Page 74 of Fated In Blood

The Silverwood family had an adage about war. Use every weapon at your disposal ruthlessly, without care to what will happen in the aftermath, because surviving the next battle was your only objective. That had been my Uncle Alistair, a brute of a man with little use for words or emotions.

But goddamn, he’d been good with his fists, hammering lessons into me like I was a block of soft wood and his instructions steel nails, driving them in so deep the knowledge was part of me now.

Besides, I’d been trapped in a situation like this before, for the first sixteen years of my life, and while this mess wasn’t shaping up to be any better, being a valuable commodity boughtme some leverage, and leverage spent every bit as well as cold, hard cash.

Riordan and Blake needed me.

They might despise me, mock me, and look down on me, but theyneededme.

Unfortunately, I needed them right back.

I paused when Crimson House came into sight, my hand pressed to my empty, aching belly. I was starving again, despising this hollowed-out feeling because it meant things other than hunger.

This feeling meant dependency and helplessness, weaknesses that made me vulnerable.

I crossed beneath the plain, ramshackle gates, then walked slowly up the drive, taking in the expanse of the rambling building for the first time.

A big, rectangular box of gloom, as if the watery sunlight didn’t want to touch those dark stone walls and arched windows. This place could have been beautiful, but even the ivy crawling up the walls was mottled and sickly, the ancient, gnarled trees barely leafed out even though April was a few days away.

A muffled scream cut through the air like a gunshot.

Male. In pain.Blake.

Before I realized I’d moved, I was running, ripping the front doors wide open, another scream echoing down the hallway as I took off. I slid to a stop in a cluttered, darkened office, where some hooded stranger sent a wash of silvery light over a bloodied, battered Blake prone on the floor, eyes rolling back in his head. The light fragmented into fissures of energy, the air ripe with ozone.

The hair on my arms stood up as bolts of electricity slammed into me, stinging like a swarm of wasps.

Blake kept screaming, neck corded from the strain, hands clawing at the floor, the heels of his boots beating against the stone, loud as gunshots.

“Get the fuck off him.” The growl that came out of my mouth was animalistic, and I shoved the cloaked attacker backward, silver light pulsing wildly as he toppled. Uncontrolled magic skated over my skin, cold biting at my windburned face like it had teeth.

“Touch him again and I’ll kill you.” I didn’t know why I was acting like this, didn’t fucking care what happened to Blake fucking Marten, but here I was, unable to control this primitive need to protect him.

The silver light wound around me like ropes, pinning down my arms and binding my legs together.

“Settle down, little slayer,” Blake hissed through grit teeth. “Sylvester’s not here to kill me. That honor is still yours.”

“What’s…he…doing?”

“Healing Blake, before you burst in here.” Riordan stepped through the doorway in the solid, paneled wall, wiping his hands on a red-stained towel. “Now let him finish, because we have work to do and not a fucking lot of time.”

Ever so slowly, Sylvester’s magic oozed back to him like syrupy moonlight, then I was free to watch him lay a blanket of glowing energy over Blake, whose face contorted into a pained grimace the second that glow touched his body.

He was an oozing mass of wounds, burns, and bruises, which I could only assume were far better than they’d been before Sylvester began working.

“Don’t look so fucking concerned, Slayer. You’re a Silverwood. You are my enemy, and you always will be.” But I couldn’t help but notice the faint hint of sorrow in his words, as if he wished that weren’t so.

“Enemies forever. We should get t-shirts made.” I winced, not believing I’d just fucking thrown myself at Sylvester and totally humiliated myself. “The backs could say Vampires Suck Ass. But I guess since I’m one of you now, I’d better come up with something else.”

What the fuck was wrong with me? IhatedBlake Marten. Just because we’d had mind-blowing, life-changing sex didn’t mean we’d forged some kind of special bond between us. In fact, our first time would be our last time.

Blake had made his choice clear, and I understood his reasons.

My family was every bit as bad as Tyrell. Worse, in some ways, because while Tyrell made no excuse for being unabashedly evil, my family acted unbelievably sanctimonious, while that same insatiable greed for blood and power festered underneath.

I couldn’t stop comparing them, even though they couldn’t be further apart.

Our legacy, their end.

---