Bloodcraft (35 page)

“Are
you
?”

“I think so. What do you see?”

She cocked her head as her irises unfocused. “I see power.” Her eyes widened. “And magic. So many tendrils of it, tethering you to the earth and to the shadow.”

“Am I strong enough?”

She stared at him. “To face Tori?” He nodded, and Angie frowned. “I don’t know. You’re strong, but there’s still a part of her in you. I can still see it—webs of stringy black slithering just below the surface.” Her gaze slammed into him as if she belatedly realized why he was asking the question. “Why?”

Christian cleared his throat. “If she becomes lost to the curse, I will be the only one who can retrieve her.”

“She’ll kill you.”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said with a crooked smile. “Shall we?”

Angie hefted her crossbow. “We follow you, Your Grace.”

†††

Victoria entered the dungeons of the château, following the tingling in the pit of her stomach. Cool, stale air rushed against her face along with the smell of long decayed death. Leto had passed through here. She could see the malevolent taint of him like little breadcrumbs left behind for her to find. He knew she would follow, after all.

Her body felt tight and coiled, bursting with the power she had stolen … and been given. Christian’s magic had shocked her—he had grown more powerful than she had guessed. But he was the descendant of a Reii. She’d had an inkling of what that meant, but until she had drawn his energy into herself, she hadn’t truly known. Christian was stronger than strong. As a vampire, he had superhuman gifts—ones that made him a fearsome predator and a force to be reckoned with. As a Reii, his powers superseded those and more. She shook her head. She’d always been a little bit afraid that she could hurt him, but now she thought that maybe they would have a chance.

If she didn’t die.

He’d told her that he still loved her, but impending doom had a way of making you say things that you wouldn’t say in ordinary circumstances. She had told him the truth. She’d give anything to take back the choice she’d made … and choose to stay with him instead of being afraid. In the end, the very people she’d put ahead of him had betrayed her. Lost in her own insecurities, she’d fallen prey to Madame Starke’s lies.

Victoria stopped at a point where two tunnels broke off from the main passageway and closed her eyes. The air was thick and musty. She focused her energy on Leto’s essence and chose the right-most corridor. It was the narrower of the two and seemed to suck the darkness toward it. As a precaution, she removed the amulet from her neck and placed it upon a nearby stone ledge. She knew it was a risk facing Leto without it, but it was also her only way out if things went bad. Heaving a deep breath, she ducked and took tentative steps into the space.

“
Illustro
,” she murmured and a ball of light flickered to life in the center of her palm. Smears of what looked like caked blood covered the cobwebbed walls. Despite herself, she shivered. Monsters, she could handle. Vampires, no problem. But spiders were part of a whole other universe of nasty.

The skin on the back of her neck tingled as a webbed skein caught against her collar and she fought to keep from gagging. The spiders down here wouldn’t be small either. They’d be monstrous. As if on cue, something skittered at her feet and she throttled the scream in her throat.

“Focus,” she hissed to herself. Spiders should be the last of her worries. She should be worrying about the rogue demon lord that was the father of the Cruentus Curse—the one who had possessed her familiar’s body and been trapped within it for millennia. He was still bound by his corporeal feline form, which meant that his power was not at its peak. But that would not last long. He’d slaughtered hundreds of supernatural creatures over the past few months, absorbing their energy and growing stronger with each kill.

Gabriel had unwittingly fragmented the curse when he’d tortured Leto last year, and since then, the demon within had been fighting to break loose. And to do that, he needed power—lots and lots of otherworldly power. Sure, he could have taken it from humans—they had magic, too, in minuscule amounts—but when a dozen humans equated to one supernatural creature, he’d chosen to go for quality rather than quantity. It’d been a relief to Victoria that he hadn’t opted to kill people. The death toll would have been staggering and would have drawn more attention from the humans than they could handle. And fear drove people—even supernatural ones—to do reckless things.

The blood surged beneath her skin. It resisted her control, testing her will for weaknesses like a beast trapped within a cage. It was responding to the presence of its true father—the blood was part of his, after all.

And part moon priestess
, a voice reminded her. The mother of the blood curse had been a powerful witch in her own right and one of the Goddess Mother’s own handmaidens. The demon had stolen Thaia from this world and condemned her progeny to a life of horror and pain, one shadowed by the darkness of his blood. Victoria remembered what Aliya had told her, that the Goddess Mother had deemed their child an abomination and had condemned her to death. Circe couldn’t bear the thought of killing her own granddaughter and had hidden her away from the Goddess Mother, trying—futilely—to bind the girl’s powers.

Leto had said he wanted to return to his demon dimension and take her with him. Victoria would die before she let that happen. But best of all, she vowed that she would use the very powers he had given her to destroy him.

“I know you’re down here,” she called out. “Show yourself.”

The faint echo of mocking laughter reached her as the passageway finally widened into a cavernous room. She stretched to full height, feeling the weight of fresh air on her face, and frowned. It wasn’t so musty anymore and she could feel dampness seeping from the crumbling walls around her. She’d lost her bearings with all the twists and turns of the underground tunnels, but at some point the ground had started to shift upward. Her gaze narrowed at a change in the light at the far end of the space. Was there an exit point leading outside? Into the forest, maybe?

But before she could reorient herself, something slid out of the murky shadows—the same half-cat, half-hulking creature that she’d seen.

“You bring me gifts,” demon Leto said in a conversational tone.

The shock of his guttural voice was like a physical blow. Leto had never spoken. His words had always been mental. She shook it off and focused her power to her core. She’d need every ounce of strength she had if she was going to best him. She eyed him, watching his form shifting into solid mass and then retreating into shadow. It made it hard to look at him—a monstrous amalgamation of the cat she knew and loved and a formidable demon that only cared for its own survival. “Why are you doing this?”

“I told you,” he said. “I want to return to my home.”

“I won’t go with you.”

“You do not have a choice,” demon Leto growled. “If you stay here, the Vardlokkur will do what they have been tasked to do.”

Victoria frowned—she did not recognize the word. “The what?”

“What your people call warlocks.”

“The warlocks have been tasked to kill me?” She laughed, the sound echoing off the walls. “The warlocks are not out for the good of mankind, trust me. Gabriel was a warlock and he wanted the curse for his own gain.”

“There are always stray sheep to every flock.”

“The warlocks are evil.”

Demon Leto pinned her with an intelligent green gaze that made her think of her many debates with Leto the cat. “As are humans, vampires, witches. No one race is pure. They all bear the stain of the very first one to fall from the grace of the heavens.”

“They consort with demons,” she seethed, power racing along her limbs and crackling across her fingers. She sensed that he was toying with her.

“I’d hardly call summoning consorting. But yes, they will use their power over my race to bind your very real demon blood. And then they will kill you. We do not belong here. You do not belong here. That is their call to arms as the guardians to the portals between the dimensions, Tori.”

“Don’t call me that!” she snapped.

“As you wish,
Victoria
,” he mocked. Demon Leto shifted forward and she automatically tensed. “Regardless, your time here on this plane is over. You belong with me. So now that we are done with pleasantries, why don’t you give me what I want? Release the curse and free me from this prison of fur and bones. Do your duty, daughter.”

Her lips pulled back in a disgusted sneer. “I am no daughter of yours.”

“Shall we put that to the test?” He smiled and murmured two words. “
Cruentus effero
.”

She frowned at the summoning charm that had fallen from his lips and braced herself for a secondary attack, but none came. Instead, demon Leto stared steadily at her, and the minute her eyes locked with his, something started happening. Her blood pushed against the surface of her skin, shoving her toward him with mystical force. She fought it with everything she had, but the pull was inexorable.
Inescapable
.

She only came to a stop when she was directly in front of him. She would have preferred to be where she’d been standing before. Now, this close, she could see the green mottled color of the demon’s skin beneath Leto’s ragged fur and smell the cloying scent seeping from his pores. She was surprised. She’d expected something far more foul. Victoria peered at the demon—and was shocked to see that it looked vaguely human in features. The sight of the handsome, if stringent, male face made her blood crawl.

The demon lifted a scaly talon and dragged it down her cheek. Victoria didn’t have to look in a mirror to know that the touch had welled blood in its wake. “Even buried within the familiar’s consciousness, I watched all the others, you know,” he told her. “But none were like you. None had your courage. Your daring. Your fearlessness. Deep down, I knew you would be the one to liberate me.”

“But Gabriel—” she blurted out.

“It was easy to suggest the kind of spells needed to crack the Goddess Mother’s bindings to him.” At the look on her face, he shrugged. “Don’t feel sorry for him. Trust me, he enjoyed every second of inflicting such pain. Those spells were not for the faint of heart, and your friend was cut from a fetid cloth.” His grip slid to her shoulder. “Now, come, give me what you have. We have a long night ahead of us. It will be enough to break the last of the bonds, but I will be weak in my true form.”

“How many will have to die?” she asked in a weak voice.

“As many as it takes.”

Her stomach clenched. “Do you truly relish taking all those lives?”

“Relish? No. Require it? Yes. I
require
their souls to sustain my existence and my endurance.”

“Why don’t you just give up and die and be done with it?” she scoffed, trying to come up with a plan that didn’t lead to the loss of tens of thousands of innocent lives.

His breath feathered into her face, his claws digging into the soft flesh of her arm, the slight stinging tell her that he had drawn blood there, too. “Survival instinct? And to right the fact that I was wronged.”

“Wronged?”

“Thaia chose to stay with me.”

Her sneer was shaky this time. “You coerced her.”

“A powerful moon priestess?” he returned evenly. “She could have left in an instant. No, my child, she chose to stay.”

“With
you
?”

He stared at her, that gaze of his compelling and intense. “Some of us choose to love those that others deem to be monsters. You, after all, should know all about that.”

“Christian is nothing like you,” she whispered.

“Isn’t he?” he said as a scaled talon raked across the tender skin of her shoulder. “He takes life from others to live. People fear him. He, too, is trapped by his own immortality. I think we are more alike than you’d care to admit.”

The demon’s words made her blood boil. Or maybe he intended to incite her anger. She stared him down, refusing to even dignify what he’d said with a response. Christian didn’t murder innocents—he took blood judiciously if and when he needed it. Victoria frowned as something occurred to her. The demon had said that once he broke free of his corporeal bindings he would be weak. That would be her chance … her opportunity. She’d give him what he wanted for now, and when he was least expecting it, she would do what she was meant to do.

She would give him the liberty he craved.

TWENTY-THREE

Blood Witch

“Okay,” she agreed. “Take what power I have.”

Demon Leto smiled then, one that crept beneath her bravado and slunk into her heart. She could see a reptilian sheen cast over his deceptively human face. Even in demon form, he bore an odd resemblance to her, and it made her stomach turn. The look in his eyes made her worried that she hadn’t thought of something. She knew that she’d be weak, too, once the transfer was complete, but she was hoping that Christian and the others would be waiting to take advantage of the windfall.

She pushed her energy out, reaching for him.
Christian
?