Dark Craving: A Watchers Novella (12 page)

My reaction is instant. I insert myself in front of her. I can’t raise my right hand, and so I lift the urumi in my left. “She has me.”

“How quaint.” He spits the words at us, then grabs a fistful of my hair, shoving my head aside to get a better look at her. “Acari, you will hand me that dagger. Give me the dagger, and I promise to be quick as I kill the boy.” He gives my head a shake.

I wrench free, feeling hair tear from my scalp. I reach behind me, pushing her back. The motion sends a fresh curtain of blood spilling down my back. She sucks in a quick breath, stepping close again, and touches me tenderly above my wound. There is no parting us.

“You’ll have to go through me,” I say. The handle of my weapon is warm in my palm, like a living thing. An extension of me, of us.

He darts a hand out around me, snatching at her, and I crack the urumi, slashing down. The metal sings as it whips through the air toward him. I step back to twirl it up and then down again, one fluid movement. Sketching an
X
in the air, I sever the hand from his arm.

The impact shoots my broken rib deeper into my flesh, and a great sound escapes me, a battle cry that is my defiance.

As he stares at the stump of his arm, his expression of shocked disbelief twists, sharpens. It becomes one of wrath. He leaps at me, a savage, slavering, wordless thing, but I’ve whipped the urumi around him and snagged his chest. He staggers, and it jolts the weapon from my grip, sending a shock up my arm. Deep in my body, broken bone grazes something vital, and I stumble, too, pitching sideways and hitting his desk, sending papers flying. Blackness beckons, my vision gray and spotty.

But Annelise is completely focused. She prowls toward him—she’s the one stalking now. “Looks like I’ve got the upper hand, Master Dag.” She kicks his hand aside from where it’d fallen to the floor. “Get it? Hand?” She lunges and strikes.

This time I hear sizzling as her strange blade slices his arm, his back. She’d missed his heart, and yet he screeches—a monstrous, unearthly sound—and drops to his knees. Howling, he wrenches his body, trying to pat at his smoldering wounds. The room stinks of sulfur and rot.

She gives the knife a little toss to her hand, reseating the weapon in her palm. “Sorry, I know how you hate my jokes.”

I see her blade clearly now. A long, thin dagger, beautifully crafted—it feels as old at this island.

Dagursson sees it, too. It’s all he sees. “No,” he whispers. “How could this be?”

“They say you Vikings like a good death.” She squats and wraps an arm around him, forming a surreal tableau. Her eyes are fevered. She’s a goddess of fire and rage and madness. “Ready for yours?”

Like a creature enthralled, Dagursson is frozen in place, tracking the weapon as she raises her arm, dagger aimed at his heart. He’s murmuring something in a guttural language I don’t recognize. It has the cadence of a prayer.

She’s about to strike. There’s a loud
click
. We all freeze. The sound has come from inside the wall, and it echoes, reverberating around us. It’s followed by a great moaning—the low, haunting groan of wood—as one edge of Dagursson’s bookcase shifts away from the wall.

A hidden passage. We are transfixed. It creaks open.

Annelise’s arm is suspended in midair. Dagursson is hunched and twitching, a creature melting in acid. And me? My mouth is agape.

Because standing before us, tall and proud, is my sister. My Charlotte.

“You?” I whisper. Have I died? Is this a hallucination? My sister come to take me to the other side?

But Charlotte—bored, annoyed—looks only at Dagursson. “Do I have to do everything, Alrik?”

“Who the hell are you?” Annelise demands. She’s standing now, tense with anger.

It means my sister isn’t an apparition.

I can barely breathe through my pain. I find my voice between quick, panting gasps. “Could it really be you?”

A foxlike smile curves her mouth as she spots me and prowls toward me. She’s in modern street clothes, looking long and sleek and gray. “Look at you, Ro. All grown up.” Her eyes rove my broken body. “And I see you’re still trying to kill yourself.”

“You’re here,” I repeat, mesmerized. Then I laugh, a giddy, childish sound. “You’re here.”

“You know this person?” Annelise blurts. I feel her gaze burning into me but can’t tear my eyes from Charlotte for fear she might disappear again.

“Yes, I’m here. I’ve been here. Why do you think you’re still alive?” She looks back to Dagursson and sighs heavily. “Bugger all. Look at this mess. How did you manage to do this? You always were a pain, little sport.”

“Help me.” Dagursson moans and reaches for Lottie. “Feed me.”

“You’ve been with Dagursson, all this time?” I try to stand upright, but my own bone stabs me from within. I bite back a cry, gritting my teeth, grasping for clarity. “I don’t understand. How are you alive?”

“Alive? Not quite.” Charlotte grins, baring gleaming fangs. She hisses at me. When I flinch, she breaks into bright, tinkling laughter—it’s the sound of a young girl, a sound I remember. She dabs an eye. “Oh, Ro, for chrissake. Shut your mouth before you catch something in it. You look like a sodding daftie.” She paces a circle around the dying vampire, huddled into a shrinking mass on the carpet. “Of course I’m alive. Do you really think I’d let some delinquent from suburban…I don’t know”—she waves a hand—“wherever that girl was from…do you really think I’d let someone like
that
kill me?”

“Ronan,” Annelise says sharply. I tear my eyes from my sister, and what I see kicks me in the chest. Fury but also—thrillingly—jealousy make Ann’s eyes glow. “Who is this girl?”

Charlotte swivels her gaze slowly, languorously, toward Annelise, perusing her as though assessing a cut of meat. For the first time since she appeared, true fear prickles the back of my neck.

A sharp crack of a laugh escapes Lottie. “Oh! I know who
you
are. You’re the girl my brother’s in love with.”

Annelise pins me with her eyes, part shocked, part flustered. “You’re in…? She’s what…?” She looks back to Char. “This is your
sister
?”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I’m relieved she chose not to address the love part of that equation.

Charlotte nods. “Can’t you see the resemblance? Though I got all the brains in the family. Ronan here…he’s just the troublemaker.” She squats and traces the hair from Dagursson’s brow. “I’ll never guess how you managed this. Now I’ll have to feed the old sot myself.”

“What are you doing helping
Dagursson
?” I ask.

“I’m not helping anybody. Alrik here is helping
me
. I’m having him trace our lineage.” She strides to the sofa, pulls off a pillow, and systematically shreds the case into strips. “I won’t let you kill him, you know. He’s the keeper of the lore. He knows all the genealogies. The family trees.
Our
family tree. We’re of powerful stock, you and I. Descended from druids and seers, we are. But first thing’s first: Lift your arms, little man,” she says, standing before me once more. I do as she says, and she begins to wrap my bare chest tight. “Though I guess I can’t call you ‘little man’ anymore, can I? You’ve been working out.” She lightly smacks my bare chest and shoots Annelise a grin. “I’ll bet you like the view, don’t you?”

“I don’t like that he’s injured, no,” Annelise says, but her cheeks have turned crimson. I lose myself for a moment, watching her, transfixed by what is a visual symphony of expressions moving across her face. She won’t meet my eye.

Lottie laughs and ties off my binding with a sharp tug, slamming me back into reality.

I shoot her a glare. “Easy, Char.”

“Don’t be a baby.” She pats my cheek. “Just think how bad this would be if you were a normal man. But you’re not normal, Ronan.” Her hands slide to my shoulders, gripping tightly. “And you’re not just a Tracer, either. You’re a pure-blooded Celt.”

She wanders back to Dagursson, standing over him. We all study him—he’s twitching now, a sizzling, melting mass on the floor, barely alive. “Bloody hell,” she mutters, rolling up her sleeves. “I’ll stain my shirt.”

“How did you even get this way?” I ask, dumbfounded.

“I told you. He turned me.”

“You just…asked him?”

“Don’t be daft. I tricked him.” She nudges the vampire with a toe of her pointed boots. “Old boys like Dag here think females are dumb. That we should be seen and not heard, all that nonsense. I like to think I enlightened him.”

“How?” Annelise asks, sounding a bit in awe.

Lottie hitches a thumb my way. “You know how he’s got his special talent? Well, I have talents, too.” She sees my surprise and laughs. “That’s right, Ro. I never told you.
You’re
the idiot who tells everyone everything. I never told anyone. I convinced Alrik to turn me, and then, uh-oh, guess who’s the strong one now?” She laughs, and she might as well have been giving a football replay for all her casual calm. “He might be a Viking, but we’ve got the old blood. The Celts were here first, Ronan. Who else do you think made the first vampire, if not the Druids? We’re way more powerful than any Viking or Spaniard or whatever.” She waves it away. “We’re wasting time. We need to get out of here before this stench travels and his lackeys come running. I’m so not in the mood.”

Charlotte is alive, I’m injured, and Annelise is watching me with an expression that says she’s not forgotten the whole I’m-in-love-with-her bit. Assassination can wait.

“Fine.” I reach out my hand, and Ann’s fingers twine through mine. My heart swells, my eyes only for her as I say, “Let’s get out of here.”

Charlotte shoulders between us with a smirk. “Sorry, little brother. Where we’re going, there’s no room for baggage.”

“Baggage?” Annelise says sharply.

“Ann is no baggage,” I say calmly. I know both women, and I’d like to stop this whole standoff before it snowballs out of control.

Charlotte sighs. “Spare me the love-struck drama. If you need the girl to live, fine. But I’m no babysitter. Your girl stays here.” She squats beside Dagursson. “I’ll have enough drama sorting this mess out.”

My eyes are glued to Annelise as I say, “I’m not going anywhere without her.”

“I’ve had quite enough of that, Ro. Now just shut up and—”

“You don’t order me around. I’m not twelve anymore, Lottie.”

“Do
not
call me that.” She scowls and shudders. “Fine, you’re”—she pauses briefly—“nineteen now, is it?” She hoists Dagursson to his feet, looking at me with an expectant look. “Well? Are you going to help me with this or not?”

“What are you doing?”

She frowns, surprised that I’m not following her unthinkingly. “Is that any way to show me you’ve missed me?”

“Missed you? I mourned you for years, Char. Bloody hell. I was gutted. You could’ve given me a sign you were alive.”

“Must we do this now?” She drops Alrik, and he grunts as he hits the ground like a sack of dead weight. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t trust you to not give me away. I have plans, Ronan. Big plans.” She reaches out and pinches my chin. “Don’t worry. They involve you, too.”

Unease prickles the back of my neck. “What plans?”

She comes to stand toe-to-toe with me, as though we’re facing off. In her boots, she’s tall enough to look me straight in the eye. “Did you know Tracers can be Vampire?”

I’ve no clue where she’s going with this. I meet her gaze unwaveringly. “Tracers don’t survive the transition. We’re saturated with enough power already.”

“Some Tracers live through it.” She jabs her thumb Annelise’s way. “Her Carden did.”

Ann gasps. “Carden was a Tracer?”

“Fine,” I say, not eager to bring
him
into this. “Some survive. A few.
Very
few.”

“Ah, but those who do”—she beams—“they’re not just regular vampires. Between your abilities as Tracer and our bloodline?” She looks to the sky, smiling and sucking in a breath as though lost for words. “The possibilities, Ro. Think about it. You’d be the strongest. The most powerful.”

“If I survived.”

“Don’t be such a little wanker. You’d live. You know you would.”

She’s right. I’m strong—I probably would survive. In my darkest hours, I’ve entertained the notion. To become Vampire. It’s a fate both repellant and enticing.

“Carden was a Tracer?” Annelise repeats, and I can’t read the subtext in her voice. Do I hear grief for what he used to be? Or is she attracted to the possibility of ultimate power?

“Oh, aye,” Lottie says. “It’s why the Directorate won’t kill him. McCloud is too strong, with too much potential. They think they can harness it. And anyway, I don’t think there’s any one vampire who
could
kill him.”

Annelise’s eyes go wide. “Carden is that powerful?”

“We should go,” I say abruptly, “
all
of us. As fascinating as this is, we should discuss it somewhere safer.” I scoop the urumi from where it’d fallen beneath the table.

Lottie’s eyebrows snap together. “Hey, that’s mine.” She snatches it from me and hooks it at her waist. “I’ve been looking for this.” She gives me an impatient nod. “Come on, then, let’s get Alrik on his feet.”