by Tanith Frost
Atonement
Immortal Soulless Book Three
Tanith Frost
Copyright 2017 Tanith Frost
With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means existing without prior written permission from the author.
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be distributed via the Internet or by any other means, electronic or print, without the permission of the publisher. For more information:
www.tanithfrost.com
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Atonement/ Tanith Frost
First edition, October 2017
For Krista
who always understands
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tanith Frost
Chapter One
The wolf thinks she’s disappeared.
It’s the same trick she’s used a dozen times over the past year. Racing ahead of me, hugging the shadows, freezing in the shelter of the underbrush, relying on her silence to hide her.
I touch my tongue to the tip of one of my fangs, tasting my poison. I have no desire for blood tonight—not after the meal I enjoyed just a few hours ago. The gesture is simply a reminder of what I am.
I am a vampire. The night is my element, and my power is strong.
But the past and the future keep creeping into my thoughts, distracting me from the present. If I want to catch her, I have to let go of everything else.
Ignoring my physical senses, I open myself to a deeper place, drawing on the void—the dark, mysterious power that sustains and animates me.
The world around me comes into sharper focus. The scents of moss and fallen October leaves fill my nostrils, deeper and heavier than I ever could have perceived when I was alive. And underneath them the scent of fear, cloaked in clean canine fur and the hot air from the breaths she’s trying to suppress.
It’s not enough.
A sense far deeper than what my body offers catches the energies that flow through my prey. Her life calls to me. I have no interest in feeding on an animal’s blood, but my power, cold as the grave and leagues deeper, responds to it nonetheless. I am a creature without a soul. A monster who feeds on life. A ruthless hunter with a hunger that can never truly be satisfied.
Life can’t hide from death. It never has. And never will.
I’ve almost located her when another power flares to life inside of me, burning bright against my darkness, strange and overpoweringly wrong.
I grit my teeth and shove it downward, willing the deep waters of the void to douse the flame. It’s a battle I’ve fought for over a year now, one I can’t seem to win. This is not life. This power—this fire, as I’ve named it—isn’t mine. It’s an invader, an unwanted guest that infected me after I fucked, fed on, and fought alongside an alpha werewolf. His death connected us on a level I didn’t understand. I still don’t.
Silas’ life washed through me as he died. Then it disappeared, as life is always destined to do after I’ve taken it into myself. But his other power, this supernatural gift possessed only by werewolves, has remained.
I lose my focus as my dark power tries to drown Silas’ flame, and a wave of nausea crashes over me. It’s always like this. Vampire and werewolf powers are age-old enemies, dissonant and repulsive to each other. Every time the fire rises in me, the void fights back, protecting me. And the battle sickens me, distracts me, leaves me feeling like I’m being torn in half.
Feeling like I need to scream and howl and climb out of my body so I can escape the warring energies.
I give my head a hard shake and imagine a dark fist of power crushing the golden flame. My visualizations are amateurish at best, but this one helps. My focus sharpens again, and I creep toward the life that’s hiding in the bushes on the other side of the clearing.
I move silently over the dead leaves on the forest floor, but the moon is too bright for me to hide my approach. A silvery grey form breaks from the shadows and bolts away from me, crashing through the bushes.
I can’t help the grin that exposes my fangs as I race after her between the trees, banking off the boulders that litter the forest floor like a giant’s discarded playthings, leaping over a fallen tree that would have given me pause a year ago.
There was a time when the wolves knew how to lose me, but these are my woods now. It’s been fourteen months since the vampires of Maelstrom abandoned me here.
My mind wants to turn to thoughts of my clan, but I force it back to the present.
These moments on the hunt are the only times I’m not haunted by my mistakes and my worries. I’ll be damned if I’ll throw my perfect clarity away for the sake of those who have rejected me.
Her breaths are coming hard and fast, her heart is pounding. I sense it all as much as I hear it, and I smile as I anticipate my victory. My legs might be sore tomorrow, but my heart remains still, and I’m not wasting my energy on anything as unnecessary as breathing. Everything in me is focused on my quarry as I draw closer.
She stumbles, and I leap.
It’s still a close thing. I wrap my arms around the thick barrel of her chest and shoulders, landing as heavily as I can on her back. My small frame should put me at a disadvantage, but her exhaustion works in my favour. She twists, snapping at my face with savage yellow teeth, snarling. I jerk my head back and release her just long enough to wrap my hands around her muzzle, forcing her jaws closed and pressing her nose toward her chest.
She struggles for a few more moments, then goes limp.
I release her. This is all I needed.
Violet climbs to her feet and shakes the leaves out of her shaggy coat, then sits and scratches behind the ruined remains of her ear—the one that took a silver bullet from a vampire’s gun last summer.
I sink to the ground and lie on my back, and she does the same. The forest is silent save for the wind in the trees and the soft squeak of a passing bat.
“My win,” I say. “Just so we’re clear. Fair and square.”
She snorts and turns her head toward me, letting her tongue hang out one side of her mouth.
I glare back at her. “Fuck you, you did not let me win.”
She shrugs, an oddly human gesture that doesn’t suit her wolf’s body. I’ve become adept at understanding Violet when she’s in wolf form, but there are definite limits to the nuances I can interpret. I know she tries to accommodate my ignorance. Sometimes I think I could do better if I opened myself more, but the fire rises in me when I try.
I want to try now. But I won’t, and not only because of the power.
Since the September night when the last of the other vampires left me here to supervise the werewolves’ transition to independence, Vi
olet and Irene, her pack leader, have been far kinder to me than any vampire deserves. Certainly far kinder than my own clan. Though the vampires left me with a camper to live in and ongoing access to stock in the nearby town of Bloody Bight, and though my requests for supplies have been answered without question, they’ve otherwise ignored me completely. My punishment, I suppose, for helping the werewolves save their species—a species most vampires would just as soon see exterminated. It’s been lonely, and I’ve often questioned my place in the clan, even as I’ve worked to keep up with the training I’ll need when they take me back.
As a result, the kindness of this pair of werewolves has become a temptation. They offer me a taste of what it might be like to belong to a community. To have friends.
My stomach knots. I can’t give in to that temptation. The idea that I could belong here is an illusion—a fact I’m reminded of at least once a month when the pack gathers and shifts. My only future lies with the vampires, with their rules and laws and the cold comforts of their society. With blood, death, the void, and all the things werewolves will never understand.
I look up at the stars in the endless night sky, willing them to absorb me entirely and pull me away from myself, but nothing hears my prayers these days. Without the hunt to occupy me, I’m at the mercy of my memories.
My mistakes.
My sins.
And every fear and doubt that’s wormed its way into my heart since last summer.
Violet and Irene were the first of the wolves to remind me of what I had been missing out on since my death. Though vampires exist as part of a community these days, we remain solitary creatures at heart. We’re loyal to our clans, but it’s as much out of self-interest as anything. We form alliances as it suits us, and God knows we enjoy our physical pleasures. But true affection, selfless loyalty, and love are forbidden. They are aspects of the light that abandoned us when we died. They are weaknesses, chinks in our armour, and opportunities for enemies to break us. We survive or perish on the basis of our own glorious, individual strength.
Werewolves live in true community within their packs, loving and fighting and forgiving, supporting each other through pain and tragedy. Violet took a risk when she reached out to me and tried to help me understand what it means to belong in a pack.
And Silas—dear, cocky, foolish Silas—drove the point home when he died to save me.
My throat closes at the thought of him, but I don’t have any tears left to shed. I didn’t love him. We weren’t some kind of supernatural Romeo and Juliet, as he once joked, though we did find our tragedy in the end. But he was an ally who chose to fight beside me when no one else would. He was a warm and extremely satisfying body when I needed pleasure to ease my pain. And he was, in the end, a friend who treated me like a pack member.
He made me feel like I belonged.
I didn’t realize how dangerous that was until after his death broke my heart and Irene invited me to stay with her and Violet during these quiet months here at the sanctuary. I accepted to preserve my sanity, but I’ve kept my distance.
Because no matter how we try to set aside the instinctive hatred between our species, no matter how I try to ignore the power that’s invaded me and changed me in subtle and infuriating ways, this is not where I belong. I’ve accepted that, and most of the time I don’t feel sorry for myself. Mad at the elders and everyone who’s forgotten me, sure. But this melancholy that’s crept up on me tonight is rare.
I fucked up. I’m paying for it. It is what it is, it won’t last forever, and I’m lucky to not be alone here.
But something’s got to give.
Violet nudges my cheek with her cold nose, bringing me back to the present. A pale, filmy cloud has drifted in front of the moon, diffusing its light and turning it to an indistinct almost-circle.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, and she snorts again.
She sits up and stretches, then looks down at me.
“You want to go back?”
She shakes her head and nods toward the shadows of the forest.
“You want privacy?”
She nods.
“You don’t have to do that. I’m really okay.”
She rests a paw on my chest and tugs at the red plaid blanket scarf that’s tucked into my leather jacket.
There’s no point arguing. Irene’s second-in-command doesn’t tend to take no for an answer. I stand and drop the jacket and scarf onto the forest floor, then walk far enough away that I won’t hear it if she moans in pain as she performs her transformation. Violet is generous in offering to shift so she can help me keep up with my training, never complaining about the inconvenience of it all for her. That doesn’t mean she wants me to witness her pain or pity her for it.
She joins me a few minutes later, wearing my scarf as a skirt and straining to close my jacket over her larger chest. She’s barefoot, but she never seems to mind that, even on a night as cold as this one. As for me, my bare arms are covered in goosebumps, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m not about to die of hypothermia.
“You’ve lost your fangs, Aviva,” she says. “I’m hardly bruised.”
“Maybe I just need something more challenging to sharpen them on.” I give her a sly grin. “Do try to be graceful about your defeat.”
She smirks, then turns to lead the way through the woods. I expect her to head straight back to the cabins before the heat of her change leaves her and she catches a chill, but instead she leads me to the nearby hillside where we can look down at the village of Bloody Bight.
It’s another world, one that neither of us belongs to, though Violet could visit in human form if she wished. She never does. She says she feels safer among werewolves than among humans, a sentiment I understand well. I feed on humans. I’ve even had tea with a woman from the village a few times. But I don’t belong there.
I smile at the thought of Susannah and brush my fingers over the blue stone of the necklace she gave me. She claimed the Labradorite would open me to the powers of this place.
Susannah is big on powers. She’s also big on oils and crystals and various theories about the spirit world. I suspect that ninety-five percent of her beliefs are bullshit, but she’s right about this. There are some weird energies in this place, even beyond the ones that now occupy me.
I wonder whether Violet feels them.
I risk relaxing my habitual hold on Silas’ fire, just for a moment, and fight back the nausea as my power responds. But though I watch Violet carefully, there’s no sign she notices the change in me. Her eyes are closed, and a faint smile touches her lips as a breeze off the river blows her thick hair back from her face. Even when she turns her strange golden eyes on me, there’s no indication that anything is wrong.
I haven’t told her or Irene about the fire in me. There’s a part of me that’s always wanted to tell them about the illness it brings when it wakes up, about how I dream now when no vampire should, about how I discovered that this power—their power—sustained me and kept me clearheaded when I wasn’t able to feed after we got snowed in this past winter. I felt like shit the whole time, and the craving was as bad as it’s ever been, but I survived.
It feels wrong to talk about it, though, as though confessing out loud that there’s something in me that’s essentially Not Vampire would somehow be a betrayal of my true nature. Or maybe it’s just that sharing a secret this huge—one that I would never dare share with my own kind—would be a step too far toward opening myself.
I might disagree with vampires about a lot of things, but they’re right about secrets. It’s best to keep them hidden. You can’t really trust anyone not to use them against you.
Or to not walk away when the secrets get to be too much to handle.
“What?” Violet asks, and for a second I think she’s sensed it in me. Then I realize it’s just that I’m staring so intently at her.
“Nothing.” I squeeze the fire back down to embers, burying it in the depths of my darkness. It’s a relief
to put it away. To keep my secret.
“You going to be okay next week?” she asks, and we turn to walk back to the cabins.
“Always am,” I say, and want to kick myself for the hint of self-pity that comes out in my voice. That’s not who I am now, and I refuse to let it consume me. I force a wry smile. “I mean, you’re okay and all, but I need a vacation.”
She’s not buying it. We’ve entered the darkest part of the woods, but her golden eyes still shine bright against her dark skin as she frowns at me.
She doesn’t say anything, though. She can’t. So much has changed for us, but the deep truth of our clashing powers never will. The other werewolves look at me and see only an enemy, so this is our compromise. Most of the pack avoids the sanctuary for three weeks out of the month, returning only for the full moon and their week of roaming the woods as wolves. Meanwhile, I return to my little camper next to the burned-out compound and accept the solitary not-quite-confinement that I’d be suffering every damn day if things had turned out as my superiors expected.
As they wanted, no doubt.
“Fucking vampires,” I mutter.
If Violet is surprised by the apparent non sequitur, she doesn’t show it. “Fucking vampires,” she agrees without hesitation. “Heard anything from them?”
I grit my teeth. “Not a thing.”
No word from Miranda, the high elder who claims she’s keeping a close eye on me, waiting to see whether I’m capable of atoning for the sins I committed with Silas. Nor from the Department of Unnatural Resources, which is supposed to be overseeing the werewolves’ transition to freedom.