Page 28 of A Token of Blood and Betrayal (Kennedy Rain #4)

Thordis emerged from the hallway a millennium later, arms over her head, stretching like a cat soaking in sunlight.

She wasn’t dressed in the leathers she typically wore.

She’d topped her black pants with a slightly loose tank top, which did nothing to hide the three visible bruises she bore like trophies, one on each curve of her neck, the third on the swell of her left breast, just barely peeking out above her shirt.

I knew how good that must have felt. I’d been bitten by a vampire exactly once, and after the initial pinch of pain, Jared’s magic had seeped into me.

I would have been lost to it if not for the mini-me in my head kicking my brain until I clawed my way back to reality.

I shook the memory from my head and noted Thordis’s bare feet. Her toenails were painted pink. Bright pink. Valkyrie painting their toes at all seemed strange—they tended to spend their time fighting, training, or screwing—but pink was absolutely the last color I would have guessed she’d choose.

She plopped down beside me on the couch, then set one naked foot on the coffee table, then the other, crossing her legs at the ankles.

“Did you lose a bet?” I asked.

Her contented smile vanished. I didn’t point out her toes. She didn’t look at them, but she did grumble yes and took her feet off the table. She then sat crisscross so she could hide the damning evidence underneath a decorative pillow she placed in her lap.

“I think they are charming.” Deagan sauntered into the living room, shirt unbuttoned and untucked, fancy coat nowhere to be seen.

“You look better,” I said. I hadn’t noticed the lack of vibrancy in his steps before, the lack of color to his skin.

White vampires were always on the extremely pale side of the spectrum, but they didn’t look dead.

Now that he’d been properly fed, he looked like he had a heartbeat again, barely there and measured in beats per hour rather than per minute like a human’s.

“All because of you, my dear.”

“Hey.” Thordis slung her lap pillow at him. He caught it and tossed it back.

“You certainly helped,” he said. “But Kennedy is the reason I still exist. Now, I am sure I told you to wait outside.”

“You asked me to wait outside,” Thordis replied. “I chose not to.”

Deagan began to button his shirt. “I must speak with Kennedy privately.”

“So you can eat her?”

“I am well sated.”

Thordis grinned.

Deagan’s abs disappeared, then his well-defined chest, when he finished with his shirt. The top three buttons he left undone. “Do you need me to say please?”

“I do like it when you beg.”

“Oh my God.” I held up my hand. “Just stop. Give us ten minutes. Or you can go home. I’m…” My brow furrowed as I looked toward the not-there window like I’d be able to see her vehicle parked on the curb. “How did you get here?”

“Uber.”

I waited for her to say she was joking or to at least expand upon her one-word answer. She didn’t. “Was an Uber just coincidentally sitting in The Rain’s parking lot?”

“Of course not.” She spoke as if I were the crazy one. “I tracked you.”

“How?” I asked.

“With a tracker.” She might as well have added a duh.

“Where is it?” I demanded.

“Where’s what?”

I gritted my teeth. “The tracker.”

“If I tell you, you’ll get rid of it.”

“Yes.”

“Then I couldn’t track you.”

I used to get Thordis and Phedre mixed up, mostly because they intentionally tried to confuse me, but also because they were so similar, both weird, violent, and kind of woo-woo. Now it was clear Thordis was the craziest of the two.

“That’s the point,” I said.

“It’s likely best the tracker remains,” Deagan said. “You are the last Rain, and you’ve made many enemies.”

“Not that many,” I said. I understood their point; I just didn’t want to admit it was valid. “Can we take care of your emergency now?”

“Yes! Of course. Thordis.” He faced the Valkyrie. “Wait outside.”

Thordis stood. “Fine. But if you harm her, I will pull your entrails from your gut and feed them to you for dinner.”

He looked affronted. “Please don’t. You would stain my shirt.”

Thordis laughed, kissed him on the cheek as she passed, then headed to the garage.

“Now then,” Deagan said. “Follow me. We are behind schedule.”

Not my fault, I thought, trailing Deagan to the hall, then into a room, the master suite judging by its size and the fact that the king-sized bed was now very rumpled.

The bed faced a flat-screen TV mounted above a polished dresser.

A comfortable-looking white chair sat in one corner, Thordis’s boots resting beside it, and in another corner, the coat Deagan had worn here was hooked on a tall stand with three others, each one so dramatic, it looked like he’d raided a theater’s costume closet.

“Close the door.” He made his way to the bed and knelt beside it.

I closed the door but remained right next to it, not wanting to go anywhere near his little love nest.

“I’ve been maintaining this secret for centuries. You, Ms. Rain, are the only other soul I will share it with.”

The reverence in his voice made me lean forward, trying to get a peek of whatever he was retrieving from beneath the bed. Maybe it was something useful, something worth this emergency.

“I am entrusting this to you,” he said. “You are the one.”

Something thunked, him moving aside a floorboard maybe. Then he slowly, carefully pulled out the priceless… relic?

“We’re here for a book?” The thought that this emergency would be worth the time vanished as quickly as a shifting werewolf’s human form.

“An important book.” Deagan placed the tome on the wrinkled and displaced comforter and motioned me closer.

I moved to his side as he opened the tome, its spine and pages crackling, and stared down at line after line of scribbles.

If I wanted to be generous, they could be called words.

Some of the lines and loops were faded by time.

The rest of it was barely readable cursive and bad or antiquated spellings.

The script ran from the top of the oversized pages all the way to the bottom with hardly any breaks.

Even though it made my eyes hurt to look at it, I squinted, trying to figure out what made this thing so special.

“Is it magical?” I asked hopefully.

“It is useful.” He turned a page. “These are my notes.”

He sounded so pleased with himself I made a second attempt to read. If I tried really hard, I could make out about half the words. To actually make it through an entire paragraph, I’d likely need a magnifying glass and a hell of a lot of Advil.

And there were a lot of paragraphs. The script was tiny, fitting twenty words or more on a single line, and the pages were filled front and back.

Deagan turned to another page. Then another. “Here we are. I’ve written in chronological order, of course. Many individuals have multiple entries, but this is the start of what you need.”

Patience running thin, I skimmed the page. Nothing jumped out at me. From what I could decipher, each line just listed observations and rumors about different paranorms, mostly vampires I hadn’t heard of. What was I supposed to do with this?

Then a name midway down the page caught my attention. Satine.

Now I was interested.

It took context clues and some guessing to piece the sentences together.

Satine traveled to the New World—I’m assuming he meant the US—with Samuel, the elusive king of the vampires.

I’d met one of his Heirs, Aidan, a couple of weeks ago.

That was the mistake that pissed Satine off because I’d been scheduled to meet with her.

I hadn’t because my gut told me she wasn’t someone I wanted to ally with.

My gut had been one hundred percent right.

“Are you finished?” Deagan asked.

“Not yet.”

I scanned the next few lines for Aidan’s name, found it, then tried to decipher the following sentences. I already knew Satine and Aidan despised each other. According to Deagan, she had tried “thrice” to kill him. She was never able to.

“Are you finished now?”

“No,” I said. “This isn’t the easiest read ever.”

It looked like Deagan had added to the entry over time. The ink was darker, and his handwriting changed. All the Heirs hated Satine. It went as far back as Kalends Mar 1281? Pretty sure that was a date.

Deagan huffed behind me. “You are literate, are you not?”

If I didn’t like Deagan so much, I would have strongly disliked him.

Stepping back, I motioned toward the book. “Why don’t you read it to me?”

I’d barely finished speaking when he said, “I’ll summarize.”

He placed his fingertips toward the bottom of the page.

“Satine is one of Samuel’s five—now four—potential Heirs.

She is a lethal, conniving, sinister woman who abhors the other five—four—as much as they abhor her.

They tried to destroy each other, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

It became such a mess, they nearly revealed our existence to humans.

Samuel had to take action. He commanded them to cease hunting each other.

They were bound to his wishes, and something resembling a détente lasted a century or so.

Then the Heirs began to mysteriously perish. ”

“You’re sure they perished and didn’t just disappear?” I asked.

“Absolutely. When a master dies, the link between him or her and their bonded vampires is severed. It’s uncomfortable and painful, especially if the master is Aged. Heirs were dying.”

Even though Deagan hadn’t glanced again at the journal, he turned a page. “I began to suspect Satine in the early seventeenth century. We savored each other’s blood and bodies. At the—”

“You slept with Satine?” My voice shot up. It felt like a betrayal, which, granted, was ridiculous considering it probably happened hundreds of years ago.