Page 10 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

JIN

The floppy, stinky fish had been Chester’s idea. While Jin was on the streets beating information out of every lead he could find, the three pint-size lordlings of Spindrift—Chester, Reni, and Felix—had been hard at work locating Flick. As well as Jin, and even Arthie.

Someone had to take charge , Chester had said with his arms crossed, when Jin snuck out of the empty schoolroom where he’d interrogated Coll and found the three of them waiting outside. They nearly caught the side of his umbrella when he thought they were Horned Guards.

You left us for an entire week , Felix added.

Alone , Reni said hollowly.

They’d been in the dark since that night at the Athereum hall, and had taken matters into their own hands.

As guilty as the words had made Jin feel, it wasn’t as though they had gone through what he had. They looked at Jin as if this was just another Wednesday, when in reality, he had died.

He couldn’t look at the sky and celebrate a rare cloudless sky anymore. He needed Ettenia’s usual gloom. He couldn’t take a stroll and follow his nose to fresh, buttery pastries and sweet jam, no. His food was inside people.

He winced at that image. The last thing Jin remembered of his life was agreeing to become a vampire and Arthie sinking her fangs into his skin. When he woke on the Athereum floor amid fallen reporters and vampires and black-clad attackers alike, he was alone.

Arthie was gone. Matteo too. Flick and Laith and the kitten were nowhere to be seen. He was overwhelmed and ravenous, but the Athereum vampires were there.

They’d turned up their noses at him, except for Sidharth, Penn’s second-in-command. He’d helped him get clean and eventually fed. Jin didn’t know if he liked it. He could barely remember the night, but he hadn’t had another sip since.

“Jin?” Flick asked, aghast in the reeking storeroom.

She was different too. Jin had always thought Felicity Linden dazzled in a gown, but Felicity Linden in trousers and a shirt with neat lines?

Wicked knives, it was something else. The tweed clung to her curves, pleats following the lines of her thighs.

He would have expected every button of her shirt to be closed, but the top two were undone, framing a tiny splotch of her dark skin between the cream-colored fabric.

He couldn’t look away. He wanted to sweep toward her, hold her shy gaze, and lower his lips to that skin she’d bared to tease him. He wanted to feel the lush press of her lips against his again. To press his brow to hers and ask if she had missed him.

Chester cleared his throat.

Right.

“You’re bleeding,” Jin said, holding himself back from going to her aid.

He didn’t trust himself yet. I’m not some feral beast .

No, but he also didn’t know this new body as well as he would have liked.

His strengths were still surprising him.

On the floor between them, the kitten rolled over with the fish in her claws, back thumping against one of the many old crates stacked about.

Flick reached for her bleeding arm. He heard the hitch in her already labored breathing when she remembered. That he was no longer human. That he was a vampire. That he was what her mother absolutely loathed.

Reni understood, being a young vampire himself. “I have a kit. Sit, my lady. I will tend to it.”

It should have made Jin feel better, seeing how sure Reni was that he wouldn’t drink her dry, an indication that one day he would reach that point. But when Flick glanced at Jin with hesitation, it made something spike within him, a feeling he couldn’t quite place.

And to think, he would have known exactly what it was like to live and act and function as a vampire if Arthie had just thought to open her mouth and trust him.

Flick finally sat on one of the crates, the wood creaking under her weight. She tossed the curls out of her face and lifted her gaze to his. “You’re all right.”

Jin nodded.

“I—” She paused, and Jin thought her lips were closing around the letter m , closing around the word miss , but she stopped herself. Her eyelids fluttered. “Good. I was worried.”

“It’ll take a lot to keep me down,” he replied, but with only half of his usual charm because he had missed her too. Terribly.

“And Arthie—” She stopped, unsure how to phrase her next sentiment.

“She’s not dead. She’s a vampire,” Jin said, and paused. “Too.”

Something flickered in her dusky eyes at the addition of too . He didn’t know what he’d meant by it. Was he asking her if she accepted him? Was he trying to remind her of what he was now, in case she’d forgotten? In case she didn’t recall watching him die by her mother’s hand?

In the week they’d spent apart, the threads between them had frayed. As if their burgeoning bond was a house that they’d been polishing and furnishing before they’d disappeared, leaving dust to settle and cobwebs to collect in the corners.

She licked her lips and he wondered if she remembered their kiss.

His last kiss, drowning him in that meadow of wildflowers and sunlight, before he’d died. Reni returned with a tin case and bent beside her to inspect her wound. It wasn’t deep, Jin surmised with relief.

“Wasn’t she one before?” Flick asked, nose scrunching with confusion. “She’s the one who…”

Who turned you , she wanted to say.

“She was half a vampire,” Jin said. “Not that she told me so herself. It’s what I’ve gathered.”

Flick nodded carefully. “My mother—I don’t know what to call her anymore.”

Jin looked away. There he’d been, concerned about how she felt about him when her entire life had been upended.

“Whatever you like,” Chester piped up. Jin had told him, Felix, and Reni everything. “You can call her a bad egg or a hornswoggler, maybe. I called my mum a ratbag for abandoning me by a fishmonger. Your mum is a lot worse, and the possibilities really are endless.”

Flick laughed, the end of it teetering to half a sob.

“Her men have been after me ever since that night,” she said finally, and Jin didn’t know if she spoke the words with blame or if he was simply feeling the guilt of it.

She sucked in a breath as Reni swiped a cloth down her arm.

“They won’t stop. And when I can get away from them in the shadows, I have to worry about the Horned Guard in broad daylight. ”

Jin nodded. “You’ll be safe with us.”

“With you?” Flick asked plainly, looking about the room. Jin saw her point. “White Roaring is in shambles.”

Her throat bobbed with a swallow, as if she was trying hard to keep it together, and Jin realized she’d never seen the chaos that he and Arthie did on a regular basis.

To go from none to this level of unrest could not be easy—it was tumultuous enough for him.

But he would keep her safe. So long as she was by his side, he would make sure of it.

She closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again. “What have you four been up to?”

“We just found ’im,” Chester proclaimed. “We’ve been looking for the three of you for days now. I know we lost a lot, but we can’t give up.”

“No one’s given up, Chester boy,” Jin said, and then answered Flick’s question. “I’ve been dodging that mess out there and following leads on my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that there might be clues in the ledger.”

Understanding flickered across her face, followed by hurt. “And that’s why you came looking for me.”

Jin clenched his jaw. He’d considered looking for her, hadn’t he? But he’d been so lost in his thoughts, in his anger, in his pain, in trying to understand this new craving for blood that he simply hadn’t gotten to that point yet.

He’d been so concerned that she might hate him now that he was a vampire that he hadn’t even thought to give her a chance to prove that herself.

And if he’d dallied any longer, the Ram might have kidnapped her. Killed her.

“Jin knows you’re not a damsel in need of saving,” Chester said matter-of-factly. “And besides, he needed us to find you.”

Jin could have kissed Chester just then. He didn’t feel any less guilty, but the words drew a small smile out of Flick.

“Whatever would I do without you?” she said to Chester.

“I missed you, Flick,” Chester said. His white-blond head bounced from her to Jin as Reni tied off a bandage around Flick’s arm. “Well? Shall we get moving, then?”

“Oh? And where to?” Jin asked, suddenly wishing he was alone with her.

“To the Athereum, of course. Ivor said that’s where Arthie and Matteo are. You didn’t think we were trading Spindrift for an old fisherman’s storeroom, did you?”

Flick scrunched her nose and opened her mouth, looking as though she was about to agree.

“We’re doing no such thing,” Jin said. “They’re my parents, and we don’t need Arthie to find them. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than a knock sounded on the wooden door of the storeroom.

Chester looked at the floor, drawing a line in the dust with the toe of his shoe.

Jin sighed.