Cold Reign

Beast shoved into my brain. I/we leaped across the room, Beast-fast, catching my primo before he hit the floor. His blood smeared my hands. He slipped through my grip until Beast’s nails snagged on his clothing. I eased him to the wood floor, his head on my thigh. He was bleeding from dozens of cuts. His dark suit was rain and blood soaked. “Call Leo,” Eli said to Alex. And he sliced his wrist, vertically, to keep from harming the tendons that made hands and fingers work. Placed it at Edmund’s mouth.

Eli had his battle face on: no emotion. No reaction. Edmund looked dead. His fangs should have flipped down. He should have ripped into Eli’s arm. He should have vamped out, insane with hunger. But he did nothing, which was infinitely worse. Eli pressed his bleeding wrist to Edmund’s mouth, gravity draining the blood in over Ed’s tongue. Some drizzled out his lips. Pooled in his cheek.

“Come on,” Eli demanded. “Drink, you sorry, fanged piece-a’-shit.”

Nothing happened. Except watery blood pooled slowly on my floor. “Jane,” Eli said. “Call him.”

“What?”

“You’re his master. He’s healed you, so he’s tasted your blood and shared his own with you. Call him. Make him drink. Keep him alive.”

I started to say I had no idea what he was talking about, but Eli snarled, “Do it.”

I started to say I didn’t know how, but Edmund looked like death-still dead, real dead, not undead. I closed my eyes and crossed my legs in a half-guru position. Beast? I called my carnivorous half. She didn’t answer, so I took a breath and dropped slowly into the Gray Between. Silver mist shot through with blue-black motes of power filled my mind. Beast? I know you’re here. How do I call Edmund?

Beast does not know.

Gimme an idea. He’s . . . dying.

He is dead. He is dead for longer than Beast is alive.

Beast didn’t lie well, if at all, except by obfuscation. A thought occurred to me. How did you call kits when they got away?

She made a little mewling, coughing sound, which wouldn’t help at all.

Then I remembered the electric velvet feel of Sabina’s magics on the air when she called the Mithran vampires of New Orleans for a gather. And the raw, slicing power of Leo calling his scions to him prior to a feeding frenzy. That magic was all vampire, rich and deep and potent as death itself.

I reached out into the Gray Between. Took the silver mist and motes of my skinwalker magic into my . . . not hands. Into my mind. I usually used the magic to shift into an animal for which I had enough DNA material. But when I called Beast, it was different. Easier. I . . . I just thought about her, called her into being. I opened my eyes and looked down at the vampire. He was surrounded by the Gray Between. In the mist of my magics, he looked dead, pale and bloody and unbreathing, heart not beating.

“Jane!” Eli snapped. “Now!”

I gathered up my magic and slapped Ed with it. A red streak appeared on his cheek. “Drink, you sicko bloodsucker fanghead.”

Nothing happened. I hit him with everything Beast and I had. And again.

The vamp coughed. Swallowed. A strangled sound of relief escaped my mouth. Eli put his wrist back at the vamp’s lips. Ed swallowed and swallowed. His fangs flipped down slowly on their little bone hinges. Edmund’s hand lifted to grip Eli’s arm, guiding it more fully to his mouth. His lips closed around the wound, wasting no more blood to dribble on the floor.

Eli hissed. “Son of a . . . gun.” He grunted in pain as Ed bit deep.

I let the Gray Between of my skinwalker magic fall away.

And that was when I smelled the stench of silver mixed with vamp blood. Toxic. Deadly. I touched a slash on Ed’s side and the smell puffed out like putrefaction. Edmund had been cut with silver blades. He was really and truly dying.

“Alex?” Eli asked. “When?”

Edmund’s eyes opened, white sclera and brown irises. His gaze focused on me as his eyes bled slowly black and his pupils dilated. Blood flushed into the vessels and his clear sclera went scarlet. He was vamping out, deliberately, controlled, even while poisoned with silver, tortured with blood loss, and dying. He was still dying. Such a slow vamping-out took power, a lot of power, for any vamp, even one in the best of undead health. Especially for a vamp who had been poisoned with silver.

Alex said, “Leo’s sending Tex, some female named Dacy Mooney, Brandon and Brian, and Wrassler to help.” I started to say something about the names, but Alex continued, his tone full of dread, “It’ll be at least half an hour.”

His eyes on me, Edmund sucked. And sucked. Time passed. It seemed forever. Eli went slightly pale. Started smiling. He sat on the floor. Boneless and limp. His head tilted to the side and he stretched out beside the vampire, who was still bleeding onto the wood flooring. Silver in Ed’s wounds was keeping him from clotting, from healing.

“How long?” I asked Alex.

“Twenty-two minutes before they get here.”

“He won’t last that long.” I knelt beside Eli and pulled a blade from a sheath at his spine. I slid up my sleeve and sliced my wrist, saying something my house mother would have washed out my mouth for. It hurt. I said it again as the sting expanded and blood welled into the open flesh. Edmund stopped sucking. His eyes were still on me.

“Take it,” I said. “Don’t make me call you a fanghead piece-a’-crap. ’Cause I will. Now let go of Eli’s wrist and take mine before you kill my partner and I have to take your head.”

Edmund’s eyes went from mine to Eli’s, and shock flashed across his face. His mouth released, fangs sliding free. “I have taken too much,” he whispered.

“Yeah. But two vamps are on their way to help. One of them can feed you and the other can heal Eli. Now drink.”

His eyes went back to the blood that was now coiling around my arm in a spiral. He looked sick, ashy, starved. He needed to drain a few humans to heal, and yet he was holding back from attacking me. “You offer me your blood? Freely?”

I knew what he was asking. Freely sharing blood was part of the binding ceremony between master and primo. Edmund had freely given me his blood several times when I needed healing. Half of the sharing. If I gave him my blood freely, that was a second part.

Edmund’s eyes fell from my arm to Eli, cradled on the floor. His lips widened the same way Pavlov’s dogs salivated. Unconsciously. Needing.

“Jane?” Alex asked, warning in his tone. He was standing over Edmund, a silver-plated vamp-killer pointed at the vamp’s cervical spine.

“Yes,” I snapped. “Freely.”

Edmund’s eyes whipped back to mine, and I had a moment to wonder if I had been played before he released my partner and snatched my wrist. His tongue cold as a body in a morgue refrigerator, he licked my arm free of the trailing blood and dipped into the wound. The pain was instantly eased, the anesthetic in vamp saliva so effective that he bit through the slash and started sucking and I didn’t even notice.

The pull was oddly familiar. Kits, Beast thought at me. Suckling. Like kits.

I blinked, closed my eyes, and the world faded from view. I was in my soul home, the cavern where I communed with Beast, with my own spirit, and with my memories. It was the memory of the first place I ever shifted forms, before I ever stole Beast’s soul in an accidental act of black magic, blood magic. Before my family died. When I was a child and happy. It was the place I went to when I needed healing or solace or when I needed to learn stuff.

Before me was a fire flickering with warm yellow flames, tossing shadows on the smooth stone walls. The smell of fire eating black walnut wood was slightly sour, dry on my tongue. Across the fire pit was Beast, lying in a curl, so her head was on her paws, thick tail around her side. Golden eyes were staring at me, lazy, happy eyes. At her teats were kits. Suckling. Five of them.

Like kits, she repeated the thought. Suckling.

As in the way of dreams, I was suddenly sitting beside her. I put out a finger and stroked the head of the one closest to my ankle. It was soft and warm and smelled of milk. I looked at my other arm in the real world.

Not exactly, I thought back, seeing nothing remotely kittenlike in the vamp hanging on my arm. But the sensation was pleasant, nothing like the experience of Leo and Katie when they attempted to bind me against my will. I should have killed them for that, I thought.