Page 35 of Battle for the Shadow Prince (A Bargain with the Shadow Prince #2)

35

Heart of Darkness

DAMIEN

I smell the blood before I see it. Eloise stumbles through the archway and tosses my mother’s earring in the box. She’s beaten Valeska back to the silo, but something’s wrong. Blood streams from her nose, and her face is white as ash. More blood pools around her bare feet. Where are her boots? Why is she soaking wet? And where is all that blood coming from?

She collapses to the stone just as her name appears on the mirror, declaring her the winner.

As the vampires who’ve bet on her howl in victory, I break apart and re-form by her side. “Eloise? Eloise? ” She’s too pale. There’s so much blood.

She doesn’t respond, but she’s still breathing, thank the gods. I move to pick her up, and the hand I scoop under her knees meets gushing blood. With some repositioning, I locate the source—a puncture wound in the back of her left thigh—and set her down again. Tearing a strip off the bottom of my shirt, I make a tourniquet for the wound. Thank fuck her nose seems to have stopped bleeding on its own. Another bloody spot under her rib reveals itself to be from an abrasion and not an open wound.

Lazarus’s already-wide eyes seem to pop out of his head as he leans over us both. “She needs a healer, Damien!” he whispers.

“Where?” Night Haven’s healers practice vampiric medicine. She needs a human doctor. But according to the old law, we’re not allowed to leave Night Haven.

Lazarus shakes his head. He doesn’t know. Panic flares behind my breastbone. It can’t end this way. I can’t lose her like this.

Marabella appears in front of me, shaking me by the shoulders. “Get her back to the house. Now!”

“She’s hurt. She needs a doctor,” I growl.

The madam rolls her eyes. “There’s one at the house, Damien. How do you think we care for forty human women down here?”

The second archway flashes and Valeska steps through, grinning with the earring in hand. I don’t wait around for what happens when she finds out she’s lost. I take off for Marabella’s, flying through the palace, through the marketplace, and up the stairs into the house.

“The doctor,” I scream at the woman manning the front desk.

Alarm sparks in her eyes when she sees Eloise, and she points to a plain white door at the end of the hall behind her. I hug my mate to me and carry her through a waiting room of vampires whose fangs drop and nostrils flare at the scent of her blood. When I reach the unmarked door, it’s locked. I move to kick it down, but Front Desk Girl runs up behind me with her badge.

“Sorry.” She opens the door for us, and we all go through. “Dr. Everline! There’s an emergency!”

A squat human woman in a lab coat saunters around the corner, takes one look at Eloise, and thrusts her coffee into Front Desk Girl’s hands. “In here, man.” She gestures wildly at an examination table through a set of automatic doors.

I place Eloise’s limp body on it. Everline smacks a red button on the wall, and an alarm sounds.

Two nurses run in, nudging me aside to work on Eloise. One seems to be attaching her to an EKG while the other pushes me out of the way to gain access to her arm to start an IV.

The doctor clicks on an overhead lamp.

“Eloise?” I say frantically from the head of the table, her face cupped in my hands.

“You should go to the waiting room. There will be blood,” Everline says.

“I’m not going anywhere.” I growl and bare a little fang. “I’m her mate!”

“I know who you are, shade. Everyone in Night Haven knows who you are.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Everline sneers and grabs a pair of shears from her lab coat. “Let’s take a look at this wound.”

She cuts away her clothing neatly and efficiently and hands it to me along with her daggers, still in their sheaths. I hate the sight of my mate lying naked and wounded on the table. She looks too small, too pale, too unconscious. I’m oddly relieved when Everline partially covers her with a thin white sheet.

The doctor turns her on her side, inspecting the deeper wound on the back of her leg that is now free from my binding. “This is a puncture wound. Do you know what bit her, Damien?”

“Bit her?” My heart beats faster. From my place next to Lazarus, I couldn’t see the details of the challenge or what Eloise saw in the archway before she stepped through. Valeska mentioned an earring. What exactly did Eloise face tonight?

The doctor grabs an instrument from a rolling table and scrapes inside the wound, holding up the result. Her brown eyes shift to mine. The ooze that covers the instrument is silver and viscous. Earring. Oh no .

A rush of fear courses through me. I lift her clothing to my nose, the brackish mildew scent of Stygarde’s Black Lake filling my nose. I draw one of her daggers. It’s still stained with black blood, and when I smell the blade, my memories are transported to Tenebris. I will never forget that smell. This is the blood of a creature that almost killed me as a child. A creature whose bite caused my brother to languish in bed with fever for a week.

“She was bitten by a Black Lake salamander,” I say, feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach.

The doctor arches an eyebrow at me. “The pattern of this bite runs from below her ribs to her thighs. No salamander could do this.”

“It’s from my world. Not from earth. They’re the size of your sharks and venomous.”

Dr. Everline and her nurse exchange glances. Everline nods and the nurse scurries off, returning seconds later with a bag of blood. “Now, I understand she’s your mate, Damien, but she’s running out of time. I’m going to have to do surgery to repair this wound. You’re an infection risk. I can’t start until you leave.”

I’m about to argue, but a hand lands on my arm.

It’s Marabella, and her face is grave. “Every minute you stand here, Damien, is a minute Dr. Everline can’t do her job and a minute closer to death for Eloise. Come walk with me. She’s in good hands.”

I press a kiss to Eloise’s cold, pale forehead and then force myself to follow Marabella from the infirmary. The door clicks closed behind us, and it’s all I can do not to slide back under the door in my shadow form. But Marabella urges me toward the back door. She nods toward a guard and then types a code into a pad near the door. When it opens, I find myself in a carefully manicured Japanese garden.

“Do the grow lights bother you? I can have them lowered.”

I test my abilities in the light, and while the brightness isn’t exactly comfortable, my shadows are still under my command. This garden is brightly lit, but the light isn’t painful. I’m not mortal. It’s not sunlight.

“They’re fine. How good is Dr. Everline?” I grumble.

Marabella starts walking. I fall in beside her.

“With humans? The best. Between you and me, she has connections among witches and has a stockpile of healing herbs and spells to enhance her medical practice. We regularly use her enchantments to improve the girls’ recovery time. I told her to spare no expense on Eloise.”

“Thank you.”

She smiles wickedly. “Oh, I can’t claim to be doing it out of the goodness of my heart. Your mate’s welfare is extremely important to me.”

“You bet on her today, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Marabella stops on the apex of a small wooden bridge over a creek filled with colorful koi fish. I study her, trying to deconstruct her motivations. The madam is an unrepentant capitalist. It doesn’t make sense.

“She’s human,” I say, “pitted against the deadliest vampire queen of the last five generations. Why would you expect her to win?”

A slow grin spreads across her face, the type that’s condescending in its smugness. “When she showed up at Wicked Divine with Cassius’s name on her lips, I knew she was no blood whore. Despite her wild red hair, Eloise is possibly the sweetest thing that has ever entered this city. Truly a kind heart. Not a mark on that creamy skin of hers. No addictions. As pretty as a doll. But that wasn’t why I chose her.”

“Then why did you?”

“She enchanted my taster.”

“Perceval?” I sneer, wanting to slit the vampire’s throat.

“That’s the one. One sip of her blood and if she’d have asked him, he would have knelt and licked her boots. I knew then that her blood was not entirely human.”

I turn to watch the water babbling beneath the bridge. “You’re wrong. She is human.”

“What she is, is rare,” Marabella snaps. “Call it a hunch.” She leans her elbows against the railing. “And I have excellent intuition. I heard rumors that the queen was keeping you prisoner in the palace. The girls hear everything, you know, and the guards couldn’t stop talking about how you’d ripped a donor’s bones from their flesh to fight your way out of the silo. I thought to myself, why would Cassius send this woman with the strange blood to me? Why was she so desperate to become a blood donor at my house? Unless… No one knew your mate’s name. The queen would have done anything for her identity. You’ve been one of my best customers over the years. I know enough about you to make some assumptions about the type of woman you’d choose, and Eloise fit the bill.” She laughs to herself. “So yeah, I put my money on Eloise, and I will do it again.”

“She’s a regular ATM for you,” I say through my teeth. “Between forcing her to sell her blood for three months and gambling on her welfare.”

“And saving her life. And getting her into the palace to save yours. You should be thanking me.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Have you even paused to consider why I introduced her to the clients I did? The commander of the guard. The master of Liberty coven. The wealthiest merchant in Night Haven.”

“Eloise told me you convinced her she needed a cheering section.”

“And you couldn’t see through that?”

I stare at her, waiting for an explanation.

She scoffs. “Damien, Valeska mating you would be the worst thing to ever happen to Marabella’s. The queen forcibly incorporated sixteen covens into her hive since she took power, and with you forced to do her bidding, no coven would be safe. No coven in America. No coven in the world. And with that kind of power, why pay human blood donors? This hive would be strong enough to enslave all the humans they wanted. So while Valeska does have her supporters, I’m not one of them, and neither are the three vampires I arranged to take Eloise’s blood. Your mate is a godsend. I want Eloise to win this thing as much as you do. So when I tell you that her blood has enchanted the most powerful vampires in Night Haven, please know that it is no coincidence that they found their way to her room.”

The pieces fall into place, and it all makes sense. “This isn’t just about money for you. You’re hoping the queen loses. You and your friends want an end to the hive.”

She folds her arms, drumming her fingers on her cashmere-clad biceps. “Oh, Damien, money is always the priority with me, but in this case, overthrowing the queen is a close and very sweet second.”