His wasn’t the only one. Mine felt like it was cracking into tiny pieces too. We finally get together and things were supposed to be mindblowing. And they had been mindblowing, and amazing and glorious and any number of other wonderful adjectives, for all of what felt like five seconds . . . then I’d woken up. Now, for some unknown reason, everything seemed to be going horribly, heart-wrenchingly wrong.
That bastard Cupid must truly have me on his shit list.
My nausea eased, the ragged tufts of grass and sandy earth beneath me coming into focus, and I realised the pain was muting. I raised my head carefully, grateful for Malik’s soothing touch at my nape.
I slanted a look at him, crouching elegantly next to me and started with something simple. ‘How come we’re in a circle?’
His golden eyes flickered. ‘The kelpie wished to take you from me.’
Huh? ‘When was Tavish here?’
‘He appeared while you were . . . sleeping.’
Had to be the voices I heard. Annoyance flashed through me. Damn kelpie. One thing for him not to trust Malik, but he should trust my judgement after all this time. Though perhaps I should’ve expected the interfering wylde fae to turn up; I’d known he wasn’t thrilled about me seeing Malik. But that didn’t explain why we were in a circle.
I asked Malik again.
Briefly he closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the gold was duller. ‘I cast the circle.’
‘You?! But you can’t do magic.’ I frowned. ‘Can you?’
He held out his hand. A can of Blue Bat juice, emblazoned with the Blue Heart logo, appeared in his palm. ‘It appears I can.’
I frowned. Had he just done some kinetic vamp trick? Or—‘Where did that come from?’
‘The Blue Heart.’ He offered me the can with a flat, eerie stare. ‘Drink it, Genevieve. It will assist with your recovery.’
I took it and chugged back half the drink before I realised he’d given me an order. The stuff tasted like goblin piss (Beater goblins in Sucker Town have their own peculiarities when it comes to subduing rogue vamps, as I’d discovered once when I’d been wearing Rosa’s body as my vamp disguise). As I started to splutter, Malik clapped a hand over my mouth, pushed my chin up and ordered, ‘Swallow. Then drink the rest.’
I glared at him, promising retribution. If he thought giving me an orgasm, no matter how freaking fuck-tastic it was, gave him permission to order me around like some junkie blood-slave, even if it was for my own good, then he was sucking on the wrong sidhe.
I finished the drink, went to throw the can at him, but it was out my hand and vanished before I had a chance.
‘Tell me you did not just do magic?’ I demanded.
‘Why would I tell you that, Genevieve, when that is exactly what I did do?’ His mouth turned grim. ‘It appears your blood not only enhances my own powers, but grants me your magic as well. Much as if you were another vampire I had fed upon.’
Which was so fucking unfair. ‘Except I can’t call stuff,’ I said, hearing the thread of a childish whine in my voice. ‘Or vanish it like that.’
He lifted an elegant shoulder. ‘The vampires I feed on cannot necessarily tap all the powers that run in their blood either.’ He flicked his fingers and the dome went fully opaque; a Privacy spell. Crap, this just got better and better. I scowled at Malik as he draped the leather coat over my shoulders, saying, ‘Put the coat on and fasten it.’
‘That’s the third order in as many minutes,’ I snapped, jerking the coat on, fingers buttoning it up clumsily, as I fought to disobey. ‘I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do that shit any more?’
In answer, he bit down on his wrist then held it in front of my face. ‘Drink.’
Both my hands grabbed his arm, my mouth latching on to the bloody bite like I was starving. I sucked down his spicy blood as if it was ambrosia, my fury mounting even as he pulled me into the V of his legs and my body traitorously responded to where his obvious arousal pressed against my butt.
Bastard, I thought loudly at him.
‘You are right, Genevieve,’ he murmured against my ear as his hard arm pinioned me around my waist. ‘I am indeed a bastard. My father never married my mother, and her people, Christians who worshipped the western god, forced her to give me up when I was seven as devşirme. Devşirme was the tithe paid by those conquered by the Ottomans.’
Surprise made me choke on his blood. He was choosing now to tell me something personal about his past? Didn’t he know the time for sweet nothings was during the post-coital haze? And not after he’d pissed me off with all his orders. But his words still muted my fury, and raised an instinctive compassion in my heart for the child he’d been.
‘You do not need to feel pity for me,’ he said coolly, as if he’d read my mind which, with me attached to his wrist like a limpet was a possibility. ‘I was trained as a janissary, one of the sultan’s elite army, and was proud to swear my loyalty to him and his blood. It was a prestigious and rewarding life, more so than the one I was otherwise destined for as a subsistence farmer in Northern Albania.’
Bully for you, I muttered at him. But how about we can the personal history and talk about the present? For starters: I’ve had enough blood. In fact, sucking on you is making me feel nauseous. Which wasn’t a lie. I was feeling sick, just not physically. Though, the way my stomach was bloating up like an over-stretched wine bag, physical sickness was going to be an option in the near future.
‘Keep drinking,’ he ordered.
I didn’t need to pity the child he’d been, or the bully he was being now. But while I might not be able to disobey his ‘keep drinking’ order, I could dig my teeth into his arm in protest. Triumph sparked as he flinched, then an odd note of remorse hit. I was causing him pain . . . or he was causing me pain . . . I was getting echoes of what he was feeling, sucking them down with his blood. Damn. If we merged thoughts any more, then between us I was going to get emotional whiplash.
‘When I was twenty, Suleiman 1 became sultan. He was my liege and my . . . friend. He had ambitions to expand the Ottoman Empire; ambitions which succeeded, as history has documented. What history does not detail is the strategy he used to win the Battle of Mohács where he defeated Louis II of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire became the pre-eminent power in Eastern Europe.’
Through my link with his blood, I caught remnants of his feelings for Suleiman: loyalty, respect, an echo of hero worship, and sadness that his liege and friend was long gone; but, above all, a brotherly love. Not that any of that explained why the hell he was telling me all this. Or made me any less furious.
‘Suleiman used sanguine lemurs, as they were called then.’ Malik’s voice was stark. ‘Revenants.’
Revenants are the skeletons in the vamps’ closet, the monster side of the vamp myth, the one that isn’t supposed to exist. Unlike the usual ‘lucky’ recipients of the Gift (3V-infected humans who are carefully nurtured over months, or even years), revenants are made instant vamps through a forbidden ritual. One day human, the next a bloodthirsty, bloodsucking monster with less impulse control than a greedy two-year-old. All they want to do is fuck, feed and kill, and not necessarily in that order. Though ‘want’ isn’t quite right, as after a few days they don’t usually have any higher functions left, and most end up shambling corpses; the true undead.
The penny started to drop. Malik carried the revenant curse in his blood, though he’d overcome it. Damn. Whatever the reason I was getting this story, I knew it wasn’t going to have a happy ending. The thought almost snapped the tether of his order and stopped my own feeding.
‘After the battle, Suleiman gave orders to keep no prisoners,’ Malik carried on in a low voice. ‘It was a good strategy. It sent a message to our enemies, plus we had neither the manpower nor the supplies to support the extra mouths. But his true reason for the order was to destroy the revenants. They had been corralled along with the vanquished enemy, and had continued to feast unchecked until the monsters died with the dawn. There was no way to determine which of the living or dead might be infected; one bite and a drop of blood can be all that is required for the curse to manifest. Suleiman paid the dragons to burn every one until they were nothing more than ashes to be scattered to the four winds.’