“Which mage?” Aunt Clarissa places a hand on my shoulder.
I lower my gaze to the reinforced, gray floor. “He’s a warlock.”
“What?” Grandma releases my head as though it might infect her with terminal stupidity.
My heart leapfrogs into my throat. I turn my head, barely able to raise my gaze to meet Grandma’s flashing eyes. Maybe I took this half-truth too far, but I must keep going lest they see through my lies.
I raise my shoulder and offer what I hope to be a shy smile. “He’s really handsome, and he took great care of me.” Peering up through my lashes at grandma, I add, “And I think he’s rich.”
Grandma turns toward the helicopter and throws her hands in the air with a frustrated snarl. I feel her pain. It wasn’t easy to portray myself as interested in a guy just because of his money and looks. Everything is too new with Alaric to understand how I feel about him, but the thought of never seeing him again twists at my heart.
Aunt Clarissa’s eyes soften. “You’ve fallen for him?”
I raise my shoulders. “He has a lot of good qualities.”
Grandma whirls around and bares her teeth. The fury in her eyes makes my stomach drop. “How old is he?”
“Umm… nineteen.”
“I forbid you to see this boy—”
“Man,” says Aunt Clarissa with a smile.
“Man.” Grandma points her finger at my face. “Is that understood?”
I lean my head back and focus on her fingertip, which makes my eyes cross. “But I’ll be eighteen soon.”
Aunt Clarissa pats Grandma on the shoulder. “Let the girl make her mistakes.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” Grandma grabs my arm and presses her lips together like it's an effort not to smack some sense into my head.
I hold my breath, hoping that this explanation will satisfy them. Warlocks aren’t necessarily bad, but they’re not governed by the Council of Mages and are free to do whatever they like with their magic. This lack of punishment means they’re more likely to stray. I want to tell them that Jude was a mage and still managed to violate my mind with that love enchantment, but that would only start another round of problems.
Grandma shakes her head, storms toward the helicopter, and boards.
“Never doubt Michaela’s love,” Aunt Clarissa says, not for the first time, and envelopes me in a warm hug.
Inhaling Aunt Clarissa’s vanilla and cinnamon scent, I let my eyes flutter shut and hug back. “She misses Raphaella, I know.”
Grandma pokes her head out from the helicopter door and barks, “We’ve lost two days on this detour, and we’re about to lose three.”
“Do you think the Blessing made her a colder person?” I ask.
Aunt Clarissa frowns. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s vampire blood,” I reply. “Directly from Empress Theodora.”
The color leaches from her face, and her features slacken. In a much lower voice, she asks, “Where did you hear that?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly.” Aunt Clarissa glances over her shoulder, presumably for signs of Grandma. “If they discover that you know, not even Michaela will be able to protect you. Don’t tell anyone, not even your conciliar.”
I give her a frantic nod. If only Aunt Clarissa knew the identity of who really held my bond.
She kisses me on the cheek and steps back. “Take care of yourself, dear.”
My hand closes around her wrist. “You know who took Mom?”
Her eyes harden. “We’re hunting a vampire who is very old, very dangerous, and was last seen in Dublin,” she replies, all traces of warmth gone. “Stay in Jaeger and don’t get involved.”
With another tight hug, she murmurs goodbye and then rushes to the helicopter. Grandma peers at me through the window and raises a hand. I wave back and smile. Aunt Clarissa just confirmed everything Alaric said about the Blessing and Saint Theodora.
I rub the back of my neck and watch the helicopter rise into the cerulean sky and retreat toward the airport. The sun hides behind a cloud the same shade as quickstone, coloring its edges an incandescent yellow. I may have pacified Grandma and Aunt Clarissa for now, but Evangeline just disqualified herself for the Blessing. Driver will offer it to me, just as Doctor and Sister Shevette had originally wanted, and I don’t know what kind of mess I’ll create when I refuse.
“Hey,” says a voice from behind.
I turn to find Poppy holding a brown bag labeled ‘MAGE AND SHAKE.’ Strands of her blonde hair blow across her face, and she fixes me with a wide grin.
A strong wind blows away the remnants of the helicopter fumes, leaving behind the faint scent of grilled beef that teases my nostrils. Saliva trickles in my mouth, and I offer my friend a smile.
“Is there a burger in there for a hungry slayer?” I say.
“Burger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake.” Poppy hands over the bag.
I munch on the juiciest, medium-rare cheeseburger as we walk down the stairs, through the convent’s upper levels, and reach our tower. The flavorful beef overpowers the wheat and yeast of the bun, and I hum my appreciation. My taste for food is still skewed toward meat, but at least I’m not craving blood.
We step into my room, which smells of wildflowers, and it seems like it’s from another lifetime. A breeze blows through the net curtains around the window, reminding me of the time Alaric stole into my room to retrieve his case. The last time I slept under Aunt Clarissa’s white quilt, I thought myself a lightblood. Knowing that the source of my power is vampire blood has made me unsure about everything.
Poppy stands in front of me, her blue eyes imposing. “Bree?”
Lowering myself to the bed, I wrap my lips around the straw and suck a mouthful of cold milk, sugar, and strawberries. Then I tell her everything. Everything. Even when her expression turns grim, and tears fill her eyes, I continue my story and leave out nothing. At the point of my account where I drank Alaric’s blood, my voice falters.
“Go on.” Poppy’s eyes focus at a point above my left shoulder. Maybe it’s because she can no longer stand to look at me.
I drop my gaze to the ivory threads embroidered into a paisley pattern on the quilt and whisper, “I couldn’t stop.”
“Because of the negative ether in his blood,” Poppy says.
“What?” I raise my head.
“It neutralized the positive ether from the bite.” She frowns. “I don’t expect that they teach slayers much about ether manipulation.”
“We only learn the basics,” I scoot toward her. “Light blood is ether-positive and dark blood ether-negative.”
Poppy counts the points on her fingers. “Werewolves are twice as ether-positive as humans, while mages and slayers are nearly neutral.”
I nod. Mages are slightly ether-negative, while vampires are heavily ether-negative. That’s why they can both feed on the ether of other beings. Slayers, on the other hand, are slightly ether-positive. Or at least that’s what they taught us.
“You’re saying that the thing that bit me is more like a werewolf?” I ask.
“In the same classification, seeing that you needed a large quantity of Alaric’s negative blood.” Poppy shakes her head. “If it wasn’t for his quick-thinking, who knows what might have happened?”
Gratitude spills from my heart and spreads its warmth across my chest. She’s not judging me for what I did. I tell her about the seer and how she anchored my humanity to Alaric and replaced the conciliar bond.
Poppy shakes her head. “I felt the bond weaken about an hour after you went missing, so I think the creature who bit you was responsible.” She exhales a long sigh. “To be honest with you, I’m too much like Ayesha to be your anchor.”
Now it’s my turn to frown. “What are you talking about?”
“If my mage power matched your slayer power, the infection might never have taken hold.”
I shake my head. “You don’t know tha
t.”
She scoots toward me on the bed and grabs my hand. “Are you sure Alaric is a good vampire?”
“He doesn’t drink human blood, if that’s what you mean,” I pluck a French fry from the bag and bite through its crispy exterior. “And he’s been good to me.”
Poppy lowers her lashes and nods. “If he can walk in the sun, it means there’s no human blood to combust. I’m glad you found him, and I’m sorry.”
My lips part with surprise. “What for?”
“I tried so hard to convince you he was a warlock.” She rises from the bed, walks to the door. “Let me pull up everything I can find about ether-positive supernatural creatures. If I can work out what bit you, we can work out how to stop it from attacking other slayers.”
Chapter 17
I place the strawberry shake on the floor and follow Poppy out of the door. The clocktower strikes two, its chimes resounding through the tower and signifying the beginning of classes. Poppy and I are supposed to be in Sensory Magic right now, along with the apprentices in our year, so the tower’s top floor landing is deserted.
“Where are we going?” I follow her through the door that leads to the spiral stairwell. Our movements stir the dust motes, which swirl in the sunlight that spills from the tower’s atrium roof.
“Library.” Poppy gallops down the stairs.
Agia Convent’s library occupies an entire tower of its own and is a magically protected, climate-controlled space that houses textbooks, the journals of the convent’s occupants, scientific research, art, and historical artifacts.
We approach it through the third-floor entrance, which opens up into a mezzanine that spans the tower’s circumference. Each level consists of walkways that allow us to access mahogany shelves arranged along the wall in U-shaped nooks.
Poppy’s the book buff, but each time I step into the library, I’m awed by its grandeur, by the mezzanines’ arched ceilings that remind me of the bowels of a ship.
I turn to the other side of the walkway toward the wood railing and gaze at the ground floor’s banks of study desks, computer terminals, and empty rows of benches arranged like a lecture theater.
Poppy and I descend the mahogany staircase to the ground floor, where students stand in line at the librarian’s desk with their books, and sisters of servitude stand by trolleys of tomes and restock the shelves. They keep the modern books here, and the rest of the space is for reference only.
We pass Ancient History and Alchemy to reach the Biology section, which is split into native and supernatural. Poppy pulls out a leather tome called Lycanthropes of the Ages and brings it to the nearest bank of empty desks.
“Sorry if I’m sharing first-year information.” Poppy opens the tome at a drawing of an anthropomorphic wolf that stands on hind legs. “With half of your classes focused on combat, I’m never sure what you know or don’t know.”
“That’s fine.” I turn the page for a close-up of its face.
The werewolf looks nothing like Fortescue’s wolf form. From what I understand about vampire transformations, those who reach the level of master can rearrange themselves at the cellular level, making the transformation rapid, painless, and indistinguishable from a real wolf.
This diagram looks like someone has tried to mold humans into a canine shape and run out of bone tissue. The snout is too short, the teeth too crowded, and the ears too stumped to look anything like a wolf. Most importantly, it looks nothing like the monster who attacked me.
“Alright, then.” Poppy flips the page to a double spread of side-by-side profiles of Homo canis versus Canis lupus, which illustrate the differences I identified.
“Order scientists examined werewolf cadavers and discovered that their brains shrink to one-fifth of their size.” She turns another few pages to an illustration of a werewolf’s head with its tiny brain. Surrounding the shrunken organ is a sac that occupies the rest of its skull.
“What the hell is that?” I whisper, the burger and milkshake curdling in my stomach.
“A venom gland.” She points at the shading at the sac’s base. “These are compressor muscles that push the venom through a series of ducts, and down a canal when the fangs pierce flesh.”
She flips the page to a closeup of a fang bisected by a thin vein. Nausea rises to the back of my throat, and I turn my head. The thing that bit me wasn’t a werewolf, but it put toxins into my body—toxins that Alaric sucked out, and the same toxins that rose to my skin and fed an army of leeches.
“I can stop if you want,” she murmurs.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I shake my head. “Keep going. I need to know how these creatures infect others.”
“Alright.”
The next few pages are text, and the muscles around my stomach stop clamping. In Supernatural Biology, Sister Anning said the likelihood of us finding a werewolf was rare. Mages and slayers hunted them to the brink of extinction, preventing them from multiplying. What’s left of the species lives in magically warded plots of land where alphas employ warlocks to reinforce their barriers during the full moon.
After another few pages, Poppy stops at a photo of a stern-faced woman wearing the charcoal tunic of a sister of servitude. She holds a round flask in one hand and a scalpel in the other. On the table in front of her lies the corpse of a hairless wolf.
Thick, ropey muscles protrude through its leathery skin, and lupine incisors protrude from a snout too small for its teeth. The skin appears darker than the woman’s but it's not wrinkled like that of the monster.
“This was taken in 1863, before the development of zoom lenses,” Poppy says.
I frown at the dead creature. “What is like a werewolf but isn’t wolf-shaped?”
She rests her chin on her palm. “How were its hands?”
“Human.” I rise from the desk and run my fingers through my hair. “Its arms wrapped around my middle to carry me away. Later, it held me down onto the rocks with hands.”
“And flew on bat-like wings,” Poppy adds in a flat tone. “It almost sounds like a master vampire experimenting with a new form.”
I shake my head. “It didn’t activate any vampire senses, but the seer called it a cherub, even though it wasn’t angelic.”
Poppy’s eyes bulge. She slams the tome shut, leaps out of her chair, and grabs my hand. “We’re going to the archives.”
As we pass two sisters of servitude, one of them shushes us, even though we’re not speaking. I let Poppy drag me to the far right of the library, where the shelves form a staircase that winds up to the mezzanine.
“What’s going on?” I whisper as she leads me up the steps.
“I want you to see something,” she whispers back.
At the top of the stairs, we pass three nooks of shelves before taking another set of stairs that leads to the next level, and the next, and the next. Poppy hums a merry tune as we ascend, making me wonder why a girl so excited by libraries ever wanted to become a slayer’s conciliar.
Eventually, the mezzanines end, and we reach a mahogany door labeled STAIRS. Poppy rubs her hands together, and I wrinkle my brow. This has got to lead to an attic or some other private space like the librarian’s living quarters. A magical seal glows in the gap between the door and its frame, indicating that this space is out of bounds. Poppy twists her foci-ring, looking like she’s about to break in.
“Hey.” I grab her hand. “If Sister Pizan catches us—”
“She won’t.” Poppy raises her palm, and silver light shimmers over our bodies. It’s an enchantment similar to the shielding spell Kofi placed over the monster and me, except it follows us as we move.
After placing her fingers on the lock and dimming the door’s glowing seal, Poppy turns the handle and steps inside.
As soon as I follow after her, the door shuts, and darkness surrounds me like a crypt. I grope around for Poppy and grab her shoulder.
“The curation room is up here.” She clicks her fingers, and the jewel on her ring flares with light.
“I’ll leave the illicit handling to you,” I mutter.
With a snort, she pushes the door open. The attic is even cooler than the library, and the only scent in the room is Poppy’s summer meadow shampoo. I glance around the huge, windowless space, which is kept bright with the same magic the seer used for her attic.
Rows of white, preserving tables stretch down the middle, some looking large enough to accommodate a mammoth. Along the walls stand huge wire racks containing wooden crates, trunks, and all manner of storage. My mind flits to announcements Presbytera Driver occasionally makes when slayers destroy vampire nests. What if all this old stuff was their property?
Among the chests are racks of crumbling books, old scrolls, and yellowed paper stacked and wrapped in string. This appears to be a storage space for items awaiting sorting and restoration.
Poppy loops her arm through mine. “Madoc and I used to visit this place when he was an apprentice here,” she says with a wistful sigh. “Now, we have to wait until he returns from missions.”
A laugh bubbles up from my chest as I can almost see them as an elderly couple, going antiquing. I glance over my shoulder for signs of a librarian or her army of assistants, but only find more shelves. “Where did you say he was right now?”
“Dublin,” Poppy replies. “He’s part of the team investigating the fire in Malone Convent, remember?”
Walking alongside her, I rub the back of my neck and grimace. “Ugh… Sorry. I’ve had so much on my mind.”
Poppy stops at a rack of gigantic, leather-bound books and encases her hands in white magic. “It’s a wonder that you’re still standing.”
I step back and fold my arms. “Why aren’t we looking through the perfectly preserved scans available on the libraryNet?”
“These items are awaiting digitization.” Poppy turns her head from side-to-side, surveying the tall, leather spines. “Besides, anything scanned can be manipulated by a first-year mage.” She pulls out a tome about half her size.
Vampire Bonds (Darkbloods Book 1) Page 18