Blood Sacrifice (16 page)

“It started shortly after your Change,” Dad said. “When you became heir.”

“And that means what exactly?”

“When you Changed, part of the magicks included tying the land to you,” Dad explained. “When you pledged yourself to Adam, the magicks felt the death.”

“So Gideon somehow cursed it?”

“I doubt he would have been able to do so directly,” Adam said. “But Huw, if you’re right, Gideon is just exploiting this fact. By claiming Challenge and tying the magicks to this, he’s basically caused something similar to a curse, correct?”

“Yes, exactly. In order to break it, you must tie the land back to you by blood and bone.”

Adam stood abruptly, crossing to the other side of the room. “That is an ancient curse, Huw, far more ancient than I. It’s not just symbolic.”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“So by sacrifice you mean, to the death?” I asked. Dad was confirming everything I’d suspected in the beginning. Death for life. Damn that black-souled bastard Gideon to eternal torment.

Three nods agreed with my assessment. Dad was silent on his end.

“This is like some sort of twisted religion. What do you want from me, Gideon?” I said to the air as I flew off the couch and began pacing. “To have me sacrifice myself like some latter-day Jesus Christ, washing away sins?” I caught the view of the former chapel’s altar out of the corner of my eye. “Much good it did him in the end. He still died horribly.”

“He rose again.” Niko’s voice, soft but strong, came from behind me. “Keira, I understand that my religious beliefs are not yours,” he said. “And I know that the history of a demigod sacrificing himself for his people isn’t unique to Catholicism, or even to any of the Christian sects. Tucker’s taught me about Baldur’s sacrifice, about the Fisher King and the other legends and myths. They had to come from somewhere.”

“What’s your point, Niko?” I asked, my rant deflated.

“Myth or not, parts of them are true, it seems.” Niko put an arm around me and led me back to sit down. “Call him. Call Gideon. We should have done a long time ago. We should have humbled ourselves and asked him to give us the translation, to work with him to see if he could accept some sort of compromise.”

“He wouldn’t have done it—he won’t do it,” I protested. “I know him. He’s getting a hard-on knowing that we couldn’t easily read this. I’ve absolutely no doubt that this was part of his plan—to frustrate me, all of us.”

“Or he wished you to call him and ask him,” Adam said. “I do not know him as well as you do, but I can see that being a motive.”

“As do I, Keira,” Dad agreed. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news, but Adam’s right. Call Gideon, play nice and perhaps this can be settled without bloodshed.” Without another word, he closed the connection.

“And Gigi?” I turned to Adam, searching his face.

“He may not have anything to do with her disappearance. Like us, he, too, is bound by terms of Truce. I do not know where they settled, but he and his people must be somewhere close by.” Adam seemed certain.

“How come?”

“He’s managed to hire someone, or convince someone to desecrate the cemetery,” Adam said. “He could not have returned to Faery through that particular door, not once he agreed to Truce. So he’s bound to be somewhere near, as we are.”

Cemetery. I’d almost forgotten. “Not to change the subject or anything, but did you know there is a priest here?” I asked him. “I ran into him outside. He looked like the gardener at first.”

“A priest?” Adam looked around the chapel room. “I’m not understanding.”

I quickly ran through my odd encounter with Antonio de Olivares.

In a blur, Adam crossed the room and grabbed my arm. “That was his name? Are you sure? Describe him.”

I pulled away, rubbing my arm. “Adam, what the—?”

Adam’s eyes focused on me. “Apologies. Please. Describe him.”

“Short, probably around five four at the most. Old. Weathered skin. Worn clothing. A straw hat. A tonsure,
which I thought was weird, because isn’t that for monks?”

Adam turned from me and stared up the stairs. “He was outside?”

“In the cemetery. Adam, what the hell?”

He turned back to me, his brows lowered. “It can’t be,” he said. “No. It’s been…” He took my arm again. “Come, we are going outside. Niko, Tucker, remain here, please.”

Tucker put down his book, and before Adam could say another word, my brother was in front of us, arms crossed. “No bloody way,” he said. “I am not letting you two go gallivanting around out there without backup.” He looked to Niko. “Are we?”

“No, we are not.” Niko carefully placed the laptop he’d been using back on the table and joined Tucker. “Your clan chief is missing. You are the sole remaining Kelly heir. Adam is the sole heir to the Unseelie Court. If you think Tucker and I, who are your blood-bonded Protectors, are going to let you out of our sight right now…”

Adam gave a curt nod. “Very well. Come along.”

With that, he pushed aside the four pews and bounded up the stairs. I shrugged and followed.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

—Albert Einstein

O
utside, the night remained still. The earlier darkness I’d felt was gone, replaced by the clear moonlight. No more clouds obscured its face. The cemetery stones all shone, as if newly scrubbed.

“Interesting,” Adam said as he examined the historical marker. He stood and wiped his hands on his slacks. “I don’t recall…” With Niko practically plastered to his side, he wandered away from the marker, toward the far end of the cemetery. “He said his church was beyond that ridge?”

“Yes,” I said. “A building he’s using as a chapel, in any case. Adam, what the hell are we doing up here, anyway? Do you know this priest?”

Adam didn’t answer right away, instead, he crouched down to read a stone half hidden by some dried-out blooms, fancy ribbons torn and faded. Other dead bouquets encircled the marker and the plot as if someone
had wanted to embrace their departed loved one by surrounding him or her with flowers. “Guadalupe Rivera de Caminante,” he read. “Beloved wife.” A distant look crossed his face as he brushed the top of the stone marker. “Beloved by many.”

“Adam?” Niko ventured a touch to Adam’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

With a shake, Adam straightened and came to me. “I may know this priest,” he said, answering my question. “But if he is who I think he is, then there are more questions than answers.”

“As if that’s any different,” I muttered. “Where do you know him from?”

“I believe that should be ‘when.’” The priest’s voice came from behind us. Startled, I whirled, a hand outstretched, a protection spell at my lips. Adam grabbed my wrist.

“No, don’t.”

The small man, now decked out in black, his priest’s collar glowing white against the starkness of the shirt, stepped forward. “Nightwalker, it’s been a long time.”

“It has.” Adam sounded grim. I didn’t take my eyes off the priest, all sorts of wrongness pinging my Spidey-Sense. “I see she is buried here.” He indicated the grave he’d just been at.

“She is.”

“You tend to her.”

The priest bowed his head. “I must.”

Adam studied the small man, who remained with head bowed, hands folded in front of him, like some penitent, some petitioner waiting for an answer from his liege. Though, that couldn’t be the case. Adam was no priest’s liege—that was impossible. This old man was
no vampire, either, nor fey. I would have known. Even if in some strange way, Antonio de Olivares had been sworn to Adam somehow as a child, a young man, when he’d swore his vows to the Church, all other allegiances became null and void.

“How?” Adam finally spoke.

“A curse.”

“You were cursed to live?”

“I was.”

Seriously? Was he truthful or just crazy? I’d never heard of this type of curse. Before I could figure out how to politely phrase “gee, how the hell did that work,” Fray Antonio opened his eyes, his gaze pinning me.

“I know what you are thinking, child.” The priest addressed me. “All you have known up to now was your world and that of Faery.”

“You know of Faery.” I stumbled over the words that, until now, I’d never uttered in front of any human other than Bea.

“He knows of many things,” Adam said. “If my calculations are correct, this man is more than two hundred years old.”

“Wait, explain,” I insisted. “Back to square one. I need the whole story. Obviously, you two know each other.”

“Back in the olden days…” The priest chuckled. “Although, I suppose that term’s gone out of fashion.”

“It has,” Adam said. “But do go on, explain. Keira has a right to know the entire story.”

“As do we all,” Niko muttered. I had to agree with him. Hell, right now, I might settle for even part of the story, instead of cryptic conversations between my centuries old vampire and this human man who looked to
be in his late sixties, but Adam said was more than two hundred.

“Yes, I suppose,” the priest mused. He stopped speaking for a few breaths, then began again. “I wasn’t a very good priest. Like many of my brethren, I caroused. I took women, took what they offered. I lived a very happy life.”

“Women?” I asked. “Aren’t Catholic priests supposed to be—”

“Celibate? Yes, we are. And I am. Now, at least.” He shook his head. “We were so far from the Church, our own origins. So lonely in this rather rough place. So few women, so few luxuries. I was never of an order that embraced full poverty, you understand. I took my vows later in life, after…” A worn hand rubbed against his collar. “I fell in love. I wanted to keep her, but…”

“Then why didn’t you marry her?” I asked. “It’s been done. Men leaving the priesthood for love. To marry and raise children.”

“I couldn’t. I was a priest…
am
a priest. Though I broke my vows in the past, I could not abandon my vocation. My calling is no different whether or not I love secularly. God came first. She did not like that.”

“And she was married already.” Adam’s words fell like an anvil.
Beloved wife
.

“Her?” I pointed to the grave. What was he trying to say? So what, he fell in love, it didn’t work out. Not the first priest, nor the last, I was sure. After a moment, he continued.

“When I told her that we had to stop, that we had no future as man and wife, that I could not live as husband to her, she wouldn’t accept it. She ran off, crying. Three days later, we found her body washed up on the banks
of the river. She’d thrown herself in. She left behind a husband and a young daughter.”

“The San Antonio River? Isn’t it pretty shallow?”

“We’d had days of hard rain back then, following a severe drought. The land couldn’t take the water so fast, so the river flooded.”

I stared at the man, not knowing what to say.
Sorry? It sucks?

“I went to her family to request her body, so I could give her the last rites. But to no avail. She’d told her sister of our love. Her sister told her
abuela
. The old woman practiced
Brujería
. She’d never converted to our faith.”

The plot thinned. I could guess what had happened next.

“She cursed you,” Adam said. “The old woman.” He stepped over to the grave again.

He bowed his head. “With eternal life. My penance to live and know that I’d caused her granddaughter to commit a mortal sin; her soul to burn in Hell forever.”

“A
bruja
? A witch? Was your lover one of mine?” I had to ask. Humans couldn’t work magick. They tried, but only those with fey blood had the ability.

“I believe she was of mixed blood,” he said. “Not Kelly by name, as the family had come from Spain, but indications are that they came from a branch of your clan.”

“Indications?”

“About fifty years ago, I met your leader, Minerva Kelly.”

“Here?” Adam looked startled. “You know Minerva?”

“I know many people.”

“Can’t be family,” I told him. “Kelly blood can’t mix with human blood.”

“Fey, perhaps,” Adam said. “Many of the local fey mixed with the incoming humans, the Spaniards as they settled here. It was a diversion.”

Diversion. Shit, is
that
what he called it? No wonder we’d had so many half-bloods and mixed-bloods at our Reception. I didn’t really care that much, but damn, couldn’t they have at least practiced some birth control?

The priest spread his hands out, raising his gaze to meet Adam’s. “Here is where I am cursed to live. Here is where I must stay. I grow older and more feeble in tiny increments.”

I gasped. That was one hell of a curse—eternal life, but not eternal health. I’d not wish that on—no wait, I might actually wish that on Gideon, except I didn’t want him to live. Too damn bad that he, like the rest of us Kellys, already had the near-immortality thing as part of our genetic heritage. None of us could die naturally. We could choose death, or die from beheading or exsanguination, but that was about it.

“Minerva tried to lessen the curse,” he continued. “But to no avail. She succeeded only in ridding me of some of the pain of aging.” He twisted a hand in front of him. “Some days it hurts less than others.”

“That’s evil—“ I began.

“Not evil.” Father Antonio came forward and took one of my hands in his. “Deserving.”

“No one deserves this kind of punishment,” I argued, pulling away. His skin felt of crepe, thin, broken blood vessels below chugged slowly. The stain of death was everywhere on this man, yet he still walked and talked, was solid. “No one.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” he said. “But it is my cross and I shall bear it as long as God sees fit to make it mine.” He gave Adam a look that I couldn’t interpret. “Unlike some of us.”

I didn’t respond. Held my tongue on my first instinct which was to say that I believed in no god, no ultimate power other than that of nature and biology. I used to want the pagan gods, the ones that governed my life’s beliefs as a youngster. But frankly, recent events had turned me into practical thinker Keira, who believed in the power of honor and loyalty and love, not in some amorphous “being.”