Blood Moon (17 page)

Not likely.

I stepped out from under the tent awning and wandered down the path, aimless. I tried to ignore the vampires who turned to watch me pass and Penelope, who curtsied so deeply and abruptly she nearly tripped an Amrita dignitary from India. I searched for Constantine’s black hair and his distinctive violet eyes, while trying not to be too obvious about it. For some reason, he always made me feel better. Or at the very least, he made me forget. Maybe he could take me back to the Bower, where I was a dhampir and it was no big deal, where I was a princess and it was no big deal either. The Bower was technically off-limits for me right now, but the ache to be sitting in the parlor under the trees was palpable. I felt better just thinking about it.

Better enough not to notice the way the crowd was parting in front of me until it was too late.

The Furies.

The sound of white damask silk rubbing over wicker panniers was soft as the wind through the snow. Fangs gleamed, diamond shoe buckles glittered, and black feather tattoos seemed to move on their own. I smelled face powder and blood.

Everyone around us stilled. Morbid curiosity thrummed. My heart would have stuttered in my chest, if it still beat. It gave me a jolt to see them looking so identical to Lady Natasha, even though I’d seen them before. Constantine might consider her to be a colonial backwater wannabe queen, but she was still the vampire who’d eaten a raw deer heart because she thought it was mine. Her Furies didn’t intimidate him, not even now, hissing and spitting as one.

Which is why he was the first one to move when the whitethorn stake came at me.

It would have cleaved my heart if he hadn’t been there.

“Solange!” he yelled, even as he leaped impossibly fast and high. He kicked the stake, knocking it out of its trajectory just before it sliced through my shirt. It grazed my skin lightly and landed in the snow. At the same time Constantine threw his own stake at the Fury nearest to us. He was as good a fighter as any of my brothers and nearly as good as my mother.

Even so, he was no match for the Chandramaa. No one was.

It all happened so fast, it was as if the snow froze in midair, as if everything else had stopped moving altogether. The Fury who’d attacked me crumbled into ashes, leaving behind an embroidered white dress that drifted to the ground as if it were underwater. Someone shouted but the sound was elongated and strange. Red
arrows fell like angry rain, creating a sort of fence between me and the other Furies. Constantine was facing me, about to land on the frozen ground.

He didn’t see the crossbow bolt, also red, whistling toward his back.

Chandramaa justice was blind. He’d taught me that.

I had just enough time and presence of mind to kick his kneecap with my boot. He dropped painfully out of his graceful descent, the look of surprise on his face nearly comical. I threw myself across him, covering him before he’d even landed. The jolt of hitting the ground snapped my jaws together. I lay there with my eyes scrunched tight, wondering if I was about to feel the bite of a crossbow bolt in the back.

Nothing happened.

I opened one eye, then the other. Constantine lay very still under me.

“I’m not dead?” I asked.

His mouth curved in a half smile but his eyes were fierce. “Too many bats.”

I blinked, turned my head slowly. He was right. There were just enough bats dipping and somersaulting over us to block any arrows or stakes from the trees. The Moon Guard couldn’t see us to kill us. The Furies were still hissing, but they were too frightened to cross the line of red-tipped arrows.

I told you I’d protect you. We are stronger together.

I stayed where I was, sprawled on top of a very handsome vampire. “Now what?”

“I have no idea, princess.”

For someone who’d just saved my life and had nearly gotten staked for his trouble, he sounded pretty calm.

But that was only because he’d never met my mother.

“Solange Drake!” Mom’s black braid snaked behind her like a whip as she and the rest of my family shoved through the crowd. She paused, seething when an arrow nearly stabbed into her toe. Sebastian put his back to her, guarding her and glaring calmly at the trees. “I can’t even begin to express how much trouble you’re in,” Mom said between her teeth.

“It’s not my fault!” I tried to glare at her, but I couldn’t quite contort my neck that way. “They tried to stake me.”

“What?” Mom’s voice dropped until it was such a cold, dark whisper several of the bystanders backed away. Dad’s fangs gleamed. The crowd chattered so loudly among themselves that when they stopped abruptly it made me flinch.

A woman marched toward us. She was young, with short black hair. “I represent the Chandramaa,” she announced, as if the red moon stitched on her black leather jacket didn’t give away her or her vaguely menacing stance. She was too young to be full Chandramaa and she’d let us see her face, so she was clearly not a full initiate. “Release him to us,” she said to me.

I knew what that meant. Constantine would be executed for saving me.

I was
not
going to let that happen.

“No.”

The guard blinked, nonplussed. “Perhaps you didn’t understand me. I was sent by the Chandramaa.”

“Solange,” Dad said tightly. “What are you doing?”

“Constantine saved my life,” I answered as the bats grew agitated overhead. “Don’t let them kill him.”
They don’t understand. They never will.

“He interfered with Chandramaa justice,” the girl said sharply. “There are no exceptions.”

“Kill her!” the Furies chanted, softly, viciously. “Kill her now! Blood traitor!”

Constantine moved so that his hands were on my hips. His eyes were like amethysts. “What do you want to do, princess?” he asked quietly, so only I could hear him. His lips tickled my cheek.

What did I want to do?

The fact that he’d asked me, the fact that he was waiting for me to decide my own fate made me all the more determined to save him from his.

“We run,” I whispered back.

“Kill her!”

I wasn’t sure yet how I seemed to control bats, but I thought about them now, as hard as I could. I imagined them swarming through the trees toward us, floating like a fanged black cloud, swallowing the stars and the arrows of the Moon Guard. I was visualizing them so intently that it took a moment for me to realize the sounds of hundreds of leathery wings weren’t in my imagination. Bats darted and dive-bombed around us, cutting off anyone who tried to get too close, even my parents.

“Solange, wait!” Dad shouted, ducking as a bat flew past his head. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Let go. Let me protect you.

“If you cross the Chandramaa, you’re exiled from this place,” the guard added, looking angry and confused. A bat went for her eyes and she shrieked. “An instant death to you and yours should you return to this place.”

“Solange, don’t!” Mom pleaded. I’d never seen her sound so scared or look so torn.

But I couldn’t just stay here and let Constantine be killed. That wasn’t justice; it was murder.

“Are you sure?” he asked as I tensed to jump to my feet. “There’s no turning back.”

I met his violet eyes. “I’m sure.”

He launched off the ground in one fluid movement, one arm pinning me to his chest. Bats crowded around us. Everyone was shouting. Chandramaa bolts snaked between the bats, but they just landed in the frostbitten dirt. Only snow hung in the cold air, not ashes.

Constantine and I broke into a run, dodging helpful hands and harmful ones. We plunged into the dark forest, still trailing bats. Someone gave a strangled yelp from the top of a pine tree. A crossbow fell to the ground. Bats winged between the trees, as if they’d been released by an invisible slingshot. I ran as fast as I could, convinced I was going to be impaled on an arrow or a stake flung from above. Constantine held my hand tightly, dragging me over roots and under moss-draped branches. Ferns flattened at our passing.

We left the torchlight of the Blood Moon camp behind us, along with my family and everything I’d ever known.

Chapter 15
NICHOLAS

Monday, early evening

We were patrolling on the very edges of the forest when Karim, the guard walking next to me, fell apart into ashes.

The bolt pierced his heart and thunked into a pine tree. Splinters ricocheted as I reached for a stake and launched into a run at the same time. There was no smell of mushrooms or rot, no clacking of teeth. Not
Hel-Blar
, but definitely vampires. They moved too fast to be hunters.

I could hear them in the trees, up in the branches, down in the ferns, everywhere. There were a lot of them; that much I could tell. I ran faster, until everything blurred. It wasn’t enough. Another crossbow bolt whistled by my head. A stake landed in the dirt by my left foot.

I was seriously outnumbered.

I hit the alarm on the GPS tag Connor had just recently programmed for everyone in the family. If we activated it, a message was sent immediately with our location. Assuming I was in range of any signal and assuming anyone else had a signal to even receive it.

Assumptions that could get me killed a whole lot faster.

I darted around a hemlock and slid into the yellowing grass of a narrow valley on the edge of the forest. I was far from the encampment, far from the farmhouse, even far from the royal caves. I’d never even seen this part of the mountains. I thought I heard screaming, faintly, but it faded and I was running too hard to be sure. If I’d still been human, my heartbeat would have drowned out every tiny sound; as it was, the rush of my blood through my veins was like needles of rain and wind. The part of me my mother had trained remained calm and removed, as if I were watching a movie. Clods of mud and dead flowers broke up under my boots as I pushed on. If I lost my cool now, I’d be dead for sure.

I had a moment to feel grateful that none of my brothers were with me. Losing Karim was bad enough. He was dead because of me. He could have been back at the encampment with his own family, or at home, wherever that might be. I’d only just met him before setting out. I didn’t even know his last name.

But dying now wouldn’t help him.

I could try to shake them in the labyrinthine caves of the mountains, but I was as likely to trap myself in a dead end as not. I might be able to outrun them, but there were no guarantees. There was also no decent place to make a stand, nothing solid to put at my back besides the mountain. A quick glance showed rock
and stunted wind-bent pine trees, and another vampire sliding down toward me from up high. A flash of pale skin on my right, a gleam of fangs behind me.

“Enough play,” someone barked, violent laughter in his voice.

The first grab caught my jacket and yanked me to a stop. I had just enough room to maneuver out of the sleeves and leave it behind. The cold air slapped my bare arms, but I wore the coat mostly out of habit anyway. I didn’t need it. And I certainly didn’t need it to fight. I managed to get just out of reach, but the way was blocked by a pile of boulders from some long-ago avalanche. Moonlight fell on moss and frost and the leaf-bare silhouette of twisted trees. I leaped forward, intending to scale the uneven pile. I’d take my chances with gravity over the lot behind me.

Not that I had a choice.

A length of rope snaked over my shoulders and yanked me backward. I landed hard, my back teeth snapping together. I rolled into the fall and twisted back on my feet, shrugging out of the rope. I threw my stake as I rose out of a crouch. It caught one of my pursuers in the chest, right over his heart. I grabbed for one of the rocks I’d landed on, tearing up my pants and my knee underneath the thick fabric. Blood dripped into the mud. The vampire clutched at the stake stuck between his ribs. I threw the rock as hard as I could, and it hit the wooden stake with an audible thud. The point slid past muscles and bone, straight into his heart. He collapsed into dust, leaving behind a pile of dark clothes.

There was an angry yell from one of his companions. The rope slid away, was tossed back at me. I managed to dodge out of the
way, barely. It nearly took out my left eye. I had weapons, but I had no room, no escape route. My only chance was to wear them down before I tired myself out. I wasn’t hopeful. I might have eliminated one, but there were still four others.

They circled me and I couldn’t stop them. I was too busy ducking rope and stakes. They didn’t seem to be aiming for my heart, but a pointy stick in the throat or the arm wasn’t any more fun.

“Who are you?” I snapped. I was surrounded now. There was nowhere else to go. “What the hell do you want?” Because with every moment they were proving if they’d wanted me dead, I’d be ashes already. This was about something else. Solange, my mother, my last name. It was all the same in a dark crevice in the mountains. And I wouldn’t give any of them up.

They grinned at me, showing fangs and bloodstained collars. They held thick branches, a combination of pointed-stake and short staff. They didn’t use the odd staves to run me through or bash me in the head. Instead, they held them end to end and closed in until they were close enough to punch. I raised my fists. I had every intention of going down fighting.