I looked up at her, and her eyes were on the flower. “I always have one of those stupid petals with me lately, when I am not there,” she said quietly.
“Why?”
She tore her eyes away from the blossom, meeting my eyes. “After thousands of years living with death, I had forgotten that what I am, more than anything, is the embodiment of life eternal. I have the power to create,” she said, and then I watched as the flower shriveled and fell apart in her hand, until only a few petals remained in her hand, the rest having fallen to dust. “Just as much as I have the power to destroy.” She glanced up at me again. “I lost my way. I forgot how magical life can be.”
I did not know what to say. She did not seem like someone who was particularly cherishing the joy of life. However, I knew that each of us mourns and heals in our own way. Perhaps if she said it enough, she would, one day, come to believe it again.
“I think perhaps you should consider creating something for the monument,” I finally said. “Maybe your mother is right?”
“Perhaps. I have some ideas,” she answered. “I should go. I want to get back to say my goodnights before Tisiphone shows up there.”
I watched her rise, and give me a curt nod, and then she was gone. I stared at where she had been, feeling an ache inside. Her sadness, her sense of loss, was all-encompassing. And I was beginning to realize what that could feel like.
It was not something I particularly wanted to feel. Ever.
“Well you look like someone just stole your lollipop or something,” Rayna’s wry voice said. I glanced up, and she was standing beside the table.
“Just thinking,” I said, shaking my head.
She sat, chuckling softly. “Yeah. I can guess what you were thinking about.”
“There is one topic I do not want to discuss this evening. Can we do that?” I asked her.
She grinned. “Fine with me.” A waiter arrived and we ordered, and then Rayna leaned back in her seat, looking around.
“Does it tempt you at all?” I asked, glancing at the humans, the Normals, as the superpowered beings in the city called them, seated around us.
Rayna shook her head. “I am old enough that I really only need to feed every week or two.”
“And how do you do that, then? Do you just find a random person?” I had had very little contact with the bloodborn in general. They had always been rather out of our sphere of interest, and, until Shanti, I had never actually spoken to one. But I realized that like any other group of people, each of them was different and chose to use their powers in their own way.
Bloodborn. I had become aware, in the past few weeks, that the vampires rarely ever used the label “vampire” when referring to themselves. “Bloodborn” was the term they used, and I was attempting to break my habit of thinking of them by any name other than the one they preferred.
Rayna sipped her water, and continued. “We have two humans on staff. One, a woman Ronan insisted on hiring, is off-limits because we freak her out.”
“Yet she works for the bloodborn?” I asked, raising my eyebrow.
She shrugged. “We pay very well. She is a genius at handling all of the day to day details of our home and dealing with the other humans. Besides her, we have a male butler and driver. He also manages the landscapers and oversees the property in general. He enjoys the bonuses he receives when he lets us feed from him.”
I nodded. “Do you have to be careful about feeding from him too often?”
“Oh, of course. Too much will weaken him, and that’s the last thing we want. Luckily, other than Zero, all of us are old enough to have control of our blood lust.”
“And how is Zero?” I asked, crossing my legs. Zero was Shanti’s boyfriend, turned just before I had left for a while a couple of years ago. I nodded a thanks to the waiter when he set a plate of sushi before each of us, along with small cups of sake.
“He mostly handles it,” she said, picking up her chopsticks and selecting a bite. “At this point, it is more his fear of losing control holding him back than anything else. I am astounded by how disciplined he has been. All of us: me, Ronan, Shanti, Sam… we all messed up early on and went too far. It is one of the dangers of being what we are, and not having someone strong watching over us. Even without us, Zero would be fine. He is going to be a formidable warrior for us once he masters his fear.”
“And are warriors much needed in your territory, Queen Rayna?” I asked. They were a very secretive group, and even Mollis was not privy to all that happened in their family.
She took another bite, then smiled. “There is one topic I do not want to discuss this evening. Can we do that?” she asked, throwing my own words back at me.
I raised my eyebrow at her, partially in irritation, and partially in amusement. “Fine. It is only fair.”
She laughed, and we shared our meal, and she talked about an exhibit of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s artworks that she had attended at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Over tea, she shared a few of the more amusing stories from what I knew to be her and Ronan’s rather difficult past. By the time we were finished, I had laughed more than I had expected to and found that the rather intimidating (for a non-god, at any rate) bloodborn queen was really quite amusing when she wanted to be.
We stood up and started walking down the street. The cool late fall night air was laced with the scent of fallen leaves and smoke from fireplaces in the neighborhood.
“As fun as this was, and as much as I enjoy sitting and staring at you,” Rayna began. I rolled my eyes and she laughed. She continued, “I do actually have something I wanted to ask you about. Work-related,” she added.
“What is it?”
She wrinkled her brow. “Shanti came across a couple of dead bodies. One, unfortunately was one of ours. The other was…” she shrugged, trailing off. “It smells wrong.”
I nodded. I knew that the bloodborn had very acute senses. “Wrong, how?”
“I’m not sure. Just not normal. We were planning to dispose of both bodies, but I wanted one of your kind to have a look at them first. It’s not anything I’m familiar with, but you all might be.”
“Are they at your home?”
She nodded.
“Have you rematerialized before?”
“No. But I have always wondered what that felt like.”
“Are vampires prone to vomiting?”
She let out a short laugh. “Not this one, E.”
“We shall see,” I murmured, holding my hand out for her to take. She put her cool hand in mine with a smirk. “What?”
“You could have just told me how badly you wanted to hold hands, babe.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. We both know you’ve wanted to have your hands on me all evening.”
She laughed. “Not even gonna bother denying that,” she answered with a wink. I shook my head and laughed, and then I closed my eyes and focused on rematerializing into the foyer of the large home the queen and her family lived in in the Indian Village neighborhood.
When we reappeared in the large foyer at her home, we were met with a scream and the sound of something breaking. I looked to our left, where a human female was standing, mouth hanging open, a tray and what looked as if they had been coffee cups shattered on the wood floor around her.
“I’m sorry we startled you, Rebecca,” Rayna said. I glanced at her. Not a sign of nausea, I noted with some respect. “Immortals and their weird travel methods,” she joked, trying to help the shaken human relax.
“Oh. Of course,” the woman said, bowing her head in my direction a little. “I am sorry about the dishes,” she said to Rayna. “You can take them out of my pay if you wish.”
“Not a chance. That was my fault. Well, really, it was her fault,” she said, pointing at me. “I’ll have her pay me.”
I rolled my eyes and made a subtle rude gesture in her direction, and Rayna laughed. My gaze went back to the human. She was quite pretty. Shapely, voluptuous, with a mass of dark brown cur
ls flowing over her shoulders and down her back. She was dressed in a skirt, knee-length brown boots and a black top that showed just a bit of enviable cleavage.
“Sorry again about the surprise,” Rayna told her. “Are you all right?”
The woman laughed. “I’m fine. Really, you think I’d be used to insanity by now,” she said wryly, and Rayna laughed.
Rayna tuned to me. “This way, E. They’re in the cellar.” I nodded, and we started walking, leaving the poor human behind.
“Well I can see why Ronan insisted on hiring her,” I said under my breath.
Rayna chuckled. “Everyone except him seems to see it for what it is. You should see him around her. He becomes an absolute fool.”
I laughed, finding it impossible to envision the taciturn bloodborn warrior acting foolishly, but knowing, at the same time, that we all have sides to our personality that only come out around the right people.
Rayna led me through the large kitchen, into a back hallway, and then down a rather steep flight of stairs into the basement level of the home.
“Those are our sleeping quarters on that half of the basement,” she said, gesturing toward a row of identical steel doors. “The bodies are in here.” She opened a steel door on the other side of the cellar, and gestured for me to go in.
Two bodies were laid out on a surgical-looking steel table. I raised an eyebrow questioningly.
“Sam and the other healing crew sometimes need to stitch us up. We heal quickly, but a deep enough gash needs help with healing,” she explained. “Hell, Sam has attached entire limbs in this room. After living in our first house and having things like that occur in our kitchen, I decided we would never live in a place without a dedicated hospital area again.”
“That would put a damper on morning coffee,” I murmured, my attention turning to the pale bodies on the table.
One male, one female. Both pale, with the waxen look the newly-dead so often have. The female was young, possibly in her early twenties. Her mouth was open, as if in an endless scream, and I could see two fangs behind her lips.
“So she was yours?” I asked Rayna.
She nodded. “Tracy. She was a badass. She and Shanti were becoming friends,” she finished. Then she pulled the sheet back from Tracy’s body, and I could immediately see why this vampire, this immortal creature, had died: her chest was brutally ripped open, a gaping hole. A glance inside showed that her heart had been ripped from her.
My gaze shifted to the other one. The body that felt “wrong” to the vampire queen. And I immediately knew why as my Guardian knowledge flared. This was Fisker, a man who’d died in Copenhagen, and escaped from his prison on the Nether with twenty-seven other souls. He was the one Brennan and I had been unable to locate during our time in Denmark. Fisker had been a serial murderer in life and, in death, he had become something nearly as horrid.
Undead.
He had a body. A full, corporeal form, despite the fact that I still recognized him as a soul that belonged to my Queen. I looked him over. Two small puncture wounds in his neck suggested that Tracy had tried to feed from him. I pointed them out to Rayna, and she nodded.
“I noticed that too. What the hell is this thing, E? And did it do this to Tracy?”
“My guess is, yes. Damn it,” I muttered.
She looked at me questioningly.
“We have had a problem… Mollis and her family have had this problem. Several souls escaped from their prison in the old Nether when her father still ruled there. Well, escaped with the aid of someone else,” I added, and she nodded. “I have been tracking them down to bring them back where they belong.”
“It’s what you’re meant to do, right?“ she asked, and I was reminded that as little as I understood of the bloodborn, she understood just as little about our kind.
I nodded. “That is my one and only role, yes. I began tracking them down, and what I found was that some of them were gaining corporeal, solid forms. In that form, they can manipulate objects. They can harm the living.” I took a breath, trying to decide how much to tell her. “It does not happen without aid. And some of our kind… some of my sisters were aiding them. They become this,” I said, gesturing to the male body, “which we refer to as undead, by eating the still-beating heart of a human three times.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, her brow furrowed, her arms crossed. “And?”
“They are ridiculously strong. Cunning. Endlessly hungry for living flesh. The heart, of course, is their favorite part, but they will feed on other parts as well,” I said, pointing to the chunks of flesh missing from Tracy’s throat and arm.
“Stronger than one of us, though?” Rayna asked dubiously.
“Usually not,” I said, looking at the bodies again. “But it looks as if Tracy fed from him. Perhaps his blood did not agree with her. And once she was distracted or weak or whatever the issue was, he was able to do the rest of this,” I said, gesturing to Tracy’s chest.
“But he’s dead, too. So what happened?”
“My guess is that we now know what happens when an undead tries to feed from one of the bloodborn,” I said, chewing my lip as I thought. “Or his own blood flowing through her heart hurt him when he ate it. I can only guess at this point. We have never come across a situation like this.” I transferred my gaze to Rayna. “I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I did not know her well. Is it cold of me that at this point, it only bothers me because one of mine was taken from me?”
I shook my head. “You are old enough to understand certain things my kind know well. You know that life is ever-fleeting.”
She nodded.
“And if you are cold, that makes me just as cold. My only concern when I look at this situation is that things just got a whole lot worse.”
She looked at me questioningly. “How so?”
“The undead threat has arrived in Detroit. It is spreading. It was contained to certain areas in Europe and Asia. I thought we had more time before we would have to deal with it here.”
Rayna’s gaze went to the body of the undead again. “Well, count us in if you all need help containing this shit. I don’t want to lose any more of my people.”
Chapter Ten
Rayna and I left her home shortly after, and ended up walking through a neighborhood on the city’s Southwest side. This time of night, some of the bars in the area were a tempting place for less scrupulous vampires to cause trouble, and Rayna confirmed what I had already heard from Nain’s team: there had been a surge in violence in the area of late. We strolled casually, though I knew Rayna was constantly listening for any signs of trouble, though it soon became clear that all was quiet, in this part of the city, at least.
“Shanti was on duty here last night,” Rayna said. “It is likely any troublemakers have been scared off.”
I nodded. This had been Shanti’s neighborhood during her human life, and she still had mortal family in the area. I knew she had taken responsibility for keeping the Southwest side safe because of them.
We were on a busy street; bars, restaurants, and shops on each side of the wide, multi-laned road. The sounds of laughter and music flowed from the buildings as doors opened and closed, and traffic roared past, carrying with it the scent of exhaust. Ahead, I saw a familiar sign: large black letters that said “Punch, Inc” over a red boxing glove. This was the martial arts studio Shanti’s boyfriend, Zero, owned with a friend of his.
And it occurred to me that I had a new sword and very little practice using one. I glanced over at Rayna.
“I do not suppose you would be interested in sparring with me, then?” I asked, nodding my head toward Zero’s studio. The lights were on, and I had a feeling we might find Shanti there, since it was her night off and Zero would undoubtedly want to check in on his business and the friend he ran it with. “I have heard numerous times how deadly you are with a sword.”
She smiled. “Haven’t you had enough fighting for a whil
e?”
At that moment, Megaera appeared, turning a corner barely ten feet in front of me.
“Hey. I was looking for you,” she said, walking toward me. My stomach turned. I had hoped, very much, that we had been wrong about Megaera. Meg never sought me out. We were not one another’s favorite people. I generally made her uncomfortable and she made me tense.
“What can I do for you, Megaera?” I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral. Rayna and I stopped walking, and Megaera approached us, stopping inches from me, ignoring Rayna completely.
“That little tussle you had with my niece was cute,” she snarled. “You really think you’re some kind of a badass, don’t you?”
“With thousands of years of evidence to support the belief. Yes,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “And you are not supposed to be talking to me.”
“I’ll talk to who I want to talk to.” She finally seemed to notice that Rayna was present. “Excuse us,” she said, taking my arm roughly and pulling me a few feet away. I glanced back at Rayna to see her watching us with a concerned expression on her face. I held my hand up, urging her to stay out of it, and she gave a small nod.
“All right. What do you want?” I asked, shaking her hand off of me.
“You come into our realm and start a fight with Mollis. I don’t even know what you’re thinking anymore,” she hissed.
“Well, technically, it is my realm as well. And there were things I wanted to say.”
“Such as?”
“Those things are for her ears, not yours, Fury.”
“Yeah? Well here’s the thing, Guardian. My niece has no shortage of enemies. She has earned every single one of them.”
“Indeed she has,” I said mildly.
“She is not an enemy you want. And neither am I. Because make no mistake about it, if you continue to add more problems to everything else she is already dealing with, I will show you why it is that I am the Fury most known for being an absolutely spiteful bitch.”
Betrayer (Hidden Book 7) Page 12