Wicked Blood (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Thanks, Allessia.” He placed his items into the backpack and slung it over one shoulder. “You’re the best.”

  Throughout these exchanges, the woman had done little more than glance at me. This time, though, she turned her full stare on me. She opened her mouth as if to say something, and then her eyes rolled back in her head. I moved forward as if to catch her, assuming she would fall. But Sorin held me back with one restraining hand in front of me.

  The woman stood steadily, but only the whites of her eyes showed. When she spoke, her voice had a spectral quality.

  “There are few paths to victory.” I recognized my grandmother’s words and shivered. This was nothing for show—it was true divination, true prophecy.

  “You must choose one another beyond all else,” she continued. “The path is bloody but may prevail.” A racking shudder ran through her from head to toe as her eyes began to roll back down to show her pupils and irises again. “Choose life and love,” she whispered, the end of the prophecy.

  “Thank you,” I said, though I wasn’t at all certain what the divination meant for me. How could I choose life, when Maicǎ was already dead? When to stop Gypsy from rising, I might have to kill many of her followers, and possibly the Daughter herself?

  Sorin leaned in and gave her another kiss on the cheek. This time I managed to quash the jealousy—at least I thought I had. But as he turned to lead me away, Allessia flashed a smile at me that suggested she knew exactly how I was feeling.

  Without any response at all, I turned to follow him. We were several yards away when I said, “Do you know every outlaw on this side of town?”

  Sorin snorted. “She’s my cousin.”

  I glanced around the marketplace, startled. “Here? I thought all of the lynx-shifters lived in Titan Park.”

  “Most of us do. But Allessia isn’t a shifter.”

  I blinked. “She’s not?”

  “No. My mother wasn’t, either. Her family is from this part of the Hollow. I grew up moving between the lynx’s Chain and the streets of the Day Market. I’m related to about half the people in this area, as far as I can tell.”

  “Including Andrei?”

  “Yes. Including Andrei.”

  No wonder he hadn’t tried to hide his face as we moved through the market.

  Moving through several streets, Sorin walked purposefully, like someone who knew his way around the area. I might have noticed that the night before, had I not been too caught up in my grief.

  He checked the address on the paper in his hand against the numbers on the buildings, then knocked on one of the doors. The woman who answered was dark and heavy and almost as tall as Sorin.

  “Esmeralda?” Sorin asked.

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Who wants to know?”

  “Allessia sent us.”

  “Ah, then, come in.” She threw the door wide, and we moved past her into a bright room with several antique chairs—the kind used once upon a time in barbershops and beauty salons. Esmeralda waved her hand in front of us, and I felt the tingle of magic prickling against my skin. “Complete transformation, then?”

  “Temporary,” Sorin clarified.

  “It will cost.” Esmeralda’s dark brown eyes sparkled. “But it will be completely worth it.”

  “I can pay,” I said.

  Both Esmeralda and Sorin glanced at me in surprise, as if they had expected me to stay silent during the negotiations.

  “I have the money from Maicǎ’s tea shop,” I said to Sorin. “This is my mission, too.”

  He nodded somberly. “Of course.”

  I stepped up beside him. “How much?”

  Esmeralda named a price that almost made me gasp, but I glanced at Sorin and he nodded.

  Apparently whatever she was going to do to us would be phenomenal.

  I pulled out the money and handed it over.

  Sorin took the packets of spice out of his new backpack and handed them to Esmeralda. She glanced at them and laughed.

  “I see Allessia has been prophesying again.”

  “Absolutely.” Sorin’s voice dropped out of its cheerful register. “I fear someday she’ll have to pay a heavy Blood Price.”

  Esmeralda nodded, similarly sobered. “As do I.”

  Not if I can help it, I thought. If I could stop Gypsy’s rise, perhaps I could make sure that no one ever paid a Blood Price again.

  But what would happen to the magic in Gypsy Hollow then?

  It didn’t matter, I decided. It was more important to stop the bloodshed that was taking over the Hollow more every day than it was to maintain magic itself. People had lived on the unbroken Earth for millennia without knowing about magic, without ever being able to use it on a regular basis. We could do so again. We simply had to learn how.

  “Let’s get started,” Esmeralda said, waving us to two chairs and setting the spices aside.

  “Don’t you need those to do whatever it is you’re going to do?” I clambered up into the chair she’d indicated.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Those are bribes. Allessia sent them because she knows how much I love the spices from her stall.” Esmeralda grinned and spun me around to face the mirror. “Now, let’s see what we can do with you.”

  Chapter 14

  Esmeralda did good work. Sorin’s darkened, buzz-cut hair and dyed eyebrows somehow made him look taller and leaner. She’d left my hair long, but it was bleached to a sunny blonde and piled atop my head in a style that was nothing like anything I usually wore.

  She had also transformed my face with a counter full of tiny tubes and pots of creams and powders. My skin was darker, stained with something she promised me would fade slowly over the next week. My eyes, rimmed in dark powder and painted in colors that made them look twice as large, stared back at me from the mirror in surprise. My bright red lips promised the kind of seduction I had never seriously considered.

  Though now, looking at Sorin, I wondered… After this makeover, we were both new people. Perhaps nothing we did would count.

  That’s the grief talking, Mirela. You’ve seen it in others. Don’t fall victim to your worst desires simply because you want distraction.

  Was Sorin one of my worst desires, though?

  I shook my head.

  “What?” Sorin asked. “Is there something you don’t like?”

  “Nothing. I only want to be sure I can replicate this look. And right now I’m certain I can’t.”

  “It shouldn’t be necessary. We really only need the disguises to get across the city, back to the vampires’ stronghold.”

  Esmeralda blinked. “You’re going in to deal with vampires?”

  “Yes.” I leaned in to examine my made-up face more closely.

  “Then you will need to disguise your scent, as well.” Esmeralda turned and opened a drawer full of neatly labeled packets similar to the ones that Allessia had sent.

  With a small stone mortar and pestle, she ground together tiny chunks of material she took out of the drawer, handling it all carefully and wrapping it back up. When she was done, she dropped the resulting powder into a vial three-quarters full of oil. Shaking it thoroughly, she handed it to me.

  “Three drops of this on each wrist and under the tongue. For both of you.” She glanced back and forth between Sorin and me, her gaze hard as if to impress upon us the importance of what she was saying. “You’ll have to reapply it every three or four hours. Don’t let it go too long. It’ll hide you from anything, at least as far as scent goes.”

  I followed her instructions and handed the vial to Sorin. After he used it, he tucked it into our backpack, as well.

  “How much more do we owe you?” I began reaching inside the waistband of my skirt to pull out more coins, but Esmeralda shook her head.

  “Everything has been getting worse in Gypsy Hollow for as long as I can remember. As long as my mother and grandmother could remember, as well. Every day the magic gets darker, the Blood Prices higher. It’s a wonder we haven’t all
killed each other already.” She gave us that significant look again. “If you’re going to try to make things better for everyone, then I want to help. Even if it’s only in a little way.”

  She handed me two more tiny pots of cream, both with lids that screwed on tightly. “Put the red one on your lips and the dark one on your eyelids. Then put a swipe of red here on the tops of your cheeks.” She pointed, drawing a line from my temple to my cheeks and a second line underneath it. “And then swipe the dark powder here, in the hollow of your cheeks. Blend them up and down, like this.” She demonstrated, using the same swiping motion she had when she had made me up. “That will help your disguise.”

  As we left her shop, I impulsively spun around and hugged Esmeralda tight. “We will do everything we can to stop the corruption in this Hollow’s magic.”

  She squeezed me back, her big arms comforting around me, making me feel like a child again for just an instant. “My prayers go with you,” she said. “If we all survive, come back to see me and I will put your hair back to its original color. It is better for you.” Her laugh followed us out the door, and my heart lifted at the sound, just a little.

  “No,” I said, my voice growing louder.

  We were halfway back to the vampires’ part of town, and I felt like all I had done for days was try to convince obstinate men to listen to me. I needed Sorin to be different from those others. “Some of us can foretell the future, yes—so we’ve known for a long time that the Daughter is going to rise soon. The darker the magic gets, the worse the Blood Prices become, the closer that time comes. We realize that.”

  “Then why didn’t anyone foresee the vampires’ plan?” Sorin asked.

  “I assume because they put some sort of ward around it. I can’t imagine why anyone would want the Daughter to rise.”

  “For power, of course.” When I stared at him blankly, Sorin shook his head. “Are you really that naïve? If the Daughter wakes, anyone in her favor will benefit. More power, more influence, more of whatever they want.”

  “People would really invite her in, knowing what she’s likely to do to the Hollow? Everyone knows her magic has been corrupted.”

  “And yet everyone who can still practices magic. Including your people.” Sorin’s sharp, accusatory gaze pinned me.

  “You know that the Sleeping Daughter calls to all the magic-users and creatures. It’s the hell we all face together. None of us can avoid it. You can’t help shapeshifting. I can’t help my Visions.”

  “Maybe you could if you tried harder,” the lynx-shifter snarled.

  What was going on here?

  I forced myself to stop walking, to avoid snapping a retort back at him. “Sorin, stop. Look at me. What are we fighting over?”

  He blinked, opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. “We’re fighting because…” His voice trailed off.

  “That’s right. You don’t know, either, do you?”

  He rubbed his hands across his eyes, as if wiping away something coating his vision. “It’s the Daughter, I think.”

  “Yeah. The closer we get to her, the more agitated we become.” For the first time in a while, I checked our surroundings. When we started out from Esmeralda’s, we’d tried to be careful not to make eye contact with anyone. Sorin had pulled down a wanted poster along the way and the likeness of our pre-transformation selves had indeed been excellent.

  But at some point, those concerns had faded, and instead we found ourselves fighting in the middle of the street. Now we moved over to stand beside a building.

  “When was the last time we used the scent-disguising oil?” I glanced up and down the street. At least everyone else was fighting, too.

  “I don’t know.” Sorin dropped the backpack to the ground and dug around inside until he found the tiny bottle. “Here.”

  Once we were again dosed with our strange oil drops, my head felt clearer. “Is this anger just a side effect of the Daughter beginning to wake up?”

  “I don’t know,” Sorin said. “But even if it is, it also ensures that everyone is too busy fighting each other to prepare for any bigger kind of darkness.”

  “We really have to stop her. She’s evil—and her rising will only make the call of evil and the desire for blood stronger.” Inhaling deeply, I once again began moving toward the vampires’ stronghold, where I knew the Daughter lay sleeping. But only for now.

  She was beginning to stir.

  Chapter 15

  We approached the vampires’ stronghold in the Officers’ Circle Palace. Although the vampires might have been arrogant enough to believe they didn’t need guards at night, they had plenty posted during the day when they slept.

  Apparently it had been that way for centuries—though there had been many fewer of them before the world was broken into Hollows, vampires had used humans as both protection and food from the beginning. Many of the old tales spoke of the blood-drinkers hiding in graves or crypts or deep underground, drawing servants to them to guard them in their sleep.

  They still had some of that—a number of the guards were also blood-givers and servants to their masters. But just as many of them were paid mercenaries. Maybe even more.

  A vampire didn’t need all that much blood to survive, lucky for us, since the Human-Fae Council’s population estimates put about two hundred vampires in Bucharest, and we had a limited population.

  One of the Elders in my own enclosure had once suggested that perhaps the vampires were here to keep us from overrunning our limited space by over-breeding. That their inclusion in Gypsy Hollow was by design.

  Whatever their purpose, they terrified me. Even during the day, even when they slept.

  In any case, we would have a definite set of problems to deal with when we faced them—but what problems were within that set varied depending on whether we went up against the vampires during the daytime or at night.

  Our first task was to decide what time of day to try to go up against them—or perhaps to try to sneak around them. That would probably be our second decision.

  Sorin pulled me past the circular drive leading to their building.

  There wasn’t really a good place to view the guards—anyone we could see could also see us. But we slowed our steps, trying to look as if we were merely interested rather than actually scoping the place out.

  “I don’t think it’s going to take two weeks for Gypsy to rise.” Sorin pointed toward the guards. I hadn’t noticed before, but there was a hole in the pattern they made—a place where a guard should be and wasn’t.

  I figured out why when two guards stood up from the ground below the stone verandah and began swinging their heavy swords at one another. “And I thought we were being affected by the way her magic leaks out.”

  “They’re practically steeping it.”

  Like one of Maicǎ’s tea blends. “If her rising really is set for two weeks from now, and this continues to get worse, continues to affect those it touches…”

  “It’ll be an absolute bloodbath.” Sorin’s mouth tightened. “We can’t let this continue.”

  I tugged his arm to keep him moving and we walked past the palace, heading toward the upscale enclosure for humans. “A bloodbath, yes. But that can’t be what the vampires want.” I remembered what the Elder Gheorghe had said about the vampires acting as predators designed to keep our population stable. “It would wipe out their food source. They’re smarter than that.”

  At the clanging of swords clashing together, Sorin and I both turned back to look. Sorin shook his head. “Yeah, but I’m not sure they really understood what they were getting into.”

  At the Councilmen’s enclosure, things weren’t much better. Two men in a shouting match outside the gate suddenly erupted into fistfight. Guards waded in instantly, swinging swords. One of the men drew back his fist then screamed as a guard simply lopped it off at the wrist.

  The violence seemed to be spreading out from the vampires’ stronghold in waves. At one point, I found myself wanting to tu
rn and snap at Sorin to hurry up—and when I glanced at him, he had grown fangs—not like vampires’ fangs, but like cats’.

  I glanced back at the gate to the enclosure where Councilman Petri lived.

  His man killed my grandmother.

  Rage consumed me. It was all I could do to keep from launching myself at the guards, demanding to be let in so I could kill Petri.

  We can’t keep this under control.

  “Keep moving,” I muttered, nudging Sorin past the wealthy enclosure’s gate. “We can’t get in here now.”

  Sorin twitched as he walked, his head twisting back and forth.

  Everywhere we went, more fights broke out. Children screamed and shoved—and so did adults.

  “There’s no place to escape. Everyone will be trapped.” Sorin’s voice trembled with repressed terror. He clenched his fists, leaving bloodied claw marks in them.

  I considered the boundaries of Gypsy Hollow. The old Bucharest Ring Road encircling the city formed the border between the territory claimed by the forest Fae and the city itself. The road encompassed the whole city, but about five to ten kilometers of farmland now stood between the currently inhabited portions of Bucharest and the Ring Road itself. That land was used to produce food to support everyone in Gypsy Hollow.

  Past the road, everything belonged to the forest Fae. They allowed some foraging, and there were reports of single families of humans or shifters taking up residence without trouble—but any large expeditions inevitably disappeared without a trace.

  Anyway, past the forest Fae’s land, the world ended.

  Sorin was right. There was no place for anyone to go.

  And if we tried to leave, those of us who weren’t killed outright in the fighting could be crushed against the invisible walls of the Hollows. Or trampled in the rush as the denizens of this strange world tried—and failed—to escape.