“How is the Master any different?” Fury swirled hot through my blood. “You’re all the same. You all want the same thing. I would rather trust the devil I know than the one who kept me drugged and locked in a room. At least the Society grants me the illusion of freedom.”
“An illusion is all you’ve got. The Grande Dame’s son lives on your property. His wraith shadows your every move.” The truth in his words cut deep. “But by all means, keep deluding yourself.”
“Oh, Goddess,” Amelie moaned from the safety of the doorway. “Grier.”
“Don’t you dare,” I growled when she darted onto the porch. “Stay inside the wards.”
“You get inside the wards,” she screamed, clutching the railing. “Now.”
Risking a glance back at Linus, I swallowed as my heart lurched at his still form. “I can’t leave him.”
“He’s not worth—”
“I won’t abandon him,” I snarled at her then whirled on the vampire. “You’re not taking me. I won’t be caged again.”
“The Master has been patient.” His fist clenched as he lowered his arm. “He wants you to come home.”
Anger erupted from my core, whiting out my conscious mind, and a new language unfurled in my head. Sigils passed through genetic memory from others like me. How else could they be branded in my mind?
The punctures in my throat had started healing, so I scratched at the scabs to reopen them, dipping my fingers in the sluggish blood. The ward separating me from him formed a thin shield of compressed air, magicked into impenetrability. The principle was the same as what Woolly used to insulate her doorway from uninvited guests.
I didn’t stop to wonder if I could do it, if it was even possible. I simply did as those instincts dictated, let that tug in my gut guide me as I drew a sigil in the air before me, right on the shield. And then I smacked it with my open palm.
Power blasted from the sigil in a wave that knocked him to the ground. “What did you do to Linus?”
There was no graceful landing this time, no crouch or mockery. Blood poured from a gash on his forehead and smudged the corner of his mouth. “You didn’t wonder why that student attacked Linus at Strophalos?”
“He wanted Linus out of the way,” I said, and heard the hollow ring to the words as I spoke them.
The pointlessness of the attack had left a bad taste in my mouth. The assassin lacked the skills to best Linus. I had given him the element of surprise by bringing him to Reardon’s classroom with me. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gotten close enough to Linus to scratch him, let alone skewer him with that blade of his.
A hairline scratch across Linus’s chest was all the guy managed before Linus gained the advantage.
The exchange began so suddenly and ended even faster. But had it been too quick? Too easy?
“He was an acolyte. He performed tasks for me, hoping to earn his immortality.” The vampire spat clotted blood on the grass. “He wasn’t a fighter, but he didn’t have to be. His blade was dipped in a slow-acting poison.” He struggled to his knees. “Your protector is dead. The toxin has been in his system too long. No one can save him.”
A pit opened in my gut, and rage howled through the abyss. I had to finish this, and fast, if I wanted to save Linus. I couldn’t believe the vampire, that it was hopeless. I had to try. “Where is the Master?”
The vampire cocked his head, listening. “What is that?”
The howls weren’t all rage as it turned out. Or at least they weren’t all mine.
The watchmen had arrived.
“Tell me where he is,” I bargained, “and I’ll call them off the hunt.”
I had no such power, but he didn’t need to know that.
“This isn’t over.” He pointed at me. “You can’t stay inside your wards forever.”
Lip curled up over his teeth, flashing fang at me, he ran for the trees bordering the property.
As much as my thighs twitched to pursue him, as much as I could taste the answers I would scrape off his tongue, Linus was more important.
A scaled beast with a golden ruff sped past me. Midas. Two more followed, allowing him the lead.
“Take him alive if you can,” I yelled after them, but they gave no sign they’d heard.
Blocking out Amelie’s frantic screams and the watchmen’s joyous baying, I yanked open the van’s door and did a quick examination of Linus. As a necromancer, I knew zip about healing from a medical standpoint. We were taught the signs of death so that we could encourage them in our clients to hasten their resuscitation, but not how to counteract them, and Linus was ticking off all the boxes.
Sluggish pulse. Poor color. Faint breaths.
“You’re going to have to trust me.” I gripped the front of his shirt and ripped it straight down the middle, sending buttons pinging off the dash. “I have an idea that I think might work.” With the fabric untucked from his pants, I parted the halves of his shirt to expose the planes of his inked chest and the smooth rounds of his shoulders. For this to work, I wanted the largest canvas possible. “Okay, here we go.”
Strange magic licked over my skin, and the ward surrounding me burst like a balloon punctured with a needle. A sharp point wedged between the knobs of my vertebrae, stunning me into stillness, and I sucked in a shocked breath that hissed through my teeth as that power burrowed into my blood.
“Hello, Grier.”
Careful to keep the movement slow, I dared a glance over my shoulder. “Eloise?”
“Not quite.” Her eyes were sharper, her face harder, and she mocked me from a greater height. “I’m Heloise Marchand. Her twin. And don’t get me started on the rhyming names. Our mother did it to bind us tighter than she was to her sister.” A mocking smile curved her lips. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, cousin.”
Twins?
Sloppy of me not to have dug into Eloise’s past after she appeared on my doorstep, but I had turned her on her heel and sent her packing. The skeletons in her closet were her problem. Not mine.
Well, until now.
Learning Mom had a twin should have jogged my memory that fraternal twins run in families.
Heloise’s smugness forced out one burning question. “How did she beat the wards?”
Woolly would have never allowed Eloise in if she had treacherous thoughts in her head.
“Vain, aren’t you?” She clicked her tongue. “With Maud as a mother figure, I expected as much.”
Maud’s blood, and my sweat and tears, had seeded the foundation for those wards, so yes, I was proud of them. I had constructed them to protect me, to keep Woolly safe, and it was a blow to my ego to learn I had failed us both. Again.
“Ellie has no idea I’m here,” she said when I didn’t rise to her bait. “That’s how she beat your wards. Ignorance. Or innocence. Depending on how charitable you’re feeling. That house read no ill intent from her, so it allowed her entrance.”
“She left that first night, didn’t she?” I thought back on it. “You were the one waiting for me at Mallow. You had done your research and knew where to find me.” I hissed out a curse. “The grape. Eloise is the one who’s engaged. That’s why you weren’t wearing the ring.”
Heels or flats could have explained away the difference in their heights, but the rest was all on me.
“An oversight, I admit.” Her lips flattened. “I had to gamble you wouldn’t notice. Or, if you did, that you wouldn’t feel it was your place to ask.”
Society training did have that effect on people. Polite to a fault up until the moment they buried a hatchet in your back. “What’s your angle?”
“I was Eloise’s first stop after she overheard the conversation between Grandmother and Madame Lecomte. I encouraged her to track you down, to make contact. An infamous relative fostered by one of the most famous necromancers of all time. How could she resist?” Her smile was wrong on Eloise’s gentler face. “I wanted an in with you, a reason why you might accept an invitation if I asked you out for co
ffee. I could have cold-called you, but you struck me as a cautious person, and I was proven right by the wards on your home. That’s why separating you from Woolworth House was paramount.”
“You’re the one who attacked the wards?”
A shrug rolled through her shoulders. “I jabbed them a little to see what makes them tick.”
All of a sudden, the random images Woolly had shown me made more sense. A fallen branch, from my family tree. A starburst, like the giant ring on Eloise’s finger. Two peas, these had shared the same pod.
“You followed us to Atlanta.” That explained why the issues stopped after we left.
“I thought your disappearance might be more open to interpretation if you got lost in the city,” she admitted, “but I underestimated how badly your grandfather wants you returned to the fold.”
The Master was…my grandfather?
A scream of denial welled in my throat, but I swallowed it down.
No time to dwell on what this meant. I could melt down in the safety of my bedroom later.
Replaying how everything that could go wrong on the trip had, I gritted my teeth, fury igniting in my blood. “The accident?”
Cruz had been adamant about a woman being responsible, but Ernestine had been the instigator between the two vampires, and I assumed that meant she had been the driver. I assumed wrong.
“I admit, it was rather impulsive of me, but the vampires were too close for comfort.” A growl entered her voice. “They still beat me to you. Though I can hardly complain given the outcome. The potentate of Atlanta was prepared to raze his own city to protect you. I find that quite interesting.”
The mention of Linus had me tasting bile. I had to buy us more time, but his was running out, and the odds of a rescue were looking slimmer by the minute. “You orchestrated the infiltration at the Faraday.”
Finally, the escalation in violence made sense. Even impatient, the Master wanted me unharmed. Clearly, the Marchands weren’t as particular about the shape I arrived in.
“It was easy with inside help.” Her smile was pure delight. “Meiko sends her regards, by the way.”
That backstabbing little beast. “He will never forgive her for this.”
“I know that, and you know that, but…” Heloise twitched her shoulders. “Meiko thinks in straight lines. Cat logic, if you will. Linus is her person, and she refuses to share him. Much like a cat knocking a glass off the counter because it can, she determined you were an obstacle to her happiness and removed you.”
Cat logic had failed her. The Faraday operated by its own rules, and she had broken the golden one.
“You executed your trap well,” I admitted. Isolating the weakest link, she used Meiko’s petty jealousy and vanity to achieve her own ends. “I can admire that, but you hurt one of my friends in the process. That I won’t forgive.”
“I don’t need your forgiveness,” she scoffed. “You will return home with me and take your place among the Marchands. Your mother was disowned. You are simply a recording error in need of correction.”
The scope of Dame Marchand’s foresight in forming this loophole made me warier than ever of that side of my family. Before they had been a nebulous nonentity. Now… They had declared themselves my enemies.
“Grandmother is strict,” she said, digging the metal into my spine, “but she won’t punish you as long as you cooperate.”
A shiver coasted down my arms as a new possibility surfaced, one that filled in a few of the cracks spiderwebbing over my heart.
Neck aching from cranking my head around, I looked to Linus for a heartbeat, let myself watch the rise and fall of his chest. “How did you nullify my wards?”
“An artifact from the family vault made by the last goddess-touched necromancer from our bloodline, more than seven hundred years ago.”
A family trait. I swallowed. This was a legacy that originated in my mother’s blood. It explained how she knew to run when she fell pregnant with me. It might also explain why she accepted the disownment rather than turn me over to her mother.
The Marchands owned a goddess-touched artifact. What else might they have in their arsenal? What knowledge might they possess about my condition? Did they know how to sever the thread binding me to Amelie? And would they ever share that information with me without shackling me to their will first?
“Let me save him,” I bargained. “Let me heal Linus, and I’ll go with you.”
“We don’t have time.” Heloise searched the darkened yard. “Your pets will return soon enough.”
“You can’t let him die.” My voice went hoarse. “Please.”
A gunshot pierced the night, and the sharp pressure at my spine vanished.
I whirled as my cousin collapsed on the grass, her mouth gaping in mute surprise. A red dot smudged her left temple, but the right side of her face was missing.
Heart pounding in my ears, I searched for the shooter and found Taz limping toward me, dragging one leg, leaving a trail of blood shimmering wetly on the grass behind her.
“Sorry I’m late,” she grunted. “I was tracking the vamp when I triggered a circle.” Her eyes blazed when they fell on Heloise’s crumpled form, a wildness in them screaming she wished the deathblow had been dealt by her hands and not her weapon. “I would have still been trapped if she hadn’t also shot me in the thigh and left me to bleed out. Took a while, but the blood erased her sigils, and the ward fell.”
The parallels between what happened to her tonight and her brother’s fate so long ago made me heartsick. Heloise had been family—blood—and she was a monster.
One halting step was all I managed before figures dressed in black fatigues bled from the shadows.
The cavalry had arrived, and the Elite sentinels swarming the night were armed to the teeth.
No familiar platinum-blond head towered over them. No chocolate-caramel eyes sought mine. No Boaz materialized to lead the charge.
“Freeze,” the man in front barked at her, clearly not recognizing Taz, a mistake that might prove deadly. For him. “Put your gun down.”
“Fair warning,” Taz growled, lowering her weapon. “Shoot me, and I’ll shoot back.”
With Taz disarmed, he set his sights on me. “Step away from the van, ma’am.”
A split-second decision had me putting my thin acting skills to the test. Dropping to my knees beside the body, I feigned shock. “My cousin.” As I bent to check Heloise’s pulse, I leaned over her corpse, using the motion for cover as I pried the goddess-touched artifact from her clenched fist. There was no time for an examination before secreting it away, but I got the impression of age-worn wood with a tapered end. “She’s dead.”
“Step away from the body,” he barked. “Move away from the van.”
Wiping my bone-dry cheeks with a hand I trembled for effect, I did as I was ordered, turning just enough to hide the movement as I slipped the artifact in my pocket.
Sadly, my theatrics had exposed Linus, and the sentinel bristled in response, his finger on the trigger.
“Sir,” he boomed, “I’m going to have to ask you to exit the vehicle.”
“Are you serious? He’s unconscious. He can’t exit the vehicle. He can barely breathe.” Huffing out a laugh that bordered on deranged, I reached up and scratched the scabs at my throat until fresh blood trickled down my neck, then wet my fingers. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Ma’am,” the Elite tried again. “We got a call—”
“Let me tell you who you can call.” I stepped aside and gave them a good, long look at who reclined in the seat. “This is Linus Lawson, Scion Lawson. Dial up the Grande Dame and ask her how she feels about her niece being held at gunpoint while her only son and heir dies from poisoning.”
The man lowered his weapon, his cheeks paling as the blood drained from them.
“Note to self,” I muttered. “Name-dropping is the new Kevlar.”
With two fingers, I drew a double-lined healing rune that stretched fro
m Linus’s collarbones to his navel. Bright crimson whirls smeared over the art covering his torso. Eyes crushed shut, I listened to that inner voice and followed its instructions to the letter. Instinct guided me, calling for more blood, more pain, more sacrifice to bring him back.
Please, bring him back.
I sent up a prayer to Hecate as I closed the final loop with a flourish.
Magic, rich and potent, coated him from head to toe in a shimmering veil of incandescence. His entire length jolted hard once, and then again, and then again.
The spell was working as a defibrillator, jump-starting his heart with magic.
The sheen beading his forehead gave me hope the poison was being expelled.
“Come on,” I chanted. “Come on.”
One last blast illuminated his skin before the glow seeped into his pores. In the stillness that followed, the impossibly long seconds where nothing happened and I was certain I had failed him, his eyelids started twitching in what appeared to be restless sleep.
A kinder woman might have given him a moment to recover. I was not that woman.
“Linus.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Wake up. Let me see your eyes.”
Cletus materialized in the driver seat, almost giving me a heart attack.
Well, that explained why the wraith had been absent. Linus had been so close to death their bond must have faded until he did too.
“Can you hear me?” I rechecked his pulse. Steady. His lungs were expanding fully, so that was good. But was it enough? “Linus?”
“In all the…stories,” he rasped, eyes slitting open, “the prince…is awakened…with a kiss.”
“Linus Andreas Lawson, are you flirting with me? Maybe I zapped you too hard.” I pinned him in his seat while his limbs spasmed. “Besides, you’ve got it wrong. It’s the princess who gets kissed. Didn’t your mother ever read you storybooks when you were a kid?”
“No.” His teeth started chattering. “What…happened?”
“The vampire who helped Volkov kidnap me got an acolyte into Strophalos. The guy who cut you used a poisoned blade. Since I’m an idiot, I didn’t realize you weren’t sleeping and left you out here until you almost died.”
How to Break an Undead Heart Page 24