The Book of Blood and Roses (The Callisto Chronicles #1)

Prologue

A bouquet of roses, lying upon a mahogany coffin, hides the stench of death. Tall, misshapen candles decorate every corner of the room. I stare at their flames, white and blue, while the vampire rummages through an old chest of drawers.

She turns to lock her crimson eyes with mine. “Don’t move yet, darling,” she says.

“I won’t.” My voice is listless. Entranced. Her red eyes give her the ability to twist a human’s will however she pleases. When she first saw me at the party downstairs and caught my scent, she wasted no time in making me follow her, as though she was in a rush. As though she won’t live forever.

Her room’s décor is the opposite of the downstairs club’s.

Dame Danger is an industrial mess, all pipes and neon lights.

But here the room has thick velvet curtains, a red Persian rug over a wooden floor.

She doesn’t hide her vanity: Framed portraits of herself fill every wall.

Her striking features, chestnut hair, and thick red lips, unchanged through centuries, appear on each canvas.

“Ah!” she says. “Finally.” She draws out a dagger.

A golden blade with a crystal hilt embedded with flowers. “Now we can begin.”

I stare at the weapon, my heart pounding.

“Begin what?” I whisper.

My back is pressed against the wall. I stand exactly where she told me to—in the very same spot, I imagine, as all her past victims. She closes the distance between us and places the cold crystal in my hands, drawing my fingers tight around the hilt.

Then she leans down, presses her nose into the crook of my neck, and inhales. “Delicious,” she whispers.

My blood, Type-S, is extremely rare, only one in ten thousand humans are said to have it. And with its scent alone, it can make a satiated vampire thirsty again.

My fingers tremble around the dagger. I know what comes next. I know what happened to her previous victims. She leans back just enough for her red eyes to meet mine again, and they glow bright before she commands: “Slit your throat.”

I lift the blade to my neck, and her pupils dilate.

Her lips part. She has fangs, razor sharp, but she doesn’t want to use them.

Perhaps this is her MO: Instead of biting and sucking from small puncture wounds, as most vampires do, this one wants me to slit my own throat and provide her with a heavy flow of blood so she can gorge without tiring herself.

Police sirens fill the street below. They’re too far away. No one will hear me if I scream.

Luckily enough, I don’t need to.

“I’d rather not,” I say.

She’s frozen, bent to drink from the wound I’ve yet to open. She stares up at me, confused. “What?”

“But thanks for the dagger,” I say, my trembling hands relaxing. I slice just beneath her chin and the blade hits bone. She clasps her neck, speechless as blood sprays from the gash. I kick her, and the same smile she used on me when she assumed I was easy prey appears on my lips now.

If she was a Heritage vampire, the kind of vampire who is born instead of made, her open neck might heal in a matter of minutes. But as a Convert, someone who used to be human, it’ll take days.

At a first glance it can be hard to tell what kind of vampire you’re facing, because they look identical except for the fact that all Heritage vampires stop aging when they turn thirty, while Converts are frozen at whatever age they were sired. Dame Danger here doesn’t look a day over twenty.

“Callisto sends its regards,” I say, before sliding out the weapon hidden in the bustier of my dress. A slit throat won’t kill a vampire, but a stake most certainly will. I slam it through her chest, hearing ribs crack before it pierces her rotten heart.

Like all vampires, she leaves no corpse behind. Just smoke and dust.

I stretch my arms above my head. A low buzz fills my right ear after I tap on my silver earring. “You really expect me to believe she was dangerous?” I say.

“Just get out of there,” Penny, my supervisor, replies.

I blow out the candles and pull open the velvet curtains.

A full moon hangs above London’s jagged skyline.

The window opens with a creak as the old Victorian building protests at my strength.

Wind blows my short black hair, and I jump out.

“Seriously, these missions are getting too easy,” I say.

I know I shouldn’t complain. But hopefully Penny will get the hint. Understand that I’m ready.

Ready for her to tell me the truth.

A black car comes to a halt beside me. Penny rolls down the window. Her red hair is in a tight bun, a grey scarf wrapped around her neck. “Hurry up,” she says. I climb in beside her, twirling my new dagger between my fingers. “And I told you not to take anything from the crime scene.”

I roll my eyes. “It was a gift,” I say, slouching back onto the leather seat. “It would be pretty heartless of me to throw it away after killing her, don’t you think?”

Penny doesn’t deign to respond.

Penny’s base is in an abandoned convent an hour west of the city, halfway up a hill and hidden by a forest. From the outside, there appears to be nothing here but ruins: stones with dried-up weeds hiding what centuries ago was a holy site.

She parks in the driveway and waits for the base’s security system to recognise her car.

A single lamppost flickers on through the fog, signalling it’s safe to get out.

We make our way across the cloister, a well at its centre, half hidden by a coat of ivy.

Most of the convent got blown to rubble during the Second World War, though it had been lying empty for centuries at that point.

Luckily, the refectory, as well as three narrow bedrooms, survived the blast. Callisto uses it as a satellite base, big enough for five hunters, at most, but it’s just the two of us out here.

“Did the rescue team save anyone from the party?” I ask. I work alone, and my job is to kill, not save. But Penny has promised me there is always a rescue team from Callisto to get the human survivors out of each blood party I dismantle.

“That’s none of your business, Rebecca,” Penny says, putting down her pen. She can’t have a meeting with me without writing my every word down in a leather-bound notebook.

“You don’t have to give me an exact number,” I add.

Her cold eyes pause on mine. “We’ve talked about this.”

We have. I breathe out between my teeth. There are so many things I need to know but Penny never tells me. How many humans survived the blood party. How the surviving humans can go back to their ordinary lives after crossing paths with creatures that shouldn’t exist.

Who killed my parents.

I still remember sitting in this very office, four years ago, when she made her promise. Work for us, and I’ll tell you who did it.

But not yet. Only when I’m ready.

“When’s my next mission?” I ask, tapping on the chair.

Penny tugs at her scarf, loosening it slightly, though not enough to reveal the bare skin of her neck.

I know she’s been hunting since she was sixteen, shortly after she and her sister were kidnapped for a blood party.

Penny made it out alive. Her sister did not.

I’ve never seen her without her scarf, but I can imagine that if I ever see her neck, it will be riddled with bite marks.

She shuts her notebook and pulls out a folder.

I have never seen Penny smile, except on the day I agreed to join Callisto.

Tonight, her expression is more guarded than usual.

Instead of replying, Penny flicks through the folder until she lifts out a photograph.

She hands it to me, and I study the image.

“Cassie Smith,” Penny says. “Heiress to an Edinburgh-based textile-distribution company.”

I stare at the girl. Large, gold-framed glasses and long red hair, the colour of blood. There’s something eerily familiar about her, and it’s only when I focus on her eyes that it hits me. “She looks like me, doesn’t she?”

“She is you,” Penny says, leaning back. “Cassie is your new identity.”

I gawk at her, then back down at the picture, which I only now realise must have been photoshopped. “Identity for what?”

“You didn’t go to university, did you, Rebecca?”

“Bit busy hunting vampires,” I say.

“Well, congratulations,” she says, taking a black envelope out of the folder and pushing it across the mahogany desk. “Cassie Smith just got accepted into Tynahine University.”

I tighten my grip on the chair, not looking at the envelope, focusing only on Penny. Tynahine. My heart skips a beat. “Who am I going to kill?” I ask. I’ve never been allowed anywhere near the kind of vampires that go to Tynahine.

“No one,” she says. “There are only treaties-abiding vampires at Tynahine. You know that.”

“The treaties don’t mean shit,” I hiss, ignoring the fact that she said I’m not killing anyone.

Killing is the only thing I’m good at. Before I can ask why I’m going there, Penny rises and walks to the bookcase by the door, a silver sword hanging above it.

The weapon belonged to Catherine Lovelace, founder of Callisto.

The greatest vampire hunter to have ever lived.

She runs her fingers down a leather-bound spine, and then turns to face me. “You’re going to find a book,” she says.

“A book?”

“The Book of Blood and Roses,” she says, leaning against her collection. “An ancient compendium of every vampiric weakness we haven’t discovered.” There’s a gleam in her eyes now. Still, she doesn’t smile. “This book is the key to finally rid the earth of all leeches.”

“But how did a human get into a vampire university?” I glance at the black envelope. For some reason I’m scared to open it.

“For the first time in Tynahine’s history, they’re accepting human students.”

A chill runs up my spine. “What?”

“The Council’s new initiative,” she says, walking back to her desk. A medieval tapestry, depicting Michael slaying a serpent, hangs behind her chair. “To encourage integration with humans who are already in the know.”

“Bullshit.”

“There’s no one better suited for the job than you,” she adds.

“I don’t want to go back to Scotland,” I say. I know these words show my weakness. But it’s true. I haven’t gone back since my parents died.

I still remember being eighteen, standing on the damp and grey platform of Glasgow Central. My hands trembling on my dad’s old suitcase. The sky was heavy, rain pattering on the grimy roof of the station. That was my last day in Scotland, and I can’t imagine going back now.

“If you find the book, I will make sure you get promoted.”

I gawk at her, not quite believing what I just heard. I missed my chance last year and have been stuck in Callisto’s lowest rank, Cross, for four years. “To Hymn?”

“To Stake,” she says. That’s Penny’s rank. While I try to process this, she adds: “And I’ll tell you everything.”

My breath catches. “You’ll tell me who killed my parents?”

“Everything,” she promises.

I take a shallow breath. For a moment the room disappears, and I’m back to the eighteen-year-old who’d just lost her parents to vampires. Back to the girl I was before Penny took my grief and twisted it into a stake.

“I’ll find your book,” I say.