A Tithe of Blood and Ashes (The Drake Chronicles Book 7) (6 page)

Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.
He wasn’t moving. And he was pale, even for a vampire. I would have thrown up, if there’d been time.

“Don’t be dead,” I whispered, digging through the snow to reach him. Smoke ringed around us and the standing stone jutting out of the ground like a monster’s tooth.

His veins were faintly blue under his skin, like rivers coursing the winter-white of his temple. There was blood pooling in the cut on his left wrist; the rest had dripped down onto the small chunk of meteorite. The crystal clusters, the ring of salt, the rowan fire. The spell was already started. A hollowed egg, like the one I’d brought with me, sat on a flat stone over the flames. Inside the egg would be a piece of paper with my name on it.

When his eyelids fluttered, I hugged him so hard he actually squeaked. I was half-laughing and half-crying. “You are such an idiot,” I said, wiping my eyes so I could see clearly.

“Shield...spell.”

“Yeah, we’ll fight about that later when you’re not dying the death of the undead.” I wasn’t even sure if I was making sense. I was giddy with relief. He wasn’t dead. I was full of butterflies and cupcakes and other revoltingly happy things. Maybe I really could sneeze rainbows now. I pulled off my mittens, exposing the thin skin of my own wrist. “Drink.”

He stared at me, mutinous. “No.” He’d bitten me once, to save me from Solange’s inner demons. He’d never forgiven himself. I wasn’t kidding when I’d called vampire hunters drama queens, but they had nothing on actual vampires.

“Nicholas, you offered too much of your own blood. I don’t have any handy blood packets in the truck and I can’t exactly hunt you down a rabbit. If you don’t drink, you will die.”

“Too close to sunset,” he pushed my arm away, feebly. Drake brothers never did anything feebly. Fear slid back in, stuttering my breath. “Can’t...control...”

“Drink,” I demanded. “Or I will stake you myself.”

He was stubborn, but I was more stubborn. And reckless and insane, according to, well, everyone. I used his own pocket knife to make a cut under my thumb, shield spell utterly forgotten. The blade bit and I swore. I waited until the blood dripped, not just beaded on my wound, before pressing it Nicholas’s mouth.

He tried to resist, tried to turn away, but I wouldn’t let him. It was just a little blood. Nothing to me, and everything to him.

I knew the exact moment the vampire in him took over.

The whites of his eyes veined red and the supernatural pheromones I was mostly immune to made an inappropriate giggle effervesce in the back of my throat. His hand closed over my wrist, pressing it closer, like a dark, tingling kiss. Languid heat tickled and trembled in my throat, my belly, the backs of my knees.

He sat up, burning like the white centre of a flame. Strength retuned to him as he swallowed, like a beautiful marionette suddenly coming to life. His features were too perfect; he was art.

He was greedy.

My eyes rolled back and I had to force myself not to swoon like some girl in a horror movie. If I was going to go down into the basement to investigate the strange sound, I’d damn well go armed.

One of us was going to have to stop him. I didn’t want to, I wanted to sink into the softness, into the darkness, into the impossible beauty of him.

“Nicholas.” I fumbled with the cartridge of Hypnos powder under the cuff of my other arm.

He stopped abruptly. He scuttled back out of reach, wiping his mouth clean. “Damn it, Lucy.”

“We don’t have time for an existential crisis right now,” I pointed out. “We don’t even have time for you to tell me how the hell you figured out the spell.”

“Samuel called.”

“That little traitor.” Not that he knew I’d be keeping it a secret from Nicholas, but still.

“He was trying to get a hold of you.”

“My phone never gets a signal out here. We need to put the egg in the stone, before the coals die out.”

Only it wasn’t there.

I frowned and reached for the egg in my pocket. It was in pieces, cracked apart when I‘d arrived and thrown myself on top of Nicholas.

“He was---.” Nicholas cut himself off. He stood up, nearly feline in his alertness. A shadow moved from behind the stone. She wore a parka and a cap over her short dark hair.

“Rosa?” I asked, startled. I’d expected something with pointy teeth. “What are you doing here?”

“Sorry, Lucy. But I have a little brother to protect.”

“Wait.” I scrambled to my feet. “What? You’re
stealing
my shield?”

“I told you how rare they are. And I need it.” She did look genuinely apologetic. Fat lot of good that would do me the next time the Hel-Blar surrounded me.

Which was all too soon.

Nicholas didn’t waste time on threats or bluster. He just moved so fast he blurred around the edges, like a smeared Pre-Raphaelite painting. Rosa didn’t run away. She didn’t have to. She pulled a bottle from the gym bag at her feet and hurled it a tree. Blood dripped down the trunk, thick and coppery. She threw more bottles until the snow turned to a Jackson Pollock painting.

Blood stung the air. Nicholas froze, fangs extended. It was only for a moment, but it was long enough for another smell to hit us: rot and slimy wet dead things. I gagged.

She’d called Hel-Bar on us. It was a hell of a distraction.

They descended on us just as they had the night before and the night before that. Nicholas was a pale, sharp blade, cutting through the infestation. Even weakened by his blood loss, he was fierce. I had stakes on my belt and in by boots and up my sleeve, and a miniature crossbow. I could only hope it would be enough.

While we fought the feral undead, Rosa approached the fire and the stone, carefully carrying her own hollowed egg in her hand. We couldn’t do anything to stop her, there were just too many Hel-Blar between us. Nicholas and I were back to back, circling like a spinning top.

“Rosa, stop!” Samuel came out of nowhere, staking a Hel-Blar even as he slid to a stop next to her. I stared at them.

“
He’s
your brother?” I asked, momentarily distracted.

“I didn’t know she’d do this when I brought you home to meet her,” he said apologetically. “I tried to call and warn you.”

“And we figured I could get here quicker to do the spell,” Nicholas added with a roundhouse kick to a Hel-Blar. “Which might have worked if you weren’t so dammed efficient,” he added drily.

“And she’d have staked you when she got here and you’d be dead,” I pointed out.

“Lucy, on your left!” Samuel interjected.

I spun, stake ejecting from under my sleeve. The Hel-Blar crumbled as it reached for me, hissing. “I’m kicking both your asses later.”

“You’re welcome,” Samuel muttered.

Finally, finally, the Hel-Blar we’re gone. Even the blood dripping from the trees wouldn’t entice them past the stink of the dead ash scattered over the snow. It was a new moon, as required by the spell, so the sky was full of stars and ice but no moonlight. Still, I’d done my research. The new moon technically set at sundown. There wasn’t any time to waste. We might already be too late.

Nicholas prowled towards Rosa, looking just as deadly as he had when facing down half a dozen feral vampires. When he reached the fire, it shot up into a column, the sudden light searing the mountain side, the standing stone, his fangs. Rosa threw water from a canteen. When it landed, it formed into icicles, spearing up out of the ground. Nicholas dodged out of the way, the ice glittering and sharp as stakes.

“Don’t,” Rosa said. “I might not know how to fight, but I know magic.” The icicles shone brighter, like sunlight. Nicholas raised a hand to protect his eyes. His cheekbones were angry and raw with the burn. “Holy water,” Rosa explained. “The kind that works against vampires.”

I froze. “Rosa, just take the shield. I don’t care. Leave him be.”

“Hell no,” Nicholas hissed, pushing against the pain. The icicles tilted at him like jousting lances.

Samuel skirted the ice, confident his sister wouldn’t hurt him. Fury simmered in his voice. “Rosa, enough.”

“Samuel, go home,” she said. “I need to keep you safe. It’s my job.”

“For God’s sake, I’m eighteen years old and I can kill monsters four different ways with one hand tied behind my back alone.”

“That’s exactly why!” she insisted.

“I’m not letting you shield me by killing someone else.”

“I’m not going to kill her. Not if she stays out of my way.”

“But not having the shield might,” he said quietly. “You don’t know her.”

“Hey,” I felt obliged to say, even though, technically he might just possibly be a little bit right. Maybe.

Samuel , never much for talking, finally made the decision for her. He slapped her arm so that the egg flew out of her palm. He caught it, crushing it in his fist.

But Rosa had smashed Nicholas’s egg as well, and now mine was broken in my pocket. There definitely wasn’t enough time to drive the half hour back to my house to get another one.

Not to mention that if I didn’t find a way to work the shield spell, the Hel-Blar would keep coming after me, night after night. I could only survive that for so long. And eventually, they’d kill someone I love just for being near me. Like my pacifist parents who were ill-equipped to deal with my hobbies, especially when they came in the form of Hel-Blar.

Nicholas and I stared at each other, the spell falling apart before it had even begun.

“Wait!” I yelled suddenly. He only blinked, accustomed to my outbursts, as I tackled my knapsack. “I brought all the chocolate in the house!” I explained, rummaging frantically through stakes, a glue gun, a novel, and left over candy canes. “As a sacrifice,” I continued. Nicholas was the only one who didn’t look surprised.

“You offer what you treasure most,” he said, understanding my logic.

“Exactly. But she’s not getting you, so next best thing,”

I pulled out a bag of all the organic dark chocolate, and raw cacao nibs, I’d found in the kitchen pantry, and more importantly, proper sugar-filled cheap-chocolate I hid in my dorm room. I pulled out a foil-wrapped oval, grinning. “Easter chocolate always goes on sale really early,” I said, tearing the foil off with my teeth to reveal a chocolate egg the size of my fist.

“You’re kinda awesome,” Nicholas grinned back.

I carefully pulled the chocolate egg in half and used a page out of a school notebook to scrawl my name on. Rolled into a tiny scroll, it fit inside perfectly. I placed it between the crystal clusters, shaped like the inside of a spiky stone egg. The smoke turned sweet and sugary. A stone egg sheltering a fragile egg, that was the metaphor of the spell. The meteorite was already tucked between the two crystals, calling to the Cailleach.

I stepped back, Nicholas beside me. I glanced around so wildly my eyeballs started to hurt.

“Did it work?” I wondered when nothing much happened. The cold stayed cold, the mountain crouched all mountain-like. I stomped my feet to keep my toes from freezing so thoroughly they fell off altogether.

“She’s coming,” Nicholas finally whispered, his pale icy pupils widening.

“She’s here,” a voice like the wind off the mountain corrected him.

The smoke curling off the dying fire wreathed an old woman who was both as tall as the standing stone and as tall as the mountain. She wore a thin veil that could have been made of starlight and moonlight. It did nothing to conceal her blue-ish pallor and the knife-glint of her eyes. Her cloak was stone-grey and there was a heavy black iron hammer tucked into her belt. I could easily imagine it crushing unsuspecting skulls.

Black Annis.

I leapt in front of Nicholas. There were vampire ashes everywhere and he’d already offered his blood, but what if she wanted more? “You can’t have him.”

The earth trembled faintly beneath us. Snow and rocks shivered down the mountain, threatening an avalanche.

That’s me. Ordering goddesses around. I’m smart like that.

“Please?” I added.

“Lucy,” she said. “My little Lucy.”

I’d faced down Lady Natasha and Viola, Solange’s possessing spirit, but this old woman with her hunched shoulders made me shiver right down to my spine. “You remember me?” I croaked.

She smiled. It wasn’t comforting.

“You are one of my children,” she said.

I bit my tongue hard, before I could ask her if I was one of the children she planned on eating.

“I’m here to Tithe.” I elbowed Nicholas in the sternum as hard as I could when he opened his mouth. “To renew the shield spell.”

She sighed and snow fell off the pines trees as the boughs drooped. “Another tithe of blood and ashes,” she said. “That one already offered his blood,” she motioned to Nicholas. “And your recent blood moon battles have stained my cloak. ” She twitched it, looking displeased. There were Hel-Blar ashes at her feet.

“My parents gave you the possibility of future children,” I said quietly, holding Nicholas’s hand so tightly that if he’d been human I might have cracked his knucklebones. “What do you want from me, if not blood and chocolate?”