Crimson Covenant

by Samantha Whiskey

  Hawke, who’d followed us silently, stopped in the open doorway. He looked very much like he’d argue, but he kept his lips sealed. Alek led us down more twists and turns until we walked through another set of doors, these leading outside where a stone fountain resided in the middle of an even larger stone courtyard. Lush green hedges bordered the space, creating a private slice of paradise under the moonlight.

  “Thank you,” I said, breathing in the night air.

  “For?”

  I spun, my dress swishing around my ankles. “I needed air,” I said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I can’t read your mind, Lyric,” he said, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “Just control it.”

  Another shiver raced along my skin, but it had nothing to do with the bite in the air. “You think so?”

  He furrowed his brow. “I know so.”

  I stepped up to him, arching my neck to meet his eyes. My heart was in my throat as I said, “Show me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I would not…violate you like that.”

  I tilted my head, studying his gaze. There, behind the powerful and the terrifying king, laid a hint of burden. I blew out a slow breath, suddenly wondering what it would be like to have a power such as his. One that could easily be abused in the wrong hands. But his weren’t the wrong hands, I felt that in my blood. Or perhaps that was his blood willing mine into submission.

  “I’m asking you to show me.”

  “Why?” His voice was rough, warning.

  “Because I want to understand you better.”

  Surprise flickered in his eyes. “You’re not afraid.” Not a question. No doubt he’d smell my fear if I had a lick of it. Which I didn’t. Not here, with him. Everything inside me settled, relaxed, and yet twisted up with a kind of need I couldn’t explain.

  “You said you were going to wipe my memory anyway, so what does it matter?” My heart sank a bit, and I decidedly ignored it. “Do your worst,” I challenged him with a smile on my lips.

  His gaze slid over my body, and I did my best not to tremble. He ran his hand just above my arm, not touching but close enough for me to feel his heat. “That dress,” he said, his tone raspy. “Is delicious on you.”

  I smiled, my cheeks flushing, and something else pressed at the center of my mind, like a knock on a door.

  “I’d love to see how it moves,” he continued, and that pressure in my mind intensified. “Dance for me.”

  I felt the primal tenor in the command, felt it heat and sizzle along my bones. My entire body wanted to respond to it. Wanted to dance for him and do anything that kept him looking at me like that, but I remained still, content to gaze into those eyes that increased with confusion with each second that passed.

  “Dance for me,” he said again, this time with more command.

  I laughed, and he jolted as if I’d hit him.

  “You really need to learn how to ask,” I said through my laughter.

  “Lyric,” he chided, but I stepped into his space, boldly taking one of his hands in mine. I positioned that hand on my waist, then grabbed his other hand, laying my other one on his shoulder.

  “This is the part where we dance,” I whispered, raising my brows at the stance I’d positioned us in. His body was warm against mine, the folds of my dress brushing his muscular legs. I swayed, but he was a statue. “Move,” I said, mimicking his tone from earlier.

  And he did.

  Gently, he swayed back and forth, spinning us around that stone courtyard with all the grace of a practiced dancer. His eyes never left mine, never stopped with their puzzled gaze. “You can’t be glamoured,” he said, almost more to himself. “Aren’t subject to my mind control powers.”

  I shrugged. “I saw the demon you said I wasn’t supposed to see.”

  Something like pain and worry flashed in his eyes as we continued to dance.

  “Maybe I have mind control powers,” I said, smiling up at him. He tilted his head, and I squeezed his hand in mine. “I told you to move, and you did.”

  “There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for you, Lyric,” he said.

  Warmth flared in the center of my chest. “Even let me go?” I dared to ask, and something deep inside me feared he’d say yes.

  “You’re testing me,” he growled. “This dress, your scent, the way you seem to have no sense whatsoever about staying away from me.” His hand snaked around my waist and hauled me closer to him.

  I gasped, electricity crackling along my skin and sinking deeper.

  “I can’t let you go, Lyric,” he finally admitted.

  “Why?” I breathed the question.

  “Beyond…my own reasoning, it’s not safe.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “Keeping me in a mansion full of bloodthirsty vampires is safe?”

  He growled again, spinning us faster and faster. I flung my arms around his neck, holding tight as we whirled at an inhuman speed. “You’re safe here. You’re safe with me.”

  “As opposed to?”

  We spun, but Alek’s eyes were my anchor point, and I clung to him, my body reacting to every hard inch of his pressed against mine. And soon I felt weightless in his arms, gasping as I realized we hovered above that stone courtyard. I clung tighter to him, and he hissed, running his nose along the seam of my neck.

  “The demon sought you out because you’re…something else. Something old. Something that by our Covenant claims you as the demon’s.”

  “What?” Cold reality crashed every writhing flame inside me.

  “They’ve demanded you. To kill you. As is law.”

  I stilled in his arms, and we stopped spinning. Alek brought us back to the ground gently, but he made no move to let me go.

  Neither did I.

  He tipped my chin up to meet his eyes. “You are safe here,” he assured me. “I would never let anyone touch you.”

  And yet, he was touching me. In more places than where our bodies connected now.

  “What am I?” I asked, my heart again in my throat.

  His mind control didn’t work on me.

  The supernatural glamours didn’t work on me.

  Alek stared down at me, that blue-gray gaze igniting a fire inside me that I never wanted to die out.

  “Alek,” I said with more power in my voice than I thought possible. “What. Am. I?”

  “I’m not certain,” he admitted, and I shook my head. He tucked me closer against him, and I trembled. “But I promise you, I’m going to find out.”

  His words sounded like a promise and a threat and even though my feet were on the ground, I felt like I was spinning farther out of control.

  And I was terrified of what would happen when I stopped.

  5

  Alek

  “I don’t give a fuck what Xavier wants!” I shouted, slamming my hands on the table. “He can’t have her!” We’d had the same fight for the last week.

  Four frustrated faces stared back at me.

  “And is that what you’d like me to send as our official response?” Lachlan asked, adding a tone of pure sarcasm that sent my temper skyrocketing.

  “This isn’t funny. I don’t give a shit what the Covenant says.” I lifted my fingers to my throbbing temples. The hunger had shifted from insistent to demanding to whatever hell this was.

  “Says the male who is in charge of enforcing it,” Ransom quipped. “His offer is clear. He’ll give you intel on the group that went after Avianna when you hand over the human.”

  I leveled him with a glare, and he sat back in his chair slightly.

  “Don’t take the lad’s head off, Alek. It’s not his fault your temper is sour because you won’t feed.” He muttered a curse. “We have to respond to Xavier, or it gives him reason to take you to Conclave. If you’d just tell him what the rest of us already know—”

  “Don’t,” I hissed.

  The words she’s your mate had been on constant repeat since Hawke had uttered
them. As punishment for fucking with my entire reality, I’d sentenced him to be Lyric’s personal bodyguard, which took him off the execution detail he loved so very much.

  Liar. Fine. If I was being honest, I’d put him at Lyric’s back because I knew just how ruthless the bastard was. He’d slaughter anyone who got close enough to breathe on her.

  “We’d have your back with the nobles,” Benedict said gently like his words were physically tiptoeing on my headache.

  “There’s nothing to have my back over.” My vision swam for a moment, and there were two of him glowering back at me.

  “Stubborn ass,” Hawke muttered as I forced my vision back to normal.

  Damn it. I hadn’t let myself go this long between feedings…ever. Vampires needed to feed at least a couple of times a week. Paired with a diet of edible food, bloodlust was controlled. Swing either way—too much blood or too little, and the cravings became unmanageable. Addiction and starvation were our biggest enemies, and the human population’s worst fear.

  I hadn’t fed in nine days. Much longer, and I’d start the biological process of going into stasis.

  “Alek, if we put her under our protection as your m—” Lachlan began.

  “She’s not my…” Fuck. I couldn’t even say it out loud. I pushed back from the table and stood, bracing my hands on the onyx slab as my head swam. “She can’t be.”

  “Says who?” Ransom asked.

  “Says every king that has come before me. She’s human.” It didn’t matter what feelings had me by the dick. She wasn’t our kind.

  “Xavier called her a Seer,” Hawke countered.

  I lifted my head and narrowed my eyes in his direction. I think. He was blurry. “Et tu, Brute?”

  He scoffed. “Don’t even think of going Caesar on me. You can’t let the woman out of your sight for longer than a few hours or you get twitchy. Your fangs come out the second anyone with a dick gets near her—”

  My fangs made an appearance, just to prove him right, and my head exploded. The pain was indescribable. They didn’t ache; that was too mild of a word. They pulsed with sharp, relentless jabs of agony, igniting my throat with a fire nothing but blood would quench.

  “For fuck’s sake, Alek,” Lachlan stood but didn’t do me the dishonor of trying to physically steady me. There was no graver insult than to imply a king couldn’t physically defend himself. My grandfather had taken the throne that way. “You have to feed.”

  “I don’t have to do shit.”

  Lachlan swore under his breath.

  “We have Julian looking into all historical records of any Seer bloodlines,” Benedict offered. “You know he’s the best historian we have.”

  “Seers have been extinct since the plague. Bubonic, to be specific.” But it made sense. She couldn’t be glamoured. My own considerable powers didn’t work on her…or was that because she was my—don’t even think it.

  “Whether or not she’s…” Lachlan shot me a questionable look. “Well, you know…we all have your back. We’ll have hers, too. But you can’t expect us to let you—”

  “Let. Me?” I turned slowly toward my best friend.

  “Fuck.” He sighed, then lifted his chin. “Make me sit down.”

  “You’re going to double down on this shit?” I let my power slip free of the tether I’d spent years learning to control, but before I could compel him to do just that, I felt my ability snap back on me like a rubber band. “Damn it.”

  “Get out, all of you,” Lachlan barked, then waited until the room cleared. “Alek, it doesn’t matter if the intel Xavier could potentially give us is good if we don’t have our king at his full wits. You have to feed.”

  When it became clear to him that I wasn’t going to answer, he marched out the door, shoving it open so hard it slammed into the stone wall. “Maybe you’ll have a better shot at getting through to him,” he said in the hallway just before it closed behind him.

  I shook my head and followed him out to find Avianna staring at me.

  “Don’t start with me,” I said, walking right past her to head up the stairs.

  “You’ll kill her, you know.”

  I froze halfway up the stairs, my stomach dropping to the floor as I gripped the banister hard enough to make the heavy wood creak under my fingers. Guess I still had some strength left.

  “If you don’t feed,” Avi continued. “You’ll go mad. The bloodlust will take you, and you will kill her.”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said over my shoulder. But she did.

  “Bullshit! You think you sent me away to study how to be a lady and cross my ankles?” Her rage was palpable as she stalked up the stairs and finally turned to face me a few steps up, making us the same height. “I might not have the power of compulsion like you, Alek, but I have an excellent mind.”

  “Avi…” And now I’d somehow managed to hurt her feelings. Shit. She’d always been tender about the fact that she didn’t have any notable powers.

  “Listen to me.” She lifted her chin, and in that moment, she looked so much like our mother that I couldn’t help but fall silent. “You’re starving, but you still sleep in the same chamber as Lyric.”

  “On the couch,” I muttered. Not that I hadn’t spent a few hours in the same bed just to be near her, to stare at her for a few unobserved moments.

  “Because you can’t trust yourself in the same bed, can you?” She arched a dark, elegant eyebrow.

  My eyes narrowed.

  “I’ve been home a total of nine days, and you haven’t fed. You haven’t used any of the humans in the Butcher’s Block—”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I listen! I observe. And I know that Lachlan is at your side almost every waking moment of the day because he’s worried, and the other moments, you’re with Lyric. Tell me, has her mating mark appeared?” She tilted her head and stared me down in a way my council would never dare.

  “Sisters are a pain in the ass.”

  “Only when we’re right.” She flashed a smile. “Seriously, Alek. You have to make yourself feed, or you and I both know the hunger will take you at your weakest—in the day, when you’re sealed behind a iron door with the one person you can’t seem to keep away from.”

  The picture she painted turned my blood to ice.

  “Alek, I like her, and you’re putting her in danger.”

  “The smell of any other human turns my stomach,” I admitted, lowering my voice. “I’ve tried to feed. I’m not even sure if I could keep it down.”

  “Oh.” She wrung her gloved hands. The custom of young, aristocratic females covering their hands was an old one. Since mating marks took hold at the first touch, it was as much for their protection against an unwanted mating as it was about control. I’d long since given up trying to control Avi. She wore them now by her own choice.

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  Her forehead scrunched. “Well, maybe Lyric wouldn’t mind. She seems to care for you—”

  “I won’t abuse her like that.”

  “We both know it doesn’t hurt. Hell, it gets them horny and high with a little compulsion.” Avi rolled her eyes.

  My mouth opened, then shut, unable to formulate a response to hearing those words out of Avi’s mouth.

  Her lips quirked upward. “Or is that what you’re worried about? Putting your hands on her? Where do you think the mark will appear, brother? My guess is somewhere you’ve already touched—”

  I stepped to the side and moved past her, my footsteps slow and heavy as I trudged up the steps. Fuck, I could smell Lyric from here. She was in my chamber—our chamber.

  “You’re going to kill her, Alek!” Avi shouted after me.

  No, I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t getting anywhere near her from now on.

  “Move her to your suite!” I called over my shoulder.

  Ten days was the maximum I’d ever heard of a vampire going without feeding, and that had been a religious sect of w
omen. Warrior bodies demanded it far before that.

  I was on day eleven.

  I barely heard the voices around me as my council discussed intel that had come in at nightfall. One of the demons involved in Avi’s attack was still alive. For now.

  Hunger screamed at me with every shallow beat of my heart. My vision had turned a sort of hazy red, illuminating the bodies around me in thermal waves. My own body had decided to forsake the pretense of civility and turn full-on predator.

  I caught her scent, stabilizing my vision just before the iron door to the war room swung open.

  The click of weapons coming off safety filled the chamber as every member of my council pointed their 9mms at Lyric’s head.

  Her eyes widened, and she stumbled, catching herself on the wall and crumpling the paper in her hand.

  “Put them down!” I growled.

  Every weapon returned to its holster.

  Fuck me, she looked good enough to—nope. I told myself to shut my eyes, to stop breathing, but the damage was done. She was here, and that little blue wrap dress made my mouth water. One tug and she’d be unwrapped like a present.

  “How did you get in here, lass?” Lachlan asked, his gaze narrowing in suspicion.

  She glanced back at the door as it slammed shut behind her. “I…uh…sensed where Alek was and followed it to your…what is this? A clubhouse?” She scanned the room quickly.

  “And you opened the door?” Hawke’s brows lowered.

  Ransom immediately went to the security system and started doing his tech thing.

  “Well, I put my hand on the pad, and it opened, if that’s what you’re asking.” She fisted her hands on her hips.

  “She’s not lying,” Benedict noted, his tone edging toward awe.

  “She’s telling the truth.” Ransom spun in his chair, glanced between Lyric and me, and stood. “Alek, why don’t you check out the screen I left open when you get a second?”

  I kept my eyes locked on the furious blonde.

  “I have a bone to pick with you.”

  “Apparently. Do you think it could wait?” I snapped out every word.