She stiffened and looked over her shoulder at something I couldn’t hear, then leaned in to whisper quickly. “You’ll have a week of almost invulnerability before the blood goes thin—and don’t think ill of me. No matter what stories you hear.”
I nodded because I knew I was supposed to, even if everything was still too much for me to take in. The door behind her opened up, and Asher arrived. What would he make of daytimer-me?
“Edie?” he asked, looking at me in relief. “You’re alive.”
I nodded hesitantly. “So far?”
He crossed the room to me in a rush and took me in his arms and I knew everything would be all right.
“Oh Edie—” His arms folded around me and he held me to his chest. “I couldn’t just let you die.” My beloved, ever strong for me, broke down into sobs. I hopped off the table I was on and fit under his arm just like I always did. He held me close and kissed my face, his hot tears sticking between us.
If our positions were reversed, I would never let him die. It was unfair, even if this … was unthinkable. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I tried to soothe him, running my hands through his hair. “We’ll just pretend this never happened. We’ll be fine.”
He held me like he wanted to press me inside himself, and I would have been fine with that. After all we’d been through I didn’t want him to ever let me go again. “I can’t believe we made it. We survived.” I assumed that if all this had been done for the sake of our child, I in turn still carried it. “Did anyone else make it out?”
Asher nodded, as Anna answered me. “They were turned into daytimers like you were, earlier yesterday. Your smaller raft took longer to find.”
I blinked and pulled away from Asher’s chest. “Turned?”
“They were all infected, as were you.”
At least I knew vampires existed before one turned me. “Wow.” I shook my head and dove back into Asher’s safe chest. Everything was over. We were finally safe. Changed, but safe. If we were alive—there was hope. I smiled and looked up at Asher, but he didn’t look happy yet.
“Hey—I’m scared too. But we’ll figure it out somehow,” I told him. And I remembered what the Shadows had told me—“It’s a boy. We’re having a boy.”
Happiness lit his face, “Oh, Edie—” There was a knock at the door behind him, and he bit his lips and bowed his head again.
“Is the family reunion over?” someone asked, and didn’t wait for permission to come in.
“Edie, meet Raven,” Anna said, introducing the stranger who entered.
Raven smiled at me, as toothy as a shark. “We’ve already met.”
“I apologize, but,” Anna went on, her gaze serious and dark, old beyond her years, “my coffin didn’t make it here in time. I was two thousand miles away from you when I was notified. I had to call in favors before I could get here myself.”
Raven smiled at her in turn. He looked like one of those vampires in the movie Asher and I had watched, with long black hair and clothing that was shiny. “Whoever would think that someday I would be in a position of power over you?”
The private kindness Anna showed toward me left her. “One human life isn’t precisely a position of power.”
“You’re fond of her or you wouldn’t be here. It’s too late for lies.” His lips rose up, and between the paleness of his skin and the oil slick of his clothing, he looked like the reflection of something a whale spit up on the beach. He turned toward me, still snarling. “You’re now my servant. And it’s time to go.”
“Wait—what?”
“Time to go,” he commanded again. And just as when Claire had ordered me, I couldn’t disobey. I let go of Asher and stepped away. Asher stepped with me, trying to hold me back.
“No—” I protested.
“There’s no need to be cruel,” Anna said.
“Let me remind you whose territory you are in, Beastly One.”
Anna stood taller and got that look in her eye that said she was going to make people pay. “The last Beast alive. I am no stranger to blood.”
Raven gave her a withering smile. “Right now if I die, she dies. My blood inside her is very fresh.” He snapped his fingers. “Girl, come.”
I took another awful step. Asher was still crushing me. “They told me it’s only until you have our baby. If you want to keep it. It’s up to you.”
“Then what?” Hope—any hope—I needed it.
“Then I change you all the way, and take you back as mine,” Anna said, loud enough that the entire room could hear.
“Change me now.” I looked over at Raven and the follower he’d brought with him. I didn’t want to go with them, and I didn’t want to be commanded to do things that I couldn’t disobey. Being a vampire with Anna was better than that. “Just change me now.”
Anna’s voice was rich with sorrow when she spoke again. “If I change you now, the child dies. Children don’t survive the changing process. Ever.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. This was Asher’s and my only chance. Our child’s only chance. Whatever it was, whatever he would become—this was the only way.
“I heard stories from the others that were saved. If she could let anything die, we wouldn’t be here,” Raven said drolly.
“Just nine months?” I asked Anna. “Eight, if you count time served?”
“Until you have the baby,” she said, and then looked to Raven. “I expect you to give her back to me alive.”
“Technically, enough of her will be,” Raven said.
Asher pressed his forehead to mine. “I’ll watch over you somehow. I’ll make sure you’re all right.”
“There’s no prohibition about me killing this man, is there?” Raven asked the air as though it might answer him back.
It was just eight months. Eight months and then I’d be free. I could survive anything for eight months, couldn’t I? Couldn’t … we?
I kissed Asher fiercely, surprising him with my strength. And he knew my kiss for what it was, a promise and a good-bye. We’d had kisses like this before. We’d lost each other—and we’d found each other again. Things had been perfect for a time. If we were both alive, we could get that back.
I twisted my head as if to drink him in, grinding my lips and teeth against his until blood ran between us and found I didn’t mind.
“Now,” Raven said, and the sound of his voice was like a snapping leash pulling an unseen collar I wore.
“Just eight months,” I whispered, stepping back from Asher. He nodded, his intent turning steel. He could wait eight months—but after that, hell wouldn’t stop Asher from coming to save me and our boy.
Anna placed herself in my path and stopped me. “I wish I could tell you that it would be easy, or that Raven would be kind. But it would behoove him to do as I say, or risk my wrath. I am the first of my line, and I already have many followers. I can endlessly make more, and would do so, for the sake of you.”
I nodded at her. That was all Raven’s invisible leash would let me do. Pulled by something I couldn’t explain, I was forced to walk to his side.
“At last,” he said, and then bowed to the room. “Anna, lovely to be threatened by you, as always. Wolf, get the car.”
Raven pulled me outside into the rain. It seemed not to hit him, but I definitely felt myself getting wet. Tears I’d been hiding for Asher’s sake leaked from my eyes.
A black car—of course—pulled up, and Raven opened up the back door for me. “Get inside.”
I did as I was told, and sat down. I buckled my seat belt, which made Raven laugh. When he was done, Wolf, beside me in the back, pulled out a black velvet hood.
“Can’t have you seeing the way to our lair,” he said, sliding it over my head. My hands weren’t trapped at my sides, but there was no point in fighting him—if I did, they would be.
A blackness darker than the night or the ocean depths came down.
I’d survived, and my child lived, but we weren’t going home.
Read on
for an excerpt from the next Edie Spence novel
BLOODSHIFTED
By Cassie Alexander
Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
We were alive.
It didn’t matter that I was blindfolded and being kidnapped by vampires, as long as my child and I were still alive.
Right?
We just have to get through the next eight months, baby. The car I was sitting in shifted gears. I felt it speed up, and knew each mile was carrying me farther away from everything I knew and everyone I loved. My past was spooling out behind me like a ribbon and I didn’t know if I’d be able to catch the end of it before it ran out.
If Anna was smart, she’d made Asher go back with her on the next flight home. I imagined him looking out a plane window at the same blackness I saw inside my blindfold, wondering if he’d done all he could, if there’d been another way. I wanted to touch him again so badly it burned.
I reached up for the necklace he’d given me instead. The vampire sitting beside me growled in warning and I carefully set my hand back down.
Eight months was longer than Asher and I’d even been dating. But when I’d found out I was pregnant, everything felt right. He loved me and I loved him, and we were going to get married on a beach in Hawaii. I’d have said everything was going according to plan, only there wasn’t one at the time. But everything had felt right—up until the cruise ship we’d been on had been taken over by a madman who’d released a parasite designed to ensure the death of everyone on board.
We’d had to fight for our lives and I’d gotten infected. By the time our life raft was found, Anna had called in long-distance favors asking for local vampire thrones to save survivors, vampire blood being the only cure for the supernatural ailment. The blood worked, but it came with a huge side effect—it bound you to the vampire that gave it to you.
So now, not that long after treating daytimers back at floor Y4, I’d been forced to become one.
Anna had offered to change me into a vampire as soon as she’d arrived, and her blood would have trumped Raven’s, the vampire who’d healed me. But pregnancies never survived the change, what with the dying and all, and vampires couldn’t get pregnant. So this was Asher’s and my only chance to have a child. All I had to do was get through the next eight months in one piece and then Anna could still come and rescue us by changing me after I had the baby. I didn’t know how I would manage to be a wife or a mother as a vampire afterward, but I’d be free, and it would be enough. When I was back with Asher, we could work everything else out somehow. I had to believe we could—because eight months being enslaved to a strange vampire without thinking I had a semblance of a life to go back to would kill me.
I slid my arms across my stomach to hug myself, and my right hand found the cool metal of the seatbelt buckle.
“You can’t escape.” A fact, stated by my now-master, Raven. He was driving and his accomplice Wolf was sitting beside me in the backseat. I kept my hand on the buckle in a small act of defiance. But the truth was if he ordered me to let go of it, I’d have to. Or if he told me to open the door and throw myself out onto the open road, I’d have to do that too. I’d survive it—Anna had told me I’d be almost invulnerable for a time, as Raven had given me so much blood to heal me he’d taken me to the edge of turning me himself—but it would still probably hurt.
I’d been hurting for so long that being well now was strange. My last days on the Maraschino had been punctuated by pain—morning sickness, a black eye, a dislocated shoulder, the parasitic infection that had taken most of the other cruise passengers’ lives, then being stranded on a life raft for days with no water or food. It was ironic to finally feel whole just as everything in my life was becoming irrevocably fucked.
By now my family would know that the Maraschino had sunk with everyone on board. There’d never be any safe way to explain what had happened and how I’d survived, much less the vampire blood thing. It would be kinder to just let them think I was dead, and that was an ache that blood couldn’t fix.
As I thought about my mom, that she wouldn’t ever get to meet her grandson—the velvet bag Wolf had blindfolded me with suddenly felt too tight. My heartbeat sped up before I could control it and I knew the vampires would know—
Cold fingers pressed against mine on the buckle. I knew they would, I felt them coming with some other strange sense, but I still jumped. Wolf chuckled as he pried my fingers off and he ran his hand underneath the sash across my chest, yanking it tight, touching far too much of me along the way. “Safety first,” he warned sarcastically.
I stayed absolutely still, like a rabbit when a hawk passes overhead. He noticed that too and I could feel the contour of the seat beside me shift as he leaned even nearer.
“Stay scared,” he whispered. “Servants last longer when they’re scared.”
I twisted my head away from him and toward the window. He laughed as though he’d just made the most amazing joke—and I realized he was laughing at me. The ice of my fear dissipated, thawed by my rising anger, and my heartbeat slowed down, becoming deliberate.
If I died, it would kill Asher. I’d promised him I’d survive—that we both would. Anything we have to do, baby, we’ll do it.
“Fear makes servants more eager to please, doesn’t it, Wolf?” Raven chided, from the front seat. His voice rumbled over both of us with power, giving me a chill.
“Yes, Sire,” Wolf agreed, returning to his own side of the seat. I felt the car downshift and take a left-hand turn. I didn’t know where were going but I knew for sure we’d be there by dawn.
* * *
Raven raced the night. I could feel us swoop around other cars on the road, taking turns at speed. I’d started off trying to memorize things, like I could breadcrumb-trail my way back to my old life, when I realized we were going in circles, probably more to make sure that we weren’t being followed than to trick me. But we were slowing down now, making turns more frequently—we’d reached civilization, wherever that was.
Then the car slowed drastically and descended, and I realized a parking garage below ground made sense for vampires. We wheeled sharply to the left, and came to a precise stop as Raven hit the brakes and shifted into park.
“Home sweet home,” Raven said, and got out of the car, slamming the door behind himself.
Wolf exited the car as well. I sat still, waiting, until I was startled by a knock at the window to my right. “You can open up your own door.”
I felt blindly for the door handle and opened it. I’d been sitting next to an unlocked door this whole time. Had they’d been hoping I’d run? How foolish had I been to not even try? But there was nowhere I could go that Raven couldn’t find me—another one of the perks of being his daytimer. I fought not to grind my teeth.
You’d better grow up to be a really awesome person, baby. I got out of the car and stood beside it, and the blindfold was snatched off me.
Lank pieces of my own hair slapped my face. Being turned into a daytimer hadn’t magically fixed my personal hygiene. I stank of sweat, and my clothes were crusted with salt water from my time at sea. I took in the dim room at a glance and saw I was right, we were in a subterranean garage. There were several expensive exotic cars in a row, and Raven was nowhere to be seen.
“He has business to attend to,” Wolf informed me. I didn’t know if I should grunt or nod—but I did know I didn’t want to be alone here with him. I figured Raven wanted me alive to curry favor with Anna, but I didn’t know how much safety, if any, that personally guaranteed me.
“Are you sure?” He angled his head toward the hill we’d driven down, where I supposed the entrance to the garage was. “It’s not too late for you to run.”
And if I did, it wasn’t too late for him to chase me down and hurt me. “You’re not the first vampire to tell me that.”
Years ago, right after I’d started working on Y4, a vampire named Dren had encouraged me to run so he could chase and kill me. I hadn’t run the
n either. My life would have been much different—and probably a lot shorter—if I had. Wolf snorted when it became clear I wouldn’t play his game, then turned and walked deeper into the garage. I curled my hands into fists at my side and felt my short nails bruise my palms as I followed him in.
* * *
Wolf led us through a series of unmarked tunnels, but I felt sure I’d be able to remember my way back to the garage. It was easy now as a daytimer to spot the subtle differences between the walls, things I might not have noticed as a human before—a small chunk of cement missing here, a chip in the unrelenting grey paint there. The last leg of the hall opened wide like an entryway, ending in a half-open oak door with ancient-looking iron fastenings, and I could hear a quiet conversation taking place inside the room ahead of us.
“Is she a spy?” a feminine voice asked.
“She’s no concern of yours, only mine,” I heard Raven say, with a note of warning. The conversation immediately stilled as Wolf led me in.
Raven was in the center of the room, lounging on a backless couch covered in folds of deep purple satin. With his shining black clothing and black hair, the only parts of him that were easy to see were his elegant white hands and his pale face. His lips were pulled into a sneer, but there were dark circles around his closed eyes. Saving me had pained him. Good.
The room itself was huge and carved from stone with no paint. I couldn’t see the ceiling above, the light from the naked bulbs strung up on the walls didn’t travel that far. Given the cathedral-like nature of the room, and the presumable age of its occupants, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there’d been torches illuminating us instead—and I realized that without Raven’s vampire blood in me, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see.
I took in the rest of the room at a glance. With the exception of one daytimer kneeling beside Raven’s couch, the rest of the vampires stood closest to Raven, equidistant to one another as though they didn’t trust anyone within arm’s length, two men and one woman. Wolf I’d already met—he looked like an old school biker, with mutton chops and a beard, his face as grizzled as his leather vest. The other vampire looked like an action hero, buff with a blonde buzz cut, and the female vampire was dressed in night blue, with smooth waves of long copper hair giving her an old Hollywood look. There were two daytimers in a circle outside of that, ready to attend, a man and a woman, him in a vest and her in a dress, and they appeared to match their owners. I wondered if that was on purpose, or just how things worked out. It was easy to tell the vampires and their daytimers apart, as the vampires only looked at me once, taking all of me in and making up their minds about me in milliseconds, content to ignore me—or to pretend to ignore me—after that. But the daytimers weren’t as good at hiding their surprise at having another suddenly join their ranks. Two of them wouldn’t stop looking at me in particular—the one whose vest matched Wolf’s, and the one kneeling at Raven’s side, who looked up at me with complete venom.
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 24
