Page 15 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Fifteen

T wo days following Morrigan’s lost bout with Sonia, we found ourselves in the crypt again, below the earth with the dripping coastal rock and musty brine cloaking the stagnant room. Misting gusts blew in off the shore every so often, though I couldn’t figure out its source. Josephine’s alchemical fires kept the cavern at a temperature that even my fledgling blood couldn’t protect me from. Morrigan had insisted this was the safest room within the estate to practice wielding my sorcery.

And now that I was here, with centuries-old vampire blood—vampires who could’ve been my coven-mates if a disastrous fate had not intervened—watching over me, the fear and thrill and expectation sent me reeling. The hammering of stone driving into metal pounded against my temples. Morrigan was tacking up Sonia’s invitation to one of the crypt’s pillars, not that I needed or wished to have another reminder. Her blood had painted a gruesome abstract, claret-dark and rusted to the parchment.

“Are you doing all right over there, Elspeth? You’ve gone pale again,” Gwen said, her voice drifting languidly through the crypt. Morrigan had asked her to accompany us for my first few lessons, explaining that we needed another vampire without blood sorcery in their veins to help me learn certain vital skills.

But after witnessing sorcery firsthand, the thought of harming one of my coven brought an uneasy tightness to my lungs, my palms clammy and tremulous despite being clenched in my skirts. I nodded, my tongue parched though my last drink had been not ten minutes ago.

“Two weeks until the Blood Moon.” Morrigan met us in the center of the crypt where we were framed by the arched pillars. “Which means we have a fortnight to teach you skills that took me decades of study, years of failure, dedication, exhaustion committed to the discipline.”

“Really, Morrigan, she feels badly enough already,” Gwen sang.

“I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m only forewarning you about the difficulties that are ahead for us both.”

“I know,” I answered, withering, possessing none of the self-assured confidence I had days earlier. All of my stubborn optimism had abandoned me. Nightmares had taken hold. “I didn’t sleep last night turning every impossibility over in my head.”

Morrigan steadied my hands, covering them with her own.

“You’ve done this before, darling. You have centuries of power waiting there within you, every skill I’ve managed at your fingertips. What you need now is understanding and focus—making yourself a conduit for your inheritance. If I’m correct in my assumptions, you won’t need blood to channel your power because you have my blood, sorcerer’s blood.”

“I suppose that’s why you’ve invited me down here,” Gwen said. “Testing out your little theory in a room I loathe with the same intensity it would take to burn Sonia to dust.”

Morrigan clapped Gwen on the shoulder. “Sorry, my love. Josephine was too busy to volunteer. That leaves you.”

She left a kiss on my forehead before moving from me, rolling up her tunic sleeves to the elbow. “If you want to fight,” she said, her voice echoing, “I’ll teach you what I can. It won’t be easy, not with time slipping away from us. We know nothing of Sonia’s plans, but if I’m sending you back to her, you need to be ready for anything.”

I blew out a breath. “Right.”

“Fledgling to a blood sorcerer in just a few weeks,” Gwen mused. “I think I’d go mad.”

Morrigan frowned. “Now who’s being unhelpful?” She whirled around to face me, the grim mausoleum of our coven’s blood behind her. Icy flames cut slanting blue light across one of her sharp cheekbones. “I need you to understand something before we begin, Elspeth.”

“I’m listening.”

“Whatever you feel, whatever may happen in this room,” Morrigan continued slowly, easing around the warning, “it’s not my intention to harm you, but to teach. Blood sorcery is treacherous. You can’t learn to counteract its effects until you feel the subtle pull of its manipulations.”

I nodded. “I trust you.”

But I didn’t trust myself to act calmly about it.

“It may be uncomfortable,” she reminded. “Painful, even. But I need that trust—that what we are doing here isn’t real. That we mean each other no harm, yet we must cause harm to strike down our enemy. Can you be all right with that?”

“Whatever it takes, Morrigan.”

Knuckles blanching, I buried my fists into the folds of my dress. I was helpless against the nerves that set my pulse to racing. Morrigan could hear it; the dead in their graves miles away could hear it, too. I’d used my own sorcery out of desperation thus far, but perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps I did not have it within me—that violence blood sorcery seemed to crave—to craft it into a weapon.

“You’ve felt the touch of my sorcery warming your veins, calming you,” Morrigan went on. “You’ve only felt its kindness, but you must feel its wrath in order to defend yourself. If another sorcerer works her way into your blood, it’s like slipping a blade between your ribs, bleeding you from the inside. You can stop it, push it out before it kills you.”

“Stars above, I feel faint already. You told me once it would scar me, wound me like you’ve been wounded?”

“I won’t go that far—not with you. Never,” Morrigan promised. “And I’ll keep you from hurting yourself You won’t need to draw on that much power.”

“But if I’m meant to go up against Sonia—”

“We cannot think of that now,” Morrigan said. “Perhaps that won’t be a concern if you acquire enough of her blood.” She carded her fingers through her hair, mussing it. “Stand still for me. Let your senses become attuned to the power as it overcomes you. Don’t fight it yet—you’ll want to, but you must restrain yourself. I only want you to feel . To understand, recognize another’s sorcery acting against you.”

My throat constricted, arid and prickling the longer I stood. The blood beat against my temples, an easy enough target. If she kept me waiting anymore, I was sure that my heart would flee of its own cowardly volition. Ripe for the taking, fresh with sorcerer’s blood pumping through its chambers.

Morrigan’s sorcery strangled the fresh sea air, pungent with blood and saltwater. An uncomfortable pressure spread between my eyes as if someone had pressed their thumb against my skull. It drove deeper, a piercing thorn pinching, stabbing at layers of flesh. Power shoving into my veins, attacking unseen. I could feel it, the subtle threads of manipulation.

The inside of my nostrils tingled. I watched as red pattered onto the stone floor like fat raindrops. My hand flew to my nose to staunch the flow, but my arm halted midair, captured, veins burning within. My muscles stiffened and went rigid, fingers contorted in a blood vise. My body wanted to fight it off, the sorcery in me clawing to the surface .

“Don’t fight it,” Morrigan reminded. “See how easily it sidles in, imprisons your blood, controls your body. And this is merely a glancing blow, a warning shot.”

Pain lanced her own concentration. While her power roped around my ankles, snaking up my legs to push me onto my knees, Morrigan’s eyes closed, her lips pursed. I was trapped, still losing blood from my nose, the stone bruising against my bones. The tide in my veins under Morrigan’s control. But she was hurting herself, too, letting it overtake her.

“Morrigan,” Gwen warned.

“I think you’ve made your point,” I said, just as she bared her fangs, hissing through the pain. “Enough now, Morrigan. You won’t be helping either of us if you’re teaching me hurt.”

Her hold on me relinquished. I dropped forward onto my hands as she nearly collapsed in relief. But she wouldn’t let herself, instead falling to her knees in front of me. Her fingers were ice-cold upon my cheeks while she whispered apologies into my hair. A flick of her wrist and my blood evaporated from the floor. A single touch of her thumb on the bridge of my nose stopped the bleeding.

She took the messy plait Gwen had fashioned in her hand, settling it over my shoulder as the ends of my hair slipped through her fingers. “Are you ready to begin?”

I had never felt so unprepared in my entire life as I had then.

“I can’t.”

“You’re not concentrating,” Morrigan said. “I need you to focus. Listen.”

Gwen had sat cross-legged on the floor some distance away and produced an embroidery hoop from her pocket. She’d set to work on her stitching while the two of us argued for the past ten minutes. We had been at this for over an hour without much real progress. Morrigan had wanted me to find Gwen’s heartbeat apart from hers to isolate the rhythm of her blood.

What had happened with ease around the estate—without realizing it—now became an impossible chore. Part of me could not separate myself from Morrigan’s steady pulse. As if I could summon my worst nightmares, I was afraid I’d return and discover her heartbeat silenced. It wouldn’t happen down here in this tomb, but nevertheless the fear caught me like spider silk I couldn’t brush off.

“Of course I can’t concentrate,” I shot back, voice rising in frustrated exhaustion. “That would require quieting my mind and it hasn’t stopped racing since I had to listen to Sonia bleeding you half to death.”

Morrigan grabbed my shoulders. “That,” she drawled, searching my face, “is over and done with. We’re here, now, and neither of us can afford to dwell on what happened or what will happen.”

“But she almost—”

“I know , Ella,” Morrigan said firmly, matching my frustration until she let it go, her voice mellowing. “I know. I’m throwing you into the surf again without an anchor, but what I need is for you to be here in this room. Nowhere else. Stay out of your own head and listen .”

“You’re wrong about one thing,” I told her once the room distanced us again. “I have an anchor. It’s you—it’s been you, ever since the night you Turned me. I was drowning then, and it was you I held onto to keep my head above it all.”

Gwen cooed, hugging her embroidery hoop to her chest. “Stop it, both of you, before I start crying. I mean that.”

If she wasn’t in the room with us , Morrigan whispered into my thoughts, her voice thick with desire, I’d have you right now.

So much for concentrating, I told her, fighting the rush her intimate whispering had provoked. I think you should stay out of my head, too, if you’re I’m going to put tempting thoughts there.

“Gwendolyn, dearest.” Morrigan gestured with her lithe fingers for Gwen to stand, the firelight glancing off her ocean-stone ring. “If you’d please.”

Stowing her embroidery hoop and spool of thread in her dress pocket—the depths of which I was slightly envious—Gwen clambered to her feet and brushed dirt from her hem.

“Now,” Morrigan tried again. “Elspeth, find Gwen’s heartbeat, isolate the sound of her blood from mine. Focus on it.”

I shook out my sweating hands, my fingertips numb with anxious cold. Morrigan gave me a few spare seconds to collect myself again, which allowed my tensed muscles to relax. After several calming breaths, the pounding in my temples abated a little more. I listened to the room around me, staring at the red behind my eyelids. The drip, drip, drip of seawater echoing on stone. Alchemical flames crackling. Each pulse and scent reaching for me from behind glass and metal the more I felt with my sorcery and not my vampiric senses. And there was Morrigan’s heart, beating fierce and resolute.

I let the monstrous thing unfurl, stretching out my hand to follow an instinct fighting its way from somewhere within. Gwen’s heart was there, flighty as the rest of her. I focused on her until I couldn’t hear Morrigan anymore, until my heart felt like it had matched the rhythm of Gwen’s. The sorcery was an extension of me, as though I were caressing her heart with my hand, holding it in my palm. Her blood ebbed and flowed, resonating within my senses.

Gwen’s breath caught. The sound forced my eyes to open. “She’s got it.” She pressed her fingertips to the center of her chest. “Don’t know what she’s doing in there, but her power’s strong.”

“It should be,” Morrigan said. “It’s a shade of my own, unburdened by weakness.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “Pull back now, Elspeth. You cannot be getting in too deep this soon. ”

But my curiosity got the better of me. Ancient power, my inheritance to claim, slithered into Gwen—another limb, another vampiric sense. There was something different about Gwen’s heart. The more my sorcery wrapped around it, I felt a wrongness there, not in the blood but the organ itself. It worked just fine, but a shadow blossomed there. I closed my eyes again and reached for it. The beast inside me craved its ominous stain, the malicious seedling someone else had planted in Gwen’s heart. If I could grab onto it, I’d be able to pluck it out—

Gwen’s choking sob pierced the crypt. “Morrigan, make her stop!”

“Elspeth!” Morrigan was shaking my shoulders. “Ella, you have to let go. Let go !”

The wave of power broke suddenly, a swell tumbling down over me. I felt like I had been on the precipice of the cliffside miles above us, at the sea’s mercy. Gasping, my eyelids fluttered open to see Morrigan’s thunderous concern, her fingers still squeezing my arms. I heard Gwen’s retreating footsteps, quick and light, before the cavern door slammed behind her.

I’d disobeyed Morrigan’s orders. I could see the anger written in the red of her eyes, but her voice had gone eerily quiet. “Are you all right?”

“Is Gwen? Is she hurt?” My voice broke, quivering to a whisper. “Did I hurt her?”

Morrigan rubbed my arms, drawing me into her, settling her chin at the crown of my head. “She’ll be fine, you just scared her, is all. I should’ve known you’d be curious enough to test the boundaries.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I told her. “I felt a shadow in Gwen’s heart.”

“And, what? You were going to chase it out, were you?” She held me at arm’s length, watching tears glisten upon my cheeks. “If it were only that simple.”

I sniffled. “What kind of curse is it?”

“Her heart’s been poisoned. ”

“She never said a word.”

Morrigan released me with some reluctance, running her hand along my arm to brush my fingers. “She doesn’t like to talk about it.” She latched onto mine loosely, pulling me toward the doors. “I think we’ve had enough for one afternoon, don’t you? We’ll check on Gwen, see if she would like to pick out fabrics for the ball so we can be the envy of the harbor.”

But my mind was not on ballgowns and bolts of expensive fabrics. I’d been close enough to touch a curse, and all I wanted now was to shatter it.