Page 33 of Kiss the Dawn (Order of Helsing #4)

ORINA

E zekiel slept like the dead. His pulse was so faint, each beat so far apart, that someone who didn’t know what he was might mistake him for a dead body. His skin was ice cold also, his body in a preternatural stasis that only sunset would wake him from.

I left him and wandered into the kitchen for coffee, only to find we were out of sugar. And bagels too. Today was my last day off before I went back to work, and I wanted to make the most of it.

I wasn’t much of a cook, but I could put together a decent meal when I wanted to, and I wanted to do it for Ezekiel. I tiptoed into the bedroom and grabbed some clothes, then dressed in the sitting room, realized I’d forgotten my phone, and found it dead on the bedside table.

I was usually good about keeping it charged, but Ezekiel was here, and my mind had been on other things. Delicious, distracting things.

Ezekiel had always been attractive to me, even when I’d found him abhorrent for the things he did. But now that I loved him, the attraction, the desire, everything between us was heightened tenfold.

I was insatiable for him and he for me. I ached in places I didn’t know were possible, but it was a sweet ache that begged for more.

I couldn’t wait for him to open his eyes and smile up at me.

I plugged my phone in to charge and popped it back on the bedside table.

“I’ll be right back.” I blew him a kiss and left the apartment, grabbing my coat on the way.

I loved the security on this place. Lifts that required a code to operate, and a sturdy outer door, also accessed via code. I stepped out into the gray dawn and paused.

Would the stores even be open at this hour?

The bakery was two blocks away, and yet the aroma of fresh bread teased my nose. Fresh bread and coffee sounded so good right now.

I took a left and strolled down the empty street. The pizza restaurant was up ahead just after the alley. Ezekiel had decided he loved pepperoni. He’d eaten with abandon, with his hands. I’d wiped sauce from the corner of his mouth, and his golden eyes had darkened and?—

I was yanked into the alley, where gray shadows tried to swallow me. I lashed out, twisting to get away, but something rough and dark fell over my head, and an acrid scent scathed my nostrils.

Darkness.

“Ah, there she is. Wake up, little princess.”

The voice was familiar, drawing me up out of the depths of oblivion and back to consciousness. It took a moment for my eyes to work, to focus on my surroundings. Gray stone and candlelight. I was on my back, a domed stone ceiling above me painted in crimson lines to make up a strange arcane glyph.

I tried to sit up and came up against restraints. My torso and limbs were bonded to…to some kind of metal contraption.

“What is this?”

“Orina! We’re here. You’re not alone!”

“Merry?” I strained my neck, twisting to find her, and my heart skipped several beats when I did.

She was in a cage fixed to the ceiling by thick chains, and she wasn’t alone. Holly and Padma were with her, and behind them…Oh God. Bodies, so many bodies lining the walls, pressed to stone and held there somehow. Thick silver pipes jutted out of each chest, one end vanishing into the wall.

“Get away from her!” Padma growled at someone out of my range of vision.

I tried to twist to see, but it was no use. Whoever it was was behind me. “What is this? Show yourself.”

The contraption I was on swung away from the cage, and light singed my vision for a moment. I blinked to adjust and stared at the effigy before me. A figure made of stone and metal woven together, it had to be at least ten feet tall. Gems and crystals gleamed across its surface, connected by abstract glyphs and symbols. The face was that of a woman—serene and beautiful—but the body was that of a beast with claws and powerful haunches.

“Do you like it?” the man asked, and I suddenly knew who it was. I recognized the voice of the head of the House of Spirit, even though we’d met a handful times.

“Christian Constrange?”

His boots clipped on the ground as he rounded my chair to stand in front of me. “You recognize my voice.”

“I have an excellent aural memory. What is this? What are you doing?”

“A little ritual,” he said. “To free Loviator.”

A chill wrapped around my spine. “You can’t. The curse is broken. ”

“Oh, I know. But it hardly matters when we have the power to tear a hole in the fabric of her prison and drag her out.” He smiled smugly. “It took some time, feeding her souls through the cold ones and gathering fuel for the ritual.” He waved a hand at all the bodies, all the missing people. “Souls are power, after all.”

“They’re alive?”

“They’d be useless to us dead.”

Us… “The new gods?”

His eyes lit up in delight. “I’m impressed. Not just with you, but your friends too. Although they only found my lair because I wanted them to.” He lifted his chin up to the cage. “Jacqueline Hyde works for me. Among others…”

That bitch. I knew there was something off about her. Okay, think, Orina. Think. Information. I needed more of it. “Okay, so you kidnapped a bunch of supernaturals, and you want to use their souls to set Loviator free, but why wait till after the curse was broken?”

He looked a little put out by this question. “You weren’t meant to break it just yet. A few more days and we’d have been ready. A ritual of this magnitude takes time. Every aspect must be perfect. And tonight, it is. Perfect. We have everything that we need.”

There was a fizzing sound, and Christian looked over my head at someone. “Ah, just in time. Do you have it?”

“I do. ”

Two words, and my heart broke because those two words were said by someone I’d trusted with my life, all my life.

I took a shuddering breath, gritted my teeth, and spoke. “Hello, Micah.”

He appeared to my left, soundless and stealthy, just as we were trained to be, and looked down on me with beautiful brown eyes, warm brown eyes, kind brown eyes, eyes that had laughed with me, cried with me, consoled, and encouraged me.

There was so much I wanted to say to him. So much I wanted to ask, but there was only one question that mattered right now. “Why?”

He pressed his lips together. “This world is broken, Orina. Beyond measure. And only the power of gods can heal it.”

“You think Loviator will heal our world? You’ve got the wrong god.”

“No. Of course she wouldn’t heal it.” He said it as if he was correcting me, his student. As if we were back at headquarters in history class, and my eyes burned for the innocence of that time. “No, Orina. This isn’t about her personally. It’s about her power. We plan to summon her and trap her in the golem that we’ve created. She will be in our control. Ours to command.”

“As new gods, we will make this world a better place,” Christian said. “Not just for vampires but for all supernaturals.”

“And you believe that?” Padma cried. “Micah, how can you believe that? How can you be sure that this bloodthirsty vampire won’t enslave all of humanity?”

Micah met Christian’s gaze with a smile. “Because Christian isn’t the one in charge. I am.”

How could I have ever thought him handsome? How could I have ever imagined myself in love with this man? All I saw now was the cruel smile on his face and the manic gleam in his eyes.

“I’ve seen how the supernaturals dominate man,” Micah said. “How they use us and abuse us. How powerless we are against them. Then I joined the Order and found out about the curse. So I did a little digging—well, a lot of digging and discovered a ritual. One that had been used a long time ago to summon Loviator. One that the Tepes brothers believed to have been destroyed, and with the help of a few like-minded individuals, I was able to reshape it for our purpose.”

He was basically saying supernaturals sucked, but Christian was just standing there and nodding along like an obedient child. “What do you get from this, Christian?”

He smiled down at me. “Peace. Freedom from the curse of bloodlust.”

“What? I thought you praised Ezekiel as a god. You built a church for him. ”

“I did what I needed to do to fit in. To make my brethren believe I was a believer, but Ezekiel is a monster. He’s the beast that infected us all. That brought death to so many. I won’t be this thing any longer. Micah will cure us once he is a god.”

Micah a god? By using Loviator. By becoming her puppet master. “Did you send Ruby to stop me breaking the curse?”

“Ruby was a devout believer,” Micah said, his tone tight. “She was mourned.”

Ruby had come to us as Ariella—a vein gifted to Ezekiel. She’d pretended to be Arabella reborn. Arabella, the woman that Ezekiel had loved centuries ago. The woman that had been trapped in Loviator’s prison with him. Arabella was the only soul that could break the curse. Ruby had tricked us all, but Holly had felt the glamour clouding Ruby and we’d figured out that she was an impostor and that I…I was the real Arabella.

Micah had orchestrated that deception along with sending the cold ones to the school, no doubt. “The souls of children, Christian? Really?” I gave him a scathing look.

“That was not sanctioned,” Micah said. “Loviator chose to do that herself. She was getting stronger.”

“So you knew I was the curse breaker and sent me here anyway?”

“No, I sent you here so you’d be where I needed you, protected for when I needed you. ”

“Under my watchful eye,” Christian said proudly.

“The curse breaker part was unexpected,” Micah said. “But it all worked out.”

He’d been keeping tabs on me through his vampire spies. I guessed the few times we’d been seen in social settings, the possessive way Ezekiel behaved, was enough for them to deduce who I was.

“I would say the curse being broken is in our favor, wouldn’t you?” Christian said to Micah. “This way Loviator is in her prison proper, and we can have full control of pulling her out and into our golem before she can fight back.”

“I suppose it is,” Micah said. His gaze dropped to me, then to something in his hand, out of view so I couldn’t see it.

My breath quivered in my lungs because there was no more stalling. It was time to ask the question that I’d been sitting on, the one that would reveal my fate. “How do I fit into all of this?”

Behind me, someone began to sob.

It sounded like Merry, and it struck me that they already knew the answer.

They knew my fate, and it was bad.

Micah slowly raised his hand, and I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the strange large iron key. “This is the activator,” he said. “It will begin the ritual and bond me to the golem, making me its master, and thus, Loviator’s too. The souls will be drawn from the bodies around us to fuel the spell, and you…” There was real sadness in his eyes as he looked down at me. “Your blood will seal her fate, locking her inside her new tomb.”

“My blood?” My throat went dry. “How much blood?”

“I’m sorry, Orina. I’m going to need it all.”