There wasn’t a chance in hell I’d open my mouth again in Kai’s class. Not if that was the price.
Chapter Ten
Kai’s sentence didn’t begin until the next night, when Alice would have an outlined task list for me. I was to meet her on the second floor of the library building, where the records department was located. She oversaw it in addition to the library.
After class, the cadets met up with Sergeant Sorano again. Combat training took an interesting turn when she passed around a box of silver-plated handcuffs. The metal burned when it touched my skin, and if I held on to it long enough, blisters formed. Roman’s notes mentioned the silver affliction, but it still baffled me.
I wanted to know why silver was such a deal breaker, but I was sure that was another newbie question that would just result in additional taunting. So I filed it away to ask Sonja later and kept my mouth shut—except for occasionally cursing through my teeth—as we took turns wrestling each other to the ground and applying the cuffs. The pain was almost as bad as the time I had to take a shot of pepper spray to the face at the police academy.
Sorano informed us that we would have leather gloves for using the cuffs once we were agents, but it was vital that we have the endurance to work with them even if we didn’t have time to slip on protection. I could barely grip the door handle to the harem afterward.
My feeding with Sampson healed most of the damage to my phalanges, and it also allowed me enough time to visit Natalie again, as I’d promised. The relief gave way to regret as I explained why she wouldn’t be seeing as much of me over the next week.
“That’s so unfair.” She fumed as she undid the braids I’d put in her hair earlier, and then did a double take when she caught her reflection in the mirror above her dresser. Her rainbow hair frizzed in all directions, the natural crimps giving it an Einstein-esque appearance that was only reinforced by the smooth span of scalp adjacent to it.
“Wowza.” I mashed my lips together, trying to suppress the laughter cramping up my stomach.
Natalie glowered at me. “Yeah, let’s not try that one again.”
I held off asking her my vampy research questions and opted to scour the library, even though I’d be spending plenty of time there soon enough. The scholarly building was quickly becoming another safe place for me on base. Mic hadn’t returned since Sonja sent him packing, and Alice even seemed to be warming up to me. I was hoping that meant she’d cut me some slack in records.
I had two things in particular that I wanted to look up tonight. The first was something I’d skimmed in one of the biology books written for human agents hoping to eventually become scions. Something about lifeblood, which I had assumed was what a vampire fed to a human in order to turn them. Roman had called it being anointed. But then a passage about the brink of death forging a blood bond akin to a consummated marriage ritual caught my attention. I was second guessing everything now.
The other thing I wanted to know was a new question spurred by the delightful lesson in class tonight. It didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that the laws and punishments Kai covered were mostly meant for the middle-class vamps. Scarlett and Raphael’s exile was proof enough of that. But I was curious. What kind of crimes justified exiling a royal vampire? I started with that question, seeing as how it was the less embarrassing of the two.
Upon entering the library, I caught a glimpse of Alice as she disappeared up the stairs in the back corner. I wasn’t sure if I should take her disappearing act as an insult or as her expressing that she trusted me alone in her domain. The few times I’d braved asking for her help to find something, she had complied, though my very human questions seemed to alarm her. I was glad for the privacy tonight.
I found the tome regarding royal vampire etiquette and customs hidden on a bottom shelf among a collection of dry, historical reads about vampire standings through various global and domestic wars. My eyes tended to glaze over when faced with books that surpassed a thousand pages, so I’d stuck to the briefer texts. I guessed it was time to expand my horizons.
The table of contents for this new book find was a chapter in itself, but it was a chapter worth reading. It took five false starts before I finally found the section I needed. It detailed how the structure of a royal family shifted and how assets were dispersed after a death. And it contained the only reference I’d found so far to an exiled royal.
The Prince of House Baumgartner, the vampire family that reigned in Austria, had murdered his sire, the king, in the seventeenth century. The prince had been coffin-locked—and unless vampires had some sort of appeals court, he was still there. The king’s other scion, the princess, was promoted to queen. The prince’s scion was offered the station of prince if he would swear fealty to the new queen and denounce his ties to his sire—a tall order for any scion. He refused, but since he had no knowledge of the prince’s murderous plans, he was exiled instead of executed.
Exile for vamps was different than for humans. They weren’t necessarily expected to flee the country, but they did have to relinquish all of their royal assets and staff, including their harem, who were considered employees of the house proper.
The prince’s scion was tossed out on his ass to start over from scratch. He was essentially homeless, having to find shelter and willing donors all over again. If he couldn’t manage or violated any of the vampiric laws in the process—which would be easy to do in such a state of upheaval—then he would be brought up on charges of his own. It almost seemed like that was the end goal, a sharp jab in the wrong direction so the powers that be had better reason to slap him with the book and coffin-lock him in the basement alongside his sire.
I didn’t care how unjust it was—I refused to feel sorry for Scarlett or Raphael. What they had done to me, to Will, to Mandy…it was unthinkable. I was relieved that Mandy had taken care of Raphael, and that there was no evidence of it after she’d made a quick meal of him.
The small bit of his blood, that had made me into who I now was, held no sway over me. I didn’t have some tender place in my heart for the bastard who’d killed my partner and then killed me. If anything, I considered Mandy my maker. It’d been her sloppy feasting that had resulted in me rising to fight another night.
And maybe that was another reason I felt so compelled to keep the girl under my wing. Not that she actually needed the coddling. Mandy had grown up homeless on the streets of St. Louis. She’d been abducted, hooked on heroine, and turned into a werewolf before being forced to work in the Scarlett Inn. But she’d escaped the vampire brothel and made her way to a rehab center for supernaturals, and then, she’d come back to help the other girls. I admired her. She deserved to have someone watching her back, someone willing to show her what the tail end of a normal childhood might have looked like if she’d been a more fortunate daughter.
My eyes glassed over as I skimmed the chapter. I had no interest in how the king’s, the prince’s, or the prince’s scion’s fine clothing or carriages were dispersed or auctioned off. So I skipped ahead to the next section, regarding what happened to their potential scions, the half-sired humans stuck in limbo after the whole catastrophe had gone down.
The prince’s half-sired scion had slipped away in the night after the murder. Some suspected that he was an accomplice, but without another vampire to sustain him, his human age would result in his demise in a matter of months, a year at best. They hadn’t bothered to hunt him down.
The king had had one half-sired scion, a woman who’d been with him for over two hundred years. She’d gone mad and killed herself. Once risen as a vampire, she took her undead life by greeting the sun that morning. Lifeblood was mentioned briefly, and I cringed, remembering I needed to look that up next.
I reshelved the book and began my hunt anew, reading each title as I prowled the stacks. So many of them caught my attention. It was a struggle not to lose sight of my quest. The Art of Bloodletting. Harem Structure and Maintenance. The Freelance Donor. Rich Blood: Feeding
Your Harem for Health and Prosperity. I would have to make a point to ask Alice where I could get my hands on some of these books off base. They couldn’t be the only copies available.
The next book I finally settled on wasn’t anywhere near the texts about vampire biology and anatomy where I’d expected it to be. It was shelved with the leisure reads, tucked between a book about historical vampire power couples and a collection of love poems written by a vampire named Ambrogio to his lover Selene titled The Blood Will Run. Creepy stalker alert, anyone?
The less alarming title of the book I spread out on the table was Blood Relations and Ceremonies. It was a bit archaic, and I wasn’t even sure if it was relevant to the modern vampire community anymore. Not with instructions on how to budget a dowry for a new scion that went so far as to suggest presenting them with their very own horse and carriage. A proper scion should not have to share a carriage with their former harem companions, apparently. And potential scions were referred to as “human servants.” At least the modern vamps had attempted to jump on the social justice wagon and replaced the crude term with the more acceptable “half-sired scion” or “potential scion.” But the book did have a chapter about the chemical reactions associated with lifeblood, so I gave it a second chance.
Lifeblood…was not the same thing as being anointed. Oh no, it couldn’t have been that simple. Anointing a potential scion and half-siring them involved a vampire sharing a little sip of their blood once or twice a week to keep them young and resilient, eager to do their master’s bidding. If they died, they would then rise as a vampire and be an official scion. Story over.
Lifeblood was something else entirely. When I’d nearly died from extreme road rash and Roman had fed me enough of his blood to bring me back from the brink of true death—that had been lifeblood. And then when he had almost died after being stabbed at Nigel’s party, and I’d brought him back by opening my wrist—that had been lifeblood.
Lifeblood was the strongest bond that could be formed with a vampire. It even surpassed the bond between scion and sire—though, that bond was sometimes established between them before the scion’s first rising. Since a sire could no longer feed from a scion after that, the lifeblood bond often faded, like Roman and I were waiting for it to do now, I supposed. But there was no indication of how long it could take for that to run its course.
It was the reason he’d heard my call when I’d been trapped in the sinking coffin. And it was the reason I could hear him in my mind, soothing my panic. Did he know? Had he kept this from me, hoping it would go away and we’d never have to speak of it? Was the ache in my chest every time I heard his voice or pictured his face just some juvenile vampling reaction? The vampire version of puppy love?
I blinked up from the pages, my breath slowly mounting as if I might hyperventilate. The aisle of books my table was situated in seemed to constrict around me, lengthening to abstract proportions. The pulse in my head sounded like thunder. I was going to be sick.
Then Sonja’s head poked around the corner of the shelf. “There you are.”
“Nothing! What? Hi,” I said, slamming the book closed.
Sonja’s keen eyes caught the title along the spine before I could cover it. “You know you’re not supposed to anoint anyone without the royal blessing, right?” she asked, cautiously glancing over her shoulder to make sure Alice wasn’t eavesdropping from her desk.
I shook my head. “It was an emergency—he was about to die. And I didn’t know at the time, and his potential sire has anointed him plenty since then, so I’m good…right?”
“Well, this sounds promising.” She dropped into the seat across from me and grinned as she leaned across the table, her brown eyes sparkling. “Tell me something juicy, and I’ll answer whatever question is plaguing you—with a straight face,” she added, seeing my hesitation.
“Is my ignorance that amusing?”
Sonja winced sympathetically. “I gotta tell you. It’s a bit like watching a newborn kitten try to raise itself in the jungle.”
I snorted at her. “Well, don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel.”
“Hey, I could blow smoke up your ass all night, but it won’t get you too far. Besides, you’re doing better than anyone expected you would.”
“Fine.” Flattery for the win. I pursed my lips and narrowed my eyes at her before finally caving. “I think I might have accidentally forged a lifeblood union with Vanessa Sorano’s potential scion.”
Sonja sucked in a sharp breath. “Oooh, scandalous.” She pressed her lips together and snickered. “And what’s this big scary question you’re hunting for the answer to?”
“How long before this wears off?” I begged. Wasn’t that obvious? What the hell else would I need to know?
“Sweetie.” Sonja gave me a comforting smile. “That’s like asking how long love takes to wear off. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never. No one really knows.” Panic fisted my guts, but Sonja reached across the table and patted my hand. “But he’ll be fully turned eventually, and that tends to do the trick. Don’t worry yourself sick over it. Just invest in an extra hunky harem donor or two.”
“Oh really? You think that will do the trick?” I glared at her. “I should just have some pie since I can’t have the cake?”
“Your human is showing.” She raised a judgy eyebrow. “Might wanna tuck that back in if you want to be taken seriously around here.”
I covered my face with both hands. “It’s just not… I can’t look at humans the same way the rest of you do.”
Sonja stood and rapped her knuckles against the tabletop as she left. “Give it time, baby fangs.”
Chapter Eleven
Records detention duty proved neither easy nor educational. And Alice did not like me, I soon realized. So the vampling bias extended beyond competitive cadets. Super.
The librarian vamp at least didn’t hurl snide insults non-stop. There was class and couth to her animosity. Her disapproval was revealed in the way she all but refused to acknowledge my presence. When I showed up at the library and asked what I should do, she silently handed me a typed list with precise instructions, and then pointed to the stairs leading up to the records department.
I spent forty-five minutes after my first harem break and forty-five minutes before my second harem break upstairs at the library, sorting through undead private records and filing them into a new set of cabinets that had been brought in.
The cabinets were the first exciting delivery made since I arrived at the bat cave, and several mystery boxes had been stashed inside the drawers. Sorano ordered us to unload and move them into her office within the barrack. One box proved to be the silver handcuffs. I wondered what new horrors awaited in the other packages.
After being emptied, we helped move the cabinets to the library and upstairs, positioning them around the lofted space at Alice’s discretion. And there they’d sat, for nearly a week, empty and waiting. Almost as if the BATC sergeants were just waiting for someone to step out of line so they could offer Alice the needed help free of charge. Like I said, they were an efficient bunch.
But, Alice really did need the help. The records department was like a legal document time capsule. Storing tax forms, birth certificates, scion appointments, living wills, and all those other miscellaneous things for vampires who were, in some cases, several hundred years old…well, it created a lot of paperwork. A lot of questions, too. And since we were working with some seriously sensitive information here, it was hardcopy only. No digital files to risk being hacked.
And someone had to sort all that shit and keep it organized. And when it outgrew its current filing system, someone had to transfer all that shit to its new home. That someone might as well be me. I was an easy target, after all.
My library research was put on hold that week, and I didn’t even get an update on Mandy’s trip until she’d been back for several days. We met outside the cafeteria at the picnic table again, along with Collins. He watched me the whole time Mandy
relayed the details of the elk hunt through the mountains she’d participated in. How, after feasting on the thing’s carcass, she’d slept in a dogpile with a dozen other wolves. How it was the most exhilarating and liberating night of her life, and she couldn’t wait to go back. When she finally caught on to Collins’ edgy vibe, her voice trailed off.
“What?” I barked at him. His eyeballing was creeping me out.
He frowned and bit the tip of his tongue, as if trying to find the right words. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a reputation with these people?”
“A reputation?” I scoffed. “Hilarious.”
“Is it?” He clenched his teeth and blinked at me. “You mean you didn’t help bring down a brothel run by the exiled Baroness of House Lilith?” He huffed at my guilty-as-sin expression. “Yeah, I know about that. And I know that you also shot and killed two former blood donors of that baroness. Oh, and one of the half-sired cadets is convinced you’re fucking the duke, because no one as green as you are has ever been accepted to train here before.”
“Okay, okay.” I held up a finger as his voice escalated. “Those first two, they were about confidential cases. I couldn’t share the details with you, legally-speaking. And as for the duke, no! Of course not.”
Collins threw his hands out, palms up. “Then how do you explain it?”
“I was only given an interview with him after I helped with that last case, and that was all dumb luck anyway,” I said, pausing to marvel at how I could ever consider a serial killer breaking into my house lucky. “I begged to be allowed here—I begged on your behalf, too. Remember? Both of you.” My eyes flicked to Mandy. At least one person was grateful for that effort.
“This baroness is still at large.” Collins blew out a heavy sigh and glanced around the base. His arms wrapped around his chest, and he rocked softly on the bench. “You are in real danger, Jenna. You know that, right?”
Blood in the Water (Blood Vice Book 3) Page 9