Page 8 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Eight

M orrigan’s eyes blazed through the night, fervent red, still raging. Her scream had quieted, harsh, shallow breaths misting in front of her. But I felt it as if it continued to echo along my bones, the scream renting the darkness, shattering it like glass. She swayed where she stood.

“Morrigan?”

She only held up her palm, staying my concern without a word spoken. My feet longed to move, my body craving the proximity of hers, if only to help keep her steady. Morrigan dropped into a tremulous crouch, fingertips braced against the mess of brick and stone. She pulled something from her coat pocket and, using a tiny coil of her sorcery—the same way she’d disappeared the bloodstains—gathered the vampire’s blood into it. A shadow lay in the middle of the wet pool, perhaps a fragment left behind, but I had no curiosity in me to seek it out.

Morrigan pocketed the blood and tried to regain her footing. When she slumped to her knees, crying out, I banished the distance between us in just a few strides.

“It’ll pass.” Mopping the bloodshed and gore from her face, she blew an exhausted breath. “It’ll pass. I’m fine. ”

I grasped her shoulder, sinking onto a knee in front of her. “You aren’t. You’re bleeding again, just as before.”

I tasted her blood and Effie’s once I touched my lips to hers, a brief, soothing kiss. My enemy’s was acrid and bitter in comparison. Morrigan’s riled my insatiable hunger yet again, and this time I couldn’t control myself.

Warm, fresh, it poured from both of her nostrils, so I caught it on my tongue, lapping at the reddened skin above her mouth. It wouldn’t slow, and Morrigan did not scold me, did not tell me to stop. The fragrant immortal nectar of her washed away the sourness.

“I have your power in me now.” It was concerning, how the flow of her blood wasn’t abating. The thought I’d started fell away from me. Morrigan lurched on her knees and something within me wanted to stop and tame my vampiric lust, but I was so famished, so desperate to have my fill of her. So devoured by the very scent of her I could barely think.

I need it to stop. Tell me to control myself, push me away. I’m making her condition worse, and I need to stop— stop, Elsepth—

“I have nothing left in me to slow it down,” she moaned. Bright red, she gushed onto my eager, starved tongue.

With a strength I didn’t know I’d possessed, I forced myself backward and landed on my elbows, the ground smarting against my bones. The drink had barely satisfied. Practicing such restraint made the hunger pangs harder to ignore and wrestle into submission. But it had to be done for Morrigan’s sake.

Her head had drooped toward her chest. I crawled back on my hands and knees and cupped her chin, my skirts fanning out around me on the slick ground. Morrigan’s eyes were half-shut.

“Morrigan.” She muttered something in whispers under her breath about the vampire’s blood and her heart, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Pinching her chin between my fingers, I steeled myself against the new wave of red that coated us.

I have her power within me. I can stop this .

The idea of it scared me to my bones.

A sorcerer’s untold power awaiting in my fingertips. The truth in those ancient books was frightening enough, but to see it done…to see what destruction Morrigan had wrought…

To know I might have held the same ability in me.

“Tell me, Morrigan.” Shaking her lightly, the jostling made her eyes flutter open. I wasn’t sure whether or not she was actually seeing me. The red of her eyes was frightfully dull with a glassy sheen. “You must teach me, give me some instruction.”

She groaned, tugging at my cloak with a feeble grip. I kissed her, hard, startled by how much iron I tasted in her mouth.

Before I lost myself to bloodlust again, I broke away. “I’m not going to let this be the end of you. I can stop it.”

Her voice came to me as if in a dream, my thoughts exchanged for her words. Find the tether of my blood and draw the power in yours to it. You only need to give it your intentions.

I quieted, as I had done during my explorations of the estate with my coven-mates’ hearts to guide me. The rhythm of Morrigan’s heart had changed, pacing much too fast, sputtering over a few beats every half-minute. Different, even, from her bat form. Listening close, I found her blood’s cadence within her veins, struggling and uncontrolled. I held onto it, but I’d yet to understand how I was to use my own sorcery.

…Don’t you feel it roiling within you?

I did. I could. It was there—part Morrigan, part my own—and alive in me as she’d said. It was utter chaos, a feral monster of a thing. A nocturnal beast I was fearful of poking at. But it was all we had left. All we had to save Morrigan and our coven.

Please, please work. Let the blood-flow weaken and cease. Leave her healed and whole, whatever her affliction is. Please…

I set the monster free, unsure if it would follow orders. Sorcery clawed at the air between us. It burned at my nostrils, making the fine hairs at my nape stand up. My blood sorcery. My own power .

A power that had led so many others before me astray.

I tried to will it back, push it into her leaking veins. I tried to dam its careless flow. The red running from Morrigan’s nose ceased to a trickle, then halted altogether, the rest gathering slowly back into her body. She collapsed into my shoulder, and for a moment I thought I’d done something wrong. But Morrigan was still breathing. Shallow and battered, yet it was there, her heart resuming its normal vampiric rhythm.

I wrapped her in my arms. “And I thought nothing could be more terrifying than nearly being killed from a vampire’s bite.” Morrigan’s embrace snaked around my waist, the two of us kneeling in the dark and wharf-mist, dewy water soaked into our clothes. She reeked of Effie’s bitter scent as I planted kisses in her hair.

“You do learn fast.” Morrigan’s praise was muffled into my cloak. “Though it becomes easier to wield when the blood’s flowing so freely. I had just enough to help it along.” She hugged me closer. “Thank you, Elspeth. That was brave of you. I hadn’t wanted your first experience to be so harrowing, but there wasn’t another choice.”

“You must know by now,” I drawled, “we can never do anything the gentler way.”

Morrigan lowered into an unsteady crouch beside the woman’s body. After allowing herself some minutes to recover—at my urging—she sent away several dockhands and longshoremen who’d come running from the pier, chasing down the source of the monstrous noises they’d heard. Once they laid eyes on the morbid scene, none of them needed convincing. One was retching up his evening meal over the dock .

“I knew her,” I told Morrigan. “She lived in one of the rooms on the floor below mine.”

Her deep auburn hair was the only color left to her, pulled loose and tangled in waves around her face. I spotted a few hairpins littered on the ground, mottled with rusting scarlet.

“Effie drained her nearly dry,” she said. “But…there’s something…” Gingerly, she turned the woman’s head and pulled back her upper lip. “She’s dhampir. See here? Their blood-teeth—fangs—are smaller.”

Dhampir.

Dreadmist Harbor had a large population of them as vampires and mortals continued to entangle their bloodlines across generations. My cousins on my mother’s side happened to be among them. They had become more common than even the vampires.

“Yes, I’ve met quite a few.” I watched Morrigan muttering nonsense to herself while she spread the poor dhampir woman’s eyelids to have a look at her unseeing gaze. “I must have overlooked that…what are you doing?”

She had unfastened the woman’s cloak and lifted her arm, peeling back her long sleeve toward the elbow. Running her fingers over the woman’s cooling skin, she squinted beneath the wan light of the moon. Her flesh, drained of life, appeared waxy in its pallor. Satisfied, Morrigan pushed off the cobbles with her fingertips and tottered to her feet. I caught her by the elbow.

“Nothing amiss, I suppose.”

I suddenly remembered Morrigan’s first words when Gwen discovered me at their doorstep. Is she dhampir?

“We’ll have to report it,” I reminded her. “For the sake of her loved ones. It’s cruel to leave her like this.” When Morrigan did not answer right away, I leveled her with a sideways glance. She wouldn’t tear her sanguine eyes from the woman’s corpse. “Is something happening to the dhampir?”

I’d heard whispers about that, too, concealed behind closed doors in high-born estates, hushed in corners of tavern rooms for the past few months.

Morrigan squeezed my hand then disentangled herself from my hold. “Find the nearest watchman or healer, make the report and tell them I sent you. Let them know it’s been handled.” She touched two fingers underneath my chin. “Then you must go directly home. You’re not to follow me.”

She had returned to the puddle of gore that had once been her former coven-mate, tracking bloody footprints back and forth across the damp cobblestone. I had no desire to follow her, to look upon it again.

A bit of blood magic brought the shadow into Morrigan’s outstretched palm.

It was the vampire’s silenced heart.

“But—where—”

“I need to pay their castle a visit,” she explained. A sneer at the fortress whose decrepit state no longer granted it such a title. “They cannot see you. Go home and wait for me there.”

“Why go there at all? You aren’t well enough to traipse about the harbor by yourself. I don’t like it.”

“Ella.” My heart thrilled at the nickname, one I hadn’t heard in so long. She grinned with dark mischief. Her bloody fingers closed around the heart in her fist. “It would be impolite not to return something that belongs to them.”

My macabre errand took longer than I’d expected. There was never a night watchman around when you needed them to be useful, and I’d had to search half the wharf, frantic and reluctant to leave her body so far behind. When I’d finally found someone, he happened to be off-shift and I’d had to pull him out of a tavern. I’d recognized him from his night patrols near the boarding house, where we’d occasionally see each other if I had been working late. He sobered up with haste given the solemn report and his dhampir nature.

A small crowd had gathered while I’d been gone, and he ushered them away, covering her body with his overcoat. Though he told me I could leave, I didn’t have the heart for it. To know I’d been so close to her fate, that it should’ve been me lying bloodless beneath the watchman’s makeshift shroud, was an unbearable guilt. If Morrigan and I had reached her a few moments sooner…

I clasped her freezing, pallid hand in between mine until a healer arrived to escort her inland to the morgue. The night watchman and I stood in silence as the dour-looking wagon slipped away into the fog that wreathed the street lamps. He swore through an exhale, bid me goodnight, and wandered back toward where I’d found him. To wash the sight of the murdered dhampir’s eyes from his mind, I suspected.

Come morning, the memory would still linger. The forgetting was temporary, no matter how deep you tried to drown your senses or impaired every emotion.

Morrigan was lagging behind me by the time I reached the cliffside, taking its winding walkway at a careful pace. “I nearly got here first. What took so long?”

I waited for her to fall into step beside me. “It was a grim affair.” Heaving out a chilled breath, I found the light from Gwen’s carved pumpkins to be a small comfort. “I waited with her body. It didn’t feel right to leave her.”

Morrigan’s hand found my own as we neared the front steps, her fingers weaving between. “That was good of you.”

I stopped at the bottom step. “She had a reason for choosing a dhampir woman as her kill, didn’t she? There’s about twice as many mortals she could’ve drained.”

“I think she was starving.”

“Morrigan,” I answered evenly. Our fingers disentangled. “You wouldn’t have been so attentive to that poor woman’s corpse if there wasn’t something else at work. Something that obviously piqued your interest. She was a neighbor—the least you could do is tell me what’s going on.”

“Perhaps it’s you who could shed some light,” she said. “You’ve been working in those ruins long enough, haven’t you?”

She leaned into the railing as if it had become a conscious effort to keep her bones upright. Her mouth opened again, but it was Gwen’s voice that reached us from the doorway, giving us both a reprieve.

“Where have you two been?” she demanded. “You couldn’t do us a simple courtesy by leaving a note? By the stars, Mor, you reek . I could smell you before you started up the hill.”

“Tell me you didn’t, Morrigan,” Josephine said from behind her. “Please tell me you haven’t done anything rash. Walking around soaked in blood never bodes well for our chances.”

They let us in, barring this terrible night behind the front door, which Gwen promptly locked. Josephine and Gwen gave Morrigan a wide berth and scrunched their noses. We stood scattered between the entranceway and the adjoining parlor while Morrigan steeled herself. It was then that I noticed the dhamphir woman’s blood had darkened the hem of my skirts.

“Elspeth’s killer is no more,” she told them. “She was part of Sonia’s coven as we suspected.”

“Who was it?” Josephine asked.

“Effie.”

“Could’ve figured that,” Gwen muttered. “She was always a monster, that one. Filling Sonia’s head with all sorts of wicked ideas, likely had a hand in crafting a curse or two. The harbor’s safer without her, though I would’ve liked to grind up her heart and feed it to the feral dogs.”

“ Gwen ,” Josephine chided. The grin she was trying so hard to stifle disappeared behind her hand .

“Morrigan got awfully close,” I said. “Where did you leave her heart?”

She raked blood-crusted fingers through her hair. “Ah…left it staked to their front door on the blade of my knife. The ruins are so haggard, it’s hard to know if anyone’s at home. I’m sure they’ll receive the message.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Josephine demanded. Gwen began giggling as if this was the best news she could’ve received.

“Possibly,” Morrigan answered, a wicked sort of gleam in her eyes.

“Of all the reckless, impulsive things to do.”

“She needed to be dealt with, you know that as well as I.”

“Sonia will see it as a retaliation,” Josephine countered. “She’ll know it was you.”

“I wanted her to know.”

“This will lead her straight to Elspeth,” Josephine worried. “Then we’ll lose our advantage—”

“She killed someone else down by the wharf. A dhampir. She drained her until her last breath,” Morrigan said. “I saw it. Sonia knows the punishment for bleeding a mortal dry. She won’t be able to connect Elspeth to our coven. Her only source of truth is in a bloodless heart on her door.”

“A heart you willingly gifted to her,” Josephine said. “You don’t know what she’ll be able to do with it.”

“Feast on it, most likely, knowing her,” Gwen answered.

The revelation roused my interest as it churned my stomach.

“Dare I ask what happens to a vampire who consumes another’s heart?”

“Eating the heart of a mortal? Nothing, except their scorn,” Josephine replied. “But eating the heart of another vampire… Blood restores us all, yes? Keeps us from aging, renews our vitality. A vampire’s heart is at the crux of their power. The vessel for it.”

“It’s how Sonia was able to fortify her sorcery,” Morrigan added. “She claimed several of our coven that way. Accelerated her powers by killing.”

“And she’s had a century and a half to gorge herself on vampiric hearts,” Josephine reminded. “Only the stars know what she’s capable of now. She could—could pull the pieces of Effie back together from what you left behind, regenerate organs—”

Morrigan threw up her hands, pacing. “We can’t be sure that’s possible. The power that would require is—”

“It’s possible, Morrigan, you know it is,” Josephine said. “We both saw it. Sonia wouldn’t have escaped that night otherwise.”

Gwen seemed to flinch at the mere mention of their shared past.

“Healing her own body is one thing,” Morrigan pointed out, “but I doubt she’s over there dabbling in necromancy. She only pursues for her personal gain. From her account, the relationship between Effie and Sonia had soured. She’ll find a replacement.”

She scrubbed a palm over her face, weary and utterly spent. “It hardly matters now. She knows we’re here, and we’ve only just rattled their nest. All of this will end sooner or later. As it should have ended long ago.”

“Perhaps we’ll be on the winning side of things this round,” Gwen said.

Josephine started for the staircase. “Got our work cut out for us, if we survive long enough.”

Morrigan stood in the foyer, her face buried in her dirtied hands.

“You’ll need a good old fashioned bath to get all this blood off you.” I tugged on her coat sleeve. “Come with me. I know a thing or two about washing up.”