Blood Feud Page 12

  “No, I was buried in London, in my uncle’s family plot.”

  “And Kala went to get you?”

  “No, she never leaves the mountains or these woods. It’s her power center and the dogs are her totem, you would say. For all of us.”

  The only reason I could follow what she was saying was because of Lucy and her New Age parents. Lucy talked about totems and auras and full moon rituals the way other people talked about ballet classes and summer barbecues.

  “So who found you?”

  “She sent Finn across the ocean with three of her most trusted dogs. They have a way of calling other dogs to them. Finn told me that by the time he found me in Highgate cemetery nearly twenty of the city’s stray dogs were there too.”

  I could picture it: mists, the middle of the night in a posh ancient graveyard in turn-of-the-century London under torchlight, the sound of horses and carriages over the wall. She’d have been wearing some kind of corseted gown with pearls at her throat and elbow-length gloves.

  She was totally made for me.

  “So the dogs found me and dug me out. I remember the sound of their claws and their teeth closing over my arms. And the air, finally, real air I could breathe. That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually breathing and I wasn’t waking up from some nightmare in my uncle’s townhouse in 1795. It was over two hundred years later and nothing made sense.” She shivered, her eyes distant.

  I’d thought our bloodchange was bad, but we knew it was coming and our family had had centuries to adapt and prepare. We got sick, sure, and weak, and some of us came closer to actually dying for real than others; but usually a draft of blood and we were right as rain. Vampiric, but otherwise okay and still ourselves in our recognizable undead life. In fact, Connor’s real worry had been that he was going to have to start dressing like me. I’d given him a black velvet frock coat for his birthday that year and hung it on the back of his door so that it was the first thing he saw when he woke up.

  “Finn gave me blood to drink,” Isabeau continued. “I thought he was insane. He had to force me and I was sick all over his boots. After an hour I was so thirsty I would have drunk a barrel of blood. He brought me here as soon as I was well enough to travel, on a ship with a windowless bedroom and a captain who didn’t ask questions. As soon as I saw Kala, I knew I was finally home.”

  I whistled. “So it’s not just a story told to scare the rest of us?”

  She shook her head. I reached out and traced a fingertip over a half-moon scar above her elbow. I half expected her to break my hand, or at least jerk away. She just went still.

  “Your aunt thinks her scars make her hideous.”

  I went still as well. “You talked to my aunt Hyacinth?” I gaped. “And by that I mean, Aunt Hyacinth actually talked to someone?”

  “Yes. She seems … distraught.”

  “That’s one word for it. She’s barely been out of her room since those rogue Helios-Ra bastards doused her in holy water and left her for dead. She won’t talk to any of us, and she absolutely won’t lift her veil. Not even for Uncle Geoffrey, and he’s practically a doctor. You should have seen her before the attack. She was unstoppable, afraid of no one, and a bear about courtesy and proper gentlemanly behavior.”

  “So that’s where you get it from.”

  “What?”

  “The way you dress, the way you can bow like this is still the eighteenth century.”

  “I suppose.” I shrugged, sternly telling myself not to ask her if she liked it or hated it. I wasn’t going to be that guy.

  “If you had dug me out instead of Finn, I might not have realized right away that it wasn’t still the eighteenth century.”

  Ordinarily, I’d take that as a great compliment; with her though, I just wasn’t sure.

  “Between our matriarch, Madame Veronique, and her medieval lessons and Aunt Hyacinth, I guess it was bound to rub off on one of us.”

  “You’re different than your brothers,” Isabeau insisted. “They don’t live it the way you do. I could tell right away.”

  “You noticed all that in the few hours you saw them?” And I absolutely wasn’t going to wonder who she’d thought was the cutest. Quinn had a way around girls, and it made them stupid. I suddenly wanted to punch him for it.

  “No, it’s kind of nice,” she murmured, and suddenly Quinn’s face was safe from my fist. “It’s like the boys I knew in France.”

  I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the word “boy.”

  “I didn’t know I missed it,” she continued, as if surprising herself.

  I’d never wanted anything more than I wanted to kiss her. I wanted it more than I lusted after Christina Ricci in Sleepy Hollow. And I’m all about the girls in corsets. Isabeau’s long, thick black hair, straight as the waterfall in the caves underneath us, her green eyes and scarred arms and vicious parry with a sword. Hot. Every last bit of her.

  I decided to take my own life in my hands and I leaned in slowly. I didn’t rush, gave her plenty of time to pull away, but I was inexorably closing the distance between us. She smelled like rain and earth and wine. If she’d been in a goblet I would have drained it of every drop. I was a whisper away from her now and she still hadn’t moved.

  I wanted to bury my hands in her hair and draw her up against me but I thought she might not be ready for that. She was a little bit like a wild animal, untamed, unbroken, and as untethered as a hawk in the sky. I wouldn’t want her to be anything else.

  I slanted my lips over hers and it felt right, necessary. I kissed her deeply, slowly, as if we had all the time in the world. Her mouth opened and her tongue touched mine, hesitantly, sweetly. I had to clench my fists to keep from grabbing her. The kiss went darker, wilder—one of us made a small sound but I honestly didn’t know which of us it was.

  There was a tingle in the back of my head, a flush of burning heat over my entire body. I pulled away reluctantly. Her mouth quirked into one of her rare smiles.

  “Dawn,” she whispered.

  I smoothed her swollen lower lip with my thumb. “Dawn,” I agreed.

  The forest was ever so slightly less dark than it had been, more gray than black.

  “We should go inside,” she said, both sets of fangs protruding slightly. It was cute as hell.

  “Got someplace safe for me to sleep?” I asked.

  She linked her fingers through mine.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 15

  LOGAN

  “Have I mentioned that this is the worst idea ever?”

  “A hundred times.” Isabeau rolled her eyes. Charlemagne looked like he was considering it too.

  “If I say it a hundred and one times will it convince you?”

  “No.” She ducked under a low-hanging branch. “You fret worse than my old nursemaid.”

  “I have a great deal of sympathy for your old nursemaid,” I muttered. It was a beautiful night, warm and filled with stars and the songs of crickets and frogs. White flowers glowed in the grass. It was a night made for poetry. We should have been kissing. A lot.

  Instead we were sneaking out of the caves to a blood-soaked clearing where we’d been ambushed not twenty-four hours earlier. Not exactly an ordinary date.

  “It will be fine,” she assured me, her long black hair swinging behind her. “It’s just trancework, nothing to worry about.”

  “Really?” I answered dryly. “Is that why we snuck out and you wouldn’t tell anyone what we’re doing, not even Magda?”

  “I don’t want to worry them. And they wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand,” I shot back.

  “I know. But you’re still here, you’re still helping. You’re not trying to stop me.”

  I shook my head. “I am so trying to stop you—I’m just doing a piss-poor job of it, apparently.”

  When I woke up next to Isabeau in her cave, her hand on my chest, I’d thought the night would go rather differently. I should have known better. There was n
othing soft about Isabeau, not even in her sleep. Well, that wasn’t precisely true. I’d seen a flash of her vulnerability, after all, a flash I didn’t think she was even aware she possessed. She was all shamanka’s handmaiden out of the caves, all warrior and duty. But this was her home and she was comfortable enough to shed a few of her hard outer layers.

  Her room had been simple, nearly sparse. There was a futon covered in quilts and several dog beds in the corners, thick rugs, and a small oil painting of a French vineyard. There were no concert posters or a closet stuffed with dresses, just a hope chest for her clothes, another one for weapons, and a jewelry box filled with amulets and bone beads. Everything about her was different.

  And she’d ruined me for regular girls.

  Even now, as she stalked through the forest, hypervigilant for the stench of Hel-Blar or a sneak attack from the Host.

  “We’re close,” she murmured.

  “I know.” I could feel the stinging in my nostrils, the penny-sharp tang of dried blood. Broken glass glittered in the undergrowth. Charlemagne sniffed his way around the clearing and then sat, tongue lolling out of the corner of his mouth. Clearly, we were alone. What a waste of a moonlit night.

  She frowned at the ground. “Look, dog prints.”

  I followed her gaze to the trampled grass, the paw marks. “Charlemagne?”

  “No, there are too many. And they’re fresh.”

  I took a closer look. “Someone came back here after we left, just to add dog prints?” I rocked back on my heels, chilled. “To frame the Hounds for the attacks, same as the death charm in my pocket.”

  She nodded tersely. “Montmartre, probably.”

  “He doesn’t want the treaties,” I agreed. “He’d much prefer we fight each other than him.” I sighed. “So, what now?”

  She was walking the perimeter much as Charlemagne had, her head tilted, sniffing delicately. “Now for the ritual.”

  I frowned. “Are you sure about this? Montmartre could be anywhere. And I didn’t even know magic was actually real before your trick with the love charm.”

  She shook her head, mystified. The bone beads in her hair clattered together. “I’ll never understand how vampires could be so ignorant of the magic in their own veins, in their own bodies.”

  I shrugged uncomfortably.

  “I can do this, Logan,” she said confidently. “Kala trained me for this.”

  “What if something goes wrong? I can’t exactly wave a magic wand over you. I’m not Harry Potter.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “All you have to do to pull me out is say my name three times. If that doesn’t work, bury both my hands in the earth.”

  “I’m not even going to ask.”

  “It will ground me back into my body. Honestly, what does your family teach you?”

  She pulled dried herbs out of a pouch hanging from her belt and scattered the mixture in the center of the meadow. I could smell mint, clove, peppercorn, and something unfamiliar. She’d put a new amulet around her neck: this one was tarnished silver and hung with tiny bells and garnet beads like frozen drops of blood. There were symbols etched around the edges.

  Next she pulled what looked like tibia bones out of her pack and stuck them into the dirt. They were smooth and polished and painted with more symbols. One was wrapped in copper wire and pearls.

  “Are those human?” I frowned. Vampires didn’t leave bones behind, only ashes.

  “Dog,” she replied. “And wolf.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say to that.

  She lay down on her back between the bones, one at her head, one at her feet. The trees around us glimmered with broken bottles. Her arms were bare as usual, scars proudly displayed, chain mail draped over her heart. She closed her eyes, looking like a feral Sleeping Beauty.

  I unsheathed my sword and paced slowly around her, listening so intently for sounds of another ambush that sweat gathered under my hair. She shifted, making herself more comfortable and murmured something too softly for me to hear.

  She lay there for a long time, quietly and eerily still.

  Just as I was beginning to think there was nothing more magical happening than a nap, every nerve ending tingled and the hairs on my arms stirred. It suddenly felt like I was entirely covered in static electricity.

  I turned to Isabeau, sword swinging out protectively.

  She was alone, safe. But I could have sworn a silver glow pushed out of her skin, making her shine. She didn’t seem concerned; in fact she smiled, the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. I admit I was relieved. I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about fighting an invisible enemy.

  There were clearly gaps in the famous Drake education.

  I could just imagine what Mom would have to say about that.

  And then the grass around her flattened outward in a circle, as if pushed by a strong wind. When it hit me, I staggered back, hitting a tree. A bottle fell from a branch overhead and tipped blood into the grass. I straightened, cursing.

  Isabeau stood up as well. She seemed to be glowing even more than before. It was a little distracting.

  “I guess it didn’t work,” I told her.

  She blinked at me. “Actually, it worked a little too well.”

  I was beginning to notice that everything around me seemed insubstantial, faded. And that I appeared to be glowing a little bit too, like those nature films about incandescent phloem under the surface of the sea. “I don’t think I want to know what you mean by that.”

  “You’re dreamwalking with me, Logan.”

  “Yup, that’s what I didn’t want to know.”

  She looked confused. “This has never happened before.”

  “Yeah, that’s the opposite of comforting.” I could see through my hand.

  Not good.

  I tried to clench my fingers tighter around the sword. Everything glittered around the edges, like the night sky was reaching down to touch everything. In fact, the sky seemed closer than it ought to be.

  “Put that away,” Isabeau told me. “It won’t do you any good anyway. Weapons are useless when just a wayward thought can kill.”

  “Well, shit, that’s just great.”

  “The best weapon’s a mirror.”

  “Huh?” I was only half paying attention.

  “So you can see a person’s true face. Don’t trust appearances here, Logan, any more than you would in your regular body.”

  “Okay, sure.” The trees had a green glow, pulsing slowly like a heartbeat. In fact, everything seemed to have some kind of bright, candy-colored aura. “Did you slip some of that mushroom tea into my blood supply when I woke up?”

  “No, this is perfectly normal,” she assured me.

  “Right,” I countered dubiously.

  “Well, not exactly normal,” she amended. “I’ve never taken someone into a dreamwalk with me before.”

  “I feel totally weird,” I told her, staring at my body, which was shooting off sparks.

  “You’ll get used to it. We should hurry though, it’s not good to stay too long on your first journey.”

  “Why?”

  “You might turn into a toad.”

  I gaped at her in horror, tried to stutter a reply but couldn’t form the words. It took a full two minutes for me to realize she was joking. She actually chuckled out loud.

  “Oh, sure, now you giggle like a girl. You have a sadistic sense of humor.”

  She grinned, unfazed. “You’re not the first to say so.”

  I turned, saw myself leaning against the tree, lace cuffs spilling out of my sleeves, sword tip resting in a clump of violets. It was like the near-death experiences people talked about on all those psychic shows. Only I was already technically dead. I wasn’t moving and my eyes were open, watching nothing. “Okay, that’s just creepy.”

  “Don’t look at yourself for too long,” she suggested. “It’ll make you queasy.”

  “I can see why.�
�� I turned away deliberately. “So now what?”

  “Now we hunt for psychic traces, for anything that looks out of place, anything with an absence of light or a strange scent.”

  The blood from the bottle traps was a different color, like I was looking at a photographic negative. It was molten silver and it made everything else look darker, more translucent. Isabeau was crouched, sifting through the undergrowth with her fingers, plucking bits of broken glass as if they were petals off a flower. I tried not to be distracted by the way her eyes went green as mint leaves, by the way the stars seemed to leak light, by the hundreds of spiders and beetles and moths moving all around us.

  She shoved to her feet, wiping her hands. “Nothing,” she said, frustrated.

  I paid closer attention to our surroundings, to the scents. I could smell mud and the river and pine needles and the humming off Isabeau’s skin. And aside from the fact that everything looked like it was covered in glow-in-the-dark paint, it was all pretty normal. Footsteps, scuffs in the dirt, all the marks of our battle in the proper places.

  Except.

  I paused. The spot where Jen had disintegrated was dull, as if the shimmering light had dried to powder. I felt sick to my stomach.

  “Isabeau.”

  She hurried over, startled at my tone. “What is it?” She stopped. “Oh. A violent death leaves psychic marks that can take years to fade,” she said quietly.

  “But she’s not stuck here, right?” I asked sharply. “This is just residue?”

  She nodded. “Oui.”

  I released the breath I would have been holding if I’d still been able to breathe. “Okay. Good.” She had a weird look on her face, her nostrils flaring. “Isabeau?”

  “I didn’t notice before,” she murmured. If vampires could go green with nausea, she would have.

  “What, damn it?”

  “It wasn’t just cow blood in the bottles,” she said. “Montmartre’s blood was in there as well. Just enough to be certain the Hel-Blar would follow the scent.”

  I frowned. “You know, that doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense. Just once I’d like an answer, not more questions. We know Montmartre is after Solange, and he’s making sure the rest of us don’t negotiate a treaty. We can assume Greyhaven is doing his dirty work here, but that still doesn’t explain why he has it in for you.”