Blood Veil

by Erickson, Megan

  He squeezed his eyes shut, pain etched in his features, before he opened them again, pupils burning holes in my skin. “I love you, Celia.”

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  He guided the tip of his cock to my entrance, then he pushed in. For a moment I wasn’t sure he’d fit. I felt stretched, and then he fell onto his hand with a moan and thrust inside all the way.

  I gasped, a stab of pain piercing me. Idris stilled and he placed his forehead on mine, dropping a kiss on my lips. “Are you okay?”

  “Hurts a bit,” I said.

  “I know,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  I ran my fingers into his hair. “No, don’t be sorry.”

  “I-I need to move, little one.”

  Oh, right. “Move.”

  “Are you—”

  “Move, Idris.”

  With a moan, he pulled his hips back slowly, and took his time inching back inside. In and out, in and out. He gained speed with every thrust, his hips changing angles, rotating slightly. I didn’t know why until his cock touched something inside me that made me squirm.

  I gripped his wrist tightly, and threw back my head.

  “There it is,” he murmured.

  Then he didn’t let up. He pounded into me, over and over again, rubbing that spot that lit my body up from the inside. It started as a smoldering ember and soon grew into an all-consuming fire. I cried out, writhing beneath, saying words and curses and other sounds.

  I came again, this one taking my breath away, so I had to close my eyes and gasp for breath. I opened them just in time to see Idris go still, and then his mouth opened and with another jerk, he spilled his release inside me.

  I wrapped my limbs around him immediately, my instinct to keep him close, keep him with me, keep him mine. His big body was thrumming with energy, and it was contagious. Despite all my fear, I felt like I could do anything now. Maybe I was delirious with blood loss.

  “Thank you,” I said, rubbing my hand on the coarse hair of his beard. “That was…more than I ever thought it could be.”

  “Celia…” Idris’s face was different, like he’d stripped off the outer shell that he shellacked over himself every day so that his inner bits were bared. He looked younger, happier, and I wished we were other people. Maybe I was a teacher in a nice little suburb, and he was the foreman of a construction crew. We met during an awkward run-in involving sheets of plywood in The Home Depot when I was attempting a DIY. He asked me out, and took me to a beer and pizza joint. We bonded over football and our hatred of cilantro. We got married, had three kids—all girls—and Idris drove our minivan.

  Maybe that was boring. But I would have chosen boring in a heartbeat.

  I buried my face into his neck, inhaling his scent. My lips settled on his skin and I darted my tongue out to taste his salty flavor. A shudder ran through his body, and he collapsed onto a forearm. The chain holding his other hand rattled, which jerked me out of my dreamlike state of no longer being a virgin to reality. Which was that we were both fucked unless we stopped fucking and started figuring out a plan.

  I loosened my limbs and rolled my ankle to work out a cramp in my calf. “I should get dressed,” I whispered, suddenly feeling naked. “I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I slowly raised my eyes to his. My God, he looked powerful. Healed, with bright eyes, hair shining from the single overhead light. Backlit like this, he was breathtaking. He didn’t look scared, or defeated. He looked determined, and that emotion sank into my bones, filling me up so full that I swore I could burst.

  He rose up over me and placed a hand at my throat, thumb rubbing where he’d bitten me. “We are getting out of here, you and me. We’ll take your sister, too. I will not die in here, and you will not be Keno’s breeder. Do you understand me, Celia?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Idris.”

  “I’m going to need you to be brave for me. One last time, little one. Can you do that? Because I can only do so much in here. I have a plan, but you have to be the major player. If there was any other way—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said quickly. “Whatever you want. I’ll do it, as long as we take my sister, too.”

  He nodded. “Of course.” He took another long look at me, then helped me up. I dressed quickly as he sat on the pallet, flexing his muscles a bit and studying where the chain anchored to the wall. He felt all around the walls, walking as far as the chain allowed him, before doubling back to the pallet.

  I watched him as I cataloged the aches in my body. My face wasn’t as sore anymore. My body ached a bit, mostly…inside. But overall, I felt lighter than I’d felt since that Quellen first entered my bedroom.

  Finally, Idris turned to me and beckoned for me to come to him. I did immediately, allowing myself to be enveloped into his embrace. He pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. I closed my eyes, relishing in his warmth.

  “The thought of sending you out there with them when I’m trapped in here, unable to protect you, kills me,” he said. “But I’ve felt hopeless before, and today I don’t feel hopeless. Understand?”

  I wished I had his confidence. “Yes, I understand,” I said.

  And then he told me his plan.

  Idris

  When they came and retrieved her from my cell, it took every ounce of my inner strength not to tear the Valarian guard limb from limb when he closed his fingers around her upper arm.

  As instructed she didn’t look at me, and I remained on the pallet, my gaze on the ceiling. I didn’t want them to know that I’d fed from her, that I’d had her under me, and that I had broken the chain so that with an easy yank, I would be free.

  When she saw Keno, she’d tell him I attacked her. As Keno planned to claim her for himself, he’d take that as a personal attack. He’d come to deal with me himself, and that was exactly what I wanted to happen.

  I spent some time trying to remember what I knew about the blood veil. The only thing I could recall so far was that it only occurred in females—Occulta, they were called. It didn’t make sense, though—she had dreams, the same dreams I did. Had her father tried to turn her at all and failed? She would have remembered that, though….

  Fuck, so many questions that I couldn’t answer while I was chained in this goddamn cell. I played out every single scenario on what could happen once Keno walked in—I refused to believe he wouldn’t. I had plans A through Z worked out, and my anger hadn’t cooled, not one bit. Every second that Celia was away from me, out of my sight, was another second where the rage burned in me, bright white and scorching hot. I curled my hands into my fists, and made sure the chain on the wall was weak like I needed.

  I had to conserve my energy and wait. While I did, I imagined all the things I’d do to Keno once I was free of this chain.

  Chapter 11

  Celia

  The guard was looking at me strange. Idris had said the bites had healed, but my body chemistry would be different now that he fed from me. And the vampires would smell it. I tried hunching my shoulders, doing my best to look scared and beaten. I’d never been good at acting and was always Crowd Member #4 in school plays, but this time, my life depended on it.

  It actually wasn’t that hard. The euphoria of being with Idris was wearing off, and to be honest, even though he held me in his arms moments ago, it all felt like a dream.

  Instead of taking me back to Keno’s room, the guard led me to Amelia. “Keno is busy,” he said gruffly, still giving me a suspicious look. “He said you can meet your sister and he’ll come get you when he’s finished with his business.”

  I perked up at that. I got to meet Amelia? Talk to her? All of a sudden, I didn’t feel ready. I was dirty and sore and out of my mind with fear. Now I had to talk to my teenage sister? When I look
ed in the window, she wasn’t sitting on her bed reading, or mouthing off to whomever she thought was on the other side of the glass. Instead she sat in a huddled ball, knees tucked to her chest, head turned so I could see the tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

  My heart seized just as the guard said, “Keno told her that her father died.” Then he opened up the door, shoved me in, and latched it behind me.

  Amelia’s head jerked up as I came to a stop just inside the door. She stared at me, and I stared at her. I was at a loss for words. Too much had happened over the past several days and this? This was going to be what broke me—looking into my sister’s eyes and having to tell her everything was going to be okay when I had no idea if it would be. If Idris’s plan failed, we were both fucked.

  I had to be careful with my words. I had no idea if the guard was outside listening to what we had to say. Knowing Keno, he wasn’t busy at all. He threw me in here to observe what I told my sister. So I had to remain calm, and not let her know that Idris and I had a plan to try to break us out of here. A plan that could fail miserably as there were too many variables. But I didn’t want to alarm her, and I didn’t want to alert any guards.

  Unsure what to do, I raised a hand in a wave. “Hi.”

  She sniffed, the little crinkle of her nose so familiar that my heart skipped a beat. She unfolded and dropped her legs to the floor on the side of her bed while she gripped the end of the mattress. “Hi.”

  “I’m—”

  “My sister. Celia,” she said on a whisper, her little eyes wide in her red-splotched face. “Keno told me.”

  I nodded slowly. “And you’re Amelia. What else did Keno tell you?”

  “I hate him,” she said swiftly, and I squeezed my lips shut. “He’ll make a terrible king.” She sniffed. “Dad was a good one.”

  Dad. Fuck, this was so goddamn hard. Because she’d had a dad and I hadn’t, I was jealous of a human teenager imprisoned in a room in a vampire compound. I was sick. I gestured to the space beside her on the bed. “Can I?”

  She wiped the back of her hand across her nose. “Yeah, of course.”

  I walked over and sat down beside her. We both stared at the mirror. At our faces that looked so similar but with over a decade of years’ difference. “How long have you been in this room?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine, based on how much she liked her father, that he kept her in here.

  “Couple of days,” she said. “Dad said he had to leave for a while. The day after he left, Keno busted into the house where I lived, took me, and locked me in here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “It’s the Valarian bunker. The emergency shelter.”

  I blinked. “So you know—”

  “Yeah, I know what I am.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “Don’t you?”

  “I only found out a couple of days ago. I grew up in the city—Mission City. Do you know where that is?”

  She nodded. “I’ve never been there, but my father told me it was a dirty, bad place.”

  He wasn’t really wrong. “Well, that’s where I lived all my life. I didn’t know I had vampire blood until recently.”

  She looked concerned. “Were you okay in that place? Mission City.” Her little hand rested on my thigh.

  Tears threatened. “Yes, honey, I was fine. I was a nurse in the hospital. I took care of sick people. Kids like you.” I couldn’t resist touching her hair, the thick of it slipping through my fingers as I brushed it off her shoulder.

  “Oh,” Amelia said. “That’s really cool. I want to be a teacher. Dad hired tutors for me, and I really liked them. I want to do that. You can heal the kids and I can teach them!”

  Oh, bless her heart. Why couldn’t she have been a brat? After everything I’d been told about the Valarians, I was convinced my father wasn’t all bad. He might not have been all good, but he wasn’t all bad, either, not if he raised a daughter like Amelia. Vampires seemed to be just as complex in their humanity as humans.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “So tell me. Tell me how you grew up.”

  She launched into telling me about her childhood with bright eyes. She was raised in a small cottage outside Mission. It was all so Disney princess-y. She had a house mother who took care of her, and Aleksandr Valarian would visit as often as he could. She sometimes played with other dhampir Valarian children, and she visited the main Valarian compound occasionally, but mostly she was kept isolated. Tutors came into her home, and she even took piano lessons. She said she didn’t know her mother, and I assumed she had a different mother than I did.

  “Father had been saying in the past month or so that changes were coming,” she said.

  “What kind of changes?”

  “He didn’t say.” She twisted her fingers in her lap, and her shoulders hitched. “And now he’s dead, and Keno locked me in this room, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want my old life back.”

  I wanted to give that to her more than anything. But no matter the outcome of Idris’s plan, her old life was exactly that—in the past. I couldn’t return her to her idyll cottage life with the squirrels she fed and deer she befriended.

  I also couldn’t leave her here to a horrible fate. Keno would crush her innocence without a second thought. How had our father not noticed Keno’s mutinous leanings?

  I reached out and slipped my fingers in hers. She stilled, then slanted her eyes up at me. I smiled at her, and she smiled back, a slow, tentative one. “Look, I’m your big sister now, and while I can’t give you your old life back, I’ll do everything I can to make life good for you now. Do you trust me?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She studied my face for a beat before she nodded. “Yeah, I trust you.” She bit her lip. “Can you tell me about you?”

  Yeah, I could do that. So I spent the next forty-five minutes sitting cross-legged on the bed with Amelia, telling her about my life in Mission. I might have embellished a bit to make my life sound more exciting than it was, but by the look on Amelia’s face, I hadn’t needed to. She asked a dozen questions about boys, and I felt ill equipped to answer seeing as though I’d just lost my virginity at twenty-five to a chained-up vampire.

  As much as I wanted to spend time with Amelia, I had to talk to Keno. Without feeding him the information I was supposed to, our plan to break out of here wasn’t going to work.

  I was also hungry as hell. They hadn’t fed me since I’d been here. What was that about? Amelia’s stomach rumbled while she was speaking, and she stopped midsentence then giggled. “Guess I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  Famished. I nodded.

  She hopped off of the bed and walked over to the glass. There was a little button on the side and she pressed it rapidly, then yelled, “Do you plan to feed us?”

  I appreciated her sass.

  As if they were just waiting for us to complain, the door opened, and the guard from before strode in carrying two bags. He tossed them on the bed. “Sandwiches. Eat. When you’re finished”—he pointed at me—“Keno needs to see you.”

  Well, crap. All of a sudden my appetite fled.

  “Thanks, Pulo!” Amelia said, skipping over to the bed. He shut the door and she whispered to me. “I don’t really like him. I just like being really sugary-sweet to him because he hates it.”

  “No whispering!” Pulo yelled at us over the intercom.

  I flinched just as Amelia turned to the window. “Sure thing, sweetie. Sorry!” Then she turned to me with a wicked grin.

  And just like that, I fell in love with my sister.

  The sandwiches were peanut butter and jelly. A mealy apple was in there as well as a bag of pretzels. I’d had worse lunches on school field trips, so I didn’t complain, but I could tell Amelia was used to better food. She picked at her food and only at
e half her sandwich. As much as I had to force the food down my throat, I still did it. I wasn’t stupid and I knew I was going to need my energy coming up.

  “Honey,” I said as Amelia pushed away her half-eaten sandwich, “I know it’s not gourmet, but I really would like if you ate the whole thing. You need the protein and brain fuel, okay?”

  I met her gaze steadily, trying to communicate something that she wouldn’t be able to understand. She had no idea what Keno had in mind, or that I planned to bust her out of here. To her, this was a setback in her pretty cushy life. Still, she was smart. She understood what I was saying to her, and with a tight nod, she picked up her sandwich, and dutifully finished it.

  When I threw my empty bag and apple core in the trash, Pulo wasted no time. He opened the door and stood just inside it. “Keno would like to speak to you now.”

  I nodded, my heart thudding in my throat, my steps heavy. I looked back at Amelia, who was watching me with eyes well beyond her years. Maybe she wasn’t so naive as to what was going on. She held up her hand, fingers crossed, and I crossed mine back to her. She smiled, and I carried that smile with me in my heart the whole way to Keno’s room.

  Idris

  I wasn’t sure when this all got so fucked up. Was I doomed as soon as I saw Celia? As soon as I caught a glimpse of her heart, her unwavering devotion to healing people and visiting sick children?

  She was on my side. She’d always been on my side. She might have been born with Valarian blood, but she wasn’t a Valarian. I thought I cared about humans, that I’d been putting them first, but what I did paled in comparison to Celia’s selflessness. When I’d been hell-bent on revenge, she’d made it through my thick skull—in a way my brother couldn’t—that I needed to focus on the greater good.

  And now, as the door to my cell opened, I knew this was my shot. My only fucking chance to make this right, to get out of here with Celia and her sister and prostrate myself at my brother’s feet. I’d serve him the way he deserved, the way I hadn’t up until this point.