Blood Ties
Contents
Chapter 1 The Siege
Chapter 2 Always and Forever
Chapter 3 When The Dust Settles
Chapter 4 Sunset
Chapter 5 Friends and Foes
Chapter 6 For Blood
Chapter 7 Reunions
Chapter 8 Unexpected Allies
Chapter 9 Tested
Chapter 10 Introductions
Chapter 11 Perspectives
Chapter 12 Over the Edge
Chapter 13 Remembrance
Chapter 14 Gifts
Chapter 15 Loss and Gain
Chapter 16 Deception
Chapter 17 Retribution
Chapter 18 Parting Ways
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
THE BLOODBORN SERIES
BOOK 3
Blood
Ties
IRIS WALKER
Copyright © 2020 Iris Walker
All rights reserved.
Also by Iris Walker
Blood Hunt (The Bloodborn Series Book 1)
Blood Wars (The Bloodborn Series Book 2)
Chapter 1 The Siege
Two Months Ago, at House Xander
Megan
Chicken little, she thought with a tremble of terror, you might have been onto something.
The sky was falling. Not that she could see the sky. She couldn’t see fuck all, except for the iron bars of her cell and Clay’s trying-not-to-be-terrified-alpha-wolf face across the way. He was in another cell. They were in the dungeon of a basement somewhere in vampire heaven. Vampires don’t believe in heaven. Did they? She actually didn’t know a thing about vampires or their beliefs. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who was in way too deep to be asking any existential questions.
Anyway, back to the sky falling.
Another explosion shook the foundation of the massive building. Dust sprinkled through the air, microscopic bits of stone shaking loose and pattering on the grimy floor. Boom. Sprinkle. Patter.
It had been that way for hours. The first explosion had sent a shockwave of adrenaline coursing through her. She’d bolted upright, as though there’d been anywhere she could go. They’d been in the same cells, staring at the same bricks, for weeks, awaiting trial.
The sad truth?
They were entirely guilty. They had driven an entire caravan of strongbloods off the road and shot all of them in front of God and everybody. Not that they’d get lawyers in here, but even if they could, it wouldn’t do them a lick of good.
Megan wouldn’t have minded staying in chains forever, if it meant she’d never see the inside of that grand hall ever again. She’d never seen a vampire in person before the night Darian’s strongbloods dragged them into the castle. Then, she’d seen fifteen, all burning red eyes staring right at them. She could still feel the cold marble on her knees as they’d been forced down in front of the council, or whatever it’s called. Wolves call their group of decision-makers the council. Wolves operated a little differently, though.
She thought her heart was going to pound a hole through her chest as Darian Xander, the head honcho himself, had risen from his throne like liquid evil, all cold power and regal intimidation. Clay wasn’t nearly as afraid as she’d been. She wasn’t sure why, and had wondered how many vampires he’d had the displeasure of meeting. He was involved in the treaty, so probably a lot. That was all back in the war days. Luckily she hadn’t been around for those fights; her mother had made sure of that. It was the only reason she’d been spared.
That brings us to a very, very important moment.
At first, Darian Xander, in all his prowess, spoke only to Clay about the crimes they’d been accused of. He looked at Clay the entire time, he walked up to Clay, and conversed – tensely – with Clay. It was as though she didn’t even exist.
Until her entire world came crashing in.
Because when he was done talking to Clay, he turned those burning red eyes to her, and they narrowed, just a hair, like he was using X-Ray vision on her. She forgot how to breathe, staring in terror at the monster in front of her (although according to all her human friends, wolves were monsters, too). For a moment, there was thick silence, until he broke the gaze and took a step closer. And then, those words.
Those. Words.
“What bloodline do you hail from?”
“The wood wolves,” she’d sputtered quickly. Too quickly.
It had become a reflex for her. Clay had practiced it with her, when he’d brought her to the Brooks Wolves, the day that he’d spared her life and agreed to help her. Three years, four months, twenty-seven days, and some odd hours ago, that was the first time she’d met Clay Brooks, from the progressionist pack that had overthrown her bloodline. Everyone she knew had talked about the progressionists like they were cutthroat sleazebags that didn’t have any respect for authority and just wanted to cause trouble. But Clay wasn’t like that. Neither were 95% of the other progressionists she’d met over the past three years. The big point in all this: not another soul knew who she really was, except for Clay, and her alcohol-riddled father, not that he’d remember it.
Until Darian Xander.
A wry smile curved up on his lips as she’d answered him, and the sight of it sent a shiver running through her. A shiver. Wolves, in case you don’t know, don’t really get cold. Ever. And then, the words that paralyzed her in terror and wonder and despair: “You smell of the snow, little wood wolf. Curious… Curious, indeed.”
She didn’t remember much after that deeply disturbing response. Except that there was supposed to be a trial, and that they were supposed to wait for it. How long? No clue. What the trial procedure would be? Not the foggiest. She got the sense that it wasn’t going to be a Bar-endorsed event.
At some point, they’d been dragged out of the throne room and into the prison. There were no words for the smell. They entered into a long hallway, rows of cells full of terrifying, blood-curdling screams of suffering to horribly disfigured prisons being beaten and chained. Then, the next section was full of shivering figures curled up in the corners of their cells, moaning at their own pitiful existence. And then, they’d gone down another staircase, entering another section. The poor vampire escorting them. He had to drag Megan pretty much the whole way, because her legs decided to stop working as soon as she’d seen that yawning portal and those crumbling stairs. This, she’d thought, was worse than death. But the thousand-ton iron door had swung open, and Mr. Mean-Muscles had dragged her inside and she’d been shocked to see that it wasn’t half as bad as the other sections.
Torches flickered, here and there. The air smelled like dust and old rock, and maybe some hay, and there wasn’t any blood snaking down the cracks of the stone floor. That was a plus.
The cells themselves were grimy, but she’d spent a lot of time camping, considering that was how wolf packs came together for the full moon. Rain, shine, snow, sleet, volcanic eruption. The wolves would still be partying in the woods somewhere come hell or high water. She’d slept on much less comfortable surfaces than the slightly mildewed hay mattress. The ground, for one.
This area of the prison was clearly a sleepy section.
They were almost at the very end of the row. Megan’s cell had a brick wall for one side, which she was thankful for. There was one cell past theirs, only one, and it was straight ahead from the hallway, bookending their little abode.
In contrast to the iron cubes they were kept in, this cell was built into the wall and had a large, bricked arch, the bars built into it. The cell was wide, luxury style, and had furniture. It was like a little apartment in there, but dirtier. Books, a lamp, and a little writing desk were nestled amidst the crumbling walls. There was a cot and a chair, too. Cozy, right?
When they’d arrived,
Clay had been really, really angry. Megan, on the other hand, was numb. She’d just sat, criss cross on her hay mattress, watching Clay with a passive, unseeing gaze. He was pacing, banging against the bars, yelling at the top of his lungs. And then, at a certain point, he’d stopped. Megan wasn’t sure when. After his rage-fueled tantrum, he’d gathered his wits and remembered that she existed. “Are you okay?” he’d asked her.
She didn’t know. Honestly, she felt ambivalent. Exhausted. But instead of any of that, she’d looked him straight in the eyes and whispered, “how does he know?”
And Clay’s eyes betrayed his fear when he’d replied that he had no clue. Vampires just knew things, apparently. It was part of their creepy personas, or whatever. They can just do things, they can just snap their fingers and something magical or hypnotic happens, and they just know things, in all their mysterious ways.
“Is he going to kill me?” she’d whispered.
Because he’d killed the rest of her family (if you could call what she’d had a family). The rest of her bloodline, that’d be more apt. And technically it wasn’t Darian that had actually killed them. More like ‘The Vampires’, with a capital V. They were the ones that sent those assassins, three years ago. Quick, quiet, devastating. And they were gone before anybody in the pack had even known they’d been there.
Clay shook his head, a feeble little twitch. “I don’t know, kiddo.”
That was the first day.
Boom. Sprinkle. Patter.
Megan’s eyes tilted upward, past the tally marks she’d carved into the wall, telling her that it had been thirty-six days since they’d arrived in this hell hole. Over a month they’d spent here, in Darian Xander’s purgatorial limbo. Not that anybody would have been looking for them. They’d both been shunned by the pack, and the pack took that practice quite literally. They wouldn’t be receiving any Christmas cards, that was for sure. They were trapped, and the world was falling apart around them. The siege lasted for eight days. At first, there were explosions, but they stopped soon. Megan, in all her youthful naiveite, had thought that was a good thing. Then, smaller collisions rocked the world above them, like someone was knocking at the door, except they were pounding, and the door was really the floor, or the walls of the castle above them. They couldn’t hear most of those down in the prison, but they felt them.
“What is that?” Megan asked, standing up and pacing just like Clay had. It had been a few days since the nice human servant in charge of their food had been down to the prison. They weren’t priority guests, she supposed. Wolves were remarkably efficient when it came to surviving off energy stores, but she and Clay had already lost a bit of their frisky energy. Even pacing was a short-timed act.
Clay looked up at the ceiling, which would tell him bupkis. “They must be fighting.”
“Who?”
He gave her that look, that one that she’d gotten used to. The ‘I don’t know’ look. Because truly, they didn’t know. She grew up in Minnesota, in a small town, set apart from their bloodline’s seat of power. Hidden. Concealed. It was probably for the best, because she was kind of a wild child, and proof of her mother’s folly, but up until the wolf war, she’d never left the state she’d been born in. Then, her bloodline relocated, closer to Washington, and the fighting. She’d been stowed in a cabin with her dad for nearly six months, waiting for the battles to be over. But after her side had officially lost, all her relatives had either fled or been slaughtered, and it wasn’t her mother’s icy face that had popped through the doorway of their hideout, but Clay’s. He’d grown up in southwest Washington, a rural boy from a long line of rural people, so he’d gotten all the royal vampire exposure he’d wanted and then some when the strongbloods amassed to end the war. So neither of them had been to a vampire stronghold before. If she’d had her way, she would have lived all her days without even coming close to one. See, in werewolf world, vampires and strongbloods and casters were talked about, and sometimes visited them (which was like a strange celebrity appearance), but unlike the other races, the wolves were mostly just human. They lived as long as the humans. They lived with the humans. Megan had gone to Elementary School, for God’s sake. As far as the world knew, they were human. To wolves, the other races seemed like those weird aunts and uncles that you always hoped never came to the Christmas party. The second cousins that nobody liked to see at the reunion and fueled most of the eye-rolling gossip. (Did you hear what the vampires are doing in Tennessee? Oh, it’s disgraceful…) Maybe they thought the same thing about the wolves. Probably. She pressed her forehead against the bars, feeling each crash shake the iron. It sounded like superman was playing dodgeball with boulders.
“Little wolf girl,” a voice murmured, raspy and hollow.
Ah, Mr. Shadow-Man. The dude that was locked in the decked-out cell at the end, that never said a word, that never even moved, that showed no interest in the world or his cell mates even when Megan had screamed at him to say something. Megan turned to him with an angry scowl. “Huh?”
“You will want to step away from the bars.”
“Why’s that?”
Clay stiffened, straightening up and resting his head against the wall behind him. “You know something we don’t?”
“No,” the voice said, his hollowed-out laugh echoing against the stone walls. “But I know much about siege tactics. And I know that soon, they will run out of toys to play with and the prisoners will be released.”
“Then why do I want to be away from the bars?” Megan threw back, craning her neck to see down the long corridor.
“Because most of the prisoners are starving vampires, and they will have no qualms about ripping your arm out of its socket to get a taste of your blood.”
Megan’s eyes widened, and she stepped away, slinking back to the mattress. Clay’s jaw tensed, and he looked to the hallway, the long gauntlet; the space between them and freedom. That, and vampiric-reinforced iron bars and doors and multiple levels of security. Her nerves were jumping out of her skin, and she pulled her knees up to her chest, pressing her back against the brick wall. Crash. Thud. Boom.
More days passed, and a silence fell. Or settled, more like it. A tense, temporary silence that lasted just long enough for her to think that maybe, just maybe, the forces that had originally imprisoned them prevailed. A little after that, the screaming started. No more explosions, no more crumbling rocks. No more dust.
But those horrible, anguished cries echoed down the drainpipes that brought a measly supply of oxygen to their cells. At first, Megan thought she’d imagined it. It sounded like a whistle, or like the wind had whipped through the halls at just the right angle. But just as she’d convinced herself that she was going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, another one rattled across the pipes and echoed in their stony coffin. “Did you hear that?” Megan asked Clay.
Clay nodded, a grim look on his face. “Just stay back,” he warned. “There’s nothing we can do.”
She lost count of how many screams rattled down those pipes, but after an indeterminable ‘while’, one bone-chilling fact became clear: while the number of screams dwindled, the ones that did pierce the prison’s oppressive silence were getting closer. They’d zoom up and then get quieter, like a car racing past her. Running, Megan thought in despair. They’re running. From what? From who? The prisoners started to get antsy, too. That was a lovely sound to fall asleep to, not that she’d done much sleeping in the past week. Moaning and rattling and crying to some unfeeling, uncaring deity. It didn’t take long for her to come to the conclusion that they were going to die in these cells. Clay had arrived there as well, though he wasn’t willing to admit it to himself. Her arms ached from gripping her knees so hard, mostly to stop the trembling. It went against everything in her to show that emotion, to be so bare in the face of others, so she did what she could by squeezing her legs against her chest until the muscles in her arms shook with the effort and she was exhausted.
A screeching clunk echoed down the hallway, and
then a long, haunting creak. It was the same sound she’d heard when the prison doors had been opened for her and Clay. A bolt of fear, sharp and stabbing, pierced her lungs. The enemies had breached the prison. “Clay?” she whispered, frantic eyes looking to the right, to the corner of her cell, where they’d be coming from.
“Yeah?” he asked, licking his dry, cracked lips. A sheen of sweat slicked his forehead, visible even in the dim light.
“Thank you,” she pushed out, drawing in a sharp, shuddering breath. “For everything you did, for me.”
Clay shook his head. “Don’t do that. No goodbyes.”
Megan felt a tear spill down from her eye, and she bit the inside of her cheek to stop the trembling on her lower lip. “Just, thank you. You didn’t have to do it, but…”
Clay’s mahogany eyes drilled into hers. “I did have to do it. You are not your mother, Megan. You never were, and you never will be, and the others might disagree, but you were never supposed to be a target of the war.”
She nodded, wiping her tears with frozen, shaky fingers. Another creak cut through the air, closer, and Megan stiffened, every muscle tense with fear. The second door. Which meant there was only one more that stood between them. Between us and… what? Rabid vampires. Whoever was attacking. Brutal, gruesome death. Oh man, she was scared; and not the ‘shocked’ kind of scared, or the electrical adrenaline kind of fear that makes you freeze in place, but the gulping, gasping, kicking and screaming kind of fear that’s entirely indignant and pathetic as fuck. She was looking for something to do, for somewhere to go, but there was just nothing. Nothing to do. Nowhere to run. Trapped. Waiting. Bars started rattling, gasps and cries and promises of allegiance in return for freedom. All the prisoners in their section were lighting up like caged birds, flapping their wings and squawking in terror.
Creak.
The thick iron door to their section crawled open with a screech, and then she heard them. Ever seen a zombie movie? That’s what it sounded like. Thousands of zombies, ripping each other apart, tearing flesh and gurgling blood and screams that would make Vlad the Impaler cower in a corner. Rabid. Megan’s breath hitched in her chest, her blood freezing inside of her. She couldn’t feel her fingertips. She couldn’t feel her nose. The only thing she could feel was the jackhammer pounding inside of her chest.