The sentiment made me wonder if Odette wasn’t right, if Woolly wasn’t a halfway house for broken dreamers. I’d tried helping Taz, but that didn’t end well for either of us. Maybe Midas would be different.
Until his gaze snagged on where I massaged my left wrist, I had forgotten the exact spot where I cut myself with a ceramic shard, choosing to bleed out rather than be recaptured by Volkov.
Midas had gotten further in his attempt than me, and he wore that bleak history on his skin while Linus had ensured I carried no physical reminder. “There are sigils…”
“I earned these scars,” he said, not unkindly. “Erasing them doesn’t wipe away the past.”
That sentiment I understood all too well. “I had to offer.”
“That kindness is why I’m here.” A slight grin curved his lush mouth. “Most necromancers would toss me a quote, not a freebie.”
“I’m not most necromancers.”
Recent financial straits left me with a greater appreciation for money than any attempts Maud had made to drum my good fortune into my skull, but I lacked the mercenary aptitude that defined the High Society. I must have been absent the day they handed out killer instincts in necromancy school.
Don’t get me wrong—I wanted a career that could pay my bills. I wanted fair compensation for the work I would one day do. I wanted to earn a fraction of the recognition Maud had for her skills. But what good were these gifts if friends in need couldn’t benefit from them?
Midas toned down the last portion of our lesson. Unlike Taz, who had focused on us venting our aggression on each other, he was into this whole healthy-living deal. He ran. For fun. Worse. He expected me to lace up and go with him.
Last week, he convinced me to invest in an elliptical and a set of weights for the room he was determined to convert into a home gym. So far, Woolly wasn’t on board with us converting the adjoining room into a dojoesque space for sparring, but that had been prior to the Wedgwood’s untimely death.
“Good workout.” Midas tossed me a towel then mopped his face with his own. “We’ll push harder tomorrow.”
A soft thud drew our attention to the carriage house, the swish of curtains hinting at an eavesdropper.
“Your friend smells wrong.” Nostrils flared, he drew in Amelie’s scent. “The beast is tempted by her.”
“The beast?” I looked back at him. “Your beast? You? When you shift?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “It’s in our nature to put down injured or sick prey.”
A twang in my heart had me moistening my lips, afraid of what his judgment meant for her chances of recovery.
“Amelie is a good person.” I twisted the towel in my hands. “She’s made some not-so-great choices, but she’ll get better.”
Pinpricks of red flamed to life in his eyes. “I hope you’re right, for her sake.”
I kicked up my chin. “Are you or the pack a threat to her?”
The question occupied him for a moment. “Can she leave the carriage house?”
“No.”
He shook a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. “Then no.”
“Good.” I accepted the towel from him to toss in the washer. “I’ll warn her to keep the door closed.”
And by I, I meant Linus, who was acting as our intermediary. Childish? Probably. Necessary? Definitely.
Thirty days wasn’t enough to ease the ache in my heart. The Pritchards had done too much damage for me to heal so quickly. Two legs of our tripod had been kicked out from under me, and it was tough balancing alone. Without Linus shoring me up, I would have fallen. I don’t want to think about how far.
“That’s wise.” Warmth broke through the usual conflict in his demeanor. “Lethe is pregnant. Hood and I will both be less able to control our impulses while our animalistic sides reign.”
Misery twined through me at how close Hood had come to never knowing his child. “She didn’t tell me.”
“She worried you would try to send us back to Atlanta.” He shifted his weight onto his back foot. “You were attacked at the Faraday on our watch. Protecting you is a matter of duty. Our honor, as a pack, is at stake for what happened to you.”
“Associating with me puts you all in danger.” Last night was a fresh and sobering reminder of that fact. “I can hire security. You don’t have to put yourselves at risk.” I didn’t want more blood on my hands. “At least consider Lethe and the baby.”
“We are,” he assured me. “The child will be born into a proud and healthy pack.” His stance softened. “This is what we do. This is who we are. We were bred for violence, born for vengeance. We live with the taste of blood in our mouths, and we’re always hungry for more.”
Remembering how Hood had taken down the woman outside the Faraday, it all made a bit more sense why an uncommon species with ties to the fae would choose that life. “That’s why you’re in security.”
“Among other things.” He ducked his head then squinted up at me. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.” It occurred to me that I had agreed too quickly, but we were talking about the guy’s family, who I was responsible for until they decided their debt was paid. “What do you need?”
“Act surprised when Lethe makes her announcement,” he said, sheepish. “I didn’t want to steal her thunder but…”
“You didn’t want me to burst her bubble either.” And that’s exactly what I would have done by saying Congratulations, now pack your bags. You’ve won a one-way ticket back to Atlanta. “I’ll put my acting skills to good use if you let me host the baby shower. You guys don’t have pack in the area, as far as I know, and Lethe deserves all the frills.”
Truthfully, it was a selfish offer. Without my job, I had nothing but lessons on my hands. This might help keep me sane by giving me an excuse to be social.
“I’ll ask her.” A true smile blossomed, and I might have staggered back from the wattage if I hadn’t glimpsed its potential in the dozen previous half-smiles he had awarded me. “After she breaks the news.”
“Deal.” I did an internal happy dance. Woolly would go nuts. Kids and parties were two of her favorite things. “I’m hoping she’ll co-plan with me. I have no clue what to buy a baby, let alone a baby gwyllgi.”
Linus must have gone in at some point since he appeared at my shoulder holding a pink smoothie with my name on it. He passed it over then looked to Midas. “Will you join us for breakfast?”
Midas eyed the drink with about as much enthusiasm as a toddler handed a carrot stick. “No thanks.”
Waving, he set off at a jog toward the privacy of the woods to complete his change and begin his shift.
A sniff of the drink only hinted at strawberries and maybe a banana or two. “What’s in this one?”
We took the stairs into the kitchen, and I claimed a stool at the counter while he stood by the sink.
“A different vintage,” was all he said before he started hand-washing dishes to soothe his nerves.
Thankfully, that meant he missed the face I made at his back. A different vintage meant he had sourced another donor to test his hypothesis that what the stalkerpire confessed was the truth. That the term goddess-touched put window-dressing on the fact I was a hybrid: half necromancer on my maternal side and half vampire on my paternal side.
Meaning the reason why I remained anemic despite his best efforts to fatten me up might be due to the lack of a certain something from my diet that Maud must have been slipping me for years.
A goddess-touched necromancer might be nothing more than the offspring of a vampire and a necromancer. The Marchands might not be genetically disposed to producing hybrids so much as they bred for that goal.
The Grande Dame would blow a fuse when she found out about the Marchand family secret, if Linus hadn’t already told her. Me? I planned on keeping my mouth shut until she pried the confession out of me. As much as I wanted the mysteries of my life solved, I refused to help her leash me.
Bracing for the tang of old pennies in my mouth, I sipped a little and then a bit more. A metallic ribbon underscored the fruit mixture, but I liked the bite. “This isn’t half bad.” I swished it around and decided I could live off this cocktail if it did the job. “Do I want to know?”
A burst of pink colored his cheeks when he glanced at me, highlighting the freckles dotting his fair skin.
Understanding dawned, and I choked on the smoothie. “You?”
“I can’t be certain without access to Maud’s personal library, but I suspect she used me as your donor.” He rubbed the base of his neck as he turned and braced his hip against the sink. “She taught me how to draw blood for my ink, and I kept raw samples here, in the lab, for her use. Her more sensitive work for the Society required a control sample—hers. I always assumed she was using mine to verify her findings.”
“Until you did the math on the volume you were donating times the growing half-vampire living under her roof.” The glass slid from my hand and thunked on the marble. “You fed me all those years?”
“I don’t have proof,” he said to soften the blow. “I’ve been researching the feeding preferences of vampires at the Lyceum. It’s not uncommon for a made vampire who pairs with a human to starve itself to death after their partner dies. They grow used to the flavor. Nothing else satisfies. They either retrain their palate, or they wither.”
Maud strikes again.
What had she been thinking? Using him like that? Her own nephew, reduced to a blood bag.
As much as I wanted to uncover the truth about her death and my incarceration, I found it easier and easier to put off asking the wrong questions of the right people. Each revelation shattered a bit more of the foundation of my childhood and left me feeling like I had never really known her.
“What’s the fix?” I shoved away the glass. “How do the other vamps avoid donor addiction?”