Blood Dark (39 page)

K
ane sat alone
in the winged-back armchair in the corner of the dusty room as he gazed out of the attic’s apex window.

The bleak night sky intensified the fog that still hadn’t lifted across the east side of Blackthorn but, in the distance, he was sure he saw a twinkle of light high in the sky. It had been so long since he’d seen a star that he had to lean forward to be sure that’s what it was. But the dense clouds quickly masked it – all that may have glimmered lost again.

He exhaled a steady stream of smoke through the open sash window as he sank back in the chair. He lifted his booted feet to rest the soles on the windowsill.

In the distance, though he couldn’t see it, lay Caleb’s club, his empire.

And in the floor beneath where he sat was the one thing Caleb needed: Sophia.

The knock on the door was brief before it opened.

Kane didn’t need to look across his shoulder – the rhythm of the footsteps was recognisable enough.

Limited by the low slanted roof, Jask had no choice but to sit in the place he had chosen beside the window. He rested his back against the defunct radiator. ‘I know that look.’

Kane exhaled another stream of smoke as he looked across at him. ‘And what look is that, Jask?’

‘That it’s far from over.’

‘It isn’t,’ Kane declared. He rested his head back against the chair as he looked out of the window.

‘They’re coming for Phia, aren’t they?’

Kane met his gaze again. He nodded. ‘Yeah. And that’s why Caleb held back those final supplies – he wanted Leila first. If he gets Leila, he gets Phia. Or so he thinks.’

‘Do you think he’ll come for you?’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to let him do the running.’

‘And Feinith?’

‘I’m not sure who will have who under their thumb between those two, but something tells me Caleb is going to have her right where he wants her. He’ll have the whole Higher Order right where he wants them.’

‘Leila’s still convinced she can get him on side. That he can be an ally not an adversary.’

‘Which is why your pack can’t take their eyes off those girls for a moment, and that includes Alisha. She’s the weakest of the links.’

‘I’ve assigned one of my pack to her and one to Leila. Two of my best. They go nowhere alone.’

‘And you?’ Kane asked. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Now that we’ve all had the full dose, we’re doing fine. She came good, Kane. Caitlin came real good.’

His throat instantly tightened. But he hoped he’d managed to conceal it. ‘She did more than good.’

Even in the hours that had passed since, he could still feel her limp, lifeless body in his arms, the colour lost from her cheeks, the breath from her lungs.

And he would never forget.

Ever.

Jask chucked him the book. ‘Phia mentioned it to me a few days ago. We collected it when we went to get Leila. She had it hidden away. It’s her mother’s diary. She was a haematologist at The Facility. Phia’s convinced she knew furtive things were going on.’

‘Where’s her mother now?’

‘Dead. Lost her when she was a kid. Murdered by a vampire in Midtown.’

‘
Midtown
?’

‘Security from The Facility raided her house shortly after she’d died in order to remove any work she may have taken home with her. Phia remembers being told it was protocol. I’ve got the gut-feeling Mother McKay discovered she wasn’t supposed to and Sirius did something about it.’

‘What does Phia know about her mother’s work?’

‘Very little. Only what’s in there,’ Jask said, indicating at the book.

‘What about the other sisters? Do they know anything?’

‘Alisha was too young. Even Phia was just a little kid at the time. Leila witnessed the murder though. And survived. Of course, now we know why with her having been a serryn. Kane, I’m not sure I want Phia to know about this. Those impulses of hers are getting harder to control. She’s bad enough with Caleb being out there somewhere. If she finds out Sirius is the one who ruined her life in the first place, I’m going to have a hell of a struggle on my hands.’

‘I’m going to want to talk to Leila though.’

Jask nodded. ‘You might also want to talk to Eden. Some girl he was dating, a doctor at The Facility, brought home some iridescent liquid one night. He didn’t know what it was at the time.’

‘Can he still get to her?’

‘I think he’d be willing to give it a try.’

He glanced to the table. ‘Is that it?’ Jask asked, indicating at the long case on the table beside him. ‘May I?’

Kane nodded. He exhaled a stream of smoke as Jask flicked the latches on the wooden case, revealing the navy velvet inside.

Jask let out a small whistle. ‘That’s beautiful craftsmanship, Kane.’

‘Shame it’s defunct now.’

‘You could always teach Leila to use it.’

Kane gave a small, curt exhale.

Jask smiled as he closed the case. He turned to face him again, his eyes laced with solemnity. ‘I’ve never seen anyone fight harder for something than I witnessed in that tunnel, Kane. I’ve never seen anyone more defiant of the odds.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve always been a stubborn bastard.’ He rested his head back against the chair and exhaled tersely before he batted away the emergence of tears that came with the recollection. He met his friend’s gaze regardless. ‘She was willing to die for me, Jask.’

‘One of the team. I was wrong to think of her as anything else,’ Jask said. ‘I was wrong about her.’

He squeezed Kane’s shoulder before making his exit.

‘You asked me what love is,’ Jask said from the doorway. ‘I guess now you know.’

He left Kane in the stillness of the shadows.

In the stillness of his own thoughts.

The next touch Kane felt on his shoulder was lighter, warmer.

Slender arms came at him from around the back of the chair. Warm lips touched his temple.

‘So I finally have his approval?’

‘You’re supposed to be resting,’ Kane said, catching Caitlin’s wrist and guiding her around to sit on his lap. ‘Not eavesdropping.’

He dropped his cigarette into the bottle beside him before he lifted her shirt to check the wound on her side. No doubt the blemishes would still be on her chest from the eighth attempt at Jessie saving her life.

The eighth attempt he had demanded with more grit and fervency than he had ever demanded anything.

The eighth attempt that had finally brought her back to him.

She looked across her shoulder at the case Jask had opened. She would have recognised it. She would have seen it in his shadow. She would have known the sword had belonged to his race for centuries. That he had carried that it one hand and Arana in the other when he left the fire. That it was identical to the one he’d had tattooed on his back – the one that was duplicated in the symbol she would have seen on Caleb. She would have known it was intended for the Tryan.

As she looked back at him, her warmth was as intoxicating as her breath against his lips, as the precious sound of her pulse, as those delicate lashes batting that life-confirming blink.

‘I cannot believe you were tracking me the entire time I was back at the VCU.’

‘No, I was
able
to track you whenever I wanted to. There’s a difference. Anyway, what do you expect, Parish?’ he said, sliding his hands up her bare thighs. ‘Old habits are hard to break.’

She drew a horizontal eight over his heart, forging the infinity symbol there. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Even though you serve absolutely no purpose to me anymore.’

She frowned playfully. ‘
None
?’ She traced her fingers down his chest towards the top button on his jeans. ‘Are you sure about that?’

He caught her wrist. ‘Rest means rest.’

She raised her eyebrows slightly. ‘Don’t you go getting all honourable on me now, Malloy.’

He frowned playfully. ‘Honourable?
Me
?’

‘Come with me,’ she said, catching his hand as she eased off him.

She led him into the adjoining room she had come from, past the mattress she should have been asleep on and across to the wooden ladder that led up to a raised platform.

Feeling the breeze through the open skylight, he knew where she was going.

He grabbed the nearest blanket as Caitlin disappeared outside.

She was sat on the four-by-six-foot ledge as she scanned the sky, her ankles crossed, her knees drawn to her chest.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said, accepting the blanket off him as he wrapped it around her shoulders.

As he sat alongside her, she lay back against the slant of roof tiles, her eyes still scanning the heavy sky.

He lay alongside her, too distracted by her though to follow her gaze.

‘I know what it took for you to hold back from Rob,’ she said after a few seconds, her eyes still searching the darkness.

‘I wasn’t going to leave you, Caitlin. Not for anything.’

And nothing was going to take her from him again – if fate had failed, so would everyone and everything else.

She met his gaze fleetingly. Just being able to have her look back at him again, to see the soul behind her eyes, to see that subtle upward curve of her lips had been worth scaring the hell out of every other person in that tunnel whilst he’d demanded,
ordered
, they not give up on her either.

As she glanced back at the sky, her breath snagged, her right hand grabbing his forearm with the fervency of a small child seeing a fairground for the first time, the index finger of her left hand thrust towards to sky. ‘Look! See it?’

He knew what she had spotted. He guessed she had seen the rare sight too – that glint of starlight through the dense pollution clouds.

But he couldn’t divert his gaze from her, not as he was still relishing her breathing beside him.

‘It’s got to be the North Star,’ she said, her eyes wide as she smiled up at it. ‘For it to have penetrated the smog, it must be. I’ve never seen it over Blackthorn before.’

Met with his silence, she turned her head to meet his gaze again.

She frowned. ‘Why are you staring at me?’

‘Because I’m trying to work out why I made something so simple so impossibly complex.’

‘What?’

‘Loving you.’

Undetectable as it would have been to anyone but him, he heard her breath snag in her throat again. She dropped her gaze. She pressed her lips together. She looked back at the sky.

‘I get it though.’ After a couple of seconds, she smiled to herself. A smile that converted to a full-on playful grin. ‘Oh, yeah, you’d better believe it, Malloy.’ She looked back at him with a glint in her eyes. ‘I know
all
your secrets now.’ She shrugged. ‘And yet I
still
love you.’

He laughed – fleetingly, but deeply. It was his turn to look at the sky. ‘Then I guess we’d best make us official.’

‘
Us
?’

He cupped his hand behind his head. ‘According to master vampire lore giving a family heirloom is the equivalent to a betrothal.’

It was her turn to laugh. ‘You’re totally lying.’

‘You think so? You had me on bended knee that first night in the corridor.’

‘Only because I pumped you full of hemlock.’

‘I carried you across the threshold in your apartment.’

‘After you’d drugged me.’

‘We had our two-week honeymoon.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll give you that one. So being official involves what exactly?’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing really. Just no get-out clause once you agree.’

He glanced at her and smirked.

She laughed. But then her eyes glazed over with sobriety. ‘I’d make you make me a promise first.’

‘Which is?’

‘Not to do it.’

He frowned. ‘Do what?’

‘What I saw.’

She rolled on her side to face him. She placed her hand over his heart – feeling the heartbeats that he could control, that, if he chose, he could speed up, the centuries he had left diminishing with it.

‘Kane, I want you to promise you’d never reduce your lifespan to be with me.’ She met his gaze. ‘I want you to promise never to sacrifice that; to not change what you are.’

‘Every one of those beats would be dead anyway without you.’

Her eyes flared. She dropped her gaze, her nails raking his chest slightly before she met his gaze again. ‘I mean it, Kane.
Promise
me.’

He sighed pensively. He licked his incisor. ‘No,’ he said as he looked back at her. ‘Not going to happen.’

She frowned. ‘And you accuse
me
of being stubborn?’

He smiled to himself, but this time he pulled her into him so that she lay her head on his shoulder, her leg across his, her hand flat to his chest.

He looked up to the night sky to where the clouds had dispersed a little again, that same glint capturing his attention.

‘This time next week,’ he said, ‘our entire world is going to be different.’

‘For the better,’ Caitlin added.

He toyed with her hair, listened to the rhythmic beat of her heart, relished in the sublime warmth of her body nestled against his.

He was fated to be alone. He was fated not to have that moment. But fate should have known better. Because he was indeed a stubborn bastard. As stubborn as they came. Which meant fate should have been starting to get the message that it wasn’t quite as powerful as it thought it was. And as he scanned the dark and foggy density of Blackthorn’s landscape, past Caleb’s empire and towards Sirius’s ivory tower, it was time fate wasn’t alone in accepting it.

He looked back up at the star.

Honourable would never be his thing. The problem with being a bright light in a dark world was that it made your movements predictable.

Darkness, more than ever, would be the camouflage to ensure his enemies never saw him coming.

S
irius sat
in the room as one by one the votes were cast around the table. Red card was held up after red card, his plan waning before his eyes.

He felt the anger build inside, the rage even as the votes were being collated.

They were less than halfway around, when yet another interruption ceased proceedings.

But this time Cameron looked completely perplexed as he listened intently whilst things were whispered into his ear.

A few moments later he stood. He disappeared out of the room again.

‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ Sirius hissed to Hall.

‘You’ll have to tell them,’ Hall whispered back. ‘You’ll have to tell them about the cure.’

‘And have the whole laboratory taken from my control?’

‘My apologies, ladies and gentlemen,’ Cameron said, stepping back inside. ‘Before we continue, something needs our immediate attention.’

Sirius looked at the door as it opened, his jaw slackening as Feinith sauntered in.

More demure than he was used to seeing her, she gave a respectful nod to the room before a chair was pulled into position for her.

‘I apologise for the interruption,’ she said, ‘but your gathering could not have come at a better time. I am afraid I have some very troubling news.’ She paused, and Sirius had the feeling it was for effect. ‘I am afraid to tell you that I have received word that the vampire leader has risen; that the prophecy has begun.’

There were panicked whispers and conversations around the room.

‘I need a call to silence,’ Cameron said.

Sirius sat more upright in his chair.

Because not even he had seen this one coming.

This
was not part of their agreement.

‘I cannot stress enough the urgency of this matter,’ Feinith continued. ‘You have the Higher Order’s full support. We want this no more than you do. I’ve had word that a rebellion is being built in Blackthorn as we speak. You will need to move swiftly. I suggest you use whatever force you need to surround Blackthorn immediately.’

Not part of their agreement, but seemingly proving effective from further mutterings around the room.

Cameron glanced across at Sirius, his eyes laced with suspicion before he averted his attention back to Feinith. ‘Who? Who are you claiming this is?’

‘Kane Malloy,’ she said.

Sirius’s heart leapt against his chest.

‘Malloy is the chosen leader.’ She looked at Sirius with a glimmer of triumph in her eyes. ‘You have to kill Kane Malloy. And I have the perfect hunter who is both willing
and
able to do it.’