Silver Blood (Series of Blood Book 1)

by Emma Hamm

  SILVER BLOOD

  EMMA E HAMM

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Emma E Hamm

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by "Mirella Santana" http://mirellasantana.deviantart.com/

  Model © Captblack76

  Edited by Sarah Collingwood www.sarahsworldofwords.com

  Created with Vellum

  To my family, for their never-ending support, love, and dedication. Thank you for always supporting every strange world I manage to make.

  CHAPTER 1

  T he neon sign above the shop door blinked in sporadic flutters of light. The store was tucked underneath a building, which listed to the right drastically. Peeling blue paint flaked off of the walls, and tiny specks of color decorated the sidewalk like confetti. The Open sign was the only life that could be seen from outside the crumbling walls.

  Sadly, two of the four letters were no longer glowing. This left the sign reading as “On” rather than “Open”. The unfortunate owner of the sad-looking store refused to fix the sign as the message was essentially the same. The Juice Bar was on and open.

  The owner of said bar was one Wren Rowan. The name was difficult to say, but she found that it had never hindered her. Wren was known to be an unusual and birdlike woman. Her long, thin nose and pointed jaw were often compared to other distinguished beaks. She was known for being fragile in appearance as she weighed little more than her namesake. Those who knew her claimed that Wren was a spritely little thing who was easy to love and difficult to understand.

  The unusual shop was as well liked in the community as the tiny shopkeeper. Just like the leaning building she lived in, Wren was different. Her hair fell in curled waves that never stayed the same color and could be seen from miles away. The bangles on her wrists created a song wherever she went.

  The clothing she owned was never in good quality. Wren tended to dress in baggy sweaters, wool dresses, and other strange materials that were not flattering to her shape or appearance. Various colors, patterns, and textures wove around her body in a patchwork of oddities. Her clothing didn’t quite fit her thin frame and seemed faded along the edges. Somehow the quirky appearance fit the woman perfectly.

  The bells on her door jangled. The man now standing inside her store was one of many customers that would visit the Juice Bar while the moon was high in the sky. Bare bulbs decorated the inside of the small shop and hung at the end of strings from the ceiling that cast a warm glow and banished the shadows. Along the rim of the single room were red leather booths, some with holes and others with stuffing torn out of them. In the center was a circular bar and inside that were shelves on which hundreds of vials were haphazardly strewn.

  The shopkeeper stationed herself in the center of the room. Her brilliant smile welcomed all who entered, and her scowl would meet those who wished to cause trouble. However, few found her intimidating as she looked as though a stiff wind could blow her away.

  Wren finished wiping the inside of a fluted vial and gently set it underneath the counter to be more thoroughly washed once morning arrived.

  “Rupert.” She greeted the man who had entered.

  The man took off a jaunty top hat that was missing its top and grinned. “Wren. You look lovely as ever.”

  She snorted and adjusted the hoop ring in her nose. “The usual? Pain or pleasure?”

  “Oh no, darling. Tonight I’m looking for something different.”

  Wren didn’t like that. Rupert was a very predictable man. He came in for the same thing every week. He was a man looking for Happiness in the depths of a bottle. When men like Rupert became unpredictable, Wren became nervous.

  “What are you looking for then?”

  “I’m looking for a little Euphoria.”

  Perhaps it is important at this point to explain the unfortunate circumstances which led the world to the current time.

  In the year 2600, the End occurred. It wasn’t always known by this name, though some may have called it the Reckoning, the Apocalypse, or Judgement Day. Sadly, none of the expected endings of the world happened. There was no meteor, no nuclear war, and no environmental collapse.

  The End was a collapse of some kind, in its own way. Year 2600 was a special time for the world. The walls that had always kept the magical world and the human world separate disappeared. A separate dimension than ours was slowly being destroyed. To escape their inevitable fate, they merged their own world with the human world.

  Magical creatures and supernatural forces flooded into the human realm until they were effectively combined. This was a very uncomfortable time for both magical and non magical folks. There was no easy way for humans to explain what happened, and the magical creatures weren’t exactly happy to be torn from their homes.

  However, one fact remained: the world could not sustain so many bodies or creatures. Because of this, the magical community was forced to share bodies with the humans. They were the interlopers.

  A simple family fell asleep in their beds after saying goodnight to their five children. The next morning, a Sunday ironically enough, they all awoke to find the world exactly the same, yet there was another voice inside their head and another cognizant creature sharing the large space of their body.

  Humans, being humans, had to explain this somehow. They sectioned these creatures into two categories they could understand.

  Demons and Angels.

  Now there’s no such thing as black and white, especially in the magical world. There are far too many colors for any creature to consider themselves something so dreary as monotone. But humans wanted to tell whether a creature was good or evil. Demons or Angels seemed to fit these unknown possessions.

  That was two hundred years ago, which leads us now to this moment in time: Rupert, an overweight man with a constant sheen of sweat on his brow, asking Wren, a tiny and currently purpled-haired woman, for something they both referred to as “Juice”.

  When Wren was born, she discovered that she possessed an unusual talent for creating emotions. This talent turned into a passion for creating a drug known as Juice, which is sold to the general public. When magic entered this world, it brought with it the most incredible substances.

  Wren sold these drugs under a license provided by the Magically Ordained Magistrates, or M.O.M. as they were affectionately known. They were the current government and had recently enforced a mandate stating that emotions must be carefully sold to the right people at the right time.

  Emotions can be dangerous things after all.

  The tiny woman in question had a talent for creating emotions she had never felt before. The Juice Bar was not the only place in town that sold Juice, but it was the only place where one could buy strange and exotic emotions.

  Which was precisely what led Rupert to her door to begin with.

  He was categorized into the bulk name of Demon. If one dug deeper into his genealogy, he was in fact a Satyr in a human host.

  Many unfortunate hu
mans found that the effects of the magical community could show on the human bodies they possessed. Some would find themselves with horns or scales. The lucky might even find themselves with wings.

  Rupert was never going to be an attractive human, possessed or not. He was greasy and didn’t take care of himself. This could be seen in the pot belly that hung over the edge of his too tight pants. The Satyr had gifted him with large ram horns that sprouted out of his forehead and tucked back underneath his skull.

  These were never meant to be grown on a human body, and Wren frequently flinched away from him in disgust. The skin at the base of the horns was red with veins running away from it. Infected, as it was, Rupert was usually caught scratching at the worn skin. Thankfully, the Satyr inhabiting his body was also a decent healer.

  Satyrs were classified as Demons as they were not the kindest of creatures. They tended to use magic to sway people into their beds and were usually successful at doing so. This was precisely why Wren tried to avoid him at all costs, and why unpredictable was not something she wanted to add to his list of faults.

  “You can’t afford Euphoria,” she said as she flicked hair out of her face.

  “Tonight I can.” He placed a few coins onto her counter and sat down. His elbows, braced against the counter, left smudges when he moved.

  Wren snagged the coins with a sigh. There were so many things in the shop that needed to be fixed, she couldn’t say no to any money. However, Euphoria was not something she wanted to give to him.

  “I have to know why.”

  “Can’t a man buy a gift for a friend?”

  “Not a Satyr.” She flicked the towel in her hand at him. It caught on one of his horns and hung comically across his surprised expression before he tore it off.

  “I have a lady friend who wants it.”

  “I’m not helping you to steal a lady with a little Euphoria, Rupert.”

  “She’s already in love with me!”

  Wren snorted.

  “I wouldn’t lie about love.” He appeared genuinely insulted. “I’m a Satyr not a Incubus.”

  Wren assumed that he was telling the truth. Sadly, Satyrs didn’t usually lie to the opposite sex.

  She turned on her heel to look at the wall of vials, flasks, and goblets that were stacked in no particular order on the shelves. One of these days she was going to organize them so she knew what was where and what she had to replace.

  Until now, it had never been a concern. There were hundreds of emotions laid out in front of her. Wren always knew what was where and what was what. Emotions were a language she spoke better than any other language she had attempted.

  Juice came in two kinds of forms. One was a mist or smoke and the other a swirling colored liquid. Depending on the weight of the emotion, Wren made it in one medium or the other. Emotions were usually either light or heavy. They sunk into the bloodstream easier if they were already the form they wanted to be.

  Euphoria was always an easy one to find.

  White mist that seemed to glitter in the light could be seen in a bottle at the very top shelf. It was sitting between an angry looking flask of red rage and an innocent pink smoke that seemed to move on its own. Wren was careful not to touch the pink smoke when she stood on the small ladder to reach for Euphoria.

  Obsession was never a good emotion, and she rarely made it. Technically, it was on the list of illegal emotions to sell. But Wren had always been a fan of toeing the line. Besides, she made certain that her Obsession only lasted a total of fifteen minutes. It wasn’t breaking the law if it lasted for less than twenty minutes, in her opinion.

  Hopping down to the ground, the long black skirt she wore split over her thigh and revealed a long leg that ended in delicately arched bare feet.

  “Euphoria. And that’ll be double the usual cost.”

  “What?” Rupert’s incredulous tone was so loud that a few other customers looked their way. “Why are you trying to cheat me?”

  “Because I don’t trust you, and I don’t think you’re going to be using this the way it’s intended to be used,” she said firmly as she pressed the bottle against her sternum. “You can always go ask Pitch.”

  “You know I’d rather not.”

  Pitch was another Juice seller, but one not many people trusted. He dealt in dark emotions and dangerous Juices that rarely had happy endings. However, he had so many followers addicted to his emotions that he made more of a living than she did. He also managed to mass produce emotions in a way Wren could never hope for.

  “Then it’s double the price.”

  “Feckin’ Cur.”

  The slang term for Curiosity was one that she was well familiar with. A Curiosity was a human possessed by something people didn’t have a category for. Wren, in particular, was a well known one.

  Whatever possessed her had yet to make itself known. After 26 years of existence, Wren had rather hoped that her body buddy would have told her what it was. It talked to her whenever it saw fit and was just as quirky as she. But it never told her what category she should fit into. Or even so much as a name.

  As such, she was a Curiosity. And that made people nervous.

  Still, Rupert handed her more coins and swiped the emotion out of her hand before she could count them.

  He stood so quickly that his horns hit one of her lightbulbs and shattered it. He flinched and then glanced at her horrified expression.

  “Well, it’ll cover that at least?”

  “Do you know how expensive light bulbs are?” she shrieked at his retreating form.

  All forms of science had become incredibly expensive. Electricity was something that was always malfunctioning whenever magic was around it. That made having any light bulbs in her shop difficult as there was always a multitude of magical creatures in the Juice Bar.

  She growled and ducked beneath the counter with the coins. She swore under her breath as she saw how little money she had hoarded underneath her counter. The shop was falling apart over her head, and she could do nothing about it.

  A light thump on her shoulder made her groan. Case in point, a small bit of the ceiling had fallen once again. There had been a massive rainstorm that had caused a leak. The water had run through her apartment above the Juice Bar and straight into the shop itself.

  One of these days, she was going to have enough money to buy a respectable place. One of these days, she was going to move out of the backend of town where only the lowest of the low lived.

  One of these days.

  The story was something she always told herself, but Wren knew the likelihood was slim to none. She had been born into poverty and wasn’t about to dig herself out of that hole any time soon.

  Sighing, she popped back up to start washing tonight’s dishes. At least she had food and a roof over her head. She couldn’t complain about that.

  “You can complain about whatever you want.”

  The voice in her head was a welcome one. She did not know if the creature inhabiting her body had a name or even a species. E was a very secretive sort and had never felt as though personal details were necessary for her to know. Wren called it “E”, short for Entity, because what else was she to call it? She couldn’t simply say “the thing”; that was insulting. And E had been with her through the lowest parts of her life. She would always be grateful to it.

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, why ever not?”

  “Because I have work to do, E.”

  “Work work. That’s all you ever do.”

  She could hear the huff of air in her head even though her body remained under her own control. It was a strange thing to have another creature in her head that sounded like another person standing right next to her.

  E was likely just as odd as Wren. It never really decided whether it was a male or female or what accent it wanted. Wren found that it wanted to be someone new every day and encouraged its eccentricities.

  She liked it. It was a little easier to justify her own odd
behaviors with the fact that she had grown up with something just as odd inside her.

  “I have to work to keep us both alive.”

  “You mean to keep you alive. I’d still be alive if you died.”

  “Yes, yes, you’d find another host.”

  Wren paused to glance into the reflective surface of the goblet she was holding in her hand. Staring into her own eyes was really the only way to have a decent look at E.

  As she stared at her own reflection, her eyes seemed to flip backwards. This was the other part of her that made people severely uncomfortable. Milky white eyes with no discernible pupils stared back at her. They weren’t her eyes, Wren’s eyes were gray. These were the eyes of the creature that was inside her.

  Nearly everyone had moments when there was something else peering out of the shell of their shared body. But all the creatures tended to have a very predictable color to their eyes. It was part of the reason these magical creatures were so easy to section off into Angel or Demons.

  Demons had pitch black eyes that expanded to swallow any white. Angels had electric blue eyes that almost seemed to glow even in darkness. Humans that were lucky enough to not have magical creatures inside of them tended to have a yellow tint to their natural eye color that marked them as “clean”.

  Wren had never met anyone whose body buddy had white eyes like this. She tended to not allow E out in public for that reason. It made people nervous.

  Whenever she tried to look at E, it was as though she had stepped backwards from her body. She could still see out of the same eyes, but it was more like looking through a window at the world outside. She had gotten used to it the older she was and the more she trusted E with moments of control.

  Wren stared back at E and watched as a smile spread across her own face.

  “You have something to say, girl?” Today, E was gentle. Its voice was calm and teasing.

  “You’d miss me if you found another host.”

  “I would not.”

  “You would.”

  Wren blinked, and her own eyes stared back at her. She shook her head firmly and got back to work. Though she couldn’t resist smiling along with the laughter that rang loudly in her head.