Relinquished Hood (Red Hood Chronicles Book 2)
Page 16
“How dare I? How dare I?” Brünhild dropped her arms, letting me regain my feet, though one cold, callused hand still wrapped vice-like around my wrist. “How dare you? You come into my sanjak, working against me with my husband, attempt to awaken my daughter on feuernacht and claim her for your clan, and how dare me? I could have your hood for this.”
Though at least six inches shorter, Consuela’s diminutive size did little to curb her attitude. “I am well within my rights to claim her! She’s as much an Amarillo as she is a red. And, she came to me. Pietro knows why you really want your daughter’s rites so badly, and he felt he had no choice but to help.”
“And both he and I know why Gerwalta must never be an Amarillo, as do you!”
Those words, that declaration... it chilled the air around us. Something thick and wet and mucked in bitterness lay within them, though what, I couldn’t see.
My father stepped back from the other side of the fire. “Mi amor, don’t. Gerwalta can wait no more. It is becoming dangerous. She must take her fire.”
Brünhild turned to her spouse, sneering. “Et tu, Pietro?”
In a blink, I was free. With a flick of her wrist, my mother’s silver formed into her favorite weapon, the short sword. Most hoods preferred the crossbow or even throwing knives; distance helped keep one safe. My mother, however, liked to feel the blood flow over her fingers when she killed.
“I have never denied Gerwalta her fire, you have. By masking her relationship with that wolf, by indulging her foolish desire to go to college, by giving in to her every flight of fancy! I would have welcomed her to the fire years ago, if not for your coddling.”
Even if a fierce and righteous hood, Pietro Kline was a gentle man not given easily to anger. My father raged, his fists clenching, the veins on the side of his neck pulsing.
“I have done nothing more than protect her from your devices until she was old enough to decide on her own.”
I grew tired of being discussed in the third person while perfectly present. “Great mother of all, I am old enough to decide anything on my own that I damned well please.”
“Silence, nascent!” With a swish of her wrist, her sword pointed at my chest, its tip hovering a few inches from my heart. “You are my progeny. You will take your fire under me, and none other. I am the only one who can protect you from the Ravens when they come for you. And they will come for you.”
My heart leapt into my ears. “You know about the Ravens?”
Of course she knew. What she didn’t know was that I did too. Red rage gave way to the clouded features of the terrified.
When she spoke, her voice trembled through purple lips. “They’ve come for you already.”
My mother had killed werewolves. My mother had faced vampires. My mother looked at the time teasing the corners of her face and the blood running from her veins and shrugged it off. She feared no creature, supernatural or otherwise, that I had ever seen.
At this moment, my mother dreaded all.
Her face shifted, from wide eyes to a steely-glared determination. “It’s not too late. The moon is still overhead. We will build you a fire, and I will perform rites so that you may claim it.”
She grabbed my wrist and yanked, trying to take me back into her arms. I knew the moment she did, we’d be airborne. Flight among hoods counted as the rarest of gifts, but one which ran in my red bloodline and which my mother had discovered after her fire.
Pulling, tugging, her grip remained. “I refuse. I will never be one of your hoods.”
“If you are anything else, they will kill you,” she continued, trying to bring me under control. “That was the agreement.”
“What are you talking about?”
No answer this time. At least, none from my mother. But as she stilled, I knew they sensed with intensity what had been a low-level buzz for me since I’d arrived in the packlands earlier that day. Wolves grew near. More precisely, one particular wolf, who in our confusion had come close to the fire.
Both the hoods across the fire called their silver into battle form. My father’s walking stick was no simple accessory. It was the canvas on which he formed his weapons. Now, it became a bow, though other times it could be an ax or a sword. His choice of weapon suggested restraint. He didn’t want to hurt the wolf, only encourage him to keep a distance while still able to defend us. Consuela, I was surprised to see, preferred her silver in the form of a chain. I wondered if that meant she planned to take the wolf captive, or if she planned to strangle it.
Both would be sorely surprised, for neither would I allow to harm the brooding red wolf approaching us.
Tobias took one look at each of his opponents and stopped his advance. The light of the fire behind us crackled in his eyes, giving him a demonic air.
My mother hissed. “This doesn’t concern you, wolf. Leave now, and I won’t hurt you.”
Inside my head, something between a voice and growl spoke words without form. Tobias was... asking me? Asking me if he should attack? Yes, that was it. Somehow, Tobias was asking me something, inside my head.
“No, don’t!” I said aloud to him. “She’ll gut you if you do.”
My mother wrenched harder, doubling her efforts to move me. “It is worse than I feared. Pietro, for Geri’s sake, we must force this to happen.”
One more pull, and she won. The ground melted away, leaving my feet scrambling in air for purchase. Before I could focus and find out which way we were traveling, however, we halted. The growl was far too close. I looked down, and saw Tobias’s maw filled with my mother’s boot, before a moment later, he in turn was knocked away by a blond wolf with a slightly swollen belly.
I needed to protect them; my mother wouldn’t tolerate such lupine revolt, and the fact that Lisa was pregnant wouldn’t make a lick of difference to her. Brünhild couldn’t counterattack and fly me away at the same time, however. I fell, she flew – straight for Lisa. I moved faster, hurting myself, becoming the shield between them.
I couldn’t say for sure what happened next. A silver blade pierced my side, the burn of injury becoming flame in my veins. Then, the fire took me down, burning me to ash.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Voices swam around the deep end of my mind, where trapped in a fog I tried to find the surface of the water.
“Is it normal to be out this long? Seems to me that’s a really long time.”
“Every patient is different, but she should be coming out of it soon.”
“Will she be in pain? Is she in pain? Oh, god, she’s in pain, isn’t she?”
“Calm down, Cody, or I’ll have to kick you out. You shouldn’t even be here; you’re not an immediate relative. Speaking of which, why are you here? Didn’t you and Geri break up? I thought I heard that you married Lisa Jenkins.”
“I did. But, Geri’s like my... She’s like my family. She feels like family.”
“We’ll tell that to the nurse if she comes by. I’m sure it’s totally allowable under our ‘only family and feels-like-family’ policy. If I didn’t know you...”
“Yeah, man. I know. I appreciate it. Really, I do.”
“Wait. Yup, looks like she’s waking up. Remember, calm.”
Light had never been so harsh. It streamed in from a nearby window, falling over my eyes, as though God had gotten new batteries in his flashlight and decided to try them out on my retinas. Slowly, the room came into focus. Instruments beeping, tubes on my arms, a weary-face werewolf at the end of my bed, fretting. The other voice belonged to a Huey I thought I might recognize. Maybe someone I knew from Paradise? What was he doing here? Come to think of it, what was I doing here, and where exactly was here?
“Don’t try to move, Gerwalta,” the blond-haired man dressed in army green scrub said. He jotted something on his clipboard, looked up again at a monitor next to my bed, and jotted a few things down. “My name’s Kevin Turner. You were a sophomore the year I graduated.”
“Kevin.” My voice was less than a whisper.
I couldn’t remember a time when my mouth had been drier. “Of course. Am I in the hospital?”
Cody took over then, weaving a cover story no doubt. “You got into a little trouble out in the woods last night. You fell, and got jabbed in the stomach by some sort of old broken pipe. I found you and rushed you here.”
Standing behind Kevin, the nurse didn’t see when he winked at me, a gesture I found frankly insulting. Did he think I was new to the whole living-in-a-secret-society thing?
I tried to stretch a hand out, feigning grace, but the pain that shot through me bit away my will. I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth as Cody reached out to ease my burden.
“Easy there, little red. You’re going to rip out your stitches.”
Kevin slid his pen into a holder on the side of his clipboard. “I’ll ask the doctor to swing by, Geri. He’ll review your injuries and tell you how to care for them after your discharge. Try not to move too much. Luckily that pipe didn’t hit any major organs, but you’re still going to have a hell of a scar. “
As Kevin left, I tried to sit up. I’d barely lifted my head when the room went into a tail spin, forcing me back to my bed.
“What really happened?”
Cody smiled, placing his hand on mine. “We can talk about it later.”
“Or we can talk about it now,” I insisted. “Last thing I remember is falling toward the ground when Tobias showed up. Oh, my god. My mom tried to slay Lisa. Is she... Is...”
“She’s fine. You kept her from getting hurt.” The joy in his eyes was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. “She’s the alpha’s mate. I guess the whole pack seems like her responsibility too. The second Tobias took off, tearing up the forest to get to you, she followed. I didn’t even know she could move that fast.”
“And Tobias?”
As a wolf that had shown open hostility to a hood, my mother would have had jurisdiction to silver him. If he resisted that, she could even kill him under our codes.
“Tobias escaped without a scratch. A little pissed at you, though. Says now you’ve saved him twice, and he owes you too much already.”
“Bull shit. It just makes us even.” I managed to prop myself up higher on the pillow at the cost of any dignity. “Who injured me? Was it my mom or my dad? And why am I here? Hoods heal quickly from minor injuries inflicted with silver, and that’s the only thing either one of them had last night.”
A fact I knew from years of training and many run-ins with something pointy and metal.
“Anyone else get hurt?”
Comfort left his features as he shifted his weight. “Hurt? No, not really.”
I knew this werewolf. I knew him in a semi-biblical fashion. I could tell he was hiding some tall truths behind those short words.
“Cooooddddy?”
His chest fell, and with it, the barrier he’d kept around the truth. “I wasn’t there. Two bloodline matrons on our territory? I had to keep the pack safe. I only know what Tobias told me.”
“Well, that’s a start, so start.”
The werewolf ran a hand over his spiky hair. “You probably figured out the big part of it. Tobias sensed you were in danger. He bolted, even though I told him he should just leave it alone. I guess when he saw your mother trying to whisk you off, he went a little crazy. Brünhild laid into him and Lisa, but you threw yourself between them. She ran a sword right through you.”
Should it have surprised me that my own mother stabbed me? But what she’d really cut when she ran me through wasn’t my body, it was the last vestiges of tenderness I held for her.
“And my father?”
Cody’s eyes watered. “He left with Consuela. Banished.”
“Banished?” Now the ire that I’d tempered down raged within me. “After all the shit she’s done and he stayed standing beside her? After everything he’s sacrificed to solidify her matronship?”
“It was part of the compromise.”
“Compromise?” I asked. “Are you telling me that even as I lay there, bleeding, they opened some kind of negotiation? I don’t even understand what there would be to negotiate.”
The lines of his face hardened, his voice grew husky. “She still wanted Tobias slain. Your father intervened. He agreed to be banished in exchange for Tobias’s life.”
“But that makes no sense. My mother wouldn’t spare a wolf and lose my father. There’s no gain in that for her. Cody, something doesn’t add up about this. Are you sure Tobias told you everything?”
All of a sudden, the alpha couldn’t meet my eyes. I reached out, trying to sense his emotions. My injury must be dampening my strength. Or maybe whatever medicine crawled through my veins from the bag dripping steadily to my right dulled my abilities, but I got an empty read on the werewolf.
Tears pricked the corner of my eyes. “There’s more.”
“There’s more,” he repeated. The wolf turned to me, an apology written into his eyes. “I don’t understand how, Geri, and I sure as hell don’t understand why. But the way Tobias explained it, your mother used the fire to do some sort of ceremony. At the end of it, he... lost you.”
“Lost me? What in the hell does that mean, lost me?”
“Hey, I hear she’s up. Can I come in?”
My head swiveled as the werewolf I’d nearly sacrificed myself for came in through the door, looking like he’d been dragged through sewage and left on the side of the road. How long had Tobias been lurking in the hall? More importantly, why hadn’t I known that?
The machine turning my pulse into an audio feed picked up tempo, driving harder by the moment. With each increase in pace, Cody’s eyes grew wider.
“Geri, stay calm. You’re going to rip your stitches if you move too much.”
Had I moved? Yes, I had. I’d sat up. I’d swung my legs over the side of the bed. I’d started to plot my mother’s murder, all without knowing it.
Nurses rushed in, first Kevin, and then a small Asian woman with the strength of a musk ox. They wrestled me onto the bed, pulling straps as if from thin air, tying me down to the mattress. Any other day, I’d had been able to throw Hueys like them off me with ease. But today wasn’t any other day. Today was the day after my mother had revoked even my nascent abilities, and left me mortal.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Igor pulled back from the viewer of the lab instrument he was using to examine a genetic sample I’d given him a few days before. He’d done his best to comfort me when I returned to Chicago, but the moment he learned what had happened to me, I could see it in his eyes: I was an outsider now. Powerless, pointless, and without clan. I was a lark set free in a world of crows and told to learn to sing a new song, all while having my voice silenced. I wasn’t a hood, but I wasn’t a Huey. I belonged nowhere and with no one.
“Well?”
He mustered his professional decorum and used his professorial, detached voice. “Genetically, you’re no different. You are still you. But at a deeper level, there’s... damage.”
“Damage is what happens to a car bumper when it hits a tree,” I said. “You can say what it is I really am: relinquished. She’s stripped me of my powers. She’s rendered me inert.”
At least he respected me enough not to try and correct me. “The type of damage I’m seeing in your cells? It’s almost like you’ve been irradiated.”
“So, can we fix it?”
The vampire dampened a nervous laugh. “This isn’t my area of research. I...”
“Bull shit,” I said, stopping him on the spot. “You’ve been studying slayer DNA for, what, three years? I know Cynthia had her own little silver box of wolf specimens. Don’t you dare pretend that there isn’t a cache of hood genetic information out there you have squirreled away.”
“Hoods don’t give us samples,” he said. “You know firsthand that it’s against your codes.”
“And I also know that you took a sample of mine when Jess dragged me into your dungeon. If it wasn’t to study us, then what was it for?”
“Yeah, unique,” I said, sealing the fate of his argument. “I remember you using that word, and Huey or hood, I got enough brain cells to patch together that that was a comparative statement.”
The sands of his features shifted, until finally settling on resolve. “Fine. I have a few – just a very few – hood samples. But the subjects had died long before I came into possession of their bodies, and the structures were far too decomposed to be robust. But even if I had hundreds, thousands of hood DNA lines at my beck and call, I couldn’t answer your question. What happened to you is beyond science. At some point, the super supersedes the natural. Why can I turn to smoke and still retain consciousness? How does a slayer create solar energy and still not burn? How do hoods make silver liquefy and reform into perfectly forged weapons with only the power of their minds? How does a matron inflict radiation poisoning on her only daughter?”
He motioned to his bank of instruments.
“If there’s a way for one of these to be able to tell me that, I assure you, I haven’t found it.” He lowered his voice. “You mentioned you can no longer sense wolves. Any other effects?”
“You mean other than I’m as weak as a wet noodle and I can’t keep my eyes open past 11 PM without six cups of coffee? No, other than that, I’m just my usual, peachy self.”
The professor paused in his ministering. “How many cups of coffee have you had tonight?”
“You don’t even want to know, Igor.” I sucked in a breath and repeated with a bit of gruff, “You don’t want to know.”
A knock at the door cut off our conversation as the ex-of-a-worm known as Jess Harmon slithered into the room.
“Jess, good to see you.”
Igor extended a hand, falling perfectly into his roll of clueless coworker. He wouldn’t call out Cynthia’s ex-mind slave as having now found a bigger shark to stick his lamprey mouth on to. Though, given that there were vampires involved, perhaps that analogy ran the other way.