Wicked Blood (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Make it an hour,” I said. “I think we should do a reading first.”

  “I think you had better tell me what you saw,” Maicǎ said, “so I can emphasize the importance of the meaning.”

  Briefly, I outlined my Vision.

  When I was done, Maicǎ’s fingers twitched. We all knew how to do readings—any one of our clan could tell a basic fortune, and often did, selling readings of dubious truth in the marketplace to gullible, or desperate, humans. But for those of us with any real magic, readings carried the risk of having to pay a Blood Price. A major Vision carried a larger risk. Adding a reading to it this soon after was also dangerous.

  Maicǎ didn’t say anything, however. She simply nodded again, pulled her shoulders back, and turned to begin spreading the news that the Elders needed to have a convocation in an hour.

  While she was gone, I went inside and breathed in the comforting, spicy scent of the tea shop. It smelled like home. When my parents had died almost eighteen years ago, when I was only three, Maicǎ had taken me in as if I were her own child. I barely remembered my parents—only the warmth of my mother’s hug, the rumble of my father’s voice. Most of what I knew about them, Maicǎ had taught me. We didn’t much talk about their deaths, though I knew the basics. They had been captured in a raid orchestrated by the Fae who lived outside the city limits, haunting the woods and forests that encroached farther into Bucharest every year.

  That raid had been the woodland Fae’s last. They had intended to use all the victims as blood sacrifices and had taken members of all of Bucharest’s communities—lynx- and wolf-shifters, vampires, and humans, both Hungarian and Romani.

  Though both the shifters and the vampires were rumored to be the result of the magical pressure the Fae Queen had exerted to create the Hollow a century ago, their common Fae origins didn’t matter to them. Any accord between them was short-lived.

  However, the forest Faes’ raids had incited both fear and anger among all the groups within Bucharest. Such an enormous Blood Price meant the Fae were aiming to gather a correspondingly large amount of magic, and that could mean nothing good for the rest of the species within the city.

  The Battle of Bucharest’s Retaliation was the only time in living memory that all the races in Gypsy’s Hollow had banded together in order to confront a single enemy.

  Almost all the forest Fae had been wiped out—but not before many of their prisoners had died. Including my parents.

  Now it seemed as if the vampires were doing something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. They had managed to avoid detection this long almost certainly by taking only a few victims at a time and hoarding the magic they were creating.

  As long as no one suspected their endgame, the vampires would face no repercussions. The unspoken agreement was that as long as no one group attempted to gather too much power, the occasional depredations enacted upon a magic user by the Blood Price would be, if not forgiven, at least mostly ignored. Killing one member of another race might lead to the victim’s family attacking the killer, but it wouldn’t cause an all out war.

  However, no one sane wanted the Sleeping Daughter to rise. That would lead to bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.

  Although our part of the world was named after her, most of us tried to avoid saying her name, Gypsy, aloud, for fear it would draw her attention. Even asleep, she was terrifying.

  Awake, she might decimate us, turning the Hollow named after her into a blood-soaked Armageddon.

  I needed to do what I could to keep that from happening.

  The Elders will help me.

  I moved around the tea shop, gathering the supplies Maicǎ and I would need to do a full reading. Blessed candlesticks. Maicǎ’s tarot cards, handed down through the generations in our family and wrapped with the sacred scarf. Protective crystals. And a perfectly prosaic, albeit deeply comforting, pot of tea.

  If the vampires had been working to hasten the Daughter’s rising, we needed to learn everything we could about it.

  And then we needed to determine which Council members we could trust.

  By the time Maicǎ returned, I had completed the preparations. The table was ready for the reading.

  She froze when she stepped inside the shop as if surprised by the speed at which I’d set up, but gathered herself quickly with a nod.

  “Let’s begin,” she said.

  Unlike many other magic practitioners, the Romani did not practice blood sacrifice before attempting magic. We had learned that working the oldest ways made paying a stiff Blood Price less likely, though of course nothing eliminated the risk that the corrupted magic permeating Gypsy Hollow wouldn’t demand something significant from us.

  It was the chance we took.

  With a deep breath, my grandmother and I began our card-reading ritual.

  Chapter 6

  Quietly, Maicǎ and I sat across from one another at the small, circular table in the corner of the shop. Usually, we used it to share tea with friends and customers, sometimes with sweet somloi galuska trifle from the Gulyas’ bakery one street over.

  Now, as I poured tea for each of us, the ritual was reminiscent of those simpler pleasures. But then Maicǎ and I clasped hands and closed our eyes, praying silently to the benevolent gods—assuming there were any left who could peer into the Hollow from outside the walls that kept us trapped within.

  “We surround ourselves with the healing power of love,” we chanted softly in unison. “We ask protection, safety, and light.” Maicǎ’s hand grew hot in mine, always a sign that the magic was beginning to ramp up. “We beg protection from all that would do us harm.”

  Normally, we ended with a moment of silence before we began the reading. Tonight—or rather, this morning—I added something of my own. “I beg shelter from the eyes of the Sleeping Daughter, that we might conduct a reading in safety and privacy.”

  Maicǎ’s fingers tightened on mine briefly, convulsively, but when my eyes flew open and I glanced at her, she nodded.

  We continued as usual, Maicǎ unwrapping the cards and shuffling them, and then handing them to me to shuffle, as well. We passed them back and forth several times, every hand off increasing the potential magic stored within them.

  When the cards warmed against our palms, Maicǎ said, “This is your reading. Do you want to spread the fan, or shall I?”

  “I will.”

  She frowned, but didn’t object. I didn’t want Maicǎ to take on any Blood Price, though I knew she’d insist on sharing the drawing and thus some of the risk.

  Taking the cards in one hand, I fanned them out across the table in a wide arc. Since the fan was mine, the reader’s position would be mine, as well. Cards would be upright or reversed according to where I sat.

  I let my hand hover over the fan until I settled on one card, drawing it and setting it down on the table before me.

  The Priestess. In traditional readings, it meant feminine spirituality. Here in the Hollow, it often referred to Gypsy herself. In the subject position of the reading, it clarified that what was to come was indeed about the Sleeping Daughter.

  Maicǎ chose the next card. Death. When we read for others, the Death card generally referred to the inevitability of change. Here, I feared that it actually meant physical death.

  My hand shaking, I chose The Tower, my least favorite of the cards, with its depiction of figures tumbling from the windows of a cracked and burning structure to their certain demise on the rocks below. Destruction and ruin—the card offered no hope at all.

  Maicǎ chose The Devil. Bondage and addiction, and the hint of the horrors on the darker side of spirituality.

  We stared at the reading.

  Maicǎ’s face went deathly white. “I’ve seen this spread before. It’s popping up all over the Hollow.”

  “Then it’s true. Unless something happens to change this path, the daughter will rise and Gypsy Hollow…” My eyes rolled back in my head, and I felt myself slump forward. The voice that rolled out of me
grated, as if clogged with grave dirt. “And when I rise, all of Gypsy Hollow will be mine.”

  As if from a distance, I heard the crack as my forehead hit the table, but I was already too far away to feel it, already slipping into a Vision.

  Unlike my travels with Sorin, in this Vision I was in my own body. Or something like it, anyway. Once again, I saw the vampires’ ballroom—this time from the inside. Vampires ringed the stained, stone altar, kneeling around it, their heads bowed. A low, sonorous chant rose from them.

  Under my feet, the chamber floor crackled with power that streaked up my legs and spun around me, sparking against my skin. It leapt off the walls and skittered across the ceiling high above, pooling directly over the altar, collecting in a ball of energy so bright I could barely look at it.

  The whining noise of the magic hummed, almost too high to hear, but I felt it as its pitch increased, piercing my eardrums and settling into my back teeth with an ache. The not-quite-sound grew louder and higher at the same time, until the pool of magic above the altar reached some critical mass and exploded downward in one bright, penetrating ray.

  When the beam hit the altar, the marble stone cracked with a mighty pop, tossing the kneeling vampires backward to land on the floor and sending dust and sharp shards of stone spraying across the room. The wave of that magic rippled outward like rings in a pond after a stone was tossed in.

  At the back of the room, the enormous wooden doors flew open, crashing into the wall on either side. I spun around, stunned to see myself striding through those double doors, accompanied by a man I didn’t know. I had only an instant to take in his appearance—tawny hair, green eyes, a determined glare—before another surge of magic tightened the muscles in my back with the compulsion to turn and look at the altar again.

  It had cracked into two enormous pieces that had fallen to either side. Along the jagged break, the blood from the vampires’ sacrifices had seeped far into the stone—the red-black stain went deeper than I would have anticipated in a stone I hadn’t realized was very porous.

  My inspection of the bloodstains was cut short, however, as the two halves of the altar began scraping along the floor, widening the gap between them. I stepped forward a little to see more, and my alter ego did the same, her hand tightly gripping the arm of the man she traveled with.

  The vertigo of seeing her made my head spin. This was unlike any Vision I had ever had before.

  A hole under the altar gaped open, a staircase leading deep into the darkness. I had no desire to explore where it led. Everything about that descent into blackness repelled me.

  Besides, I sensed something coming up from it. I didn’t have to wait long. A hot, red glow was moving up from the bowels of the earth, up from wherever the stairs led.

  It ascended smoothly, not like someone climbing the stairs, but as if it floated toward us. As it grew closer, I took a step back, away from whatever had lain beneath this blood-soaked altar.

  But I knew who it was.

  I wasn’t surprised when the blood-red glow brought a woman to the surface, then lifted her out of that grave, so that she floated above the altar itself.

  She was beautiful, in a dark way. Her blue-black hair floated out around her in a halo stained purple by the light. Her pale skin glowed and her eyes were burning black coals, both pupil and iris sparking with a dark fire.

  Her lips were stained an even darker purple than the halo. And her terrifying smile offered a caricature of invitation. She looked like the high priestess in my cards, had that image been drawn as an evil princess.

  The Sleeping Daughter had risen.

  Outside, the full moon ran red with blood. And as she threw out her arms to either side, reveling in the power she commanded, I saw our destruction. No one in Gypsy Hollow would survive. My stomach clenched in fear, and I shrank back, away from the Risen Daughter, as she threw her head back and laughed, the sound echoing through the chamber where she had been buried when Gypsy Hollow was created by her mother.

  Without warning, I slammed into a second, different Vision. I was back in the lynx-shifter’s body as he raced through the city. All around him, the residents of Bucharest attacked one another.

  The Blood Moon above us—above him—infected everyone, and those not turning on one another raced toward those barriers that kept us confined to our own Hollow.

  Not that anyone knew if getting free would do us any good. We had no idea if any of the other Hollows had survived. Or if they would even be better than this one.

  Sorin’s paws landed in blood, and he slipped. Behind him came a screeching laugh, and he regained his balance to push on.

  I have to save her, or none of it will have been worth it.

  With another dizzying start, I dropped out of the Vision altogether, landing back in myself at Maicǎ’s table, where my grandmother tenderly wiped my face with a damp cloth.

  “You’re home. You’re safe,” she said soothingly. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “We have to tell the Council.”

  Maicǎ nodded. “The Elders are meeting in fifteen minutes. Do you feel able to tell them what you’ve seen today?”

  “If it meant being able to hand this problem over to someone else, I could be ready right now.”

  Maicǎ laughed. “We should take the information to them and let the Elders report it to the Council. Using the lines of communication that are already in place will give us more credibility.”

  I nodded. “Just don’t let them tell Councilman Petri anything.”

  “Of course.” Maicǎ helped me stand, one arm under an elbow, the other solicitously supporting my back.

  I nodded to let her know I was steady enough to walk. With a single gulp, I drained the tea in my cup, and with a clatter upended it on the saucer. Reading tea leaves wasn’t my usual form of divination, but I did know how. But the leaves told me what I already knew.

  Something dangerous was coming, and it was up to me to stop it.

  Chapter 7

  I stood in the center of the enclosure’s courtyard, staring at the semicircle of Elders in front of me. “What do you mean, no?” I demanded. “The Sleeping Daughter is rising sometime soon, and we need to try to stop Her.”

  Elder Salaru, a heavyset, gray-haired man who worked as a cobbler, stepped forward. “We understand your concern, child,” he said, in perhaps the most patronizing voice I had ever heard. “Should that happen, we will remain safe in our enclosure. As Elder Nuta pointed out, however, the Sleeping Daughter isn’t due to rise for more than another decade. We have time to prepare.”

  “The vampires have been feeding Her extra magic,” I insisted, leaning forward as if getting closer to them would help them understand my point. “Everything about my Visions tells me that we are in very real danger.”

  Elder Salaru folded his hands together and stepped back into the circle, shaking his head.

  Maicǎ placed her fingertips on my shoulder, as if to draw me away, but I had to try at least one more time.

  “You say that we will be safe inside our enclosure.” I gestured at the nearest wall, topped with glass. “But I saw her crack a marble altar, shove it to the side as if it were nothing, and rise floating into the air. Our walls will be nothing against her.”

  A third Elder stepped forward. Elder Lupul was the enclosure’s seamstress, and one of the most conservative members of our community. I knew what her opinion would be long before she gave it.

  “Say this is true, and the Daughter does rise,” she said. “You also said that you saw only vampires attending her rising, and only shapeshifters running through the city. For all you know, the damage will be minimal and confined to the areas inhabited by those who pay the largest Blood Prices—and that the magic users such as the vampires and shapeshifters will be the ones who most attract the Daughter’s attention.”

  I cast my eyes at my grandmother, pleading with her to help me break through to them. With an almost imperceptible shake of her head, she pulled m
e toward the side of the circle. Then she stepped in and took my place facing the Elders.

  “I’ve known many of you since we were children,” she said. “And I have been invited several times to join our Elders Council. I’ve always declined. Today, I am reminded why.” She paused, making eye contact with every member of the Elder Council.

  “I’ve always chosen not to participate because you are all a bunch of damned fools.” Maicǎ enunciated carefully, making sure none of her words would be lost. “I’ve always assumed that we lived behind walls because we had no other choice, but that if we had the opportunity to rid ourselves of the evil that has permeated our city and our land, we would do it.” She speared Elder Nuta with her gaze. “I know that you have seen this tarot layout, too. You were in the tea shop just last week practically gibbering in fear over it. And you, Nicolau, always with your tough talk about hunting vampires and shapeshifters. Where’s that fire when the need for it arises? Now you’re afraid to leave your walled city?”

  With a huff and a roll of her eyes, Maicǎ turned to me. “Come,” she said imperiously. “Leave these fools to their hopes. We’ll find people who are more interested in saving others than in saving their own skins.”

  She held out her arm, and I wrapped my own around it, snugging her close as we walked away, striding out of the courtyard as if we had actually won.

  If the Elders hold true to this decision, though, we may all die.

  ”Luckily,” Maicǎ said as we neared the ceainărie, “we do not need the Elders to go to the Council.”

  I glanced at her in alarm. “What about Councilman Petri? He’s in on it.”

  “Leave that to me,” Maicǎ said, a mischievous grin flitting across her face. “I think I can get us in to speak to one of the committees that Councilman Petri is not a member of.”

  I nodded. It was the best we were going to do. But my stomach still twisted and rolled in fear of what I had seen. The Elders had not witnessed the power roiling off the Sleeping Daughter. They had grown up in the enclosure, had always depended on its walls to protect them. I shuddered to think about the day coming when that wall would no longer offer safety.