I reached for his hand and squeezed. “I’m glad you found one.”
He squeezed back, just briefly, then dropped the small embrace. Hurt pierced me, and I tried to shove it away. He was clearly ready to be rid of me and this bond. After the night we’d spent together, though…
It was hard to believe.
Well, believe it, cookie. Life is full of disappointments.
“Where are we going?” I asked, wanting to get my mind off the miserable train of thought.
“To Hellebore Alley, not far from my tower. There’s a blood sorceress called Cyrenthia who can help us.”
“Blood sorceress?”
“A magic that teeters on the edge of dark. The key ingredient to her magic is blood. Taken willingly, her magic falls on the right side of the law. Taken unwillingly . . .”
“Dark magic.”
“Precisely.” He nodded at Miranda as we passed, and she watched him with steely eyes. The worry that I’d seen on her face earlier was gone, hidden no doubt when he was around.
Grey led me out into the square in front of his tower. The clouds had grown even more ominous, dropping lower in the sky, and taking on the shade of gunmetal. It was almost as if the weather agreed that sad shit was about to happen.
Of course I wanted to fix Grey. I’d cut open my vein right away and let the blood sorceress take whatever she wanted. But breaking our bond . . .
It felt like breaking the thing that was growing between us, and I was definitely conflicted about that. I shouldn’t fall for the tortured, ancient vampire, but I was beginning to teeter at the edge. And I was liking it.
“How is your guild tower coming along?” he asked.
His words dragged me to the present, and I looked up at him. “Fine. We’re getting there, but its slow.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it’s working out.” He approached an alley that smelled vaguely foul. Nothing overtly terrible—more like a swamp than a dumpster—but it wasn’t pleasant.
He turned down the alley, and I followed, spotting the sign on the brick wall at the corner. Hellebore Alley.
The air felt thicker, as if it were coated with smog. It was darker as well, the clouds hovering around the roofs of the buildings. The alley was so narrow that Grey and I had to walk shoulder to shoulder. On either side of the little road, the buildings rose three stories high.
In the style of Tudor buildings, the upper floors jutted out over the lower ones, the overhang creating a tunnel effect. The dark wooden beams surrounded gunmetal gray plaster. It had once been white, the usual color, but soot appeared to have coated the surface.
Grey caught me looking. “That’s the stain of dark magic. The top floors are flats. Rent is cheap in this part of town.”
No surprise. The letting advert would say something like Charming hovel in a perpetually gloomy part of town. Sun never seen.
The windows of the upper floors were all shuttered, either by wood or curtains, as if the inhabitants were constantly walking around in their knickers and couldn’t risk being spotted by the people in the windows across the road.
Given the dark magic stink in the air, however, I had a feeling that it wasn’t nakedness that kept the windows covered.
The contents of the shops were nothing like those on the other streets. Sure, they had the same magical aura that made the contents of the windows move around, but the contents . . .
I shuddered.
One window was full of weapons. Normally, I’d be entranced. I loved a good blade. But these were different. They were the sharpest, evilest looking daggers I’d ever seen. Serrated teeth and double pronged. In the window, they stabbed at the air, darting around with an aggression that was so different from the elegant, fanciful movements of weapons in the shop windows in the rest of Guild City.
Worse, the blades were speckled with a rusty brownish-red.
“Is that blood on the blades?” I asked.
“I would think so, yes.”
I shivered and looked toward the next shop. Hundreds of potion vials sat on the shelves, vibrating with a low hum that radiated through the glass, making a shudder run through me. My stomach turned, and I pressed a hand to it.