by M. J. Scott
“If you’d told me, I could’ve made my own.”
“No time,” Guy said.
I nodded and peered at the charm again. I could see how it worked now, so I shoved it in my pocket, sending a tiny surge of magic into the leather to activate it. Sure enough, my entire body suddenly vanished from sight. I’d been expecting it, but it was still disconcerting. I’d never liked invisibility charms.
“Show-off,” Guy muttered, then activated his own charm—I assumed it was primed to respond to something he did to it, given that, as far as I knew, he had no magic. Seeing such a big man disappear was somehow even odder than vanishing myself.
“Can you hear well enough to follow me?” Guy asked. His disembodied voice made me jump.
“Of course,” I said. The big Templar was light on his feet but not as silent as a Fae. Plus, he smelled of leather and, faintly, of horse. Easy enough to keep track of even without the iron song that rose from the weapons he carried.
“Good. Let’s go.”
I let him get a little ahead of me, then started after him. At the next turn of the tunnel, I stopped abruptly as the sudden bite of iron stung the air. Much more than the annoying buzz from Guy’s sword. The sensation surrounded me, making my magic shy away and weaken. Unpleasant. But not nearly so unpleasant as the sudden burning ache in my bones.
Iron. More than I’d ever felt in one place before. I’d been right—there was definitely something important down here. “Wait,” I called.
I heard Guy stop. “What’s wrong?”
“Just give me a minute.” I breathed deeply, trying to adjust. I was used to iron but not so much of it so close. It was relentless, like a fog closing around me and thinning the air, making it hard to think and breathe. I reached for my magic and it was as if there were a wall of ice between it and me.
My skin crawled. I couldn’t push through the barrier; my magic was choked off to nearly nothing. My breath went shallow, panicky as I reached again and felt just the merest thread of magic. I wrestled the panic away, took another deep breath. Bryony knew this was here. She must come down here. Which meant I could bear it too. I made myself step forward again. “I’m all right.”
Guy took off again and I walked, more cautiously now, as the iron sensation built and swelled and pressed and made me want to turn and flee back the way we had come. How did every Fae in the City not know this was here? Or maybe they did.
But along with the iron there was an ever-increasing buzz of warding magic. Layers of “keep away” and “go back” adding to the desire to turn around and leave. Maybe it was enough to keep everyone away. It should certainly work on anyone human who came this way.
It didn’t, however, seem to bother Guy. Maybe his charm shielded him. The soft pad of his booted feet on the marble-tiled floor of the tunnel stayed steady. We turned one last corner and I came face-to-face with the iron warping my senses. A massive door was set into the stone wall, dull gray and ominous. Wards shimmered around it, sparking like fireworks, but they weren’t enough to distract me from the weight of metal around me.
Guy suddenly materialized, looking no happier than he had when we started this journey. I took that as a sign that I could deactivate my charm too and hoped, as I did so, that my face didn’t look as green as I felt.
Bryony was stronger than I’d imagined if she came down here regularly. Maybe she’d built up her tolerance over time, the way I had with the weapons my men carried. Though how she’d been able to do so, I couldn’t imagine. This close, the iron felt as if it were warping my bones, making my head ache unbearably. My stomach churned in protest.
Guy took another charm from his pocket and pressed it to the door. The wards flared, then died away. He grasped the massive bolts, slid them back, and then swung the door open. He gestured me through with a wave of his hand and I managed to make myself do as requested.
As I stepped over the threshold, the pain in my head intensified with a jolt that felt like an axe blow and I nearly stumbled. Luckily I didn’t. I didn’t want to find out what it would feel like to make actual contact with the iron when just standing near it was so painful. Exactly how much iron was here? A queen’s ransom and more. And all hidden away and kept secret.
Which made me worry more about what was yet to come. What warranted this much protection?
Guy closed the door behind us and I tried not to shudder as the iron bit around me again.
“Are you all right?” he asked, coming over and peering into my face.
“It’s not the most . . . pleasant sensation,” I admitted.
He nodded. “So I understand. Bryony says it’s better inside.”
I hoped she was telling the truth.
We traveled a short distance down another tunnel only to be confronted by yet another iron door. I stood and breathed whilst Guy opened it.
I moved more carefully through the second door and found myself in a room lit only by a single old-fashioned oil lamp burning in a bracket near a more ordinary wooden door on the far side of the room.
Gaslight so far below the earth would be risky, I supposed. The rest of the smallish room held only a few tables littered with various kinds of medical apparatus and glassware and a plain wooden desk near the door that had an equally plain chair drawn up to it and a stack of leather-bound books piled neatly in the right-hand corner.
Guy finished locking the door behind us. He came up beside me. “Last chance to change your mind,” he said. “Once you go through that door, then you’ll know something that very few people know. And that knowledge is not without its risks.”
“People are already trying to kill me,” I said, trying to sound more cheerful than I felt. “It can’t get much worse than that.”
He didn’t smile at my feeble attempt at humor. “Trust me. It can.”
“Will knowing this help me win this war?” I asked.
“It will help you understand part of the reason we fight,” he said. “As to the other, well, maybe in time.”
“Then lead on,” I said.
Whatever it was that was hidden behind that very simple last door, it at least offered the comfort of no longer being quite so close to the iron behind me. At this point, I was willing to do almost anything to get some distance from that.
“Very well,” Guy said, but before he moved, the wooden door swung open and Bryony appeared, still looking as though her temper was less than even. The chain at her neck glimmered orange and red, confirming my impression.
“What took you so long?” she said to Guy, without acknowledging me.
“Wonder Boy here was sleeping.”
Bryony looked at me then, her gaze unreadable. Unfair, when she was the one who’d told me to rest. I stared back at her, and her gaze sharpened suddenly. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.
“As good as I ever feel with a ton or more of iron nearby,” I said. Making my voice sound close to normal took an effort.
“I have something that will ease it a little.”
Ease, not fix. Damn. Still, I’d take any relief offered.
“How do you stand it?” I asked curiously.
“I’m used to it now,” she said. “And I limit my time down here. Come through. It’s better on this side.”
I didn’t need a second invitation.
Though I did wonder if I might have made a massive error in judgment in taking this contract in the first place when I saw what lay before me in the room beyond.
A hospital ward. Full of people who either lay too still for true sleep or—for maybe a third of them—seemed to be awake but moved too slowly for my liking. I studied one of the beds. I knew that stillness. Had seen it before.
“Veil’s eyes,” I swore softly. “They’re blood-locked.”
“Some of them, yes,” Bryony said. “Some are getting better.”
“There’s no cure for blood-locking,” I said automatically. That was a simple fact of life in Half-Light. Any humans who were stupid enough to sample the delight
s that the Night World dangled before them like hunters baiting a trap and came under the spell of the addictive pleasures of drinking vampire blood were doomed. Maybe not if they were found out the very first time and kept away forevermore, but that rarely happened. And few who had a first taste turned away voluntarily.
From across the room, a figure straightened beside one of the beds. “Not yet,” he said in a low voice. “But we’re getting closer.”
His voice was polite, but as he straightened, I saw the white hair caught back in a tail behind his head.
“He’s Blood,” I blurted, then felt somewhat foolish. Obviously this was not news to Guy or Bryony.
“Yes,” Bryony agreed with a hint of amusement in her eyes. “But he’s not going to bite you. Atherton, would you come over here please and say hello to Captain Pellar?”
The vampire nodded, then flowed across the room, moving too quickly. The sight didn’t ease my nerves. Only when he stopped beside Bryony did I get a good look at his face—or what was left of it. Scar tissue twisted and formed red whorls where his eyes should have been and marred half of the length of his face as well.
“Shal e’tan mei,” I swore again, though I kept the words under my breath. Or I thought I did.
The vampire’s mouth twisted wryly. “I agree,” he said. “The Blood Court’s handiwork has a way of taking you that way.”
Bryony touched his arm. “Atherton, this is Asharic sa’Uriel’pellar. Captain of the mercenaries working for the Templars. Asharic, this is Atherton Carstairs. He works with Simon.”
And how in all the possible hells had that little alliance come about? I fought for some semblance of manners. “Hello,” I said, and started to bow but then stopped myself when I realized that the gesture was fairly futile. Atherton wouldn’t be able to see it after all.
“Captain Pellar,” he returned affably. “Bryony has told me so little about you.” There was a hint of reproach mingled with curiosity in his voice.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “Sword for hire.”
His head tilted. “That seems like an oversimplification. For one so . . .” He trailed off and I stared at him. Could he sense Fae powers?
The Blood had their own strange magic—not the least of which was how they transformed humans into their own kind—but it was nothing akin to the magic we used.
“And what exactly is that you and Simon are doing down here?” I asked Atherton, determined to change the subject away from me. I was fairly sure I knew the answer to that one. There was only one likely answer as to what a vampire and a healer might be doing in such a secret location with a roomful of blood-locked humans.
“We’re working on a cure,” Simon’s voice said from behind me.
I started. Damned iron. Normally I would’ve been able to sense a sunmage moving behind me as easily as breathing. But the iron made me feel half-blind and dumb. Which made my hands itch for the pistol at my hip as my instincts blared false alarms of imminent danger.
Unless Bryony and the DuCaines were the ones who’d tried to kill me earlier—and I’d bet my entire fortune and that of my Family against that, no matter how annoyed Bryony currently was with me—it seemed unlikely that they’d brought me down here to reveal their biggest secret and then kill me. Though I had little illusion about what might happen to me if I turned around and shared this particular secret with anybody else without their approval.
“Working on?” I looked at some of the patients . . . the mobile ones. The only blood-locked humans I’d ever seen didn’t move unless instructed. And the worst of them didn’t even do that. They just lay where they were until they died.
“We’ve had a little success.”
“How?”
“Firstly something we stumbled upon,” Simon said, and his tone suggested that I shouldn’t ask too many questions about what that might be just yet. “And then with some assistance from my sister and Lady Adeline.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Lady Adeline and her friends know about this?”
“Yes. They’re assisting us.”
“And how long will that last?”
“Well, it’s not like they can take what they’ve shared back,” Simon said. “Even if things do go wrong.”
“They could kill all of you.”
“Unlikely,” Simon said.
“Extremely,” Lily agreed, coalescing out of the air beside him. “They might get one of us, but it’s difficult to pin all of us down.”
I looked at the four of them. Bryony, who was from the highest of Fae Families, Simon, the strongest sunmage in the City, from what I’d been told, a wraith, and a Templar who was legendary several realms away. I had to agree with Lily. Short of blowing up the entire hospital at a time when all four of them were in it, I wouldn’t want to try to take them out.
I frowned while I considered the implications of Simon’s matter-of-fact statement. If the humans had a cure for blood-locking, then it changed the balance of power between the races considerably. The humans had conceded that the Blood had the right to any blood-locked humans and agreed that those who chose to go to the Night World and drink what was on offer ceded their rights to protection as part of the original treaty.
At the time, they’d probably never imagined that quite so many people would continue to willingly—or stupidly—give themselves into the Blood’s power. But they had. There were always those curious or reckless or idiotic enough to think that they would be the exception. That they could drink just once and not be ensnared.
True, there were some humans who managed to stay on the fringes of the Night World and never actually taste vampire blood, but there were far more who fell. And died.
The Blood also fed from their Trusted, of course. Their human servants traded service for the chance of one day being turned and becoming near immortal. The Trusted too ceded their rights, but the Blood didn’t lock them. The vampires needed them functioning until—if they did—they earned that final reward. But the Trusted were few in number and of course, for every one of them who turned, there was another Blood to be fed.
The Blood needed the humans. They could drink Fae or Beast blood, but neither of those races was easy prey when unwilling and not many were willing.
No, most of their food came from the humans and most of that from the blood-locked.
If the humans could cure the blood-locked, then they would not be so willing to declare them lost.
And then what would the Blood do?
“So,” I said to Simon, casually, “anyone tried to kill you lately?”
He shrugged. And then, oddly, grinned at Lily. “A time or two. No one’s managed it yet, though.”
“So someone in the Blood knows what you’re doing?”
“We think that Lord Lucius suspected,” Lily said. “I don’t know for sure. Nor do I know what Ignatius or any other Blood lord may know or might have known. Lucius wasn’t one for sharing secrets very often, but he may have told somebody.”
“If Ignatius knew, why didn’t he use this to break the treaty?”
“For the answer to that, you’d have to ask him,” Guy said.
Simon sent him a look I couldn’t decipher. Guy’s grim mood didn’t seem to have improved now that the secret was revealed and he’d done his duty in bringing me here. I wondered if he was not as happy with Simon’s work as the others were.
“For Ignatius to do that, he would have needed proof. He didn’t have proof,” Simon said.
“He could have broached the issue,” I said. “Forced the queen to deal with it.”
“Apparently he thought other methods would be more effective,” Simon said. “Perhaps he feared the queen would be sympathetic to our cause.”
“And was she?”
“I don’t know. I never spoke to her,” Simon replied with a shrug. That was evasion. I was good at spotting evasion. I sent a questioning glance at Bryony.
“I don’t know either,” she said. “She never asked me about it if she did.”
“Hmmm.” That lack of explanation was apparently as good as I was going to get. “So Ignatius may be trying to kill you or find out what’s down here?” That explained the exercise the other night, at least. Testing the defenses.
Which was a concern. What did Ignatius have up his sleeve that he felt confident to try to launch an attack on one of the human strongholds? It was one thing to send a few Beasts—fast moving and excellent night fighters—to pull off a raid, but it was another thing entirely to try something on the scale that would be required to win their way through the hospital’s defenses and down here to the tunnels.
Not to mention that they then had to get through the wards. Which would require Fae help, I thought. The wards obviously couldn’t be broken with iron. They’d need to be undone magically. And vampire magic wasn’t the same as Fae.
“Exactly how many people know about this place?” I asked.
“Everyone in this room,” Simon said. “Plus, Holly, Fen, and Saskia. Father Cho. And Lady Adeline and a few of the Blood who came with her.”
“No spies, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Guy said firmly. “Especially not now with the border so closely watched.”
“There are ways around any perimeter guard.” I could think of several forms of communication—magically aided—that could be used for a start. And that was before you got to simple codes. “It’s naive to think that there are no sympathizers on this side of the border.”
“That’s why the wards have all been increased. Here and for the rest of the hospital and the grounds,” Bryony said.
“We need earlier warning than that,” I said. “Wards closer to the border . . . you have those. We need to sensitize them.” I frowned, thinking. Charles would be the best person to use. He had a devious mind and had come up with traps and defenses that had saved our necks from sticky situations more times than I could count. Then the Fae—whether from my men or Bryony’s healers—could execute whatever ideas he came up with.
“We can do that,” Guy said. “Anything else?”