Blood Magic by Laken Cane
Chapter Twenty-Two
Despite the elders’ sudden showing of power, I didn’t expect what happened next. The…lead elder, as I thought of him, left his spot behind the long table and approached the master vampire. As he walked, two other vampires—the council’s assistants, I supposed—appeared from the shadows and walked behind him. And they were dressed appropriately in gray robes and hoods.
The elder stood before Axton, who, even though he was chained, injured, and on his knees, did not seem at all diminished. He had been too long without authority, and he seemed unable to grasp the fact that he was in trouble.
In the next second, I found out why.
He threw back his head, stared the elder in the eye, and attempted to mind-control him. Which made me realize something I hadn’t considered before. Humans weren’t the only ones his magic worked on.
I glanced at Bastien. Not all vampires were susceptible, or Bastien wouldn’t have stood against his master.
The elder chuckled, his voice as dry as ancient cornhusks. “County Master, do you believe you are more powerful than your council?” He leaned down to get his face level with Axton, and even though Axton was on his knees, the elder didn’t need to lean far. “Do you attempt to capture me?”
“Of course not,” Axton lied, and he didn’t seem to care that everyone knew he was lying.
The elder nodded, then straightened. “Bring them in,” he said.
I shivered as power danced over my skin, stiffening the fine hairs and creating almost painful gooseflesh on my arms. Two people were hauled in through the side entrance—one of them was human, and the other was Axton’s seer, Kaloni.
“Kill it, master, or it will kill you. Kill it!”
Chills shook my body as I remembered her words. The madness was still in her eyes, and she peered out through the strands of her lank, gray hair, muttering curses. But she had been wrapped in silver, and her hands, which she kept thrusting into the air, had been burned with patterns I recognized. They’d branded her with charms to keep her from using her magic.
The human was a man in his late twenties, maybe, though it was hard to tell from the awful state of his body. Like Kaloni, his long hair partially obscured his face, and I imagined that had it been clean, his hair would have been a dark blond. His body was covered with new wounds, old scars, and bruises.
He’d been Axton’s prisoner and apparently for a long time. I frowned when I saw that his hands were restrained behind his back. His two vampire “escorts” were unnecessarily rough with him, and after they shoved him to the floor beside Axton and took their hands from his arms, I saw proof of their crushing grips on his flesh.
Rage began to grow inside me, causing my wolf to growl, and shockingly enough, I realized my hands had begun to shift, my nails blackening and elongating into thick, lethal claws.
I should not have been able to control my shift to the point where only my hands shifted. Some alphas could not even do such a thing. My shock caused my rage to lessen. I snatched my hands behind my back, hoping no one had noticed. That was something I wanted to keep to myself. At least until I better understood it.
Axton seemed to finally understand the danger he was in. He glanced from the human to his seer, and he began to shiver. He licked his lips. “Why have you brought my human slave and my beloved seer?” he asked the elder. “They should not be here to witness my punishment.”
But something in his voice told me that he knew exactly why they were there, and the realization scared the fuck out of him.
“Oh,” the elder said gently, “they are not here simply to witness your disgrace, County Master. They are here so that you might witness their deaths.”
The two people most important to a vampire master’s existence were his seer and his human servant, and though the human was his human slave and not his servant, he was important to Axton in many ways. Magic would have been involved, which was likely the only thing that had kept him alive through his nights of torment, and the human’s ties to the master would have been as deep as the ones he’d forged with his human servant. I couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t captured the human servant as well. Perhaps they hadn’t had time to find him or her.
The slave was next in order of importance, at least to the master’s health. The seer, as well. Taking one of them would have hurt him more than anything their torture guy could have dreamed up. It would have devastated him. Taking them both? That was unimaginable. I almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
The seer began to wail with her master, but the battered man made no sound at all. They were facing away from me, and suddenly, I had to see their faces. I had to see the human’s face.
I slipped away from the wall and walked quickly to the side of the stage so I could see him. And for one second, as though feeling me there, he shook his hair out of his face and looked up at me.
He was not broken. He was full of sorrow, and horror, and rage, but he was not broken. The master had taken him against his will. He’d marked him, made him his slave, imprisoned him. And maybe this human looked forward to death. It would be his only escape.
Maybe I was projecting, but I didn’t think so.
“Your bonded slave and your seer will die here tonight,” the elder told Axton. “You are forbidden from creating another human slave. You may not take in another seer for fifty years. I understand that it is because of your seer that you are capable of such twisted, lawless magic and I will need have no worries that you can replicate it without her. But should you attempt to so blatantly break our laws again, Mr. Axton, your human servant will be killed, and you will be wrapped in chains and buried so deeply into the ground that no one will ever find you while you scream and starve and lose your angry mind. Do you understand, County Master?”
“You cannot do such a thing,” Axton roared. “You cannot.”
But the elder lifted his hand and abruptly, the seer’s wails cut off and she listed to the side, unable to move. “Kait,” the elder called. “You will stake her and take her head, and we will nail her hide to the master’s bedchamber wall. Should he be tempted to forget, she will remind him.”
My hands were shaking as I pulled a stake. I didn’t mind staking the warped, twisted seer. I didn’t even mind hacking off her head. I did not like doing it in front of such a large—and hostile—audience.
I did it anyway. I slammed the wooden stake into her heart and it pierced her chest wall easily, with only a subtle cracking of bone and hiss of blood. Without hesitation, I lifted my blade and with two strokes, parted her head from her body.
Axton screeched and fell to his side on the floor, his voice ending in an agonized howl.
“Now his bonded slave,” the elder said, and it took me a few seconds to understand he was speaking to me. “Kill him. His remains shall be burnt and spread upon his master's lands where the warped blood magic might dissipate.” He gave me a regal nod. “Once through the heart, Ms. Silver. The master’s magical hold on the boy will be strong, so do not remove the blade until his lifeforce has bled from his body.”
Axton could no longer shriek. He whimpered and his body jerked, and I wondered if he weren’t having a seizure. The human slave simply bowed his head and waited. He didn’t beg or cry or even look up.
The audience whispered and cried, some of them, and it was like a wind raking its cold fingers through piles of dry leaves. The vampires would feel their master’s sorrow. Whether they liked him or not didn’t matter or occur to them. He was their master, and they didn’t want to see him suffer.
“Kill the slave,” the elder ordered. “Kill him.”
At my hesitation, the whispers on the wolf side of the room became murmurs, and those murmurs rose into a chant that wrapped around my very soul.
Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.
Why did they want to see more death? I wasn’t sure. Maybe they only wanted to see the vampires—and especially the vampire master—suffer.
I walked to the human and knelt before him, and then without thinking about it, I reached out to brush his hair out of his face. He refused to lift his stare, at first. But as I knelt there, silent and patient, ignoring the bloodthirsty wolves and even the elder’s command, he looked at me.
“Do you want to live?” I murmured.
There was something in his eyes. Not the look of a normal human who’d been tortured by vampires. There was something wild and fierce in his eyes, and there was pride. He was a warrior, this human, or he had been, once upon a time.
“I won’t beg,” he said.
I was shocked that such a strong voice came out of such a wreck of a face. I shook my head. “But do you want to live?” I was genuinely curious. I’d seen the despair inside him. He would choose death, and gladly, over slavery. But what if… “What if you were freed? Would you want to live?”
His eyes blazed but he said nothing, not at first. Then finally, “I don’t know.”
But I think he did know—he was simply afraid that he would not be free. Ever. I knew that feeling.
I stood, abruptly, and faced the elder. “I’ll take him,” I said. “I’ll help him get free of his master’s chains, and then I’ll release him back into the human world.”
He stared at me, his eyes dark and displeased. “No, Wolf. You will not do that.” And even as I narrowed my eyes and opened my mouth to argue, he added, “You cannot. He is a vampire master’s bonded slave, and he will die without his master. He will break free of you and hurry back into his master’s arms, even if he has to dig forever to reach him. It will not be possible for you to stop him. And he will slaughter and spill the blood of other humans along the way. Do you want to be responsible for that?”
But I tapped my chest, right over my heart, where I felt the confidence and determination and I knew I could do what he thought was impossible. “I won’t kill him, Elder. I want to help him. Give him to me.”
He stepped closer to me and peered up into my face, and I didn’t look away, not even when I so badly wanted to. And at last, he gave me what I wanted. Sort of. “You have one month to break the bond. If, in that time, he returns to end his master’s—and his own—punishment, he will be swiftly killed, and you will be publicly flogged. Fifty lashes with a magic-laced whip. Is that agreeable to you?”
I swallowed hard, and for a second, I wavered. More than anything else, being publicly whipped was about humiliation. Oh, it was about pain, too—a whole lot of pain—but mostly, it was about degradation and shame. Humiliation.
I looked down at the human. “Tell me.”
Finally, he nodded. “You have my word. I will take my own life before I return to that…” He curled his lip, and it was a moment before he could speak. “That thing.”
I believed him. I nodded at the elder. “It’s agreeable to me. I’ll take him.”
Deep inside me, my wolf slunk away and hid, afraid and alone.
