Made By Design (Blood Bound Series Book 2) (40 page)

“As well as the execution,” I finished, feeling a gentle current of hope.

Dorian slapped his hands together. “Oh, I see. If the council grounds are evacuated, it’ll be easier to break Ty out.”

“Unless they decide to extradite him back to the Armaya,” Marcus, being the voice of reason, spoke up. At my worried look he waved me off. “But I wouldn’t expect them to. They’ll have much more pressing issues to contend with than moving a prisoner when they don’t care if he lives or dies.”

I gulped at that, imagining the damned streaming in while we made our escape. We knew from my vision when the damned would come. But could alerting The Council alter their time of attack? There was no way to know, and even with the risk, this way was our best option.

Feeling like I was suddenly desperate for air, I sucked in a deep breath. My lungs ached in response. “Let’s hope everything goes to plan.”

Kendrick scrubbed a hand down his face. “What if it doesn’t?”

I cracked my knuckles. The release did nothing to loosen the tension stiffening my bones. It also had no effect on the rising vengeance that had begun to throb through my veins. “We still have plan B.”

In twenty minutes I’d fled the rec room, suburbia, and miles of thick forest. Still no matter how fast or far I ran, I couldn’t escape the mounting shit storm that my life was becoming. The words
It’s all over
by Three Days Grace pumping through my earbuds only fed my rising hate. Because I was just like a junkie. Whether it was my animalistic need for blood, being the freaking Oracle, or turning into a human lightning rod, everything I touched turned to shit. I was continually endangering not only my own life, but also everyone’s I loved.

Kendrick was wrong. I was cursed.

Breaking through the tree line, I fell to my knees in crunching snow and screamed into the darkness of early night. A rustle of tree leaves from behind alerted me to Kendrick’s arrival, but he had the good sense to butt out. Right now I needed to let off steam. Over-bubbling, poison pots of the stuff. And anyone who got in my way was going to fry.

With my entire body shaking with the need to release, I flung out my whip. It cracked loud as thunder in the air, my gloves relinquishing the voltage from its silver links. Again and again, I flicked the weapon out, hitting air and mulching up dirt and snow. But it wasn’t helping. I needed to cause irrevocable damage, like the damage I felt in my tearing internals. Like the damage I’d brought upon Ty.

I made for a copse. The young clustering trees vibrated, as if they quaked in fear with the gusty wind. My arm drew back, then surged the whip forward. The silver spikes flared out mid-air, biting into the saplings and capturing them in a bear hug of silver. I yanked back and its grip constricted, decapitating the trees halfway up. The destruction didn’t relieve my pain, my heartache, or my fear. How could it? If we couldn’t convince The Council, there’d be a battle to the death. Damned against vampire. Good versus evil.

I thought of Ty and the moment he’d been chained and dragged away. If my vision came true, he’d be there too, wolf form and all. Battling for survival against my sorry excuse for an uncle.

“We’ll get him out.” Kendrick was now behind me, far enough back to escape a lash from my whip. “Whatever happens, I promise you that.”

Even with his reassurance and belief, rage suffocated me like plastic blocking my airway. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

The fight inside me was building, voltage swarming into dangerous pockets beneath my skin. It grew like wildfire, coalescing into a human-shaped bomb ready to explode. With my flesh burning up like hot coals, I tore off my gloves. Fire streamed down my arm. A thick blue fork plunged into the whip as I struck at the largest maple in sight. The hit cracked straight through the trunk, blue veins streaming from the whip’s speared tip down the wood. A shockwave ricocheted off the destroyed tree, hitting our bodies like a blast and sending us flying back onto our butts.

Groggy and feeling the voltage recede, I lurch up as the tree fell. Snow dampened my jeans, but my focus was frozen. The whip in my hands was intact. The metal was heated, but otherwise unharmed.

Kendrick groaned and lifted himself up, elbows perching on his knees. He wasn’t hurt, so I didn’t bother asking. “That was crazy.”

I shook my head, hand covering my mouth before dropping. “Check this out.”

Concentrating, I gathered a few small sparks, watching the electric-blue travel to my right hand. Then I picked up the whip and rolled it out along the snow. Blue streaks shot along the silver, escaping the spikes and melting the icy white covering. As this occurred I grabbed Kendrick’s hand with my free one, raising it to eye level. Not a single volt came up my other arm. “I can control it. I can channel the power.”

~

My nerves were shot the following afternoon. Having to wait for The Council to agree to hear me out was torture, but it had given us time to put Plan B into action. Now it was half an hour past twilight as I stood before Kendrick in the back corner of the council property’s parking lot. He opened the top few buttons on his shirt, revealing the mark Vanessa had etched into his chest. I reached out with my rubber-lined glove and ran a finger over the mark. It was gold, as all her tattooed markings were, a symbol resembling a drop of blood. “I hope this works,” I said, glancing at Dorian behind us.

Kendrick glared down and my hand shot back. Then he licked a drop of blood from his lower lip. “I may not be on board with this whole plan, but I do trust Vanessa. If she says it’ll work, it will work.”

Dorian gave Kendrick a hard look, and then nodded down the gravel path to the council hall’s soaring doors. “Well, there’s no time like the present. Let’s do this already.”

The sword-armed guards nodded with respect as we passed through the thick wooden doors. Then one frowned, eying the stiffness that corded the muscles along Kendrick’s neck. Still, in keeping with custom, he said nothing.

Once inside I fought the urge to take a breath of relief. So far so good. I led our trio up to the packed marble table. Being dark outside, bar the growing light of the almost full moon, every red velvet curtain was drawn open. The tall black panes reflected the brilliant light of the lavish candle-lit chandelier strung from the exposed-beam ceiling. And a few domed lamps created a centerline down the long marble table.

As I headed to the only spare seat, every vampire in the room turned to stare. This of course included Caius who headed the table’s opposite end, watching me with cold wariness. From the seat beside my former uncle, Marcus nodded as if cheering me on, his smile the only warmth in this room. On the other side my mom looked nervous, her fingers intertwined and her face tight. The room fell quiet, every member waiting on me to deliver the chilling news of my latest vision. But even with Kendrick and Dorian flanking my sides, my tongue felt tied and my throat bone dry.

Caius seized the opportunity and rose. “Amelia, my dear niece. What is it you have to tell us all?”

Feeling exposed, as if I were standing there in all my naked glory, I swallowed my fear of being laughed at and labeled a liar. This was our best chance to get Ty’s sentence held back. I had to try.

Feigning confidence, I let my voice ring out over The Council, filling the cathedral hall. “I’ve seen what is coming. We’re all in grave danger. Regardless of your personal beliefs in me and the return of the damned, please don’t ignore what I have to say. Your own lives and those of your families are at stake if you do.” Sweat beads spouted across my forehead. I shoved my gloved hands, which had begun to shake, behind my back. “Believe me or not, but the damned have returned. I’ve seen them attack.”

Instead of gasping in surprise or voicing outrage or disbelief, The Council stared at me. As if I’d just sprouted snakes for hair. Caius was the only one to move. He strode around his colleagues, his expression a grim shade of death. “Amelia.” His tone and masked amusement as he twisted his head from the table to look at me, made my skin crawl. “Your vision has come too late. They have already attacked.”

“What?” I scanned the room. Nothing was out of place. No shattered glass. No shredded drapes. No blood. Where was all the black and red blood? And what about all those dead lumps that had once been living vampires. Even the balcony was clear, the balustrade unmarked with stacked antique chairs taking up space. “How? When?”

Caius moved closer to me, now standing a foot away. He dared to lay a hesitant hand along my shoulder. I braced, trying to keep a lid on my emotions as I struggled to hold back the static growing in my heart. Every waking spare minute between visions and escape plans had been spent with Kendrick, practicing to control my new ability. Before the meeting I’d even managed to hold Kendrick’s hand without shocking him. But it wasn’t working now. The tension grew, alive with purpose. Because what I really wanted to do, was let my power’s full force explode from every inch of my skin and into this monster. To blow him to hell where he belonged. For everything he’d already done to me, and for what he planned to do to Ty, he deserved it. Except that would cause a mega problem. We didn’t need The Council knowing about my power.

Before the voltage took flight, Kendrick moved like a flash. He clutched Caius’s hand and pried it from my flesh. The move was blocked from The Council’s view by Caius’s body, but Kendrick’s vehement expression wasn’t.

Whispers rose before me and I flashed Kendrick a
control your facials
scowl. The hate propelling from his face faded and he took a step back. His retraction made me feel vulnerable. I glanced nervously up at Caius’s amused expression. He half turned back to his colleagues while keeping his cold-gray eyes on me. “You are too late. I am sorry to have to tell you this, my dear. The damned compromised the Armaya before dawn this morning.”

What. The. Hell. When had this happened? Had there been deaths? Either way this was bad. Seriously bad. The hope was that my vision would force an evacuation. That it would lead everyone back to the Armaya and the safety of their impenetrable walls. Black dots clotted my vision, muddying the room. My knees trembled. How could the damned break into a place that was renowned as the safest of all vampire locations?

Caius is behind this. He has to be.
Kendrick’s thought words were clear, even though he made no move beside me.
Though I have no idea how he did it.

Almost in answer, Caius kept on talking. “The wards were disarmed.” His gray gaze slid to Marcus then back to me. “We suspect from an insider.”

“Perhaps the culprit you envisioned but couldn’t name in your last vision,” my mom offered. She glided over to stand beside Caius.

The middle-aged man who’d been one of the first to doubt my ability spoke up. “Without a timely warning, or the protection of the wards, they walked right on in.”

Uriel pointed a bony finger across the table at the guy, her azure gaze shining. “Vision aren’t controlled by the viewer. They are simply received. Do you mean to insinuate that Amelia purposely withheld this information?”

The guy scoffed, but Serafina was the one to speak, taking no notice of her son as she pinned me with a stare. “How can we know when she had this vision? She hasn’t told us.”

All eyes turned on me, some hopeful, but most skewering. How could I tell them that this latest vision had come to me last night, and I was only now telling them about it? I had wanted to meet this morning, but the attack happened before dawn. Still, I knew the answer in my heart. Because it wasn’t too late. Yes, the Armaya had been invaded, but that’s not what I’d seen. The real attack would come in two night’s time, straight after the Oracle ceremony.

“P-please, you have to listen to me.” Most rolled their eyes or scoffed. A few had looks of dwindling hope. My head swooned, light and dizzy, but I pressed on. “My vision wasn’t of the Armaya’s invasion. What I saw in my vision hasn’t happened yet. It happens here. After the ceremony.”

Roars of disbelief erupted. The balding man’s voice carried over the shouting. “How can she have a vision about a proposed attack, when she saw nothing of the Armaya’s?”

“It’s a diversion,” Serafina called. “We all saw her reaction when the wolf was captured. They’re involved.”

“That’s disgusting,” said the old white-haired woman. She’d been one of the only ones to speak in my favor when my link to The Sight had been revealed.

“She’s trying to prolong his execution,” Serafina spat with disgust.

Through all the Ping-Pong arguing, my heart squeezed tighter and tighter. They didn’t believe me. And if they wouldn’t listen, they’d never evacuate. Ty’s execution wouldn’t be postponed.

“You are all being ridiculous.” Uriel rose to her full willowy height, punching her knuckles into the table. The marble shook, vibrating the line of lamps. All the shouting quieted but didn’t stop. Nevertheless she spoke over them. “You are all forgetting the big picture here.”

“Yes,” Caius said, striding back to take his throne at the far end of the table. Mom followed behind. “There is a viable threat, whether we like it or not. The Armaya was compromised. There is no doubt on that. And perhaps my niece was confused and her vision
was
of the Armaya.” Daring eyes lifted to lock on mine. “Would you say that is a possibility, my dear?”

I gritted my teeth. “No. It’s not. I’ve never been surer about anything in my life.”

“It doesn’t matter either which way,” Uriel added, surprising me. She glanced around the table, eying each member as she went on. “True or not, the one thing we do know is that the damned have returned. Their thirst is for the death and destruction of all Pure Bloods.”

“So what do you propose?” Marcus leaned back in his seat. As usual he appeared calm and not nearly like he was facing a war between good and evil. “Cancel the proceedings?”

“No!” Caius bellowed. “We cannot compromise our customs. We will not return to hiding, fearing the dark as we did so long ago.” He ran fingers through his salt and pepper hair. Then he pointed to the stacked papers in front of him on the table. “Every still-living resident from the Armaya is on their way here. We all voted and agreed on that. So if this proposed threat is real?” His expression mocked the possibility. “
If
it is truly coming? We will have numbers above all. Even our security will shame the Armaya’s.”