Page 17 of Blood & Bedlam

“I took some time. Spent a few decades in a monastery in Budapest, learning to curve and accept. Learning to establish rules to keep me from disappearing into my brutality. Then I met you, and your sisters, and after so many years alone, I knew that was what I had been preparing for. And I don’t regret it, not for a moment.” I pull her up and she sits on my lap, engulfing me in a bone-crushing hug. Cami isn’t physically affectionate, so when she displays it, I go all in. In her, I feel love. I see the manifestation of a life worth living, of the four lives I saved, and I am grateful.

“We are going to figure this out. I promise.” Cami pulls back, her jaw set and determined as I study her face.

“I know you will. I just need you to be patient for me, while I navigate this. And Reine too. She’s in shock, she’s in danger, and we are about to tear apart the fabric of her world.” I brush a tear back from her face. Cami stands, righting herself and smoothing back her platinum hair.

“I’ll find the girl. As soon as the sun goes down.”

A knock at the door draws our attention, and Cami tenses up immediately as she registers who’s on the other side of that door.

“Papa,” she growls, the word low and deadly, all traces of the doting daughter gone in her annoyance.

“Come in.” My words are barely spoken, but I know that his shifter hearing can pick up the invitation with little strain. The solid door swings wide to reveal the tall, bulked shifter with sandy-colored hair and too-green eyes that seems to set my eldest off just by existing.

“Dracul, you sent for me?” Tully asks, stepping into the room with a quiet ease that further pisses Camille off. I’ve known the alligator shifter since he was a boy, when he proved his worthiness of my trust during a war that didn’t belong to him, and saved an innocent without a spare thought of his own safety. Bartholomew Knight was the first alligator shifter to ever pick up the badge of Ranger, and it cost him everything. His people, his home, but it saved another life and I know he would do it again. It was his selflessness that earned him a position with the Eternals, a vow he took to protect the Royal Family until his death.

“Tully, yes. I need you to look into the disappearance of Makenna Du Pont. She was reportedly unwillingly thralled, then subsequently murdered in an unsanctioned kill last night. I need you to confirm details, gather testimony, and search her home. Anything that could lead us to a body or a witness. Camille will assist you in your efforts as an official emissary.” Cami’s glare turns on me, her lips thinned in displeasure, but Tully’s eyes shimmer with what looks like delight.

“Lady Camille, you’re looking ravishing,” he says, the Cajun lilt of his accent thick on the charged air between them. She curses under her breath, and with a last deadly look at me, snaps her fingers.

“Come, then. It’s nearly sundown. We’re going to start losing moonlight.” She strides past him, and he turns, arching an eyebrow.

“Wrong type of shifter. Gators don’t come on command, My Lady,” he drawls, baiting her. Camille barely spares him a glance before clearing the threshold.

“Oh, I’m sorry, do you need me to beg first? It must be a change, walking upright instead of being on your hands and knees,” she quips back. I let out a low whistle as the muscle in his jaw ticks. He’s got a retort on the tip of his silver tongue, but one look at me has him reconsidering, which tells me it’s highly inappropriate.

“Good luck,” I say, offering up a manilla folder with what we were able to gather about Makenna tucked inside. He grabs it but doesn’t spare it or me a glance as Camille snaps again. There’s something about the way the two of them interact, like two magnets pushing and pulling each other. The rest of Cami’s siblings have found love, found hope, but my girl has always shied away from giving anyone that kind of power over her. Perhaps, with the right person, at the right time.

“Thanks,” Tully responds, and then he’s gone, chasing after her.

The sun outside starts to set as my hearing stretches out, slipping through the Manor until I hear the steady breathing and the subtle shift of pages turning. I’m on my feet before I know it, but I grab for my desk, willing my hands to keep me rooted. Claire and Fleur are speaking in the hallway outside of their rooms, so I wrench my hearing away to give them privacy. I want to know where their minds are on everything, but they deserve a chance to come to me, as Camille did. I have no doubt she bloodlinked them the entirety of the conversation as soon as she walked out of here, and a small part of me is grateful I won’t have to relive it three more times over. The cowardly part of me worries they will see what I did, the carnage, the destruction, and it will change who I am to them in their eyes.

To know that I used to kill with the same cruelty as the men who stole their lives away.

I swallow down the guilt and shame long enough to pour myself a drink. The whiskey is sharp as it burns my throat, aged and spiked with O negative blood, freely given. But memory is in the Blood, and because I can’t stay in my own head even a moment longer, I allow myself to see a small snippet of a life not mine. I sit myself back down and catch a fleeting glimpse of the shrimp boats coming into the harbor while the love of my life breathes just a few floors away.

Reine

CHAPTER 8

This Manor is a sprawling labyrinth that seems so much larger from the inside than the outside betrays, and I have decided there is some sort of weird magic making it that way. Sitting in the middle of this big bed, I focus on the feel of soft silk beneath my fingers, the smell of Vladimir’s cologne, the heavy tones of earth and sage and oak. The fading light of day drops below the horizon from the window I poorly attempted escape from as my mind wheels and deals, trying to make sense of all I’ve learned.

Magic. Vampires. Monsters.

I met shifters today, like the nice girl who brought me a change of clothes after Vladimir left, and the cook who insisted on feeding me breakfast. I met a witch, who healed my bruises and ankle after I took a too-long, scalding shower, saw the guards walking the fence from the safety of a second-story balcony. All of them working as staff for the Dracul, as I’ve learned is Vladimir’s official title. I haven’t seen him since he left me in his room, but I have spent the time exploring this house, speaking with the others who dwell within the walls, and one thing has become excruciatingly clear.

Either I am in a tragic coma, making all this fantasy up in my head as my body rots away, or worse, monsters are real and I am indeed in way over my fucking head. My mind feels fuzzy, and I keep glitching out whenever I think about Makenna. Has anyone noticed we’re missing? Does anyone know a young girl was murdered? She was so vibrant and outgoing and there are people who love her, who care about her, right?

People to miss her.

I fight the urge to curl in on myself. The reality is, there probably isn’t anyone to notice we’re missing. Bartenders no call no show and quit all the time …

It’s also clear that if these people were going to hurt me, they already would have. I couldn’t remember much about what happened at the ball those Italians brought me to, but I remember a commotion. I remember him, and his arms ripping that other vamp’s teeth from my skin. I’m just a human, and Vladimir could have let me die, but he didn’t and I don’t know why. A soft knock at the door sounds, and then Juliette’s dark head of hair appears inside.

Relief washes over me at her familiar face, and the kind smile on her lips. Most of the creatures I spoke with today were polite, but they regarded me with an otherness that’s noticeably absent from Juliette’s treatment.

“Hey there, Reine, how are you holding up?” she asks, inching her way inside. Behind her are the soft murmurs and echoes of hustle and bustle, so different from the quiet of the Manor from earlier, and it occurs to me that there must be way more vampires here, now that dusk has arrived.

“I’m okay. Did you just wake up?”