The man who had spoken to me swallowed. He nodded and drifted his hand away from the weapon strapped to his hip, then stepped aside as he opened the big wooden door. His colleague didn't seem as willing to let me inside. That man's hand didn't stray from his club.
I didn't blame him. My very presence was designed to strike fear into the hearts of mortals. It was in the genetic makeup of all prey species to know when they were being faced down by their apex predator.
I met the eyes of the man who was willing to speak with me and asked, "Where is your library?"
He shared a look with the other guard who, only shrugged in response.
"Down the hall and to the left," he said.
I nodded my thanks and took off in the direction he indicated, smearing blood-and-mud footprints across the carpet with each step. I hoped that man with the roll of carpet had been here to change out the rugs. They weren't going to be salvageable once I was done.
A large, arched opening led into a room lined with shelves stuffed full of old leather-bound books. The air was scented with the rich fragrance of old paper and hints of wood polish with a tinge of citrus. And a strong undercurrent of nightwalker.
I made a quick study of the shelves, looking for the book Talia had indicated. If it took more than a minute, I was determined to go back and grab one of those guards to make them show me where the book was. I couldn't wait any longer. To hell with the veil. I would tear this place down to the studs if I had to, I didn't care if the mortals were frightened. They had every reason to be scared—and not because of me.
I found the book on the bottom shelf, crammed towards the corner. A small statuette of Prometheus stealing the fire from the gods sat beside it. The copy of Dracula was bound in red leather, the title imprinted with shiny gold leaf. I grabbed it and pulled as Talia had suggested, and jumped back, startled, as the shelf swung away from me. It opened into a wide, dark hallway with a set of stairs leading down into more blackness.
I hesitated with the book in my hands, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with it now. I dropped it to the ground and stepped through the entrance before it closed behind me. Here in the dark, surrounded by stone, the nightwalker smell was strong. Fresh. I took the first step, reaching for my blade, and was met by a piercing, and very human, scream.
Thirteen: Screams in the Dark
When given reason, sunstriders can move faster than humans can follow with the naked eye, and a human scream makes us reach for our power like nothing else. I didn't care what awaited me down there in the dark. A human was hurting. Nightwalkers were causing that hurt. It was my job, my oath, to correct that situation.
I hit the ground at the bottom of the stairs and brought my blade up to a guard position. I may have been in a hurry, but I wasn't stupid. It was just as dark down here as it had been in the stairway, but my eyes were already adjusted. Benefits of the blood, damned as it may be. I may never get to experience human love or joy again, but I can see in the dark and move like the wind. Most of the time, it's worth it. The times when it isn't, I try not to get too worked up. I made my choice. 2020 was a bit late to start regretting it.
A chorus of snarls greeted my arrival. Three ghouls dropped to a crouch upon sighting me; two women who looked like sisters, and a man who was a good six inches taller than me. The man appeared to be smuggling some muscle under that tight shirt of his, but it was the ladies I worried about. They moved in unison, coordinating without words, and that was a lot more dangerous than the biggest lug you've ever seen. I had Roisin at my side, once. I knew how nasty we could be working together. Throw in the ghoul taint, and things were about to get messy.
One of the sisters dropped what she'd been holding, and it took a second for my eyes to wrap up what they were seeing and deliver it in a bow to my brain. Ghoul number one had been chowing down on a human. Her mouth was smeared with blood, looking like thin chocolate syrup in the low light, and the human male at her feet had a big chunk taken out of his shoulder.
That bitch. Ghouls didn't even have fangs—they weren't set up to feed on human blood yet. They supped a bit from their nightwalker lords and ladies, and that's what put them into thrall and gave them a few perks like speed and strength—and a tendency to follow nightwalker orders like a brainless zombie—but this girl had been playing nightwalker, pretending she was big and bad enough to have a taste of fresh human on her own.
The man slumped at her feet groaned and twitched an arm. Good. He was still alive. And there was no way in the pits of hell that I would let that ghoul finish the job. She had a satisfied smirk on her face, like a cat who'd just yanked on a mouse's tail and was watching the little squeaker get indignant before it went in for the kill. She didn't know what I was. None of them did.
The ghouls at Club Garnet had been work. This was going to be fun. I had a lot to make these fuckers atone for, and I had to do it fast. Never mind the coming night—I didn't need my full strength to handle a couple of over-inflated ghouls—but they weren't the only ones who'd been here. Above their stink, the putrid stench of nightwalker—real, full-blooded nightwalker—hung on the air. One of their masters had been here, and that was my target if I wanted to find out what was being done to my sunstrider family.
Would-be-nightwalker never saw me coming. I reached for supernatural speed and parted her head from her shoulders like I was chopping through grass. She didn't even have the time to register shock. Her expression was frozen in smug indifference, even in death, a challenging smirk stuck on her lips as her head slid off her shoulders, coming to a wet stop just inches from the crumpled human's face. He found the strength to scream again, and I felt a little guilty for being the cause of his horror. At least he'd live to see another morning.
Smug's sister had more time to process what was happening. Her faint grin parted into outright horror, her whole body going rigid with what looked like rage. I'd killed her sister. Couldn't blame her for being angry with me, but that anger wouldn't last. I wasn't about to stop because I'd upset her.
"Who is your master?" I demanded, stepping into the woman and cracking her hard in the ribs with my elbow. She hissed and doubled over, spitting someone's blood on the already stained floor, and reached for a knife holstered on the inside of her denim jacket. With my senses up, I saw her go for it in slow-motion, and slapped her hand away even as I brought the point of my blade to bare against her pale throat.
She froze, leaning away from the steel until her back pressed against the wall. Big blue eyes stared daggers into me. The girl was about to discover that those were way less effective than the real thing.
"Fuck yourself," she said.
There was a time, before I went to my rest, when the sunstriders put effort into recovering the souls of ghouls. We called them the lost flock, and whole coteries functioned solely on the hope that they could be reeled back in. Detox from nightwalker blood was a nasty thing to watch, and an even worse thing to live through, but some of them could be saved. It was our job to save humanity, if we could.
I'd never been a member of the recovery coteries. I was meant to hunt. And I was not yet done.
It didn't take any effort to open her throat, a human toddler could have done the deed. I've always kept my blades bone-splittingly sharp. Preternatural strength or not, there was no point in mismanaging the tools of one's trade.
A hole exploded in the wall over my shoulder, flinging blue-painted plaster across the fresh corpses I'd just made. Right. The man. Who apparently had a gun. I'd forgotten about those.
I dropped to one knee alongside the whimpering human and the two cooling bodies. The Sun Guard's face was paler than any nightwalker I'd ever seen, but he hadn't lost all that much blood. His body would live. I wasn't too sure about his mind. I grabbed him by the back of the shirt and yanked, dragging him behind the cover of one of the many desks that dotted the office of this Sun Guard compound. They were all starting to look alike.
Once the human was safely stowed away, I planted a
hand on the edge of the desk and vaulted the blood-spattered piles of paperwork in one easy bound. Much to my surprise, big and shooty had his wits about him and was ready for me. He cracked off a shot, taking me in the hip, and I swore as my body jerked with the force, waves of fiery pain radiating from the wound. The bullet tore through me, slamming into the wood of the desk I'd jumped. I hoped it didn't make its way through to the human I'd hidden there.
The big man brought his aim back around and gripped the weapon with both hands, eyes narrowing as he used his ghoul-enhanced senses to target me again. Yeah, he was good, and he was pumped up on nightwalker blood, but I was faster. And angrier.
I relieved him of his hands before he could squeeze the trigger. Finished up with a quick jab through the heart so he wouldn't suffer the long agony of bleeding out through his wrists, then took a quick survey of the room.
While the sisters had been menacing the only human left standing—or whimpering, as was the case—the man had had his back up against a door. One that had the aroma of nightwalker about it. I sniffed the air, hesitating. Something about that scent tickled at the old halls of my memories.
It was cloying, yes. The same thick sweetness that all nightwalkers exuded, with a touch of decay and dust. But something about it was warm, too. Warm in the way human scents sometimes were—a hint of spice, or hay, or sunlight.
Whatever caused that familiarity, I shook it off. Once you reached my age, old ghosts were as common as hangnails, and I meant to see my duty through. No more mucking about with ghouls. There was a nightwalker in this building.
Keeping my blade up, I yanked open the door and peered into another dark hallway. It was easy to guess what had happened here. The nightwalkers and their ghouls must have cut the lights before entering the building, stripping away any hope of escape the Sun Guard employees may have had. I thought of the staff of Somerset House—Seamus, Talia, Adelia and Emeline—and my blood boiled with fresh rage.
How frightened they must have been, trapped in the dark, not understanding what had happened to them. I had only come to know the humans of my compound briefly, but the thought of them going through a similar experience enraged me. These were servants of the light. They should be protected, not cast into darkness and made to tremble with fear in the final moments of their lives.
The sound of stone scraping against stone reached my ears, and I hurried down the steps, taking them slower this time as I didn't wish to leap into the center of a gathering of nightwalkers. I could show restraint when the threat of being killed was very, very real.
A crackling sounded in my ear and I flinched, forgetting the device Seamus had given me. His voice hissed across the distance between us. At least he'd had enough forethought to whisper.
"Mags? Are you all right?"
I pressed the button as he'd shown me and whispered, "Yes. One injured Sun Guard. Send in the healers."
"I'll, uh, call an ambulance."
"Quiet, now," I ordered, and pulled my hand away from the earpiece, creeping the last few paces down the stairs. The scraping stopped. The faint scent of sunstrider hung in the air along with nightwalker.
I braced myself for battle and stepped into the crypt. The last of the day's light bled through an open door at the end of the room, leading out to a tree-shadowed path with a white van waiting at the end, its back doors swung wide open. The stone caskets of my brethren were strewn about the room, their lids open and their contents gone. All, save one.
A tall man stood over an open casket, an unconscious sunstrider thrown across his broad shoulders. He glanced up from his work, startled, his eyes a field of steely grey so dark and cold they chilled me straight to the bone. His black coat obscured his figure, the collar tugged up to hide the profile of his jaw, wide and square to better hold the fangs that would extend from his canines. His hair had grown into dark waves, pushed back just above his ears, and his forehead carried a few more wrinkles than I remembered. But I knew him.
I would know him until all the world turned to ash.
"Lucien."
For a long moment, he could do nothing but look at me. Lucien. My Lucien. The man whose memory followed me through the haze of my long years, the man whose laugh and touch I knew better than my own. The mortal man, vibrant as the day, who should have long since gone back to the earth.
Lucien. Who carried the nightwalker scent and looked upon me with moon-colored eyes.
"Magdalene," he said, and shivered, taking a hesitant step back.
I did not mean to, but I lowered my blade, and in that moment, he fled.
Fourteen: No Love Lost
My oath compelled me to move, though my legs were stiff as old iron. The first few steps were stumbling, my muscles dragged forth by the power of the oath pounding in my veins. I sped my steps. Lucien was almost to the van. I couldn't afford to give in to shock.
I was so close I could feel the wind whipping off his body as he threw the sunstrider into the van and slammed the doors shut, slapping the back panel with an open palm. The van's tires kicked gravel at me before shooting down the narrow road. Lucien turned to regard me, a cloud of dirt from the tires hiding the bottom half of his body.
"Magdalene..." he said, his faint French accent smoothing the hard edges of my name. Gentle as the word sounded, it hooked in my chest like a barb, drawing me to him. I wanted nothing more than to demand what had happened, to discover what had become of him. To find out who had made him into... into this so that I could rip their heart from their chest myself.
But the white van drew all my attention. The sunstriders were in there, and I needed to protect my family. Reaching for power, I stutter-stepped past Lucien, ignoring his cry of alarm, and sheathed my blade. In the van's rear-view mirror, the eyes of the driver bulged as I leapt, slamming into the back of the van. The vehicle jerked, swerving to the right. I extended my claws and dug in, piercing the thin metal with my fingertips.
The driver swerved hard toward the trees. Hunching my shoulders, I tried to flatten myself against the van, but the lane was narrow and the cursed trees had grown too close to its edge.
Branches whipped my back, thudding against the thick leather of my jacket, and smaller twigs tangled in my hair and scratched my cheeks. Thin streaks of blood traced lines across my face. Each time the driver swerved, I had to give up my quest for the handle of the van's back door and dig in deeper, the metal scraping against my hardened skin.
I hadn't really thought this plan through before I'd jumped. Instinct had always served me well in my own time, but this modern era kept finding new ways to punish my impulsiveness.
The crack of a gun pierced my ears and I flinched down, shifting my feet along a thin metal ledge running the back of the van. Dirt and gravel exploded alongside me, again and again, as some asshole in the passenger's seat fired wildly at the back of the van. He probably wouldn't hit me, but he was sure slowing me down.
"Cease fire!" A familiar voice bellowed somewhere above me. I craned my neck, searching for Lucien, and gasped as I saw him sailing through the treetops.
He propelled himself from thick branch to thick branch, claw-sharp fingertips tearing up bursts of splinters each time he launched himself anew. In the lavender kiss of dusk, his pale skin glowed otherworldly, an apparition outside of both nightwalker and sunstrider, his eyes bright enough with silver to challenge the brilliance of his power-giving moon.
Lucien hit a broad branch and sprung, his whole body stretching out like a leopard going in for the kill. For a second, I dared to hope that he was coming to my aid, that his bellow for his colleagues to cease fire had been to save my hide as I found my way into the van. Then I mapped his trajectory, and swore. I had only a second to dig my fingers in before he crashed into me, ripping us both from the van.
My jeans tore the second I hit the ground, lashes of pain radiating up my legs. Something in my shoulder popped, making my left arm go numb. I ducked my head as we rolled, Lucien's strong arms wrapped around me, keeping me
sheltered with his body.
Some instincts were too hard to let go.
His back came to a hard stop against the trunk of a tree, jarring us both, and before he could grapple me into submission I pushed away, scrambling backward across the leaf-strewn ground like a crab. My left arm buckled as I put weight on it. A searing agony throbbed from my fingertips up to my jaw and ricocheted down into my chest.
I scrambled to my feet and backed away from him, half turning to figure out where the van had gone. I could no longer see the vehicle itself, but its dust trail veered to the left a little way through the treetops. I pressed the button in my ear.
"Seamus. White van, heading left out of the park behind Chatham House. Sunstriders inside. I'm held up. Find them."
"Plate number?"
"I don't know what that is!"
"Right. Sorry. On it."
Lucien groaned and pushed to his feet with relative ease compared to my mad scramble. Twigs and leaves stuck in his hair, and he smiled as he reached up and shook them out, watching the debris fall around his feet. He was, I thought, doing everything he could not to look me in the eye.
"My Magdalene," he said with a rueful smile, "using Bluetooth technology. I never dreamed I'd see the day."
"What are you doing with my family?"
It was only the first question that bubbled to the surface of a roiling froth of confusion, but it was a beginning. The only beginning my oath would let me take. I could feel the pull of it hammering in my blood.
A balance had been tipped in the world, nightwalkers overran the streets, and it was my job to slaughter my way back to a balance. The oath that bound my blood saw no difference between any other nightwalker and Lucien. It demanded his death.
To slow the throbbing urge to kill, I drew my sword with my good arm and fell into a ready stance, hoping he wouldn't notice my injury. The binding of the oath eased, sensing that I was prepared to handle Lucien. If I had been mortal, it would have been hard not to vomit. Such a ruthless thing, my duty.
Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1) Page 7