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The Vampire's Bond Trilogy: The Complete Vampire Romance Series

Page 5

by Samantha Snow


  Siobhan contemplated that detail for a moment, looking thoughtful. It certainly opened up a lot of possibilities for the future, though it wasn’t the sort of thing she tended to think of when discussing super powers. “Are there any really exciting powers?” she asked, her head cocked to one side.

  “Occasionally,” he answered slowly, “but it’s rare. If they turn up at all, it takes time. A fledgling never just…has those abilities. And while there have been stories of vampires developing all kinds of strange abilities, most of them can’t actually be verified, so we tend to assume they’re just that: stories. The only one we can actually say with confidence is possible is pyrokinesis.”

  “…Setting things on fire,” Siobhan repeated slowly. “With your brain.”

  “Basically,” Jack returned easily. “It’s not common, but it does happen for some of us. I don’t know any who can do it personally.”

  “What about the Vampire Lords?” she asked. “Can they do that?”

  “Some of them. Regina can’t,” he admitted. “They have other advantages. The Lords basically can teleport, and their strength is Herculean. And…I know they have other abilities, but I’m not actually sure what they are. Regina hasn’t talked about it, and I’m not old enough to have met another Lord. Though I guess that’s going to change soon enough.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Siobhan supplied, once again batting her eyelashes like a preteen. Jack flicked a speck of dust at her.

  *

  “You mentioned side effects,” Siobhan chimed in, watching the sun sink slowly toward the horizon, painting the sky in purple and orange and gold.

  “Huh?” Jack shot her a sideways glance.

  “Earlier,” Siobhan clarified. “When you were talking about vampire abilities. You said there were side effects, too, but you never really said anything about those side effects.”

  “Oh.” He swallowed, seeming distinctly uncomfortable for a moment. “There’s…” He trailed off and cleared his throat. “There’s a bit of a mental bond,” he finally supplied. “Between a fledgling and the vampire who sires them.”

  “A mental bond,” Siobhan parroted back at him, slowly turning to face him as her eyes narrowed. “What sort of mental bond?” she asked sharply. “Is that why it’s felt like I’ve been going crazy since I woke up, feeling random shit that I swear I shouldn’t actually be feeling?”

  He slid her a slightly alarmed look, and the truck swerved for a moment before he corrected it. “Already?” he asked, his voice half an octave higher than usual in his surprise. “It usually takes days for a fledgling to realize it’s there!” She could feel his alarm, actually, rattling its bars in the back of her mind and only making her even more high strung than she was just then.

  “You were such a whining piss-baby back at the manor that you woke it up early!” Siobhan snapped in return before she shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “What do I do about it?” she demanded. “There’s a way to shut it up or whatever, right?”

  He was not fond of the phrase ‘whining piss-baby.’ She could tell because she could feel his emotions. To his credit, he didn’t actually bring it up.

  “You can learn to block it or tune it out or however you want to think of it,” he assured her, nodding once. “It just takes some practice and some exposure to the one the bond is with.”

  “And that’s why Regina insisted I go with you,” Siobhan guessed. “What would have happened if I had stayed behind?” she wondered, eying him skeptically. “Would I have gone crazy?”

  “Well, I mean, some vampires have,” he admitted, glancing away from her pointedly. “It’s rare, though, and usually means they didn’t have anyone to teach them anything. Regina would’ve looked after you if you had stayed behind. But she’s really good at convincing people, so that outcome was really unlikely.”

  They lapsed into silence after that, until Siobhan asked slowly, “What’s that like, anyway?” At Jack’s inquisitive noise, she elaborated, “Having that sort of link to a Vampire Lord. Or do the Lords not have that little quirk?”

  “No, they do,” Jack replied. “It was…intense. They don’t…really feel things the same way you or I would. Everything is either muffled or overpowering, and everything has a sort of twisty edge to it, like you’re constantly reading it wrong.” His nose wrinkled slightly. “Like constantly having an itch in the back of your brain, and you can’t reach it, so the only option is to just learn to ignore it.” He shrugged the moment off. “But I did learn to ignore it, so it’s not like it was such a big deal.”

  “And now I get to learn to ignore it,” Siobhan groused, folding her arms and sliding down in her seat until the seatbelt bit at her chin. “Can you feel what I’m feeling, too, or does it only go one way?”

  “If I wanted to, I could feel what you’re feeling,” he replied. “But I don’t really want to. I’m pretty sure I would just feel a lot of impotent annoyance.” He snorted when she reached over to smack his arm. “Relax,” he soothed. “You can handle it. Pretty soon blocking it out will come as naturally as breathing.”

  “And my only other option was dying, I know,” she grumbled, but she let the topic drop.

  *

  Siobhan napped for a couple hours, waking up as she felt the truck slowing. She looked up, out the window, as the truck pulled into a hospital’s parking lot. Jack cut the engine a moment later. Curiosity piqued, Siobhan hopped out of the truck and followed him into the emergency room.

  It was as crowded and as hectic as any emergency room was expected to be, with the waiting room littered with people waiting for attention. And it smelled, in a way that Siobhan had never quite experienced before. Blood, alcohol, bile, cleaning solutions of every type, anesthetic…

  She covered her nose with one hand and kept quiet as she followed Jack to the desk, where a harried nurse was explaining to a man with a towel wrapped around his hand that the hole in his palm was not their most pressing matter and that he would need to wait his turn like everyone else.

  At last, the man stomped away, and Jack offered a winning smile as he stepped up to the desk. “Good evening,” he greeted cheerfully. “Is there a deal in the phlebotomy lab tonight?” He sounded like he was reciting something from a script as he asked.

  For a moment, the nurse looked confused, and then something like anxious recognition clicked into place. She offered Jack a hesitant, polite smile and stood up. “Let me check.” She strolled away, leaving them standing by the desk.

  She returned a few minutes later, a small Styrofoam cooler in her hands. She slid it across the desk, her smile tight as she bid them a polite, “I hope everything is to your liking,” as Jack picked up the cooler.

  Outside, he pulled it open and pulled out two blood bags. He handed one over to Siobhan, and she mimicked him as he bit through the bag and began to drink.

  It tasted…a bit like licking a battery. Faintly metallic, and it gave her a jolt. It was cool and thick as it flowed down her throat, and while ordinarily, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it, just then, it was amazing.

  The bags were empty and shoved deep into a trashcan by the time she asked, slightly incredulously, “You have deals with hospitals?”

  “Some of us are opposed to murder and assault,” he answered dryly. “We don’t suddenly become god awful monsters when we turn. I mean, some do, but Jack the Ripper was as human as you used to be.”

  She pondered that thought for a moment as they walked to a nearby gas station, picking up a few cans of dog food for Barton’s dinner before they returned to the car.

  It didn’t take long for Siobhan to notice that her eyes had returned to something like a natural color, once she had eaten. They still weren’t her color—they were too bronze, like a filter had been laid over the green—but someone could look her in the face and believe she was human again.

  *

  “So, why are most of the Vampire Lords unconscious?” Siobhan asked. The roads were empty in the late-nigh
t darkness, save for the occasional set of headlights. There wasn’t much to see as they drove. Barton was asleep in the back, and Siobhan and Jack couldn’t agree on a radio station. The only thing to do for entertainment was talk, really.

  Jack hummed, mostly just to let her know that he had heard her, but it took him a few moments to answer. “The Lords are all…very different people,” he decided on carefully, his phrasing delicate. “They all tend to have very different opinions on things. While getting two of them to agree would probably be doable, getting all of them to agree would be next to impossible, unless it’s something that can’t possibly end well for any of them, like the current circumstances.”

  “They sleep for however long to prevent arguing?” Siobhan asked, incredulous. “Seriously?”

  Jack shot her a sidelong glance, his expression very serious indeed. “Considering how powerful they are? Yes.” He snorted. “If they got into an actual fight, the damage would be…extensive, and we’d be left without a power structure, or we would have to implement one ourselves.” One shoulder lifted in a shrug. “They’re too powerful to be getting into slap fights with each other and too different to be expected to govern effectively as a group. So, one at a time it is.”

  “How long do they sleep for?” Siobhan asked, baffled.

  “Around three centuries,” Jack answered. “Honestly, it’s good for them. It keeps them from getting burnt out on the world and doing something drastic either to mix things up or because they don’t care anymore. Every time they wake up, the world is different than they left it, so things are exciting. It keeps everything compelling.”

  “You have the strangest form of government,” Siobhan informed him blandly.

  “Hey, you have to get creative when immortality is involved,” he protested. “We make things work as best we can.”

  “I guess that’s the important part,” Siobhan sighed in acknowledgment. “Who comes after Regina, anyway? In a typical cycle, I mean. Without angels.”

  Jack paused, his head cocked to one side as he thought. “Osamu?” he guessed. “I think. Like I said, I’m not old enough to know any of them but Regina.”

  “This must be an exciting year for you,” Siobhan drawled. Jack flicked another speck of dust at her.

  *

  Siobhan had been expecting another manor. She had been expecting something grand, maybe sitting on a few dozen acres of land. She hadn’t been expecting a cottage sitting on a tiny spit of land in the middle of a lake. The roof was beginning to cave in on one side, the windows had been broken so long ago that the edges of the glass had been worn smooth, and there was a hole in one grime-coated wall.

  They let Barton out of the truck and waited long enough to see if anything caught his attention, but all he did was bound cheerfully into the trees surrounding the lake.

  “This is glamorous,” Siobhan commented wryly as they approached the water’s edge. There were only a few broken planks where a dock had once been, and the canoe that waited was suspect, to say the least.

  “It can’t really be helped.” Jack shrugged, evidently unconcerned, though the blasé act was ruined slightly as he very cautiously tested the canoe with one foot. “I think it’ll hold us,” he decided slowly as he carefully climbed in. He sat down and held up a hand to her. Siobhan eyed the canoe skeptically for a moment before she reluctantly took his hand and stepped into the boat.

  There was two inches of water in the bottom of the boat by the time they made it to the island, and they both hopped out quickly. The front door to the house opened easily, the latch having long since been eaten through by age.

  The cottage was small. There was just a single room without any furniture. The only thing to catch their attention was the door to the basement.

  Jack took a step inside, and Siobhan grabbed him by the back of his shirt and yanked him back as the floorboards gave beneath his foot. He backpedaled quickly, until once again, they were both standing in the front doorway.

  Siobhan stepped forward next, light on her feet as she cautiously tested each step, only letting her weight settle on the places where the boards creaked ominously but wouldn’t crumble. Jack followed cautiously behind her, his footsteps mimicking hers exactly.

  By the time they were standing in front of the basement door, neither of them was breathing, just in case that might set the floor to splintering. The basement door was more formidable than the front door, and it remained stubbornly closed until Jack slammed one fist against it and sent it swinging inward.

  The staircase was not a comforting sight, but they could only loiter in the doorway for so long. Eventually, the sun would rise, and they wanted to be on their way before that.

  With a deep breath, Jack took the first step down the stairs, paused for a moment, and then hurried down the rest of the staircase with Siobhan at his back.

  The basement was damp, with water dripping down the walls in the corners. The floor was made of uneven stone, and water pooled in small, stagnant puddles in the irregular dips in the rock. There wasn’t much in the room, save for a bed directly across from the stairs, its headboard pressed against the wall.

  Its curtains were stained and threadbare, and when Jack drew them aside, the thin mattress was spotted with mold and smelled of mildew. There was no blanket, though they weren’t quite sure if that was because there simply hadn’t been one, or because the blanket that had been there had rotted away to nothing.

  A woman slept on what remained of the bed, her face peaceful in sleep. She had full, round features and a straight nose, and her ink black hair was braided around her head like a crown. Her skin was dark, with an undertone like red clay.

  She was dressed in a simple beige dress made of some sort of hide, with moccasins of a similar color that went up past her knees. Both the dress and the moccasins were utterly unadorned, but considering both were worn through almost entirely in places and water damaged in others, Siobhan could understand why not much had been done with them.

  “This is Lord Dask’iya,” Jack explained, his voice low and nearly reverent. “She’s been asleep since the 1700s. Technically, she’s not supposed to be awake for another few centuries. It was her turn last time.”

  Siobhan’s own anticipation was mirrored by Jack’s, and she watched with rapt interest as he bit into his own wrist. Suspending his arm over the sleeping Lord’s mouth, he flexed his hand back and let the injury drip, blood trickling down in irregular drops to speckle over her mouth.

  Slowly, the first drops of blood slid to the seam of her lips and into her closed mouth. Her eyelids twitched, and her fingers flexed. One of her knees jerked, and her mouth turned downward as her brow furrowed, her dark eyebrows knitting together.

  When her eyes opened, they were as black as coal and as red as embers, and Siobhan thought of her first glimpse in the mirror of her own eyes.

  And then, Dask’iya abruptly sat up, the bed bursting into flames around her. Jack and Siobhan leaped back, their backs hitting opposite walls in their haste to avoid the flames.

  Dask’iya looked back and forth between them slowly, nothing moving save for her eyes. “What year is it?” she demanded in a voice that rasped with disuse, like sandpaper over stone.

  “2017,” Jack answered quickly, his voice unsteady.

  Dask’iya turned her head at last, her gaze locking on him with all the intensity of a laser. “I should not be awake yet,” she ground out, her eyes narrowing as she turned to swing her legs off of the bed. “How dare you?” She got to her feet, straightening up to her full, rather impressive height. “Explain yourself, fledgling.”

  Jack’s words spilled out in a rush. “Angels have started attacking, and while we could handle the principalities and the archangels on our own, a seraph has been spotted, and if any more show up, then we don’t stand a chance. Even just one could very well take more than one Lord to defeat, and we’re going to need all the Lords if the seraphim want to make visiting the mortal world a hobby.” Finally, he dragge
d in a breath, and it shuddered out again.

  Dask’iya’s eyes narrowed contemplatively, and she regarded Jack carefully, as if gauging the worth of his soul. Finally, she sighed and folded her arms, and the flames died down to smoldering embers, though the bed was long beyond saving, only a few smoking chunks of wood remaining.

  “Very well,” she murmured, though there was nothing gentle in the softness. “Who is awake now?” she wondered, and there was something detached and clinical in her tone. “I will go there.”

  “Regina,” he answered, his voice unsteady. “Do you need--”

 

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