Page 18 of Once Upon a Dark October
Chapter Eighteen
I t was the first occasion since I had been living at the estate that I had seen a carriage arrive, and from the reactions of my coven-mates, it was not a regular occurrence. As we picked our way along the beach to the cliffside’s private path, Morrigan explained that they did not have visitors calling on them unless it was some vampiric business that required urgent attention.
Dreadmist had long forsaken the rule of royal blood—blood sorcerer or otherwise—and the ruins from those ancient, bloody days lay crumbling on the outskirts where Sonia’s coven now resided. A High Council governed us now, elected by the harbor residents. Morrigan’s status as the harbor’s sole blood sorcerer kept her well within their sights, she’d told me. They did not always trust her, but her magic was sometimes required to investigate dire circumstances where her skills were necessary.
Morrigan hadn’t said it outright, but it sounded as if the High Council tasked her with the unpleasant business of punishing vampires who’d broken long-established rules. It seemed that they relished a blood sorcerer’s methods whenever it served them .
Whatever had happened, it warranted her immediate concern.
Still bearing the sea and beach wind and briny salt on our skin and clothes, we met the elegant coach in the front drive. An older mortal woman waited for us, twisting her leather gloves in her hands, her body trembling. Her lavish, high-collared evening dress was trimmed with ruffles and lace, a decadent autumnal hue somewhere been crimson and copper. Underneath a flowered top hat, her dark hair was streaked with grey, and large sapphires dangled from silver pierced through her earlobes. I didn’t know who she was, but with such fine clothes and a personal conveyance, she must have held a title.
She grasped Morrigan’s hands, her lower lip quivering. “Morrigan,” she greeted. Tears welled in her deep brown eyes, reflecting the eerie flames from the pumpkins. “I wasn’t sure you were at home.”
“Madame Georgina,” Morrigan answered. “What’s happened? Let’s get you inside out of the cold. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Gwen offered.
Madame Georgina wrenched Morrigan toward the coach, their hands still clasped. One of her gloves dropped to the cobbles and I stooped to retrieve it. The woman was in such distress that she paid no mind to our bare feet and unkempt, water-logged clothes.
“There isn’t time for that,” she insisted. “There’s trouble…one of the dhampir girls. Better come quickly, she’s in a bad way, and it’s the second incident within a week.”
“Second…in a week,” Morrigan’s tone sharpened rather quickly. “And you never thought it important enough to come to me sooner? You have nearly fifteen dhampir under your employ from what I recall.”
Madame Georgina took her glove from me without sparing a glance. “I didn’t think anything of it until I heard about a dhampir boy who almost killed his parents. Tried to gouge out their eyes, someone said. The High Council seems content to ignore the whispering. Well, they aren’t whispers any longer, that I can tell you.”
“They know. I’ve raged at them all I can,” Morrigan assured. “I advised the High Council to not cause a panic, but that seems hopeless now.” She squeezed the bridge of her nose. “What’s happened to her?”
Her faraway look was hollow, ravaged by what she had seen. Tears found the weathered lines of her cheeks. “Whatever it was, I don’t think a healer will be of help to us. You must see her for yourself, Morrigan.” She pinned Morrigan with an imploring, watery stare, one that would not be denied. “Quickly, we’ve wasted enough time here. Her bonds will not hold for long.”
Leaving Madame Georgina to climb back into her coach, we followed Morrigan up the walkway, our bare feet slapping harshly on the stones while we quickened our pace.
“Jo, please make my apologies to your wife,” Morrigan declared, ushering us inside the foyer. There was still a hard edge to her voice, roughened by anger. “I’ll be needing all three of you to accompany me. This is Sonia’s work, and I’d rather not face it alone.”
The coven agreed without question.
While Gwen and Josephine hurried into a change of clothes, I trailed Morrigan to her bedroom, fashioning my damp hair into a neater plait as I went. Morrigan stowed my new chatelaine in her bedside table for safe-keeping, still nestled in its cloth. We hadn’t had the time for me to thank her for it, as the night had taken such a deviating shift.
I found a dry pair of stockings and was lacing up my boots again just as Morrigan pulled on another of her high-collared overcoats. This one was deep red with fine silver embroidery climbing up from a hem that brushed the top of her boots. The back had been intricately tailored with pleats gathered under silver buttons.
I tugged on her lapels, rising on tiptoe. The row of matching silver buttons along the front facings and cuffs had miniature etchings of bat wings.
“I like it.” I smoothed my hands down the front of her coat. Despite her stoic expression, she allowed me a smile. Stars above, I’m blushing again, aren’t I? “How dashing it makes you look.”
She stole a moment we didn’t have just for us, bending to kiss the sweet spot behind my ear. I turned my head to make it all the easier for her, letting a soft whine pull the air taut with desire between us.
“Perhaps later,” Morrigan said while her kisses traveled downward to my neck, “you can help me take it off.”
“We’ll see what chaos the night brings us first.”
The coven did not employ a carriage of their own—an oddity I’d noticed for such a massive home; part of their reclusive nature—so we stuffed ourselves into Madame Georgina’s coach. It was not meant for more than four passengers, but I held no objections when Morrigan suggested I sit on her lap for the short journey.
Josephine gave a pained, forlorn glance to the estate as we departed from the front drive. Pressed up against the door, she touched two fingers to her lips, then held them to the window. I watched her trace a tiny heart where her exhaled breath fogged the pane and wondered if Clarabella had answered with her own from the stained glass windows high above. Spectral hands and ghostly mist and luminous in her soul.
The carriage ride inland was pleasant in spite of the circumstances, and while I jostled about listening to the clipped notes of the horses’ hooves on the cobblestone streets, I realized it had been some years since I’d been in a coach this luxurious. Plush fabrics softened the interior, their colors rich and dark, a palette of earthy green tones. Madame Georgina did not hold a title in the traditional sense—by land or inheritance—but as the proprietor of a blood brothel, she would be among the wealthiest in the harbor.
Balancing on Morrigan’s lap was precarious in such close quarters. Her firm thighs under me were a distraction, and I was getting hungry again listening to her blood rushing so near. Flush against her chest, the edges of her coat grazing my hips, her breath stirring the fine hairs at my nape, she was all I could think and breathe and hear.
I tasted her scent on my tongue. She clutched my upper thigh to keep me from tumbling into Madame Georgina and suddenly I wanted to use my sorcery for more sinful purposes. Just as she had done to me, bringing me to climax from her magic alone. I’d slither inside her blood and find her throbbing pulse without my fingers or my tongue, watch her unraveling for me with intentions and power and nothing else.
Easy, darling , Morrigan warned. She shifted beneath me, clearing her throat. Had I accidentally let the power in me reach for her, already so intimately attuned to her blood? But you have the right idea.
Perhaps we’ll find the time to entertain that thought later, I answered.
A nuisance rain had started, thin and hard like pebbles being tossed at our moving coach. It wouldn’t last. The clouds were beginning to part in deference to the stars, and the fog had yet to settle inland. The main roads, under a golden haze and fresh sparkling rain, were decorated now with carved pumpkins and autumnal flowers blossoming around each lamp post. Though it did not scare away Dreadmist’s permeating nocturnal gloom, it was always a comfort to see grinning pumpkin faces and paper garlands in shop windows and the front doorways of homes.
While the scenic coastline was dotted with charming, shingle-sided fishing cottages and sea-swept estates, the town center seemed to command the attention of the whole harbor. Lacework gable roofs and towering spires breached the veil of fog, searching for moonlight. The central district kept the oldest buildings in Dreadmist, constructed from coastal rock by the first vampires. The harbor’s inland skyline resembled those sandcastles we’d make as children, wet sand dripping through our fingers, piling upward into rows of lumpy spires. Ancient vampiric architecture had a certain dramatic, forbidding look about it. Severe angles and jutting rooftops, extravagant stonework and massive doorways. The nearly perpetual sheen of sea-spray and rain made the ancient stone glisten.
We took a few narrow turns to navigate side roads through a middling district where merchants, artisans, and healers lived and spent their time away from work. Like the wharf, the roads were harder to pass, winding and hilly, the dark yawning wider between the gaslamps than it did on the main streets.
People darted from one corner to another, a constant flow in and out of taverns and dining clubs, brothels and leisure halls, and the harbor’s infamous nighttime dessert shops. Those were a favorite this time of the year, where decadence did not inspire guilt and a warm drink was needed to fend off the approaching winter cold.
The leisure halls would be hosting their nightly parties with lively music and dancing and masquerades, for the spirit of the Blood Moon stayed for all of October. Others would host a more macabre gathering, communing with the restless dead beneath a shroud of cigar smoke and sparkling wine in parlors overstuffed with lush furnishings.
The coach went at a crawling pace as we came upon a well-lit street corner, seasonal garlands—crafted from fabric able to withstand the ever-changing weather—laced between the gaslamp posts and the rooftop of a four-story building. Hewn out of the coastal black stone, it had to have stood here longer than generations of my mortal family. The exterior dripped with intricate stonework in the ancient vampiric style, like the cliffside estate. The blood-red spire that crowned its rooftop signified its business as a blood brothel, of which the harbor had aplenty.
Bold gilded letters glinted from above the wide doorway: The Scarlet Veil .
“We’ll go in through the back door,” Madame Georgina said. She pulled on her gloves after she’d spent most of the ride wringing them in her hands. “It’s just around the corner.”
After the carriage rolled to a stop at the mouth of an alley, we piled out of its stifling confines and followed Madame Georgina along the side of the building, wet fallen leaves like a soggy carpet underfoot. Morrigan brushed my fingers while I took in the scents of the town wafting on the breeze—hints of cigar smoke and bonfires, coffee and savory stews that would take the chill out of anyone’s bones on a night like this.
Madame Georgina led us into a dim corridor, then up the service staircases. The best path if you wanted to flit about like a ghost and not be seen nor heard. The same could not be said of the brothel’s patrons, as the walls were quite thin here. Or it might have been my keen senses that brought the sounds of raucous pleasure to me more easily. Between the panting and moaning and begging, I heard the strains of rousing string music from somewhere below.
A startled young charwoman passed us on the stairwell, her arms full of clean bed linens. I offered a soft smile, forgetting my newfound station for those brief few seconds. I’d never found work in a blood brothel, but I imagined the wages were desirable for the long hours it required washing out careless bloodstains and changing bed linens.
“I’ve kept her in my quarters on the uppermost floor,” Madame Georgina explained. “After her behavior changed so dramatically, something had to be done to keep her from causing a scene. She was attacking her own friends, Morrigan…like she’d forgotten who they were.”
A small group of women waited in the hallway outside of Madame Georgina’s rooms, greeting us with hollow stares when we came up from the service stairwell. They leaned on each other and sat against the walls, stricken with worry, wearing the same tension their madame had arrived to us with. Dressed in darkly vibrant blouses, low-cut corsets, and knee-length bloomers ruffled with lace and ribbons, the elegant facade of pleasure had fallen without outsiders around to entertain.
Madame Georgina touched the cheek of a woman wrapped in a satin dressing gown. There was a bruise gathering on her cheek, mottled in purple and sickly green. A deep scratch marked the hollow of her throat, mortal blood glistening, fragrant, recently spilled.
“Get yourself to a healer.” She closed the woman’s hand, tucking a few coins into her palm. “She will be herself again when you return. I’ve brought the blood sorcerer for her.” Madame Georgina nodded to the younger woman beside her. “Claudette, you had better go with Ada. She’s in no state to be alone.”
Screaming tore through the walls from inside. The words I could parse out were broken and angry, cursing that would make a sailor’s ears bleed. A tumbling crash followed, as if something had been knocked over, the tinny rain of glass falling with it.
“Prepare yourselves.”
Madame Georgina closed the door behind us, and the pit of my stomach twisted into knots. I smelled the dhampir girl’s blood already…but it had been tainted. It was bitter, vile, and as I reached with the curious touch of sorcery, it chilled my own veins .
A shock of cold went straight to my heart, making my knees wobble.
“Do you smell it?” I gasped.
Morrigan grabbed my wrist. “Careful. Don’t touch it unless I tell you. Her blood will be unpredictable.”
Another brothel worker emerged in a hurry from the bedroom, a kerchief bunched in his fist. He fled from Madame Georgina’s quarters without uttering a word, pale-faced and holding back a sob. Her rooms bore signs of a struggle—curtains askew from their hangings, tables flipped onto their sides, broken portrait frames and beeswax tapers. Madame Georgina and Gwen stepped over the jeweled pieces of a wine goblet.
Josephine pulled Morrigan aside. “What are you thinking?”
“That I hate having my suspicions confirmed for me,” Morrigan answered. “I didn’t see it soon enough. I should have—”
“But we’re here now, that’s what counts,” Josephine reminded. “Someone’s got to keep you out of your emotions so you can get me a sample.”
Gwen’s terrified sob dragged our attention to the bedroom doorway where she had stopped short. “Estella?” She vanished into the darkened room, but her voice continued to drift toward us. “Estella, it’s me—it’s Gwen…I’m here. It’s going to be all right now, love. Morrigan ! Hurry!”
We rushed in after her, and the scent of poisoned blood shoved me back a few unsteady steps. Gwen was wringing out a kerchief over the wash basin while Madame Georgina stood statuesque in the corner, unable to even look upon the young woman in the bed. She folded her hands in front of her, head bowed.
Gwen fell to her knees at the bedside and pressed the wet cloth to Estella’s brow. She was doused in a sweat yet shivering at the same time; if she wasn’t dhampir, I might’ve thought she’d been Turned. Her delicate underclothes were torn, mottled with blood. What looked like claw marks—perhaps her own fingernails—had left the rise of her breast above her corset shredded and leaking murky blood. Gwen ran her fingers through Estella’s hair, the loose black curls knotted and frizzy from her thrashing and perspiring.
Someone had tied her wrists and ankles with makeshift bonds of torn fabric, but her restless straining against them had caused inflamed and bleeding welts across her golden-brown skin. And the poison I’d scented… It was as if every vein and artery in her body had been claimed. A web of toxic blood writhed beneath her skin, but the red had soured into a shade that was unnatural and lurid. Like the petals of Clarabella’s flowers, like tainted wine.
“Morrigan, please,” Gwen wept. “You have to help her.”
“When did this start?” Morrigan asked.
“Not long after she’d been with a patron,” Madame Georgina responded. “She complained of feeling ill.”
“Did you get a name?”
“We do not ask questions here, as you well know,” Madame Georgina insisted. “Nothing is required except coin.”
Morrigan stood at the end of the bed. Slowly, steeling herself, she collected a miniature glass decanter from her coat pocket. “She has ichor in her—demon’s blood. It’s found a way in and I need to extract it…carefully, delicately as I can. Otherwise she won’t survive it. I’ve seen what happens to those before her with this affliction.” Her gaze softened when it fell upon Estella. “I do not think all of their bodies can tolerate it, as some dhampir cannot even consume mortal blood.”
Chasing out a shadow , I whispered into her mind.
If I’m strong enough , Morrigan answered. You’re not to help me, do you understand? I don’t want you to get hurt.
“How am I supposed to learn how to fight this if you won’t let me help?” I asked, aloud this time.
Morrigan heaved out a breath. It was clear that she couldn’t afford to expend too much of her energy arguing with me. “Do not draw out your power until I tell you.”
Estella hissed, showing her dhampir blood-teeth while she struggled in her bonds. The ichor had reached her eyes, pooling berry-dark in the whites of them.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Gwen soothed. “It’ll be all right.”
Morrigan spoke low to me and Josephine, hoping to evade Gwen’s ears. “If she reaches sunlight like this, she’ll turn to ash. The solitary flaw in Sonia’s crafting, at the expense of the dhampir.” She leaned in closer, head turned away from Gwen. “I think Sonia’s earlier attempts were much more volatile, unstable. But Estella’s reacting badly, and it seems to be progressing quicker than some. She’ll want to escape—not her instinct, but the influence of the demon’s blood. We must not let her.”
She sunk down onto the side of the bed, holding out her palm over Estella’s flailing body. Morrigan narrowly escaped being shoved onto the floor as Estella rolled sideways, jabbing with a knee.
The low candles around the room wavered at her sorcery. Estella’s body stilled. Morrigan flinched but maintained her concentration, her eyes fiery with power, blazing in the surge of it.
“Gwen, keep talking to Estella,” she instructed. “It’ll help to bring her back around. Jo, Elspeth—I need you to untie her. Get her out of these, she’s already hurt herself enough.”
We worked the knots loose from her bonds and cast the bloodied rags to the floor. Morrigan kept her from moving, fangs clenched so hard that she’d nicked her bottom lip. Estella’s eyes were open and unblinking as if captured spellbound. Her chest moved evenly, if perhaps a little agitated, with each breath.
The poison within her flared anew, mottled beneath her skin. It had a sentience all its own, it seemed, lashing out at Morrigan’s power. Trying to contain it, Morrigan’s fingers went rigid and then flexed. Her hand trembled from the will she was attempting to exert over it. To pluck it from Estella’s blood, to separate it…the possibility of the ichor killing Morrigan and Estella instead seemed a nightmarish consequence.
“Morrigan,” Josephine called. “Careful.”
“I feel it,” Morrigan gasped. “A shadow taking root…but if I get too close, it crawls in, tries to consume me. At least shadows vanish with the light. This suffocates, bends what it touches to its malevolent will.” Her next attempt made the candles extinguish, a gust blowing through the room tinged with souring blood. Estella whimpered.
Gwen laid the cool kerchief across her forehead again and spoke softly to her, then to us. “I begged her to stay at the coven-house. She told me I was worrying too much, but now look at her…”
“Stars damn me,” Morrigan swore, clutching at her chest. “It’s like being staked through the heart with glacier ice.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “Let me do something.”
“I can’t hold her,” Morrigan groaned. Her blood was sweet to my primal fledgling senses as it began to drip from her nose. But I couldn’t let the hunger or the lust distract me, not now. “You’ll have to do it—carefully, a light touch and nothing deeper than that. Hold her still. Remember your focus.” She tossed the decanter to Josephine. “Be ready to trap the ichor if this doesn’t kill us both.”
I sunk into the bed behind Morrigan, closing my eyes so I could find Estella’s blood without the utter chaos around me. Her pulse was the flutter of hummingbird wings, fragile and caged within her chest. A light touch, Morrigan had said, but still, the ichor was infused with her blood. I’d brushed the surface and it was winter-cold. Estella’s blood was restless, thrashing as her body.
“Are you trying to pull it from her heart directly?” Josephine asked.
“It’s already spilled in. ”
“And it’ll be too much,” Josephine reminded. “You can’t seize it all at once, it’ll overwhelm you. Think smaller, Mor. You need somewhere else to drain it out slowly.”
Morrigan inhaled, sharp as the ice leeching into my veins. “I have it.”
The wound on the swell of her breast began to weep blood. Where it had begun to heal at its jagged, pink edges—for dhampir healing was much slower—Morrigan had torn it open again.
“It will get more difficult as the ichor binds itself to her,” she advised. “If you cannot hold her, focus your energy on her hands and feet. Gwen will keep her from moving too badly.”
Josephine sat opposite Morrigan and countered Estella’s desperate rolling with her hip. She pulled the stopper from the miniature decanter, brow furrowed at the ichorous blood seeping forth. Gwen all but draped herself over the pillows, her whispers frayed by faint apologies and her crying. My knuckles went stark white as I made a fist to rein in the blood at Estella’s wrists. Her whimpering turned to cries and guttural sounds; she nicked her tongue on her blood-teeth while convulsing beneath our power.
“Can’t you reach Sonia’s blood and take it that way?” I asked.
“It’s already too late,” Morrigan answered. Sweat glistened at her temples. “Once it’s inside her heart… I’ve no choice, I have to take the ichor itself. But there may be enough yet to—yes, I can still scent her here. It’s faint.”
Estella’s wound bled darker.
“Hold her,” Morrigan yelled. “She’s fighting it. Bring her back, Gwen. Help to break the spell…she can still hear you.”
“And if I kill her, this will be useless.” Gwen lifted her head, her eyes squeezing closed. A few tears slid from beneath her eyelashes.
“You won’t,” Morrigan said, strained. “You cannot think of that now. She needs you.”
Gwen combed her fingers through Estella’s frizzy curls, her lips close enough to kiss—wanting to with soul-deep desperation, but never daring to touch. It must have killed her, that restraint, that longing. All of her love in the tears that ran freely down her cheeks, in the way she tried to shield Estella from the poison inside her, in the brittle whispers that filled the room with those three words she could not let herself confess.
“Listen to me,” she pleaded. “Hold onto the sound of my voice, don’t you pay any mind to that evil thing in your blood. It’ll be nothing but a bad dream soon, you’ll see.” Gwen ran her thumb back and forth across Estella’s sweaty forehead, soothing as she could. “Don’t you give into it, Estella…don’t let that shadow fall across your heart. You hear me? Come back. Come back—don’t you dare let it take you away—”
Estella’s head drooped to the side, her eyes—leaking blood like fresh tears—searching for Gwen with a brief glimpse of clarity. Her bottom lip trembled. “Gwen…please…”
Gwen’s sobbing turned broken.
Morrigan grunted with the effort of dragging the ichor back to the surface, one hand reflexively clutching the center of her chest. She’d bled all over her clothes and Madame Georgina’s linens, a sweet gush running from her nostrils. It made concentrating that much harder, and I had bit into my lip without realizing it while I fought against the violent tide crashing in Estella’s veins. I heard Morrigan smother the cry that had burrowed deep in her chest and clamped my hand on her shoulder again.
I can’t do this , she confessed to my thoughts alone.
You can , I whispered. You’ve nearly got it.
It’s stronger than I am… It almost stopped my heart.
I had felt that, too. The stabbing of its insidious blade, the air rushing from my lungs, so icy-cold it stilled the beating for a breath or two.
You cannot let it have that power , I told her. You put warmth in my veins, you can do that for her. It isn’t any different. Be the light that drives out the shadows, makes them cower in fear of you.
Morrigan’s strength, that fire inside of her, renewed. The room had grown so dark after the night had found favor here, the candles doused, the gaslamps diminished under the veil of her sorcery. She was the blazing light. The red of her eyes searing, she bared her fangs in defiance.
As she forced the ichor out, the poison-scent wreaked havoc on my senses. Estella’s blood became easier to manage, her body lying placid, her fingers relaxing from their contorted fists.
Where there was still warmth in the room, it slowly drained away. Morrigan’s hands curled, claw-like, when she finally let out the sob buried within her. Estella’s heart had slowed, perhaps to a dangerously sluggish pace. Morrigan’s next breath—and mine as well—exhaled in a cloud.
The wound at Estella’s breast, bleeding in earnest now, had drenched her corset. We watched, nearly enchanted by the gruesome sight, as the ichor spilled out. It coalesced into a thick puddle, which Morrigan had captured in the air between her and Estella. The ichor sloshed and churned and spread sinewy branches outward, seeking its new host.
Morrigan cursed and bracketed the raging ichor with her palms. “Josephine,” she called. “I’m going to force it into the vial.”
“And we’ll hope it contains this damned thing,” Josephine replied.
Another surge of Morrigan’s power dispelled the demonic cold from the room and shoved the foul blood into the decanter, where it did its own thrashing, fighting Morrigan in return. She gave it one last angry push, and once the dregs had spilled into the curved glass, Josephine sealed it tight. Morrigan slumped back into me in the next instant as Estella bolted upright, stealing a breath as if it had been her very first. Somewhere behind us, Madame Georgina gave a tearful sigh of relief.
Estella looked down at her ruined underclothes, her veins no longer held prisoner. Gwen touched her fingers to her own lips, aching to kiss her. She wept out a breath and smiled in spite of the tears that were still falling from her chin .
Estella blinked at the rest of us, frowning, trying to make sense of what she’d awoken to. “Gwen? What’s happened?” she asked. “How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember anything at all?” Morrigan questioned, nostrils flaring while she regained control of her breathing.
I had let my own power flow into her, begging it to restore the blood she’d lost. I wasn’t sure if it had worked; I was still shaking from everything else, the ichor’s cruel touch fresh in my mind. It could have easily found its way into Morrigan’s sorcerer wounds, another deep well of power ripe for corruption.
Estella worked the heel of her palm into her forehead. “I wanted to lie down, rest for a little while. I was closing my eyes. A nightmare…but the kind you can’t remember once you wake up.” Gwen hovered nearby, wanting to offer some comfort, but she couldn’t even bring herself to rest her hand on Estella’s.
I raked my fingers through Morrigan’s hair, felt her sigh. “Perhaps it’s best that you don’t.”
“What about your last patron?” Gwen wanted to know. “Have any details that might help us?”
Madame Georgina cleared her throat and stepped closer to the bedside. She’d begun to relight some of the candles. “We do not reveal the personal ident—”
“She could have been killed,” Josephine cut in. “She could’ve killed someone else in your employ, under your roof. We’re past all that now, so if you have a ledger or something we might look at, you’d be doing yourself a kindness to retrieve it.”
With a shrewd look at Morrigan, Madame Georgina’s lips thinned. “I do not think this—”
Morrigan didn’t bother to meet Madame Georgina’s flinty eyes. “You heard Josephine right, Madame.”
Madame Georgina’s tone was suddenly brusque. “Then it will be waiting for you at the receiving desk downstairs.”
Her heels struck the floor with more strident steps than necessary, and I couldn’t help but flinch when the door slammed behind her, knocking one of the crooked portrait frames off the wall. Josephine and Morrigan shared a glance, a simultaneous roll of their eyes.
“I feel so tired,” Estella said, rising from the bed, swaying a little. Gwen was quick to catch her by the elbow, her grip fragile as if she was still afraid it would silence Estella’s beating heart. “It’s like I haven’t slept at all.”
“Let’s get you back to your room.” Gwen tossed a knitted blanket over her shoulders as they went. “I’ll meet you all at the front desk, then.”
“Be careful with her, Gwendolyn.” Josephine nodded to Estella’s retreating back, hunched under the blanket. “I know that look. It’s easy to lose yourself to it.”
Gwen’s smile turned down at the corners, the shadow in her heart crossing over her face, resigned to a fate she didn’t deserve. “I’ll be careful.”
After they had left, Josephine and Morrigan seemed to breathe out the same weary sigh together. Josephine sunk back down onto the edge of the bed, and Morrigan reached over to grasp her upper arm, a quiet reassurance.
“Doing all right?” Josephine asked Morrigan. Her fingernail clinked against the crystal cut glass as she tapped it, and the roiling blood within seemed to swell, angry as a thundercloud. “This was no simple parlor trick.”
“This was a warning,” Morrigan said. I’d counted her breaths as they shuddered against my chest. She was still rubbing at her breastbone absently. “Sonia’s virulent power gone awry, as it has before. Someone within her coven was rather careless this time.” She inspected the blood on her hands, curling them into fists to quell the trembling. “Her vampiric blood must be for control, and the ichor is what sends the victims into a frenzied rage. There are moments of lucidity, but they’re few and far between. Their bodies are seized from them.”
“Why go after the dhampir?” I asked .
“Given their nature, they’re more vulnerable to blood sorcery, but more useful than mortals, whom she would probably kill outright. Sonia needs them as her foothold…among the population of Dreadmist, they would be easiest for her to subjugate.”
“But she can’t seize control of this place on her own,” Josephine said.
“All the same, I fear the reach of her capabilities now that she’s being aided by demon’s blood and the poisoned dhampir,” Morrigan answered. “Stars help us, if they can turn vampires into rabid monsters with a bite, it’ll be nothing short of chaos.”
“Dhampir can’t Turn mortals,” I said.
“No, but the ichor might still find a way in through their bite—they do have their own blood-teeth. Ancient vampires used to Turn mortals by drawing their immortal blood into their fangs,” Morrigan replied, weary from the idea of it. “And that would leave vampires susceptible to the ichor if a bite is all it takes.”
Josephine stowed the miniature decanter into a leather pouch belted around her waist. “Let’s hope the Madame will be more forthcoming about the dhampir under her roof. There’s another incident unaccounted for.”
“I’ll need a few minutes more to recover. You go on ahead, see if you can learn anything useful.”
Once the door clicked shut, another shudder wracked Morrigan’s body as though the ichor’s shadow hadn’t entirely left. “I cannot imagine what dark places you must take your soul to find demon’s blood. The things it whispered while I held it…the malice, the anger, torture…it was evil itself, alive and flowing. I hated to bring you so close to it.”
“You asked for my help,” I reminded. “And I wanted to learn.”
“Even for an experienced sorcerer, this is a dangerous and slippery path,” Morrigan said. “If I can help it, you won’t touch it again. But you did well with Estella, you kept focus despite the unfavorable conditions. Your strength will improve with practice. ”
She tipped her head back into my chest, tilting her chin to look up at me, and I met her there, relieved to see the pain easing. I brushed my nose against hers, scented her drying blood. It cleansed the lingering phantom of poison.
“We should get you cleaned up or else you’ll frighten everyone downstairs looking like a bloody mess.” The tightness at the center of my chest released its stranglehold. “You can finally start teaching me how to lift bloodstains from clothes.”
“I told you that you’d never have to worry over messes again,” she reminded.
“And still,” I answered, the words hushed against her lips on a gentle laugh, “you keep making them.”