Crowned by Blood, page 2
part #3 of Daughter of Cain Series
“He needs to be secured,” Vane agrees.
“So?” Draven’s dismissive tone is clearly grating on my brother, who growls under his breath. “We’ve got the grimoire that the village peasants were hiding, but Evie is the only person who can read it. She has what she needs to kill Cain, and he lost her!”
As if on cue, Gideon lets out a low groan. I turn, just in time to see the blur of Vane pushing through the gap in the seats and barrelling down to the other end of the van.
I hit the brakes right as the snarling starts.
“He needs blood,” Frost growls.
Vane—currently pinning Gid to the floor by his throat—agrees, “Hurry! He’s strong!”
Finn snatches three bags from the fridge and hands them to Draven, who grabs them with one hand. He’s using the other to help Vane and Frost restrain the writhing, hissing alpha between them.
A bag is thrust beneath Gid’s brand new set of double fangs, but it's only once he’s drained two more that he starts to settle. Drinking consumes all of his attention, and when the blood runs dry, a new bag is quickly supplied.
It’s a good job the van has an emergency stockpile, because Gideon gets through another eight bags before his drinking starts to slow and a sliver of rationality returns to his eyes.
“Evelyn,” he mutters, fangs still stuck into the blood bag.
Frost and Vane share a look.
“How are you feeling?” My brother asks.
“Thirsty?” Gid mutters, but his eyes are glazing over.
Before he can blink, Frost has another bag wedged inside his mouth.
“He’ll be useless until the initial thirst wears off,” Draven complains. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t drain the omega to death before the week’s end.”
“Gideon, I need you to tell me what happened,” Frost continues, ignoring him. “We found Immy’s body.”
“She turned herself,” Gideon mutters, confirming Vane’s theory. “Then she…” His hands touch his chest, then his eyes meet Frost’s, a slow horror dawning in his expression. “Ghoul?”
Frost looks away. “And vampire,” he confirms, passing Gid yet another bag. “We had no choice.”
The noise that escapes his throat as he drains the bag dry is one of pure and utter misery.
CHAPTER TWO
EVELYN
The blood they’re forcing into my mouth tastes like dirt. It comes back up as soon as it goes down, painting the people feeding me in red. It doesn’t matter what type: lycan, vampire, mortal… Nothing will stay in my gut for more than a few moments before my body rejects it.
My mind is heavy with the fog of silver. I can barely think past the painful gash in my chest where Gideon’s bond has been ripped away.
“Sire, she’s not responding to the blood.”
“She’s going into stasis.”
“The silver has weakened her. The death of her thrall on top of that might’ve been too much for her to handle.”
I know my skin is burning. I’m aware that I’m back in the coffin and far away from my other thralls. But it all seems so distant.
I’m drifting. Cut loose by the loss of a bond which was only recently completed.
The pain is familiar, yet a thousand times worse than ever before. When I lost Frost, he was a human. The bond that snapped into place between Gideon and me in his final moments was the truest of thrall bonds, meant to last an immortal lifetime.
Not mere minutes.
“Your blood isn’t working, sire—”
“Then drain her. If she thinks this defiance will save her friends, she is sadly mistaken!”
Their voices are urgent. Angry. They’re also getting dimmer. Slowly but surely, I’m slipping away, carving out a place in the recesses of my mind where the pain can’t hurt me. The bleakness is peaceful. Safe.
CHAPTER THREE
FINLEY
Gideon is back, except he’s not.
The controlled, stoic alpha I love is gone, replaced by an unpredictable and violent stranger. I’m under strict orders to stay away. So now, I’m on the other side of the plane, pretending to work as I sneak glances at him.
He’s slumped in his seat, nursing a blood bag with about seven more piled high beside him—just in case. Turning requires an increased blood intake for at least the first week while the body adapts to the changes—I know that. But the facts don’t make the reality any less alarming.
Every few minutes, he lunges for a new bag—or one of us, whichever is closest. So far, he’s managed to catch both Silas and Frost unaware. Both are now healing chunks of missing skin, because Gid isn’t just a vampire—he’s a flesh-eating ghoul. Thank God his venom hasn’t come in yet, or Silas would be turning, and we don’t have any of Evie’s blood left.
My instincts are still reeling from the loss of him. His death severed the pack bond, and although I want to bare my neck to his bite and drag him back into the pack more than I want to take my next breath. I can’t do that if I can’t get close to him.
Of course, Gideon’s pack bond isn’t the only thing which was severed.
His death shattered his thrall bond to Evie; a tether far stronger and more intimate than the one we shared as a pack. Ever since then, she’s been in so much pain I can barely think past it. Yet, in the last hour, that has started to abate, slowly replaced with something worse.
Nothingness.
Now, as our plane starts its final descent back to New York, my own thrall bond with her is shutting down.
“Stasis,” I mutter, looking up from the records I’ve been searching. “It’s got to be.”
“Stasis only happens when vampires have received a near fatal wound and have no blood to heal,” Frost counters. “This has to be Cain’s doing.”
I don’t argue, but my silent disagreement hangs heavy in the air as the plane judders and shakes, then hits the tarmac and rapidly begins to decelerate.
The landing is all the distraction I need to sneak another glance at Gideon. I don’t need a thrall bond to know that he’s just as broken as Evie is. When he’s not consumed by thirst and hunger, his face is so blank it’s painful. His lips are pursed, and his eyes are bloodshot.
I’ve seen ruined men before, but this is my alpha, so it’s a thousand times harder to take in.
“She’s numb,” Vane mutters, echoing my discomfort. “It’s not right.”
Frost unbuckles himself and strides over to the door, throwing it open before the plane has even rolled to a stop. The tiny private airstrip we’ve chosen is so remote that the forest has begun to creep in around it, but there are two black cars waiting for us with their doors open and the keys in the ignition.
I type out a quick thanks to the leader of the resistance cell responsible, then start the process of packing up my gear. A red-eyed and tired Draven grumbles as he grabs a heavy black coat with a deep hood to protect himself from the sun’s rays, then sprints across the gap at speed, still carrying that ancient book.
“Gid, you should…”
I look over my shoulder to see what’s going on just in time to see Gideon ignore the coat Silas is offering and stride casually out into the sun.
A cry of alarm freezes in my throat and escapes as a half-squeak of protest. I’m not the only one. Silas has his arms outstretched, ready to tug our alpha back inside at a moment’s notice.
But he doesn’t burst into flames.
“That was reckless,” Vane scolds.
Gid turns, his golden skin glowing in the sunlight, and rolls his eyes. “If you’d seen what became of Imogen, you’d know exactly how easy it is to tell a failed ghoul hybrid from a real one. The fact that I can think rationally—” He pauses, ripping into the blood bag in his hand with a grimace. “How long does this last?” he asks Frost, his words mangled by the mouthful of plastic.
“The urge to drain everyone you meet?” Frost shrugs. “A few weeks. Maybe less for you. You’re already more coherent than I was.”
“No. This… the thrall bond…” His eyes close as he says the words, and the corners of his mouth turn down in a grimace as he grinds the heel of his hand into his breastbone.
Frost snorts. “Oh. The agonising deadness in your chest? That doesn’t go away. Ever. I lived with it until she made me her thrall a second time.”
My heart pangs with sympathy for the ghoul. This second-hand experience of how badly Gid’s broken bond is hurting Evie is painful enough. If Frost lived for centuries with even a sliver of the emptiness she’s feeling, then he was truly suffering a living hell.
Gideon might even feel worse, given he’s lost his pack ties as well. His lycan side must be going mad.
“We’ll get her back,” I swear. “You’ll be part of the pack and her thrall again before you know it.”
“I’m glad you’re all enjoying the sun,” Draven shouts from within the car, clearly fed up with waiting. “But don’t you think you should get your asses moving if we plan on saving her?”
Taking his point, I resume winding my cables back into the trunk. A second later, Silas joins me and starts carrying the equipment out piece by piece. The two of us work in tandem, picking up the extra jobs that Vane and Frost can’t do because they’re too busy keeping watch on Gideon.
“Where are we going?” I ask, as I finally climb into the car with Silas.
Draven is asleep in the corner, and I’m surprised he managed to wake up at all, given that it’s almost noon. The other two have taken Gideon in the second car, and once again, they weren’t even subtle about keeping him as far from me as possible.
I may be an omega, but I’m not completely defenceless.
Although… if Gideon’s bite feels as good as Evie’s…
Shaking myself, I put all thoughts of fangs and biting from my mind and nudge Silas, who seems to have spaced instead of answering me.
“Huh? Oh, where are we going?” he shrugs. “I’m following Frost.” He leans over and flicks on the receiver. “Where are we going, guys?”
“Echo Lake,” Vane growls. “They have agreed to supply us with a reinforced room—”
“Let’s call a cell a cell,” Gideon interjects, and I bite my lip.
“You’re not stable,” Vane retorts. “We can’t focus on finding Evie if we have to worry about you getting hangry and slaughtering everyone around you.”
The dark silence that echoes from the other car is so oppressive that I reach across and flick the receiver off. Then, with a sigh of resignation, I slouch in my seat and let my head fall against the tinted window.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” I whisper, more to my own reflection than anything.
“Keep going,” Silas replies, determination steeling his tone. “Gid’s fucking strong. This won’t keep him down. Evie will be back with us before we know it—”
“We have no way to get her out,” I retort. “All of our inside people are gone. Morwenna and Mia have gone to ground, and our agents say Cain isn’t letting any lycans near Evie. He barely seems to trust his own vampires around her.”
“We’ll find a way.”
I wish I had his faith.
“We have all the pieces,” Silas continues. “All we need is her, that book, and some time, then Cain is finished. Evie won’t let him keep her locked up. If we don’t find a way in, she’ll find a way out.”
I shake my head, but he’s too busy focusing on the road to notice. He’s lucky. Like Frost, his bond with Evie is still limited enough that he can’t feel what’s going on with our girl. Evie’s not fighting her way out of anywhere.
She’s not fighting at all.
I keep reaching for her, sending reassurance, but she recoils from each touch. The more she does that, the worse my instinct takes it. Emotional rejection… she can’t understand what it does to me.
She’s not to blame. I know she’s mourning the loss of a thrall. Evie has no way of knowing Gideon is alive.
But the instinct isn’t a creature of reason. It wants to crawl down the bond and bare our neck to her until she accepts the comfort we’re trying to provide.
A barely audible whine escapes me, the sound reedy and thin, but Silas goes rigid just the same.
“Finn,” he begins, trailing off. “Believe me, omega. This will all be fine.”
Breathing in his scent, I nod once.
Evie has escaped Cain twice before. Three times is nothing.
The journey is long, and the road gets worse as we get closer to the pack territory. I’m not surprised, but at the same time, I can’t help but think this looks worse than it did when we were here a few months ago.
When a lycan streaks alongside the car in a blur of brown fur and grizzled features, my hand clenches on the door handle.
“It’s just a patrol,” Silas murmurs, sensing my unease.
“They didn’t use to patrol this far out,” I reply.
Vane pulls in ahead of us, leaving a respectful distance between our cars and the pack houses, and I watch as Frost exits the vehicle, shutting the other two inside.
Two lycans in shifted form lope out of the forest to meet him before shifting back, revealing Alpha Echo and one of his betas. I strain to read their lips as they converse for a second, and I almost debate lowering the window for a second before I remember what a bad idea that is.
If the tension between the two packs is already high, then adding myself into the mix will just make my pack more defensive. When Vane exits the car a second later, followed closely by Gideon, I stiffen.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
Silas, for once apparently more patient than I am, murmurs, “Wait.”
Gideon says a few words, then pulls the corner of his mouth back, exposing a new set of double fangs that he didn’t possess before he was turned.
Are they telling Echo everything? That’s a huge leap of trust.
I grimace as Gid’s nostrils flare, and Vane stiffens, clutching our alpha’s arm in warning. Gid shrugs him off and takes a blood bag out of his pocket. When he sinks his fangs into it, everyone relaxes.
“I hate being left out like this,” I grumble.
Fortunately, Frost wraps the discussion up pretty quickly after that. I watch with curiosity as the rest of my pack gets back into their car and our convoy resumes, following Echo and his beta down the road.
I almost expect us to return to the same guest cabin we were in last time, but we don’t. Instead, Echo leads us past his pack’s namesake lake, and up to the main pack house built overlooking the bank. The giant log cabin blends seamlessly into the towering forest of pines around it, and people mill around.
Why are we being brought into the heart of the pack’s territory?
Vane pulls up, and Silas comes alongside their car, but we still don’t leave until Frost gets out and gives the signal. The second he gestures us out, I shove the door open and make my way around to where Gideon is standing.
The moment I’m within touching distance, he takes a step back. At the same time, I catch a hint of the scent of another omega. It’s old, and faint, but still there.
There’s a reason omegas are the heart of the pack, and that we typically refuse to share our packs with other omegas. We’re a possessive bunch. Just thinking about my unclaimed alpha walking into a building with another omega sets my teeth on edge.
God, this shouldn’t be a thing. That other omega is probably a wonderful person, yet my instinct has already decided that they’re the enemy and out to claim my pack for their own.
My next low-pitched whine escapes and causes everyone within earshot to stiffen.
“Sorry,” I mutter, rubbing the back of my neck.
Gid’s hands fist by his sides, and he almost shakes.
“Finn,” he mutters, tone haunted. “This won’t last.”
“I need you back in the pack,” I whisper. “I can’t… I can’t function.”
Caught between Evie’s pain and my own crippling, irrational sense of loss, I can barely think straight. I’m a mess of instinct and nerves, and I hate it.
Perhaps that’s why I fall to my knees in front of him and bare my neck.
“Please, alpha,” I beg, shamelessly. “Please.”
“Finley,” Gideon’s voice is clipped as he jerks back. “I’m not… safe.”
“I don’t care. I’m Evie’s thrall. I can’t be drained to death. Please. Gid.”
I don’t actually know if being Evie’s thrall protects me from being drained to death by other vampires, but I’ll take my chances.
“We’ve got him,” Vane says, but his voice barely penetrates the fog of rejection slowly taking over my brain.
Gid takes another step back and something inside my chest breaks. Does he not want the pack bond back?
My neck is starting to ache, and my eyes burn behind my glasses. I shut them, using my eyelids to hold back the flood threatening to escape.
The slightest brush against my collarbone makes me stiffen. A second later, I look beyond my own misery and discover Gid’s scent surrounding me. It’s different, but the underlying notes of him—of alpha—are still there underneath the new darker overtones of death.
He doesn’t bite down. Doesn’t claim the submission I’m offering, and I bite the insides of my cheeks to hold back a second whine.
Then it’s there; the pain I’m expecting is so sweet it’s almost freeing. Our pack bond snaps back into place, calming my instinct with all the warmth and comfort of a weighted blanket. I have an alpha once more. My pack is complete again.
But then something I’m not expecting hits me.
Gideon’s venom.
“Shit,” I moan as the first drops hit my system.
Suddenly my jeans are too tight. My dick is trapped, uncomfortably so. My skin prickles with awareness at the same time that my body relaxes in welcome. Gid releases a rough growl, but he’s ripped away before he can take more, leaving me cold and aching.
Snarls fill the space around me, but I couldn’t care less, because for the first time since Gideon’s death, my instinct has quietened to manageable levels. When I look up, Gid is being held back by Vane and Silas, and my blood is still dripping from his mouth. His eyes are wide, pupils blown, and I’d have to be blind to ignore the erection tenting his grey sweatpants.
