Everafter Series 2 - Nevermore (11 page)

“Val! It’s me.”

I forgot about my exhaustion. Karma wouldn’t have shown up like this if she didn’t have some kind of news. I threw on a T-shirt and shorts, raced to the door, and threw back the deadbolt.

“What’s going on?”

Karma was dressed as immaculately as always, but her eyes were wild as she stepped inside my apartment. “It’s Telassar,” she said with no preamble. “The city has fallen.”

“Fallen?” My heart leapt into overdrive, and I clutched at a nearby bookshelf as the world seemed to tilt. “What—what does that mean?”

Karma’s hand closed around my forearm. Her touch was warm, and my throat began to burn at the sensation of her pulse fluttering lightly against my skin. “The city has been besieged for a week. Yesterday, the invading force broke through Constantine’s defenses. A few escaped, one a contact of Malcolm’s.”

“Alexa?” My voice sounded strangled to my own ears. With my free hand, I pressed hard against my chest, over my galloping heart.

Karma shook her head. “Malcolm’s source said that she left the city with Constantine two days ago.” When she hesitated, I shook off her hand.

“What? What, aren’t you telling me, Karma?” My breaths were coming in quick gasps, and I was starting to feel dizzy. Hyperventilating. I couldn’t stop.

“My source claims that Brenner was after Constantine and Alexa specifically.”

My entire body jerked at the name. “Balthasar Brenner?”

Surprise flashed across Karma’s delicate features. “Yes, how do you—”

“A dream.” I stumbled to the futon and sat, holding my head in my hands, trying to tamp down the panic long enough to think. She had escaped. With Constantine. She wasn’t dead—or at least, she hadn’t been, a few days ago. A groan escaped my lips at the thought.

“Oh, Val.” Karma sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. Warm. So warm, the aroma of night-blooming jasmine rising fragrantly off her smooth, dusky skin… Saliva flooded my mouth as my jaw began to ache. So thirsty.

“She’ll make it through this,” Karma said. “Constantine is wily, and the lands around Telassar have been his for generations. He will know how to keep her safe.” When she began to rub the back of my neck with gentle pressure, a spark of arousal burst in my gut to flood my body with swollen heat. “Now, what were you saying about a dream?”

I took a deep, shuddering breath, desperately trying to focus on her words instead of the delicious promise of the delicate blue vein that ran just above her collarbone. “He was in my dream, two nights back. Sebastian’s father. Burning a city, but not of Weres. Of vampires.”

Karma’s hand stilled. “You had a dream about the razing of Sybaris?”

“It was just a dream,” I panted, shaking with the effort of holding myself in check. The impulse to feed was growing stronger by the second, and I had no idea how long I could hang on before it overpowered me.

Karma frowned. “No. It wasn’t. Because Sybaris was razed to the ground by Brenner’s elite forces a few days before he besieged Telassar. Our source fled there after he escaped Telassar, because Sybaris is the nearest Consortium outpost. But he found it in ruins.”

“Weres and vampires fighting.” Was this the beginning of a war, like the ones to which Helen had alluded several times? “What will this do to the Consortium? To you and me? Oh God, to me and Alexa—”

“Val, stop.” Karma tugged hard on the short hairs at the back of my neck. Alexa had done that sometimes when she was seducing me, taking control of the moment, using her sensual force to compel me to surrender.
Surrender…

“Constantine and Helen are allies,” Karma was saying. I watched her full lips form the words and licked my own. “This isn’t a matter of Weres and vampires fighting. This is Balthasar Brenner and his cronies lashing out against the Consortium itself. Against our alliance.”

In the pit of my belly, Thirst finally broke its chains. I wondered whether this was how Alexa felt, in the moment when her panther overwhelmed her consciousness.

“Karma,” I whispered, barely clinging to lucidity. “Oh God, something’s—please, will you just—it’s not safe, please,
go.
”

Something in my tone must have alerted her jackal, because in the span between two of my breaths, she was off the couch and her hand was closed around the doorknob. She faced away from me, head bowed, suddenly struggling with her inner beast for control.

I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. The rush in my ears was the thunder of her blood—hot and fresh and mine, mine,
mine
for the taking. My vision telescoped until all was darkness save for the buttery swath of skin where her neck met her shoulder. Reason fled.

Yes.

I rose and lunged for her in the same fluid movement, a cobra striking its prey. In the split second before my sharpened teeth sank into the smooth expanse of her skin, she whirled, snarling deep in her throat—an inhuman noise.

Darkness descended, mercifully swift.

*

I woke to the steady beeping of a heart monitor. Blinded by the harsh fluorescent lights, I blinked until my vision cleared enough for me to distinguish my surroundings. A small room, its windows swathed by blackout curtains. The acrid scent of antiseptic. A dull ache in my left arm.

Hospital. No. Not again!

I sat bolt upright, clawing back the thin sheet that covered me. The metronome of the monitor leapt into hyperdrive, but my gaze skidded to a halt at the bag of blood hanging to my left, connected to the line that was buried into the crook of my elbow. I swallowed back a surge of bile as I realized what was happening. A transfusion. Someone else’s blood, not Alexa’s, flowing into my body.

I was reaching to yank the IV out of my arm when the door to my room opened and Harold Clavier stepped inside, his tinted glasses perched atop the line of cropped dark hair that framed his thin face.

“Don’t, Valentine.”

“What have you done?” I spat, my voice cracking as a wave of fury burst over me. “You’ve fucking violated
me! I drink only from Alexa. You know
that, you bas—”

Clavier moved to my side and loomed over me. “Be quiet,” he said disdainfully. “Hysterics will accomplish nothing.”

I glared up at him, trembling in my rage. “Why have you done this to me?”

He stared at me for several seconds before turning to examine the monitor’s printout. “You brought this on yourself by denying your own needs.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to regain my equilibrium. How long had I been here? The last thing I could remember was sitting on my couch with my head in my hands, fighting off panic as Karma told me about Telassar and Sybaris and… All in a rush, the memories returned: the call of her blood, my rising thirst, the jarring sensation deep in my brain as parasitic instinct replaced human superego.

“Oh God, Karma—is she all right?”

Clavier’s lips tightened. “Is
she
all right?” He laughed, but the sound carried no humor. “She brought you here, after putting you down like a whelp. If she didn’t have excellent control, your remains would be strewn all over your own apartment.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve gone almost this long in the past without Alexa’s blood. It’s difficult, but I’ve never even been close to losing control before now.”

He looked toward the door a moment before it opened. “Your situation has changed,” he said, stepping away from my bed to make way for my new visitor. Helen. Her pantsuit was the same deep blue as her glinting eyes, and her dark, wavy hair brushed against her shoulders as she moved into the room.

“Valentine, hello.” When she reached my bedside, she stooped gracefully and swept a light kiss across my cheek. “I wish I could say you look well.”

“Helen.” I glanced between her and Clavier and decided that small talk was out of the question. “Get this thing out of my arm. Now.”

Unmoved by my brusque demeanor, Helen sank into the empty chair to my right and crossed one leg over the other. “If you promise to hear me out.”

My skin crawled with the knowledge that someone else’s blood was mingling with mine. How would this affect the chemistry Alexa’s blood shared with my own? I needed that IV out, now
.

“Fine.” At Helen’s nod, I removed the needle myself, welcoming the twinge of pain. Clavier taped a small square of gauze to the insertion point, and I focused on breathing deeply, willing my stomach to settle.

Helen waited in silence until my heartbeats were steady again. “Karma Rao told us that she informed you of the attack on Telassar.”

“Yes,” I said, my throat tightening as I thought of Alexa in peril. “Has there been any word?”

“Constantine will reach me when he can,” Helen said, and I took a small measure of comfort in her confidence. “And we will help him to wrest control of the city back from Balthasar Brenner. But I have come to talk with you today about Sybaris.”

“The vampire city.” I shuddered at the dream-memory of ash coating my tongue and filling my lungs.

“One of the seven great fortifications of our kind.” Helen pulled her chair closer. “The city traditionally inhabited by your clan.”

“Karma said the two are related—that Brenner destroyed Sybaris first before invading Telassar.”

“That is correct.” Helen grimaced, and I wondered why she was taking the time to sit here and hold my hand when one of the “seven great fortifications” had just been razed. “Brenner has harbored a strong resentment toward Sybaris for many years, because its army drove him out of Telassar many years ago.”

“So he was taking revenge.”

“Yes. But he timed his vengeance to coincide with the election of the new Missionary.”

Comprehension dawned as I recalled Henri’s words aloud. “All members must be present.”

“Precisely.” Her lips thinned and I watched her eyes grow several shades darker. This quiet, unexpressed rage was even more frightening than the moments when I’d seen her lash out. “Balthasar Brenner has succeeded in almost completely eradicating one of the seven great vampire clans—the clan, remember, whose parasite may in fact be the original species from which all others derive. Your clan.”

Her emphasis on “your” roused my apprehension. “What are you trying to say?”

She took my hand and held it tightly. “You are the sole survivor of your clan, Valentine. The blood prime. And as such, your parasite’s cravings are exacerbated. As you can imagine, each blood prime feels a significant evolutionary imperative to increase the numbers of their clan.”

I stared at her numbly. I had been the newest member only a few days ago, and now I was the blood prime? And that fact was the trigger for the intensification of my thirst? “So I attacked Karma because my parasite wants to…reproduce?”

“An oversimplification, but yes. As soon as you became blood prime, your urge to feed became magnified.”

I shook my head. “This is impossible. There’s no scientific basis for what you’re proposing. How could my parasite suddenly ‘know’ that it’s the only one left? That’s…that’s mystical!”

Helen looked as though she’d swallowed something unpleasant. “Really, Valentine,” she snapped. “You, who are studying to be a doctor—you, who have experienced firsthand the effects of the vampire parasite and witnessed the transformation caused by the Were virus—you are going to protest that something which appears miraculous
cannot
be explained by science?”

I raised my hands in surrender. She did have a point. “Fine. It’s true that my appetite has been much sharper than usual for the past few days.”

“What you also must realize about your new condition,” she said, “is that not only are you the blood prime,
but you are also the Missionary. The office is yours by default, and as such, you will sit on the ruling counsel of the vampires known as the Order of Mithras.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had gone from a relative nobody in the Consortium ranks—a newly turned vampire struggling to control her appetites and find her place in a new world order—to a subspecies on the verge of extinction? I hadn’t even known that I was part of a clan before two weeks ago! And to pile on the lunacy, I was now expected to take an active role on the council that ruled all vampires, everywhere?

“This is insane,” was all I could say.

Helen stroked my hair back from my forehead. The simple touch felt so good, just as Karma’s had earlier, and I had to struggle not to lean into her hand. My body was starving and my bloodstream parched.

“I’m sure you’re feeling overwhelmed, especially given the news from Telassar. But don’t worry. I will do everything I can to help you ease into these new responsibilities.”

“Responsibilities?” Suspicion suddenly trumped my surprise, and I balled my hands into fists. “Are you talking about turning people?” Clavier’s violation of my blood notwithstanding, I was faithful to Alexa and always would be. Besides, I had been turned against my will. I never would have wished this life for myself, and I certainly didn’t wish it on anyone else.

She seemed unfazed by the edge in my voice. “It will be important to grow Sybaris’s numbers, yes.” When I opened my mouth, she cut me off. “Don’t be hasty, Valentine. We will discuss the specifics later. The other members of the Order are eager to meet you, but given the present political unrest, we will have to delay a convention.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. No good would come out of getting into a blowout argument with her right now. I would have to bide my time and remain firm in my convictions. No matter how hard the parasite rode me.

“In the meantime,” she said, “I’ve asked the staff to prepare a room for you here.”

“But—”

“Make no mistake, Valentine—Balthasar Brenner knows that you are alive. And as long as that is the case, his plan to eradicate an entire clan of the Order has failed. You are under my protection now, and I insist that you not leave this facility without my knowledge and a bodyguard.”

I blinked at her, probably looking like an idiot. Sebastian’s father had a price on my head? “All right,” I said, still battling my disbelief.

Only after she left did the exhaustion slam home. In the wake of the adrenaline surge, it settled over me like a dense fog. Alexa was missing. I was the Missionary. A shifter plague had broken out in New York and Sebastian and I seemed to be the only ones who cared. Balthasar Brenner wanted to kill me. And all I wanted to do was sleep.