In the Contagion of Blood Read online

  “I slept just fine,” I said.

  Getting into the lab was a little harder than I thought it would be. We had to show all sorts of ID, special permissions, and badges. Well at least Helene and I did. The gargoyles run a tight ship, but it was nothing Turin couldn’t seem to find his way around. He simply leaned over and smiled at the security guard and asked, “Do you need me to get my papers out?”

  “No, you’re fine,” she said, with an emphasis on “fine.” I couldn’t stop the scoff that came out of my mouth. Really? Apparently, that shit works on female gargoyles as well as anyone, but his charm didn’t stop her from giving Helene and I a look of disdain when she realized we were blood mages.

  “Can we just see the corpse?” I asked, my voice coming out a little rougher than I had intended.

  She got my not-so-subtle hint. “I’ll notify the Inspector you are here.”

  “Back home, I have my own lab,” I muttered. No such luck here. We’re in an annex of some tiny judicial station. There’s a chance the corpse wasn’t even put in chillers last night. I was a complete idiot for not going with them and taking care of business.

  My skin grew hot and I closed my eyes, trying to calm myself. I imagined ice cold water rushing over me. The last thing in the world I needed was to think of Turin’s fingers touching my skin, his lips pressing against every crevice of my body.

  Inspector Bernard came out of some apparently smoke-filled back room, because he stank. Helene wrinkled her nose, but I gave a slight jerk of my head to show her to not do that. Gargoyles were more than easily offended. They’d worked hard to maintain their place in our society. They cared a lot more about what other people thought than the blood mages did. The last thing we needed was to show him any disrespect.

  The Inspector tucked his shirt in, as if he just woke up from a nap. He even gave a mighty yawn as he pulled the door open and motioned us through.

  “The shifters have rules about when to bury their dead,” he said. “We have one hour before we have to, by law, allow them to take the body away. You should’ve gotten here earlier.”

  “That soon?” I asked.

  “We didn’t realize he was from out of our sector,” the Inspector said. “He’s direct from the Wildelands. Shifters around here don’t follow the traditional ways. But this one, his family showed up this morning to claim the body. I had to deal with a pack of angry lions. Barely bought you this hour, so get in there.”

  “Message received,” I muttered.

  To my surprise Turin took a step closer to me. Like I needed some sort of protection from a gargoyle. Still I couldn’t say it didn’t give me a little thrill, feeling his desire to protect me. Or maybe it was just some freaky vampire dominance thing. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know many vampires. Let’s be real, I didn’t know any at all.

  I felt Helene’s eyes on me again. When I glanced at her, her eyebrows raised, but I stared directly into her eyes daring her to ask some stupid question. That girl had some uncanny sense of perception. More than just an ordinary blood mage. I was going to have to stay on my toes so she wouldn’t find out about last night.

  Good Lord, I had to stop thinking about it.

  I shook my head, maybe a little too obviously. When I opened my eyes Helene, Turin, and Inspector Bernard were all staring at me.

  “Well, come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I started walking down the hall until the Inspector cleared his throat.

  “It’s this way,” he bowed his head slightly to the left.

  “Thank you,” I clipped the two words out as I turned on my heel and marched the other direction.

  To my surprise the lab wasn’t half bad. It had white sterile metal counters and a wealth of basic equipment needed for an autopsy. Only, blood mages did things a little differently.

  The body was waiting for us, pale, stiff, and naked on the table. Not even covered with a sheet. Back home we would’ve covered him. But I guess here, they didn’t really care. And, really, what did it matter. The guy was dead. His modesty flew out the window with his last breath.

  #eight

  I’d have sunk to a squatting position to catch my breath, but my legs were frozen stiff. There was a freaking demon in my room. I reached for the dagger that rested in the scabbard on my hip. When I asked the Inspector to leave the room, there was no objection. I turned to Turin and was about to ask him the same thing, but as our eyes connected he just raised a single eyebrow. I realized immediately there was no point in asking him. He wasn’t going to leave no matter what.

  Helene looked from him to me and back to him. “Why are you letting him stay?”

  “Blood mage rituals must only be kept from those with blood in them,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “He’s a vampire.”

  But the truth was that my greater fear was if I asked him to leave and he didn’t want to, he would bring up last night in front of my niece. I had worked really hard to raise her in a way that my sister would’ve been proud. The last thing I wanted to teach her was that one-night stands were a good thing. No good ever came of them. Only entangled emotions, wasted time, and potentially disease.

  No.

  The last thing she needed to know was that I’d been overcome by some deep dark power some…thing and had had a one-night stand. With a vampire, all things.

  “Just stand back there in the corner.” I gestured behind me to the farthest corner of the room, although that wasn’t very far away because the room was quite small. Turin gave a slight bow and moved away.

  “You know, there are rumors that blood mage spells come from the dark fae,” he said.

  “You want to know what my father always said about rumors?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “That believing them was like looking for a horse in a pile of horse shit.”

  “Oh yeah!” Helene burst out laughing, which seemed a bit odd standing in front of a gruesome corpse. “He would totally say that!”

  “Can we get this done?” I asked. “We don’t really have that much time left,” I nodded to the door where we all knew the Inspector was waiting, and he was undoubtedly nervous. Nobody messed with shifters, especially shifters from the Wildelands.

  Helene composed herself, nodded, and raised her finger pointing at the light and dimmed it. Turin’s eyes flickered upwards, but he said nothing. He seemed ot have accepted his position as a voyeur and not a participant.

  I took a deep breath and turned my attention away from him. I needed all of my focus and presence and essence to be on the body in front of me. The only way to study his blood was to be focused and open to the story it would tell me. I drew my Athame out of the engraved leather holster on my belt. Its ruby-red jewel shone even in the dim light. I mumbled the spell beneath my breath so, even with Turin’s vampire hearing, my sacred creed would be undetectable.

  “Blood of my mothers. Blood of my fathers. Show me the truth of the blood of all. Connect me to this one whose blood has seen all.”

  Wrists give just the right amount of blood this type of magic. I slid the blade up my wrist, barely wincing at the familiar sting. I could feel Turin’s energy expand into the room, craving my blood. But still, not even a vampire would take a blood mage’s blood. It was certain death. The only place blood mage’s blood survived was inside our own bodies. But we could sacrifice it for connection. As my wrist bled, I drew my finger up my forearm and then slowly walked around the entire circumference of the corpse, drawing a line of blood steadily and clearly onto the stainless-steel table where it lay. I murmured the same spell over and over again.

  Finally, I brought the blood back around to where I first started, and the hot plasma connected, forming a thick red line all around the shifter. As the circle closed, it started to glow bright red and tendrils of blood reached out towards the corpse, like rays around the body. I placed the tip of my athame, still dripping with my blood, into the shifter’s navel. I pulled up sharply and sliced up his chest, letting the magic eas
ily force apart the bone, cartilage, and muscle. When I reached the heart, I plunged the blade through to see the black, sludge-like blood ooze out and into the chest cavity.

  The spell wafted, glyphs red and glowing, up from the circle of blood. Like tentacles, it reached out and started to lap at the stagnant blood coagulating inside the torso. And as the fingers of my blood reached out to lick and taste the black sludge, the blood of the dead shifter, my body stiffened and my arms snapped back to my sides, frozen to my body. I could feel the cuts on my wrist heal, as if they were never there. And through my blood on the table, I could feel and sense everything it was feeling and touching, until it began to rise off the table and into the air.

  The blood flowed upwards then dissipated like a mist above the shifter. It pulled the black blood upwards and they blended into a thick, dark clot. It rose to me and slowly I inhaled, deeply and completely, the dark red cloud that was my blood mixed with the shifter’s.

  I breathed in several times until every particle of my blood had been drawn back into my body and every particle of his blood was absorbed.

  The room grew dark and fuzzy as images flashed before me.

  My mouth was filled with the taste of dirt. The scent of mold and mildew, of wet, black shadows. I gasped out prayers, almost suffocating as my limbs, tired and aching, flailed around me. I fell deep, but now I was there, in the stone. I was with her.

  Where she had called me.

  I fell limply to me knees, gasping for air

  “Theía Ophelia!” Helene exclaimed as her hand landed solidly on my back.

  I had done this magic many times before, but I balled my fists tight against my knees. The power and energy rippling through my body was something I could not fathom.

  My eyes opened wide as I took in the black smeared body of the shifter and started dictating everything I now knew. Words fell like rain out of my mouth as I leaned on the metal table. There were dates, times, rock types, soil types and finally the location. “New Forest.”

  “What the hell was that?” Turin was staring at me.

  “Blood magic,” Helene said, propping me up with her arm. But I shook her off and steadied myself on my feet.

  “I understand that,” Turin said. “But in all the studies I’ve done a blood magic I have never seen anything like that. “Even the archaic magic.”

  “My father studied with humans,” I said softly. “He learned from them the composites of the blood and he began to understand all the things we could tell from it. He said they could tell things from particles of the human body like what the person has touched recently, where they’ve been, down to incredibly specific details.”

  “Incredible,” Turin murmured.

  “My father thought there was magic we could do that would go even deeper than what humans are capable of. We could discover things about corpses and about disease if we were willing to take it into our own bodies.”

  “Like you just did.” Turin shook his head. “You must have an encyclopedia of knowledge inside you.”

  “The magic tells me everything I need to know, even when I don’t know it. The spell is bound to an encyclopedia of knowledge, though, not me. I am simply the body through which it is transformed and the mouth through which it is understood. The magic does all the work.”

  “That can’t possibly be the only truth,” Turin said. “You need great strength to do what you just did. To absorb the fetid blood of a corpse…”

  And to my surprise he was not looking at me with disgust. He was looking at me with respect and surprise. Something I really would not have expected to see from anybody after watching one of our blood magic rituals.

  My skin went hot again and I looked down at my hand. This is not the time to get sappy over some vampire just because it wasn’t completely disgusted by me.

  “Helene, what are the details?” I asked.

  “He dug down into the dirt, drawn there by a force, or a voice or something calling inside of him. They called him from a long way away. He dug with his bare hands into the ground until he struck the rock. And as he later pressed up against the stone, something entered him. He then went to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and pulled the altar with the mark up.”

  “And he inflicted the curse of the necromancer on himself. Why in the red mother’s name would he do that?”

  “She waits in the dark, without body or blood. She seeks a soul willing. She seeks a soul able. To dig in the remnants. To rise to the steeple. To die for their sins. So, she may rise for her people.” Turin’s voice was low in the dimly lit room.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “Now is hardly the time for nursery rhymes.”

  “It’s not a nursery rhyme,” Turin said. “It’s a song. From medieval times, a song rarely written down, bit it survived. It speaks of the rise of Morgan Le Fae.”

  “Morgan Le Fae is a myth,” I said. “Whatever happened to that shifter is a disease undoubtedly caused by digging around in some crypt. What we need to do is find the crypt, get a sample, and figure out a way to stop this disease before it infects more shifters.”

  #nine

  I knew exactly where we were going. I could see it in the dead shifter’s eyes. And his blood is inside me making me sick and a little doubled over, but it is calling me forward in the same way he was called. I try to squash the discomfort, but it’s exacerbated by my fear. The lion met with a painful end.

  “Are you okay?” Helene asked as we got in Turin’s Aston Martin.

  “Yes, I’m fine. You always know I get a little queasy after these things. We all do.”

  “Your skin is kind of gray,” she said.

  I ran my hands along my cheek and it wasn’t simply gray, it had become quite leathery and rough. I have never taken in that much blood before, much less that diseased. Even the thought was somewhat making me sick, even though the consumption of blood essence usually made me strong.

  “I will be fine,” I said, but I stumbled a little bit while stepping into the car and it was only Turin’s fast reflexes that caught me from slamming my face against the glass window.

  “Do you know how far we’re going?” Concern flickered across his face.

  “I’m not sure. I know it’s that direction. Out in the forest.”

  It eventually took us over an hour to find the spot. We never even went on the main roads, just some backroads from Glastonbury, through pastoral fields, resplendent with cows, but something in the blood inside me, the essence of the shifter’s blood, was giving me stomachaches. And yet, I felt so good. So, alive. Which seemed strange, considering it was the blood of a dead beast inside me. Every five minutes or so a cold wave passed over me, and my teeth with suddenly chatter. After the first couple of times, I could tell when it was about to happen and I would clamp my jaw down tightly so they would not sense it happening.

  Turin and Helene looked at me a little oddly as I sank down into the red leather seats of the Aston Martin, clutching my arms around me.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Helene said.

  “We have to go to the tomb,” I said. “I am sure of it.”

  Turin’s eyes were bright as he watched the road and his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He had been looking for Morgan Le Fae for a lifetime. He was going to be sorely disappointed. We were going to a place of disease and death. Not a place of dark fae princesses rising out of the earth.

  “There,” I said, pointing to a small dirt track that led off the one-lane road we were on. “That’s where it is.”

  I wasn’t sure it was the right road to drive an Aston Martin on, but Turin didn’t seem to care. He gunned the engine and hit the dirt track without a second thought.

  We jolted and bumped forward, following the weaving path up and down the low rise of the forest, until we were nestled in the dark shadows of the deep woods.

  “Stop!” I said, and the voice that came out of me was hardly recognizable. But it was mine.

  The pain in
my stomach was suddenly gone, and I stood up, my body alive with feral excitement. Almost as if the shifter still lived within me and I was feeling the shadow of his excitement when he had first discovered this place.

  I pulled Helene out of the car and along the edge of the trees until we came upon a trail that looked like nothing more than a deer path. But it was the right path. It went over three small rises, through a creek, and then finally up to a clearing, which wasn’t much of a clearing at all. It was covered in an overgrowth of trees and bushes. There were mounds of tall grass and Victorian ferns everywhere. The light seeping through the trees cast heavy shadows on the ground. A big gaping hole, like a wound in gut of the earth was laid bare and raw before us.

  “The tomb of Morgan Le Fae,” Turin whispered, as if he was in a cathedral.

  “We need samples,” I said to Helene, watching as she pulled her gloves out and handed me a pair. “Do not go in there,” I said to Helene and Turin. “I understand you can survive many things, but we are here for a reason and you must let me do my job.”

  I descended with a single leap into the bottom of the tomb and the rotten stench wafted over me. I inhaled sharply but tried to hold my breath as I began collecting black sludge that crusted the side of the tomb and decrepit gray moss that clung to the stone. Turin was next to me in seconds, moving to the far end of the pit.

  “A doorway,” he said, his voice low. I step closer, drawn to the pulsating energy rising from the door. “Look, you can see it here.” His fingers traced a line etched deeply in the stone. It was a black diamond with the two upper lines extended and turning back on each other. “The mark of Morgan Le Fae.”

  “And there,” I pointed juts below, the three lines with the diagonal line. “A necromancer. They are trying to bring her back to life.”

  “I disagree,” Turin said. “I think she is trying to bring herself back to life.”

  A short scream rose from the top edge of the pit as Helene tumbled over the side. Her skull cracked resoundingly against the stone at my feet.