Sighing, I told the man the only true words I could, “You could never know how grateful I am to you for what you’re doing, Luca.”
“We’ve known each other half of our lives. Don’t you care at all that I’m going to die?”
“Of course, I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come.” Guilt thrummed through me as I grabbed my coarse and patched trousers from the ground. It had been guilt that drove me to Luca’s bed this morning to fulfill his dying request. It wasn’t like Luca and I hadn’t slept together before. We’d been paired frequently as teenagers while we practiced our craft. We knew every inch of each other’s bodies, every sensitive place. My body had enjoyed his skilled caresses even if my heart had turned away from the man long ago.
Why he’d wanted to sleep with me when there were at least a hundred courtesans in Portland much more skilled and beautiful than me, I would never understand. Going in, I expected to feel so much devotion to the man I would take into my body. He’d volunteered to save everyone I loved. But my heart felt nothing for him except that persistent guilt. I pulled on a shirt and belt with my knife before turning toward the bed.
Luca still kept his courtesan room just as it had been before the war. Silk and velvet draped over his bed. Priceless paintings hung on his wall. Chests overflowed with jewels. Everything here was patron gifts he never released to the rebellion. I had given up every last patron gift and even my gowns to the army. But I supposed he was giving his life, so resenting him for keeping his jewels seemed petty.
Luca climbed off his bed and crossed the distance toward me.
“Only once, Luca.” I shoved my feet in my boots. “I need to check that everything’s in place.”
“So I can die,” he said as he glowered. His hand came up and cupped my chin. “Pretend that you love me while you tell me goodbye?”
Damn. I wish I could love Luca. He deserved to have someone other than his sister mourn him. I had known there was a slight fixation growing on his side, but I had thought it was jealousy, at first jealousy for the favoritism that the royals showed me, and after the king’s murder, resentment for the role I earned in the rebellion. I had no idea that he’d gained something like a patron’s obsession, the most dangerous fixation for a courtesan to acquire.
Reaching up, I rubbed my fingers along the stubble on his jaw. I looked into his eyes, letting them brim with the only emotion I could feel toward him, gratefulness that he was sacrificing his life so my brothers and sister could live. I went to my toes and pressed my lips against his soft mouth. Luca’s hand wrapped around the back of my head, and he kissed me with all the skill his years of training allowed him. His lips slipped over mine, sucking and licking until he broke away. “I was never good enough for you, was I? I was never good enough for you and your fucking ambition.”
As much as I didn’t want them to, my insides iced over toward the man who was about to die. I wanted to feel genuine remorse at his loss. I wanted my heart to be aching. I felt nothing.
I pressed a hand to his chest, knowing that his words were coming out of a place of fear for the day ahead. “You’re a hero. You’ll be remembered as the man who died to save every human in Portland.” I had always had an instinct for telling people what they wanted to hear from me, so I cupped Luca’s face, leaned in and whispered, “I love you. I’ll keep the memory of what we shared forever.”
His blue eyes fixed on mine, and for just one second, fear and uncertainty flashed over his expression. His lip trembled. A moment later, the look vanished, and his eyes grew hard. “No one could ever lie as well as you, Kori. You should go.”
His words were meant to wound me, but I was numb to their spite. Deception was a gift in my arsenal. It had always served me faithfully. Luca didn’t need to tell me to leave twice, as soon as he released me, I rushed out of his room.
As I exited Jackson Tower into downtown Portland, the dome above glowed its usual red hue of morning. During different times of the day, red or full spectrum light would shine down. At night, the lights were blue. It was regulated by generations before ours to produce the ideal growing environment for crops. In just one month with water rationed away from raining down on our agriculture, the light did nothing to the fields. We’d picked them barren weeks ago.
Beneath that crimson-soaked illumination, the vampire armies bashed against our outer containment wall. Their battering vehicle hit the metal door with a loud, repetitive clap, shaking the warped metal to clang against the inner fortifications. The familiar crash and clang had been the heartbeat of Portland for a year now, but this evening the thumping had hastened its pace. The vampires’ strikes were more powerful than they’d been in months, as if they could already taste our blood on their tongues.
The siege of Portland would end before the dome turned blue.
We knew it.
The vampire armies knew it.
A buzz of excitement thrummed through every rebel soldier I passed on the way from Jackson Tower. They carried heavy loads, pouring the last drops of oil onto the ground before smashing the wooden barrels for kindling. There was a steely determination in their eyes, and more than one soldier offered their companion a weary smile.
Smiling.
That was something I hadn’t seen in the kingdom of Portland for a long time. It felt like hope, a new sense of confidence surging through the war-torn city.
As I crawled along the system of barricades toward the front gate, the reek of gasoline burned my nose. There was a tittering just before something whistled past my cheek and wood exploded in splinters close behind me. A lock of my long black hair drifted to the dirt, sheared off in a perfect line from where the bullet passed through. I dove behind an overturned car, only to have three people jump down beside me.
“You wouldn’t last a day in open combat,” my brother Brendan said as he smirked over at me and flicked my hair. “You’re moving into the line of fire for them.”
“It’s probably a good sign that Kori yet again closely evaded death,” my sister Genevieve said as she tugged my shortened curl.
I hunkered down between my twin and older brother Brendan, plopping my butt on the cold dirt. It had taken me months to forgive them for going behind my back on the night that Portland Palace fell, and I would never trust my brother Brendan and sister Genevieve as I once had, but in the end, I had to let their betrayal go. They’d been following orders, and, as much as I hated it, they didn’t view the vampires as I did. “I just…” I paused to look back at the warped metal containment door, “I feel like I missed something.”
Brendan leaned into my side. “We get the rebel soldiers down the tunnel we dug. Luca the Snake burns this and then opens the containment door into the dome. We escape and blow the tunnels up on our way out, trapping the vampires in Portland with no humans to drink from.” Brendan shrugged his muscular shoulders. “Crude, but simple enough to work. What’s to get wrong? Well, it’s always possible that the Snake will decide not to get his hands dirty.”
Genevieve rolled her eyes. “Don’t call Luca a snake, Brend. Kori just got back from attending him, and he’s about to die to save all of our lives.”
“Kori is the one who made the nickname up,” Brendan objected. “Okay, fine. I won’t say it after he actually succeeds in saving us. But I reserve the right to call him a snake if Luca shirks the duty off and, as always, I end up doing it.”
“I think we’re going to have to get used to calling Luca by a very different name,” I said as I peeked back at the hole-ridden and warped containment wall. “He’s determined to do it.”
The same squirming feeling writhed in my stomach. I’d been trying to ignore it, yet it only wriggled all the faster, and I pressed a hand over my shirt, feeling the ridges of where the material had been patched and patched again.
“What if the barricade won’t catch fire?” I mumbled, looking at the overturned cars and piles of broken building shards.
Blue flames ignited in Brendan’s palm, making my heart skip a
beat. “We could do an experiment with a larger sample—”
Genevieve reached over and calmly set her hand on Brendan’s palm, absorbing his blue Ignis fire. “Brend, I’m not questioning your thought process, but I don’t trust having an open flame right here right now.”
“I’m questioning your thought process and whether or not you have a functioning brain.” I pushed Brendan’s shoulder. “We don’t know how far the oil splattered. The army has been at it for hours. Sometimes, I swear, Brendan, that you are the stupidest genius I know.”
“As opposed to you, Kori, the most competitive and ruthless genius we know,” my brother Timothy teased from where he’d been watching on, silently, from the other side of Genevieve. The constant gleam of mischief in my not-so-little, younger brother’s eyes made him look like a rogue. “Then there’s Vivie, the sweetest, most deadly genius we know.” He grinned wide. “And then there’s me, the poor fool who has to live with you intolerable geniuses.”
Genevieve slung an arm around Timothy’s shoulder and squeezed him to her side. “Never call yourself a fool again, please. I really hope you don’t think of yourself that way. In the Intolerable Genius Pack, you can either be the mischievous genius or the sneaky genius.”
Brendan’s nostrils flared. “If this is becoming a standing joke between us, I am not keeping my place as the stupidest genius. I’ll take most well-read or learned genius, hottest genius, most charming, charismatic . . .”
I lifted my brows. “Humble.”
Brendan gave me one of his heart-stopping grins, a grin that made life-long courtesans giggle. “You know me so well,” he said with a wink. “Brendan, the Humble Genius.”
I knew what my siblings were doing. I was falling into a place of deep calculation, a place where all sums didn’t add up and bitter, self-loathing ruled. They were needling and teasing me until I surfaced, as they so often did.
“You made a good plan, Kori,” Timothy said, reaching over to squeeze my hand, his fingers calloused and rough. “We’ll win.”
“Is that a prophecy?” Hope surged in my chest but dropped as my younger brother shook his head. Like all blood mages, my three siblings inherited magical abilities from our parents that only Brendan remembered. Unlike typical mages, who inherited magic in their spirit, blood mages carried only one magic power in our blood. Our magic was more limited than spirit mages, but in the power we had, we were infinitely stronger.
Genevieve and Brendan inherited Ignis, the power to make flame erupt from their hands and immunity to heat. My little brother inherited a very different ability, Tempus. He heard a voice telling him the future. It was a power that was very dangerous to have in the vampire kingdoms. The vampire kings and queens of the four monarchies didn’t agree on much, but they’d agreed on one thing. All Tempus mage bloods must die. There were only a few cardinal vampire laws that all vampires must follow, but that was one of them.
The Tempus line was supposed to be extinct. Clearly, one of our parents had managed to survive the purge.
Timothy dug his hand into the soft dirt beneath us before letting it sift through his fingers. He didn’t look at us as he answered. “Not a prophecy—just an observation. You and Griff debated this one for two months—if there were holes, Griff would have found them.”
Pressing into the ridges of the old car behind me, I sighed and looked back to my siblings. “You’re probably right.”
“What in the name of hell are you doing here?” A voice growled from within the skeletal remains of the nearest building. The general of the rebel army, Griff, leaned just slightly out of the hole where a door should be. His eyes shone yellow in the light, meaning he was using his powers to partially shift his eyes into that of an animal, likely a hawk. Even though the grizzled blood mage warrior was like a father to my siblings and me, there was nothing tender about having the battle-worn animal-shifter glaring at us. I was twenty-four years old, and yet, under his glare, I felt twelve.
Brendan whistled. “How does Griff do that? We just mention his name and then he’s found us?”
Griff bared his teeth. He was armed with two rifles and a crossbow, not that any weapon was very effective against a vampire warrior. His glare focused on me. “We might be following your strategies and campaigns, Kori, but you still follow my orders, and my order was for all of you to wait in front of the courthouse. The bulk of our citizens have already gone underground, and I was disappointed that the four of you weren’t there to see them off. You’re something of heroes to them—undeserved as it may be, judging by your behavior today.”
Guilt and shame washed over me in equal measure. “I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”
Another round of bullets broke through the dome doors and clanged off the barricade right next to Brendan’s head.
“Yes, I am completely okay with leaving,” Brendan said as he crawled forward and maneuvered through the overturned cars.
Staying low, we headed along the barricades. Broken glass shards crunched under our boots as we crossed into the building. Griff yanked on his long, braided beard, as his shoulders released their tension. “If the vampire hordes don’t kill me today, you four probably will.”
Genevieve bit her lip. “Sorry to worry you, Griff.”
“I’m fine. Feel guilty about worrying Mira when you should be in there supporting her. She’s inconsolable that Luca won’t let her sacrifice herself in his place.” It was a statement of his deference to the consort of Portland that he didn’t point out how ridiculous a suggestion that was.
“His sister withstanding, it is a little surprising that Luca won’t let one of the ten other volunteers sacrifice themselves in his place,” Brendan muttered as he pulled a tiny bit of burnt rolled tobacco from his jeans pocket and lit it with blue flame in his palm. He blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke, and continued in a strained voice, “And then—we all might die in an inglorious way in this godforsaken dome, so perhaps Luca is just ensuring that any survivor will sing his praises as the hero of Portland. It was the reason I volunteered.” He shrugged nonchalantly, but I didn’t believe him for a second. Brendan volunteered for the same reason I would have if I could have. He wanted us to live, and for that to be possible, someone had to die.
Griff grunted. “Well, we’re all expected to go in and thank Luca for his sacrifice, and if you don’t want to be written into the history of the Revolution of Portland as the jackass who mocked the great Luca before he saved the lives of thousands and sacrificed his own life, you might want to show a little gratitude.”
Brendan raised his hands in surrender. “If he actually does it, I’ll be more grateful than I could ever express.”
Before Luca volunteered, Brendan had been the one planning to open the gates. We all knew the sole human left behind in a dome full of hungry, trapped vampires would be lucky to die quickly.
Someone with the physical strength to open the warped containment door alone and the speed to light the barricades without catching fire had to sacrifice themselves. The fact that the sacrifice was a courtesan we all disliked made this somehow all harder to swallow. It felt a little like I’d made a plan to murder Luca, even though he volunteered.
A tunnel gaped at the center of Pioneer Courthouse Square, the red bricks splintered around a jagged hole. It led one hundred feet, twisting and turning into deep darkness. Then, it dropped. It was the first tunnel we dug, and as the abyss below was too far for any of our ropes, we’d mined it to the surface and made the passageway so obvious that the vampire army couldn’t miss it.
All around the tunnel, rebel officials lined up. The consort sobbed, standing central in a crowd of soldiers. Tears streamed down her beautiful face as she held Luca’s hand to her cheek. “Please, you have a full life ahead of you, Luca,” she sobbed like her heart was breaking. “I can’t lose you, too. Let me take your place.”
Luca towered over his sister’s petite frame. Looking very like a hero, he wore automatic rifles crisscrossing both of his shoul
ders along with our only flamethrower. I’d known this man half my life. But somehow right now, he was unrecognizable from the arrogant boy I grew up with.
“I started all of this. Let me go instead.” There was no way that Mira could take her brother’s place, but from her determined and fierce expression, I could tell she meant every word. I couldn’t help but think that if Luca hadn’t volunteered and it was still Brendan going, I’d probably be standing where Mira was, making the same irrational suggestion.
Griff stepped forward and boomed, “Thousands here will know that the only reason we’re alive is because of what you’re doing tonight.”
As if they were waiting for Griff’s cue, all around us, soldiers chanted Luca’s name, louder and louder, and the stunning man yanked his arm from his sister’s grasp. His gaze passed over the square, skimming by mine without catching, before he turned on his heel, lifted up a gun, and shot the consort in the head.
It happened so fast. There was an earsplitting crack through the air, blood splattered out, and then Mira collapsed to the ground, sprawling out on the pavement. Everything locked in one moment of shock, then giant forms dropped down on us from all directions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KORI
All around the square, massive vampires leaped from rooftops. Figures smashed through windows, sending glass exploding out. They moved with a swiftness only the undead fiends could manage, surrounding our army. With a battle cry, hundreds of vampires swarmed out of the courthouse. Dust flew, and blood sprayed. Raucous gunshots ripped through the air, and a soldier beside me shuddered and fell.
I needed to find cover. But the army pressed ever closer. Bodies shoved into me on all sides. An earsplitting boom sounded right by my ear as a rebel unloaded his handgun into a feasting vampire’s back. The creature shuddered and fell, but another leaped in to take his place.
Ruin: A Reverse Harem Dark Fantasy Vampire Romance (Fire & Blood Book 1) Page 5