Blood Magic by Laken Cane

Chapter Thirty

I took the time to stop at a strip mall to pick up some t-shirts, jeans, and shoes for the two vampires, guessing at their sizes. I was being extremely optimistic, but I hoped like hell Axton had told them to rebury his brother before they’d gone too far. He liked to torture him, but surely he wouldn’t kill him. I could only hope.

Sixten was waiting when I pulled in behind him at the meeting place, leaning against his car with his ankles crossed. He lifted a hand in greeting, shot a lingering glance at Joe, then turned to pop his trunk. When he made deliveries, he drove an unassuming drab green car that was about fifteen years old, but I’d once seen him in a much more expensive ride.

“Who the hell,” Joe asked, “is that?”

I couldn’t help but grin. Sixten was six feet eight inches tall, and his braided black hair, piled on top of his head, added five or six inches to that. He was slender, pierced to within an inch of his life, and wore a colorful leather overcoat that reached his ankles. “I’ll tell you about him when I get back,” I said, and left him in the car as I went to meet Sixten.

“You’re as pretty as a summer morning,” Sixten said, when I approached. He pointed at the satchel in his trunk but didn’t take it out and hand it to me, for fear our fingers would touch. Sixten didn’t like to touch people.

I pulled a check from my jacket pocket and placed it into the trunk for him to retrieve later, then grabbed the satchel. “Thanks for coming through for me, Six.”

“Honey, anytime.” He gave me a wink, slid on a pair of enormous, bejeweled sunglasses, then slammed shut his trunk. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Take care, Sixten.”

“You too, Sugar.”

He got into his battered car, somehow folding his tall frame into the front seat, then drove off, leaving exhaust fumes hanging in the air.

I hefted the satchel, then climbed into my car and handed it to Joe. “Keep your fingers crossed, Joe. If the vampires are dead, I have no idea how to get to Rick.”

“You know what?” He placed the satchel on the floor at his feet. “If Bastien is dead, you’ll figure it out. You will save the detective.”

I gave an abrupt laugh. “Yeah. I will do that.”

And strangely relaxed, I drove us to the graveyard. It took me twenty-three minutes to get there, and five minutes to get out of the car.

“Kait?” Joe asked, after a while.

“I just have a bad feeling.”

He opened his door, then tossed the satchel—now heavier with the weight of the clothes and shoes—to the correct grave. He strode to the hatch and opened it, grabbed the shovel, then peered in at me. “You want anything from your kits? Come on, Kait. The longer you sit there, the more time Axton will have to torture the detective.”

And that was finally what pulled me out of the car. I couldn’t have said why I was so reluctant. My gut was screaming at me, but it did no good to sit there thinking about it. I’d seen how tortured Bastien and Farrow were. I wanted to help them if I could. But my gut was screaming at me to run far away.

I took off my coat and left it in the car, and the cold night air immediately soothed my overheated skin. I buckled a belt over my chest and one around my waist, filled the loops and sheaths with goodies, then dropped a silver chain over my head. I squeezed the cross. Bastien had been so burned by the sun that he might not even notice any burns he’d get from my cross.

Joe pulled a pair of gloves on, then reached me a pair. We’d dig for a while, but some of it would be done by hand lest we chop them up with the sharp shovel. A healthy vampire’s sleeping aura repelled a digging tool, but neither Bastien nor Farrow were healthy.

“You’re scared of them,” Joe realized, a little amazed. He fastened the straps of a light around his head, then clicked it on.

I slammed the hatch shut and walked with him to the recently dug grave. “I’m scared of what he might do.”

He frowned. “What can he do? Even if you do heal him, you saw the state he was in. His flesh was melting off his bones, Kait. He’s not going to hurt you.”

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid he’s going to kick my ass, Joe, for God’s sake.”

“Then what? You’re afraid he’s going to kick mine?”

“I don’t know. Let’s get them up.” I reached for the shovel, hoping to expend some of my nervous energy by digging, but he looked just a little insulted and refused to hand the shovel over.

Once he started digging, I crouched and pulled the bag to me, opening it up and pulling out its contents. I put the clothing in a neat pile, then pulled out the bags of blood and the hypodermics. The needles were just to get them started.

Their jaws were likely locked, and I’d need to slip the funnels between their cheeks and teeth and pour the blood into their unresponsive bodies. But with the damage they’d sustained, the two bags might not be enough.

I absolutely didn’t want to kill them if they came after Joe or me to get the hot, pumping blood they needed. If I did, I’d lose the detective.

“Okay,” I told Joe. “That’s enough. Let’s pull them out.”

He tossed the shovel and dropped to his knees, his silver cross swinging over his shirt. I wanted to ask him why he wasn’t terrified. He was a human who, as far as I knew, hadn’t even believed vampires existed a few days ago. Now here he was, in a graveyard in the cold night, digging a couple of injured vampires from their sleeping places.

But in the next second, my gloved hand uncovered Bastien’s burned shoulder, and the second I touched him, even through the thick fabric, a needle of fire drove itself through my wrist. It hurt—badly.

“Shit,” I cried, and yanked my glove off. “Ow.”

Joe stopped scooping the soft dirt from the grave. “What happened?”

“I think something crawled into my glove and bit me.” I shook it and thumped it on the ground, but nothing fell out, and I didn’t see anything scurrying away. The burning stopped, and I shrugged and put my glove back on.

But the instant I touched him, it happened again. I ignored it and continued to dig the dirt from around his body, grim and silent, because suddenly I knew exactly what was causing the burning.

The first time I’d dug Bastien up, he’d bitten my wrist. Just a scrape of his teeth, but enough for him to taste my blood. I’d thought he’d been crazed from his starvation and wanted to get a little of my blood inside him. I wasn’t so sure of that now.

I thought maybe he wanted to get a little of himself inside me.

Why? I couldn’t know. Not then.

If he’d somehow tied me to him with that bite, after the detective was safe, I was going to kill the bastard vampire myself.

Finally, Joe and I sat back and stared down at the uncovered vampires. They lay on their sides, and Bastien was curled around Farrow, half on top of her with his arm around her. He’d attempted to protect her from the sun, but the sun had not cared.

Their flesh was black, mostly, with some raw, bloody parts and the gleam of dull white bone.

Farrow’s screams echoed in my head, and the image of Bastien’s hollow, hopeless eyes would not leave me. I shuddered, then finally, reluctantly, I reached for the blood.

Joe held the syringes and funnel, aiming his light into the grave. “Ready?”

I took a deep breath. No. No fucking way. “Yeah,” I said. I filled both syringes, and without another hesitation, I found pieces of flesh on both of them that looked a little less black, and I shoved the needles into them.

My wrist was throbbing, but I ignored it. I could handle pain. It was the reason for that pain that got to me.

“Nothing happened,” Joe whispered, as though he didn’t want the vampires to hear.

I refilled the syringes and repeated the injections, but there wasn’t so much as a flutter from either vampire. I was going to have to try funneling blood in while they lay on their sides, and that wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t move them, though, or they’d fall apart like slow-roasted chicken sliding off the bone.

I shuddered as my stomach rebelled.

“They’re too far gone,” Joe said.

But I wasn’t ready to give up. “I need to get to his mouth. Help me, Joe. Gently.” I was still afraid of causing more damage, but I had no choice.

Joe gave me the funnel and the blood, and I put them on top of the bodies and thanked God for the gloves as I slipped my hand beneath Bastien’s ruined flesh and attempted to turn his face away from Farrow’s head.

“They’re stuck together,” Joe said, and finally, there was some emotion and horror in his voice. They came apart with a crackling but sucking sound, and Joe cradled Bastien’s…face, if that’s what it was, while I opened the blood, slid the funnel between his teeth, which weren’t closed after all, and let the blood pour into his mouth.

“Come on, Bastien,” I said, fiercely. “Come the fuck on.”

My heart was pounding, hard and fast, my wrist, hand, and fingers were on fire, and my head was aching so violently that it was making me sick to my stomach. As nausea rolled through me I swallowed hard and hoped I wouldn’t throw up all over the vampires.

And then, Bastien’s awful face twitched, and a terrible sound slid from his mouth. A moan, sort of, but one like I’d never heard. That moan wrapped around my brain and heart and squeezed, and I screwed my eyes shut and forced myself to stay where I was when I’d never in my life wanted anything more than to throw the blood and funnel, shift into my wolf, and run.

I ground my teeth, my wolf’s rage growing even as my terror and physical pain grew with it, and the thunderous sound of my galloping heart and blood pumping through my veins filled my ears, drowning out that awful, unending moan.

The bag emptied of its blood. “Kait,” Joe yelled. “The other one.”

I grabbed the full bag and held it over the funnel as Joe quickly sliced a hole in the bottom, and it didn’t matter that some of it splashed onto Bastien’s face. It sank into his flesh, into his body, and he began to live—as much as a vampire could live.

He came back.

He gulped down the remaining blood, then flipped to his back and grabbed my face between his rough palms. His eyes, lidless and horrible and empty only seconds earlier, opened, and he saw me.

“There was only darkness,” he told me, his voice a thing of nightmares. “But I felt you.”

I scrambled back, jerking out of his grip, and he wasn’t strong enough to stop me. Though he looked better, his black, raw skin healing, it was a slow process. And I needed fast.

“Cover us,” he said. “I will tend Farrow. We will sleep and heal and live.”

I closed my eyes, then looked at him. “There’s no time for that. I need your help, Bastien.”

His body spasmed, and something, a bone or a tendon or some part of him I couldn’t see, snapped. His eyes were bright with pain, but they were also bright with life. “I can only lie here,” he whispered. “Return in a week.”

“No.” I scooted to him. “I can’t wait. You have to come with me.”

“Kait,” Joe murmured, grimacing. “Look at him. There’s no way he can—”

“Feed me,” Bastien said, his voice scraping along my nerves. “So I can help you.”

I swallowed convulsively and shook my head. “I saved you. You owe me. My friend is caught by Axton and he will die if you don’t help me.”

“Would you have saved me,” he murmured, refusing to release my gaze, “if you had not needed me?”

Would I have? “I don’t know,” I told him. And that was the truth. “No,” might have been closer to the truth, but I didn’t speak that word. I believed he knew, anyway.

“What will you sacrifice for him?” Maybe his bloody lips lifted in a slight smile. It was hard to tell. “Will you give me a taste of your blood, Kait Silver? Is he worth that much to you?”

I began to cry. I was overflowing with too many emotions and they needed an outlet, so they leaked from my eyes. “Fuck you,” I whispered, enraged, grief-stricken, horrified. I was a wolf. Wolves did not feed vampires. They just didn’t. If I gave him my blood, I would be offering him myself. Me. It was like submission when I wanted to dominate. It was aligning myself with a revolting enemy. It was repulsive and wrong and it would create a dark bond between us forever. The magic in a wolf’s blood was strong, pure, and sweet. It was ours.

And a vampire wanted mine.

I did not want to give myself to him. I wavered, bringing the detective’s face to my mind’s eye, thinking about his pain and what the world would be like without him in it. What my life would be like if I let him die.

“What will you sacrifice for him?”

I groaned, my voice little more than a hoarse whisper, and I gave him my wrist. The same wrist he’d caught his fangs in before. “Take it, you bastard,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure he heard me.

He didn’t have to hear me to know what I offered. He grabbed my arm in a surprisingly strong grip, and he didn’t hesitate. He sliced into my flesh with his sharp, sharp fangs, and he began to drink.

My wolf’s coldness slid through me and I welcomed it with open arms. It was best to feel nothing, sometimes.

“Suck it up, Princess. Suck it the fuck up.”

I nodded, as though my father were standing at my shoulder, and I did what I had to do.

I fed the vampire.