blood 03 - blood chosen

by Tamara Rose Blodgett

  Her eyes rose and coolly met his.

  “Having tried to kill Julia was not enough. You've got to stick your nose in everyone's shit, and maneuver and manipulate every scrap of our blood history against your own people.”

  “Scott,” Marcus warned in a low voice. “This is not helpful.”

  Scott stood straighter, as he'd been looming over Jacqueline and the disgust was plain in his voice. “What are you going to do, father?” he asked, his hand flinging in Jacqueline's direction.

  Marcus let the silence roll out like the tide in the ocean, as silent as its progress. “Exile,” he said and Jacqueline stood, trembling with rage.

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to dig for deeper magic, Jacqueline, monarch of Region Two?”

  They faced off and Marcus stalked her like a panther who knew it had time to toy with its prey. Jacqueline held her ground, only the ebony of her eyes reflected her rage like dark glass, her true emotions laid bare in that black gaze.

  “Wait.” All eyes turned to Slash. Adi saw his discomfort in speaking in front of everyone. Adi knew Slash, it might not be obvious to the rest. “Every Were, regardless of what pack they hail from, will know if they are true mates, or if this Singer engages in a sham, for some future plan on her part.”

  Scott folded his arms and Julia asked Marcus, “How long? How long will Jacqueline be somewhere else so I don't have to worry about the next bomb she'll ignite.”

  Marcus paced, palming his chin then stopped abruptly in front of Julia. “There is a place... near here.” Jacqueline stiffened and Julia swept her eyes back to Marcus', nearly as dark as Scott's. “It is a void. None of our powers work there. It's as if...”

  “We were human,” Jen said and Marcus nodded.

  “I thought we were just a sub-species, but still human,” Julia said, looking at the assembled Singers peppered throughout the confines of the formal parlor.

  “We are.” Scott looked at her and suddenly she knew.

  “We're like some kind of X-Men thing?” Julia asked.

  Michael laughed. “I wish. No, it's just...” he looked for help and it was Brendan who expounded. “We think that more humans will evolve into Singers as time passes. As it stands, we're still rare. But necessary,” he finished, his eyes touching on the Were and William, who stood not too far from Delilah.

  “If we were not meant to be what we were and be interconnected, then I would not be here and neither would she,” Delilah said, sweeping her hand to Reagan, who flanked Julia. “Vampire and Singers have been enemies for so long they have forgotten what caused it. Now they are enemies because it has always been.”

  “But no more?” Julia asked, feeling one brow rise in question.

  Delilah shook her head, her black hair like a curtain of ink as it slithered over her shoulders. “No. It will continue, but, as our respective prophesies all compel us to believe: we are meant to unite.”

  “Why?” Julia asked, feeling like she was circling a yet unrevealed truth.

  “What would compel three species of paranormals, known for warring for centuries, to lift up arms together?” Victor asked and Julia was startled to hear his commentary, as was Jacqueline, who visibly flinched at his voice.

  He was Julia's now. Jacqueline had lost him when the circle of the Combatant had formed and she knew it, her already hard heart turning to stone within her.

  Jason pushed away from the wall, his eyes flicking to Julia then away. “There is a threat. A threat that we can't meet unless we unite- all of us.” He didn't say it as though he liked the idea, only that it might be the answer.

  Victor and Slash smiled, seemingly satisfied by his spoken thought.

  Jacqueline gave a sharp look at Marcus and he nodded. “Yes, Jacqueline. There might be something more important than your pursuit of the crown. Something that rings strongly of survival.”

  “Then you need us. Tony and I,” she queried. But her eyes spoke of winning.

  “No,” Scott said and looked at Marcus.

  “Jacqueline cannot be of critical importance even if your postulation proves correct,” William echoed and Julia thought he sounded hopeful; Hopeful that Jacqueline would be taken out of the picture.

  “Whose?” Adi asked.

  “Jason's,” Julia replied quietly. My, wasn't he a fast learner to have seen the pawns on the chest board and known what the next move might be.

  “There is but one way to find out what battle we might face,” Marcus said. “Before Julia weds her soulmate, or chooses to wed all three supernaturals to give true protection to herself and provide peace for our people, there is one thing we must accomplish.”

  “You're going to summon the Reader, father?” Jen asked, breath held.

  He gave a single nod.

  “What, or who, is that?” Julia asked because everyone seemed grim about it.

  “A future teller,” Brendan said and William scoffed, “And what good will that do but alert us to what we do not wish to know?”

  Marcus gave a nod of acknowledgment to William. “You are right. A Reader is only born to Singers once in a millennium, a complement to our Rare One, if you will. They are sequestered for what they are, their identity guarded. But now, we must know why there is a drawing of three. A number of power,” Marcus said.

  “No one wishes to know the hour of their death,” Victor stated logically and Julia couldn't fault it. Mortality shouldn't be an equation to be solved.

  “Or what remains of their life,” Reagan added and they looked at each other in perfect understanding.

  “Then we're asking the Reader because we want to breach that?” Julia asked. “Didn't you just say that we should never make contact with the Reader?”

  Marcus nodded. “We have a Deflector who resides within one mile of the Reader and in that way... some of her needs are met.”

  “Her?” Julia asked and fought empathetic tears, thinking about a stranded Singer. Who lived on a metaphorical island not of her choosing, with only one Deflector to ease her loneliness.

  Suddenly, murmurs rose and fell in a wave of distressed noise.

  Julia turned and got what was the equivalent to a slap in the face.

  A woman entered, one who looked so much like Julia it made her heartbeat stutter.

  “I didn't know,” Scott said before Julia took her next breath. Jason and William looked at Julia as she staggered to the wall, her gaze never wavering from the female figure who appears as a living and breathing mirror image of herself.

  “Who are you?” Julia whispered, her eyes roving the woman head to toe. Then again.

  The woman who looked so much like herself smiled beatifically at Julia. “I am your sister.”

  The room began to spin so Julia sat on her butt in the middle of the rug while Jacqueline stared in awestruck wonder at a relative Julia hadn’t known existed before that moment.

  “I am Heidi, the Reader.”

  “We were coming for you,” Marcus said, his eyes moving between Heidi and Julia.

  “I know,” she said simply, her gaze never leaving Julia's shell-shocked form.

  Scott gathered Julia close and she felt the steady rhythm of his heartbeat as it fell into line with hers, it felt like the only solid thing she had right now. “I don't have a sister,” Julia managed from Scott's embrace.

  Heidi smiled and walked toward Julia, wrapped in the arms of her soulmate.

  Safe.

  For now.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Heidi

  The room seemed to hold its breath. The silence had presence as if it were no longer inanimate, but a living thing. Julia took a giant sucking inhale, trapping that unseen energy inside her lungs as she peered at the woman who shared her gene pool.

  Heidi stopped when she was at arm's length from Julia. “You have many questions?”

  “Double-duh,” Cyn said, rolling her eyes and Heidi looked at her in a measured way. “I come peacefully, as I am meant to. I don't appreciate your sarca
sm, Singer.”

  “Okay- you're a Reader? Read this,” Cyn said, popping first one middle finger, then slowly letting the second one rise. The audience of mixed supernaturals shifted nervously at Cyn's show of disrespect.

  “Well … damn,” Adi said, staring at the two.

  “It's okay, Cyn, I've got this,” Julia said, frowning at Cyn, her tone apologetic if a bit shaky.

  “You don't sound like you've got anything but a case of hemorrhoids brought on by suprise-a-twin here.”

  Heidi sighed, pushing back hair that was intricately braided away from her face, the plaits like linked gold dipped in carmel. “I cannot help what I am, what I mean to our Region. My appearance here is necessitated by my visions of the future, the drawing of the three ….”

  “Six,” Michael said around his sucker.

  Julia lifted her head off the safe, solid warmth of Scott's chest where she'd been clinging like a lifeline. “How?”

  “How did I come to be? Or how is it that I am here at the precise moment that my people need the answers to their questions?”

  “Both, maybe,” Jason spoke, his suspicious eyes taking in the new woman who was identical in every detail to his wife. He didn't trust it, something felt off.

  Heidi looked an unspoken question to Marcus who nodded, sweeping his hand out as if to say you've got the floor.

  “I am not a very strong Reader, in a broad sense,” Heidi began, giving Cyn a look to which a snort could be heard in response. “My area of foresight is for royalty alone.” Her gaze moved past everyone and landed on Jacqueline. Then it touched on Scott, his siblings, and finally- Marcus. “I knew when Julia had arrived. I was acutely aware of the hour she would arrive, yet … I waited.” Heidi gazed, seemingly sightless, into the small crowd gathered inside the parlor. “I wish that I came bearing better news.”

  Julia held up a palm, stepping a little away from Scott, her eyes holding back tears of shock and frustration. “Wait. Before you drop the bomb...”

  “What?” Heidi asked, her brow wrinkling.

  “To unveil a shocking and negative piece of information,” Marcus elaborated.

  “Right,” Julia said. “I'd like to know your history.”

  Heidi inclined her head. “Very well. I am your sister.”

  Julia saw Adi roll her eyes in the periphery. “Clearly.”

  Julia frowned at Adi and she shut up. “That's evident. Did you? How did you come...”

  Heidi smiled. “I was given up when I was just past weaning age. It was the concession our parents made … so that they might keep one of us.”

  She pushed the loose hair that had come escaped from her braid away from her temple, and there, on the opposite side of from where Julia's lay, was the same scar.

  Julia unconsciously touched her own scar. “I got that in my accident.”

  “That is what you were told.” Heidi let her hand drop from the glossy white crescent-shaped scar that kissed her temple. “However, it is not true. It has always been a part of you. Consider it, if you will, a birth mark.”

  Julia's mind churned furiously to understand all the half-truths she'd been fed since she was a child. By her Aunt Lily. She gazed at Heidi as if she was an apparition. They looked identical but this girl spoke differently, like some of the older Singers, her mannerisms were off, her clothing, hair... none of it was similar to Julia. Of course, it could all be chalked up to disparate upbringing, since hers had been isolated and sequestered. Julia's eyes snapped to Heidi's. “My aunt?”

  Heidi shook her head to the negative. “She is not a blood relation.”

  Julia exhaled a sigh of surprised relief. It made a sort of terrible sense, but logic seldom came disguised, but as a great rushing storm, sweeping away all other thought but what it forced you to acknowledge.

  “No shocker there,” Cyn said. “She was always a bitch on wheels to you.” Jen and Brendan turned to Cyn.

  “True,” Jason defended with a shrug.

  “Your guardian was an unkind steward?” Marcus asked and Julia thought about it. Remembering the fights, the strictness that had seemed unwarranted. And finally, Lily's aversion to Jason. She nodded.

  “Yes.” She looked at Marcus curiously. “Guardian?”

  Before he could respond, Heidi answered, “They do not know how your upbringing was handled. Only the guardian, our parents and myself were aware. You had growing up to do, maturing. Your purpose was on a timeline of destiny's making.”

  “Did you know our parents died?” Julia asked quietly, still disbelieving the Reader, her sister. It was too surreal for Julia to capture as a reality.

  “I did. I also know that the fey warrior who guarded you has gone missing.”

  Fey? Julia's tenuous grasp of that new reality slid perilously close to ending, the superimposed images of her aunt with that of mythical guardian combining in dizzying imagery.

  “Julia,” Scott said softly, running the back of his fingers down her face.

  “Yes,” she answered in a whisper, her eyes never straying from Heidi, a telepathic blank to her. She grabbed Scott's stroking fingers like they were the last solid thing in the world and felt her heart slow to a more normal rhythm.

  “Are you okay?” he asked against her ear, no doubt wondering why his fingers were getting crushed.

  “No,” Julia answered honestly and Scott wrapped his arms around her as she released his hand and clung to him. She met Jason's guarded eyes over his shoulder and she couldn't read the expression. Was he as blown away by the last half an hour as she was?

  “Don't tell me the legends are real?” Michael asked with scorn as his face jerked backward in a disbelieving scowl.

  Marcus was silent.

  Jacqueline gazed at the newcomer. “I know why the Reader is sequestered,” she said but no one asked her to elaborate. They did not want to hear what she had to say. Not that it would stop Jacqueline.

  “You know only of what gains you power,” Heidi told her

  Adi laughed. “She's smart.”

  “Yes,” Slash agreed in a troubled voice, adding, “Very.”

  “If you wish to know the minute … the second you shall take your last breath, invite me to tell you. Otherwise, remain silent,” Heidi instructed in a droll tone and Julia felt her eyes widen.

  Jacqueline and Heidi stared at each other, the test of wills zinging like a too-tight wire. In the end, Jacqueline must've not wanted to know her fate.

  “The fey are not legend. They are real- dangerous,” Heidi said and Julia frowned at her comment, her eyes automatically moving to Marcus, who seemed similarly disturbed by Heidi’s pronouncement.

  The Combatant, who lingered close by, shifted uneasily with news of this possible new threat. A threat that had been implied only moments before Heidi's appearance. Hadn't they all been discussing why the drawing of the three was happening at this time? Why the battles between the three groups of supernaturals would necessitate an ending to the centuries of strife? Maybe there was something large enough that any one group couldn't combat it, couldn't stop it.

  “Why would the parents of the Rare One agree to have... fey guardianship?” Marcus asked his face drawing into clear lines of puzzlement.

  “Yes,” Julia said, that.

  “It is because they knew their lives were marked—numbered. To be in control of the Rare One's fate is to know death. So they chose the fiercest of them all to guard you until you became.” It was unnerving to have her own eyes trained on her face. Julia shook off that sense of strangeness with difficulty and felt herself do a slow blink. She knew that vampires, werewolves and Singers couldn't be it. All of it. There had to be some other mess waiting around the next bend. And of course, there was.

  “They knew they would die? So they give me to a fey—what?”

  “Unseelie warrior. She would have died to defend you. Yet, you went undetected until your becoming became known to the Were of the Alaskan den.”

  She'd always known that Jason was a Singer,
Julia supposed. Because Aunt Lily had simply not been what she seemed.

  “The most evil of the fey was guarding Julia?” Victor asked and Heidi nodded.

  “Why would they take that chance?” Slash asked, forcing the gooseflesh down that rose with the mention of the Unseelie fey within spitting distance of the Rare One. After all, the legends of the Unseelie were frightening, even to the Were. Immortals of all shapes and sizes, of various degrees of evil. They ruled The Host.

  “It takes evil to stop evil,” said Delilah cryptically, and William gave her a sharp look, his brow knotting at her comment.

  Heidi spread her hands away from her body. “It was the best choice amongst bad ones.”

  Marcus was pacing, his chin inside his cupped palm, thinking her words through. He stopped suddenly. “So what of it? The fey, who played relative, has now vanished and Julia is safe, here in the bosom of Region One.”

  Julia gave a sharp look at Brendan, whose nose flared at Heidi. Once. Hard.

  “Not so safe,” Jacqueline said.

  Heidi's spooky golden gaze settled on Jacqueline. “Soon,” Heidi's voice cracked like a whip in Jacqueline's direction and she flinched.

  “Well that's a slice of happy,” Cyn said. She loved that Jacqueline would be out of the picture. She liked Heidi better for keeping her word about telling Jacqueline when she would die. Soon couldn't come soon enough.

  “That's a relative term,” Victor said thoughtfully and Jason nodded.

  “They live by the old magick. They will come,” Heidi said as Brendan moved closer to her and Julia frowned. What was going on?

  “Why? Why must they come? How do these legendary creatures hide in the dark recesses of our consciousness and become nightmares in the flesh just when we think there is a respite in sight?” Victor asked in frustration. William's eyes found Victor and a silent communion of agreement passed between the two.

  Heidi sighed, her eyes lighting on Brendan as he drew nearer and she took a step away. “They come for the same reason all who are present are here. The Rare One has become, the Combatant is assembled and her advisor and guardian are present.” Heidi looked from Scott then to William and lastly, Jason. “I am sorry to bring this news but it will change everything for us all. The Unseelie fey are an evil but necessary balance in the world of blood that Singers navigate. Those waters have dangerous currents. The Rare One is but one tool, though mighty, in our arsenal of defense.”