Blood Pact (Darkling Mage 7)

The three women, each in a couture gown the color of a different jewel, tittered again.

“Lovely night, sir,” the one in the ruby dress said.

“Such delicious hors d’oeuvres,” the lady in the emerald gown purred. The three of them laughed softly. I laughed with them, unsure if they were making fun of me and my appetite, but when in Rome, you know?

“An excellent spread, to be sure,” I said. “Very generous of the Ramseys to host for the Society this evening.”

“Indeed,” Ruby replied, fanning herself gently. “Are you personally acquainted with our hosts?”

I winked, then flashed another glittering grin. “I suppose you could say that. I don’t see them among us, though.”

The third woman, let’s call her Sapphire, fanned herself and grinned openly. “Well that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? The masks. Nobody knows anybody. I’ve heard that Delilah and Marybeth have made it a kind of game. If you discover and unveil them, they’ll donate ten thousand dollars to the charity of your choice.”

I almost smashed my champagne flute between my fingers. Ten thousand dollars was more money than I’d ever collectively held in any of my pitiful bank accounts at any given time. Okay, so maybe that was down to my irresponsible spending habits, too, but sometimes you need a little extra spool of golden thread from the Black Market for a ritual, you know?

Sometimes a new video game release catches you by surprise. And sometimes your boyfriend wants to do a fun little weekend adventure in San Francisco, or farther south in Downtown LA, and you empty the coffers because you want to treat him special, the way he deserves to be treated.

Yeah, that’s right. I said boyfriend.

I chatted with the jewel ladies a little longer, then left them to titter into their hands and their fans. Thanks to Carver’s briefing, I knew better than to sift through the throng of the rich and not-really-famous to find the Ramseys. That was the real game they were playing. They weren’t in the ballroom at all.

And Sterling and I knew exactly where to find them.

Chapter 2

“Coast is clear,” Sterling said, the potted plant rustling as he spoke.

“About damn time,” I grunted. “How do you manage to always smell like cigarettes?”

“And body spray,” he muttered, leaning in to give me a whiff of his neck. I curled my nose and grimaced. “Smell.”

“Get off,” I grumbled, shoving him off me, and out from the safety of our hiding place.

Like I said, the Ramseys weren’t about to show, because they were sequestered somewhere private, even more private than their home. My guess was an underground chamber of some design. Sterling said it might have been a side room that they set aside specifically for ritual magic.

Whatever it was, we had a strong – and probably accurate suspicion, honestly – that the sisters had spent the night locked up in their special room, drawing on the ambient energy of so many of their gathered guests to fuel whatever blasted ritual they were attempting. So we waited, after dark, after all the guests had gone. We waited, like a couple of criminals, behind the safety and obscurity of a massive indoor plant tucked away in an alcove just off the ballroom.

Because it’s possible, after all, to fuel magic even with the unintentional psychic force of so many unwitting people. It was something I learned from Thea, my former mentor and murderer, of all people, a long time ago. The ball guests were gathered for the sake of supporting the Ramsey sisters and their cause, and whether or not they knew it, their mere presence and mindset would contribute in some small way.

Very insidious, honestly speaking, and very reminiscent of cult magic. That was exactly why Carver had sent us to the Ramsey House to begin with. We’d nipped the Viridian Dawn in the bud, and that whole mess with the Crown of Stars had caused the slaughter of a great many of the Eldest’s worshippers.

And now that the Dark Room had been suppressed – now that I no longer had access to the shadows – it made even more sense for pocket groups of cultists to pop up and attempt to summon the Eldest via alternate means, to continue to draw their attention to our plane of existence.

The Society of Robes, obviously, was at the very top of our list of suspects.

I should have known better, truthfully. The Ramseys were wealthy enough to do this sort of shit, and certainly rich enough to snag just the right kind of eldritch artifact to initiate a summoning, or at least some kind of communion with the Old Ones.

Wh

at the society rags and that gossipy section of the Comstock Times didn’t ever mention, you see, was that the Ramseys were also aspiring sorceresses. They were normals, in short, who’d somehow been keyed into the realities of the underground, the magical world behind the Veil, and had developed a kind of appetite for the arcane. And that was always a dangerous thing.

The Society of Robes liked to position itself as a kind of organizational front for the city’s wealthier class, its more prestigious occupations: doctors, lawyers, politicians, the luxurious and lucky few who, at some point in history, had worn wear ornate cloaks and robes as part of their uniforms. The Lorica and the rest of the underground knew the truth, though.

Through a combination of their wealth and influence, the Society and the Ramseys were more or less untouchable. It wasn’t like they necessarily dabbled in the more apocalyptic aspects of magic. Not on a regular, anyway. It was more of the innocent stuff: divination, minor summonings of benevolent spirits, that sort of thing.

This time, though? This time was different. The Ramseys had gotten their velvet mitts on something especially explosive. According to Carver, it was difficult to pick up on specifically because of how the Ramsey House had entire sections that were warded from the prying powers of scryers like himself and the Lorica’s Eyes, kind of like the magically impregnable Vault that Bastion’s family kept in their manor’s basement.

The good news? We had a small lead on the Lorica. Carver’s powers outstripped even the Lorica’s best Eyes and Scions by leaps and bounds. Sterling and I had a chance of slipping in and absconding with the goods before the Lorica’s people had even rolled out of bed to scratch their nuts.