The Tomb of Blood

by Britney Jackson

“Your heart is barely beating,” Kallias realized.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘I told you so,’” Rose informed him.

  Kallias ignored her remarks, his pulse racing, as he stared at the hole where her heart should’ve been. “I came as soon as I felt your pain,” he breathed, “but I was too far away.” A haunted look came over his eyes. “I could feel you dying.”

  Rose’s brows creased with sympathy. “It’s okay. I’m all right now.”

  “No, she’s not,” Aaron told Kallias. “She could still die.”

  Rose glared at the ancient vampire. “No one asked for your input.”

  As soon as he heard Aaron’s distinct, thickly-accented voice ringing through the icy air, Kallias stood and spun toward him, his eyes narrowing. “What the hell happened?” he snarled. “You said that you would protect her.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, Greek,” Aaron growled, dropping his hand to his side, even though he was still a little unsteady on his feet. He pinned Kallias with his steely, black gaze. “I did everything in my power to save your stupid girlfriend. I even gave her my blood, and I never give anyone my blood.”

  “Stupid?” Rose repeated in disbelief. “I have a genius-level IQ.”

  Aaron’s dark gaze shifted toward her. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, what kind of genius lets a group of humans shove a wooden stake into her heart?”

  Kallias turned back toward her, frowning. “Humans did this to you?”

  Before Rose could answer that question, a series of noises drew her attention—the thud of boots, the crackling of branches, and then, the crunch of snow. Unable to even move her head, much less any other part of her body, Rose watched out of the corner of her eye as Kara jumped from the nearest tree, landing in the snow on the other side of Kallias and Aaron. For several moments, Kara said nothing. She just stared at Rose, her light blue eyes wide with shock.

  “Kara,” Aaron sighed. He seemed relieved to see her. He turned toward her. “I need to know something. Does Alana have any humans working for her?”

  Kara didn’t even seem to hear him. She just continued to stare at Rose.

  Aaron raised his voice. “Kara! I need you to answer my question.”

  Rose stared back at Kara, stunned by the raw emotion that she could see flashing in Kara’s piercing, blue eyes. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that Kara was worried. Maybe even terrified. But surely, Kara wouldn’t feel something that strongly for her, Rose thought. They’d only met recently, after all.

  “Kara,” Aaron growled, losing patience. “What is wrong with you?”

  “What do you think is wrong with me?” Kara snapped, her low, melodic voice echoing through the cemetery as she practically screamed the words. She’d spun toward Aaron so suddenly, her eyes narrowed, her fists clenched at her sides. Her chest rose and fell quickly with her shallow, erratic breathing. She didn’t seem to realize that she’d snapped until afterward, though, as her gaze darted back toward Rose, her brows furrowing. “What happened to her?”

  “She was attacked by humans,” Aaron growled, his eyebrows raised, “which is why I need to know: does Alana have any humans working for her?”

  “Just one,” Kara said, still watching Rose. “He’s a government official.”

  “How do you even know that?” Kallias asked suspiciously.

  Kara looked at him, a look of disbelief twisting at her face. “Don’t you have better things to do right now?” she snarled. “Like…worry about Rose?”

  Kallias seemed taken aback. All of the suspicion and bitterness seemed to have rushed out of him, all of the sudden. “You’re right,” he admitted quietly.

  “You’re sure that it’s just that one?” Aaron asked Kara.

  “Yes,” Kara said, turning back toward him. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because, like I said, we were attacked by humans,” Aaron said irritably.

  Kallias frowned. “Well, you told me that Rose was staked. A wooden stake—that sounds like a weapon that superstitious lunatics would use. Vampire attacks have been all over the news. Maybe this had nothing to do with Alana.”

  “Are they really superstitious lunatics, if they’re right?” Rose remarked.

  Aaron nodded, agreeing with Kallias. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “But the human who started the attack said that Alana brought her here.”

  “She also pretended to be chained up,” Rose added.

  Kara glanced down at the corpse of the human woman. She stepped toward the human, cocking her head to the side. “This one?” she asked Aaron.

  Aaron nodded. “Yes, she’s the one who mentioned Alana.”

  Kara crouched beside the woman’s corpse, her leather pants stretching tight over her thighs. She studied the woman for a moment, and then, she leaned forward, pressing her hands into the snow, and sniffed the woman’s body.

  Rose frowned. “Um…Kara, what are you doing?”

  Kara leaned back on her heels and sighed. “Alana hasn’t even touched this woman,” she assured them, standing and dusting the snow off of her hands.

  Aaron nodded. “You’re positive?” he asked her.

  “I am absolutely positive,” Kara confirmed, crossing her arms across her chest. “There isn’t even a hint of Alana’s scent on that woman’s body.”

  Kallias frowned. “So, why would she say that Alana brought her here?”

  “To cover up the truth,” Kara said easily. “She must have known somehow that Alana and Aaron are at war right now, and she was using that.”

  “But how would she know that we are at war?” Aaron asked her.

  Kara shrugged. “That,” she sighed, “I don’t know.”

  The snow crunched as Erik approached, finally catching up with them. Kara glanced at him as he scowled at her. “You ran off and left me,” he muttered.

  Kara shrugged unapologetically, but despite her attempt to hide it, a hint of emotion flashed in her eyes. “You weren’t moving fast enough,” she said.

  Erik’s frown deepened. “That wasn’t fast enough?” he asked in disbelief. “I mean, I know you were worried that something had happened to Rose, but…” he trailed off, his nostrils flaring, as he realized how much blood he smelled.

  Rose raised an eyebrow at Kara. “You were worried about me?”

  Kara’s icy blue gaze shifted toward Rose, and she swallowed uneasily as she noticed the bluish tint of Rose’s skin. “I’m still worried,” she admitted quietly.

  Rose blinked in surprise, not sure how to respond to that confession.

  “Holy shit, Rose,” Erik said, gaping at her. “What happened to you?”

  “She let some humans stake her,” Aaron said harshly.

  “Once again,” Rose grumbled, “I didn’t let them do anything.”

  “You just stood there while they staked you,” Aaron argued.

  Rose pushed back, trying to pull herself into a more dignified position, but her body didn’t move at all. As her blood drained out of her body, pouring out of the massive wound in her chest, her strength drained as well, leaving her unable to move. It was only a matter of time, she realized, before she would once again lose consciousness. “I was checking on one of the humans. She got stabbed during the attack,” she explained tiredly. “I wanted to make sure she was okay.”

  Erik raised an eyebrow. “One of the humans that was trying to kill you?”

  “Yeah,” Rose answered, scowling at him. “What does that matter?”

  Kallias raked his fingers through his long, brown hair, sighing in frustration. “Rose, you stopped to check on a human that was trying to kill you?”

  “Yes,” Rose said, narrowing her eyes at him as well. Unfortunately, the fact that she could barely stay conscious took a tiny bit of the edge off of her murderous glare. “Why is everyone acting like I did something unusual? Kallias…you don’t kill humans either. You, of all people, should understand.”

  “I don’t kill innocent humans,” Kallias corrected, his eyes wide,
“but if it’s between me and them, you better believe that it won’t be me who dies.”

  “This isn’t helping anything,” Kara said to Kallias and Aaron. “So, she made a decision that got her injured. What I want to know,” she paused, shifting her body toward Aaron, her eyes narrowing, “is: why didn’t you kill the humans?”

  Aaron raised an eyebrow. “Are you questioning me?”

  Kara didn’t budge under his intimidating glare. She stared him down, her shoulders rolled back, her chin lifted, her body language conveying complete and utter confidence. “Yes,” she growled. “That is exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Kara,” Aaron said slowly, as if he were warning her.

  “I serve you because I respect you, Aaron, not because you scare me,” Kara informed him, her icy blue eyes flashing defiantly. “You promised me that you would protect her, and I trusted you. So, I want to know why you didn’t.”

  “I did protect her,” Aaron argued. “I gave her my blood.”

  “Believe me. That didn’t go unnoticed,” Kara assured him. “I know that you never give anyone your blood, so I appreciate that you did it for her. But you said that you would protect her. Not save her after she’s been nearly killed.”

  Aaron sighed, clearly not wanting to tell anyone what happened to him.

  So, Rose did it for him. “He was unconscious when I was attacked.”

  Kara glanced back at Rose, her brows furrowing. “Unconscious?”

  “How was he unconscious?” Kallias asked, echoing Kara’s confusion.

  Aaron shot an irritated glare in Rose’s direction and slid his hand into his pocket. “Because of this,” he said, pulling out a long, thin syringe.

  Kallias frowned at him. “What is it?”

  Kara stepped forward and took the syringe out of Aaron’s hand. She turned it over in her hand, examining it, and then, she lifted it to her nose and sniffed it. “It’s human blood,” she realized, “and it’s laced with a sedative.”

  Kallias’s frown deepened. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of weapon that a group of superstitious humans would use,” he said suspiciously.

  Erik nodded in agreement. “How did they know that would work?”

  Kara handed the syringe back to Aaron and cast another glance back at the dead body lying on the ground. “Obviously, we’re not dealing with a group of superstitious humans. These humans know exactly what they’re doing.”

  “But if that’s true,” Kallias argued, “why would they use a stake?”

  Kara shrugged. “To keep up the ruse. They clearly wanted us to write them off as lunatics, like we almost did. They figured that if we found a vampire staked through the heart, we wouldn’t look past the surface of what happened.”

  Kallias gave her a skeptical look. “They didn’t expect us to ask questions once we realized that they used drugged blood to knock out an ancient vampire?”

  “I don’t think they expected us to realize that,” Kara explained.

  “She’s right,” Rose agreed. Her voice sounded strange to her ears—too low and lethargic. “They came to kill Aaron. No one would have ever known that they knocked him out first. They’d just know that someone killed him.”

  “If they were here to kill Aaron,” Erik asked, “why did they stake you?”

  “Because I’m a vampire,” Rose answered, remembering the way one of the humans had sneered the word. “They would have left me, if I were human.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Aaron asked curiously.

  “They hate vampires,” Rose stated. Then, realizing that the others didn’t understand her certainty, she added, “Do you know how sometimes you can just tell that someone hates what you are? Not by what they say, but how they say it?”

  “No,” Aaron muttered impatiently.

  “Yes,” Kara said quietly, staring at Rose, “I know what you mean.”

  “Then, trust me,” Rose said, holding her gaze, “these humans hated us.”

  Aaron crossed his arms across his blood-soaked T-shirt. “Okay,” he said slowly, “but I still don’t understand how these humans knew so much about us.”

  Kara glanced at him for a moment, her brows furrowed, as if she were thinking deeply about something. She turned, her intense, light blue gaze shifting toward the woman lying on the ground. “This woman on the ground—she is the one who injected you with the drugged blood, right?” she asked Aaron.

  “Yes,” Aaron said, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Kara stepped toward the corpse and crouched down beside it again. She reached out with her forefinger and tilted the woman’s head to the side. Blood seeped into the snow, oozing from the jagged bite wound in the woman’s neck. Kara frowned and leaned forward over the woman, suddenly busying herself with stripping the drenched blue dress off of the woman’s body.

  Erik watched her with a raised eyebrow. “You’re undressing a dead body again?” he asked playfully. “Kara, I’m really starting to wonder about you.”

  Kara ignored his teasing. “I’m looking for something.”

  “Well, at least she’s too dead to freeze to death,” Erik muttered.

  Kara set the dress aside and knelt closer to the corpse, examining the woman’s skin, searching for something. She flipped the body over and froze as she saw the familiar tattoo at the base of the woman’s spine. “There it is.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” Kallias asked, stunned.

  Aaron stepped forward, his eyes widening. “That’s impossible.”

  Rose tried to lift herself higher against the stone, straining to see the mysterious thing that had shocked everyone. She groaned as she failed miserably. “Could someone tell me what you’re all staring at? Since I’m kind of dying over here…”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t make jokes about dying,” Kallias complained.

  Kara’s icy blue gaze shifted toward Rose, and her brows creased with fear and pain as her gaze lingered on the bleeding hole in Rose’s chest. “It’s a tattoo of the sun with flames inside of it and around it. It’s the mark of the Assassins.”

  “Ah, the Assassins,” Rose repeated dryly. “That’s not vague at all.”

  “The Assassins of Light,” Erik said, “was the name of an order of monks who devoted themselves to eradicating all vampires back in the 1700s.”

  “Hmm, she didn’t really look like a monk to me,” Rose quipped.

  Erik snorted. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I seem to remember the monks having a distinct lack of breasts.”

  “They weren’t Assassins,” Aaron insisted. “They couldn’t have been.”

  Kallias frowned at him. “How do you explain the tattoo, then?”

  Aaron shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she saw it somewhere.”

  “That sounds like an awfully big coincidence,” Rose said skeptically.

  “The Assassins of Light haven’t existed for over three hundred years,” Aaron said between clenched teeth. “I know because I killed all of them.”

  “It’s true,” Kara agreed. “I was with him. We killed every one of them.”

  “That explains why they disappeared so suddenly,” Kallias muttered.

  Rose concentrated as intensely as she could, desperately trying to remain conscious, as her mind grew fuzzy and the voices around her began to sound like unintelligible gibberish. “Maybe,” she trailed off, pausing to gasp for breath.

  One moment, Rose saw Kara crouched beside the corpse of the human woman, and the next, she found Kara knelt right in front of her. She frowned, frustrated by how fragmented and incomplete everything seemed. Kara lifted her hand and placed it on Rose’s face, tilting her head back against the tombstone. She watched in confusion as Kara’s lips moved, but she heard only garbled noise.

  “Rose,” Kara whispered, her brows creased with worry. She rubbed her thumb over the cold, soft skin of Rose’s cheek. “You have to relax, okay?”

  “She’s losing too much blood,” Aaron pointed out. “She can’t heal.”

&nbs
p; “We need to get her inside,” Kallias said, “and bandage her wounds.”

  “Maybe,” Rose tried again, even as her vision blurred, turning black at the edges, “you missed someone. Maybe the order continued without the ones that you killed.” Her words slurred lethargically. “And they’ve just been waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?” Aaron asked, his brows furrowing.

  Rose blinked slowly as she tried to concentrate on the conversation, rather than the steady cadence of Kara’s heart, the soft rush of Kara’s blood through the arteries of her wrist—her wrist which was currently so close to Rose’s face. “The first signs of war,” Rose said finally, “which is what Alana gave them.”

  Aaron straightened. “We need to lock down the Tomb of Blood.”

  Rose turned her face into Kara’s hand and inhaled her scent, the sweet, sensual scent of her blood and her body. “You smell so good,” she whispered.

  Kara swallowed, heat rushing through her body, despite the bitter cold.

  Erik’s eyes widened as he felt Rose’s emotions. He stepped forward, his boots crunching in the snow. “Kara, you might want to get away from her.”

  “Unless you want her to drain every drop of blood from your body,” Aaron muttered, reaching up to touch the partially-healed wound on his neck.

  Kara shuddered as Rose licked her wrist. “If it would help her…”

  Aaron rolled his eyes. “You are not letting her drain you,” he snarled, stepping forward and dragging her away from Rose. “I need your help tonight.”

  Rose fell back against the tombstone as he pulled Kara away from her.

  Kara jerked her arm out of Aaron’s hold but didn’t even spare a glance in Aaron’s direction. She just stared down at Rose, her brows creased in concern as she watched Rose struggle to remain conscious, despite her gruesome injury.

  “Kara,” Aaron said, scowling as she continued to stare at Rose. “I need you to inform everyone that I am closing down the Tomb of Blood for the night. No one will be able to enter or leave until sunset tomorrow. Don’t mention the attack or the Assassins of Light. Just tell them that there is…a security threat.” His eyes narrowed when she didn’t respond. “Kara, are you listening to me?”