Blood Reign (#4): Alpha Warriors of the Blood (The Blood Series) (18 page)

Slash knew something was afoot with the purple fey warrior. He hadn't been war-torn and buffeted not to notice the subtle signals. But for the life of him, he was unsure the motivation.

It did not benefit the fey to kill Julia. She was the Blooded Queen, and everyone wanted her alive. He took her off the list of potentials. His thoughts mulled over the possibilities of what else there was.

The facts presented themselves. Tony had gone bat-shit crazy, was obviously part demonic, and had a blade juiced up with the blood of a high demon. Those were nothing to fuck with. Slash understood very few supernaturals possessed any immunity to demonics.

Then there was the counterpart, aware that the blood of the angelic ran through Singers’ veins.
Terrific.

Slash drummed his fingers on the stiff, borrowed jeans as he drove.

If Tony was truly demonic and wielding a weapon charged with a high demon’s blood, their collective gooses were cooked. Unless Julia could somehow dampen its power.

Slash chuckled. He clenched his hand around the steering wheel, making it creak in protest. Julia was basically an angel.

His smile faded when he wondered what Tharell's angle could be. His mind turned over the different scenarios a second time. Slash touched on the females, always critical to every scenario. The only species with equal numbers of genders were the Singers.

An epiphany struck him.

There were few females making their way to Region Two.

Slash knew a trap when he saw one.

Somehow, the females were key. He'd like to take the easy road and settle on Julia, but that was too simple and obvious. He had already dismissed her as the focus.

If not her, then who?
Adrianna—his wolf flinched at anything to do with her—was nothing exceptional except her position as an Alpha female. That was distinctive to the Were, but not important to demonics. Cyn was both Singer Healer and newly turned part Red Were. Interesting combination but again, not exceptional.

What could it be?

Jacqueline came to mind, but he dismissed it. She was pregnant by an Unseelie Sidhe, and with such a mixed lineage, she couldn’t be anything but a mess of genetics for a demonic.

It must be Julia.

However, how could Tony hope to combat what he'd have to assume was coming after him.

Unless...

Slash’s eyes widened.

There'd be a huge welcoming party from Hades.

The Reds could hold their own. Slash rubbed the scar that bisected his face like a talisman. It ached sometimes, usually when blood would be shed.

His own.

And that of others.

*

Julia's eyes slid open. Sleeping against Jason had been wonderful, but now she was paying with a crick in her neck. She moved, and his arm slipped from around her.

She lifted her chin and gave him a sleepy smile.

“Hey you,” Jason said and kissed the tip of her nose.

“Hey.” She cupped her hand over breath she was sure was all kinds of bad.

He smiled. “For better or worse, Jules. I bet my mouth smells like ass, too.”

Julia laughed. “Nice.”

He tucked her in, squeezing her against his side, and her ribs protested the movement. She shoved her arm behind him, feeling his muscles clench, and he laughed and arched his back.

“Still ticklish?” she asked in an evil voice.

He nodded, a dimple disappearing as quickly as it came. “Yeah, thanks...”

“We're coming to the end,” Brynn announced without inflection.

The pale dawn began to suffocate the darkness.

Brynn drew Julia’s gaze.

His skin was smoking.

“Oh my God,” Julia said, “we've got to get you in the ground.”

He gritted his teeth, and Julia wanted to clap her hands over her ears at the sound. “Yes,” was all he said.

She was a shitty leader. She should have thought this through and known that Brynn would blow up. So dumb. Julia looked around the dim guts of the car, her eyes lighting on a folded canvas tarp. “Pull over.”

He didn't argue. He'd begun to smell like simmering flesh.

Brynn jammed the gearshift into park as the tires sank into the soft gravel at the shoulder.

He hopped out of the car as Jason and Julia slid back.

Brynn barely made it to the ditch before he threw up.

Blood splattered like a can of thrown paint. Fresh scarlet coated the ditch and halfway up the embankment. Droplets hit the trunk of a nearby tree and slowly scrolled down the deep ridges on the bark.

“What the hell?” Jason yelled, throwing himself at the vampire.

“Drag him around back,” Julia yelled, running for the trunk. It was an older model with a handle on a single swinging door. She tore it open, so thankful it was unlocked she could barely stand it.

Jason half-dragged, half-carried Brynn around the back. His skin had cracked in small fissures like shattered glass. The cracks deepened before her eyes and begun to run further.

“Get him underneath this.” Julia threw up the corners of the canvas and Jason positioned the poisoned vamp underneath.

He gave a rasping sigh as they cut off the growing light.

Julia tucked the canvas around Brynn's body as the first rays hit the SUV like a slap.

Jason half-fell against the side of the black rig. He plowed his fingers through already disheveled hair. “Goddamn... that was cutting it close.”

Julia nodded.

“I can't believe I saved a vampire.” He shook his head. “How many shades of bizarre is that?”

“About as weird as us racing against Tony to save our people?”

They shared a look of tense disbelief.

“Let's go.” He seated her beside him in the passenger seat.

“Are we almost there?” Julia asked and Jason smiled, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. Scabs from fighting scraped along her skin.

“You're like a kid.”

“I only wish.”

“Yeah,” he said with more than a touch of sadness. “True that.”

He put the truck into gear, and they pulled away.

Julia glanced behind her.

Brynn's blood stood like an unmarked crime scene. She turned to face ahead before grief took hold and never let go.

She still had a job to do, and she couldn't let the abyss of sadness take over.

Lives were depending on her.

*

Tony kicked the severed limb inside the door and slammed it tight, putting weight against it to secure the latch. He didn't bother locking it.

He untucked one lapel from the borrowed coat and sighed. Fucking finally.

He strode to the stolen car just as sirens began to wail in the background. He wasn't much for speculation, but he assumed someone had gotten too clever for their own good.

Tony frowned. Ten rooms had been occupied.

Who'd squealed?

He paused for a moment. Tony didn't have many of those to waste. He jogged to the other nine rooms and kicked in the doors of each. His nose did its job, finding nothing but decaying meat.

He was stumped.

A
woot
from a siren that was closer still alerted him his seconds had run out.

Dammit.
He hated there might be a potential witness. He scanned the scene, seeing nothing, missing nothing.

He sprinted back to the running car. Tony leapt inside and slammed the shifter into drive, putting the clutch practically through the floorboards.

Gravel sprayed as the wheels turned and finally grabbed asphalt.

Tony whistled as he crossed the Idaho-Montana border.

A lone female Were had been left behind. She hung up the receiver from her call to the human authorities. The rogue Alpha male had slaughtered her human guardians.

He had not scented her, as Taliah had not entered her change. It had been a near thing.

She could hear the human officers.

A tear slipped out as she surveyed her beloved male guardian, his body discarded as a heavy weight against the door, an arm missing and driven between him and the door.

Taliah looked for any escape and found it in the bathroom window.

She heard shouts and was scared.

She must use her rare talent or be interrogated about her own kind. Yet phoning the police had distracted the insane Were.

Her wolf would not help her in this situation.

But the bird inside her would.

She muffled the cry of pain that escaped, ending in a note of a birdcall.

A snowy white dove spread its wings, turning its neck as eyes like ebony crystal found the window, open enough to allow a small body to move through.

Taliah sprung to the ledge and, looking out, flew through the hole and toward her den. She needed to warn her people that a murderer approached them.

The cops never saw a pure-white bird make a deliberate slow circle above their heads before moving east.

The carnage distracted them too much to notice.

A terrified group greeted Julia and Jason.

They were also looking awfully ready to lynch Jacqueline.

Julia walked into the middle of some bad blood. There simply wasn't time to deal with the backlash against their leader. Tony was coming, and Brynn's vamps were near. They hid for now as the day was at its height.

“I say we jail her forever,” one tall and icily beautiful man, who looked eerily like Victor with his dark blond hair and pale gray eyes, said. He drew closer, and Jacqueline retreated a step. Julia knew firsthand how powerful Jacqueline was, but she was no match for a crowd of talents fueled by adrenaline and emotion. Bad combo.

Julia put her hands to her temples in a hopeless attempt to ease the ache of the mind-noise that coursed through her brain in a numbing sea of static. She let her hands drop and walked in front of Jacqueline, facing the new group.

“Listen up!” Julia blasted out, and Cyn
chuckled somewhere. She plowed forward into the silence of their surprise. “My name is Julia Caldwell...”

Noise erupted again.

Jason put two fingers to the edges of each side of his mouth and gave a whistle so shrill Julia cringed.

“Shut up,” Jason said and instantly, three large Singer males fenced him in.

“Don't even think it, dudes,” he warned.

“I am the Rare One,” Julia said, hoping for things not to escalate further.

“We know who you are,” the one who looked like Victor said.

“Are you a relative of Victor?”

His face flooded with surprise, and he nodded once. “He is my brother.”

Great
. And the bad hits just kept on coming.

“And she”—he jabbed a finger in Jacqueline's direction—“is the reason he is no more.”

Oh boy.

Julia put up her hands. “Listen, I know there's a lot of hate for Jacqueline....”

Cheers interrupted her comment, and Julia frowned. “But she's a changed woman... and a pregnant one.”

The crowd grew quiet, and Tharell showed himself.

Everyone backed away at his appearance, the rush of whispering uneasy.  Julia sensed the undeniable energy of talents readying themselves.

Things were getting out of hand. Tharell had just revealed himself like an alien and the Singers of Region Two were getting aggressive.

“Listen! Please!” Julia begged and two more whistles and a nod from Jason let her speak. “There is a rogue werewolf who carries a special blade dipped in the blood of a demon and he's killed most of...” She stuttered to an incoherent stop. The grief threatened to swallow her.

Julia slowly lowered her head to her chest. She couldn't contain her shaking. She couldn't say the words—they were so horribly final.

Tharell finished for her. “The Singers of Region One are now dead.”

“Not all,” Slash interjected, and Julia lifted her head as she frowned at the look he shot Tharell. It wasn't friendly.

Tharell leveled his own stare at Slash and gave a long blink. Julia guessed that was his silent agreement. However, she wasn't too sure with Tharell, he was hard to read.

Julia collected herself like a broken teacup and looked out over the hundred or so faces. The thrum of their likeness was like a battery that powered her. Mainly men, some women and a few children gazed back at her.

This was all so hard. Laying all the details out. The deaths, the oncoming murderer. Jacqueline the Unpopular returning, Tharell cropping up looking all… purple.

“We have not heard of this”—Victor's brother began, indicating Tharell. “And the threat of a demonic has been so rare and so long ago, it is no longer mentioned. It's not part of the public consciousness. As far as our blood, we have always known it is anchored in the heavenly.”

Julia was swimming upstream with a group motivated the right way but not awake to the mortal danger coming toward them. A terrible storm was ready to tear them apart, and she was the only one in the know.

“He's going to kill us all,” Julia said.

There were gasps and murmurings but not the panic she thought they ought to have, considering there had been a mass killing in their neighboring Region. She and Jason exchanged an anxious glance.

“I am Gallagher, and am one of the oldest at this Region,” Victor's brother introduced himself.

Jacqueline spoke up for the first time. “I have suffered at the hands of this Were, and he has a void where compassion would normally be. We are in grave danger.”

A nearby Singer scoffed at her comment. “Whatever acts he has committed against you are deserved.”

Julia had had enough. The feeling of surrealism descended as she took on the role of defending Jacqueline. Again.

“Rape?” Julia stepped forward in challenge, her gaze surfing the crowd.

The male Singer backed away and stuttered, his face filled with the blood of embarrassment. “No, I did not know...”

“Then shut the fuck up, why don't ya?” Adi said. “Jacqueline's had a case of The Dumbs for about... I don't know, forever. But now she's changed, she's sick because she hadn't ever been to Faerie, and now she has.” Adi squinted her hazel eyes at the crowd, daring them. There were no takers. She went on, “She got knocked up by a green Sidhe warrior, and she doesn't want to be queenie anymore. So now you guys have Julia, so get over yourselves.”

“I really like her,” Jason said with a grin.

Julia did, too. She got things said, summed up, and thrown out there for immediate consideration. That's what they needed.

Gallagher frowned, cupping his chin. “She was forced by this Were?”

Jacqueline kicked up her chin. “Not in the beginning. When I first arrived at the Faerie mound, I was as I've always been. I allowed the vile wretch to use me in the hopes we could make the fey uncomfortable enough to release us.” Her face grew pink, and she added quietly, “To cause more mayhem in a bid for power.”

There were mutterings of assent to this. Her people had known well the temperament of their leader.

She linked her hands together in a knot that appeared so uncomfortable Julia flexed her own fingers.

Jacqueline spoke to the ground. Her voice was a natural contralto, sultry and evocative. No one had trouble hearing her next words, “When the environment began to work on my... sickness, his attentions became violent against my person.” Her head rose. “As I was no longer willing to play his game. And... my talents did not work in Faerie. The magick prevents talents from working correctly.”

“You did nothing to help her?” the Singer who'd first commented asked Tharell in a sharp voice.

Tharell nodded. “When we became aware that the Singer was suffering at the hand of Anthony Laurent, we intervened.”

“Who's 'we,'?” he asked.

“Domiatri,” Jacqueline stated quietly, “The father.”

Gallagher put his hands on his hips. “This is all very untoward. A male claiming to be the mythological Faerie has come in our midst, while a Rare One we've only just heard about claims Region One is effectively no more. And a contingent of Red werewolves stands around making noise of defense and war. And our former leader was held in some kind of prison where she was abused then further assaulted by another male of your species, only to later become pregnant with the fey's offspring.”

He frowned, then his face took on a new expression of disdainful amusement. Gallagher threw his head back and belly laughed. “Forgive me if I am not, what would you call it, ah yes, ‘
on board
’ with all that you have relayed.”

Gallagher looked around at the faces of the Singers. As Julia opened her mouth, he raised a hand to ward off her comment. “And where is this other fey... Domiatri?” he asked with a lilt of aggressive disbelief.

Tharell's entire face changed. The first genuine smile Julia had seen on his face in days, spread and stayed in a happy freeze.

It gave her the creeps.

“Why—he is dead,” Tharell stated, and Jacqueline turned to him, paling before Julia’s eyes.

“What?” Jacqueline asked, hand to chest. “This is not funny, Tharell.” She dropped her hand, and Julia saw a fine tremble to her body. Jacqueline was nearing the edge of whatever threads kept her together. Unraveling before their eyes.

Welcome to my life,
Julia thought.

Tharell looked down on her, his humor fading to nothing. “No, but it was necessary.”

Julia let that comment percolate for about one second before terror shredded her as a many-bladed Chinese star.

Julia's hair spun into her eyes, momentarily blinding her as she swung toward Jason. He was already moving, dragging her behind him as talons slammed out of his fingertips in a painful burst of rendered flesh.

Slash leapt to Julia's side as well, hauling a bewildered Adi behind him as Jason shifted into a wolf, his human shell splattering around her. Julia barely had time to react but managed to throw a telekinetic shield around herself. The bits of him hit the surface invisibly and slid down in front of her as though a thin sheet of glass molded to her body covered her.

She let the entire thing go, and what remained of Jason's human body was chopped meat at her feet.

She stepped over the circle of his remnants and his wolf moved by her side.

Julia was too late to stop him. He'd played the card so well that it seemed only Slash was ready.

Tharell held Jacqueline by the throat and jerked her backward. Her dark eyes, so like Scott's, were so human in that moment as they regarded each other.

Fear reigned supreme in Jacqueline's gaze, where only power and bloodlust had before.

Tharell taking Jacqueline to parts unknown was certainly a concern.

But the demons which bled out of the surrounding forest and circled the group really got Julia's attention.