Daughter of Shadows (To Darkness Bound Book 1)

by Zandria West

  ‘You must, my son…’ I hear a sound like a deep sigh resonating in the chamber around me, and then she is gone.

  34

  ALEXANDER

  She’s losing too much blood. I can feel her heartbeat weakening, her breathing becoming so shallow it is almost beyond my hearing.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you care so much, vampire. It’s not what your kind is known for,’ Garenda smiles daggers at me, but something in her expression has changed. There’s a guardedness in her eyes that doesn’t match the confidence she had a moment before. ‘It must be the warlock Gabriel’s doing,’ she says. ‘Do you enjoy being his plaything?’

  I watch her. ‘I don’t know. I thought the Barrier was meant to be the single greatest enchantment ever woven. The pride of witches everywhere. So how about you? Do you enjoy being the plaything of demons? Because that is clearly what you are.’

  ‘You don’t think a simple desire to watch the world descend into chaos is enough motivation? There will be power in that chaos, for those who are willing to take it. Think about it, Alexander. Truly imagine how it will be, when the Barrier is gone. Imagine how they will fear you, all those weak, defenceless humans….’

  I hold her gaze. My need to go to Lana is becoming desperate. It’s all I can do not to fall on my knees beside her and offer her my blood. I know that if I did, Garenda would kill her on the spot.

  So instead, I smile. ‘If the Barrier goes down, the demons will eat you alive, Garenda. You may feel special but to us you’re just another weak, defenceless human. As soon as you’re not useful anymore, you’ll be discarded.’

  ‘You think you could hurt me?’ she hisses.

  Her face contorts for a moment. Suddenly Jamie staggers beside her, released from the magic that had bound him. He holds his hands up and looks at them, then looks at the witch.

  ‘What have you done to me? What the hell is going on? You promised you’d help…’

  Garenda’s face is strained, as though she’s fighting some internal battle that I’m not witness to.

  ‘Help? Of course I’ll help,’ she says, then reaches out a hand and there’s a sudden crackle, then Jamie cries out and collapses. He spasms a couple of times, his spine arching like he’s stuck a fork in an electrical socket, and then he lies still. I listen for his heart beat, but I don’t hear it.

  She’s killed him. I can’t believe it. She’s fucking killed him.

  Garenda closes her eyes and makes a low noise, a cross between a groan and a growl, and behind me I hear a movement. Reuben!

  Something’s happening. Something is disrupting her power. She puts her hands to her throat and tries to speak but all that comes out is a gargling sound. A line of blood so dark it looks almost black trickles from the corner of her mouth. She drops to her knees, clutching herself and shivering, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  What the actual fuck? Is this a trick of some kind?

  Reuben staggers forward, coughing so hard I think he’s going to puke. Garenda’s magic is broken. I lunge past where Jamie’s body lies, to Lana. I pick her up and cradle her in my arms. She feels so light, like a child. There’s blood everywhere, her blood, freshly spilled. She’s bleeding still and for a moment I feel the haze of blood-lust descending on me like I’ve never felt it before. There’s an ache in my jaw and in my chest and all I want is to sink my teeth into her and drink until I am filled with her essence, until we are one and the same. There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more.

  I hear Reuben let out a bloodcurdling growl behind me, and then his strong hands are on my shoulders. ‘Hurt her and I’ll kill you, brother.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’ve got it under control,’ I gasp, feeling the agony of it as I draw myself back, let go of the desire I feel, and instead become cold and hard. I’m back from the edge, for now at least.

  And then, I sense something I haven’t in too long. Gabriel. I can feel him through the bond. Thank the gods. We’re fucking lost without him. The last few hours provide pretty solid evidence of what happens when he leaves me in charge. Chaos and disaster. I look back to where Garenda lies unmoving on the ground.

  ‘We have to go,’ I say. ‘Before the witch comes around.’

  I don’t let myself hope that she might already be dead. Sorceresses of her power don’t die easily. I don’t dare to touch her – who knows what kind of protective wards she’s wearing. I’ve seen some crazy witchcraft in my time. Getting Lana as far away from here as possible as quickly as we can is the only thing that matters now.

  I see Reuben crouching over where Lana’s brother Jamie lies. ‘Bad. This is bad,’ he says shaking his head. He looks up at me with an expression of anguish.

  ‘I fucking know it’s bad,’ I say. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about it now.’

  Guilt twists like a cold knife in my gut. I let this all happen. I never should have. I could have stopped it. I should have stopped it. I don’t want to imagine what it will do to Lana when she finds out Jamie’s dead.

  If she’s even alive to find out.

  On the floor, Garenda groans.

  ‘We have to go. Now!’ I yell.

  I push through the door and carry Lana out towards the car. A cool breeze has risen during the night, and it whips me in the face. I taste sea-salt on the air, and it mingles with the scent of her blood. Reuben lopes along beside me, muttering under his breath.

  ‘You drive,’ I call to him, as I open the back door of the car, and angle Lana in as gently as I can.

  He grunts, which I’m taking as a yes, then turns and begins to walk back towards the cabin.

  ‘Reuben? What the hell are you doing?’

  He crouches down beside the car that Garenda must have driven to get here, and I see a flash of metal as he draws a knife from a scabbard at his waist. Quickly and methodically, he slashes her tyres. He moves on to Jamie’s car and does the same thing. I groan and roll my eyes. Like that’s going to help. When Garenda comes around she’s going to be mightily fucking pissed, and a rabidly angry witch won’t let a little thing like a flat tyre stop her from seeking vengeance.

  Finally, Reuben climbs into the front seat and turns the key. The engine roars.

  ‘How long is it since you drove a car?’ I ask suspiciously. He’s looking around as though he’s surrounded by a bunch of things he’s never seen before.

  ‘A few years,’ he growls.

  I settle Lana so that her head is resting against my shoulder. She’s so pale, her skin seems almost translucent. Her heart flutters like a baby bird.

  ‘Well, the basic principles haven’t changed. Just fucking drive,’ I say, and hear the engine purr as he takes the handbrake off and puts the car into reverse.

  I close my eyes. I know what I have to do. I take a breath and feel myself shift. There’s the sudden ache in my jaw as my teeth descend.

  I study Lana’s face. She looks so peaceful. I don’t want her to look peaceful. I want her to look furious, agonized, confused, terrified. Anything but fucking peaceful. Dead people look peaceful and she is not allowed to die.

  I hold my wrist to my mouth and bite. There’s a moment of sharp pain, then the blood begins to flow.

  I see a faint light glowing in the sky. The sun is beginning to rise. If it wasn’t for Gabriel’s helpful enchantments, I’d be toast any minute now. I hold my wrist to Lana’s mouth. At first, she does nothing. For a long time, she does nothing. Please, please, please, I beg every God I ever heard of, even the ones that I despise. With my wrist against her lips, I close my eyes. She can’t die. She’s not allowed to die. There’s a roaring inside my head, pain pounding in my chest. I want to scream. But all I can do is cradle her head and let my blood flow into her.

  Finally, I feel the tiniest movement.

  ‘That’s right. That’s the way. Come back to us angel….’ I whisper. With my free hand, I stroke her forehead and her cheek, tangle my fingers in the blue chaos of her hair.

  Then I feel her beginning to suck and to sw
allow. I let my blood fill her mouth, feel the burning path it makes as it enters her body. She shivers, then opens her eyes wide and looks up at me.

  I turn away. She hasn’t seen me like this before. I don’t want to face the horror and revulsion I’m sure I’ll find in her eyes. She’s alive, that’s all that matters. She’ll understand, I hope, that I only fed her to save her.

  ‘She’s back,’ I call to Reuben, my voice rough.

  She squirms a little and I think she’s trying to pull away from me. I feel her arms clasp around my neck, and her head nestle closer in against my chest. Finally, I let myself look at her. I brace myself for what I might find.

  She looks up at me, her eyes shining against her still-pallid skin.

  All I see is love. Something inside me shatters. I can’t remember the last time anybody looked at me like that, truly looked at me. She is my soul, my home. I almost lost her. I hold her tighter.

  Her expression changes. She looks around the car.

  ‘Where’s Jamie?’ she asks.

  35

  LANA

  Everything hurts.

  I close my eyes and rest my head against Alex’s chest and try not to think. I hear him talking to Reuben, but I don’t listen to their words. I don’t know where we’re going. It doesn’t matter. None of it does.

  Jamie’s dead and it’s my fault.

  If I hadn’t organised this fucking pointless rendezvous, my brother would still be safe. Jamie’s dead because of me. I don’t know if I can live with the pain.

  I haven’t even cried yet. It’s like I can’t. The shock goes deeper than tears, deeper than words. I’ve lost something I never imagined I’d lose. The brother I’ve known since before I took my first breath. The last member of my family. I’m alone in the world now. Completely alone.

  ‘No,’ Alex grips my hand. ‘Not alone. Never alone, angel.’

  I look down at my arms where the beautiful Bondmarks should be, and now there’s nothing but a scarred mess. Alex’s blood has sped my healing, which is probably why I’m not dead, but it hasn’t brought them back. It seems stupid to miss something that I never chose and that I didn’t have for long anyway, but I miss those marks more than I can say.

  ‘Did Clarissa break the bond?’ I ask, my voice coming out as little more than a whisper.

  ‘Does it feel like she broke the bond?’ Alex tightens his arm around me. I feel the warmth of his presence humming like a drug through my veins. I close my eyes again. I reach for them with my mind – I feel Alex, so close, comforting and protecting me. Reuben, his mind fierce with rage at what has been done to me, and somewhere, Gabriel, like a spark of hope. I can feel him again now.

  Our bond is still strong. And every last trace of Clarissa is gone.

  ‘Is she dead?’ I ask, not allowing myself to hope for it.

  ‘She will be soon enough if I have anything to do with it,’ Reuben growls from the front seat.

  ‘First we find Gabriel,’ Alex says. ‘We need to know what happened and I have a feeling that whatever it was, he had some hand in it. Then we plan our next move.’

  ‘Would he really have the power to fry the likes of Garenda…?’ Reuben asks from the front seat.

  ‘Who fucking knows what that man can do,’ Alex sighs, shaking his head.

  I feel so tired. Having to think about strategy, action, danger is almost more than I can bear.

  ‘She could have just killed me. Why didn’t she kill me?’ I wonder aloud. She had me completely at her mercy. I don’t understand why I survived when my brother didn’t?

  ‘She almost did kill you,’ Alex says, his voice hard and cold. He runs his fingers gently over the delicate skin on the inside of my forearm. The pain is gone, but I remember the agony I felt as she tried to tear the signs from my body.

  ‘The bond goes deeper now,’ I whisper. A dark energy moves through me. I feel it in my core. Before it was just on the surface, and now it’s inside me, inhabiting me. I remember what the old woman, Freya, said when Gabriel was injured: The magic is on the skin, but it will work its way to the heart.

  ‘We need Grayson,’ Reuben rumbles from the driver’s seat. ‘We need to complete the binding, combine our powers.’

  Alex closes his eyes and rubs his fingers over his temples as though he’s in pain. ‘Of course we fucking need Grayson. But needing him doesn’t help us find him. He could be anywhere.’

  ‘He’ll come,’ I say. ‘He’ll know I need him.’

  ‘We’ll be lucky if he knows his own name,’ Reuben growls.

  I frown. ‘Why? What’s wrong with him?’

  There’s a long silence in the car.

  ‘What is it?’ I say, sitting up and looking at Alex, whose eyes dart to look out the window at the passing countryside.

  Reuben answers. ‘We didn’t part on good terms. Grayson was… self-destructing.’

  ‘Doing a fucking stellar job of it, too,’ Alex mutters. ‘Might have passed through Hell on Earth on the odd occasion. Though now that I think about it, he probably wouldn’t have met the dress code.’

  ‘There isn’t a dress code,’ I say.

  ‘Angel, there’s always a dress code,’ Alex says, looking at me like I’m an idiot.

  ‘He’ll come,’ I say again. I just know it’s the truth. I don’t know if he’ll be any use when he does, but I’m certain he won’t be able to resist the compulsion of the binding. It’ll be even stronger now that the other three are with me, and after everything that’s happened. I look out the window. We’ve almost reached the city. I guess they’re taking me back through the Barrier into Darktown, into their world. I have no idea what will happen next.

  Then something pings an alert in my brain. Hang on, there’s something I have to do in my own world first. Something really important. The most important thing of all. I can’t believe I almost forgot it.

  ‘Turn right,’ I say. ‘Take the next turn. We need to get off the freeway. I have to go to Jamie’s house.’

  Reuben lets out a low growl from the driver’s seat.

  ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea,’ Alex says. ‘I know you’re upset, but…’

  ‘No. It’s not that, it’s the urn. My father’s urn. Jamie told me he’d taken it from my apartment. There’s a USB on the urn that has a message for me from my father. Gabriel thinks it might be telling me how to find the key.’

  I feel a rush of excitement. The two men are silent, but Reuben takes the turn like I asked him to. I direct him through a series of intersections to the fancy, hillside suburb where my brother rents a house that’s much too big for a single twenty-year-old man.

  Rented a house, I remind myself, feeling sick.

  We pull up out front.

  ‘We’re coming in with you,’ Reuben says.

  ‘I’ll be okay. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Angel, you’re even crazier than I thought you were if you think for a moment we’d let you walk in there alone and unprotected.’

  For a second, I almost tell Alex that he was meant to be protecting me at the cabin and we all know how well that went, but then I see his expression and bite my tongue. He looks exhausted, and guilty, and frightened.

  If I’m honest with myself, I’m relieved that I don’t have to do this by myself. ‘Just don’t touch anything, okay?’

  The two of them nod.

  Jamie would hate the fact that I’m letting demons into his home, but he’s dead, so he’s not hating anything anymore. Anyway, he was wrong. Wrong about them, and about so many other things. I feel a sudden, harrowing pang of sorrow. I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can face it. The thought of seeing all my brother’s things, of being inside the house he was so proud of… but then I think of the urn. My father’s ashes. Answers. I steel myself.

  Alex reaches and takes my hand, and I sense Reuben stepping into place behind me, ready to protect me from anything the world might throw at me.

  We’ll do this together. We walk towards the
front door.

  36

  LANA

  I thought Gabriel would never let go of me. In fact, I hoped he wouldn’t. The way he looked at Alex when we walked through the door of the safehouse – I was scared that the next thing on his list after comforting me was staking his friend.

  ‘It wasn’t Alex’s fault,’ I tell him again, because it doesn’t seem to have sunk in from the first dozen times I said it. ‘I didn’t leave him any choice.’

  ‘You could have been killed –’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I say, squeezing him tighter.

  ‘I never should have left you…’

  ‘You had no choice either. You saved us, Gabriel. You do understand that?’

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ Gabriel says. ‘Though after everything you’ve been through today, I don’t know…’

  I pull away and look at him. I’m struck again, as I was the first time I saw him, by his sheer physical beauty. But now that beauty is darkened by pain and worry.

  ‘It can’t be worse than anything that’s already happened, can it?’ I say, trying to smile. He winces. ‘Ah… or maybe it can?’

  ‘I spoke to the Great Witch,’ he says.

  Reuben stops pacing the room behind us and turns. I see Alex come closer too. They’re both listening intently.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She told me how to find the key.’

  ‘She did?’ My heart races. ‘Can we get it? Is it safe?’

  A strange expression passes over Gabriel’s face, and he reaches for me and draws me to him, holding me so tightly that for a moment I can hardly breathe. I wriggle free and look at him.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s you, Lana. You are the key. I should have guessed it. There was an accident before you were born, while your mother was working with your father excavating the temple complex. There was a rockfall and she was trapped in one of the chambers. The spell must have been triggered. She was pregnant with you and Jamie at the time. Hopefully your father’s message will tell us more...’