Page 45 of Blood Freed

A soft noise behind me makes me turn. “Emma?” I say. A woman stands in the doorway, her slight frame trembling. My sister – not by blood, but by Maxwell’s gift of immortality. She’s one of the eldest of his line, turned shortly after I was.

“Is it true?” Her voice cracks. “I felt it…the bond…it’s gone.”

I nod, unable to find words, as she stumbles forward to the door.

“Don’t,” I say when she reaches for the doorknob. She shoots a look at me.

“Did he…?” Pale blue eyes lock with mine from beneath a wave of fair hair. She still bears the accent she picked up on London’s streets before the plague took her.

“He’s gone,” I tell her. She doesn’t need to know more. “It isn’t safe,” I add.

She drops her hand, her chin lowering, her eyes shut. A sound flutters from her chest, a low groan of pain that I understand all too well. But there’s something more. A pallor to her skin. A tremble. She’s weak, and it’s not just because of what’s happened here today.

I stay silent, watching her as her shoulders shudder, sobs wracking her. It’s a pain I feel, too. A grief so profound that I don’t know what to do with it.

Finally, she turns to me. “He left this for you.” Emma pulls a letter from her jacket, hands shaking so badly she nearly drops it. “Said if anything happened…you needed to know the truth.”

I frown. “How did you know…?” I begin.

“He was afraid,” she says. “Worried that he was in danger.”

The envelope bears Maxwell’s seal and my name in his elegant script. Inside, several pages of his distinctive handwriting unfold. My eyes skim the lines.

My dearest Soren,

If you’re reading this, I am gone. There are truths you must know about our line. We are cursed, all of us, descended from an ancient vampire who betrayed a powerful witch. Her vengeance was terrible – she cursed his blood, ensuring all his progeny would eventually develop the Bloodbane.

God forgive me, I knew this. My own maker had warned me when he’d brought me back from death. He’d given me new life, only to damn me to a world of isolation.

You see, Soren, before I was turned, I was a different man. I had a family, friends, joy, purpose. But immortality cursed me. Doomed me to watch all I’d loved wither and die. I fought it. I swear to you, I did. But the loneliness…dear God, it was intolerable. And so, knowing the risks, I made you. You were my first hope at happiness. And when decades passed, and you seemed to thrive, daring to believe we could escape the curse, I turned others.

My children. My family.

It was a mistake. I knew that when I watched the first of my children die. The Bloodbane. Others followed, each one taking a part of me with them.

You see, there’s no escaping Destiny. And ours is written in stone.

Emma’s sob breaks through my reading. I look up to see tears of blood streaming down her face. “He knew,” she whispers. “He knew I was starting to show symptoms.”

“You have it?” I stare at her, the pages in my hand trembling slightly.

She nods. “Yes. And others, too. Maxwell wept when he found out. He swore to me that he was going to do something to save us. Said it might damn his soul to hell, but he’d fix things.”

God, Maxwell…

Things are beginning to make sense as I keep reading. My heart goes heavy.

…I turned to Marlowe because he promised a solution. The blood farms… God forgive me, Soren. I knew what was happening there, but I couldn’t watch any more of my children die. The witch blood sustained them, bought time for those who hadn’t found a blood match. I know it was wrong, but I’d seen it, son… what the Bloodbane could do to our kind. The death is a cruel one. Slow, torturous. Some starved over decades, and there was nothing I could do.

When Marlowe spoke of the Blackwood witch’s power, I saw hope. Her blood could save our line…

Maxwell’s elegant script blurs as pieces of my own history slot into place like a macabre puzzle. The growing distaste for human blood over recent decades. The shame-filled visits to witch blood dealers, telling myself it was just a peculiar preference, a fetish I’d developed.

Emma’s quiet sobs echo my thoughts. How many others in our line are showing symptoms? How many are already hiding their condition?

My fingers trace the words on the page. All this time, I’d credited my sympathy toward witches to Ingrid’s influence. Her death in the witch trials had shaped my views on vampire-witch relations, or so I’d believed. But looking back, I’d felt drawn totheir kind long before meeting her. Perhaps some part of me had always known what I truly needed.

“Did you know?” Emma’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “About the blood farms?”

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