This meant Lacroix had been cultivating his bloodline, as some vampires chose to do. They reached back to find their closest living relative and then set about ensuring their line continued, usually supporting the humans financially in return for pick of the litter as heritors or clan members were needed.
Ah well. Linus had the Grande Dame, and I had Gaspard Lacroix. No one was perfect.
Before that thought marinated for too long, Lacroix snapped his fingers.
“Say your goodbyes,” he told Corbin, “and then we will leave for our clan home.”
Corbin strode to me, eyes bright, pleading, but I had to pretend not to see, not to react.
Lacroix had to believe Corbin was buying into his spiel, not ready to snap off the nearest chair leg and stake him with it, if this was going to work.
“Corbin and I haven’t spent much time together,” I said to Lacroix. “Would you allow us a stroll through the gardens before you leave? He is my first progeny, and I have questions.”
“You will be able to maintain a relationship with him.” Lacroix smiled, and there was real cheer behind it. “I would never dream of keeping the two of you parted.” He grew wistful. “It is a shame you’re already spoken for, Grier. Just think of the children you two could give me.”
Progeny incest wasn’t really a thing, but that didn’t help me feel better about what he was suggesting, or the fact he wanted children from us. Not grandchildren. A slip of the tongue? Maybe. But I doubted it.
“Sadly, I’m engaged.” Thank you, marriage contract. “Those are only slightly less difficult to break than wedding vows.”
“Ah, well. You are still young, still fertile.” He made a gesture in the air. “The Lawson scion might not prove to be as long-lived as his mother. You can never tell about these things. A time might come when you consider the match with Corbin.”
The mask flaked off and left my face bare. I wasn’t as adept at this as Linus, and hearing Lacroix threaten him ignited a caustic blend of raw terror and panic in my chest that nothing short of setting my eyes on him would douse.
“Linus is very important to me,” I enunciated carefully. “Today, tomorrow, in a century, I would take the black if we married and he died.”
Dames and matrons who chose the black after the death of a spouse fell into two categories. Either they could afford not to wed again, and they led their family alone. Or, less commonly, their heartbrokenness and refusal to entertain marital offers drove their families into the ground.
“You’re young,” he soothed. “Hearts change with time.”
“Mine won’t.” I hadn’t framed Linus and me in that light in my mind. I still wasn’t sure how the future looked when I had been so single-minded in the past. But I knew I couldn’t lose him. Not to Atlanta, and not to my grandfather. That had to be enough until we figured out the rest. “I hope I’m never given occasion to prove I mean what I say.”
Temper sparked in his eyes, but he kept his tone civil, even if the tic in his cheek betrayed his fury.
“You are young,” he repeated. “You do not know what you say.”
“Sir,” Corbin said, calling Lacroix’s attention back to him, “if you don’t mind, I would like to escort Grier to the gardens now.”
Pleased one of us had manners at least, Lacroix chuckled. “Go on.” He smiled. “Have your walk.”
Corbin cocked his elbow and presented his arm to me, and I looped my hand through. The move was one I had come to expect from Linus, and I wondered if that’s what had given Corbin the idea. I clung to him like a lifeline, and he escorted me past Hood and Lethe, who stood posted on either side of the door but peeled aside to follow us.
We didn’t wait for our vampire escort to set out, and that explained how we ended up at the entrance to a room I had never seen from this angle but would have recognized anywhere. The paintings, I realized, hung on the opposite wall had given it away. I remembered them from all the desperate glances I shot in the hall each time Lena entered or exited my room.
Cletus, who had waited in the hall, drifted to the door and tapped his finger against it three times.
“You want us to go in there?” I bumped against the far wall before meaning to take a step.
The wraith tapped three more times, then he lowered his bony hand to grasp the knob.
The gwyllgi exchanged glances, but they kept their mouths shut.
I bit back a whimper when the door swung open on a room I remembered all too well.
The covers were thrown back, the French doors left open onto the patio. Leaves and other debris littered the floor, and the gauzy curtains danced in the breeze. Cletus drifted out into the small garden enclosed by stone walls. He paused at the patio furniture and pointed a damning finger at the concrete.
I drifted out, aware of what I would find but not understanding its significance.
A perfect seashell had been pressed into the concrete along the farthest edge. During my captivity, I had oriented myself by its curve. The patch of dirt beyond it was where I hid the porcelain shard I used to open my veins to ink on the sigils used during my escape.
I hadn’t reached the shell before the wraith crossed to me and tap, tap, tapped my front pants pocket.
“What does it want?” Corbin crowded in, looking around in confusion. “What is this place?”
“Remember the difference of opinion between me and Grandpapa? It started here, when he let his protégé, a Last Seed named Danill Volkov, kidnap me with intent to marry me. This is where they held me after a panic attack incapacitated me in my original room, which I later discovered was my nursery. Turns out my personal jailer was my nanny back in the day. How’s that for irony?”
Corbin stared at me, lips parted, but my family drama appeared to have stumped him.
When I considered how a hunter must have been raised, I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.
Until I decided, I awarded the contents of my pocket my full attention.
The ark shell from Tybee filled my palm, its sharp edge pressing into my fingertips. I withdrew it, running my thumb over the ridges, and when I could no longer resist, I knelt and placed it on the concrete beside the one embedded there.
“I don’t get it.” Corbin scratched his cheek. “What does your shell have to do with that one?”
“I’m not sure.” I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of them side by side. “Maybe nothing.”
“Your wraith seems to think otherwise.”
“Wraiths don’t think,” I lied. “They’re nothing but spirit and bone.”
Disbelief was written across his face, but he elected not to argue with me.
Breathing out his frustration, he said, “I can’t stay with him.”
“Hush.” Eyes darting around, I pricked my finger then drew the privacy sigil that had worked so well during the carriage ride with Linus on the back of my hand. Pressure filled my ears, and they popped as a bubble of silence enclosed us. Any vampires we encountered would smell the fresh blood and assume I had been up to something, but they wouldn’t know what. That was as much a guarantee as we could ask for. “Okay, go ahead.”
Taking what must be peculiar magic in stride, Corbin repeated, “I can’t stay with him.”
“He’s willing to teach you, protect you. You’ll have a clan at your back.”
“You heard him,” Corbin growled. “He wants me to kill humans.”
“He wants you to live up to your potential,” I countered, keeping my tone neutral.
“I won’t do it.” He set his jaw. “I’ll figure out another way.”
“You’re willing to risk your life to save others? You would rather die than kill a single human?”
There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in him. “Yes.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” I admitted, tossing aside my Dame Woolworth mask. “We need to figure out his endgame. He’s splintering the Undead Coalition. Why? He’s folding the most powerful members into his own clan rather
than killing them. Why? Others are allowing their clans, some centuries old, to vanish beneath the Lacroix flag. Why?”
Corbin exhaled a slow breath like he was sorting through everything I had thrown at him.
“The vampires have been under Society rule through the Undead Coalition for as long as anyone living can remember. As far as necromancers go, anyway. Lacroix is old enough to recall what led to the Society founding the Undead Coalition. He’s old enough to know what they gave up by existing under the ruling Grande Dame’s thumb. He reemerged after I was released from Atramentous. I wondered why for a long time, but I understand now. For the first time in my life, I had no protector. My mother is dead. Maud is dead. The Grande Dame…has never cared for me. She didn’t lift a finger to liberate me until you.” I hadn’t realized it was true until the words hit my tongue, but “You saved me as much as I saved you.”
Maybe that was why, despite his past, I wanted to save him back. Second life, second chance.
“What if he wants me to…?” He rubbed his face. “I can’t hurt others, not even to live.”
“You don’t have to kill anyone,” I assured him. “Blame me. Tell him our bond compels you to admit the complete truth when I ask you a question. He can’t be sure it’s a lie. How many goddess-touched necromancers are walking around with their Deathless progeny for him to ask? Better yet, tell him I forbade you to kill. He holds power over his subjects. Why shouldn’t I?”
A fraction of the tension eased in his shoulders. “I can do that.”
“I can’t promise his intentions are any more nefarious than rebuilding his own clan from the ground up, but I have to believe if what he offered them was anything they wanted, he wouldn’t have to use compulsion to get them to defect. He cast his net for new clan members wide, and there might be innocent vampires tangled in the mesh too.”
“Compulsion?”
“Do you remember when Lacroix put his hand on your shoulder?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed the spot. “Pretty sure he left bruises.”
“He was trying to nudge your mind.” A shiver rippled down my spine. “He almost succeeded with me, but you appear to have a natural immunity.”
“We always assumed vamps got in their victims’ heads. It was the only thing that made sense. Hearing it confirmed, having a name to go with it—a lure?” He shook his head. “I saw a jogger almost break her ankle once to stop and follow a man dressed in baggy jeans and a hoodie off the track, away from the streetlights, into the shadows. I saw a guy on his way to his daughter’s ballet recital stop on the last step, smile at someone I couldn’t see, and walk off without entering the building. There have been kids too. Out playing basketball in the street after dark. They just got this look in their eyes and walked off without a word to their friends.”
“You killed those vampires.” I hadn’t meant it as an accusation, but the tone rankled him.
“I did.” He challenged me with a look. “I tracked my targets, made sure they were killers.” He rolled his shoulders. “It doesn’t make me any less of a murderer, but it helped me sleep at night. I have no innocent blood on my hands, and I plan on keeping it that way.”
“Lacroix might hammer on you until you crack.”
“I won’t.” Corbin infused steel into his voice. “Not on this.”
“Can you do this? Stay here, with him? I can’t promise he won’t make you cross lines, but you could save a lot of lives, a lot of human lives, if you help us get ahead of this.”
Corbin cast his gaze across the garden. “You just want to know what he’s planning?”
“Yep.”
“How do I get out?” He stopped his perusal on me. “When the time comes, what’s my exit strategy?”
“I hope you won’t need one.”
“You think he’ll bring me in that close?”
“He already considers you clan. Part of that is your connection to me, part of it is his need to secure what he’s identified as a valuable resource and a potential heritor. He’s going to want you to be happy to make me happy. He’s going to want to prove he can protect anyone I place in his safekeeping. Such as future progeny. He’s also going to want to stick it to the Grande Dame. He doesn’t care for her or the Society. He’s not thrilled by what they did to me, either. But seeing as how he didn’t have me sprung either, he wasn’t invested until he knew what I was and what I could do. Until I became valuable to him.”
“That’s brutal,” Corbin murmured. “I thought I got a raw deal.”
“We both had families who loved us. We might not have kept them long, but that’s still more than a lot of people get.”
Kids blessed with two families, like me, whose second mother loved them like blood, were rare. People who lost them both through violent and sudden means, well, we were probably as common as unicorns.
Corbin scratched the dark stubble on his jaw. “How am I supposed to get word to you?”
“Don’t trust Grampy to keep the lines of communication open?”
“No.”
“Your immunity complicates things. He would honor the offer to let us stay in touch if he thought he could control what you were saying and doing. Since he can’t, he’s going to ease you over to the dark side one cookie at a time.”
“Lucky for us, I don’t have a sweet tooth.”
“Will your power affect a wraith?” I raked my fingers through Cletus’s tattered cloak. “Drain him?”
“We can find out.” His gaze hooked into Cletus, and with an effort of will, he tugged on the wraith.
Cletus drifted closer to him, head cocked, then froze, the mist of his cloak darkening.
“I can’t call him,” Corbin said, sweat popping on his brow. “He can hear me, but he’s not receptive.”
“Good.”
Calling off his experiment, Corbin exhaled. “Why is that good?”
For one thing, it meant he couldn’t drain Linus through their connection. For another, it kept Maud safe.
“I’m sending Cletus with you. He’ll get a lock on your location and report back. That way Linus and I can keep an eye on you. I’ll send the wraith to your room each night until you’re confident you can go for longer stretches. The new clan home can’t be far. Lacroix has roots in the area, and old vampires prefer staying close to home.”
“Okay.” He blew out a breath. “What about afterward?”
“I’m going to talk to the Grande Dame about an immunity deal. You bring us intel on Lacroix, she grants you a pardon for your past crimes. It’s a fair trade, even though it won’t protect you from retribution unless you join a clan willing to keep you safe in exchange for the novelty of having a Deathless in their ranks.”
“You’re half vampire.” He gave me a measuring look. “Ever consider starting your own clan?”
“I’m already Dame Woolworth. I don’t want to be Master Woolworth too.”
“I get that.”
“Linus has thriving progeny and a solid reputation. One of the clans in his debt might be more willing to host you for his sake. A favor owed by the Grande Dame’s son carries weight.”
“Linus isn’t here,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you can speak for him?”
“Yes.” Even if the bottom fell out between us, he would honor this bargain. That’s the kind of man he was: honorable. “I’ll send details with Cletus when it’s safe.”
Linus would know how to make our note-passing scheme work. He had used the wraith for multiple covert ops in the past.
“Ah. There you are.” Our escort had located us at last. “I searched the gardens.”
Before turning to him, I scratched off the sigil with my fingernail. “I got sidetracked with a stroll down memory lane.”
“The nursery is untouched if you’d like to see your dollies.” The cruel edge in his voice made me wonder if he had been here during my stay, if he had been one of the vampires who escaped. “You remember your old room, don’t you?”
“I’ve wasted too much of my gran
dfather’s time.” I poured as much regret as I could muster into my voice. “I’ll have to request the grand tour of the estate on my next visit. I didn’t spend much time outside my room the last time I was here.”
“There were casualties the night you escaped,” he said softly. “I lost friends I’ve known for centuries.”
“Your friends should have never locked me in a cage. I don’t deal well with confinement.”
The vampire took a menacing step into my personal space, and Lethe moved. She palmed his throat and slammed him against the stone wall, a dozen feet away, pinning him with his feet dangling above the grass.
“Bad vampire,” she tsked. “Grier is under our protection.”
“You can’t—” He coughed. “The master—”
“That deal is done,” Hood said. “His secrets are safe, and so is his clan, but Grier is pack.”
Confirmation they had ties to Lacroix smarted worse than expected, but I concealed my reaction to the sting.
The vampire’s eyes widened in shock, his lips moving over the word pack like he wanted to spit out the taste.
Grandpa would love hearing that I didn’t want to be a member of his vampire clan but had accepted a spot in a gwyllgi pack.
“Put one finger on her,” Lethe snarled, their noses touching, “and I’ll bite it off then shove it up your nose into your brain. If you have one, which I’m beginning to doubt. Grier is Lacroix’s granddaughter. You’re a lackey. You’re a predator, start thinking like one. She’s so far up the food chain you can’t see her from where you’re standing.”
“Let him go.” I reached into my pocket. “I got this.”
The second she relaxed her grip, he broke away and charged me. I let him. Welcomed the confrontation, as a matter of fact. I couldn’t afford a hit to the reputation I had started building the night of the ball. I had to prove I could hold my own, that I didn’t need protectors, that I was more powerful than the familial baggage leaving ruts in the road of my life from dragging it behind me all these years.
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