“Indeed. Her power is corrupt, and growing only more so. It’s beginning to affect all magic, I fear,” the queen said. Her eyes narrowed as she focused in on Sorin. “Your people, the shifters, where do they stand?”
I shook my head. “We escaped Trident Park only with difficulty.”
“I had hoped for more.” Sorin shrugged. “Enough of them overheard our news that I still hope for some of them to come with us. Soon they all will know where we’re headed.”
“You know, in a way, Gypsy is our cousin,” the Fae Queen mused. “When she and her sisters gave themselves willingly to save the world by breaking it into the protected Hollows, they proved that the Fae do not have to be the capricious creatures we have been portrayed as, both here and in the world before.” She tapped her fingers some more.
It was all I could do to keep from throwing myself at her feet and begging, but I sensed that it would do no good. She was working on coming to a decision on her own. I only hoped it would benefit us. At the very least, she didn’t seem inclined to make us fight our way out, which was more than I could say for any of the other groups we’d dealt with so far. Sorin, too, held his peace as we waited for her determination.
“Very well,” she finally said on an exhale. “My people will join you. Gypsy cannot be allowed to corrupt Bucharest any longer.” Suddenly she changed from being a languorous, indecisive woman to a militaristic general as she snapped out orders, pointing at various retainers. “Mihai, take word to the forest Fae. Send their fastest runners and their strongest warriors. We converge on the vampires at dusk, before they awaken. Iacob, prepare our troops. Let them know will be fighting in close quarters, indoors unless Gypsy breaks free. Titus, prepare to take these emissaries to join with us when we muster.” She turned us. “And may we all survive to meet again.” With a stately bow, she swept out of the room, her wings fluttering behind her. Her people sprang into action as Sorin and I stared at each other, openmouthed.
“I cannot believe that worked,” Sorin breathed out.
“Me, either.”
But for the first time since I had seen the vampires feeding power into Gypsy’s tomb, I believed we might actually have a chance not only to win, but perhaps also to survive the battle that would lead to that victory.
Chapter 21
The distance it had taken us hours to cover earlier during the day took only a fraction as long in flight with the two winged Fae warriors who’d carried me up to the tower. I glanced down and shivered at the distance between me and the ground. But it didn’t take long for me to adjust to flying—and what I saw on the ground horrified me. Bucharest, it seemed, had come out of hiding to wage war on the street. The city’s walkways were packed with more people than I had ever seen in one place at a time, many of them shouting and brandishing weapons. In some places, I couldn’t see the ground at all for the people, and in other spots, when I did see the ground, it was awash in blood.
When we flew into Gypsy’s area of influence, it felt like a sword to the gut. Then a rising tide of fury engulfed me and I twisted against the hold the Fae warriors had on my arms. One of them whipped his head around to snarl at me, his eyes glowing a fierce crimson.
My surprise knocked me out of my rage for instant, long enough to gain control of myself. Sorin and his flight-guard were behind me. I couldn’t see them no matter how much I craned my head, so I had no idea how he was faring against Gypsy’s all-encompassing fury. With all the people below fighting one another, the death toll must have been enormous.
This will be a Blood Price like none the city has ever seen.
And this was without the influence of a full moon. I could only imagine what the Sleeping Daughter might have wrought had she been awoken during the moon cycle the vampires preferred.
And she’s not even awake yet.
My shudder this time was for the bloodshed that might yet come, if Gypsy took over.
The Fae circled over the vampires’ building, looking for a place to land. But the mercenaries hired to guard the vamps had kept the fountains and the grassy lawn in front of the palace clear of people—they must have overcome their own fury long enough to turn it outward. If we landed there, we would be dead before we could fight back. The Fae conversed over my head, their words swept away by the wind. Moments later, they landed atop the roof.
“This is as close as we can get you, I fear,” the one on my left side said.
“It is the landing site our own people will use, as well,” the other one added.
I took a few shaky steps toward Sorin as he was set down gently, as well. “We will do our best to clear a way in for you,” I promised the Fae.
“But be prepared to fight,” Sorin suggested.
The Fae soldiers nodded, clicking their heels together in an abbreviated bow. They took off into the air and swooped down over the crowd just outside the range of the mercenary guards.
What had been a madding mob suddenly turned frightened, screams echoing off the outer walls of the palace as people ducked away from the legendary wings of the flying Fae.
“And they dealt death from above,” I murmured, one of my favorite lines from a tale Maicǎ used to tell.
Used to. It had been such a short time since her death, and yet everything else had crowded out my grief, shoving it down into a tiny ball deep inside me to be dealt with later.
After Gypsy’s rising was stopped.
If there is an after.
I turned to follow Sorin, who was already running lightly toward what looked to be a door leading into the building. Roof access had never occurred to me as an option, though I assumed that Sorin had considered it when he spied on the vamps the first night I had Seen the Vision with him.
He paused to peer around the corner of the wall that held the door. I kept moving. The sun had already begun to set. I didn’t know precisely how long we had before the vampires awoke, but I assumed it wasn’t long. And of course the door was locked. I tried it and grunted in frustration.
“Watch this.” Sorin snicked his claws out on his right hand and inserted one into the lock. Within seconds, the handle turned and the door popped open.
The stairwell was dark after the fading sunlight from outside. I suspected that they had electric lights and contemplated flipping a switch. However, I didn’t want to risk waking any sleeping vampires. Instead, I blinked my eyes and reached out tentatively to Sorin, moving steadily ahead of me. I trusted that his lynx vision would be better than my own human eyesight.
The stairwell zig-zagged back and forward all through the building—an especially utilitarian space in a structure that was so very ornate in other ways. When we reached the ground floor, Sorin carefully pushed the door open, and we stood in the dark for a long, silent moment until he finally reached out and flipped the light switch. We couldn’t continue moving in the dark, not entirely.
When I discovered we were in the kitchen, it validated my theory that we were in the servants’ area of the palace. The space was enormous and gleaming. For several minutes I contemplated considered why vampires needed a clean kitchen—or, opening a cabinet, a well-stocked one.
Sorin leaned in close and whispered, “Blood servants.”
Of course.
The kitchen had no windows. I suspected that it did have passages to the rest of the building. The story in Bucharest was that the palace was originally built in the nineteenth century to hide from the public the wild parties the military officers had thrown on a regular basis.
As we moved through the building, I began to believe it. There were rooms upon rooms of elaborate design—more than I could imagine any military needing. The world had been so much bigger before.
I was glad I had Sorin with me to figure out where that first ceremony had taken place. I never would have found the room on my own. Not before the vampires woke, anyway. The whole building was ornate and labyrinthine—designed for those who already knew it to move around. I worried that even with Sorin’s guidance, we might take
too long getting back to the main hall. If the vampires awoke before we found Gypsy’s tomb, we might not live past sunset.
Of course, if that happens, there’s a chance no one at all will live to see morning.
Or, if anyone survived, Gypsy Hollow would be full of Wicked Bloods.
Eventually, though, and sooner than I had anticipated, Sorin whispered, “This way, I think.” He led us around to a wide doorway that I recognized from my Vision of the first night. “Are you ready?”
I shook my head but said, “Let’s go.”
Chapter 22
I half expected Sorin to throw open the doors and stride in. Instead, he opened them just a crack, far enough for us to slip through, but only barely.
The room was much as I remembered it. Tall, marble pillars on the sides supported a vaulted ceiling, carved and gilded. It was a straight shot from the end with the doors to the other end, where Gypsy’s tomb sat, seeming to glare at me malevolently from its squat, hunkered position. Reddish-black stains ran down the sides and I wondered briefly how Gypsy had come to be buried less than a hundred years ago beneath the building that had stood here for more than two hundred years.
There were chairs scattered around, but the hall was empty of vampires. We hadn’t seen any as we moved through the building, either, so I had to assume that they had gone to ground during the day, perhaps in a basement or some other part of the palace, even better hidden that when I had already seen.
Sorin eased the door closed behind us and we leaned against it, breathing more heavily than should’ve been necessary given the relatively light exertion it had taken to get down here.
“What now?” I hissed.
Sorin stared around the room helplessly. “I don’t know.”
As if she were standing next to me, I heard Maicǎ’s voice whisper, “Use your cards.”
“Follow me,” I said, striding brazenly up the middle of the room. Given what I was about to do, there was no use trying to hide, anyway. Sorin followed me, his claws anxiously flicking in and out of his fingertips. The sound of it followed me.
At the other end of the room, I circled around the tomb. Close up, it looked like a marble table carved out of a single stone. It was enormous and heavy—and unlike the rest of the marble in the room, it had absolutely no gilding on it anywhere. For that matter, it had no carving or decorative flourishes at all. Just a Rorschach ink blot test of the blood of countless victims. I stared into it trying to decide what it was I saw.
Pain, misery, death. The monstrous exchange of the Blood Price, sanguinary magic.
Power.
“And what do you want in return?” I murmured, placing my fingertips lightly on the edge of the altar.
Everything, the stone whispered back to me as it thrummed beneath my hands I remembered Gypsy’s voice running through me as it said Everything in this Hollow is mine. To oppose me is to die.
Maybe, I replied internally, but to embrace you is to die, as well.
I trembled at the thought.
With one hand, I fumbled for my tarot cards, my magic talisman against the horrors that Gypsy could bring and the only piece of my grandmother I had left. The scarf wrapping them fluttered to the ground and I slapped the deck down onto the stone tabletop defiantly, as if they alone could protect me from Gypsy’s wrath.
With a shudder, I picked up the cards and shuffled through them for a few seconds, then dealt out a short set of cards.
It was the same reading I gone before, the one that Maicǎ had said had been showing up throughout Bucharest: The Priestess, Death, The Tower, The Devil.
For the first time, I wondered about the validity of the meanings we had assigned to it. What if we’d been reading it wrong? The Priestess was still Gypsy, the Sleeping Daughter. But what if the Death card really referred to the inevitability of change and not physical death? What if, by change, it meant shifting—or shifters, like Sorin? And The Tower could mean the winged Fae’s stronghold. That would make The Devil the vampires, right?
I kept going, flipping out more cards.
The World. This usually meant a positive outcome—but in my new interpretation, the image of a woman floating in the air took on another meaning: Gypsy would rise.
But the further I went, the less I understood.
The Lovers. A choice? Love? Those were traditional meanings. I couldn’t imagine what else the card might mean.
The Wheel of Fortune. A life cycle or destiny was the typical interpretation.
The Sun. Success and vitality.
I hoped those last two were augurs of our own success—but I wasn’t about to bet on it.
Okay, I told my cards telepathically, if ever you’re going to protect me, now is the time.
At that moment, the altar shuddered and the doors we had crept through flew open, slamming back against the walls on either side. With an enormous cracking noise, ear shattering and hot, the altar split down the middle and fell away to either side, a great blue light shining out of it straight up to the ceiling like the pictures of spotlights from one of the old magazine photographs.
Winged Fae poured through the open doorway, both in the air and on foot, and I was stunned to see a number of lynx-shifters intermingling with them. Sorin had been right—some of his people had joined us.
The mixed group flooded into the room and made it up the aisle about halfway to the altar before they turned around to face the horde behind them. Following close at their heels came vampires and wolves, working together in a way I had never seen before. The leader of the Fae turned to me and Sorin and shouted, “Whatever you’re planning, do it now and do it fast. We don’t have much time.”
And then the two armies clashed in a space that was never designed for anything other than dancing at elaborate parties. The noise of the fighting overwhelmed me as the two sides snarled and snapped and screamed and bled and died—but I closed my mind to it and tried to focus solely on the tomb in front of me. Beside me, Sorin shifted into his animal form, circling and pacing around me to protect me from any attack.
When the tomb cracked completely in half and fell into two pieces, my cards flew to either side, landing around Gypsy’s burial site in a circular pattern. They had to be important somehow, or Maicǎ’s voice would not have led me to them. And yet all I knew to do was employ the same power I had used to travel into Sorin before.
All around us, as combatants on both sides died, the blood spattering the floors and walls, a white-hot power began to rise, circling around the room, drawing energy from every death. I watched it anxiously and gasped when it flashed to the front of the room to pour down into the open tomb. Every bit as much as the vampires sacrifices had, the battle we had brought here only made Gypsy stronger.
Had we been fighting for nothing? Had we been instrumental in making Gypsy’s rising happen sooner?
No. I could not believe that.
Even as the room’s columns trembled and underground tremors shook the entire room, sending bits of plaster and shards of cracked marble raining down from the ceiling in the tops of the pillars, I knew there had to be something else, something we were missing.
I spun around and caught Sorin by the scruff of the neck. He snarled and snapped before he realized who had hold of him.
“This isn’t working,” I shouted over the din of the battle raging around us. “The fighting is helping Gypsy. It’s feeding her.”
And again, I heard Maicǎ’s voice. It came to me like peace, closing down over me to create a circle of perfect silence.
Do not be afraid to love.
Almost immediately atop it, I heard Allessia’s prophecy. You must choose one another beyond all else.
Choose life and love.
Sorin, standing next to me in the midst of that perfect silence, stared at me with wide green eyes and in a blink, shifted into his human self.
I glanced around at my cards on the floor. We stood in the circle they formed and this time, I understood the meaning of the reading as
soon as I looked at it.
“I know what we have to do,” I shouted to Sorin as the noise around us brushed back in, our few seconds of peaceful quiet quickly delete that ended as quickly as it began.
And on the tail of my words, Gypsy awoke.
Chapter 23
The two sides of the marble table flew outward, smashing against the walls and raining down in a million shards of stone, their blood-soaked power slicing into combatants on both sides. Every drop of blood that fell from them only added to Gypsy’s power and she arose from the rubble like a terrible, fierce, awesome beauty.
All around the room, the fighting slowed, then still as vampires, shifters, and humans first stared up at her in all, and then dropped to their knees in terrified reverence.
So much magic throbbed from her that I couldn’t even see the Fae woman at the center of it all—I couldn’t make out her features at all. She was a contradiction in terms floating above us, soaking up all the light in the room like a black hole, even as she glowed so brightly with the negative light of her corrupt power that I feared I’d go blind from looking.
So I turned away from her, grasping Sorin’s forearm and pulling him to me to whisper fiercely. “All Gypsy has is death magic. We have to counteract with its opposite. With life magic.”
“But we don’t have anything like that,” Sorin objected wildly. “What is life magic, anyway?”
“We do have it,” I insisted. “Everyone does. Everything that lives has life magic.” My words came faster and faster, spilling out of me as if I had always known the answer and had only waited until now to share it. “Everything about love is life magic.” I grabbed his hands, shaking them in my intensity. “Everything vital and good will serve to counter her.”
I dared a glance up at her, at the vortex of power she’d become. “Gypsy herself used to have it—and may still. She agreed to be buried alive, to give her own life energy to help create the walls that separate us from the other Hollows. Before her magic was corrupted, Gypsy herself was a force of life. We can bring her back to that, no matter what the vampires and the Blood Prices have done in the meantime.”
Wicked Blood (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 12