Page 61 of Blood Moon

I can confess in the silence now; fate made us ignorant.

Article VII, Lost Letters from Aadan the First

This place felt like the catacombs.

Long dark hallways met us with every turn. Ivory and yellowed bones were plastered between crooks in the wall. Small oil lamps lit the way. A rancid smell lingered in the cracks, sour and rotten. My stomach turned.

“ Please ,” I whispered to the man. He’d had his hand around my arm so tight, I knew a bruise threaded beneath his grasp. “Let me go. I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”

The man’s voice was set at a tone so low, I wondered if it caused him pain. He laughed, struck me at my side, and I stumbled forward. “Your kind? Promising? Not gonna happen, kid.”

We stopped at an arched wooden door. He placed a key in the handle, turned it, but knocked three times. When it opened, the girl who’d taunted me was there. A sneer on her petite face as she welcomed us in.

It was a bathing room. A porcelain tub sat in the center, already filled with clouds of steam rising above it.

A hole in the floor, all the way on the other side of the room, cloaked in shadows.

Linens and towels were folded on a steel counter.

Melted wax and flickering candles adorned the room, generating light.

“She’s all yours.” He pushed me to the girl, and I stumbled. “Abba wants her ready in thirty minutes for the ritual.”

“Mmmh,” she said with a raised brow, holding my shirt with the tips of her nails. When he left, there was a turn and a click, the door locking. In a blink, silver bands appeared, clamping around my wrists and neck. “One wrong move, and you’ll be electrocuted,” she promised.

I swallowed, teeth chattering from the cold room.

“Remove your clothes, now,” she demanded, staring at me.

Her eyes didn’t blink as she waited. “I guessed that bucket of water I poured on you just wouldn’t do.

” She picked at a nail before folding her arms. Then she huffed, aggravated by my lack of urgency.

“Take them off,” she snapped. “Get into the tub.”

I had no choice. I did as she said, dropping my ruined clothes to the floor before stepping into the porcelain tub. The water scorched my skin as it steamed around me, and I gritted my teeth, jaw locking as I sat.

“I am Thea,” she said, and she filled a pail with water to dump on my head. Momentarily, my vision went, and I spat out the searing liquid. “Not that it matters,” she continued. “You won’t know me for long.”

Thea pulled me back by the shoulders, held me underwater. From above, her smile haunted me, canines elongated in anticipation, slick straight hair cascading around her. She kept me there until I was at my last moment.

Upon release, I emerged, gasping for air.

“Don’t be such a baby. It’s faster to clean you if you submerge first. Haven’t you ever had a bath?” she quipped.

I rubbed at my eyes, spit out more water. “Why are you doing this?” I demanded, the words bit out, cutting at the tip of my tongue.

Thea lathered my hair with shampoo, tugging at my scalp, pulling at the ends. My strands would become far beyond tangled if she continued the way she was. “What, cleaning you?”

“ All of this.”

She poured another pail of water over me, dropped it, and forced me under again. There was no real point for the pail, other than to anger me. A dunk would have rid all the shampoo from my hair.

When I came back, she conditioned my loose curls. Years of heat had damaged them; I was astounded they spiraled at all. “This is for the Blood Ritual,” she started. “Blood for blood.”

“But why?” She pushed me under again, and I inhaled water. “Fuck,” I screamed, my face aflame from the liquid trickling inside.

Thea laughed. “Because you stink, and Abba wants you cleaned for the ritual. She doesn’t want the pure blood tainted with whatever mess you’ve been tied up in today.” Thea scrubbed me with a bristled loofah. My skin swelled and reddened with each brush.

I winced, eyes shut tight. “No,” I managed between my teeth. “But why the charades? Why do all this?”

“Blood for blood,” she repeated. “A life for a life. Your mother killed Elena in cold blood with no remorse. You should feel honored that you’re going this way.”

Thea dunked me again, but I held in the expletive I wanted to shout as I came up, groaning instead.

She wrung out my hair, wrapped it in a towel, her nails scraping at the sides of my face and neck.

It only provoked me further, and I fought back my need to send a blow to her face.

Electrocution seemed much more horrid than this ritual.

She commanded I stand. Upon doing so, she threw a towel at me. I caught it before it landed in the tub and wrapped it around myself. “Who is Elena?” I suspected I should know. If her demise was the reason for mine, I sought to uncover it all.

Thea snickered. “They said you were dumb, but I didn’t realize how ignorant you actually were.

Elena was the eldest daughter of Horacio, one of the first Blood Lycans who descended from Aadan the First, one of the Originals.

She was Julian’s mother, and he is her only son.

” I wobbled, almost slipping into the tub.

In my head, I saw that framed photo of Julian.

A happy baby being held by his mother. “Ah, and she’s clumsy, too. This should be fun.”

But I couldn’t move from the position I was curling into. My eyes watered, my vision went. Elena was Julian’s mother, and my mother had killed her. It was her connection to the woods, to the wolves, to the Blood Lycans. Why had she chosen to take his mother?

But Elena’s death was perhaps one of her reasons for running, for why she’d been so secretive.

And it was why they were after me. Why they wanted me. Blood for blood.

Suddenly, every loose link clicked together. Julian had hinted that I was protected, hidden from the world of the paranormal. It turned out, I was hidden by the hand of my mother. She foresaw the damage she’d done, knew there would be grim consequences after she killed Elena.

He’d said, “I’m trying to find a way for you to understand that … that I don’t believe you’ve been sheltered from this world the way you think you have.”

It was why Julian was supposed to stay away from me, why he had such an aversion to my presence upon our first encounter. We were enemies with an established history, and I understood that now.

“As if you don’t know,” he’d said, and, “Sometimes vengeance doesn’t have a timeline.

” He knew, he knew, he knew. And how could he stand to look at me?

Your miserable existence is my demise. Every word falling together like beads on a string.

I wilted ever so slightly, crumbling, water dripping down my legs.

“Move,” Thea snapped. She wanted me out of the tub, but she was oblivious to what was seething beneath my flesh, clawing at the curve of my bones, trapped. The way I viewed the world would never be the same.

My stomach soured, and I heaved, only dry air ascending my throat.

Rena, my mother, was a murderer. She was the reason Julian was motherless.

A flash, and I clearly made out Bobby’s findings.

Those wounds, the bruises. The wolves were after her, and she’d been fighting them.

She was never an accessory, no. She was the sole perpetrator.

Thea moved me herself, upset I’d disobeyed. I almost slipped on the concrete floor once I was out, and she rolled her eyes. My tears were full of wrath as she buttoned me into a white satin gown with sheer puffed sleeves. “Death’s bride,” she mumbled, and I could taste the bitterness in her mouth.

“Sit.” She forced me into a chair. Thrust pearls into my ears, fastened them around my neck. She tugged on my hair next, pulling half of it back and away from my face, twisting it, or braiding it perhaps. The rest of my strands waved into the shape of a V down my back.

My thoughts spun, cranked away until they snapped. How much of what Julian had told me was a lie? How much was the truth?

In the tent, everything he’d said … it didn’t seem like a lie.

I’d felt those words in me like an emblem, like he’d sawed at my ribs and pressed into my heart.

The way he looked at me, how he held me, the enormity of our time together burrowed in my chest, conveying it could be love, or something comparable at the least.

But I supposed when you were taught love through venomous bites and daggers, you’d give it the same way. Subsequently, when Julian said my blood had a particular scent, that it was why the wolves and the Blood Lycans were after me, was that true, or was that all part of the ploy?

Or maybe it was because my blood and my mother’s blood were similar.

“My blood,” I began when I sensed Thea was almost done. But I was unsure of how to ask the question. “Is it not different from other humans? Special?”

Thea made me stand, and when she did, she spit at my bare feet. “I wouldn’t categorize your blood as special. Rare? Sure. But dhampirs—” And she paused, her face hard and then taunting. She knew I had no idea what any of it meant.

A cruel smile. “You are half human, half vampire. A disgrace. An abomination,” she said, and she forced a white veil over my head.

At this, the door unlocked, opened.