Page 73 of Tainted Blood

“You killed the man who made me want to be decent. He asked me to bedecent,and I wanted to be decent forhim, Solon.” Isaiah leaned in closer, his lips practically touching Solon’s ear. “With him gone, I have no more reasons to be decent, and I can finally show all of you what I'm really capable of.”

He yanked his fingers out, bringing Solon’s eyes with them, drawing another scream of pain from the man chained to the wall. With a swipe of his hand, they hit the floor, becoming nothing more than piles of barely identifiable organic material. Isaiah pulled out a handkerchief and started wiping his hand clean as he turned to us, Solon falling unconscious behind him.

“You two can go. If Everly gets any more emails, let me know. This isn’t over, but I want you both to take some time off. Get Everly capable of walking safely among humans. Finish up some of her training. Focus on that and healing.” Isaiah’s eyes were dead. While red, they lacked vibrancy, looking terribly flat. His expression was benign, feeling wrong for the situation.

“You’ll try to find the others?” Alexius asked, nodding at Solon.

“I’ll save one for you,” Isaiah said, the benign look turning to a smile as if he were talking about cookies and not lives.

Alexius only nodded then made a gesture for me to start walking. I obliged, not looking back, knowing Isaiah was standing in that cell with a smile. We reached the ground level, escaped the building, and Alexius waved down a human.

“Isaiah said we could leave tonight—”

“A car is already ready with your things, and a jet is on standby to fly you home,” the human said quickly.

“Thank you.”

We left because it was all we had left to do.

32

THREE WEEKS LATER

“How do you feel tonight?” I asked Alexius as I entered the sitting room, where we often relaxed. He wasn’t wearing the bandages anymore, and his skin was healing. He was in a recliner by the fire, a book in his hands.

“If a couple of patches scar, they’ll serve as a reminder that I was foolhardy, rushing, underestimating a human and their capability to use certain weapons to hurt us.” He put the book in his lap and rubbed his injured arm. “But it will only be a couple of small places. Everything is healing well, fresh skin coming in instead of scar tissue.”

“That’s good.” I sat across from him on the couch.

“Your leg? You seem to be walking fine.”

I looked down at the leg in question, thinking about how it had looked when I woke up that morning. I had asked him not to hover when we got home when he tried, and he proceeded to never ask me if he could look at my leg or even mention it most nights if we even saw each other. We had taken some much needed time to ourselves after returning from Isaiah’s country estate.

“The bone is fine. Has been for a couple of weeks now. I have three thin scars from where Kallias hit me,” I answered. “They’ll probably fade in time.”

“Probably. If the bone is fine, we can get back to your training.”

“I don’t mind them, really. They’re pretty high on my thigh. Unless I’m wearing tiny shorts, no one will ever see them. If another vampire does see them, I get to explain that I helped kill the demon-vampire hybrid monstrosities in Isaiah’s house.”

“Sadly, you can’t tell them about the demon-vampire monstrosities, remember?” Alexius lifted a brow.

“That’s right. Only four of us know about the cambion blood…” I sank into the couch further. “You wanted me to come in. What’s going on?”

“I received a package from Isaiah.” He pointed at the table, showing the brown wrapped box. “For the garden.”

“Let’s go.” I got up quickly, grabbing the box. I was there before Alexius, opening it as he caught up. I pulled out the two jars we’d received, one with less than a quarter of what was normally there.

“He sent most of it to Ramman,” Alexius said, reading a note he pulled from the box. “For the best. Ramman deserves to put his lover to rest. And we’ll put the monster Samas became to rest here.”

Together, we worked the ashes into the soil of Alexius’s night garden, the flowers that would bloom under the moonlight, giving those in the dark something beautiful. It was a silent thing.

“Would you like to… finish that Dracula show?” Alexius asked me before I left the garden to clean up.

“Yeah, I would like that,” I said, nodding. Because we both needed to heal, we hadn’t spent a lot of time training together, and Alexius was particularly withdrawn.

I knew he was hiding something from me. Something was bothering him, but I didn’t press. I had seen him at his worst, fully enraged and willing to kill anyone that moved. With such a reputation other vampires wouldn’t go near him. He didn’t hurt me, though. I gave him his space to get over it, to realize I wasn’t scared of him, if that was indeed the problem.

Plus, I was hiding things from him, too.

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