Blood Deep (Blackthorn Book 4) (35 page)

J
essie didn’t wake
up cold like she usually felt, coming around on the unforgiving concrete floor. Instead she woke feeling enveloped by warmth. There was something firm yet comforting beneath her head, and her hand didn’t feel like her own, her fingers prised apart by something.

She instinctively flexed her bound fingers to realise they were interlaced with another’s. As she tilted her head to look up, Eden raised his head from resting on the back of the sofa, so his gaze could meet hers.

A split second later she realised her head was in his lap. She was covered in one of the throws. The room was still shrouded in candlelight. Her headache had routinely lifted now she had let out the overbearing images in her head.

She could barely remember anything of what had happened after tearing away from him, after falling to the floor. She remembered his questions. She remembered the word “angel”. She remembered thinking only of ridding herself of the pain in her head.

She glanced behind her at where the door still lay open, the secrets within now exposed.

She slammed her hand over her eyes. ‘Shit,’ she hissed quietly.

‘Busted,’ he said.

She parted her fingers to peer up at him, searching his eyes for any sign of how he felt about what he’d seen – of her. But there was no fear, no horror, no disgust in his eyes, just his thumb gently working a lock of her hair.

‘I’m afraid that trick stopped working the minute you were old enough to pull your own socks up,’ he said, peeling her fingers away to reveal her eyes fully. ‘I’m still here.’

‘You saw everything?’

‘I have to say I’ve never had
that
happen mid-session before, but hey, I’m all for new experiences.’

‘Fuck,’ she cursed quietly as she eased herself from his lap to sit side-on to him.

He rubbed the back of his neck as if the position had been awkward for him, her knowing it could sometimes take anything up to a couple of hours before she came out of the trance-induced exhaustion.

‘How long has it been?’

‘No more than an hour,’ he said, leaning his elbows on his spread thighs as he bent forward alongside her. ‘Has the pain eased?’

She nodded.

‘An angel, huh?’

She tucked her hair behind her ear so she could look at him fully. ‘Envoi,’ she corrected him. ‘Just one class of what, I suppose, you could term as angels.’

‘Your existence has never been proven, in all these decades. There’s been so much speculation about your kind, but never one that came forward to confirm or deny.’

And there were good reasons for that.
Very
good reasons.

As she looked back into his eyes, she had to ask. ‘Does it bother you? What I am?’

He exhaled tersely. He looked genuinely bewildered by the question. ‘Why would it bother me?’

She shrugged. ‘My kind carry a lot of connotations – if you believe all you read. I didn’t know if it would make you uncomfortable…with everything that’s happened between us.’

He smiled. ‘Darling, if hell exists, I’m going to be rotting there for
far
more than bedding an angel.’

She smiled back, but it was fleeting.

‘Are there more of you?’ he asked.

‘In Blackthorn?’ She shrugged. ‘Probably.’

‘You haven’t come across any others?’

She raised her eyebrows – something that should have been an answer in itself. ‘In this row?’

‘Fair point,’ he said. He frowned pensively. ‘I don’t get it. Aren’t your kind supposed to be super powerful? How can Pummel control you just from a necklace?’

She tongued the back of her teeth as she looked at the floor. She warily met his gaze again. It was time he knew more about her. Understood more about her. ‘Because it’s a punishment.’

His frown deepened. ‘For what?’

‘Disobedience is the most probable. My species might be powerful, but by our very existence we’re servants – whether to battle, to guardianship or to visions, we have a purpose. If we defy what we are, we’re punished. That necklace is the ball and chain around my ankle. My punishment is passed from human to human, only to be broken on finding one selfless enough to give me up.’

‘Then can you destroy it – the necklace?’

‘If the necklace is destroyed, I die with it.’ She glanced at the floor then back at Eden. ‘Nothing is ever that simple.’

His frown deepened. ‘So the last one who had you had your necklace? Why did he give it to Pummel? Why not give it you?’

‘Because Toby didn’t have it. He’d given it back to me decades before. One of Pummel’s men found it the night they broke in. They didn’t know what it was but the minute they handed it to Pummel, it was a lost cause. I can’t retaliate against whoever owns it. It’s like they’re surrounded in a barrier I can’t penetrate. Even to attempt it is excruciating. Like I said before, Toby told Pummel what he had to in order to save my life.’ She scraped her socked foot across the rough concrete, watching its path. ‘Some days I wish he hadn’t.’

Eden caught hold of her hand, interlacing his fingers with hers. ‘I’m glad he did.’

She met his gaze again. This time she let herself linger. ‘I’ve thought about ending it all some days. But I’m not going to let that bastard beat me, Eden. Whoever inflicted this on me – I’m not going to let them win either.’

Eden squeezed his fingers tighter into hers. ‘How did you meet this Toby?’

‘I woke up here a century and a half ago – on the floor right out there. I didn’t know where I was from or what had happened, only my name and what I am. I didn’t even know what the necklace meant at the time. All I remember was being held to my knees. I remember bright lights and chanting. I remember the necklace being wrapped around my hand.

‘Toby found me unconscious with it still there. He took it from me, not realising he was taking ownership with it. When I woke, I ran. But I only got so far. You know why. After a while, I worked it out too.

‘A few days later, I returned to him to collect it. Without hesitation, he gave it back to me. He offered me food, water, shelter. He was just a child back then. I didn’t look much older than in my late teens myself, though I knew I was. I had nowhere else to go, so I chose to stay for a while. He hid me from his parents. We became friends.

‘Once I told Toby what I was, he started researching. Not the kind of research you can find in libraries – we’re talking about records thousands of years old. He tracked them down. He spent over twenty years uncovering the truth. This was all before the regulations came into being – when people were still free to roam. That’s how we found out the necklace was a punishment. It’s also how I found out what class I was.’

‘Envoi?’

She nodded. ‘A messenger. It’s not exactly the glamorous end of the spectrum.’

‘So is that what those drawings are – a message?’

‘They’re things I see.’

‘Visions?’

She nodded. ‘My kind have no control over it. Sometimes we don’t even know who the intended recipient is. But the headaches don’t go until whatever is coming through has been passed on. I don’t have anyone
to
tell, so I draw it just to ease the pain.’

‘Is that how you got those scars?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does it scar you every time it happens?’

‘No. From what I understand, most of those scars came from the first time. But small lacerations can happen when it’s particularly intense.’

‘How often do you get these visions?’

‘Sometimes not for years.’

‘When was the last time?’

‘It started happening again a few days ago.’

‘Why?’

And that was the trickiest question of all.

He seemed to sense her reluctance and diverted – but no doubt only temporarily.

‘Does anyone else know about this?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Not even Pummel?’

‘No one. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often enough for anyone
to
know.’

‘But this is where you come to record it?’

‘When I can. When I can get out here. And when I can’t, I record it on the paper in my room. Then I try to fill in the gaps down here, but it doesn’t always work. It gets foggy quickly, like a fading dream.’

‘Looks more like a nightmare to me.’

‘And something you shouldn’t have seen.’ She turned to face him. ‘You can’t tell anyone about this.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Please, give me your word.’

There was a moment’s silence as he frowned again. ‘Jess, what is all this about?’

There was genuine concern in his eyes. She could have so easily offloaded to him, but what was routine and habit was hard to break. And he would know things – things no human should know; a secret that wasn’t hers to disclose.

‘Jessie,’ he said, the look in his eyes as much about wanting to release her from the burden as to uncover it for himself. ‘Talk to me.’

She tried to release her hand from his but he tightened his grip.

‘Jessie,’ he said again, his tone softer but with a more insistent edge. ‘I’m not just going to be able to forget what I saw. You can trust me – you know you can. If you want my word, I’m giving it to you. Is it a message?’

She stared deep into his dark eyes, eyes that were even darker in the candlelight. And as he kept a grip on her hand, she knew she did trust him. She needed to trust someone. ‘Yes.’

‘Of a pending disaster?’

‘Of The Latent Prophecy.’

‘The what?’

‘You’ve heard of the prophecy. Everyone’s heard of the prophecy.’

He frowned then raised his eyebrows slightly. ‘The
vampire
prophecy?’

‘If you’re coming from the vampire perspective, then yes. But it’s more generic than that.’

‘You’re telling me,’ he said, his outstretched arm pointing back towards the room. ‘That you have the vampire prophecy drawn all over that room? That
that’s
what’s going to happen?’

‘It’s called “latent” for a reason. This is not about pre-destination, Eden. Some prophecies are but this one belongs to the category of free will. Pre-destiny might set up the game, but the players dictate the outcome. And when those players change the path, the old one evaporates and I draw the new.’

He looked back into the room. Then into her eyes again. ‘And you keep going round in a circle?’

‘Every time something significant happens that could change the final outcome, yes.’

‘How long have you been doing this?’

‘As long as I can remember.’

‘Before the regulations?’

‘Yes.’

‘Before the Higher Order outed you all? Did you know
that
was going to happen?’

She nodded. ‘It was one of the significant changes. Toby found me in here one night, sketching it out. I told him that because the drawings had started here, I needed to keep recording them here. It must be some kind of epicentre – and I was the nearest to receive the messages.’

‘Like a conductor.’

She nodded.

‘Is that why you didn’t move out when the regulations came?’

‘Yes. I asked Toby to leave but he wouldn’t.’

‘Then the cons arrived.’

‘Yes.’

He stood from the sofa, gathered up a candle and stepped back into the room. He placed it on the floor before going back for two more to light the room as best he could.

‘So that blank space,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder at her as she leaned against the doorframe. ‘Is that where the new line begins? And it works clockwise?’

She nodded.

‘And this is the end?’ he asked, pointing to the image she had been working on just over an hour before. This darkness?’

‘I think there’s more to come.’ She stepped up alongside him and scanned the images for herself. ‘At one time, it was different. In a drawing I did many decades ago, the third species came into the open as was always intended, but a political leader challenged the powers that be. They fought for equal rights and won.’

He glanced across his shoulder at her, his frown resumed. ‘You make it sound like that wasn’t a bad thing.’

‘You say that as if equality is inevitably a bad thing.’

‘There’s no talk of equality in the prophecy. It talks of vampire supremacy.’

‘Because with humans in the equation there will always be a fight to come out on top. And the vampires won, just like the prophecy dictates.’

‘You
still
don’t make it sound like it was a bad thing.’

‘Because nothing good could ever come out of humans not remaining top of the hierarchy, right? I hate to break it to you, Eden, but just because your conditioning and your survival instinct tell you that’s the best outcome, it doesn’t mean you’re right. And the fact that anything that is a threat to your survival is automatically constituted as warranted for annihilation should yell that fact to you. But, unfortunately, there’s no species more arrogant than humans when it comes to having their belief system questioned – not least when an external source is the one to tell them the entire thing is faulty. It doesn’t even seem to occur to you that, even though you have the widest range of beliefs within any species, somehow you all remain impassioned that each of you are still ultimately correct. Explain to me the logic in that?’

He frowned pensively. ‘You
really
don’t have much time for humans, do you?’

‘Look around me, Eden. Look where I live. Look at what I see every day. Are they not human – the ones you claim are the anomaly of your society because you don’t want to face your own potential? Yet they still have your so-called soul – the very basis for your kind dictating why you’re better than us.’

‘Then what
is
the difference between souls and shadows?’

‘There isn’t any. We’re opposing ends of a battery that ensures everything works, the yin and yang, both just part of the balance. There is no right or wrong or good or evil indicative to either species – just the reasoning behind the choices each of us makes.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘Your Global Council clutched at straws to justify creating segregation. They needed a species that was potentially more powerful than them locked away where they could control them. They had to have something to base the division on and, more importantly, to maintain it. With familiarity comes understanding, and they couldn’t allow that to happen – they couldn’t let people see that the differences were nothing more than physical.