Chapter 13

Iwake to Caspian"s arms circling my waist and shoulders, his chest a soothing and familiar block of ice beneath my cheek. I move, and crystals of ice crackle as my skin separates from his: frozen bloodtears.

"You saw your mom in the dreamscape?" He murmurs, his voice the thick black of an unblooded vampire.

"Not saw," I say, and my voice is like his—dense, dark, muffled by permanently extended fangs, "spoke to."

"You wept for hours." His voice is a refraction of the pain I felt as she faded. "You cried "mommy, mommy" over and over again."

"I miss her so goddamn badly, Cas," I whisper, and feel tears leak anew. I smell fresh bloodtears.

Sitting up, I wipe at my face with my palms, and they come away smeared and crusted with crystals of frozen blood.

I stretch, and Caspian moves beneath me—his muscles creak audibly as they loosen from being held immobile for what must have been a very long time.

He gasps. "Holy shit, Maeve. Your hair." He pinches a strand between finger and thumb near my scalp and trails it through until the strand falls free.

"What?" I pull a sheaf of hair in front of my face so I can see what he"s so shocked about.

It's…god, how do I even describe it? An inch-wide strand of hair is now…well? The color of vitality, the color of a cast glamour, the color of magic: golden-white. Not blonde, not platinum, not honey-blonde or bottle blonde or any color naturally or artificially occurring. It doesn"t glow, exactly, but it does sort of…shimmer, a bit. I have a feeling when I"m full to bursting with vitality or casting a glamour, it will glow like my skin and eyes.

It"s the strand of hair Mom always touched…the one she traced behind my ear one last time in the dreamscape.

I sob and collapse into Caspian"s arms all over again. I thought I"d cried all my tears for Mom that day in the forest with Alistair, but apparently not.

Caspian just holds me.

I smell them first. It"s not enough warning—I open my mouth to shout, wrench my body away, but it"s too late. The windows go black, and then flare with a blinding golden-white light of a glamour, and then they shatter, bursting into an infinity of shards and fragments, each of which glint and glimmer and flare, and then dissolve.

Gunfire erupts—fully automatic, deafening chattering, unsilenced, arrogant. I hear a smashing sound as of cracking, bursting marble, and Caspian is knocked backward, twisting with impact after impact.

I hear a scream—my own.

Something hits my shoulder, my thigh, my side, all at once—BAMBAMBAM, but there is no pain, not even shock.

Only feral, primal rage.

The spark that is me vanishes, buried beneath an avalanche of rage, burned up in an inferno of violence.

I see through my own eyes as if I"m merely a passenger in my own brain.

My scream carries, echoes, reverberates—shatters, and then transforms into the roar of a wounded lioness.

Gunfire, impacts.

Caspian"s roar.

I see a fae Enforcer wielding a shield and a small automatic pistol—he"s across the room, still attached to a fast rope; now he"s in front of me.

I rip his arm off at the shoulder, smash him in the head with it, and then my clawed fingers tear his skull free from his neck.

Blood—so much blood. I bathe in it. Lap it up, glory in the gore.

It"s a blur of murder then, as I whirl and dance, a dervish of slaughter. There are Elites as well, and they have hastaxi, but I cannot be touched.

Finally, only one fae remains.

A young male—I scent his youth, his terror, and it is a sweet smell. I hear Caspian groaning somewhere.

"Maeve…don"t." His voice is weak.

I kick a fae corpse in the direction of his voice. "FEED." My voice echoes weirdly, booming and hissing at the same time.

I approach the fae male. He shakes. He"s an Enforcer—I clutch his helmet in my claws and squeeze until it cracks and crumbles, and I toss it away.

I have no control. A part of me observes with horror, but the vampire in me relishes this, and I fully comprehend the dark lore of vampires in mortal culture.

I rip his armor away, piece by piece.

I hear Caspian feeding, and I feel his strength returning, can almost hear his wounds knitting closed.

This fae male…his blood calls to me, and I have no choice but to heed the siren song.

"P-please, I"m sorry, I didn"t want to—" His voice trembles.

My fingers hook into his mouth, catching on his lower teeth, and I feel his tongue pushing against my fingers. He falls silent.

I rip his shirt off. Tear away his black paramilitary trousers. His lean hard perfect body ripples as he heaves silent sobs of terror.

His nudity pleases me. He"s a pretty little thing, a pleasant toy to play with as I sate my thirst, slake my bloodlust.

I prowl around him, come to stand behind him. Trace my fingernails—my talons—down his biceps, leaving thin trails of blood. I run a thumb beneath his lower lip, bring the crimson to my tongue—his mouth bleeds where I used my claws to silence him. He still has his tongue.

I inhale his scent—his blood. Honey and sunlight and terror.

Arousal.

Mine?

I press my lips to the side of his neck and taste flesh. Fuck, so sweet. Salt, hot flesh, warm blood pumping just beneath the surface.

"No, no, no, please, please don"t kill me."

"Kill you?" Amusement laces my thick, dark, predator voice. "Oh no, my soft little fae. You will not die this day."

I grasp a handful of his mouse-brown sweat-slick hair and yank his head backward, and I lick a trail along his throat, to that tender delicate hollow where his pulse pounds so frantically, so tantalizingly.

I lick again, and again, and I smell the venom in my saliva, sweet-sour and tangy.

I feel it take hold.

"No, no, no…" he murmurs, and I lick again, and he groans. "What? What are you…what are you doing to me?"

I feel his body tense, and then I feel him accept it.

"You may even enjoy this," I whisper. "At first."

My fangs slice into his throat, and ohhhhhhhh fuck, yes, fuck yes, the blood begins to flow, slowly at first, and the anticoagulant does its work and it sluices over my tongue in a hot wave of purest pleasure.

He groans—ecstatic, lost in the envenomed bliss.

I savor it. Swallow a mouthful, and feel it coat my throat and line my stomach with heat and life.

His hips flex, thrust. I grasp him. He"s thin and rather small. Barely a handful. Not like my Caspian. But needs must, and the warmth of his skin is intoxicating. His hardness fills my hand, and he moans, thrusts. I let him thrust into my hand as I take another long pull of blood.

I feel the glass barrier blocking me from my fae nature pop like a soap bubble, and the vitality within me roars like a waterfall, like a boiling hot spring, and it demands, hungers.

I pull—and taste his vitality, as well: vinegar and salt, brine and rain.

His cock pulses in my fist, and he goes limp. I hold him upright effortlessly, one arm around his chest and under one arm. Caress him, stroke his length, such as it is, and feel him nearing the edge.

Vitality floods my system, and some instinct dips a mental finger into the flow of magic and casts…something.

Light flares, blinds even through my closed eyes.

I don"t know what I just did, and I don"t care. I have blood. I have vitality.

Ah, there it is: his soul, in the blood.

A beloved dog, large and shaggy and gray-brown, a faithful companion, glamoured to be able to speak.

His mother, beautiful and distant.

His father, cold and aloof and arrogant and demanding.

Schoolmates in uniforms.

Practicing forbidden glamours beneath the bleachers.

A lovely young fae girl peeling her shirt off, baring small, budding breasts with a shy smile; I savor the memory of their first union.

The same girl, now older, riding him vigorously.

His mate.

A letter, on thick expensive stock, the ink heavily embossed with glamoured gold, accepting him into the Enforcers Academy.

Training.

Missions.

Me.

All this, in a single slow beat of his heart.

You have to stop, now, Maeve.

Caspian"s hands are on my waist. His lips are on the back of my neck. "You can"t take anymore, bloodmate. He"ll die."

I feel him—the fae—pulsing in my hand. I squeeze gently, once, and he releases with a weak, ragged, rasping groan. I feel his release, sticky on my fingers.

I feel his death approaching, can almost taste it. Wouldn"t it be a delicacy, to taste his end?

"Maeve. Stop."

I can"t.

The fae in me awakes.

She wraps herself around my vampire like vines of kudzu growing rampant, climbing, occluding, choking.

"P…please…" the fae—Malek: I taste his name in his blood—whispers. "Alinah. Alinah."

"MAEVE!"

Another freshet of blood floods my mouth, and with it, another barrage of memories, recent ones: a large circular table, a dozen seats filled with the faces of old, serious fae; mouths move, but there is no sound; angry gestures, palms slamming onto the table, fingers stabbing at the sky, pointing at a large photograph of me taken from a distance, with Caspian at my side, at the high school sometime before all this chaos exploded.

Another large room, this one clogged with row after row of folding chairs, each one filled with armed and armored fae warriors, Elites and Enforcers, each one watching a lean, middle-aged fae male with a hard, scarred face as he speaks—still no sound.

"MAEVE! STOP!" Caspian"s voice bellows in my ear.

I find a fingerhold in my mind and pry the vampiric nature away.

I gently remove my fangs and lick the wound—he moans, equal parts pleasure and relief.

I let him fall to the floor and I spring away, tripping, sliding on blood.

Turn in circles, hyperventilating. So much blood. So, so much blood.

"Maeve—"

No bodies.

Just blood. An ocean of blood. Red blood, hot blood, in spreading pools, in Rorschach splatters.

The naked fae male writhes in a sea of blood, wan and pale and wrinkled. Aged a decade in minutes—seconds.

"Maeve, breathe. Just—just take a breath, Maeve. You"re okay. I"m okay."

I shake my head.

Look down at myself—I"m naked, smeared with blood. Another male"s seed coats my fingers, sticky and alien. Red, bloody hands. Blood caked under my fingernails. Blood on my breasts, throat, mouth, and belly. Up to my forearms.

Images assault me—bodies ripped apart, flung to pieces.

Primal savagery.

"What did I do?" I collapse to my hands and knees in a pool of blood, sobbing. "What—what did I do, Caspian?"

He scoops me up in his arms. Carries me—somewhere.

Cold marble or tile under my skin. Water spurts, splutters, streams. Cold at first, shocking me. I gasp, the sobs broken. Then the water turns hot, too hot, but the scalding heat soaks into me, and the basin of the tub runs red, red, red.

"What did I do?"

"It was bloodlust, Maeve. That, and protecting me—the protection drive between bloodmates is arguably as powerful, if not more so, than even bloodlust. Both? You didn"t stand a chance of stopping it, and they didn"t stand a chance against you."

I can"t look at him. He"s using a shower wand to rinse me off, focusing on my hair. Works shampoo into my scalp and down the strands—the weird new vitality-colored strand does indeed glow a little, now that my fae side is unblocked. He massages my scalp, letting the water run so hot it should burn, but it doesn"t. The water swirls pink around the drain. He rinses my hair. Lathers up a scrubby poof with shower gel and scrubs my back, and my shoulders; he coaxes me to stand up and scrubs my belly, my breasts—gently, clinically—my sex, my arms, my hands, my thighs, my feet. Scrubs and rinses until the water runs clear and my skin is clean.

"Look at me, Maeve." his voice is so gentle and so full of love I can"t help but meet his eyes.

"I slaughtered them, Cas," I whisper.

I gasp, remembering the gunfire, the crack of his marbled skin. I touch his bare chest, finding one, two, three—no fewer than eight circular divots, tiny craters dotting his torso at the chest, shoulders, and belly. Another in the middle of his throat. One in the middle of his forehead.

In fact—I squint at his forehead: something glints in the divot. A round is still buried in his forehead. I reach up and pinch it between my finger and thumb and pry it out—a ribbon of blood trickles down his nose, but the hole closes before my eyes, although the divot doesn"t disappear.

He touches my body in the places where I remember being hit—I look, and see similar divots.

"They brought guns against unblooded vampires," he says. "Not very smart."

"They shot you." My voice is small and quiet.

"I would have survived, left alone, but they would have killed me."

"How? If a bullet to the head can"t."

"Decapitation. We can be slowed and even dropped if we take enough damage, but only decapitation can totally end us."

"Where did the bodies go?"

"I have no clue. Once you started feeding, I could see you get your magic back or whatever. You flashed super bright for a second, and the bodies all just…vanished. Where they went, what happened to them, I couldn"t even guess."

"Me either. I didn"t—I didn"t do it on purpose—it"s like…it"s like my magic has a mind of its own, or….or…I don"t know. Things just happen when I'm…angry or defensive or whatever. My body just…does things."

My hands need something to do, and my mind needs a distraction, so I begin washing Caspian. I shampoo his hair, massage his scalp and his neck, kiss the divots where he took bullets. Scrub his flesh.

"Caspian, that fae, I…" Tears, human tears—or rather, fae tears rather than bloodtears—pool in my eyes. "I know you said that I would…when I fed from him, that I—"

He takes the poof from me and tosses it at our feet. "Maeve, I was there. I watched. I knew what was happening."

"It was like being an observer of myself." I look inward—the part of me that"s still the mortal girl with mortal views on sex and monogamy is disgusted and horrified. The rest of me, fae and vampire, is just confused and mixed up.

He cups my face. "You haven"t been a vampire for long, so I think a lot of you is still sort of…" he trails off.

"Thinking and feeling like a mortal," I finish.

"Exactly." He brushes my tears away, and then leans in and kisses my cheeks, tasting my tears. "Your tears taste like magic," he murmurs. "You were in full bloodlust and protecting yourself and your mate. You stopped—You didn"t drain him of blood or vitality. According to every immortal law I know, you did nothing wrong, and according to vampire ethics, you did nothing wrong. Nothing. I"m not mad, I"m not jealous, I"m not confused. If anything, it was actually…kinda hot. If only because I know how good your hands feel."

"When they"re not ripping living beings apart limb from limb?" I say, my voice heavily laced with sarcasm.

"You"re not the first vampire to do that, Maeve. Not by a very, very long shot."

"Have you?"

The water is starting to run cool, so Caspian shuts it off and grabs a thick white towel from inside a glass-fronted cabinet—the towel is warm. He dries me with it and then wraps it around my shoulders before seeing to himself.

His answer is long in coming, but I can feel him approaching the topic in his mind, and I allow the silence to linger until he breaks it.

He wraps his towel around his waist and then hops up to sit on the counter between the two sinks. The bathroom, now that I"m aware enough to see it, is as magnificent as the rest of the apartment: a white marble slab swirled with gold, inset with deep ovular sinks and twin oval mirrors, elegant, antique ivory faucet handles with gold trim, and a massive clawfoot tub, also clearly an antique with the same ivory-and-gold fixtures and a matching shower head curving up overhead—the tub is set on a pedestal in a nook surrounded by windows with a stunning view of the city.

He lets out a long breath. "Once. World War One. My unit had been in the trenches for…hell, weeks without being rotated out for R-and-R. This was…Verdun? I think. We took a beating. Lost most of our unit. It was a muddy fucking hell." His eyes go distant. "I"d been surviving on stolen sips from freshly dead soldiers—I'd sneak into no-man"s-land in the night and find some poor asshole who was either almost dead or just dead and get enough to pass for mortal so I wouldn"t snap. But the offensive got…fuck, it was awful. Endless shelling. Gas attacks, enemy charges…there wasn"t an opportunity to sneak off for blood. I was getting worse and worse. At some point, weeks into being unblooded, I knew I couldn"t hold out any longer. So I…" he shakes his head. Closes his eyes. "I jumped as fast as possible across No Man"s Land into the enemy trenches, and I…I went into a bloodlust frenzy. I don"t know how long it lasted or how many I slaughtered, how many I drained. By the time I came back to myself, it was dawn and our side was starting to shell the enemy lines where I was. Now that, being blown limb from limb by bombs, that can kill us. I barely made it out alive, or undead, or whatever. My unit was gone by that point, wiped out in a charge, so I stole clothes from a corpse and joined another unit."

"Did anyone ever find out?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "No. Fortunately for me, the shelling erased the whole section of the German line so completely you couldn"t have even found recognizable pieces of bodies."

"And you never went into bloodlust again?"

"To that point? No. Not to where I slaughtered people. I think for any vampire who has ever gotten to that point, you only end up there once, and never again." He stares off into space. Shakes his head to clear it of the memories. "Of all the battles I"ve fought in, Verdun was the worst. I mean, it was just…endless hell."

"I can"t imagine."

"Good."

I lean against the counter beside him. "I saw…when I was drinking from Malek, the fae. I saw something."

"Something other than the usual glimpses of his memories?"

"Yes—well, no. It was a memory—his most recent. The briefing right before they came here." I gesture at the doorway, indicating the living room where the attack occurred. "That was…it was just the tip of the iceberg, Cas. They won"t stop coming. Not ever. They"ll just keep sending more and more and more, and eventually, they"ll win. There"ll be too many, and you"ll die, and they"ll get me."

"I know it seems that way, Maeve, but—"

"No! No, Caspian. It doesn"t seem that way—it is that way. I saw it in his mind. In his blood, or whatever. I saw them. Dozens of them, Elites, Enforcers, all of them together. Hundreds. A get-Maeve taskforce."

I feel overheated, and I toss the thick, fluffy towel to the floor, pacing the bathroom naked. Thoughts race through my mind, fears and doubts, worry and anxiety.

"I can"t keep doing this, Caspian. I can"t keep running. I can"t keep waiting and looking over my shoulder, expecting another attack. More fae dead. More blood on my hands."

The memory I saw in Malek"s blood washes through my brain, occluding my sight—reliving the memory all over again. This has the tang of magic to it.

I see the rows and rows of chairs in what looks like a hangar. Each seat is occupied by Enforcers and Elites, fae all.

But I scan the memory, and details resolve into clarity: not just fae Enforcers and Elites. I see shifters, loosely garbed in unadorned black trousers and shirts—more like pajamas or prison uniforms. Easy to shred through when they"ve shifted, I suppose.

I see, also, clustered in pairs and trios and quartets along the edges, old fae. Men and women, all identically clothed in white tunics belted at the waist with a wide strip of leather variously marked with slashes of color: one fae male has a single red slash, another female has six blue slashes, a different male with one red, two blue, and four green; no two have the same combination or sequence of colors and slashes. Rankings, perhaps, or some kind of tally system, something like the color squares worn by US military servicemen and -women to indicate campaigns and awards.

These fae are old. They look old to my still partially human brain, which means in the world of immortals, they must be truly ancient.

Dotted here and there throughout the crowd I also spy more than a few ancient-looking vampires, cloaked in their own personal shadows, radiating icy threat, wreathed in death and cold and darkness.

I rummage through the memory with magical concentration and clarity.

The photo of me and Caspian changes to the scene of the first attack—the SUVs on the remote country road. Then the downed helicopter. A close-up of spattered blood on a wall somewhere.

Evidence of my hybrid nature. The memory, here, comes with a strong flavor of shock and horror and disbelief.

I close my eyes, inhale deeply, let it out…and return to the apartment above the haven. Caspian is watching me. Worry clouds his features.

"We can"t win, Cas. We can"t keep fighting them. They have ancient, powerful fae mages, and ancient, powerful vampires. At least one shifter. Hundreds of warriors. They all know who I am—what I am. And they"ll do anything to prevent the larger immortal population from becoming aware of my existence." Tears pool in my eyes as I cross back to Caspian and take his hands. "I have to turn myself in. Take my chances. Maybe…maybe my grandfather can help me. I don"t know. I just…I…They"ll kill you all just for knowing me. For knowing about me. For helping me. All bets are off, Cas. The normal rules and laws don"t apply to me. Or to you, for being associated with me."

Caspian hops off the counter and pulls me into his arms. "You can"t, Maeve. You can"t turn yourself into them. I"ll never see you again. Better to die defending you than go crazy being apart from you."

"Better for who? If you die, I"ll go mad. And if I go mad, Cas? I"ll…I"m afraid of what I"d do. So far, the magic inside me has only defended me, acting to save my life or yours. But if I lose you and go mad with grief, I…I could…." I shudder.

"I could rip the whole world apart," I whisper.

"Maeve—" Caspian starts.

"I have to turn myself in. I have to. It"s the only way to keep you all safe. To keep everyone safe."