Hellgold's Blood Contract

1. Max

Max

“Elephant,” Caspian said.

We’d been over the New Mexico line an hour, running dark. No headlights, no dome light. The road came at us out of nowhere and went under us at a speed no vehicle that size could hold.

Here it came.

The seatbelt cut a line across my collarbone. I put my hands flat on my thighs. There was only one elephant in this van, and it was me.

We’d let the Collector walk through our gates, and he’d unrolled a marriage contract with my blood on it—taken from me as an infant. Signed, sealed in blood magic, and sold in front of three kingdoms.

And the parchment had said the rest of it out loud.

Your blood on the contract, girl. The entity in me had sounded pleased about it.

The White Witch’s lost heir. Stolen twenty years ago. The daughter of the worst enemy the heirs had ever had, riding south in their van with a Spartan escort and a rescue mission.

They could have ended Xander and me on the ballroom floor. I wouldn’t have blamed them. Instead Aelindor had looked at me and said it to the whole room.

Nothing changes. Max is ours.

He hadn’t even looked surprised, because he’d known. Lady Vaelith had cut into our training to whisper it in his ear, and I’d watched the warmth go out of his winter-blue eyes right then. He’d called me theirs anyway, in front of everyone, and he hadn’t left himself an inch of room to take it back.

Drakken had sworn to finish me if he ever learned what I really was. He hadn’t cashed that vow in yet.

“What, wolf?” Nikolai said from behind the wheel. His crimson eyes came up in the rearview. Not to Caspian. To me. “You’re the only animal in this van.”

He drove without lights because he didn’t need them. Whatever the dark kept from the rest of us, it handed straight to him. His hands moved on the wheel a half second before the road gave him a reason.

Out past the shoulder, Xander’s people held every road worth holding, and ours watched them right back.

Nobody moved on anybody unless the other side moved first, or the word came down from the top.

The Collector had brought twelve men north to the summit just to show us how little we scared him and left the rest of his men crawling all over Covenant territory.

The van ran like a bullet train on two drops of Coldiron I’d fed to the Stormglass in the engine.

“We need to talk about it,” Caspian said.

“About what?”

Only the heirs and I had read that contract. If this crew found out whose blood I carried, they’d hate me for it and they’d have the right. Everybody in camp had lost somebody to the White Witch.

I couldn’t even fault Caspian for dragging it into the open. Holding a thing back wasn’t in him.

“The elephant,” he drawled, “is the woman who walked in on Xander’s arm and called herself Max’s friend.”

Every muscle in my shoulders let go at once.

Desta. He meant Desta.

Half the ballroom had watched her throw her arms around me in Xander’s colors. So that was where the shifter prince had been going. Clearing the air and covering me with the same move. This team was about to risk their lives for my little sister. Caspian needed them to trust me before they did it.

“Who is that chick?” Bryn asked. “She looks soft.”

Bryn hadn’t stopped buzzing since Denver. Fucking awesome first mission, Max. Not some milk run, she’d whispered at the motor pool, close enough that I felt her vibrating with it.

She’d wedged herself against my right side. Caspian took my left. Behind us, Frost, Marco, Enna, and Jace filled the back rows, and every one of them had gone quiet.

“Desta. Crimson Ridge, Utah district,” I said.

“Your mine mate,” Enna said from the back.

I turned to look at her. Corporal Enna, one of the few female Spartans I’d ever laid eyes on. Olive skin, brown hair buzzed to the scalp, a nose that had been broken more than a few times and healed proud of it.

Bryn worshipped her. My friend was dead set on the Spartans, and she’d started picking extra fights lately, which I was fairly sure was her way of working on getting a nose like that.

“I heard Crimson Ridge is the worst of the labor mines,” Marco said.

“Fourteen-hour shifts in the shafts. Rations cut low enough to keep us too weak to fight and high enough to keep us digging for the White Witch.” I recited the words like a duty roster.

It was easier that way. “I worked the deep shaft. Desta worked the shallow drifts. She was pretty, clever, got away with things the rest of us couldn’t. ”

Bryn had stopped bouncing against my shoulder.

“I was the biggest man in Crimson Ridge,” I said. “Nobody down there knew I was a woman.”

In the mirror, Nikolai’s eyes found Caspian’s, and something passed between them that only they knew.

I’d woken up briefly in the Scorched Wastes with the vampire prince’s hand on my breast and his thumb kneading my nipple. It’d felt damn good. I’d broken his nose anyway.

“Three of them were in on the escape,” I said. “Desta. Kaid. Rogue.”

Nobody interrupted. I’d never handed anyone this much of the mine before, but they were driving into an enemy kingdom for me.

“Kaid and Rogue dug the secret tunnel with me when they could get away. I started it alone when I was eight. The year a collapse took my parents.”

“Eight,” Caspian growled. Too much wolf in it. “They put a little girl down there.”

“They put me down there because it was no secret in Crimson Ridge that I had a way with metal.”

“They’ll pay for that.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “Every one of them, sweetheart. All of it.”

Nikolai’s knuckles went bloodless on the wheel, and the van picked up speed.

“We’ll take their whole operation apart,” Frost said, his voice tight. “It’s on Prince Aelindor’s list.”

Nikolai’s foot came off the accelerator.

Far out to the left, past the shoulder, three low lights burned in country that should have been empty. Somebody’s post. Somebody’s road.

Nobody moved. Marco’s hand went flat on his throwing knives. Bryn’s knee stopped jittering against mine.

We ran past them dark and silent, and not one of those lights so much as swung our way.

Nikolai put his foot back down.

“We got out,” I continued, “and I realized I’d underestimated the Scorched Wastes. Badly.”

The words came harder now.

“Rogue went down in front of me. The mutants took him apart while I was still turning around. Kaid and Desta got separated from us.”

“You asked us to search for them.” Caspian shifted toward me, careful of the gap. “Our scouts swept the whole area and never found a thing, because Xander had already picked them up. If we’d gone out to the Wastes a few hours later than we did, he’d have had you too.”

That thought still had teeth. I let it bite and kept going.

“He scooped up Desta. Kaid was already dead by then.” My jaw ached from how hard I was holding it. “That’s what Desta told me. I didn’t ask for the details. I couldn’t. And she found out I was a woman from Xander’s mouth, not mine.”

Every day since the Scorched Wastes, I’d assumed she was dead, and I’d carried that weight.

Then she’d walked into that ballroom with the man who’d bought me, wearing his colors like a girl at her first dance.

She called him the Saint, the way all his people did, and she’d had stars in her eyes doing it.

She had no idea what he was.

I couldn’t afford to worry about her tonight. Desta had always been better at surviving than the rest of us put together.

The van hit a bad stretch of road and threw us all against our seatbelts.

“Seriously,” Enna tsked. “Not one of your closest friends ever clocked it?”

“To be fair, Max is a giant,” Jace said. “She’s taller than Prince Caspian.”

“Hey,” Caspian said.

“Nobody in the fortress worked it out either,” Frost said. “Not until the dragon fire. Well.”

He stopped there, which was decent of him. Drakken’s fire had burned my uniform off me in front of the entire academy and left three patches of flame doing the work of a swimsuit.

The three heirs had known what I was the day they brought me in, and they’d kept it to themselves. They hadn’t even told Drakken.

“Drakken was an asshole for doing that,” Nikolai said.

“He was an asshole before he did that,” Caspian said.

“My parents had me living as a boy before I could walk,” I said. “They drilled it into me. A secret told is a secret gone. Tell your best friend, and their best friend has it by morning, and a dozen people have it by lunch.”

Half my childhood I’d thought they were paranoid. They’d just been keeping me alive.

I pushed the white lock of hair off my face.

“It helped that my voice came out low on its own. The only person I ever told was Missy, my sister. She’s six and a half.” I looked down at my hands. “Her mother died giving birth to her. Then her father got blown up in the same kind of accident that took mine, and she came to live with me.”

The van hummed underneath us.

“And I left her behind.”

“We’re getting her back,” Caspian said.

Bryn twisted around to the back rows. “Corporal Enna. What was your deal before the Rupture?”

“Lions,” Enna said. “Wild ones. Jace and me both. Every leave, we went back to Africa. When the world was still open enough to cross.” A pause. “We hunted poachers. Scumbags who traded lion bones.”

“Trophy hunters too.” Jace grinned, dimples and all. “Those fuckers were my favorites.”

I’d always had a weakness for lionesses and their cubs.

“How old are you two?” Bryn asked. “You’re both immortals, right?”

“Jace is a hundred and twenty.” Enna shoved him. “I don’t remember my age.”

Marco snickered.

Jace rolled his eyes. “Please. We all know you’re older than me.”

We traded stories after that. The dark poured past the windows, and something knit itself together in that van one mile at a time.

Somewhere in there, I started breathing again.