Guilt pricks, but I shove it aside. I had no choice. He wasn’t going to tell me, and I need this information to have an icicle’s chance in hell of saving them. I’ll work on earning his forgiveness after I’m sure he’ll be alive and free to give it.
I press my fingers to my temples. Wolf said to charge the circle, which confirms my suspicions on why he was the one to summon Azazel. The blood ward was vital to the process, which is a problem because I don’t know how to charge my blood. I only know how to bleed.
Life has never been easy for me before. No reason for it to break the trend and start being easy now. “Wolf said I need to make a circle, charge it, and then focus to summon Azazel.”
“That’s it.” Grace sounded suspicious, not that I blame her. It sounds too good to be true. Too simple to work.
“Sounds easy. Is a lot more complicated in practice.” I shake my head slowly. “Wolf is a bloodline vampire whose specialty is blood. He can do things that no one else outside his family can.” No one except me, at least in theory. I swallow hard. “It’s a power we share.”
“You do.” Again, the disbelief.
I still haven’t told her about my seraphim half or my bond with the men. Grace might have some strange allegiance to Rylan—or owe him a favor, as she says—but I don’t know how far that, well, grace extends. She’s a monster hunter from a family of monster hunters, and everything I’ve discovered about seraphim to date paints them as monsters even among otherworldly creatures that prey on humanity.
There’s a reason they were hunted to apparent extinction by the vampires.
The amount of harm the seraphim did…
I can’t guarantee Grace won’t decide that I’m too much of a threat, even if I don’t know how to use my fledgling powers properly, or even that the little cluster of cells inside me that is a combination of both seraph and vampire will be too monstrous to allow into the world.
I’m not sure she’s wrong there, either.
I’m not sure of anything anymore.
“I can’t control it,” I finally admit. In fact, none of the bloodline powers have manifested since I fled the mountain home where my father had finally caught up with us and taken the men captive. I haven’t thought too hard about that, but it has to be because I’m so exhausted all the time. “I’m not even sure how to begin to make it work.”
“Well, shit.” She slumps onto the bed. “Guess we’re back to square one.”
A hopeless situation.
I give her a long look. “Why help me? You got me out of there, which is repayment enough for whatever debt your family owes Rylan.”
“Undoubtedly.” She shrugs. “Honestly, I was going to pay your hotel for a week and then leave today, but now that I know you can summon Azazel—or at least one of those vampires can—you’re stuck with me. I need access to that demon.”
I don’t tell her that her chances of finding her mother alive are low. Maybe they aren’t. This world is strange and vast and odder things have happened. It’s not my place to crush this woman’s hope when I’m engaging in my own long shot.
I need my men back, I need to kill my father, and I need to announce this damned pregnancy publicly where no one can refute it to ensure my half-siblings don’t hunt me until the end of days just like my father planned to. I need to essentially crown myself queen the same way my father acts the part of a king. None of my siblings are as formidable as he is, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.
The only path to peace is through power, and it means taking my father’s place as head of the compound…and head of the bloodline.
Ironic, that.
I hold three sets of bloodline powers inside me, but none of them were passed to me by my father.
3
I try to eat, knowing I need the calories for the bloodletting that comes next, but I last all of twenty minutes before I’m in the bathroom, losing my lunch. Hopelessness wells up inside me, deep and dark and all too willing to suck me under.
I’ve been in bad spots before. I was born into a bad spot, a powerless dhampir in the compound my father rules. Normally, dhampir children—those who are half human and half vampire—inherit powers from their vampire parent, at least if said vampire parent is a bloodline vampire. Not me, though. Up until I met Malachi, Rylan, and Wolf, I thought I was defective.
Turns out, my mother wasn’t all that human to begin with.
I brush my teeth, staring at my reflection in the dingy mirror. I look like shit. Dark circles stain the skin beneath my bloodshot eyes and my dark hair has gone greasy and lank. I’ve lost weight, too; weight I can’t afford to lose. I was hardly at peak health when all this started, though the blood the vampires shared with me seemed to do just as much as…