Chapter 14
Excerpt from Blood Feud
(book one, chapter eight)
by August Lirio
Callum heard a twig snap—he was certain someone was following him through the forest.
“Who’s there?” he snarled. “If you want to fight, don’t be a cowardly little shit about it. Show yourself.”
He was expecting to see Felix or one of his many henchmen, but instead, a girl Callum had never met peeked out from behind a nearby tree. She wore a simple white linen dress and looked to be in her early twenties, young and afraid—but Callum wasn’t stupid enough to judge any vampire based on appearances. Still, he found her wide eyes, rosy cheeks, and ample curves extremely appealing, so he strode toward her.
“Out for a walk, love?” He gave her a charming smile.
“I know who you are.” Her voice was light and breathy.
“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “Who am I?”
“You’re the most dangerous man on the Isle.” She took one step closer. “You’ve killed dozens of vampires, hundreds of humans. Felix says—”
She stopped talking. Callum narrowed his eyes.
“What does that jealous little prig say about me? Go on.”
She bit her lip, and Callum felt his desire building—he wanted to take that lip between his own teeth, to suck on it until it was bruised and purpled. He was a creature of voracious and insatiable appetites, and he had little inclination toward restraint.
“I shouldn’t say,” she whispered. “He told me not to.”
“Let me guess.” Callum closed the distance between them in half a moment. “He said I’m a vicious beast who can’t be trusted, who’ll rip you apart just to amuse myself—or toy with his mind.”
Her voice was strained and full of lust. “Something like that.”
“And instead of staying away from me, that made you curious.” Callum’s voice was low. “What a dirty little bird you are. Wanted to meet the monster and judge for yourself?”
She nodded. Callum ran a finger along her jaw, and she shivered with anticipation. His icy blood grew hot as he imagined all the pleasures that lay before him—he was going to fuck this girl until her legs shook and she begged for more. And then, just as Felix predicted, Callum was going to kill her to send Felix’s clan a message: If they weren’t afraid of him yet, they should be.
“Can I tell you a secret?” he whispered into the girl’s ear, then sharply nipped her earlobe.
“Oh!” she gasped. “ Yes, please.”
“Everything Felix said was true.”
The kitchen at Nantale’s compound was, as one might expect, more like a blood bank: a long row of glass-doored refrigerators stocked with different sorts of animal blood, as well as several industrial stoves to heat the blood to a vampire’s preferred temperature. Most of the vampires hunted their own food, but since Callum was still too weak to leave the compound, Tess was warming up his breakfast. He’d mostly been asleep for the past two days; she thought it was a good sign that he wanted a hot meal.
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone native.” Hamish swanned into the kitchen wearing a black yoga onesie and a silky floral robe that billowed behind him. “You’re drinking blood now?”
“It’s for Callum.” Tess exhaled with relief that Hamish was alone. Of all the vampires here, he seemed the least interested in killing her—and since the crystal bridge was destroyed and Tess was now trapped on this island indefinitely, she was grateful for any scrap of safety she could find.
Hamish grabbed a bottle of blood out of the fridge, popped the top, and took a deep drink.
“ So good. Goose blood.” He indicated the bottle. “Can’t compare to human, but at least it’s got foie vibes. What’s Callum having?”
“Pig’s blood. So more like Carrie vibes.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a little telekinesis just to pass the time.” Hamish sighed. “So how’s it going with you two?”
“Me and Callum?” Tess asked. “Not great—we still haven’t found a way off the Isle.”
“Ugh, who cares, I want to know what’s happening with you and the hottest vampire alive! All those hours alone in the forest, him wanting your blood, you wanting his body? Are you two doing that sweet human-vampire nasty?! It’s been so long since I’ve had hot tea, please, you have to tell me.”
“What?! No! Nobody wants anybody’s anything.” Tess flushed, her mind lurching to the moment in the moonflower meadow when Callum put his hand on her thigh. Ugh, that was nothing—and besides, she didn’t have time to think about it. She needed to focus on helping Callum get healthy and finding a way back to New York.
“It’s so stupid he doesn’t sleep with men,” Hamish groused. “It’s like, hello, we’re immortal, maybe live a little?”
Hamish gestured broadly, and the bottle of goose blood slipped out of his hand—it shattered on the kitchen’s immaculate white floor.
“For fuck’s sake.” He grabbed a kitchen towel to mop up the mess.
“Let me help you,” Tess offered. She knelt to pick up some glass that had landed near her feet but yelped in pain when she pricked her finger.
“Fuck! We’re a couple of klutzes, huh?” She turned to Hamish and smiled, but his whole face had gone dark—his eyes were practically black.
“Hamish?” Tess asked quietly. “Are you okay?”
“You’re bleeding.” His voice was strained.
“Oh.” Tess looked down—the cut was tiny, but the smallest droplet of blood was visible at the surface of her skin.
“Go,” he ordered. His jaw was clenched, his hands balled into fists.
“Hamish—”
“Get out of here. Right now.”
Tess grabbed the pot of pig’s blood off the stove and bolted into the Isle’s art-covered hallways. Was this what the rest of her life was going to be? Living in constant fear that at any moment, some stupid cut would spell her death? What the hell was she supposed to do when she got her period?
The walk to Callum’s rooms helped Tess feel calmer, but her hands were still shaking as she opened his door.
“What’s wrong?” Callum sat up in bed, then sniffed the air twice. “You cut yourself? Are you all right?”
“You can smell it?” she whispered, terror flooding through her. “I stopped bleeding, I thought—I’m sorry, I’ll leave right now.”
“Why?” He frowned. “You have the pig’s blood, don’t you?”
“I mean, with my cut. Should I really be here…with you?”
“You think I can’t control myself?” He raised an eyebrow. “Just because a certain book describes me as ‘a creature of voracious and insatiable appetites’?”
“Wow, you’re already on chapter eight?”
“You know exactly where some arbitrary line is from?” He peered at her. “How many times have you read these books?”
“That’s a really famous passage.” Tess blushed. “It’s Callum’s first—I mean your first—I mean—”
“The first sex scene in the book? Yeah, I noticed. Do you mind pouring the pig’s blood into one of those bowls by the fireplace?”
He nodded toward a sideboard filled with celadon bowls and teacups, all glazed a vivid dusky blue and inlaid with a pattern that reminded Tess of ocean waves.
“These are beautiful,” Tess remarked.
“Glamoured them after a set Octavia found in Busan.”
Tess filled a bowl with pig’s blood, and he laid his hands on it, his eyes glowing fiery amber. The bowl started steaming, and Tess saw the blood had morphed into a hearty soup; it smelled delicious.
“Soondae guk—blood sausage soup,” he explained, then lifted the bowl to his mouth and drank. “Glamour works a lot better when you have fresh blood. Thanks for that.”
“I live to be a good babysitter.” Tess grinned.
“God, that bit. You really don’t have to stay.”
“I have a feeling Nantale’s protection is contingent on obeying her orders,” Tess pointed out. “But anyway, we have a lot to discuss—if you’re up for it, I mean.”
“Do we?” Callum looked at Tess with interest.
“We still haven’t talked about the portal we saw in the meadow.”
He leaned back against a pile of pillows. “What did you make of it? Did it remind you of anything from your books?”
“I was obviously wrong about desire being what summons it.” Tess sighed. “It appeared in the middle of the fight. Neither of us was thinking about conjuring a portal to New York. Or at least, I wasn’t. Were you?”
“My thoughts were somewhere along the lines of ‘Ow, fuck, my leg, ow, that fucking cunt.’ Sorry.”
“Thank you for apologizing. As a meek and proper lady I’d never heard the word ‘cunt’ until just now and I’m very offended,” Tess deadpanned, and Callum chuckled softly.
“Delicate little flower, that’s you,” he teased, and her cheeks warmed.
“So if it wasn’t desire—uh, I mean, if it wasn’t, you know, a strong will to create a portal, why do you think the light appeared?” she asked. “Just dumb luck?”
“I have no idea.” Callum tilted his head, considering something. “But I know someone who might.”
—
Octavia’s rooms were just down the hall from Callum’s, but it still took them several minutes to get there, Callum walking with a cane to support his injured leg. From her brief encounter with Octavia, Tess expected her rooms to be sleek and organized, but they were just the opposite: a riot of colors, fabulous dresses and furs strewn everywhere, mammoth reproductions of striking modernist paintings hung on walls already covered in patterned wallpaper, extravagant oversized furniture upholstered in velvet and silk.
“Wow,” Tess said.
“My sister.” Callum’s tone was terse—Tess noticed he seemed more tense the second they walked into the room. He pointed toward a massive drafting desk made of iron and glass, covered in notes and drawings. There were books piled around it, most of them ancient-looking and leather-bound, written in languages Tess couldn’t identify, let alone read.
“What is all this?” Tess asked, walking over to the desk. There was a stack of faded watercolor paintings atop one of the piles: an old-fashioned sewing machine, an icy blue tunnel, a large gold pendant in the shape of a medieval cross set with a glowing ruby.
“Octavia was…a bit obsessed with finding a way off the Isle,” Callum explained. “She’d hole up for weeks researching, then get demoralized and abandon the whole endeavor. She’d try to make the most of living on the Isle, but that never lasted long. The longer we were here, the more time she spent in this room, looking through…all of this.”
Beneath the watercolors, Tess noticed a book open to a page with a drawing of an angel. Tess held it up. “Callum, look.”
He walked slowly toward her, leaning heavily on the cane. Tess slid the book across the desk toward Callum. His jaw twitched as he ran his fingers over the drawing.
“Do you think this is why Octavia went to the angel statue the night she left?” Tess asked. She peered at the caption beneath the drawing, but it was written in an alphabet Tess couldn’t recognize.
“No.” Callum’s voice was cold. “I don’t.”
“What is it?” Tess frowned. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Octavia and I…we had a fight that night,” Callum said. He sat down slowly in her desk chair and groaned with relief as he removed the pressure from his leg. “She was, um. Pretty angry with me.”
“What about?” Tess asked. She pulled over another chair to sit beside Callum.
“She was in one of her states, really obsessive.” He shook his head, the memory obviously painful. “And she was convinced she could glamour a suit that would let her walk across the crystal bridge without being harmed by the sun. I told her she’d lost her mind, that nothing glamoured could get you across the bridge or the river, that everyone who’d ever tried it burned to death. But she was consumed, she kept saying over and over that I had to trust her, that she knew it would work. She finally went to bed—at least, I thought she did. But the next morning, when I couldn’t find her…”
“You assumed she tried it.” Tess closed her eyes. “And that she died.”
Callum’s face looked stony, his expression distant. “Yeah. And it was my fault.”
“But why?! You tried to stop her.”
“At first, I did,” Callum acknowledged. “But when she wouldn’t give it up, I told her to go ahead and do it. I said she was as good to me dead as alive, that she was so far gone I couldn’t even recognize my own sister.”
“Oh.” Tess wasn’t sure if she was more shocked by what he’d told her or the fact that he’d admitted it at all.
“Pretty despicable, eh?”
“I don’t know,” Tess said sadly. “It sounds like you were both incredibly desperate. She was going through something terrible, and you were trying to shake her out of it. It makes sense you would snap in a situation that intense.”
“Maybe.” Callum shrugged. “Or maybe it’s like your books say. And I really am a monster.”
Tess felt a twist of sadness for him; she didn’t know what to say.
“Do you…” He looked up at her, and she was shocked by how vulnerable his face seemed, how open. “Do you think it’s true? What Lirio wrote about me?”
“I don’t know,” Tess answered honestly. “Is it true that you’ve killed hundreds of humans?”
“No.” Callum sighed. “I’ve killed forty-three. Not sure if that’s better.”
“You know the exact number?” Tess frowned.
“Not something you tend to forget,” he said quietly. “Especially when you didn’t want to kill them.”
Tess peered at him. “How could you murder someone against your will?”
“Guess I could have given up my life to save theirs, but it wouldn’t have done much good.” Callum shrugged. “If Konstantin wanted someone dead, they ended up dead.”
“Wait.” Tess was confused. “You’re saying you only ever killed humans when Konstantin made you? The books make it sound like—I don’t know, like you enjoy killing.”
“I enjoy killing vampires, ” Callum corrected. “That’s who we are, it’s what we’re supposed to do. Natural order of things, isn’t it? If we didn’t kill each other, we’d all live forever, and that’s no good for anyone. But killing humans? There’s no challenge to that, it’s not sporting. It’s just…mean.”
“Doesn’t stop most vampires, does it?” Tess asked. “I mean—sorry, you guys aren’t exactly known for your strict codes of morality.”
“Do you know about Konstantin’s factory? Is that in the books?”
“I know you and Octavia worked there when you were kids. You ran a gambling ring, right?”
“The gambling ring.” Callum laughed. “I forgot that. We rigged it too.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Tess smiled despite herself.
“We’d let one poor soul a day win big, so everyone wanted to gamble with us, they all thought they’d be the lucky one. Little did they know we were stealing from everyone else. It was more money than we’d ever seen—it was nothing of course. Enough to eat, buy candies from street carts.”
“It sounds fun,” Tess said gently.
“It was, yeah.” Callum was wistful, but then his face hardened. “Anyway, kids went missing all the time there. We figured some died in the machines, some got sick, some ran off. But when Konstantin turned us into vampires, we realized what was really going on.”
“You mean…”
“That the man who rescued us from poverty was the one killing all our friends, stealing them from their beds and draining their blood?” Callum folded his arms. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. Kinda put us off the idea of killing humans.”
“And then he made you do the same thing to other humans that he’d done to your friends,” Tess said. “That must have been awful.”
“It was a nightmare.” Callum set his jaw. “One I couldn’t wake up from for a hundred years.”
“Was it…easier, being here?” Tess asked carefully. “Like, you were somewhere new, away from him—like you could close that old chapter of your life, finally be free of it?”
Callum didn’t answer—just looked at Tess with a kind of awe.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “did I say something wrong?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It’s just—you’re the first person to notice I felt that way.”
“Oh.” Tess looked down at Octavia’s watercolors. “I guess I’ve felt that way too.”
“When you left school?” he asked. She looked up sharply.
“How did you…”
“Not every day you hear about someone dropping out of a PhD program to work in a hotel. Figured there was more to the story.”
All this time, Tess had been studying Callum, paying careful attention to see how this person matched up—or didn’t—with a character she felt like she’d known for years. It had never occurred to her until this moment that he might be paying the same kind of attention to her.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked, and he nodded. “Why did you come to the moonflower meadow?”
“Worried about you getting captured, wasn’t I?” he said casually. “Couldn’t very well have Felix using you for information on our clan.”
“Oh,” Tess said, unsure why she suddenly felt so disappointed. “That makes sense.”
“Speaking of information.” Callum nodded toward the stacks of notebooks on Octavia’s desk. “You take half, I’ll take half?”
Tess and Callum started paging through Octavia’s piles of notebooks, and soon the only sound in the room was the shuffling of papers. Trying to follow Octavia’s train of thought was a challenge—sentence fragments didn’t match up, one thought about Konstantin would bleed into a paragraph about the River Styx and ships made of bone. Even when Octavia’s writing was more cogent, Tess found her own thoughts kept slipping back to Callum: the feeling of his hand on her thigh, the notion that he cared at all what she thought of him, the revelation that he’d never kill a human by choice. At every turn he was subverting her expectations—but did that even matter? It didn’t change the fact that she was trapped on this island, and that this stack of papers hadn’t given her a single idea of what to do about it. She glanced over at Callum, but he looked equally frustrated—he set his notebook down with a thwack.
“Going that well?” she asked.
“I’ve got bloody nothing,” he grumbled. “You?”
“Same.” Tess sighed. She was starting to wonder if Callum was right—maybe Octavia’s research really had been a waste of time. “How are you feeling? Do you want some more blood?”
“I’m fine,” he demurred, but she noticed him wince when he shifted in his seat.
“You’re not,” she said. “Why don’t you head back to your rooms and lie down? I’ll get some cloves from the orchard to make you a tea. Sylvie said that would help with the pain.”
“You shouldn’t go alone.” Callum sat up straight, clenching his teeth. “I’ll come with you.”
“Please, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m not even leaving the compound. I’ll be fine.”
Tess didn’t wait to see if he’d argue more. A walk in the fresh air was exactly what she needed—plus, she could pick some apples to bring to Artie. The compound’s hallways were blessedly empty, and Tess made it outside without incident. The day was cool and windy, with purple-hued clouds swirling above, threatening to open up and unleash a storm. Tess had no idea if it ever actually rained on the Isle—the place was so lush, she thought it probably must, but then again, anything was possible here. Still, she heard an ominous rumble of thunder in the distance, so she figured she’d better not waste too much time finding the trees she needed.
The orchard was lovely and sprawling, with uneven paths wending through trees from all different places and seasons—olives and almonds, pears and peaches, all growing in haphazard harmony. Tess found the apples first, threw a few into a basket for Artie and ate one herself—it was crisp and tart, and it made Tess wish Sylvie were around to glamour up a strudel. But another crack of thunder (this one sounding much closer) kept Tess moving. Sylvie had told her the clove tree would be one of the tallest in the orchard, bearing red fruit—after a few moments, Tess spotted it and hurried in that direction. She was almost there when someone stepped from behind a tree and startled her—
She stopped cold.
What the hell was Felix Hawthorn doing at Nantale’s compound?