I tried to catch them with my fingers.
Green stems pushed their way into the fog, seeking for something to hold onto.
‘Oh good, hon, you’ve done it.’ The voice was female, brisk.
The fog closed over the stems, hid them from my Sight.
‘Did you inject her over the heart?’ the voice said.
‘You should’ve let me stun her.’ Finn’s voice was harsh. ‘This is too dangerous.’
‘No. This way is better. If you’d stunned her, she might have
cracked
it before you’d hit her - much too risky. She’s been iffy with magic lately. Too much salt in her diet.’
I had to banish the fog. I had to find the stems.
Gold light flared, formed trembling tendrils that curled into the greyness. One green shoot crept its way up through the fog.
‘I told you, she’s too strong. Even half out of it, she’s trying to use her Glamour. It has to be the heart. Lift up her top.’
‘No, I won’t.’ But it was more a plea than a determined denial.
‘Finn, there’s no way you can gainsay me, not with the spells I’ve tagged you with, so stop fighting and just get on with it.’
Pink and purple streamers slithered through the grey, twisting over and along the fragile green stem. The stem shivered and struggled and writhed in pain, trying to be free. But the streamers wrapped around and around, until there was nothing but a thrashing nest of brightly coloured snakes.
Feverish fingers traced over my skin.
‘That’s it, do it there. I’ll hold her down.’ Weight pressed against my ribs. ‘Sorry, Honeybee, but this is going to hurt like the Nine Circles of Hell.’
The sting was a tiny, distant pain. She’d been wrong. Somewhere I laughed.
The fog bloomed with golden flowers.
Then cold iron filled my chest.
And the flowers withered.
Chapter Forty
M
y inner vamp sense told me sunset had long gone and night was here. My eyeballs felt like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper and my lids stuck together with Super Glue. Fear made my pulse jump in my throat. It jagged with pain. I lay frozen and listened.
I could hear a faint noise: shallow, fast breaths.
My heart pounded as my eyes snapped open. I stared, fearful, at the fuzzy greyness. Mouth dry, I blinked and the greyness resolved itself into a carved rock ceiling. Wincing, I slowly turned my head towards the light. There was a door about five feet away, steel, like the ones at the Bloody Shamrock. I sniffed, and caught a whiff of earthy dampness. I was in a cave, somewhere underground.
Why couldn’t I remember what had happened?
I tried to sieve the confusion from my mind.
Venom fizzed through my veins, but its usual lust-hyped high was muted; my body felt like one big bruise. And I could smell blood. Had I been caught feeding? Was that why I felt like I’d been in a slugfest with a horde of Beater goblins? My stomach clenched in hunger and I ran my tongue over my fangs in anticipation - only I didn’t have fangs, just teeth. Confusion slipped back into fear. Had I become so melded with the Alter Vamp spell that I no longer knew which body I wore? The blood snagged at my senses again. It smelled of sour blackberries.
And memory rushed back like a charging troll, smashing my fears into insignificant pieces.
Finn was somewhere nearby.
Toni the bitch witch had tagged Finn with the spell, and tied it with some sort of compulsion magic - no way would he poison me with cold iron. I visualised Toni’s face, compared it with the photo Psycho Louis had shown me. Now I knew what I was looking for I could see the similarities. Toni might have lost a lot of weight, but her eyebrows and nose were still the same.
‘Gen?’ Finn’s voice was quiet, hardly more than a whisper.
I slowly turned towards his voice. The cave room went back almost thirty feet, the ceiling sloping down to meet the floor at the end. In the gloom I could make out a body. Finn.
‘Gen?’ The anxious whisper came again.
I tried to say his name, but all I managed was a croak. I touched my sore throat. There was a swollen lump the size of a golf ball.
Shit.
Whichever sucker Toni had palled up with, they’d sunk their fangs into me.
I checked out my arms. I had three other bite marks: one on my right wrist and the others at the pulse points inside my elbows. I wrinkled my nose at the map of blue veins wriggling under my skin. The suckers had almost bled me dry.
No wonder I felt so depleted.
At least I still had my clothes on. I’d only been venomfucked, nothing else.
‘Are you okay?’ Finn’s voice was louder.
‘Yeah,’ I whispered. ‘Give me a sec.’
I rolled onto my front, got my hands flat underneath me.
‘Gen, I want you to come here to me.’
The words hit me like a hard promise, raised shivers over my skin. I got up onto my elbows and rested my head on my forearms for a moment, then dragged my legs up until I was on my knees. Panting, I peered down towards Finn. I caught the emerald gleam of his eyes.
‘C’mon, Gen. I’m waiting.’
Lust twisted sharp thorns in my belly, venom fizzed in my veins and both drew a painful gasp from my mouth. I started crawling, my hands and denim-clad knees scraping the stone, muscles protesting with aching soreness.
‘My Lady, I need you.’
‘I hear you,’ I whispered. The soreness in my body dissipated, pushed aside by a more urgent craving. I crawled faster.
‘Genny,’ he crooned.
I stopped, shaking, my skin flushing with heat. The throb between my legs and at my throat was hard, insistent, almost too painful to bear. My head buzzed and the cave swam and swayed into greyness.
‘Gen—’
‘Dammit, Finn,’ I croaked past another wave of lust, ‘keep your Glamour to yourself. My body can’t deal with it. I’ve lost too much blood.’
Silence. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was soothing. ‘I thought it would help.’
The desperate need inside me blunted and the aching my body had ignored returned with a gleeful vengeance. Crap. I gritted my teeth and started crawling again: slow but steady, that was the way.
Hand ... knee ... swallow ... pant.
‘I don’t know when she gave me the spell.’ Finn’s voice washed with anger. ‘You know, the spell you came to tell me about? It sucks the magic out of you.’
Hand ... knee ...
‘Psychic vampirism, the bitch called it. She’s worked it so a sucker can bind a fae’s power and use it as their own.’ Fear flowed beneath the anger. ‘You don’t even have to know about it. No need for negotiations and bargains, just a cocktail of blood and spell and that’s you.’
Swallow ... pant ...
Damn. It all fitted with what Mick had told me - and I’d a good idea that Toni had tagged me with the spell too, but for some reason it hadn’t worked so well on me.
I reached Finn, my lungs gasping for air
‘You need to get out, Gen,’ he said quietly, staring at the ceiling.
Of course, the ‘getting out’ involved steel doors and solid rock, and I doubted I could blast through them with magic, even if I knew how.
‘There’s some sort of fight going on,’ he added. ‘The sucker’s siphoning off my power to win.’
I tried to catch my breath as I peered through the half-darkness at him. They’d stripped him naked and staked him out, stretching his limbs to the four points. The Glamour he’d been wearing to appear more human had gone, dispersed by the gem-studded silver shackles on his wrists and ankles, or maybe he just hadn’t the energy left to
hold
it. His body was broader, muscles heavier, his skin more darkly tanned than before. Sleek sable hair covered his stomach and his flanks, then smoothed like silk down his legs until it feathered over his hard cloven hooves.
Lifting my head, I crawled closer. His horns were small stubs almost hidden in his matted hair and he was covered in blood - his blood. I briefly closed my eyes as the scent of blackberries made my stomach twist with need. Hanging my head, I willed the hunger away. Deep wounds scored down Finn’s chest and stomach, and bite marks punctured his skin. The familiar-looking injuries told me which sucker Toni had palled up with, which sucker was using him:
Rio.
He turned to look at me. His face was pinched, almost feral, the bones sharp under his skin. But it was his eyes I stared at. They were dull, grey, desolate with the spell.
‘You need to get undressed, Gen,’ he said wearily.
‘What?’ My mouth fell open. That was the last thing I’d expected.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. There’s a chance you can escape using a blood door.’ His gaze held mine, then he looked away again, as if it hurt him for me to see him like this. ‘Only you have to go naked, in supplication. It won’t work otherwise.’
I knew of blood doors. I’d even been through one once, taken by another fae. Once you activated the spell, it took you straight to the person who’d shared the ritual with you.
I frowned, slumping back on my heels. ‘Don’t they have to be pre-arranged?’
‘You need to go to Helen.’ His voice caught as he said her name. ‘Ask her for aid.’
Oh right, Helen, as in Inspector Crane.
‘Helen and I have performed the blood exchange. We did it when we jumped the broom before—’ A spasm of pain cut him off.
They’d jumped the broom? When did that happen? And before what? Before they split up?
They couldn’t be still together, could they? An odd feeling slipped from beneath my heart, as though I’d lost something I never had to begin with. I shrugged it off. No wonder the inspector didn’t like me. Still, priorities: escape first, pity-party later.
‘Great plan,’ I said, brightly. ‘I’ll
crack
the spells holding you.’ I pulled off my T-shirt. ‘Then once you’re out of the shackles, I’ll absorb the psychic-spell and you can take us through.’ I tugged off a boot.
‘Gen,
cracking
the spells isn’t going to work.’ He slowly turned his head back to me and gave me a shadow of his normal smile. ‘I really don’t want to lose any of my appendages.’
I levered off the other boot, paused as a wave of dizziness hit me. ‘Then I’ll absorb those spells too.’
‘You can’t absorb the shackles, and absorbing the spells could knock you out, or worse.’
I unsnapped my jeans. ‘Who cares, Finn?’ I wriggled the denim over my hips. ‘If you can’t carry me, you can always drag me.’
‘Be realistic, Gen,’ he sighed. ‘You have to go to Helen and get help. You have to go alone.’
‘I’m not leaving without you.’
‘The sucker will be back soon, and the closer she is, the more power she can take from me.’ His hands clenched. ‘You need to go as soon as possible.’
I almost screamed in frustration and fear - this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Taking a deep breath, I said, ‘Okay, tell me how to do it.’
‘We do the ritual, then you have to stand in a circle of your own blood and
call
to Helen. Once she feels the
call
, she’ll open the door.’
‘What’s the ritual, Finn?’
‘Nothing drastic, just blood freely offered and exchanged.’
I stared at him in horror. ‘You mean I drink your blood and then spill mine over the floor, then wait for your ex to answer.’
‘Yes, that’s pretty much it.’ His eyes drifted closed. ‘I think that should work.’
‘What do you mean, “should”? Don’t you
know
?’
‘I’m working from memory here,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not easy.’
Crap. I couldn’t drink his blood. Just the smell was tempting enough. And what if it didn’t work, or Helen didn’t answer? He’d end up in more danger from me than the vamps we were trying to escape from. Of course, there was still my other option: I could bring out my Alter Vamp and just break his shackles ... only she wasn’t strong enough to get us out of the cave, or to fight off more than a couple of other vamps. And she -
I
- would be right back to being hungry.
‘You have to do it, Gen,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t kill the sucker, I’ve already tried. I can feel her in me, controlling me, feeding off me, like she’s turned a tap on and I can’t turn it off.’ He turned his head away again.
Something about that didn’t tally; I hadn’t noticed the spell at all, not even after I’d taken it from Holly - nothing other than tiredness, and maybe the bad dreams—
‘She’s not going to let me fade—’ Finn’s words shattered my thoughts. He was talking about fading - letting himself die - shit, it had to be bad. ‘Gen, you have to go and get help—’ He was almost pleading with me.
Heart aching, I finished tugging off my jeans and briefs as another flash of dizziness hit me. ‘Okay, let’s do it,’ I said.
He turned back to face me, hope turning the grey in his eyes back to their usual green for an instant.
‘Looks like it’s my turn to ride to the rescue.’ I gave him a lop-sided smile.
‘What are you talking ’bout, Gen?’
Leaning over, I gave him a butterfly kiss on the mouth. ‘You running off to do the shining knight bit earlier when the witches kicked me out of Spellcrackers.’
He gave a weak laugh. ‘If I’d known it’d impress you, I’d have tried it sooner, instead of the cheesy sex god line.’
‘Don’t worry; the sex god thing is pretty impressive too.’ I opened my eyes wide to keep the tears from falling, grinned at him. ‘Just don’t tell anyone I said so.’
Chapter Forty-One
A
ll I had to do was bleed a large enough puddle that I could stand in. I grimaced at the blue veins mapping my naked body. Getting blood out of one of them wasn’t going to be easy.
‘Why can’t I just draw a circle in blood?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t work that way, Gen.’ Finn gave another weary sigh. ‘It’s a sacrifice, a last resort thing, so no one opens a blood door without thinking seriously about it.’
Yeah, right
. Heart labouring in my chest, I clambered to my feet, checked out my left wrist. Maybe I’d be lucky and the vein wouldn’t have healed yet.