Night Blessed

by Megan Blackwood

  I did not.

  "She's mortal," Roisin said low enough for only me to hear. A live wire of tension threaded through her whole body, as if she were restraining herself from doing more—from executing what our oath demanded. She was sunstrider. I had killed an innocent mortal. The rules were simple.

  Every part of me wanted to close my eyes, to hide the swelling mote in my eye that announced my crime. My shame. No oubliette could cleanse this. It was too much. Too much for either of us—the drumbeat in my mind swelled, as if calling to Roisin, begging her to do what I could not. To fulfill the oath we'd both taken. The oath I could now ignore.

  Roisin snarled in frustration, her claws dug into the ground around my wrists. She was fighting it. Fighting the oath. For me.

  "Roisin..."

  The blast of a shotgun rocked through the air. Ragnar snarled in pain and his body thumped against the ground—I'd never seen him get to his feet.

  "Mags!" Seamus called. His footsteps sped over the rubble, rushing toward us.

  Roisin met my gaze and held it for a second that felt like an eternity. I did not flinch away—I let her assess me, make her own decision. If I died here, now, at least I would know the moment was just. She rolled her eyes and hissed softly, peeling herself away from me and pushed to her feet, extending her hand—still clawed—down to me. I took it, and she jerked me to my feet.

  Seamus rushed across the rubble, Maeve at his side with her skirts hiked and her glittery pink helmet still on. She took one look at Raina and stiffened, reaching out to grab Seamus's shoulder and stop his headlong dash toward us. The shotgun in his hands smoked—Ragnar lay twitching not far off. He would recover, but it would take him awhile.

  "That's not Raina," Maeve bit off the words and clenched Seamus's shoulder so tight the fabric of his jacket bunched under her grip. "The Venefica wears that shape."

  His eyes widened and he stopped, taking a hesitant step back, then raised the shotgun and leveled it at Raina.

  "Stop," I said, holding out a hand to him. "Raina's still in there."

  Seamus pointed the barrel of the shotgun at the ground as the Venefica contorted Raina's face into a tortured smile.

  "Get out." Maeve rolled up her sleeves and set her stance, holding her hands out to either side, then took up a tight, rapid chant.

  The mockery of a smile shifted into something darker and the Venefica snapped her own hands out, fingers down, as she called that crackling blue power to herself once more.

  Maeve's chant ended in an abrupt bark. She flicked her wrists, directing the wave of power toward Raina.

  It struck her like a fist. Raina staggered, her chant cutting off. The crackling blue power pooled in her hands like small lakes, her body thrummed with the impact of Maeve's exorcism. She blinked once, then cracked a dark grin.

  "The subject has to want the power excised for an exorcism to work," Raina said—and it was very much Raina, her young voice crisp and slightly drunk with power. "The Venefica and I have an arrangement. How else was I to catch the eye of the most powerful vampire in the world for the Daughters of the Moon? He wouldn't have sniffed at us if we weren't useful. If I took on the Venefica, he would grant us immortality and rebuild his hive. Quite a simple arrangement, really." She shot a look to Sonia, who cowered against a wall bright with sigils. "Until Sonia got upset that the Venefica rejected her and thought she'd be cute drawing Magdalene into things."

  "You've made a deal with nightmares, child," Maeve said. "Once they have their claws in you, they never let you go."

  My skin crawled as residual energy from Maeve's broken casting washed over me, and somehow I sensed that Maeve's power was not welcome in this place. The corruption in the soil and the glyphs on what was left of the broken walls rejected her—denied her easy access to her own core of power.

  "We have to break the walls," I whispered to Roisin.

  "My turn," the Venefica's voice returned. She flicked one wrist, the aborted power pooled in her palms flinging out toward Maeve. I moved—trying to intercept—but was too slow. The power slammed into her and tossed her like a rag doll over the broken half of a wall, her brown boots visible for just a flash beneath the many layers of her skirts as she tumbled and came to rest in the dew-heavy grass.

  "Maeve!" Seamus scrambled over the wall after her.

  I grabbed Roisin's arm before she could follow his lead. "The sigils."

  "Right," she said.

  It pained me to turn away from them, but we lunged for the walls, each of us digging our claws into separate sigils, funneling what little strength we had left into our muscles so we could rend the marks from top to bottom, drawing larges slashes that broke the lines. The magic flickered, the eerie blue light that they put forth fading into nothing more than plain old rock. It worked. How many more were there—ten? We could do it. We could stem her strength.

  The Venefica whipped around, Maeve all but forgotten.

  "Clever," she said, "but I've had enough of your resistance."

  She spoke words that didn't sound like any syllables I'd ever heard before. Words like a hammer on an anvil, like hoof beats on stone. Like drums in my blood.

  As I lunged for another sigil, my vision went black at the edges, a presence I didn't recognize pushing into my thoughts, prodding, exploring, a haze washing over everything that I was. A wrenching yanked at me from deep within my being and then I was outside myself—watching my body as if from a great distance.

  Watching it be puppeted.

  "The blood runs so strong in her," the Venefica said.

  She—for it must be she—turned my head slowly, scanning the area as if taking stock, getting used to the way I moved and saw. Raina's hand was extended toward me, her fingers twitching as she directed the power tugging on my being. Everything in me rebelled—bucked back—struggled, but she only laughed, clamping down on my every struggle, and I felt as if I were back in that endlessly black room, isolated on my plinth of marble, feeling the corruption seep through my veins.

  She turned my body toward Seamus. "Now, Magdalene, I wonder what kind of vampire you'll make—nightwalker, or sunstrider? Let's find out."

  I lunged.

  Thirty-six: It's Time

  Seamus danced out of the way, hands extended in defense, as I landed in a deep crouch a short jump away from him. Maeve lay where he had knelt, her eyes open and her breathing steady. Even though my body spared her only a glance, I could tell she wouldn't come to Seamus's aid. Her right arm twisted up at an impossible angle—dislocated, I thought. I didn't know much about magic, but I knew she liked to gesture when she channeled their power.

  "Mags. It's me. It's just me," Seamus said as I hissed, stalking toward him with my fangs extended and mouth opened, claws curled at my sides.

  I wanted to scream at him to run—little good that would do—that I could not be reasoned with. That he needed to fight, to blast me with that shotgun. To do anything and everything to get away, for I could not stop myself.

  "Come on. It's okay, right? I... I trust you." His voice cracked over the final words, some deep animal instinct finally getting through his thick skull to tell him he was doomed—I was a predator, and he was prey, and that was all this dynamic could ever, ever be.

  I tried to imagine myself as he might see me now—a monster. A thing out of myth, out of human nightmare. A vampire, straight down to my cursed bones. Hulking and violent and hungry. So hungry.

  This time, when I lunged, I did not miss.

  My body collided with Seamus's but did not drive him to the ground. The Venefica did not so much pilot me as feed strength to my darkest desires, my animal instincts. My whole body screamed with the urge to devour, remembering the sweetness of his blood not so long ago. Remembering that it had been cheated of the last drops of that elixir.

  My fangs sunk in, the blood washed into me, and all sense of being was ripped away on a torrent of ecstasy. Distantly, I was aware of shouts. Of Seamus jerking in my arms, whispering, murmuring,
pleading with me to let him be—to save him, and in doing so save myself.

  Power like fire—like life—poured into me, solidified my body, made me whole in ways I hadn't ever imagined I could be and yet I sensed this all from the outside, pounding against the walls in my mind locked into place by the Venefica, thrashing against both her possession and the primal needs of my own monstrous body.

  Seamus was ripped away from me—or I him—and then Roisin was there, her golden eyes so bright they stung me, like pools of incandescent molten metal as she drew upon what must be the last dregs of her strength and plunged her claws into my chest. Into my heart.

  She missed. Whether by accident or some deep-seated desire not to be the maker of my destruction, she missed.

  Gods in heaven, if only she could have struck true.

  I looked down at the claws in my chest, the nails of my friend spread out around my drumming heart, my blood dripping across her palm and fingers, and smiled.

  Seamus's blood powering my veins I lashed out, slapping her away as if she were little more than a fly. Roisin's hit the ground somewhere to my right—the thump was hard, I could hear bone crack—and though I desired nothing more than to turn my head, to see if she was all right, my body was not my own, and it had eyes only for Seamus.

  He lay bent over a piece of what had been furniture at one point or another, his clothes torn at the elbows and knees, his pale neck slicked with blood seeping through his fingers as he pressed both hands into the wound, as if he could force it back in.

  Weak, so weak. His body trembled, muscles lacking enough blood volume to move properly, flailing and sliding as he tried to push himself up—tried to push himself away from me.

  "So strong," Ragnar said, as if from a distance, the admiration in his voice making me scream though I could not so much as part my lips under my own free will.

  Someone came at me from the side. I slapped them away without looking. Maeve's helmet smacked into rock. I knew that sound, and it drove an ice pick of dread into me.

  My claws were on Seamus's shoulder. I yanked him to his feet, swatted his arms away—such worthless protection, the strength of mortals, why did they even try?—and sunk my fangs back into his neck, shivering as my sustenance was restored.

  No. No. No.

  I wanted to scream, to pull back, to throw Seamus away from me and never look upon him again so long as it kept him safe.

  The beat of his heart slowed. Stuttered.

  "Seamus," Maeve whispered, "the exorcism chant. Use it."

  "I can't," he whispered at my feet, and the sob in his voice made me bite deeper.

  "Your blood, boy. It's a lens. A magnifier. I can lend you my strength but you must channel it. Chant Seamus, gods above and below, chant."

  He did. His throat moved against my lips as the words Maeve had thrown against Raina slipped out, painfully, one after another as if he were a doomed man trudging across the desert. A trickle of familiar power—Maeve's—seeped into him, tickling my senses. Urging me to drink deeper as it made his blood that much sweeter.

  The Venefica heard, through my ears, and I delighted at her burst of indignant rage. Raina had been a willing supplicant, pliant and eager. I was not.

  Seamus said the final word and my world inverted.

  I hit the ground hard, sliding on my back across gravel and dirt, and snapped my hands down to dig my claws into the loam, stopping the slide.

  I. I had dug my claws in.

  At some point the Venefica had closed my eyes. I opened them. Ragnar stood above me, his shoulders hunched, his body riddled with bullet holes weeping black blood.

  My shotgun, I thought blurrily. The gun I had left behind in the garden had been the one Seamus had used. Of course he'd know to look for it. Clever guy.

  My thoughts caught up with reality. The buttons on Ragnar's jacket were silver, like the moon he served, and reflective. They showed me my own face, lying in the dirt, bloodied and bruised and nestled in a thorn bush of tangled hair.

  And my eyes. One gold, the other fully silver.

  What had I become?

  Ragnar extended a hand to me, his claws retracted. Elegant fingers, pale as grub worms and miraculously clean, curled slightly in invitation.

  "It is time, Magdalene."

  I took his hand. Lucien's had been so cold, even compared to my crypt-cold skin, but Ragnar's was the same temperature as my own. Matched. I wondered if it had always been that way, or if my change had made me colder. Driven me closer to the night.

  He flexed, pulling me to my feet, and I let him, meeting his gaze, looking nowhere else but the silver ring of his eyes and wondering if something else—something not Ragnar—watched me from within. I hoped so. I hoped it saw this.

  I rammed the claws of my other hand straight into his heart.

  Thirty-seven: Her Maker

  Ragnar's expression froze, the last emotion it would ever reveal, shock widening his eyes and stretching his lips back from his teeth. His skin broke into a fractal map, the seams deep lines of black char forming valleys across his face, his neck, down into his chest and racing out across his arms to his fingertips. Like my black veins—but these were so much more.

  He tried to say something, his lips curling back from his teeth as he struggled to force the words out, but his body had already given up on him. The patchwork of shadows that clung to him fell away, shattering against the ground like broken glass—broken promises of power. At the joins where his skin met the black canyons his flesh began to peel back, to shrink within itself like an old man left dehydrated, to die, in the middle of the desert.

  His eyes—so mercurial before, vibrant and flashing with life even though his flesh was dead—went dull as neglected steel. As if something vital, some quickening of his whole being had been stripped away in that instant.

  The seams of black gave way. He shattered.

  In the breath before his body transmuted to ash his heart, impaled upon my claws, kicked once. A desperate attempt to restart itself, to claim life and eternity once more. And then—nothing. Grey dust pooled in the palm of my hand where the heart had once been, a gust of ash like the plume of a volcano's angry mouth fluttering out from the place where Ragnar had once stood.

  The larger flakes, tinted by the blue-violet light of the Venefica's magic, slalomed to the ground like snowflakes. Caught in my hair.

  "No," the Venefica whispered.

  The desperation in her voice sent a shock of pleasure up my spine. I had never heard her afraid before, even the last time we battled she had not sounded half so defeated. So frightened.

  I turned to her, the pale cloud of what had been Ragnar at my back, my claws held out to my sides. Something like triumph threatened to raise a victory cry in my heart, but I pushed it back. Raina and her passenger were still a threat.

  "My blood is my own, and no other's."

  She curled back her lips in a facsimile of Ragnar's final snarl. "Your blood is a leash reaching back through the generations. I've taken your mind before, Magdalene. I can do so again."

  Sweat made Raina's brow shine in the blue-violet light, her hair plastered to her temples. She reached her arms out once more, gathering power to herself, but the strain on her face drew dark shadows across her cheeks, below her eyes. Raina's body was tiring. Rejecting the power the Venefica struggled to force through it.

  I stepped toward her, and stumbled, my hip giving out underneath the strain. While the Venefica had ridden my mind, my body had been hers to command—a mere puppet—pain signals dashed away as superfluous. In pushing through, she'd made those injuries worse. I braced myself against a half-crumbled wall and struggled forward another step. Another. The Venefica's chanting increased in urgency, her eyes widening with each step I took closer.

  Roisin. Seamus. Maeve. None of them could rise against the Venefica. None of them could stand against me if she took my mind once more. We were, all of us, broken.

  I hadn't counted on Talia.

  She
leapt from behind a wall, deadly silent aside from the harsh draw of her breath and the scraping of her heeled shoes against the ground. Pale and bloodied, I didn't recognize her at first. Her long hair whipped out behind her, her throat smeared with dried and flaking blood.

  Something silver flashed in her hands—the dagger. The dagger inlaid with silver that had been used to poison me. That I'd stabbed Ragnar with. I'd all but forgotten it as we'd struggled through the rubble of the castle.

  Raina—the Venefica—half-turned toward Talia, her mouth widening in shock, stumbling over the words of the enchantment. I forced myself to move faster, to draw upon everything I had left to get there before Talia did, lest she be hurt again, but I didn't have it in me. My strength was gone, washed away on a tide of magic and blood. All I could do was watch.

  Talia brought the blade down in a clumsy, but forceful jab, both her hands on the handle as she rammed it into Raina's chest then twisted, angling it into the heart.

  Raina screamed. Such a human sound. What small parts of me were still bound to the sunstrider oath rallied at that noise, urged me to intervene—to save the mortal, even if it meant my destruction.

  But that mortal had invited an evil witch into her body, had admitted to the fact herself. I had no duty to defend her. At least, that was what I'd thought. I'd have to ask Roisin later—my instincts were no longer to be trusted.

  Raina lurched, grasping the blade with both hands, and dropped to her knees. The blue-and-violet power crackling through the air fizzled out all at once, the young woman's face contorting as the Venefica struggled to regain control of the body that was, now, running on primal instinct.

  Talia staggered away, holding her hands out as if she'd never seen them before, her palms bloodied not just from the vital fluid of Raina's heart but from deep lacerations across her palms and fingers. If you'd never stabbed someone before—even if you had—it was always likely you'd end up cutting yourself in the process. Talia had just learned an important lesson of self-defense. If we all survived this, I'd have to teach her others. Clearly she was no longer content to sit on the sidelines.