Drake Chronicles: 02 Blood Feud (16 page)

Ox-Eye lifted his head. I’d seen smal er horses.

“Ox-Eye because he’s part ox?” I asked, lowering into a crouch beside her.

“No, like the daisy.”

“You named this beast after a flower?”

She scratched his ear fondly. “He’s rather gentle.
Très
sympathique
.”

“Sure he is,” I said doubtful y. She was rubbing a piece of faded silk between her thumb and forefinger. It was frayed at the edges. “Good luck charm?” I asked softly.

She paused, slipped the cloth into her sleeve. “Yes, I suppose so. I thought I lost it a long time ago.”

“What is it, Isabeau?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Isabeau.” I didn’t know how I knew exactly, but I was sure there was something else going on. She bit her lower lip, final y looking like an eighteen-year-old girl.

“I was wearing that good luck charm, as you cal it, the day I died. The day I was turned and left for dead, I should say.” She sounded angry, bitter, and fragile in a way I hadn’t thought was possible for her. It made me want to find the bastard and rip his head right off his shoulders. “I haven’t seen it since that night.” I frowned. “Where did you find it?”

“In the woods outside your house,” she replied. “When we were tracking the Host.”

“Shit.”

“
Oui.
It was left for me.”

“By?”

“Greyhaven. Or so I assume. I was wearing it the night he kil ed me.”

I sat back. “That’s why you lost it when they said his name in the woods last night.”

“
Oui
,” she said again, grimly. “He’s back. And now I can final y kil him.”

“Isabeau, he’s what, three hundred years old? Four hundred?

”

“So?”

“So, you’re a newborn, however long he might have left you in your grave.” I real y, real y wanted to rip his head off. “You’re not strong enough yet.”

“We’re not like other vampires, Logan,” she insisted cool y.

“Yeah, believe me, I get that.” I raised an eyebrow in her direction. What, did she think I was an idiot?

“I couldn’t find Greyhaven before. He’s always been off on Montmartre business. I couldn’t get close to him, didn’t even know if he was on the same continent.” She pul ed out the indigo silk. “But now I know. Now I can track him.”

“How? I know you’re good, Isabeau, but he’s one of Montmartre’s top lieutenants. Even I’ve heard his name.”

“There are rituals.”

I jerked a hand through my hair. “I’l just bet there are.”

“I have this now. I can smel him on it.”

“But why? Just to taunt you? There’s something else going on here.”

“I know,” she admitted. “But I won’t figure it out by sitting here and waiting for him to make his next move. What I can do is take this back to where I found it and dreamwalk.”

“Dreamwalk?”

“Like a trance. Similar to what you saw with the cave paintings.”

“And where exactly did you find it?”

She winced. “In the meadow where they set the trap.” My mouth dropped open. “In the field with the
Hel-Blar
and the blood everywhere? That’s where you’re going to lie down and go into a trance?”

“
Oui.
”

“Wow. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. And I’ve known Lucy practical y her whole life.”

“You don’t understand.”

I snorted. “I total y understand. You’re nuts.” She shrugged one shoulder, let it fal . “I’m handmaiden to the shamanka. This is what I do.”

“Ever notice you only say that when you’re about to do something reckless?” The soft light from the setting moon caught the shiny skin of her numerous scars. “Did he give you those?” I was surprised that my voice sounded more like a growl. Ox-Eye lifted his head curiously.

“
Non
, the dogs did this.”

I stared at her. “Your own dogs attacked you?”

“No.” She smiled for the first time, softening the tight lines in her face. “They rescued me. Kala’s dogs pul ed me out of the earth. I would never have been able to do it by myself.

Greyhaven only slipped me enough blood to change me, not enough to revive me. I was unconscious for centuries in that coffin.”

“In France?”

“No, I was buried in London, in my uncle’s family plot.”

“And Kala went to get you?”

“No, she never leaves the mountains or these woods. It’s her power center and the dogs are her totem, you would say. For al of us.”

The only reason I could fol ow what she was saying was because of Lucy and her New Age parents. Lucy talked about totems and auras and ful moon rituals the way other people talked about bal et classes and summer barbecues.

“So who found you?”

“She sent Finn across the ocean with three of her most trusted dogs. They have a way of cal ing other dogs to them.

Finn told me that by the time he found me in Highgate cemetery nearly twenty of the city’s stray dogs were there too.” I could picture it: mists, the middle of the night in a posh ancient graveyard in turn-of-the-century London under torchlight, the sound of horses and carriages over the wal . She’d have been wearing some kind of corseted gown with pearls at her throat and elbow-length gloves.

She was total y made for me.

“So the dogs found me and dug me out. I remember the sound of their claws and their teeth closing over my arms. And the air, final y, real air I could breathe. That’s when I realized I wasn’t actual y breathing and I wasn’t waking up from some nightmare in my uncle’s townhouse in 1795. It was over two hundred years later and nothing made sense.” She shivered, her eyes distant.

I’d thought our bloodchange was bad, but we knew it was coming and our family had had centuries to adapt and prepare.

We got sick, sure, and weak, and some of us came closer to actual y dying for real than others; but usual y a draft of blood and we were right as rain. Vampiric, but otherwise okay and stil ourselves in our recognizable undead life. In fact, Connor’s real worry had been that he was going to have to start dressing like worry had been that he was going to have to start dressing like me. I’d given him a black velvet frock coat for his birthday that year and hung it on the back of his door so that it was the first thing he saw when he woke up.

“Finn gave me blood to drink,” Isabeau continued. “I thought he was insane. He had to force me and I was sick al over his boots. After an hour I was so thirsty I would have drunk a barrel of blood. He brought me here as soon as I was wel enough to travel, on a ship with a windowless bedroom and a captain who didn’t ask questions. As soon as I saw Kala, I knew I was final y home.”

I whistled. “So it’s not just a story told to scare the rest of us?” She shook her head. I reached out and traced a fingertip over a half-moon scar above her elbow. I half expected her to break my hand, or at least jerk away. She just went stil .

“Your aunt thinks her scars make her hideous.” I went stil as wel . “You talked to my aunt Hyacinth?” I gaped.

“And by that I mean, Aunt Hyacinth actual y talked to someone?”

“Yes. She seems … distraught.”

“That’s one word for it. She’s barely been out of her room since those rogue Helios-Ra bastards doused her in holy water and left her for dead. She won’t talk to any of us, and she absolutely won’t lift her veil. Not even for Uncle Geoffrey, and he’s practical y a doctor. You should have seen her before the attack. She was unstoppable, afraid of no one, and a bear about courtesy and proper gentlemanly behavior.”

“So that’s where you get it from.”

“What?”

“The way you dress, the way you can bow like this is stil the eighteenth century.”

“I suppose.” I shrugged, sternly tel ing myself not to ask her if she liked it or hated it. I wasn’t going to be that guy.

“If you had dug me out instead of Finn, I might not have realized right away that it wasn’t stil the eighteenth century.” Ordinarily, I’d take that as a great compliment; with her though, I just wasn’t sure.

“Between our matriarch, Madame Veronique, and her medieval lessons and Aunt Hyacinth, I guess it was bound to rub off on one of us.”

“You’re different than your brothers,” Isabeau insisted. “They don’t live it the way you do. I could tel right away.”

“You noticed al that in the few hours you saw them?” And I absolutely wasn’t going to wonder who she’d thought was the cutest. Quinn had a way around girls, and it made them stupid. I suddenly wanted to punch him for it.

“No, it’s kind of nice,” she murmured, and suddenly Quinn’s face was safe from my fist. “It’s like the boys I knew in France.” I wasn’t entirely thril ed with the word “boy.”

“I didn’t know I missed it,” she continued, as if surprising herself.

I’d never wanted anything more than I wanted to kiss her. I wanted it more than I lusted after Christina Ricci in
Sleepy
Hollow
. And I’m al about the girls in corsets. Isabeau’s long, thick black hair, straight as the waterfal in the caves underneath us, her green eyes and scarred arms and vicious parry with a sword. Hot. Every last bit of her.

I decided to take my own life in my hands and I leaned in slowly. I didn’t rush, gave her plenty of time to pul away, but I was inexorably closing the distance between us. She smel ed like rain and earth and wine. If she’d been in a goblet I would have drained it of every drop. I was a whisper away from her now and she stil hadn’t moved.

I wanted to bury my hands in her hair and draw her up against me but I thought she might not be ready for that. She was a little bit like a wild animal, untamed, unbroken, and as untethered as a hawk in the sky. I wouldn’t want her to be anything else.

I slanted my lips over hers and it felt right, necessary. I kissed her deeply, slowly, as if we had al the time in the world. Her mouth opened and her tongue touched mine, hesitantly, sweetly.

I had to clench my fists to keep from grabbing her. The kiss went darker, wilder—one of us made a smal sound but I honestly didn’t know which of us it was.

There was a tingle in the back of my head, a flush of burning heat over my entire body. I pul ed away reluctantly. Her mouth quirked into one of her rare smiles.

“Dawn,” she whispered.

I smoothed her swol en lower lip with my thumb. “Dawn,” I agreed.

The forest was ever so slightly less dark than it had been, more gray than black.

“We should go inside,” she said, both sets of fangs protruding slightly. It was cute as hel .

“Got someplace safe for me to sleep?” I asked.

“Got someplace safe for me to sleep?” I asked.

She linked her fingers through mine.

“Yes.”

CHAPTER 15

LOGAN

“Have I mentioned that this is the worst idea ever?”

“A hundred times.” Isabeau rol ed her eyes. Charlemagne looked like he was considering it too.

“If I say it a hundred and one times wil it convince you?”

“No.” She ducked under a low-hanging branch. “You fret worse than my old nursemaid.”

“I have a great deal of sympathy for your old nursemaid,” I muttered. It was a beautiful night, warm and fil ed with stars and the songs of crickets and frogs. White flowers glowed in the grass. It was a night made for poetry. We should have been kissing. A lot.

Instead we were sneaking out of the caves to a blood-soaked clearing where we’d been ambushed not twenty-four hours earlier. Not exactly an ordinary date.

“It wil be fine,” she assured me, her long black hair swinging behind her. “It’s just trancework, nothing to worry about.”

“Real y?” I answered dryly. “Is that why we snuck out and you wouldn’t tel anyone what we’re doing, not even Magda?”

“I don’t want to worry them. And they wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

“
I
don’t understand,” I shot back.

“I know. But you’re stil here, you’re stil helping. You’re not trying to stop me.”

I shook my head. “I am so trying to stop you—I’m just doing a piss-poor job of it, apparently.”

When I woke up next to Isabeau in her cave, her hand on my chest, I’d thought the night would go rather differently. I should have known better. There was nothing soft about Isabeau, not even in her sleep. Wel , that wasn’t precisely true. I’d seen a flash of her vulnerability, after al , a flash I didn’t think she was even aware she possessed. She was al shamanka’s handmaiden out of the caves, al warrior and duty. But this was her home and she was comfortable enough to shed a few of her hard outer layers.

Her room had been simple, nearly sparse. There was a futon covered in quilts and several dog beds in the corners, thick rugs, and a smal oil painting of a French vineyard. There were no concert posters or a closet stuffed with dresses, just a hope chest for her clothes, another one for weapons, and a jewelry box fil ed with amulets and bone beads. Everything about her was different.

And she’d ruined me for regular girls.

Even now, as she stalked through the forest, hypervigilant for the stench of
Hel-Blar
or a sneak attack from the Host.

“We’re close,” she murmured.

“I know.” I could feel the stinging in my nostrils, the penny-sharp tang of dried blood. Broken glass glittered in the undergrowth. Charlemagne sniffed his way around the clearing and then sat, tongue lol ing out of the corner of his mouth.