Velvet Shadows (The Crimson Court #2)

Chapter 6

NATE

Sera is still panting, fumbling with her skirts and the pins at her hair, eyeing me with those dark irresistible eyes when I feel the change in the horses’ pace.

“Why are we stopping?” I raise my voice over the sound of the rain still hammering against the glass, but no response comes to the question I have barked into the night at Aulus.

I open the door and through the deluge I can see the shadows of the other carriages in our convoy continuing onward, the squeaking of the wheels lost to the sounds of the summer storm.

Immediately, my hackles are raised. We have only a few hours until dawn. We should not be stopping at all.

“Stay here,” I mutter to Sera. I swing from the carriage onto the dirt track, now thick with mud, and walk round to the horses. They whinny gently as I approach, tossing their heads, chomping on the bits in their mouths, rain spraying from their manes. When I glance up, the reins are loose. The gutterfang enlisted to take us to Bath is no longer in the driving seat. “Aulus, if you’ve decided now is the time to take a fucking piss…” I fly around to the other side of the carriage, peering into the line of trees for a silhouette, smelling the air. Aulus is nowhere to be seen. I cannot even detect him on the breeze thanks to the rain. Ordinarily, I would be overwhelmed with smells if I tuned into them for long enough, even in such weather. But there are none. And at that moment, when the horses’ and Sera’s blood are the only scents reaching my brain, I know it’s a setup.

Lock the door. I throw the command to Sera in my mind, my fangs lengthening. Every muscle in my body tenses, bracing for impact. My fingers flex, longing to rip off the head of whoever emerges from the shadows.

Nate, what’s happening?

The rain eases as a figure bursts from the undergrowth with a stake clutched in their hand. They launch it, but I dodge it with ease, the wood whistling past my head and into the trees on the other side of the track.

Fucking hunters. Don’t move.

They reach into their cloak for another, but my fingers are around their neck before they can reach it. I throw them against the trunk of a tree and the force sends their hood falling back. Beneath it is a grizzled, scarred face and eyes filled with fury. He squirms under my grip and I shake my head, laughter caught in the back of my throat. Did he think this through at all? There will be more of them in the woods, but regardless, this feels amateurish. Even without the strength Sera’s blood affords me, I could out manoeuvre them all in a heartbeat.

The hunter’s voice comes out strained from the pressure of my fingers, “You are a demon. A monstrosity. A plague on humanity. You will die tonight, and be sent back into the fiery pits of hell from whence you came.”

“I will not meet my maker tonight, but be sure to give Satan my best regards.” With one hand, I snap his neck and release him, watching as he crumbles to the ground.

A quick death is more than a hunter deserves. If Valeria hears of this, she will be furious that I didn’t strap him to the back of the carriage and drag him the rest of the way to Bath — his body ripping to ribbons with each bump and root in the road. But there are more of them — perhaps those who are not so stupid as to fly at me like their friend did.

Hunters are well-trained. They have been known to infiltrate families, befriend them, even submit to the jaws of their masters, just so they can choose the right moment to strike. They are patient, not reckless.

Maybe this one was a new recruit.

Let me help. Sera’s voice.

I turn and see her face pressed up against the carriage window, her eyes wide. What does she think she can do? The thought almost makes me smile. She has powers, but she cannot control them. And the horror she felt over killing Ambrose despite all he had done…

No, she is not a natural killer.

And by rights, she should be on the side of the hunters. If we weren’t bonded, she would want me dead, too.

Not a chance, witchling.

An arrow sails at me through the trees, but I catch it in my fingers, ripping it from the air and snapping it in two.

“I should commend you for your bravery, I suppose,” I yell into the darkness. “Or perhaps it is simply stupidity.”

I sniff the air, trying to anticipate their attack. From the heartbeats I can feel thrumming in the air, there are three more positioned at different points around the carriage. But where the fuck is Aulus?

Hunters know everything about our kind. They know we are fast — so fast the human eye can barely comprehend it — and strong. They also know that, ordinarily, we do not travel long distances by carriage. Why would we when we can near-fly in a fraction of the time it takes the horses? We are only doing so tonight because we have the pledges with us.

The fact they knew our movements tells us they have been watching.

Or they have someone to watch for them.

A roar moves from my belly into my throat. Could this be Aulus’s doing? He is a gutterfang, one of those chosen to serve the noble houses at court with menial tasks such as carriage driving when we need to cast an illusion of humanity. It is a dull existence, but an easier one than his kin have in the city — even before the hunters launched their attacks. But to work with the hunters and help them ambush the grandson of one of the Court’s matriarchs would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

I refuse to believe a creature as insignificant as Aulus has the power to change the way of things. He cannot be behind this.

I stand, listening for movements on the breeze, planning my next move. This kind of attack is unprecedented for hunters. They are not common highway bandits; they are skilled assassins. They rely on their guile more than their strength to get the job done. For them to do this…

Something is off.

I hear the click of the carriage door unlocking and I fly to it, slamming my body against it before Sera can join me.

I said, stay where you are.

Why are we waiting to be ambushed? We should spur the horses on?—

No. I snarl the word, letting Sera know I’m serious. If Aulus is in on this, he will only take after us and kill the horses. The hunters have to die. All of them.

Pushing away from the carriage door, I become the black blur of every human’s nightmares. Hidden in the darkness between the trees, following the racing of heartbeats that give them away. Do they not realise there is no hiding from this? From me? That the sound of their pulses is like thunder in my ears; that I could track them wherever they fled to in this godforsaken country from that sensation alone.

They do not know what they are dealing with. No matter the information they have been given, they cannot comprehend how fast or strong I am now that Sera’s blood flows through my veins.

But they will.

The second hunter does not see me coming. I grab them by the neck and throw them from the safety of the trees and onto the ground next to the carriage. I could snap their neck and be done with it as I did with their friend — move onto the next. But the others need to see what they are risking. They need to know just what I could do to them.

I lean forward, watching the pale, wide-eyed face of the hunter at my feet. He’s only a boy. Sixteen at most. He will have been trained to be a soldier for them because of his bloodline. One, or both, of his parents will have been a hunter too.

I look into his eyes and see how they fill with tears and terror as he stares into mine. Am I the first monster he has met?

With a snarl, I stamp down on his leg. The bone snaps as easily as the twigs on the ground.

He bellows out in pain, and a shower of arrows rains down on me from opposing angles. I catch them all, then grab the first archer by the throat, pushing him into the dirt next to the boy.

This one will be easier to kill. He smirks at me — an expression so infuriating that it makes me want to claw the flesh from his face, just to wipe the smile away.

“You cannot run from us forever,” he says, resting back on his elbows as he stares up at me. “You have no idea what you’re up against.”

More arrows come. One embeds itself in my upper-arm, but it feels like a pin-prick. I pull it out and throw it to the ground, feeling the flesh heal as if it were no more than a splinter.

“The only creature I see running is your friend.” I jerk my head toward the final hunter, who has now abandoned their bow and arrow. “It doesn’t seem fair that they get away and you are made to suffer. Let us right that wrong, shall we?”

I am back with the fourth hunter before the smug one even realises I have moved.

The fourth is a girl, barely old enough to be called a woman. I throw her into the dirt with the rest of them.

Now they are all at my feet, together and not hiding in the darkness, I see just how pathetic they are. Three mortals who have no idea what they are doing; who cannot comprehend the strength of the vampire they have attempted to ensnare and destroy. And two of them so young I cannot believe they were even born when hunters last launched their attacks on my kind.

“If you want to start a war, this is a good way to go about it,” I growl. “And you can’t be so stupid as to think you would win?”

The pock-faced boy whimpers. The girl glares at him.

“You are murderers,” the smug fucker spits. “Spawns of the devil. We will never stop until all of your kind are back in hell where you belong.”

“You know I could make you one of us right now,” I snarl. “It’s a good thing for you we have taste.”

His smile falls away as I yank him upwards and hold him in front of me by the throat. I feel the other archer move, reach into her cloak for a weapon, and leap to her feet. She is fast, but I am faster. I throw my free hand into her face, my knuckles smashing against her nose, and she falls backwards.

“The others aren’t like you,” the hunter chokes beneath my fingers.

“Your source clearly hasn’t given you all the facts,” I say, squeezing tighter. “You chose the wrong vampire tonight, my friend.”

With the girl watching through a bloodied nose, and the boy still at my feet with his mangled leg, I smash my fist through the hunter’s ribcage, my knuckles ploughing through flesh and blood and bone, and pull out his heart.

It isn’t his body I am watching as I do it, but his face. The expression is exquisite. The way his mouth tries to hang open with shock, but can’t quite unhinge because of the pressure of my palm that remains pressed against his jaw. His eyes are wide and popping from his skull, the breath stuck in his now impotent lungs.

The boy yells from the ground, squirming backwards, but the girl says nothing, even as I throw her comrade’s still pulsing heart into the dirt and lick his blood from my knuckles. She just watches me. There is hatred in her eyes, but something else… a flicker of defiance. A spark.

And then I realise why.

The world tilts on its axis. My vision clouds.

What’s happening? Sera’s voice. She senses the change in me — that I’ve gone from furious, but in total, crushing control, to… this.

“You are not so different,” the girl says, wiping the blood from her nose with the back of her hand. “You are faster than we expected. That much is true. But you’re all the same, in the end. Violent. Cruel. Driven by your inhuman lust for blood.”

The world is horizontal, then upright again, branches swaying, then stilling. I stagger towards the tree line.

I feel Sera’s temper rise, her heart galloping. She wants to help me, but she’ll never get out of this alive. She’ll end up killing us both.

Stay there, Sera.

“What did you do to me?” I steady myself against the trunk as the darkness slips and slides in front of me.

“You saw firsthand that we are masters of potions when you lost that pathetic excuse for a noble at your ball. I wish I had been there to see him frothing and foaming at your sister’s feet. I have heard it was quite the spectacle.”

I lunge forward, but this time the girl easily side-steps me, smiling through the blood still streaming down her face.

How have they done this?

My boot bumps into the now still heart of the other archer that is laid in the dirt, and the realisation crashes through my blurred brain.

I tasted his blood. Barely more than a drop. But it was enough.

“You have all drunk it?” I ask.

“We didn’t all need to.” The girl grins. “Just those who felt they could provoke you enough to lash out. You proved our theory quite excellently.”

Hunters have always had a reputation as being martyrs — a group of humans that would happily die during their mission if there was a chance to rid the word of one less vampire. But their attempt tonight was risky. Foolhardy. And I cannot let it pay off.

“Our appetites are monstrous, you are right,” I straighten up. “But to think you can outwit my kind? Out manoeuvre us? I did not paint you as stupid creatures, but after tonight, I may have to change my opinion.” My fangs flare, and the world comes back into focus. The archer sees the change in me, for she steps back, reaching for one of the stakes strapped to her body before flying at me with it.

I knock her to the ground easily. I am not at my full-strength, nowhere close, but it is enough to unsettle her.

“I am not so easily killed. You can take that message back to your masters.”

“Tell them yourself,” she bellows, flipping back onto her feet.

As the mist of the poison lifts, it’s then that I sense them — a second wave of hunters swarming at us through the trees. This time, they are heading not just for me, but for the carriage, too.

With a battle-cry roar, I fly at them, blocking their path. They must not get to Sera.

The first hunter lunges, his stake aimed at my heart. I twist aside, seizing his wrist and wrenching it back with a crack. He screams, the stake tumbling from his useless fingers.

Another two hunters attack in unison. I weave between them with none of my usual precision, and one of the pair lands a glancing blow. The stake tears through the sleeve of my jacket, grazing my skin. I hiss in pain, the wound burning like acid.

The poison might not have killed me, but it is slowing me down. And there was more of it dripping on that stake.

I retaliate with a vicious uppercut, my knuckles slamming into the hunter’s jaw. He reels back, blood spraying from his shattered teeth. The third hunter presses the attack with a stake in hand. I catch his arm, twisting it behind his back until the bone snaps. He howls, the stake clattering to the ground.

Breathing hard, I survey the carnage. There are hunters writhing on the ground at my feet. One with a broken neck. Another with no heart. But the girl has gone, and there’s a prickling at the back of my neck, a sense of unease that I cannot shake.

Nate… Sera says my name on an inhale, the gasp caught in her throat.

I spin and my eyes widen in horror to see the carriage door open and Aulus standing with his arm locked around Sera’s chest, a knife pressed to her jugular.

“Let the hunters go,” Aulus hisses, his voice trembling with barely contained panic. “Or I’ll slit her throat right here.”

I freeze, my mind racing. Ordinarily, I could kill Aulus before he could so much as blink, but I know I cannot do it now without risking Sera’s life; not with the hunter’s poison in my blood.

Around us, the hunters are quick to stir, finding their feet. They are trained to withstand torture and not buckle, to fight through injuries and broken bones. They will not stop until they, or I, are dead.

I need to act fast.

“Aulus,” I say, my voice low and measured. “Think about what you’re doing. You know the consequences of betraying me, betraying the Court.”

Aulus laughs, a high-pitched, desperate sound. “If you leave here alive, I am as good as dead, anyway.”

“If you stop this now, I can protect you.”

“Like you’ve helped my kin in the city, you mean?” He licks his fangs. “It’s not gutterfangs the hunters want, not really. It’s you.”

“Whatever lies they have fed you, you cannot believe them.” My words come out quickly, impatient. “You know they will never let you live. They’ll come after you tonight. Hunt you down. You’ll never be free.”

Aulus shakes his head, his grip on Sera tightening. “No, you’re wrong. They gave me their word.”

I see the resolve hardening in his eyes; the knife digging deeper into Sera’s flesh. A single drop of blood wells up, staining the blade crimson. The smell of it — that sweet, honeyed nectar — makes my fangs lengthen and itch.

I am distracted by it, and the archer knows it. For once, I am the predictable blood-sucker that she has trained her entire life to defeat. Out of the darkness, she launches herself at me, flying at my back. She locks her forearm around my throat, her legs clamped around my waist.

You’ll be the death of me, Seraphina Sterling.

With the girl attached to me like a limpet, I roar, trying to shake her off. She holds tight. We struggle and tussle until I finally sink my hand into the long blonde braid that hangs down her back, and use every bit of my strength to pull forwards. The braid rips from her head and she screams, falling to the floor with her bloodied scalp, sobbing.

I feel Sera wince — the sharp stab in her chest as if I had just wounded her, too.

With the archer off my back, Aulus seems to have realised it’s all over. He hisses, then throws Sera to the ground and vanishes into the night like the coward he is.

I want to fly to her side, but they cannot know there is a tie between us. They must not suspect she is anything other than a human I have taken for sustenance.

They won’t hurt you. I murmur into Sera’s head. They think you’re human. Take the horses and go.

You think I’m leaving you? If you die, I die, remember? And at the moment, I’m not sure I like your chances.

I feel the fear pulsing through Sera’s body, but it’s secondary to the adrenaline. For a moment, I think all my fears, all my suspicions, will come true. That Sera was working for them all along; that this was her plan. I watch her hands, expecting her to pull a stake from beneath her skirts and plunge it into my chest, obliterating me and herself along with it. The ultimate martyr.

But she doesn’t. There is no hatred in her. Not for me.

I feel the pang of sympathy she has for the boy and his mangled leg, the archer with her raw, bleeding scalp, and a flicker of concern for the other hunters who now drag themselves to surround me. But the overriding feeling? Grit. Determination.

She will not let this end us.

The boy pulls himself up, hobbling on his one good leg, and calls out to her, “Stay back, Miss. You must not believe the lies he has told you; he is no gentleman.”

I chuckle inwardly, so only Sera can hear it. The boy is na?ve enough to think she doesn’t know what I am. That she hasn’t drunk from me, too. That we aren’t tied together for eternity.

As the maimed hunters lunge at me, a new figure launches themselves through the trees. I do a double-take, thinking my mind and the poison in my veins are playing tricks on me. For the resemblance is so striking, so clear, that it is as if we are back at the Blood Rose Ball of twenty years ago.

In that split second, the figure is on me, the remaining hunters with their bleeding faces and fractured bones coming to his side to help pin me down.

Somehow, they get me to the ground. Fury rattles through me. If it wasn’t for their poison, I would be flicking them from me like flies. I could pull myself from the ground with twenty of them hanging off me and taking chunks out of my flesh and still shake them free.

But even though the flesh from where the stake dug into me has closed up, I can feel it throbbing with the poison it has deposited. It is as if I am wading through treacle, everything in slow motion as I fight against the mortals that are here to end the monster.

The world is blurry. Above me, I see the glint of silver from the leader’s hands. His stake isn’t wooden like the rest and it glitters in the moonlight as he positions it above my heart.

“I’m doing this for my father,” he spits, lifting his arm back, ready to strike.

No, it can’t end like this.

I’m saying it to myself, not Sera, but I know she can hear me. And in that moment, she is all I am thinking of. Her deep brown eyes, the smell of her hair, of her skin. The laugh I once heard on the breeze when she walked in the grounds of Nighthaven. Her waist beneath my hands…

I might deserve to die, but she does not.

I cannot let it happen.

I brace myself, gritting my teeth, pulling every ounce of strength I have to push the hunters away when a wave of light fills the clearing. Bellamy’s son and the rest of the hunters are all knocked back — blasted away from me, slamming against the carriage and tree trunks, their weapons scattering into the undergrowth. Sera is at my side in an instant, pressing my mouth to her throat and the knick where Aulus’s blade skimmed her skin.

“Drink,” she whispers. “And then we can get out of here.”

My cheek falls into her bosom as I lap at her skin, my hands on her neck, desperate for her and the strength only she can give me.

As soon as a bead of her blood melts onto my tongue, it is like a lightning strike through my veins. My pupils dilate, my fangs grow longer, and my muscles bulge and broaden.

With it, the compulsion to destroy the hunters is instantaneous.

In a split-second, I am on my feet, turning on them with a monstrous roar. I snap necks, pull hearts from chests and stamp them into the dirt. I rip open throats, force stakes into their lungs, and slice daggers into their bellies until their guts spill onto the forest floor.

And I enjoy it.

I enjoy seeing every second of their panic and pain — the moments they realise they underestimated just who they were dealing with.

Bellamy’s son lies dead at my feet, his body twitching and pulsing as the final breath of life leaves his bones. The boy is gone, too, impaled into the ground, his mangled leg covered by a headless corpse.

The sheer volume of blood as it puddles on the earth sends a surge through me. I long to sink into it and drown in the victory of their demise, but I cannot risk another drop touching my tongue when any number of them may have drunk their poison in the hopes of sending me to my end.

It is only the girl that remains alive. She lays at the foot of a tree, her hands pressed against her flapping scalp to stem the bleeding.

I could end her in a heartbeat. And perhaps I should. If she leaves here alive, she will use what she has learned tonight, and they will regroup. There will be dozens more of them, and together they will plot and scheme and find new ways to end us.

And then there is Sera. If I had not drunk from her, the girl might have assumed she was nothing more than a witch serving House Blackwood. But the fact I tasted her blood and regained my strength will not be lost on the girl.

No, she has seen too much to leave here alive.

I stride over to her and she makes no effort to move, simply looking up at me with hate-filled, angry eyes. There is something in the shade of them that makes me pause. A pull of muscles at the side of her lips as they twitch in fear for the first time.

Let her go. Sera is behind me, surveying the blood and ruin around us. She is trembling. Please.

I cannot. She will tell the hunters about your powers and it will be our ruin. No one can know.

Nate—

I block her out. I do not need to know how monstrous Sera thinks me for what I am about to do.

I kneel in front of the girl, her eyes still defiant despite the carnage around us and the blood seeping from her ravaged scalp. She doesn’t flinch as I reach out and grip her chin, forcing her to meet my gaze.

“You fought well,” I say, my voice low. “But it wasn't enough. It will never be enough to defeat us. You must see that now.”

She spits at me, a glob of blood and saliva splattering across my cheek. I wipe it away with the back of my hand.

“Do it then,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “Finish what you started, monster.”

I tilt my head, considering her for a moment. The flicker of recognition that unsettles me still lingers, but I cannot let her live.

My hand tightens around her throat, my fingers digging into her flesh. She gasps, her hands scrabbling uselessly at my wrist.

“They are coming for you,” she stutters. “And soon, even your witch won’t be able to save you.”

There is no sense in asking who she refers to; who sent her or gave their information to the hunters, for she would happily die rather than confess anything that harms the cause. That much I know. She either dies here by my hand, or is dragged in front of the Court and tortured until her body finally surrenders to the beyond.

There is no hope of anything else.

“Nate…” Sera’s voice is barely a whisper behind me, a plea for mercy that I cannot grant.

I close my eyes, steeling myself for what must be done.

And then, with a single, brutal twist, I snap the girl’s neck.

Her body goes limp in my grasp, her eyes wide and staring. I let her fall to the ground, her lifeless form crumpling at the base of the tree as if every bone in her body was broken, too.

Sera makes a choked sound behind me — a sob caught in her throat. I turn to face her, my expression grim.

I want to bark at her, to tell her there is no place for her emotion. That she did not weep when I decimated the others. So why this one? Is it because she is a woman? Or did Sera pity her for the same reason I took pause — because there was something about the girl’s eyes, the jut of her chin, that felt familiar?