Blood Rules (Blood Immortal Book 2)

by Ava Benton

  I had tasted life. I had soaked it in. No wonder I looked so happy and healthy again.

  I jogged downstairs with an armload of gifts and set them on the coffee table.

  My mother oohed over the purse, the hat, the scarves, the perfume.

  “I wish I could’ve brought back some of the food. The cheese!” I closed my eyes and could almost taste it.

  “You didn’t put on any weight,” she noticed.

  I bit my tongue before I could snap at her for even mentioning it.

  “I was underweight when I left, and I walked until my blisters had blisters.” I held up a printed caftan, and she clapped her hands like a happy child. “Oh, I almost forgot.” With a wave of my hand, the ward on the kitchen dissolved. “Konstantin? I have something here for you.”

  “For me?” He was frowning as he entered the living room, ducking under the doorway.

  Even so, his dark chocolate-colored hair brushed the doorframe. Green eyes squinted almost warily as he approached.

  “I hope you don’t mind. My last stop was in Serbia.”

  His expression softened. “Serbia.”

  The word was heavy with meaning, and my heart went out to him.

  What would it be like, forced to leave my homeland and spend hundreds of years someplace else? With no chance of ever going back?

  I held out the small sword I had bought for him. It wasn’t cheap, though I was pretty sure the man who’d sold it to me from a cart outside a crumbling old church had given me a steep discount anyway.

  “It’s believed to date back to the Siege of Belgrade, or so the man told me,” I said. “A Serbian weapon used to defend the city against the Ottoman invasion.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he murmured as he took it from me.

  And it was.

  It had immediately caught my eye when I first saw it. The wooden handle was clearly hand-carved and dated back hundreds of years judging from the way time and touch and smoothed it down. But the blade was heavy and sharp.

  “The man I obtained it from proved the quality of the blade,” I said, remembering my surprise. “I was wearing a thin scarf. He asked me to hand it to him. When I held it out, with the ends dangling down, he sliced them off.”

  My mother gasped. “He did?”

  “I made him take the cost of the scarf off his asking price,” I grinned.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was how pleased Konstantin looked.

  “I don’t know why I thought of you when I saw it. Maybe because you’ve always protected my mother. Not that you’ve ever needed a sword to do that,” I chuckled.

  Good thing, too. He might have used it on her. I knew she had taken me to that point many times and could only imagine she had done it to him, too.

  He looked at me and did something I had never seen him do before. He smiled—and it lit up his face.

  I had never really looked at him before then, I realized. Sure, I knew what he looked like and had once or twice commented to myself on how handsome he was. It was always in an offhanded way, like an afterthought. But he had never smiled. When he did, I wondered how I had missed him for so long.

  “This is very thoughtful. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” I turned away and made a big fuss over straightening up my mother’s gifts. Anything to keep him from seeing the way I blushed. “I should go up and get ready for the meeting, or we’ll be late.”

  4

  Konstantin

  I sat beside the driver with the sword in my lap, wrapped in layers of fabric to protect it.

  She would never know how much it meant, and it would’ve sounded stupid if I tried to tell her. Stupid and pointless, since she cared as little about my life as I cared about hers.

  She would likely shift uncomfortably and avert her eyes if I tried to explain what having that sword did for me.

  I didn’t ask for an explanation, she would think, looking for a way to escape the conversation.

  She couldn’t know that my father had fought in the Siege of Belgrade. He and roughly sixty-thousand other citizens had joined with the army to hold back the invading Ottomans. And they had won.

  It was before I was born, but that didn’t mean the picture he’d painted for me in story after story of that epic, nearly three-week battle had lost any of its clarity or significance.

  There were times when, sitting on his knee by the fire after a long day of hunting and trapping, I would add in the details he had skipped that night.

  We would tell the stories together. They became ours and remained so even after I was too big for his knee and was doing the hunting and trapping along with him.

  She couldn’t know that. But somehow, some way, she had come across a relic from that time and had chosen it for me. Like the past was trying to tap me on the shoulder, remind me that I had once been human and had loved and laughed.

  Until the night I went out hunting alone.

  The night I became the prey.

  I clenched my jaw and willed myself not to think about that night—that, or anything else which came after it. Knowing I could never see my family again.

  That I was a monster, unfit to be around my mother and father and sisters. They were good, hardworking, God fearing. It was better they thought I was dead, for at least they would love my memory.

  Finally giving in one day, months later, telling myself it wouldn’t hurt to watch them from afar as they took their evening meal.

  Stop this. No good will come of it. I shook my head, willing the memories away. The screams. The blood…

  I looked down at the sword, invisible in its wrapping. Somehow, she knew what it meant for me to have it.

  If anybody were to ask, she would shrug and say it was a random purchase. There was no significance. And she’d be telling the truth, as far as she knew it.

  It was well past dark by the time we arrived at the meeting place, the same location the coven had been holding its meetings since the days when witches arrived in a horse-drawn carriage instead of a luxury sports car.

  I decided to leave the sword in its wrappings, under the front seat, before opening the door for Marissa to exit the car.

  Her breath was a cloud in the cold, clear night as she looked up at the tall, unimpressive, boxy building.

  It was dark inside, abandoned before it was ever completed. Many such buildings had existed on that land over the years. She had once explained to me the fact that multiple enchantments had been cast over the location back before the United States was a proper country.

  Nothing ever built on the land would be successful or even finished, because the land had been claimed by the original coven when they’d reached the New World.

  That wasn’t exactly the sort of message they could print on a sign and hang on a fence, of course, so developer after developer had to try—and fail—to make it their own.

  Of course, no sleep was lost among the coven. One of the few things witches and vampires agreed on was the uselessness of humans and what they considered important.

  The latest incarnation was supposed to be a high-rise apartment building for young people with more money than sense. They would have to find an overpriced apartment somewhere else.

  I stayed a few steps behind the women as they walked through the front door, stepping around a stack of cinder blocks left behind by the construction crew before crossing the threshold.

  It was only after another few looks around to be sure we were undetected that I felt comfortable following them.

  Once inside, it was a very different world. Whatever the building’s designer had envisioned faded into the background as Marissa’s tastes took over.

  The wide, deep lobby featured a fire pit in the center, surrounded by cushions on which dozens of witches reclined while waiting for their High Sorceress to arrive.

  Only it wasn’t she all eyes turned to.

  Monika was the star of the night, and they all rushed over to greet her as she slipped deep crimson robes over her
street clothes.

  “Much better, thanks… yes, it was incredible… oh, I already can’t wait to get back there…” She looked embarrassed at the attention. It would be better for her to get used to it, since rumor had it she would follow her mother one day.

  That would be another Nightwarden’s problem. I would be enjoying a well-deserved rest at that point.

  The thought of The Fold snapped me out of my gossip-fueled thoughts. I still felt steady. The beating of so many hearts—I could hear them all, every single one, overlapping—didn’t send me into a frenzy.

  I remembered that Marissa had extra blood with her, just in case. Needing her as desperately as I did made me sick. Who was I becoming? I barely recognized myself anymore.

  “We’re all glad to have her back,” Marissa agreed, her voice rising above the others.

  She didn’t like sharing the spotlight. A fair leader, a smart one, but vain.

  I supposed all leaders, especially ones adored by those they led, developed an ego if left in power long enough.

  They took that as a cue to get the meeting started.

  I knew this part all too well, and stood back as they formed a circle around the fire.

  Marissa flicked her wrist, making the many candles around the room flicker to life and the fire roar higher and hotter than before.

  It cast the cavernous room in a warm glow and made shadows dance on the walls.

  Sometimes I watched the shadows. It was more interesting than what the witches did.

  “We thank you for the blessings you have showered on us,” Marissa crooned, eyes closed.

  The others echoed her, raising their arms until their palms touched.

  I wondered what they thought it did, their words and chants and rituals. Not that I hadn’t seen evidence of their power—just the fact that humans couldn’t see the abandoned building for what it really was showed me that much.

  None of them would step foot inside, thanks to whatever spells Marissa had cast once the developer and contractors gave up on the project.

  There was none of the graffiti or garbage which marked other abandoned buildings in the city. Homeless squatters wouldn’t consider it. And that was the tip of the iceberg.

  Marissa and my other charges had performed feats of jaw-dropping significance before my eyes.

  Even so, they would probably have just as much power without the chanting and swaying and candles.

  It wasn’t my place to voice an opinion, and I didn’t feel like taking a lightning bolt to the ass for it. With that in mind, I suffered through every full moon, stifling my yawns and wishing I could be alone with my television. I wished it just then, maybe more than ever. I didn’t feel the cold the way the witches did, of course, but even without that sensation the bleak, cold, foreboding pressed in on me wasn’t something I could ignore.

  Didn’t they feel it?

  A gust of cold air swirled around the room and blew out the candles all at once.

  The witches barely had time to react before the fire went out, too. No ordinary breeze could do that. Nothing natural could, since the fire was controlled by magic.

  I darted to Marissa’s side out of instinct, but I wasn’t in time before her head snapped back, knocking the hood to her shoulders.

  Cries of panic and fear filled the room, but she stayed still and silent.

  “Mother?” Monika cried out.

  I stepped between them, obeying instinct again. Something told me not to touch her.

  “You have what is mine.” The voice was deep, throaty, completely unlike Marissa’s.

  It came from Marissa but from the room as well, from thin air, all around us. “You shall pay the price.”

  “What? What do you mean?” one of the witches asked. “Speak!”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. “You have what is mine. It shall be mine again. And you shall pay for thinking you could deceive me.” A bitter laugh bubbled up in her throat, growing louder and louder until it nearly deafened me.

  I covered my ears—we all did—just before it turned into a shriek of fury and Marissa’s face twisted into a mask of rage.

  The fire flared up, bigger and stronger than before, and several witches fell back before their robes caught.

  The shriek faded.

  Marissa dropped to the floor like a puppet whose master had suddenly abandoned it.

  “Mother!” Monika pushed past me and fell to her knees beside her mother. “Mother, Mama, speak to me, please. Open your eyes.” She held Marissa’s head in her lap and patted her cheeks firmly, insistently.

  The witches crowded in on us—only to fall back when they caught sight of the fangs which extended over my lower lip, the claws I held up in preparation for attack.

  “Stay back!” I growled, and they did as I commanded.

  I scanned the room from where I stood, close to Marissa and Monika. I saw no one but the terrified witches in their hooded robes.

  The cold, dark presence I’d become aware of moments before the flames went out was gone.

  The sound of Marissa’s groans drew my attention, and I fell to one knee beside her.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Oh… oh, I can’t believe it,” she whimpered. “It was too terrible.” She caught sight of my still-present fangs and shrank away from me.

  I calmed myself, and they retracted.

  “First off, are you all right?” Monika asked, stroking her mother’s cheek, smoothing her hair back. If she noticed the fangs or claws, she didn’t show it.

  “I think so. But it was awful. Awful…” She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head.

  “You were aware of what you were saying?” I asked.

  “Mm-hmm. He was in my head, and I saw him. I felt him. Oh, it was something I never want to do again. But I had no control over it.” Her hazel eyes darted back and forth, like she was looking for the presence.

  “You saw him?” I asked.

  This was beyond my experience. I could fight physical threats. I could sense the presence of darkness more easily than even witches could, which explained the sensation of foreboding just before Marissa’s possession. There was nothing I could do when the threat was inside her and invisible to us.

  “Yes. Inside my head. Not… not exactly a picture, but as close to one as I can imagine.” She tried to sit up.

  Monika helped her.

  Marissa blinked hard. “If I never experience that again, it will be too soon.”

  “Who is he?” a random witch called out from behind me.

  “I have no idea. I’ve never felt his presence before.” Her chin quivered as she leaned against Monika’s shoulder.

  I had never seen her so vulnerable. Between the pain written on her face and the flickering light from the re-lit fire, she seemed to age years in the blink of an eye.

  “What is he looking for?” somebody else asked as we helped Marissa settle down on a stack of cushions.

  “I—I don’t know,” she sputtered, shaking her head. “It’s all such a confused mess. Once I have a little time to process, I might be able to understand what he was referring to. Whoever he is.”

  Marissa was lying.

  From the look on Monika’s face as she looked up at me, she knew it, too.

  5

  Monika

  I waited until we were in the car to ask any further questions. I didn’t want to put my mother on the spot in front of the rest of them.

  They needed reassurance just then. They needed to know their High Sorceress was all right and things were as under control as they could be.

  I made sure to keep a confident smile on my face and deliberately made eye contact with as many of my coven sisters as possible.

  Inside the car was another story.

  I leaned back with a sigh, rubbing my temples as my teeth chattered from the cold.

  My mother’s driver had kept the heater running while we were inside, but I was still freezing. Or scared to death.

  My mother’s face was
a funny shade of gray. I had never seen a face that color before. Especially not hers.

  “What happened back there?” I murmured, watching her from the corner of my eye.

  “I told you everything. There’s not much more to say. Or do you want me to keep reliving it?” She looked out the window, away from me.

  “I knew you were lying. So did Konstantin—I could tell.”

  He didn’t turn toward us, but his head cocked to the side in such a way that I knew he was listening.

  “Neither of you were inside my head. You don’t know.”

  “So, tell us.” I turned to her, took her hands.

  She still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Mother, this is serious. If we’re going to figure out who did this and why, we have to know everything you know.”

  “I don’t—I can’t—”

  “It was really that bad for you?” Konstantin murmured from up front.

  “Yes.” She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

  I could’ve screamed at her, taken her face in my hands and screamed with my nose touching hers.

  It wasn’t a damn game. It wasn’t smart, wasting time the way she was.

  “Mother! Damn it.” I moved closer, though not as close as I wanted to. “Listen to me. If there’s someone out there who’s powerful enough to possess you while the coven was circled together, as one, we need to take action. Now. There’s got to be something you can remember that you didn’t mention back there. An image—what he’s looking for, what he looks like, who he is. Something.”

  I could’ve shaken her until her head fell off when she didn’t say anything right away.

  She only stared at the back of Konstantin’s seat, but the unfocused look of her eyes told me she didn’t see anything in front of her. She was in her head.

  I looked at Konstantin, who turned his head slightly to look back at me. He was useless in a situation like this, and he had to know it.

  I imagined it was tough for him.

  I felt useless, too, so I could relate.

  “He must have shown you something,” I murmured softly, wondering how fine the line was between prompting her and pushing her.