Blood Prophecy (2 page)

“He didn’t say where he’d been or what had happened to him,” I said quietly. “But he looked bad.” I bit my lower lip hard to keep it from wobbling. I didn’t have time to wobble. Not right now.

“But he’s in one piece?” Helena asked.

I nodded. She lowered into a chair, as if she just didn’t have the strength to stand anymore. We stared at her. Helena never slumped. She was a force of nature, battering at the storm windows and storm cellars of the world. Liam grabbed her hand.

“Solange made him prove his loyalty by biting me,” I continued. Quinn swore viciously. “She called me his bloodslave.”

“Oh, Lucy,” Aunt Hyacinth said. “You know—”

“That’s not Solange.” I waved away the rest of her comforting speech.

“She’s gone darkside, Lucy,” Connor said. “She’s blood-drunk.”

I shook my head. “Look, I know Solange better than anyone.” Even if I’d spent the last few weeks wondering what had happened to my best friend. She’d changed, there was no denying it. “That wasn’t her. So we have to help her!”

“We will,” Uncle Geoffrey assured me, glancing up from his notebooks. “I’m sure there’s something here that I’m missing. Her bloodwork has been unique.”

“What, she has the vampire flu or something?” Duncan asked. He rubbed his jaw. I remembered Nicholas telling me Solange took him out just last week. “Hell of a flu.”

“I know this is difficult,” Uncle Geoffrey said. “But you have to accept that Solange has changed, Lucy.”

“No one changes that much, that fast.” I crossed my arms stubbornly. “And I know what I know. This isn’t her. I mean, I thought I caught a glimpse of the old Solange, but then she was . . . gone. She doesn’t even move like herself anymore, did you notice? She was all haughty and predatory.”

Logan pushed away from the wall, lace cuffs fluttering. “Isabeau said there was magic,” he said. “That’s what knocked us on our asses when she crowned herself.”

“Language.” Aunt Hyacinth clicked her tongue.

“Sorry. It’s why the Hounds took off so quickly,” he continued. “They were all muttering and whispering.”

“Find out what you can,” Liam ordered. “You’re our best link to the tribe.” The Hounds were decidedly reclusive and still might not help us. But Logan had been initiated as one of them, and, more importantly, Isabeau loved him. And Isabeau kicked all kinds of magic ass. “How did you find Nicholas?” he continued.

“He found me,” I said. “Well, us. Solange had dragged me out into the woods.” I shuddered. “I . . . it’s not her,” I repeated.

Logan put his arm around me comfortingly. “How did you get away?”

“Kieran found me.”

They finally noticed him, all at once. Helios-Ra training had his hand hovering over the stake at his belt. “Nicholas tagged her shirt,” he explained. “Probably while he was biting her. We had it worked out weeks ago so when the chip activated, I followed the coordinates.”

Helena looked impressed. “That’s my boy.” She almost smirked. “He’ll be okay.” She glanced at me. “We’ve had our own little plan, Lucy. Nicholas knew to ally himself with Solange if it came to a choice.”

“What?”

“We knew we might need someone to keep an eye on her,” Liam elaborated. “Though I admit, I could never have imagined it would go quite like this. He’s our best chance though. She’d believe he’d stay by her before anyone else.”

“Except for me,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” he admitted gently. “But the camp isn’t safe for you.”

My knees felt soft with relief. “Do you really think Nicholas will be all right?”

“Of course,” Helena replied. “He’s a Drake.”

She hadn’t seen him. I wasn’t so sure even the legendary Drake blood was enough to save him from whatever had happened to him while he was missing.

“We’ll have to kill her,” a woman said coldly. I couldn’t see her
over all the people between me and the door. I didn’t have to see her. I could hear her just fine. “I won’t have Solange undoing the honor of our name. Tomorrow night, though tonight would be better. She’s become a risk to us.”

“Kill her?” I exclaimed, pushing through a wall of Drake brothers. “Who the hell— Whoa.”

The vampire could only be Madame Veronique, currently the oldest Drake vampire alive and the matriarch of the line. I’d never met her before, had only heard the stories the others whispered about how scary she was. I’d assumed they were exaggerating.

They totally weren’t.

Despite her words, she didn’t do anything outwardly aggressive. Still, all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stuck straight up. I felt like a threatened porcupine, every quill bristling painfully. Her brown hair was in braids that reached her hips, under an embroidered wimple. Gold glinted off her circlet and the ribbons on her long, medieval-style dress. Her eyes were such a light gray they were practically clear. Not to mention glacial.

She was pale, small, and strange. She radiated otherness in a way the Drakes didn’t, not even Aunt Hyacinth—and she was almost two hundred years old. Madame Veronique was eight hundred years old, and everything about her was deadly. She was the silent poison to Helena’s blade. I shivered.

“Humans?” she inquired with faint disdain. Her gaze flicked over me, dismissing me as unimportant. Quinn and Connor stood in front of me regardless, shifting casually so that I was hidden. Sebastian blocked Kieran. “Haven’t we enough trouble without
your unruly pets?” Madame Veronique inquired calmly, after a terrifying pause.

Logan’s hand clamped on my arm, and he dragged me out the sliding glass doors, Kieran at our heels. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye to Christabel. “Come on, before Madame Veronique sics one of her handmaidens on you.”

“She has handmaidens?”

“Yes, and they look like scary undead librarians.”

“She really wants to kill your sister?” I asked as we hurried through the dark gardens. They were slightly overgrown, mostly roses and fields. My parents’ gardens were crowded with vegetables for canning and herbs for Mom’s health tonics. Not to mention the crystals planted everywhere to help everything grow. “Can she do that?”

“Yes,” Logan answered grimly.

“But . . . your mom can stop her, right?”

“I hope so,” he said, his charming smile gone. “I really hope so.”

“We’ll stop her,” Kieran said, walking silently beside us. With his Helios-Ra training he was nearly as noiseless as Logan. I was learning, but I still cracked the odd twig under my boots. “Somehow.”

“I’m going to see what Isabeau knows,” Logan said, leading us down the driveway to Kieran’s car. “Be careful.”

“You too, Logan.” I hugged him tightly. “I don’t want to lose any more Drakes tonight.” I got into the passenger side. Logan closed the door and stood there glaring at me until I locked it. “I should call Jenna,” I said, grabbing my bag from the backseat. I’d taken her and Tyson to a bonfire party with friends from my old school. A
vampire snuck in and one of the girls got bitten but, luckily, she was too drunk to remember details. Tyson brought her to the school infirmary, and Jenna and I tried to track the vampire. That was when Solange’s guard had grabbed me and left Jenna unconscious in the forest.

“She’s fine,” Kieran reminded me. “Spencer got your message and called Chloe and she got help. Jenna’s back in her dorm room with a few stitches and a mild concussion.”

I couldn’t even argue; I was too busy yawning so hugely my cheeks tingled. Despite everything that was going on, I fell asleep on the way back to the academy. The adrenaline crash made me feel as if I were made of wet cement. When Kieran nudged me awake, I tried to punch him.

“Lucy—shit!” He ducked, smacking his head on the window.

I blinked blearily. “Sorry, Kier. Habit.”

He rubbed the back of his head. “Between you and Hunter, it’s a wonder I have all of my limbs still intact.”

I snorted, rubbing my eyes. “You dosed me with Hypnos.”

“Three months ago. Let it go, Hamilton.”

I just grinned sleepily. “You have so much to learn.”

Chapter 2

Solange

I landed on a spiraling stone stairway. I was in some kind of a castle, with dust in the air and dried flowers and hay under my bare feet. I wore a burgundy, medieval-style dress, the kind Madame Veronique favored, with a jeweled belt. She’d been turned in 1162, so my brothers and I studied the twelfth century thoroughly enough that I knew the window in front of me was actually a murder hole, through which archers shot arrows at advancing knights. Sunlight pierced through it, landing on the back of my hand. I snatched it away, as if it were an arrow being sent back at the castle.

It didn’t burn.

Or make me feel weak.

I lifted my fingertips to my teeth. I still had the triple set of
fangs but no desire to sink them into the nearest living thing. I wasn’t thirsty for blood; and lately I was
always
thirsty. I wanted to enjoy it, but I knew I couldn’t stay here. Mom would say get to high ground, or at the very least, don’t let yourself get cornered. I was definitely cornered in the stairwell, but if I went up to the roof, I’d be just as confined.

I hurried down the steps, listening carefully for the sounds of the castle’s inhabitants. I could hear the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer from somewhere outside and the whinny of a horse, but nothing closer. The walls were whitewashed and painted with a rose in the center of each stone. Tapestries hung in the rooms that opened up out of arched doorways. I smelled smoke and roasting meat, and dried lavender under my feet.

I made it to the great hall without being discovered. I peered around one of the tapestries and saw wooden tables and benches, a fire in the center of the room, smoke rising to the rafters and staying there. Women bustled back and forth, wearing dresses similar to mine. A young boy brought in an armful of firewood. I slipped away, into the sunny courtyard.

This made no sense. I should be in the Blood Moon encampment. I felt insubstantial, as if the precious sunlight were glittering right through me. Was I invisible? Insane? Was this time travel? Or another vision like the one Kala had given me? It didn’t feel the same but it was definitely some kind of magic.

It didn’t matter.

I needed to get back home. I needed to make sure my family was safe and that Lucy wasn’t bleeding to death in the woods. And that
Kieran didn’t hate me, before he left for Scotland and I never saw him again.

I remembered the taste of his blood in my mouth. I’d bitten him long before that girl’s voice started to merge with my own. I couldn’t blame that on her, not entirely. She’d been there, in the background, but I’d been the one to bite him. Hadn’t I? And he still hadn’t turned me over to the hunters. He’d called Lucy instead of the Helios-Ra. He deserved an explanation. An apology. Everyone did.

When had I stopped being the girl with dried clay on her pants and a pathological need for solitude?

Guilt and worry would crush me if I let it. Right now, it didn’t matter why or who or what. It only mattered that I get myself back home to fix the mess I’d made.

I skirted the edge of the courtyard, staying in the shadows of the rosebushes and lilac trees. I passed stables and a dovecote. There was an orchard in the distance, and a gray stone wall beyond that. I stepped on the dirt path, uneven with ruts from carts and horseshoes, toward two round towers. I ducked between them, waiting for a guard to shout out my presence. Instead, there was only the wind and a stray chicken pecking for seeds. The sun was warm and pleasant on my face. It had only been a few months since my blood-change, but I still missed the daylight.

A longer path went downhill to a lower bailey and past a huge field full of armored men practicing with swords and lances and maces. Grizzled, scarred men fought with broadswords. A cluster of younger boys, around my age, loosed arrows at a haystack painted
with red and white circles. Men on horseback charged at a heavy sack on a stick, and if they didn’t hit it just right, it swung back around to knock them off their saddles.

A shaft of sunlight fell on me, making my dress look like fire and my skin glow like pearls. The shadows around me darkened, as if my glowing skin were leeching the light from everything around me. I was a lantern on the longest, darkest moonless night.

Every knight stopped abruptly and turned to stare at me. And they didn’t look happy.

Guess I wasn’t invisible after all.

Crap.

I didn’t hesitate, didn’t wait to see if they were just curious, instead of outright malicious. I tore down the path toward the last two towers in the wall and the forest beyond it.

I already knew I wasn’t going to be fast enough.

The wind snarled in my hair as I pushed myself on. The pounding of hoofbeats behind me got closer and closer. Stones dug into the soles of my feet, cutting through my skin. I was running fast, but not vampire-fast. An arrow sliced past me, slamming into the ground. Daggers were sharp steel rain, just close enough to pin my hem to the ground. I tripped and tore free.

Hot horse breath echoed in my ears as a destrier caught up to me on my other side. The horse was massive, muscles bunching, sweat stinging the air, and clumps of dirt hitting my ankles. Light flashed off the length of a sword. No one spoke, which made it all that much more awful. They didn’t shout or laugh, only ran me to ground like a rabbit.