Blood Fever: The watchers (13 page)

My flesh grew hot, buzzing where he touched me. “I…I thought we were supposed to stay away from each other.”

“Ah.” He pulled his hand back. “How quickly I forget. You are still anxious to break the bond.”

“I am,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt. “It is possible, right? To become unbonded.”

“Aye,” he said. “It’s possible. Difficult, but possible.”

“And you think Acari Kate had bonded with a vampire?”

He shrugged. “It would explain such rash behavior. It’s the blood fever. Some who’ve bonded feel as beyond the reach of death as their vampire mates. Others bond, and when they cannot feed again, they grow mad with their need.”

Mad with need. I had some experience with that. I remembered Kate’s restless, fevered eyes. Was that how I appeared?

Clouds scudded overhead, stealing light from the sky and warmth from my skin. “You’re saying my options are to stay bonded, be reckless, or go insane.”

He gave me a sidewise look. “I don’t recall saying any of those things.”

“You’re giving me more nonanswers.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “I’ve been more honest and more forthcoming than anyone.”

Even though the wind had whipped his words from me, they reverberated in my head. Carden was right—he
had
been honest with me, from the moment I’d met him in that dungeon.

I had to ask another question and I feared the answer. “Will I become reckless?”

“Is that a bad thing?” he asked in a musing tone. “There are two sorts of reckless, are there not? There is impulsive and there is brave—you must decide which you will be.”

“Strong and brave,” I whispered into the wind. He’d told me I could be these things.

Then it hit me. I didn’t need some vampire to tell me—I knew in my heart already that I was these things. Strength and guts—it was how I’d survived my childhood.

I became aware again of his body next to mine. There was another sort of reckless, and the blood pounded beneath my skin to consider it. Could I be the sort of woman who was strong enough to stay bonded with a vampire and remain sane? To be brave enough to lean over and kiss her bonded vampire? “So I can be whomever I want to be?”

“Are you so quick to think yourself incapable? Do you accept Vampire superiority so willingly?”

“No,” I answered at once.

He gave me a thoughtful look. “Then why are you quick to doubt yourself? Perhaps
you
are in control. Maybe you have only to realize this.”

How much was in my control? The longer I stayed on this island, the more mysterious it became. “The vampires have told us why they want us here. But why might they
need
us?”

Carden smiled. “You ask a good question, pretty one. You are strong, and the vampires recognize this strength. Now you must recognize it, too.” He put a fingertip beneath my chin, ensuring I wouldn’t turn away. “You must recognize your power.”

Why was he telling me this? “You’re a vampire. Why help me? Why be honest?”

“I was once a man. As not all men are good, not all vampires are evil.”

I
was in control. I was powerful.

I was also very, very stupid. I was heading back to Crispin’s Cove. I’d need to do some climbing, and yet there remained just one tiny problem: I still didn’t know how.

But ideas had woken me in the night, implanting themselves and not letting go. What if Trinity hadn’t been attacked from behind? What if the killer had climbed up the rock face, surprising her from below? What if there was evidence lodged somewhere on the bluffs, waiting to be discovered? Or what if she’d wrested something from her attacker? A tuft of hair gripped in her hand, a bit of fabric torn free, someone’s dropped knife. She’d put up a fierce fight; maybe something had tumbled down with her.

It was a long shot, but one I had to take.

Unfortunately, I was taking that shot before I’d had a chance at more of Priti’s climbing instruction. But I had to act now—soon the infamous island wind would scour the rocks clean.
And besides, I did have that one climbing class under my belt, and thanks to Acari Kate’s little exhibition, I’d learned two things:

1. I didn’t need ropes and carabiners to scale rocks. (Good, because I didn’t know the first thing about that kind of gear anyway.)
   
2. Ropes and carabiners helped you not die. (Bad, in that a plummet to my death wasn’t exactly on my bucket list.)
   

I assured myself that this’d be different from Acari Kate’s ascent. I’d be going down—surely that was easier, right? And besides, I wouldn’t really be rock climbing anyhow. More like bouldering. Hiking, even.

Really, really steep hiking.

I headed straight to the ledge—it’d do no good to chicken out now—and tightened the straps of my bag. The thing had been thump-thumping across my back as I’d jogged along the coast, but I decided to keep it just in case I found something I needed to tuck away. And hey, maybe it’d provide padding in the event of a freak accident.

I edged closer, and the height gave me a moment’s vertigo, sending a wiggly sensation crawling up the backs of my legs. “A puzzle,” I muttered, parroting Priti’s words. While Carden had been climbing the Needle, she’d lectured. I’d tuned her out but had tuned back in when she’d likened climbing to mathematics, speaking about angles, degrees, ratios. “Just a problem to be solved.”

I squatted now, trying to decipher that puzzle and detect a
possible path. It wasn’t a sheer drop here at the top. Instead, the upper ridge was graded, forming steep, mossy tiers.

I craned my neck to see. There was an outcropping roughly fifteen feet down and a few feet over. It angled away, not readily visible from above. If I could make it down there, it’d be a good vantage point from which to scan for some clue that might’ve lodged in the rocks and brush.

I sat on my butt, scootching past the spot marking Trinity’s final footprint. What lay between me and that plateau couldn’t have been called a trail, but it was horizontal enough to shimmy and slide down if I used the rocks and roots as handholds. I inched some more, tentatively scrabbling down like a crab—a lame, clumsy crab.

My boots met flat rock, and I pushed with my legs, testing the support. It was solid. It gave me a spurt of confidence. I inched to the left, over to where I thought I’d spotted the rock shelf below.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered as I eased onto my side. I had the sensation of being almost vertical now, and it felt more secure to have so much of my body pressed against the granite. I guess somewhere in my reptilian brain I also figured that if I started to slide, maybe I’d be able to stop myself using hands
and
legs
and
belly.

It took me about thirty seconds to realize my reptilian brain was a total idiot.

Getting down to the next tier was less a thoughtful descent than it was a controlled fall. I slid, and rocks scattered loose, clacking down the side of the cliff in a shower of gravel.

“Crap.” I picked up speed and careened past the next tier without stopping. Rocks cut into my belly and punched hard along my rib cage as I bounced and slid down the face. “Ohhhh crap.”

Panic choked me as the mottled brown, gray, and green of the cliff angled steeper, rolled by faster. I grabbed for all of it. Flailing now, I swatted for rocks, dirt, the tufts of grass that poked from between the cracks.

My feet slammed into something, and the impact reverberated up my body.
The plateau.
Relief.

But I’d hit it too hard. Time slowed as I felt my body propelling forward, like I was about to swan dive from a platform.

Carden appeared in my mind’s eye, a vision of him diving from the Needle, all power and grace.

Power and grace. I could be that, too.

I refused to die this way. I’d see this through. I’d see
him
again.

I made a split-second decision. It was me or my knees.

It took a conscious effort to let go, to render myself limp as a rag doll, but I did, forcibly turning my legs to jelly beneath me. They buckled and I slammed hard onto my knees. I gripped the ledge, stopping myself before I tumbled from the outcropping.

I winced, immediately flopping back onto my butt, half cradling my bruised legs while skittering away from the ledge at the same time.
Made it.
And I refused to think on why, in my moment of near death, my mind had gone to
Carden
.

I dusted off my legs. I was here to investigate, to get my mind
off
the bond. I sat all the way up, and punishing wind instantly whipped the hair into my face, bringing tears to my eyes.

I squinted. Looking around, I saw how it wasn’t just a shelf I’d landed on, but there was a little niche, too. Not big enough to be called a cave, but deep enough to shelter me from the wind howling off the sea, lashing the rock face. I pressed my body into it, feeling like a creature in a seashell, and let myself take a moment
to gather my wits and pick the bloody bits of grit and rock from my tattered palms.

I was busily panting and catching my breath, so I didn’t hear it at first. But as my heart slowed, I began to discern an alarming sound from above: men’s voices. Two of them.

I mouthed a curse, instantly pressing as far into my little shelter as I could. Had the killer—or
killers
?—returned to the scene of the crime?

I curled in more tightly. If I was discovered, I’d be dead meat. Literally.

I tucked my legs, grimacing through the pain as I bent them. I quickly reeled my bag in, too, and clutched it close to my side, grateful that I hadn’t stowed it at the top or anything stupid like that.

My sweaty undershirt clung to me, and I became instantly chilled leaning against the damp, hard rock. But I hunched closer, turning my back to the voices, praying that, if they happened to walk to the edge and look down, the gray of my Acari uniform would act as camouflage.

I huddled and stared at the rock wall, and that was when I saw it. Simple carvings. Old runes, like graffiti.

The sight made me smile despite myself. Viking carvings could be found all over the islands in the North Sea. It was amazing—the graffiti was thousands of years old and yet it was as unremarkable as the stuff you’d find in the bathroom stall at Applebee’s.
Magnus red-legs was here
, that sort of thing.

I used my thumbnail to scrape away the fine layer of moss, peering at the letters.

I imagined it was Icelandic, or Old Norse maybe. I could stare till I went blind and it still wouldn’t make any sense. But it cheered me just a little. It was such a peculiar reminder of my humanity.

I wriggled heat into my fingers and toes, forcing my mind back into the moment. The men were still there, closer now.

Angling my head as far as I dared, I tuned my ear, trying to make sense of their conversation in the keening wind. Their words echoed down the bluffs, bouncing into my shallow crevice.
German
, I realized. They were speaking German. I didn’t recognize the voices, but I could tell that one speaker was more deferential than the other.

The wind shifted, bringing me a phrase.
Hat er unter Kontrolle?
“Is he in control?”

Ja, Meister.
I didn’t need to rely on my years of study to recognize “Yes, Master” when I heard it.

The explosive cries of a flock of seabirds bursting into flight shattered the moment. I shifted, waiting for the flapping to subside, considering what I’d heard.

Is he in control?
He who
?
A vampire? Tracer? Trainee?
He
could’ve referred to any number of people on this island.

There was more gruff murmuring, a pause in the wind, and then:
Sie werden unvorsichtig.

“They grow reckless.”

Again,
who
?

Reckless.
The word harkened back to my chat with Carden. There were so many different ways to be reckless. There was reckless brave. Murderous recklessness. Or my favorite kind of reckless, disobedience. Then another wrinkle occurred to me: There was also the recklessness of pure instinct that was the Draug.

I hung on for more, but the voices dissipated and never returned. Even so, I dared not budge. I needed to make certain the men were far from here.