The Shifting Price of Prey

Chapter Thirty-One

Distant voices dragged me from the darkness.

I pushed them away, enjoying the warm weight of the leather coat covering me with a familiar dark spice scent and the sated haze swirling through my mind and body. But even if I was sated, Malik wasn’t; I’d passed out before we’d really got down to it, an annoying hazard of donating blood during orgasm. But now there was more to come. I grinned at my unintended pun. Oh yeah, so much more was to come. My body perked up, obviously appreciating the thought, and I stretched out under the coat, searching for the beautiful vamp so we could continue what we’d so gloriously started.

He wasn’t there. Something neither I, nor my body, was too thrilled about.

I opened my eyes. Above me, I expected to see the night sky. But the view was hazed, as if I were looking through thick plastic. I squinted uncomprehendingly. Then blinked. A dome of magic rose high above me. A blood-Ward circle. And judging by the golden-pink tinge to the magical dome, it was my blood and power fuelling the protection it offered. Either I’d started doing magic while unconscious – unlikely – or something weird was going on.

I looked sideways, vaguely aware my neck felt like someone had chomped on it—

Malik sat a couple of feet away on the sandy grass, leaning against a lump of rock, forearms resting on bent knees, hands loose between his leather-clad legs. His head was tipped back, his eyes closed. Unease slipped down my spine. He didn’t look like a happy blood-bunny basking in the aftermath, but more like he was waiting with weary resignation for me to wake up. I glanced back up at the moon; it didn’t appear to have moved across the sky much, so I couldn’t have been out of it long. I looked back at Malik to find him staring at me with an unnerving blank expression.

Out of eyes gone solid gold.

‘What happened?’ I said, or meant to, instead I croaked ‘Whahp—’ thanks to the killer sore throat.

His eerie gold stare didn’t flicker.

Fuck. Had I trapped him in my Glamour? Only he’d said it wasn’t possible. Gut clenching, I threw off the leather coat and leaped up—

The ground heaved like I’d jumped on a storm-tossed boat, my stomach roiled, darkness spotted my vision, and I faceplanted again. This time into his arms. He lowered me gently to my butt and pushed my head between my knees.

‘My apologies, Genevieve.’ His not-quite-English accent was formal, his tone empty. ‘I fear I took too much blood.’ Cool fingers on the back of my neck eased the rapid onslaught of a hammering headache.

‘’S’okay,’ I whispered past the thudding pain in my head. ‘Body’ll replace it soon. Red cells’re turbo-boosted – 3V, remember.’ Though why I was explaining all that to him, a vamp . . . Only, beneath his empty tone, he’d sounded like his heart was breaking.

His wasn’t the only one. Mine felt like it was cracking into tiny pieces too. We finally get together and things were supposed to be mindblowing. And they had been mindblowing, and amazing and glorious and any number of other wonderful adjectives, for all of what felt like five seconds . . . then I’d woken up. Now, for some unknown reason, everything seemed to be going horribly, heart-wrenchingly wrong.

That bastard Cupid must truly have me on his shit list.

My nausea eased, the ragged tufts of grass and sandy earth beneath me coming into focus, and I realised the pain was muting. I raised my head carefully, grateful for Malik’s soothing touch at my nape.

I slanted a look at him, crouching elegantly next to me and started with something simple. ‘How come we’re in a circle?’

His golden eyes flickered. ‘The kelpie wished to take you from me.’

Huh? ‘When was Tavish here?’

‘He appeared while you were . . . sleeping.’

Had to be the voices I heard. Annoyance flashed through me. Damn kelpie. One thing for him not to trust Malik, but he should trust my judgement after all this time. Though perhaps I should’ve expected the interfering wylde fae to turn up; I’d known he wasn’t thrilled about me seeing Malik. But that didn’t explain why we were in a circle.

I asked Malik again.

Briefly he closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the gold was duller. ‘I cast the circle.’

‘You?! But you can’t do magic.’ I frowned. ‘Can you?’

He held out his hand. A can of Blue Bat juice, emblazoned with the Blue Heart logo, appeared in his palm. ‘It appears I can.’

I frowned. Had he just done some kinetic vamp trick? Or—‘Where did that come from?’

‘The Blue Heart.’ He offered me the can with a flat, eerie stare. ‘Drink it, Genevieve. It will assist with your recovery.’

I took it and chugged back half the drink before I realised he’d given me an order. The stuff tasted like goblin piss (Beater goblins in Sucker Town have their own peculiarities when it comes to subduing rogue vamps, as I’d discovered once when I’d been wearing Rosa’s body as my vamp disguise). As I started to splutter, Malik clapped a hand over my mouth, pushed my chin up and ordered, ‘Swallow. Then drink the rest.’

I glared at him, promising retribution. If he thought giving me an orgasm, no matter how freaking fuck-tastic it was, gave him permission to order me around like some junkie blood-slave, even if it was for my own good, then he was sucking on the wrong sidhe.

I finished the drink, went to throw the can at him, but it was out my hand and vanished before I had a chance.

‘Tell me you did not just do magic?’ I demanded.

‘Why would I tell you that, Genevieve, when that is exactly what I did do?’ His mouth turned grim. ‘It appears your blood not only enhances my own powers, but grants me your magic as well. Much as if you were another vampire I had fed upon.’

Which was so fucking unfair. ‘Except I can’t call stuff,’ I said, hearing the thread of a childish whine in my voice. ‘Or vanish it like that.’

He lifted an elegant shoulder. ‘The vampires I feed on cannot necessarily tap all the powers that run in their blood either.’ He flicked his fingers and the dome went fully opaque; a Privacy spell. Crap, this just got better and better. I scowled at Malik as he draped the leather coat over my shoulders, saying, ‘Put the coat on and fasten it.’

‘That’s the third order in as many minutes,’ I snapped, jerking the coat on, fingers buttoning it up clumsily, as I fought to disobey. ‘I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do that shit any more?’

In answer, he bit down on his wrist then held it in front of my face. ‘Drink.’

Both my hands grabbed his arm, my mouth latching on to the bloody bite like I was starving. I sucked down his spicy blood as if it was ambrosia, my fury mounting even as he pulled me into the V of his legs and my body traitorously responded to where his obvious arousal pressed against my butt.

Bastard, I thought loudly at him.

‘You are right, Genevieve,’ he murmured against my ear as his hard arm pinioned me around my waist. ‘I am indeed a bastard. My father never married my mother, and her people, Christians who worshipped the western god, forced her to give me up when I was seven as devşirme. Devşirme was the tithe paid by those conquered by the Ottomans.’

Surprise made me choke on his blood. He was choosing now to tell me something personal about his past? Didn’t he know the time for sweet nothings was during the post-coital haze? And not after he’d pissed me off with all his orders. But his words still muted my fury, and raised an instinctive compassion in my heart for the child he’d been.

‘You do not need to feel pity for me,’ he said coolly, as if he’d read my mind which, with me attached to his wrist like a limpet was a possibility. ‘I was trained as a janissary, one of the sultan’s elite army, and was proud to swear my loyalty to him and his blood. It was a prestigious and rewarding life, more so than the one I was otherwise destined for as a subsistence farmer in Northern Albania.’

Bully for you, I muttered at him. But how about we can the personal history and talk about the present? For starters: I’ve had enough blood. In fact, sucking on you is making me feel nauseous. Which wasn’t a lie. I was feeling sick, just not physically. Though, the way my stomach was bloating up like an over-stretched wine bag, physical sickness was going to be an option in the near future.

‘Keep drinking,’ he ordered.

I didn’t need to pity the child he’d been, or the bully he was being now. But while I might not be able to disobey his ‘keep drinking’ order, I could dig my teeth into his arm in protest. Triumph sparked as he flinched, then an odd note of remorse hit. I was causing him pain . . . or he was causing me pain . . . I was getting echoes of what he was feeling, sucking them down with his blood. Damn. If we merged thoughts any more, then between us I was going to get emotional whiplash.

‘When I was twenty, Suleiman 1 became sultan. He was my liege and my . . . friend. He had ambitions to expand the Ottoman Empire; ambitions which succeeded, as history has documented. What history does not detail is the strategy he used to win the Battle of Mohács where he defeated Louis II of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire became the pre-eminent power in Eastern Europe.’

Through my link with his blood, I caught remnants of his feelings for Suleiman: loyalty, respect, an echo of hero worship, and sadness that his liege and friend was long gone; but, above all, a brotherly love. Not that any of that explained why the hell he was telling me all this. Or made me any less furious.

‘Suleiman used sanguine lemurs, as they were called then.’ Malik’s voice was stark. ‘Revenants.’

Revenants are the skeletons in the vamps’ closet, the monster side of the vamp myth, the one that isn’t supposed to exist. Unlike the usual ‘lucky’ recipients of the Gift (3V-infected humans who are carefully nurtured over months, or even years), revenants are made instant vamps through a forbidden ritual. One day human, the next a bloodthirsty, bloodsucking monster with less impulse control than a greedy two-year-old. All they want to do is fuck, feed and kill, and not necessarily in that order. Though ‘want’ isn’t quite right, as after a few days they don’t usually have any higher functions left, and most end up shambling corpses; the true undead.

The penny started to drop. Malik carried the revenant curse in his blood, though he’d overcome it. Damn. Whatever the reason I was getting this story, I knew it wasn’t going to have a happy ending. The thought almost snapped the tether of his order and stopped my own feeding.

‘After the battle, Suleiman gave orders to keep no prisoners,’ Malik carried on in a low voice. ‘It was a good strategy. It sent a message to our enemies, plus we had neither the manpower nor the supplies to support the extra mouths. But his true reason for the order was to destroy the revenants. They had been corralled along with the vanquished enemy, and had continued to feast unchecked until the monsters died with the dawn. There was no way to determine which of the living or dead might be infected; one bite and a drop of blood can be all that is required for the curse to manifest. Suleiman paid the dragons to burn every one until they were nothing more than ashes to be scattered to the four winds.’

His blood told me he’d been one of those who’d directed the massacre, and I tasted the horror and shame he still felt at that memory. It coated my throat, made it hard to swallow.

Was that when you were made revenant? During the fighting?

‘After the battle, Suleiman dispensed with the vampire’s services, the one who had made the revenants. When the vampire left, he took something of mine. I hunted him down. Offered myself in exchange. That was when I was afflicted with the blood-curse.’

He stopped. And this time I felt grief, failure and soul-deep revulsion and hatred. For what he’d become, and for the vamp who’d made him both evil and a monster.

The vamp that did this to you is the evil monster, I said firmly, my own anger rising. Not you.

Bitter denial trickled through his blood, and then he gently ordered, ‘Stop now, Genevieve.’ My mouth and hands let go of his wrist, and I gasped, slumping as he released his mental hold on my body. ‘You have received back all but a small part of the power I acquired from you when I fed.’

I rubbed my neck and jaw, easing the stiff muscles there, swinging between anger, the need to comfort him and wondering what the hell he was talking about. ‘Explain.’

A weary sigh chilled my nape. ‘It was too dangerous for me to carry your magic, Genevieve.’

I twisted to kneel between his legs, relieved to find his almond-shaped eyes were back to their normal obsidian black. ‘Dangerous?’

Malik traced a finger over the pulse in my throat. It jumped at his touch. ‘I became close to losing control of the revenant when I took your blood. It is why I took more than I intended.’

My chest constricted. It was his biggest fear; that he’d go insane with bloodlust, start killing and spread his revenant curse. Personally, I couldn’t see it; after all, he’d kept himself under strict control for centuries, always feeding from other vamps, however difficult they made things for him, and never from humans. Or even me. Until now. But then that’s phobias for you. Still, it was understandable after the trauma of seeing an army destroyed by a pack of animalistic revenants, only to become one soon after. I shuddered. It also sort of made sense of his ordering me about, but—

‘But more than that,’ Malik continued, ‘the danger is also due to the Emperor. He is the one who gave the Gift to Bastien.’