In the Contagion of Blood

by Melle Amade

  BLOOD FAE PANDEMIC ONE

  in the

  CONTAGION

  of

  BLOOD

  EPIDEMIC REBELLION

  MELLE AMADE

  IN THE CONTAGION OF BLOOD

  Copyright © 2020 by Melle Amade.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For information contact:

  www.melleamade.com

  melle@melleamade.com

  Book and Cover design by Fantasy Book Designs.

  First Edition: March 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  MELLE AMADE BOOKS

  BLOOD FAE PANDEMIC

  1 – IN THE CONTAGION OF BLOOD

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  DARK FAE ASSASSINS’ ACADEMY

  1 – CROWN OF THORNS

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  KNIGHTS OF VALLIERE SERIES

  1 – ORDER OF THE REGENT

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  2 – VALOR OF THE KNIGHTS

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  3 – HERALD OF THE MAGE

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  4 – BLOOD OF THE CROWN

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  5 – HEART OF THE DARKNESS

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  THE SHIFTER CHRONICLES SERIES

  1 – RAVENSGAARD QUEEN

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  6 - SANCTUARY

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  9 – DELUGE

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  #one

  The beast glared right at me; its bloodshot yellow eyes faded next to the glowing green pupils. Saliva dripped from its jagged teeth as it snapped at me. I yanked my arm back. The mangy gold fur of the lion’s back was missing entire patches and the skin underneath was raw and bleeding. A feral rotten stench wafted from its mouth as it let out an angry guttural growl.

  If I didn’t do something fast, this thing was going to kill me.

  I lay on the ground in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. But even as my fingers tensed and fumbled behind me in the dirt, trying to find something to defend myself with, one thought kept popping up in my head.

  “What the hell was a lion shifter doing in England?”

  I pushed the thought aside as the beast let out another mighty roar. Even though it was clearly sick with something, it still had enough power in its jaws to crush me. And even if it didn’t have enough strength to finish the job, whatever disease the thing was carrying would probably kill me, too.

  As a CDC Agent, I know what death looks like. And this shifter was definitely dying.

  I scrambled back along the ground, grabbing at a low stone wall and pulling myself up. The beast lunged, ripping at my knee. Its nails usually sharp as they tore through my jeans.

  “Fuck!” I cried, giving the beast a swift kick in the head with my red cowboy boots. I had to do something more than that or he was going to rip me, too. I jumped to my feet. The beast pressed down on its front haunches getting ready to spring.

  In the dim light of the abbey ruins, there was nothing, not a single damn thing to grab onto as a weapon. I grimaced. A flash of ancient Greek warriors wrestling bears came to mind.

  So be it.

  “Molon labe.” The Spartan warrior motto rang clear from my mouth into the dark mist surrounding the abbey ruins. “Come and take it, kitty.”

  The beast leapt, but I was ready. I lunged to the side and reached into my left boot, whipping out a dagger I bought in a troll shop back in London. I might not be able to carry a gun here, but I sure as hell wasn’t going into an investigation unarmed. It was amazing how often fighting disease in the Faentom world led to bodily attacks.

  The shifter’s teeth ripped into my shoulder as I dove away on my shredded knees. I dug the knife sharply between its ribs. I’m way out of my jurisdiction here.

  The beast fell to the side. I kicked it with my good foot, pinning its deadly claws to the side, then threw my full weight down on its boney body as I pressed the knife harder in its side. I needed to make the wound bad enough.

  It gnashed at me, head swinging around as it tried to get to me. But I kept my weight on it and dodged its jaws as I drove the blade in. I was careful not to hit it too hard. But I didn’t stop pressing until I heard the animal whimper. Blood poured from its side, black and thick in the pale blue moonlight.

  The beast let out another whine, until finally its head laid to the side, still. The hair on its body began to recede, the filthy mane retracted, its form changed becoming smooth and lithe. I was still trying to catch my breath as the shifter stopped moving. I pulled the blade out of its shoulder and watched the final transformation, as the sickly lion transformed into a tawny-haired anorexic man, gasping for breath and clutching at his side as the gash continued to bleed.

  Sores covered his body, but I moved forward anyway.

  “What the fuck?” I wondered quietly to myself. The wound was supposed to close. Shifters always healed faster in their human form. I tore off my thick sweater, shivering in my tank top in the cold British air, and wrapped it around his shoulders. He gasped for breath.

  “You better not fucking die on me.” But even as I said the words and pressed my hands hard against the wound, I knew the blood loss was too great and the wound wasn’t getting smaller. It was getting bigger.

  “Stop!” I gasped, but it didn’t. The man, naked and bleeding, his body sunken and starving, eyes hollow, was deteriorating before my eyes. His body gave a final wracking shake before it lay still across my lap. Black blood poured out staining my jeans.

  My tattoos glowed bright on my chest and arms, protecting me from the biohazard that was flooding me. Blood Fae got all

  “Shit,” I muttered moving the dead shifter’s body off my lap. I scooted back and wiped my hands on the only patch of grass I can find on the lawn. It’s freezing cold and covered with frost even though it was barely past midnight.

  I grabbed my cell phone, my teeth starting to chatter as I pressed it on. This was going to be one hell of a thing to explain to the Commission.

  #two

  The gargoyles got there sooner than I expected. Wings folded beneath their magical uniforms, but faces still ugly as a stone carving meant to frighten the crap out of a thief. They brought their lights, their vans, their photographer and their crime scene investigators, like they were any ordinary forensics team. They made it look like everything was normal, in case there happened to be anybody walking by Glastonbury Abbey in the middle of the night.

  I leaned against a low wall in the shadows of the remnants of the Abbey, the two walls left standing. This was supposed to be Avalon. But nobody ever proved it, not in the human world and not in the world of Fantom, where we all lived. Avalon had fallen so far off of our radar, no one even came here anymore. Except for lately. The strange reports we had been getting at the Commission were enough for them to send me out here.

  Shivering beneath a blanket, I watched my intern do most of the work. Many wouldn’t have let an intern do lab samples, but Helene was different. She was my niece, my sister’s daughter and, like me, a blood mage with Greek
roots from the outskirts of Melbourne. At fifteen she was exactly fifteen years younger than me and thrilled to have been invited on this case. This was all she ever wanted to do since she was six years old. She’d hang out with me every summer, every chance she got, to learn more so she could be a CDC agent for the Commission, like it’s some glamorous life traveling the world, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with our people whenever something mutates or upsets the delicate balance of the Fantom world.

  The last couple of months I had given up trying to change her mind about what career to pursue. I thought a few trips to dark, remote places would turn her off completely. Standing over a dead body and taking samples from their swollen black tongues and grimy fingernails, running autopsies…not to mention the blood scans we do. The scans no human could do. In each individual body part, we looked for traces of magic, besides the obvious shifter kind. But even as I sat there, looking over from the shadows and watching Helene…she had a smile on her face. Who the hell has a smile on their face while they’re going over a dead body trying to scrape the truth out of it?

  “Your niece?” I glanced up at the tall dark Brit who approaching me from the gloom, my breath catching in my throat. His dark short hair stood up a bit from his broad, pale forehead and a neatly trimmed beard curved carefully around his square jaw and rich lips. He was stunning. But his pale skin and red eyes gave me no doubt as to what he was. Vamp. And a hungry one.

  My eyebrows knit in a frown.

  He shrugged and his mouth turned up in a smile that hardly seemed appropriate for dark, cold, middle-of-the-night ruins, examining-a-dead-body space that we were in. Was he just some lecherous guy staring at my teenage niece?

  He must have seen the menacing look in my eyes because he held up both his hands and his smile got even broader. “That was just a question.”

  “Don’t ask questions about my niece.”

  “Right,” he said as he folded his arms against his chest and leaned back against the low stone wall. He looked completely amused by my protective reflexes. “I was just going to comment that she looks pretty good at what she does. She must have had a pretty good trainer.”

  “She did.” I stared back at him. “Her grandfather.”

  The man’s smile didn’t waver for one minute and it was starting to make me a little nervous. It was a little cold and dark to be standing and smiling all the time. And I was pretty sure he knew what we were. Yet it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Which was weird.

  Nobody liked blood mages.

  While the citizens of Fantom regularly turned to us for help when anyone was sick, they avoided the crap out of us at all other times. We were their “Hail, Lilith! Come save our ass. Just don’t come for tea.”

  Blood mages were considered a danger to society and I came from one of the longest and strongest lines around. My father was inarguably the most famous blood mage ever. He had developed the Center for Disease Control for our kind, those who lived in the human world but were not of it. The kind who developed sicknesses and caught illnesses and then went to blood mages for healing. But if there was an outbreak that moved through the vampire clan, because they were certainly not impervious to getting sick, or the shifters, he started setting up labs and methods to study them. His book, Disease Classification and Methodologies for Healing was considered the opus of disease prevention for the Fantom.

  I’d been fascinated by it, much like Helene. We were both drawn to the idea of helping a bigger cause, not just fixing one person at a time, but being there when shit really hit the fan and everyone started going down.

  Fortunately for us, it was a lot of lab work. While there were massive global outbreaks of disease back in my grandfather’s day, mostly now we were trying to sort out common diseases for our people and figure out how to cure things like the common cold or diabetes.

  But sometimes, when a group of Fantom died, we would be called in to see if it was something they got from humans or from animals. We’d be asked to get rid of it, find a cure and make sure it didn’t get around to anybody else. Human literature always wrote about how we were invincible superhuman beings who lived forever, but nobody lives forever when you’re infected with something your body can’t fight. Bodies die. So, our task has been to develop immunizations and help grow the Fantom stronger.

  We also get called in when things look suspicious. So, I ended up here. Helene and I took the twenty-four-hour flight from Melbourne, because the Fae don’t let Mages have portals, even though we invented the damn things. We stopped in Bangkok for the night. Sat in a high-rise overlooking the lights of the noisy city and avoided talking about the death of her parents. Even after five years I couldn’t think about it without wanting to kill whatever rat-bastard murdered my older sister.

  “What were you doing out here all alone at night?” The vamp startled me from my thoughts.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  The smile didn’t waver from his face. “Jetlag.” He nodded as if he knew what that was.

  “If it was jetlag, I wouldn’t be standing here,” I said. “Jetlag is not sleeplessness. Jetlag is the inability of your body to process the time in the location where you actually are. It results in nausea, irritability, agitation, and a deep dragging at the molecular structure of your cells, to the point that you are unable to easily move through time and space. If I had jetlag I’d probably be vomiting on your shoes.”

  I waved my hand forward to point out his patent leather, spotless black shoes, but his gaze doesn’t follow my finger. It stops at the blood-red polish neatly tapered nail and I’m sure he can just see the tattoo that rings my wrist. I tuck my arms back under the blanket. No need to show this guy my clan.

  “Nice avoiding of the question.” He raised his eyebrows, a smile dipping the corners of his mouth up.

  “Shouldn’t you be investigating the crime scene or something?” I asked.

  There was something disconcerting about his gaze and his constant smile. This guy was sincere. His dark red eyes were soft and gentle. And there was a kindness in them I’d never seen in a vamp before. It lifted my mood, even though I didn’t want it to. It’s rare for a blood mage to see kindness from any other Fantom but another blood mage.

  “I’m with the Agency, but I’m not a detective. I am an archaeologist.”

  “Really?” I tilted my head to the side and looked up at him. “What the hell is an archaeologist doing out here?”

  “I haven’t quite figured that out yet. My name is Turin.” He held out his hand and it was almost like his fingers had muscles, they gripped my hand firmly and heat shot up my arm. My breath caught in my throat. Did this guy have to be so sexy? “The Agency said they needed a specialist in Arthurian legend.”

  “Huh?” I masked my confusion. “Because the outbreak is here, they think you might have something to add to the case?”

  “I guess so,” Turin said looking down at my hand that was still draped in his as if he might raise it to his lips. I yanked it back. “But from the looks of it, no one here is in charge.”

  We saw it at exactly the same time. The tiniest car ever, careening around the corner. I wasn’t even sure it actually had four tires. A tiny gnarled man jumped out and came running straight for us. But like all gargoyles forced to move on their legs, he was out of breath by the time he got to us.

  “We weren’t expecting you until the morning meeting in the war room.” His knotted face moved up and down as he spoke. I was still trying to figure out the bunches of skin that made up his face when his forehead suddenly lifted and his eyes bulged up towards Turin. “Who are you?”

  That damn charm popped back onto Turin’s face. “I’m the archaeologist you called in from Oxford.” He held out his hand in greeting.

  “You’re the archaeologist?” His mouth turned downwards as if he was about to argue Turin’s self-identification.

  The vampire raised an eyebrow and eyes glowed, daring the gargoyle to comment that vampires were ra
rely given such a position in society. They were hardly ever allowed to be professors, and mix with humans. Much like the blood mages, actually. I wonder what strings he had to pull with the Assembly to get the gig at Oxford.

  “Well, right then. I’m Inspector Bernard. Wallace Bernard.” He held out his hand to Turin, who took it firmly. “There’s something we want you to see.”

  “Good, that’s one of the things I’m interested in,” Turin said, but his eyes were settled on me over the gargoyles head. My heart raced forward.

  What the hell? I pulled my eyes away from his.

  Damn vampires, always trying to get their fix. Crazy he’d look at me like that, though. Vamps don’t drink from blood mages. My skin was heating up even in the cool night air. What would it be like if they did? If he did? I shook the thought out of my head. I must be delirious. Maybe I do have jetlag.

  But Turin’s attention was back on Inspector Bernard. “I know this site inside and out, and I can’t imagine there’s anything here I don’t already know about.”

  “I know. That’s why we called you. We looked in your book and found no mention of it whatsoever.” The Inspector’s gnarled hands were worrying each other

  “Oh, did you actually read it?” Turin crooned, his voice lilting over the small gargoyle and I could see it visibly calm the Inspector. “Did you like it?”

  “Well, um,” the monster coughed self-consciously, “I’m halfway through the introduction.”

  “Ah, good, then,” Turin grinned. “You’ve made it past the table of contents.”

  “Why yes, I did,” the inspector nodded enthusiastically. “And, there is absolutely no mention of a triple helix cross altar.”

  Turin looked completely taken aback at the gargoyle’s words. “An altar?” He said. “A triple helix? It signifies–”

  “Theía Ophelia! Aunt Ophelia!” Helene’s voice interrupted Turin, her pale gray eyes shining with excitement and horror from under her fire red hair as she knelt over the shifter’s body with a pair of tweezers. “You have got to see this.”