A Tithe of Blood and Ashes (The Drake Chronicles Book 7) (5 page)

“It’s clear,” Helena shouted into the open kitchen door. My parents burst outside just as I was shimmying down off the roof. The bones in my feet felt like iron. I stumbled, pain lancing up my ankles. Dad found my boots while Mom hugged me so tight she nearly strangled me with one of her braids. “Mom, seriously, what the hell?”

“I’ll make tea.”

“I don’t want tea.” I stepped back out of her embrace. “I want answers.”

She rubbed her face.

“Cass,” Dad said. “It’s time.”

“I know.” Mom looked exhausted suddenly. “When you were little, you and Solange were cornered by a vampire who wanted to kidnap Solange for Lady Natasha,” she said, her voice shaking.

I frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were five, “Helena murmured. “And it was over quickly.”

I could just imagine. “Okay, but what does that have to do with the Hel-Blar invasion?”

“After that, we found someone who could cast a shield spell.” Mom tried to smile. “To protect you.”

“Cailleach?” I hazarded a guess. “Black Annis?”

“Where did you hear that name? Never mind. The Cailleach is the Winter Hag in the old Celtic stories,” Mom explained. “Like the woman in the grey cloak you drew. She comes from the winter mountains. We gave you a shield of stone and ice.”

It explained, a little, how I’d survived the Drakes for so long.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Because the shield can’t protect you from everything. It just gave you an edge, a little luck. And I love you to pieces, Lucky Moon,” Dad replied. “But you don’t exactly need another reason to be reckless.”

He said reckless, I said spitting in the face of fear. Given my proximity to vampires and general mayhem, I figured there were two options : let fear turn me into a dumbass or a smartass. No contest.

“But we didn’t even believe in magic before last year,” Connor said quizzically. It was part of the reason we’d all nearly had our asses handed to us by both Lady Natasha and Montmartre.

“The Drakes didn’t,” Dad corrected. “But we always have.”

And because they had, I knew exactly what happened in the old stories. I faced them both, heedless of the cold air sneaking under my collar and the burning tingle as my toes defrosted. “What did you sacrifice?”

Dad’s gaze slid away. “What do you mean?”

He was such a bad liar. “In all the stories you used to read to me, magic comes at a price.”

“It was a long time ago,” Mom said quietly.

“It was a vampire spell. You must have offered blood at the very least.”

“In a way.”

I actually growled in frustration. “
Mom.
”

Her shoulders slumped. “We gave up the ability to have more children.”

How could you miss something that had never happened?

Clearly, it was possible. You only had to look at my parents’ pallid faces. They’d probably imagined a big family with lots of children. But they’d given it all up for me.

“What now?” I asked, feeling small and sick and strangely exposed.

“The magic’s run out,” Dad explained.

“It hasn’t just run out, it’s backfired,” Nicholas pointed out quietly. “So we call Isabeau.”

Isabeau was a Hound, part of reclusive tribe of vampires who worked magic. They’d come out of hiding last year to help us defeat Lady Natasha and Montmartre. She was also Logan’s girlfriend, even though the term girlfriend seemed ridiculous for such a severe, ferocious girl.

“Isabeau is away with the Hounds,” Logan said. He was starting to slur his words as dawn unfurled. “They’re searching out new caves in the mountains.”

I looked at the ashes clumping in the snow. “And we clearly can’t wait. If the last three nights are any indication, there will be a Hel-Blar army at our door tonight.” We’d killed so many already, but there were always more. We couldn’t keep this up.

Weak sunlight finally brightened the clouds until the sky was pearly and luminescent. Nicholas and his brothers toppled together, trying to hold each other up with varying degrees of success. Helena held tightly to the side mirror of the van they’d driven here.

“We’ll fix this,” Mom promised. “Leave it to us.”

My parents had already given up too much to keep me safe.

I’d find a way to protect myself.

Nicholas was the only one who caught the glint in my eye. He tried to speak, even as his eyes rolled back in his head.

“I’ll get them home,” Bruno said, catching Connor before he took out the mailbox with his head. “Before they start drooling on themselves.”

***

Mom might personally know every guru, witch, and shaman in the area, but I had other resources. Paranormal Studies at the academy for one, and Samuel for another. And I had exactly five and a half hours of sunlight left to figure it all out.

Because Nicholas knew me as well as I knew him. It was a race, no question.

“A shield spell?” Rosa looked at me across her desk, suddenly interested.

I’d cornered Samuel at lunch and told him just enough about my magical problem to get him intrigued. I’d promised to be his guinea pig for his next paper, if he helped me out. Instead of taking me to the converted greenhouse behind the gym that currently served as study hall for the Paranormal Studies division, he drove me to the dodgy end of Violet Hill.

We stopped at a run-down looking century house and went around back to a large shed. When I asked if all magic was performed in gardening sheds, he pointed out that magic was frequently smelly. Rosa was his secret contact, and that’s all he’d say about her. Apparently she taught him things about magic that the profs refused to. I’d expected long skirts and faded tattoos like my mom, or at least a proper old lady with some kind of an accent. Instead, Rosa was in her mid-twenties. She wore a plain white t-shirt with ancient jeans and her hair was pixie-short and as black as her eyes. No New Age sandals either, just red converse.

“Shield spells are extraordinarily rare,” she continued. “Especially when they work. Are you sure?”

I thought of my parents’ bleak and brave faces. “I’m sure.”

I paced around to distract myself but there wasn’t much room. I was used to the cramped quarters in Solange’s pottery shed, though, so it didn’t stop me. Rosa’s shelves were crowded with plants and glass jars filled with stones, salt, and feathers. There were books in a chest under her wooden work table. “They called on the Cailleach,” I said, hoping that would make sense to her. “Or Black Annis, I’m not sure.”

“That’s brilliant.” Her eyebrows rose sharply. The ring through her left brow glinted. “The Cailleach created the Scottish highland mountains by dropping stones from her apron. She’s an old woman with blue skin and governs the winter dark. Sympathetic magic,” she elaborated when I didn’t look properly fascinated. She was excited enough I was half-afraid she’d try to high-five me.

“Your parents created a link from those mountains, to the Violet Hill mountains, from the blue skin of the Cailleach to that of the Hel-Blar. Parallels like that almost never happen.”

“Who’s Black Annis then?”

“Another face to the Cailleach. One who eats children.”

I thought of my parents unborn children.

“There was a sacrifice,” I said quietly before Rosa got any giddier.

“There always is.” She wasn’t surprised or particularly sympathetic. “Only we don’t call it that. It’s a tithe.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a big difference between sacrifice and payment. Well, sometimes. And the spirits or gods, or whoever, don’t exactly need money. So we tithe energy, dreams, broken swords.”

“Blood.”

“In Violet Hill? Yes.”

“My parents will try again.”

“But you’ve decided you don’t need a shield?”

I thought of everything that had happened since Solange’s birthday in August: Lady Natasha eating a raw deer heart thinking it belonged to Solange, a Drake cousin, London, turned to ash, Hunter’s grandfather and my friend Tyson killed at the battle, Nicholas’s scars, Solange traveling the world on a self-imposed exile.

“Oh, I need it,” I said. “But the sacrifice should be mine.”

“You want to call up Black Annis and make a bargain?” Samuel’s usually impassive assassin-face was comically shocked. “Dude.”

“Yes.” I faced Rosa. “What do I need to do?”

“Pray.”

“Not helpful.”

“I wasn’t kidding. You go in humble, or you don’t come out. You bring gifts: flowers, cupcakes.”

“Like a tea party?” I asked dubiously. I was accustomed to this, my parents offered enough incense and flowers to make their own Mardi Gras parade float.

“You’re going to her home,” Rosa pointed out. “So be a good guest.”

That made sense. “What else?”

“You already have a link to her. If anyone can pull this off, it’s you. More so than your parents. More than any witch I know, even. But it would help if you could go to the same spot your parents used. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, there’s a big boulder near the bottom of the Crowfoot Trail that looks like an ancient standing stone. They always go there for weird rituals.” They’d been married there, had conceived me there, and had covered me in flowers there when I was just a week old. And Mom had made each of the Drake brothers go there after their sixteenth birthdays, to start their vampire lives with a blessing. That blessing mostly entailed standing under the full moon while my mother sprinkled them with red rose petals and chanted. Solange had escaped the ceremony, but only because she’d been kidnapped.

“You’ll need rowan wood for the fire. And a bunch of other things. I’ll make you a list. Do you know when they worked their spell?”

“I was five. So twelve years ago, I guess.”

“Even better,” Rosa declared, after typing something into her laptop. “There was a comet twelve years ago. That’s partly why this is happening now.”

Samuel and I exchanged a glance. “And?” He asked.

“And the Cailleach is linked to comets. Some think the first mention of her Black Annis aspect was actually just a comet sighting. So you’ll need a meteorite stone.”

“I can get that.”

“Really? By tonight?”

Nicholas’s brother Duncan spent so much time alone roaming the mountains and the forest , he’d found a meteorite once, still smoking from being swallowed by the atmosphere. It was in a glass box in the Drake library. I texted him so he’d get the message as soon as he woke up. I asked him to leave it in the mailbox Solange and I had set up in a grove of birch trees by the road that led past their property. We’d been reading Little Women and loved the idea of secret letters.

And I couldn’t visit the Drake farmhouse at dusk anymore, not since the battle and the resulting vampire delegates and visitors swarming the place. Dusk is a vampire’s most violent time, it can make them as vicious as sunrise makes them vulnerable.

“Just be careful, kid. Black Annis collects children, to protect or to eat , but no one ever knows which it will be until it’s too late.”

“Why is everyone always so determined to make me into food?”

***

I didn’t make it to the secret mailbox until after sundown. My parents were smarter than I gave them credit for and they’d sicced all the teachers on me. I couldn’t go three feet without one of them getting in my way.

But I’d once snuck out of the house when Helena was home so a few vampire hunters weren’t going to stop me.

But by the time I made it to the birch grove though, the letterbox was empty.

Instead, I got a text message from Nicholas.
I love you.

I stared at it with a sinking feeling of dread.

“Shit.”

***

I stole a car.

Sort of.

I took Dad’s truck while he and my mother were inside making phone calls to every flaky person they’d ever met. It would take a while. They’d still be searching out the spell ingredients while I was at the base of the mountains chatting with a goddess who, may or may not want to eat me.

Even for me, this was a spectacularly bad idea.

But Nicholas had drank the Drake White-Knight Kool-aid a long time ago, and while I was bouncing and shuddering over the rocky road, he had already done something heroic. Read: stupid. I knew it was partly Duncan’s fault, he must have told Nicholas about my text.

I would have pounded the steering wheel if I wasn’t holding onto it so tightly. Driving through the old mountain passes, even in a snowplough truck, wasn’t easy. I finally had to abandon it when the snow got too deep. I strapped on snow shoes, knapsack on my back and a bundle of rowan twigs under my arm. The sun had set while I was driving, turning the mountains pink as cotton candy. It was darker now, and even colder. Luckily, I didn’t have far to go.

Unluckily, I could already see Nicholas on the ground, his blood on the snow.

Running in snowshoes is nearly impossible but I managed. My heart was in my throat, choking me.

Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.
I stopped myself from shouting out his name. His blood would be calling to any Hel-Blar in the area, and I didn’t want to make it an easier for them to track us.