Chapter 16 The Blood
THE BLOOD
SAERIS
“HOW MANY MORE times do I have to tell you?” I protested. “I didn’t do it on purpose!”
When I was a child, I accidentally melted my mother’s only cooking pot.
I’d told her I’d left it hanging over the fire, unattended, and had forgotten about it.
That hadn’t been true, of course. I’d touched it, and the metal had liquified unexpectedly, splashing to the floor like water.
It had solidified there like that—a puddle of metal that had once been one of my mother’s most prized possessions.
When she’d returned home and found the remains of her pot lying on the kitchen table, her anger had been the stuff of legends.
I hadn’t been able to sit down for a week.
But this? This was far worse.
The whole palace was in chaos, and Algat was baying for blood. Guru had escaped.
Not for the first time in the past hour, I thought the old female was about to try to put me over her knee to spank my hide like my mother had. “He is an indoor cat, Your Highness,” she spat viciously. “He’s never stepped foot outside of this library.”
I almost laughed. Guru was a shadow, and a shadow would go wherever it pleased, regardless of a closed door or a rule that couldn’t be enforced. Guru had probably explored the entire palace from top to bottom, and if Algat didn’t know that, then she was an idiot.
She jabbed a book at me across the reading table. “There are far worse things out there than Guru. Far bigger predators that would inhale him without a second thought.”
“He’s going to be fine, Algat. He’s probably just sitting up on the roof, watching everyone freaking out in the courtyard.”
“He doesn’t like the wind,” the crone said sourly. “It scatters him when he’s transitioning from one form to the other.”
“Mmmfffmf mmmhhhnnn.”
Algat’s eyes widened, overflowing with annoyance. She jabbed the book at the vampire asshole with the gold-plated teeth. “And what the hell have you done to him?” she demanded.
“Nothing he didn’t deserve. He attacked me. Ergo, he gets tied up in chains and lashed to a chair.” I had used the length of silver that Fisher had given to me before my coronation—the one he had tied around my waist to act as a belt.
Algat let out a stiff laugh. “Well, I can’t wait for you to explain that one to your sire, child, I really can’t. He’s going to get a kick out of this.”
My hand throbbed like crazy. Before, when the runes had blazed through my skin, my hands had healed themselves instantly once the episode was over.
This time, I hadn’t been so lucky. My fingertips were split open, the skin charred and black from where the magic had discharged from my hand.
Blood dripped from deep slices on my palms, and my runes were still raw and blistered, as if someone had just pressed a burning brand to my skin.
It was healing, I could feel that it was, but it was taking way longer than I would have liked. It fucking hurt.
“Tal won’t have anything to say about me defending myself, Algat. I’m the queen of this court. By rights, this crazy bastard should be dead already.”
A calculating look flashed in Algat’s eyes. “Oh, I agree. Assaulting the monarch of the Blood Court is high treason, after all. So why isn’t he dead?”
Shit. I kind of walked myself into that one.
I could have ended the stranger. I’d had the window and the opportunity.
I could have fired the overflow of my power at him instead of the wall and left nothing behind but a black scorch mark on the rug.
But killing someone was always a last resort.
It had to be. Even if they were technically already dead.
“I’m not just going to kill him without questioning him first,” I said in a bored tone.
“How will I know who sent him otherwise?”
Disappointment flickered briefly in Algat’s cloudy eyes. “Then you’d better take that fabric out of his mouth, hadn’t you? What did you stuff in there? Wait. Are those my velvet gloves?”
The gloves were the first thing I found when I’d been searching for something to quiet the angry vampire. He’d been yelling at me in Old Fae; I hadn’t understood what he was saying, but I could tell from the sneer on his face and the acid in his tone that he hadn’t been paying me any compliments.
Algat scurried around the reading table and ripped the balled-up gloves out of the vampire’s mouth. She held them up in the air, scowling at me. “These were expensive!”
“My apologies. I’ll buy you some new ones.”
“Be sure that you do!”
“I will.”
“Swear it.” The old female set her jaw.
“I swear it! Gods!”
“You should be careful, making flippant promises like that,” a male voice said. The vampire on the chair wasn’t pulling against his silver restraints anymore. He was sweating, his head resting against the back of his chair, as if he’d given up and had resigned himself to his fate.
Quiet, you,” Algat snapped.
The vampire laughed breathlessly, rolling his head along the wood to smirk arrogantly at the female. “What, you don’t like it when people interfere with your groundwork, hag?”
Her shoulders hunched up around her ears. She looked ready to climb onto the table and claw at his face. “I should cut out your tongue—”
“Go on, then. Why not. You’ve done it before.” The vampire closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “It only grows back again,” he added wearily.
I stood before the stranger, folding my arms over my chest. He looked like he was in his early thirties, perhaps. He was considerably older, of course. It was going to take some time for me to shift the way I thought about how people aged here.
His hair was dark and shorn close to his scalp. The strands were unevenly cut and messy. His eyes were pale blue with a bright golden starburst around his pupil, which . . . oh. Wow. His pupil was vertical, like a snake’s.
I hadn’t registered that he had turned back to me.
I hadn’t registered the hatred on his face, either.
Not until he bared his teeth, flashing those sharp, golden canines at me again.
“Please. Feel free to stare,” he snarled.
“You might as well kill me now, unless you want to be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. I won’t stop coming for you.
Not until I’ve cleaved that pretty head from your shoulders. ”
I huffed, rocking on my heels. “Am I supposed to be grateful that you think I’m pretty?”
He ignored the question. “What did you do to him?” he spat.
The change in direction sent my eyebrows skyrocketing upward. “Him? I didn’t do anything to him. Taladaius is fine. I’m guessing you’ve been lurking in the shadows since I got here. You must have watched him lea—”
“Not Tal. What did you do to Kingfisher?”
I jerked, taking a step back. I hadn’t been expecting my mate’s name to come out of the vampire’s mouth.
It would have been better to keep the surprise from my face, but it was too late for that now.
The vampire had definitely registered my reaction.
He narrowed his strange eyes at me, anger flaring in them as he strained forward against the silver chain that tied him to the chair.
“That’s right. I know,” he said. “You killed him, didn’t you.” An accusation, not a question.
I sized the vampire up. “Why the hell would you think that?”
“That dagger you stabbed me with. I know it well. I know its owner even better, and he wouldn’t have been parted from it without a fight. So, either you killed him and took it, or someone else killed him, and they gave it to you. Which is it?”
“First, I am queen of this court. I am not obliged to explain myself or my weaponry to the likes of you.” I spoke slowly, my words laced with sarcasm.
“But aside from that fact, there’s obviously no possibility in your mind that the blade was given to me, of course.
Because I’m unworthy, or because I’m female, or—”
“You’re a vampire,” he hissed. “I can smell it on you. The blood.”
I cleared my throat, staring down at my boots as I considered how to word this next part. “I’m half vampire, yes. But the only blood I have tasted was given freely. By my mate. Maybe it’s the scent of his blood that you can smell on me.”
“I don’t care who you drank from, or if they—” He stopped speaking, his mouth open, still forming the shape of whatever word he had been about to speak. I saw the shock ripple over his features. “No. No, you’re not . . . That’s not possible,” he whispered.
“Isn’t it?” My gloves were already ruined, the leather hanging in tatters. I took them off gingerly, trying to avoid the burns on my palms. Once the gloves were gone, I slowly pushed up my sleeves, revealing the black scrolling inkwork that spread across the backs of my hands and up my forearms.
“What in the name of sin and salt is that?” Algat had been watching our exchange with obvious amusement, but now her mirth fled her. She pointed a shaking finger at my hands. “Stupid female. It’s sacrilege to ink your skin with those kinds of marks.”
I didn’t have the energy to explain this to her.
And she didn’t deserve my truth, anyway.
I focused on the male with the cat eyes who seemed to care so much about Fisher’s well-being.
“You broke a royal edict,” I said. “I made it law that no member of this court would be able to attack me or any of my friends, and yet you still did it. How?”
The male stared at me, dumbfounded, his eyes bouncing between my hands and my face. He couldn’t seem to believe what he was seeing.
“He broke your edict because he isn’t bound by it,” a voice said from the library’s entrance.
It was Lorreth. He was out of breath and disheveled, his hair falling loose from his braids, his cheeks bright pink.
He gave me a meaningful look as he entered the library—the kind of look that said Kingfisher would be hearing about this.
His attention flitted to the yawning hole in the side of the library tower’s curved wall, and then to the restrained vampire, who was staring at Lorreth like he was hallucinating.
“That’s right, isn’t it? You aren’t obliged to follow the rules of this court, because you never swore fealty to it, did you?”
The vampire slowly shook his head. “No.” The word barely made a sound as it left his lips. Were those tears in his eyes?
“Because, no matter what. . . .” Lorreth said under his breath.
“A wolf never becomes a leech,” the vampire finished.
Lorreth stood in front of him, an array of emotions fighting for control of his features. “Hello, Foley. It’s been too long. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, brother.”