Page 30 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Thirty

“ D iluting vampire bloodlines with mortal’s blood. A waste. She’s not fit to sate me, even in death.” Sonia touched her fingers to her neck and snarled while she stood over Rosie’s body. She brushed past as Drusilla finally let go of a keening whine. “Anastasia, get her up. I want her out of my sight. Do whatever you want with the body.”

A tear rolled down my cheek before I could wipe it away, before it could escape Sonia’s hawkish sight.

“Something the matter, Elspeth?”

I stared down at Rosie. Another pair of eyes with no light left behind them, another dhampir life snuffed out.

“ Elspeth .”

I cleared my throat. “Of course not. I’m…I’m sorry, my lady. I wasn’t thinking, I made an awful mistake, I—”

She turned up her nose at me. All of my favor had disappeared in the smoke that still clung to the room. None of that mattered now. I just had to survive these next moments, had to escape this place. “Your mistake has cost you a month’s wages. Clean this up and be on your way. Get to it before the bloodstains set into the marble. Replace the curtains—I don’t care how you do it.”

The rancid scent of her blood settled over me again. Her wounds had already healed, but her skin was still red with the evidence, the lace around her neck mangled. I shrank back, cowering, the burnt fragments from the curtains slipping beneath me. Sonia’s scowl darkened the red of her eyes, but her sorcery remained still.

I waited for her to leave before I could take a full, deep breath. After Anastasia had peeled Drusilla from the floor and cursed at the fledglings to drag away the body, I was left alone.

The tears I’d held back began to swim in my vision. I had Sonia’s blood within reach, but at the cost of another dhampir life. I allowed myself a few moments to let them rain down my cheeks, to pierce the quiet with the cry I’d buried too deep. But I couldn’t linger in that pain, that awful guilt. I couldn’t, though I wanted to and Rosie deserved a proper remembrance.

Later , I promised myself. Once Sonia is nothing but bloody pulp on the floor.

Her blood on the marble—

I returned, blinking away the last of tears, forcing myself back into the present moment. It came with the terrible realization that I had to use my own power if I wanted to collect the blood. There wasn’t another way to capture it in the vial.

I’d call up my sorcery, do what needed to be done, then flee into the dungeons, using the castle’s underbelly to find the path back to daylight. They couldn’t reach me once I was under the sun’s safe haven. Even if Sonia scented my power, I’d be protected.

Her demon-touched blood pulsed along my senses. The stains were threaded through with burgundy, paint smeared upon an artist’s canvas. Though I felt the ichor’s abrasive chill, its sentient pulse humming in rhythm with Sonia’s, it wouldn’t be enough to grasp my veins if it wanted. I wasn’t even sure if whatever I managed to collect from the floor would help Morrigan.

Crouching over the splotchy puddles—they were congealing at the edges, rusted from a stir of careless feet—I uncapped the vial on my chatelaine. It took another breath to steady my hands. This hadn’t ever worked when Morrigan tried to teach me. I hadn’t lifted stains from anything yet. But I’d held a clot of ichorous blood in my sorcerer’s grasp once, and I’d willed Morrigan’s blood back into her healing wounds. Sometimes the simplest skills became the most difficult to wield.

I needed this to work.

Remember your focus , Morrigan would say.

“Morrigan,” I whispered her name, a litany to the painted stars watching from above.

She was still my focus, my anchor, my guiding star.

I held my hand outstretched over Sonia’s blood. It pulsed with resistance, a shadow of malice harbored within. With my sorcerer’s caress, I slipped inside until I felt that pulse in the veins along my hand. My skin mottled with prickling bumps. The tang of blood sorcery upon the air dispelled the odor of singed vampire skin. Another protest, but I held on, taming it with my stubborn will. Her blood wanted to flail and scatter as it clung to the ichor.

No you don’t , I told it. Into the vial you go.

Her blood was ice in my grasp. It lifted from the marble and converged into a burgundy puddle underneath my hand. Morrigan had always evaporated her bloodstains, but I needed this one to keep its rotten form. Motioning with my fingers, I steered the grotesque, pulsing blood into the vial. It gurgled against the sides of the glass. I spun the metal cap tight over my small victory.

My hands began trembling—half worry, half hope—as I clasped the slim chain into place. The blood filled the vial a little under halfway, but it would have to be enough.

For me, time had run out.

In my haste to leave the library, I’d forgotten my cloak. Yet again.

It was my hope that she would find it first before she came hunting for me. Let it distract her for a moment or two while I put distance between us. I knew from the very second my power burned the air, she’d taste it.

And she had the advantage of fresh blood in her veins—veins bolstered by a demon’s insidious power, likely seeking out what I’d just stolen from her. The glass vial clinked against the tools I’d chained beside it with every harried step. I was running, forcing my weak, ungainly limbs to cooperate, willing myself onward so my knees didn’t give out and leave me for dead. I splayed my hands on the rough stone as I went, shimmying through the narrow servant’s corridor. Every few feet, I’d stop to listen. Nothing except scurrying creatures and, somewhere farther into the castle, the weeping of Drusilla and her broken, doomed heart.

I was more grieved for Rosie and her father because Drusilla’s heartbreak felt like vengeance for Gwen.

My vision grayed out when I reached the floor below. Swaying, I grabbed the threshold and stifled my groan. This was the closest path to the locked door, though I was fighting quite a haze to remember the map Gwen had sketched. I’d already lingered here for too long. Shoving off the threshold, the shadows of the hall beyond pulled me in again.

I would be lucky if Drusilla’s wild sobbing hadn’t woken the entire coven.

A few sleepy, languid heartbeats greeted me from the rooms. I held my breath every time I passed their doors. Stumbling forward, my knees had nearly given up once I disappeared behind the ugly tapestry. The door kept me upright when I collapsed into it, sweat-drenched and wavering.

I cursed inwardly. I need blood.

The pulse of Sonia’s seemed to answer from inside the vial, a wicked temptation.

My forehead rested against the door, I closed my eyes and forced the craving down where I couldn’t find it again. My fangs ached . I wouldn’t succumb to that, no matter how starved I was. Morrigan’s warning flittered through my mind. It’s a dark legacy . It was within our nature. Temptations, corruption, the siren’s call of power rippling through our veins.

“No,” I breathed out, fingers curling into fists on either side of my sweating forehead. “ No. ”

Rifling through the tools chained to my bodice by shaking touches alone, I found a hairpin in the coin purse. I had to slide down the door, hands braced the whole way, to get level with the grimy keyhole. After rooting around, a lot of swearing, and wobbling backward once or twice, the lock gave with a grating, rusty click.

I ducked out from behind the tapestry to filch a stubby taper from its holder. It was a stump of melted wax, but I struck a flame to it anyway, carrying it with me into the dark. The door shrieked closed, perhaps awakening whatever waited for me below. The scent of ichor was suffocating. It gave me pause, its merciless cold, its thumping, feral pulse.

Earthen walls led me down into an unpleasant, rotting darkness. Each hesitant footstep dusted the next with loose dirt and gravel, as if I were approaching a pit carved into the starving underbelly of Dreadmist. My candle struggled to stay lit, my ragged breath leaving the flame to shudder in front of me. I was thankful to have it, but for how much longer, I couldn’t know. The air hung stagnant, scented with decay, with something foul that captured my waning vampiric senses .

There was a certain darkness here that rendered my sight no better than a mortal’s.

Dragging my fingers along the walls, collapsing spiderwebs as I went, I descended into the maw. Trying in vain to banish the putrid odor choking what remained of the air, I pressed my apron to my nose and mouth. Wood creaked, brittle and aged. Spiders skittered, restless in their disturbed webs. Clumps of dirt fell and hit the stairs ahead like sea spray pelting windowpanes.

And yet, somewhere within, somewhere in that deep, impenetrable dark, there came the sounds that had traveled through the walls, ascending from the dungeon. Sounds I’d pretended had been mice or rats scampering to escape the cold. I’d known better than that, of course.

The raspy growls that wafted out of this dungeon weren’t human nor animal. Shuffling, scratching noises raised the fine hair on my skin.

I’d barely noticed that I held my breath against whatever horror waited for me once I reached the last step.

Heartbeats , I realized, one moment too late. Not my own.

Dozens of them beat at once but with a discordant rhythm, none in harmony, pacing faster than mortal hearts. Pounding with a fury no vampire’s pulse could contain, even at the height of bloodlust. A raging, riotous, disorienting cadence—nothing I could grasp onto without descending toward madness. No singular thread to unravel. No monstrous vein I’d be able to seize.

They’d already heard me.

I dared the last step and hit the hard-packed dirt of the dungeon’s floor. Counting my paces, I walked forward, though each footfall dragged, reluctant and leaden. I kicked a pile of dirt-covered bones, the pile woven through with tattered clothing. The next breath sputtered in my throat.

My boot slipped in a slick of congealing demon’s blood—darkest, deepest red. A strange shade, a somber mimicry. Its pounding pulse called to me. It whispered evil into the dark. Holding my candle aloft, the edge of its pale light reflected.

A well of ichorous blood, fetid and gurgling.

All of it here within my reach, calling out to me—

The sputtering candlelight found a pair of beady, burgundy-black eyes an arm’s length from my face.

A dhampir face twisted into a monstrous creature, blood-teeth dripping with demon’s blood, rotting and dark. I swallowed the whimper that threatened to slip from me as dozens of demonic eyes—once dhampir, holding a soul prisoner within—crept closer to my guttering candle. Throaty snarls filled the dungeon. Contorted bodies writhed against their will, growls slowly turning to shrieks, pale skin veined with a deep, unsettling, thrashing stain.

The evil that ripped everything human and vampire from their gaze and left behind a malevolence so chilling my own veins ran colder than the dungeon’s stale air.

The poisoned dhampir tilted his head to one side, leering at me with a vacant stare that twisted into wickedness. I remained still, hardly breathing. Steeling myself, I stayed unflinching beneath his feral gaze. Even as he leaned into me, stinking of demon’s blood, his fine clothes streaked with cobwebs, gruesome fangs bared an inch from my ear. There was still a dhampir somewhere within him, though it was far from the surface now. Not like Estella had been at The Scarlet Veil .

Perhaps there was a part of him to salvage—

His breath stirred the back of my hair while he circled me, sizing up his prey. The flame held fast to the wick against the stinking gust of air he left in his wake.

I listened to the frantic beating of his heart. That writhing poison in his veins lacerated me the moment I reached for it, stabbing my heart like a claw of frozen shadow.

He doused the candle with a pinch of his fingers before the sorcery snuffed it out .

And then he lunged at me, snarling. But I was faster, if only by a moment, the rush of fear urging my sluggish body into flight. Enough to spin from his grip, to drop the candle. Pain lanced down my arm, shoulder to elbow, as I turned back toward the staircase.

There wasn’t another way out.

Shapes moved in the dark, peeling themselves from the walls. They hung like bats from the ceiling before they landed with a clumsy, hard impact. I heard them, but didn’t see all of them. And what I had seen had been quite enough.

Their guttural growling chased my retreating steps, snapping at my boot heels. Ichor-laced spittle tangled knots into my hair and stuck to my skin while the creatures descended on me.

I was outnumbered.

A hand wrapped around my ankle, pulling a scream from me. Strangling fingers dragged me down the only steps I’d managed to climb, down into the demon’s lair of rough hands and hissing fangs and wild, jerking shadows. The pins were torn from my hair. I heard ripping fabric, even as I kicked and twisted, stretching for the stair above my head, desperate. My spine scraped against the splinters underneath me.

The creatures’ gnashing blood-teeth seemed to be everywhere. Shrieking pierced my skull until I realized it hadn’t come from the dhampir. Poisonous fangs sliced my leg and punctured the calf muscle.

My fingertips strained to grip the edge of the stair, blanching stark white. As I reached my other hand to the one above it, hefting myself out of their writhing pit toward salvation, they tugged me back. It was a gruesome struggle—one I wasn’t sure I’d win. Their hold on me was bruising, hostile, a horde of bodies with an instinct to kill. A sob wracked my chest when another dhampir mouth latched onto the back of my shoulder, the scent of my blood—mine and Morrigan’s, whatever was left of it— drenching the air while their demon-rotted fangs shredded my flesh.

No… The panic was enough to make me fight back. Not like this. I won’t go out in this moldering dungeon, forsaken by the stars.

“Morrigan,” I sobbed. “Morrigan…”

Her name was my reason to fight, my remaining hope. Even if it was the last word to ever fall from my lips.