Page 11 of My Blood Is Yours

“… Evandriel Vayne of White Chapel Rd...”

Evandriel is not a nice man. He’s not even a doctor. He’s the Undertaker. I’ve known him since I was a child, and his presence is just as unsettling now as it was then—a certain darkness seems to loom around his otherwise bright, otherworldly features. Forsythe hires him privately to bring him corpses when hisresearch requires something altogether different from what the morgue usually has to offer.

“Evandriel. I need yourdiscreetassistance with something rather urgent.”

“Not a word. Do you understand?”Lightning streaks across the pregnant sky beyond the back door as Forsythe’s eyes bounce between mine, filled with both impatience and excitement. The ominous rumble of thunder follows a moment later as my throat works against the emotion swelling in my chest. Something inside me screams not to let them take the so-calleddaemonaway—to let me keep him—but I have no power here. Forsythe would sooner have me committed. Not that he would be wrong in doing so, logically speaking. What in god’s name would I do with a corpse? Still, I can’t help it as my eyes wander from Forsythe’s to the horse-drawn hearse waiting in front of the house.

Where Evandriel waits.

My eyes connect with his—an unnatural shade of pale blue—no doubt brimming with secrets beyond my imagination. His expression is entirely unreadable as he tips the brim of his cloth cap towards me, pipe in hand.

Forsythe slams the door, and I realize then that I’ve never felt a greater sense of doom and longing in my entire life.

SARIEL

The scrape of metal on stone stirs me from a deep sleep, followed by an unfamiliar, strangely accented male’s voice.

“… He’ll be waking up soon. Best keep him drugged until we can reinforce the steel, or he’ll rip the iron bars right out of the cell.”

The words have adrenaline trickling into my system, gradually lifting the fog clouding my mind and the lethargy weighing down my body slowly lifts as reality settles heavily upon me. My eyelids feel like they’ve been glued shut as I attempt to open them—only to discover a leaky stone ceiling above me. A steady and slowdrip, drip, dripechoes against the walls. I hear two pairs of feet shuffle somewhere in the distance.

Dread and panic, in equal measure, bleed into me. I rise from the hay palette upon which I’ve been laid, only to find myself encased within three stone walls and another wall of black iron bars. My head spins, and my vision doubles and triples in a way that I can distinctly sense has nothing to do with the Summoning—though it remains an ever-present ache in my chest. By some miracle, I make it to the iron bars, gripping them to keep myself steady.

My skin prickles at the sensation of an oddly familiar yet foreign magic as booted footsteps echo down the hallway. A few moments later, my teeth are bared at a male whose features might vaguely tick all the human boxes, yet I can clearly discern he is very much somethingother.Despite being a foot shorter than my seven feet five inches, he is just as heavily muscled. His silvery-blue eyes are so pale that, if it weren’t for their eerie, preternatural glow, they look almost entirely white. Even the pupil is oddly pale. White hair hangs in a straight sheet at his back, peppered with a few braids from between which a pair of gilded horns poke out that match his golden-tan skin. Large feathered wings of white and gold are tucked tight against his back.

And if all of that weren’t enough to tell me this male is anything but human, the magic rolling off of him in waves certainly would. The only thing about him that is distinctly human are his rounded ears. My eyes dip to his blunt fingertips—another distinctly human feature.

Still, there is no doubt about what at least half of this male’s genetic makeup is.

“Seraphi.”

What humans refer to as an angel.

I cannot begin to fathom why he would choose this place over Ourinessa, the place in which his kind are from, a breathtakingly beautiful divine realm parallel to the hell realm in which I was born.

From all my considerable studies on Terrenea—particularly since my dreams harkened the arrival of the Summoning—I read that only humans and animals walk this realm, minus the rare few who visit or seek exile here. Clearly, this male is the product of one such occurrence.

Though it does nothing to better my situation, even if at least half of this male’s genetic makeup should implore him toward benevolence, it is clear he has chosen to do the opposite.

He studies me with a hard expression that I cannot mistake for anything but a mixture of awe and disbelief. Admittedly, I am equally surprised to see one of his kind here.

And his words, despite being barely audible, make my fucking skin crawl.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting to find you?”

I have nothing to say to that.

He must glamour himself heavily to be able to walk freely amongst a world of humans.

“Where is she?”

The Seraphi’s attention shifts briefly from me to the door at the end of the corridor. A moment later, the hinges of a door whine, followed by the clicking of boot heels, and my nose is filled with the scent of… wolf. In the span of a blink, the Seraphi’s horns, wings, and all other nonhuman features disappear to give the appearance of a human… A strange-looking one, but a human nonetheless.

“Safe.”

The word is pointed like a blade as he holds my gaze in a way that tells me, if I don’t go along with his charade, she’ll be anything but. The clicking of boot heels echo down the hall and it triggers a smile to split the Seraphi’s face. Two white, though less prominent, fangs seem to glitter in the low light.

“My name is Evandriel Vayne. You’re currently in a cellar within the Eldridge Conservatory of Medicine, under the care of Dr Cedric Forsythe.”

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