NIGHT BLESSED
Shades of Blood Book Two
Megan Blackwood
Copyright © 2019 Megan Blackwood
All rights reserved.
www.meganblackwood.com
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder except for brief passages quoted by reviewers or in connection with critical analysis.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover art by Book Covers and Designs by Juan
Also By Megan Blackwood
Shades of Blood Series
Sun Cursed
Night Blessed
Shadow Redeemed
Table of Contents
She Chooses
One: An Invitation to Dance
Two: Something Like an Encore
Three: Numbers Game
Four: The Infection Within
Five: Weight of Ages
Six: What's Left Behind
Seven: Roses in the Air
Eight: Broken Shadows
Nine: Sanctified
Ten: Black Veins
Eleven: Other Weapons
Twelve: A Blackened Rose
Thirteen: Confidences
Fourteen: A Storm About to Break
Fifteen: The Age of Stones
Sixteen: A Mind Not Her Own
Seventeen: Enough
Eighteen: Celestial Bodies
Nineteen: Another Kind of Home
Twenty: Other Paths
Twenty-one: Tea for Two
Twenty-two: Just a Jab
Twenty-three: Patient Zero
Twenty-four: A Quick Exit
Twenty-five: Flower Beds
Twenty-six: The Beast, and Me
Twenty-seven: Initialed in Blood
Twenty-eight: Higher Powers
Twenty-nine: Old Oaths
Thirty: An Older Vintage
Thirty-one: Turbulent Waters
Thirty-two: Circles of Stone
Thirty-three: Old Friends
Thirty-four: Thin Roots
Thirty-five: Fifty-Fifty Chance
Thirty-six: It's Time
Thirty-seven: Her Maker
Thirty-eight: Judgment of Blood
Thirty-nine: Arrangements
She Writes
She Chooses
My name is Magdalene Shelley. It is a name I have chosen, a name born from my lips as my blood was reborn into the realm of the undead, the ever-living. My old name was lost the moment I tasted of ancient blood, my mortal coil severed for all eternity. As with all my sunstrider kin, I do not remember the human bloodline that bore this body. Our humanity is lost to us. That is the choice we make, the deal we broker, so that we can better protect the finite lives of this world.
The Venefica, the sorceress of sorceresses, remembered.
And though that long-dead family is not bound to me, she called to my blood with hers, tugged on the reins of my lineage and implored me: obey. Become as she, and free her by granting the power of my blood to her ritual.
I put her body in the ground, and that shared blood stains my claws.
But a sorceress is more than her flesh, and her spirit whispers on, cajoling Ragnar to perverse experiments, offering power from beyond this world. She would claw her way back to the living.
It is I who called her forth, all unknowing, desperate to undo a crime done against my heart. And it is I, knowing now what she is—what I am—who will atone. Who will break the shackles of her power and dissolve her mind and soul into the endless void.
For if she returns to fulfill the bargain I begged of her, the pact that will bring my love, my Lucien, back to the light, her corruption will enshroud the whole of the world.
In my darkest moments, I crave failure.
But the oath of protection bound to my blood sings me back into the light. Though it destroys me, I will end her, and cast her and all her monstrous creations back to the shadows whence they sprang.
My name is Magdalene Shelley. It can be no other, lest the whole of the world burn.
Lucien, forgive me.
One: An Invitation to Dance
My tires squealed on the wet London pavement, struggling to grip the road as I swung the motorcycle around, paying more attention to my quarry than to the street. Rain sheared off my helmet's visor, transmuting the lights of London into watercolor blurs. The red car I pursued remained in high focus—the scent of ghoul wafting back to me through the cleansing effort of the downpour. In the back window, a mortal brunette woman turned and screamed, pounding on the glass while the ghouls surrounding her laughed.
I'm coming, I willed the words to her. You will not have her, you fucking gutter scum.
At three a.m., the streets of London's outskirts were deader than me. I stroked the throttle, edging up tight on the car's tail but not too close. I didn't want them to sideswipe me, or brake check me. Roisin, the sunstrider who'd taught me to ride, had also taught me about gas mileage. I'd chase these creatures until they stopped, or their car choked on fumes.
A human's natural state is a persistence predator, running down its terrified prey with long legs and efficient cooling. If a human had the patience to run a bison to death, just imagine the patience of us, the undead born to hunt them.
Steady, I told myself, as the woman buried her face in her hands, shoulders rocking in a violent tsunami of sobs. Her pain yanked on the leash of my oath as a sunstrider to protect humanity, but to rush ahead now would only make matters worse.
"Coming up on the Thames," Seamus's voice crackled in my ear. His voice resonated with assurance. I'd never seen him so happy as the day Inspector Culver had given him full access to London's CCTV network.
"Understood," I said.
"Flanking," Roisin said.
In the distance, the purr of her bike's engine revving tickled my ears. These ghouls were nothing. Between the two of us, working together as we had hundreds of years ago, I believed—truly believed—that we could bend all the nightwalker hives of London beneath our wills. If only we could find them.
Pockets of wild ghouls were one thing, an outbreak that the strained resources of the Sun Guard to its very limits, but those ghouls had a source, somewhere. And every time I chased a group down, every time I caught a whiff of the nightwalker that'd made them. I wanted to scream at them, demand the location of their master. They all carried the same scent, a watered-down version of Ragnar's bloodline.
It was possible that they had been made by a young nightwalker turned by Ragnar in the months since he had escaped his battle with me. That would explain the weakness of his scent. I didn't want to contemplate an alternative. That it might be my Lucien flooding the streets with cast-offs.
Those who lived long enough to answer my questions did not know their master. They were toys, broken and disposed of upon the streets of London. Left behind to slow the Sun Guard down and overwhelm us while the nightwalkers licked their wounds and rebuilt in some other, hellish, complex we had yet to find.
Light help me, it was working.
I tucked into a corner, leaning low as my bike's tires threatened to give up their companionship with the road. The road narrowed into a lane that bridged the river Thames. Despite the rain, fires marred the bank of the ancient river, greasy smoke coiling into the air between tents and silhouettes of broken souls.
The stink of nightwalker hit me hard—not the distilled, ancient aroma with all its trappings of power—but the ghoul-taint, rotten and festering. How many of these liminal people had the nightwalkers assaulted just to keep me and my or
der busy?
Rage burned fresh my in chest, and I had to force myself to keep from hitting the throttle hard. Roisin's bike purred closer, drawing ahead, closing the space. We were fanged jaws preparing to snap the ghouls in our maw.
The car darted for the bridge. Roisin's sleek emerald-green bike shot out of the cover of the side streets, a spear thrown at the front of the car, unerring. The car swerved, hard, drifted around so that it faced me, then jerked off to the side, down a narrow dirt-and-garbage path that ran along the tent city. Mud kicked up from the car's tires in black arcs as it lost control and swung, coming to rest parallel to the river.
The doors flung open, four ghouls piling out with the woman held between two. Her knees buckled and they jerked her up, frog-marching her toward the tent city. A howling scream pierced the night and was met by nothing but cruel laughter.
"How many?" Roisin asked through the earpiece. Her tires hissed through the rain as she got herself turned around, pointed back the way the car had jagged off.
I eased the throttle, not wanting to lose control on the mud, and approached the encampment. Shadows lurked between the sputtering, half-sheltered fires, dark faces twisted in amusement and anger. I whipped my helmet off to restore my full peripheral vision and swung the bike to a stop in the mud.
Without the helmet, the scent almost made me gag. This was more than a homeless encampment attacked by nightwalkers. This was a crèche, a place where the cast-off ghouls throughout the city had gathered, drawn by some unknown impulse to shelter together.
They wore not rags and time-worn clothes, carefully cared for, but the garments they'd walked out of their old lives in. Tracksuits, slim-cut business dresses, blazers, heels, loafers, sagging jeans and bedazzled hoodies. Every last one had a glint of silver in their eye—not a mote like mine—but a swirling, hint of smoke. A hint of the full transformation that'd been denied them.
"A dozen, easily. It's a crèche."
"Fuckin' hells."
Her bike rolled to a stop beside me and she tore her helmet off. We hated the limited vision but Inspector DeShawn Culver, our liaison to the mortal constabulary, insisted we had to wear the stupid things. Cracking our heads open wasn't really a concern for us, but drawing too much attention was, so we obliged the mortal law. It hadn't cost us anything but annoyance yet.
The ghouls pressed toward us, a wall of hollowed-out bodies blocking the path the four with the woman had taken. In the distance, she whimpered, and it took every ounce of my self-control not to tear through the bodies blocking my way to rip her from the arms of her attackers.
"We want the mortal woman," I forced myself to say, hands held out in a conciliatory gesture. Roisin, never one for subtly, put her hands on her guns, pushing her jacket back to make them visible. Rain matted down her glorious mane of hair, making her look something like a wet poodle. I was sure I looked no fiercer.
Still, something in the ghoul's nature responded to our presence. They flinched back, wary, glancing from one to another to see if a leader would emerge from the herd. Rehabilitation of ghouls had never been my thing, but rarely it could be done, and there were sunstriders back at the Sun Guard's temporary headquarters who would put the work in, if these lost souls would give them the chance.
A woman in a red dress stepped forward, her toned body maintaining muscle mass while the others already looked like long-gone heroin addicts. She'd been a powerful woman, when she'd been mortal. From the look in her eye, I didn't think that sense of power was about to serve her well right about now.
"You're not welcome here," she hissed, fingers flexing as if she could shape them into nightwalker claws. She couldn't, of course, but that was the lie the nightwalker blood she'd tasted told her. The same lie that told her a dozen ghouls could stand against one sunstrider, let alone two.
I sighed and gripped the handle of the mortuary sword strapped to my back. "The Sun Guard is willing to attempt rehabilitation. Last chance."
She spat on the muddy ground. The others howled with laughter.
Laughter cut short as Roisin's gun cracked, blowing the top of the red-dress woman's skull clear off and painting those standing near her in crimson splatters that soon mixed with the rain.
"Need back-up?" Seamus asked in my earpiece.
"No," I said, drawing my blade as the ghoul's laughter transformed into screeches of rage. The thin line of gold inlaid just above the cutting edge gleamed in the firelight. That noble metal was poison to nightwalkers, just as silver was to my kind. One of DeShawn's clever little modifications. "This will be easy."
Two: Something Like an Encore
The cowards fled, splintered in all directions, flinging themselves out into the night. Roisin cracked off a few shots, dropping two, but there were too many to track. My oath tugged at me, urging me to pursue, but the scream of the mortal woman snapped me back into this spot, smoothing over the sharper edges of my prey drive.
The four hadn't gotten far. Surrounding a fire kept in full flower by the shelter of the bridge above, they had thrown the woman to the ground and circled her tight. Each time they edged closer, she let out a low moan of fear that riled them into laughter. A long slash marred the woman's collarbone from tip-to-tip. Though the wound was not in danger of killing her, she pressed her palms against it, her grip slippery with blood, as if hiding her vital fluid could keep the monsters which tormented her at bay.
"Your friends are dead," I lied, stepping into the slim ring of firelight. Behind me, cradled in shadow, Roisin began a silent circle.
All four jerked as if the flame had jumped up and licked their cheeks, spinning around to hiss at me with teeth deformed and crooked, but not yet fangs. I marked the one with blood staining his gums for my first victim. Unlike the others, these we would offer no chance to detox themselves. We had seen them brutalize a mortal life. Their time was forfeit.
Bloody-gums hissed at me.
"Look at you." I shook my head as I drifted imperceptibly closer. They may have had a taste of nightwalker blood, but they were still demonstrably mortal and could not sense when I drew power, or catch the subtler movements of my body when I employed supernatural grace and speed.
"You can't even digest blood, did you know that? Whoever did you the disservice of making you their slave—and you are a slave, if your maker appeared right now and demanded you dance naked in the Thames, you would without hesitation—failed to inform you of many things. Drink enough blood, and you'll puke it up just like a human would. Because you are human. Mortal. And weak."
"You're not one of them, bitch, what the fuck do you know about it?"
"Ah. Unfortunate that your education in what you are, in what powers you play with, would come so close to the end of your life." I tilted my head so that the firelight reflected in my eyes. While nightwalker eyes shone silver as the moon, sunstrider eyes burned with the molten gold of the sun. Never mind that the iris of my eye was infected with a freckle of silver. The ghouls wouldn't know what that meant any more than I did.
Some blood-borne instinct warned them, without them ever knowing, that I was a predator and they were my prey. Despite their bravado, they retreated a step, almost trampling the whimpering woman. Their toy had all but been forgotten, now that I demanded their attention.
It wasn't a skill I liked to use, drawing the eye and mind of mortals and trapping it, but it was useful when a situation might turn to hostages. I let them stare into the swirling sunlight of my eyes and wondered—did they know, in their bones, that this was their end? Did they know that I had all but hypnotized them, a cobra dancing before the rat?
No matter. Knowledge would not save them. That chance had been lost when they'd forced the brunette woman into their car and sped off under the watchful eye of Seamus's many cameras.
The one alongside bloody-gums drew a knife and waved it at me. "You're dead, slag."
I held my blade low, easy at my side. "Mine's bigger."
He screwed up his lips for another burst of vitr
iol. Over his shoulder, I caught a hint of Roisin's hair in the light, the gleam off both barrels of her guns raised and ready. She was in position. Good. I was tired of playing tutor to these wretches.
Her weapons barked. The two standing behind the woman dropped, dead before they hit the ground, and the woman screamed to break the night. I was sorry for her trauma, but it was better this way, a quick and bloody ambush, than risking any hostage situation they might cook up if they were given a moment to rub the four brain cells between them together and spark up a plan.
I moved in the second those guns fired. Bloody-gums and knife-wielder were closer to me, so I came in low, drawing my blade in a wide arc across both of their bellies. They'd been turning to address the shock of Roisin, and so they didn't see me until they were curled on the ground at my feet, guts like ropes tangled in their hands as they tried, in vain, to stuff them back inside.
Roisin dispatched them both with quick shots to the back of the head. She'd always been kinder than I.
"Seamus," I said into my earpiece while wiping my blade clean on the back of one of the ghoul's shirts. I sheathed it before the woman could get too long of a look at the weapon—she'd been through enough—then took a knee beside her. "We need mortals over here."
"Two guard and Maeve are en route."
"Thank you."
Roisin made herself scarce—keeping a lookout—while I extended my hand to the shaking mortal as if I were approaching a fearful dog. She sobbed, hard, and recoiled from me at first, but her back ran into the corpse of one of the men Roisin had felled and she let out a low, pain-stricken moan.
"I know it's hard to believe right now," I said, willing her to look into my eyes so I could draw upon a little power to soothe her terror. She only had eyes for the bodies around the fire. "But my friend and I, we really are here to help you."
I prayed for Maeve to get here soon as the woman curled up and buried her face in her hands, whole body shuddering. I'd gotten better at interacting with terrified mortals ever since I'd woken up in this new London, but immortal patience had its limits. Now that she was safe I wanted nothing more than to hop back on my bike and speed off after the ghouls who had fled.
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