn together. I kept my hands held out, palms open, though he knew how fast I was. Knew the promise of empty hands was as hollow as my heart.
Even so, if I launched myself at Ragnar or the Venefica, they would cut me down before I made it halfway there. My speed was no match for a storm of bullets.
His finger eased off the trigger, rested against the guard. Why? There was something in his expression, something intense, that he was trying to convey to me. Even if... even if he was on my side, the nightwalkers would slaughter DeShawn and all his men in an instant.
Behind me, a soft murmur. So low and muted that only I, with my enhanced hearing and standing so near the door, could make it out. The low hum of Maeve's spellcasting. Maeve, who I'd brought with me begrudgingly. Maeve, who'd only wanted to secure the safety of her ancestor. Maeve, who I'd left behind as I'd charged bull-headedly forward, triggering the remembrance spell.
When Lucien had been taken as a nightwalker, I had shucked off Roisin and Sebastian, turned my back on my kin. Reached to fix it—somehow, anyhow—myself. And this... this was what that had wrought me.
The Venefica's chanting raised, approaching some climatic pitch that I knew I couldn't allow her to reach. DeShawn's eyebrow quirked: a question. Did I trust him?
I didn't. But I didn't have a choice.
This, I could not do alone.
I lunged backward, twisting to throw myself at the warded door. Magic tingled against my skin, a fizzy prickle that frothed and burst, the web of a spell that triggered my memory, and kept Maeve out, snapping as the woman it had been designed to encounter only once rammed into it for a second time. Take the magic, and turn it back upon itself. The Venefica wasn't the only one who could learn that lesson.
Feedback cycles, Maeve had said. Loops of power feeding into one another, used against themselves. Twisted, perverted, and finally broken. I didn't understand the details of such things, but I knew the smell of a spell breaking when I scented one. Threads of power, gleaming, tore at the air for just a second and then I could see—not the beach, not that terrible night—but the hall I'd charged down, and Maeve filling the doorway with a quirked grin on her lips even as she chanted under her breath.
She raised her hands. The chant
snapped shut.
"Magdalene, dearie?"
"Yes?"
"Duck."
I hit the ground, and the world above me transmuted to light.
Forty-Seven: Time's Up
Sunlight. Not the raw plasma of it, but the power-stripping brilliance, washed over my head, banished the shadows in the cavern to little more than ash. Ragnar's nightwalker children screamed as one, confused and blinded, their skin seared by the blast of light.
Below their shrieks, stirring, the muted groans of the sunstriders. Rising. Rising.
Roisin's laugh cracked like ice across the room. Metal squealed. Power, fresh as if I stood basking in the noon sun, coursed through my veins. I threw my head back, letting the light flow through me—a cleansing baptism. The mortals would be temporarily blind, the nightwalkers injured.
Now. Now. Now.
Maeve lifted her hands, her chant switching from the soft mutter that was her nature to a bold, almost halting shout. Each syllable speared after the other, lancing through the room, echoing. Challenging the volume, and concentration, of the Venefica.
That witch's shoulders jerked as if yanked on from behind and above, but she kept her hands out, her focus laser-tight on Ragnar and Roisin. All around her the sigil carved into the ground bled light, some magical equivalent of blood-plasma leaking out into the world. The power that woman commanded... She would break the world to see her will done.
Of course she would. It was why I had called her.
But that will did not flow through her veins alone.
DeShawn's men had positioned themselves so that one each stood at the head of a sunstrider casket. While my kin stirred, they leveled the guns on the nightwalkers hissing in the light, and fired. Pop-pop-pop.
Cacophonous in the stone cavern, my ears began to ring. Nightwalkers screeched in rage, but were not yet strong with the setting of the sun. They looked to their maker, their sire—Ragnar, wrapped in the ecstasy of the Venefica's magic even though his skin burned red and blistered, determined to see this through though all his children should fall—to the mortals who had betrayed them.
Lucien looked at me.
As his brothers and sisters swarmed the walls, leaped high and wide, did everything they could to reach DeShawn's men before their gold-dipped bullets could rend them to shreds, Lucien met my gaze.
It was not yet dusk. Not yet night. Here, in the space between, with his master distracted, he could act. My throat swelled all at once, understanding ramming my chest like a poleaxe. Maybe Maeve knew what would happen if the circle surrounding Ragnar and Roisin was broken, but we didn't. He smiled at me, a little quirk of the lips, a puppy-dog apology, and as my world slowed to a crawl, as my limbs became so stiff with fear that I couldn't reach him no matter my speed, no matter Maeve's sunlight power pouring through me, he took one step.
Just one.
His boot crossed the line of the sigil, breaking the glow with the dark shadow of his body. The Venefica's head cocked, her arm twisted, bending as if it had sprouted new joints, and her palm faced him as her chanting changed in tone, skirting away from the high pitch she had been driving toward back down to something more sedate. Defensive.
He wasn't there for her, though.
I found strength in my legs, shook off the hoarfrost of fear freezing me in place, and sprinted. The room was not big. I could make it. I had to make it.
His other boot crossed the line. Lucien's hands—those gentle hands which should have never been transmuted to claws—curled at his sides in pain. But he reached, gritting his teeth, groaning under his breath, blood leaking from the corners of his once clear and bright eyes, and grasped the chains which anchored Roisin to the floor. He yanked.
Stone cracked, metal groaned, and with all her strength Roisin flung herself from the glyph which had held her, landing hard on her side behind the thin cover of a sunstrider coffin.
Lucien faced Ragnar, his master, and dug his heels in, long fingers shifting to claws. The Venefica shrieked. The very air grew thick. Dark. Feedback cycles, Maeve had said. The backbone of all spells, of all oaths. Of the Venefica's power. Looping now—in and in upon itself—as two nightwalkers, bound in transmuting power, faced one another. Lucien's eyes flared silver, a slick of mercury across an endless night, then seemed to collapse within themselves. The blood dribbling across his cheeks darkened. Seared. And his eyes, those eyes which I had loathed to see turned to the moon's silver, turned an endless, vacant black.
I hit him a second later. A second too late.
Lucien's body, which had always been a substantial thing, an earthy powerhouse of muscle and grit, ricocheted off of me as my shoulder connected with his ribs, launching him against the wall his kin swarmed over. Lucien was clear of the circle. I stayed, to break what I had wrought. Magic burst against my skin, mosquito kisses, and the light filling the glyph beneath my feet flared so bright I had to shield my eyes.
Walls of power rose up around us, hemming the glyph in, cutting me off from the battle between the nightwalkers and DeShawn's people. Ragnar's blistered face was all I could see, grinning with madness or—something else. Something like triumph.
My fingers formed claws before I could think, my aching body falling into a well-worn defensive stance. I had seen the beating Ragnar had taken and walked away from. I would not be taken by surprise again.
But he did not strike. He cocked his head and smiled with something like fondness.
"I had begun to fear the bait on this trap had grown mold."
He just wants you.
The power licking my skin grew cold, bitter. Pushed beneath the borders of my flesh and dug deep into my veins, rooting, twisting. Shifting a primordial balance so intrinsic to my being I had never noticed it before. I was on my knees, not knowing how I'd gotten there, Ragnar's hand on my shoulder, the Venefica's chant renewing its slow mount to climax.
The walls of power around me stifled, cut me off from even the sound of DeShawn's guns. I reached for strength, dug deep within myself, gritted my teeth against the weight pressing me down and found... Not light. Not the sun's strength.
A new power, heady like sweet wine. Like hay and oak and clove.
I slashed up, pushing to my feet in the same motion, drawing on every last drop. Skin resisted my claws at first, pulled taut and firm, but Ragnar's flesh opened to me all the same, and I gutted the fucker from groin to throat.
He reeled back, screaming. I planted a boot in his stomach with all my strength. The wall of power dissolved, fractured like broken glass, as he broke through it and landed on his back with nothing more than a foot inside the glyph. I kicked it out and stalked forward, towering over him, letting him see the blood—his blood drip from my fingertips.
A grin split his face, and though his body quivered with pain and his fangs descended on their own, I had never seen such delight in a pair of eyes.
"Oh, Magdalene," he rasped, blood foaming from his lips. "I knew you were the one."
I tensed. All around him his nightwalker children lay in piles of ash while my sunstrider kin stirred in their barrows, drawn back to the world by Maeve's low chanting. Madness alone could not account for that joy, for that certainty.
Lucien coiled on the floor, close to where Ragnar lay, his hands covering his pale, bloodied face. Slowly, he rocked back onto his heels. One by one, he peeled his fingers from his face. Black, empty eyes. His once soft lips split across overgrown fangs. Horror coiled in my belly as shadows licked across his skin, his clothes, drawn by whatever the Venefica had done to him. He wrenched his face away in shame and sadness.
The Venefica. Her power was fueling his torture. Leaving Ragnar to wither on the floor I spun, reaching for the dregs of my strange new strength, and ripped her throat wide open. Her eyes rolled, a serene smile passing across her angular features, and her body dropped. My ears popped, the world shivered, and the fizzle of dying magic raced up and down my arms.
My watch beeped, the alarm a piercing echo in the
cavern. Sundown.
Lucien threw his head back and roared. Utter hatred contorted his features, his lips twisting into a snarl as his clawed hands grew, and grew, longer than any I'd ever seen. He did not stand, so much as rise, his body jerked up on strings of shadow, the edges of him indistinct as darkness flowed around and through him.
He snatched Ragnar from the ground, bundled his dying master's body in the shadow of his arms and twisted, faster than I could follow, a whirlwind of darkness kicking up the ash of his fallen brothers and sisters. The air grew tense, thick, and all the nightwalkers left standing transmuted to black smoke and faded, whisked away on the eddies of Lucien's power, leaving nothing but the searing glare of Lucien's black eyes in my memory.
And the memory-echo, low and delighted, of the Venefica's laugh.
A Spear of Silver
Emeline rebuilt the Durfort-Civrac manor, and though the Sun Guard resides within it now, it will never be my home. My motorcycle bends to my will, finding new speed as the tires grip the road carrying me away from the estate. It is a weight behind me, not uncomfortable, but grounding. Seamus and Talia and Emeline and DeShawn. They may not ever be my friends, not really, but they are something important to me. Something like family. My anchor, holding me to Earth.
And, I think, as clouds slip across the sky and block the sun for only a moment, family should not have to see what I am about to do next. They have the risen sunstriders to care for. To get acquainted to this modern world. Roisin has Maeve. Emeline has arguments to hash out with DeShawn. And I...
I have this road, and this moment, and a memory of two eyes—black as coals, black as night.
There is a mote in my eye. A sliver of Ragnar, a sliver of the moon's power, gleaming like new steel in my golden iris. As the sun slips beneath the horizon a trickle of the night's strength threads through me—fresh, invigorating. No longer can I stand in the night and feel mortal again.
It is no matter.
I look up to face the moon, my new part-time mistress, and wonder if she is laughing, or weeping. Do these powers that rule our blood, our hearts, care what we do with them? Were they the ones that set us into play, consciously, or are we a twist of random fate? Do they understand, that when I am finished in my atonement, that I will do everything in my power to make certain they atone, too? Do they care? If the powers that be can suffer, I will discover the way to their pain. I will make them hurt.
Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1) Page 23
