Page 82 of Cursed to Be Mine
“However, there is one thing I need to discuss with you first – in private.”
Talon and I tense. Varius can handle himself against most Death Hunt and Blood Fang members, but he is magicless and Aleric is over three hundred years old.He will kill him before we can get back into the room.
“Out,” Varius says without hesitation. Talon takes a step forward, but I move in front of him and gesture to the door. His eyes narrow over my shoulder, undoubtedly at the vampire. Magic hums off him, but he turns without trying to kill Aleric. We linger outside in the hall. I search the house again with my power. Still no other vampires.
“He shouldn’t fucking be in there alone.Weshouldn’t fucking be here. We should just kill him while he’s alone.” Talon paces across the hall, rubbing his head in his rage. “What do you think they’re saying?” he asks, stopping to glare at the door. Electricity flickers between his fingers, and my gaze settles on them.
Exhaling sharply, he forces his magic down.
I shrug. “Varius will tell us if we need to know.”
Barely a minute passes before the door is yanked open. Our brother steps out with a dark energy boiling off him. Talon and I both look past him. Aleric stares at Varius’ back, his lips tight but no urge to attack in his eyes.
Varius doesn’t pause in the hall, heading for the stairs that’ll take him outside. We follow in silence. Maddox jumps out of the car and opens the door with a flourish. Once we’re all inside, he spins the Mercedes around and heads home, singing at the top of his lungs.
Blocking him out, I look at Varius expectedly. Secrets are rarely kept between us, but he keeps his eyes on the window. It isn’t until we’re back home and Maddox and Talon have disappeared inside that he finally turns to me. He gestures towards the lake, and we walk down to its lapping shore.
Insects buzz around us in the balmy heat. A fewland on my skin, only to immediately die, their mouths and proboscises activating the minorprotectionrune tattooed on my skin.
“Are you going to her tonight?”
I glance at him, but his gaze is on the lake. “If I’m able.”
He nods. “Do it. The ritual needs to be completed as soon as possible. I need you at full power.”
An uneasiness fills me. A war, I expected. Antonio will not go quietly into the night, and he already declared us as enemies by attacking my girl. But the cloak of energy around my brother speaks of something worse. “What did Aleric say to you?”
“He has ninety-six sired vampires, half under twenty years old. Antonio hasn’t bothered killing them.”
Why would he?They were infertile, useless in making hybrids.
“Everyone we saw today driving in, that’s about all he has of born males, minus those at work.”
Less than fifty or so males…It made sense. A wolf’s fluids were toxic to vampires. After being forced to fuck a female wolf, they would die – if they even managed to finish. A female vampire could not survive the following pregnancy, the child’s blood killing her long before the second trimester. “How many women?” I ask.
“Three hundred and seven. He’s already ordered men from other parts of his territory to come here. They arrive tomorrow.”
“And the condition he put on our alliance?” I ask, knowing there is one. Aleric’s hold on this city might be greatly weakened, but he has connections with powerful vampires all over the world. The Kacicbrothers, pirates from Croatia in the twelfth century, are hundreds of years old and capable of phasing across continents. But the biggest ace he has in his pocket is a born vampire called Sebastian the Ancient Destroyer. He’s the whole reason the portals between Earth and the rest of the Seven Planes were closed by decree of the archangels four thousand years ago.
Over five thousand years old, Sebastian has the power to phase from plane to plane. Although he is being hunted by the Elv’ve’Norc, an interplanal force that was created solely to kill him, he rewards his allies with unspeakable power, and Aleric helped him find a special woman a few months ago. If he calls, Sebastian will come, and hyped up on hybrid babies or not, Antonio will be nothing but a stain on the floor.
But it is a one-use card, and with Sebastian’s activity heating up after a three-and-a-half-thousand-year hiatus, Aleric fears what is to come.
The last time Sebastian moved with this much flourish, he caused a war that reached to six of the seven planes. One was entirely destroyed, now nothing but a wasteland where space and time constantly folds in on itself. Another is rapidly dying, Sebastian having killed off all but one of the primordial elementals keeping the plane alive. Lakes and rivers there are drying up. Forests are withering. Grasslands are turning into arid deserts where nothing can survive. Earth lost Atlantis and its connection to the rest of the Seven Planes in a bold attempt to save it from utter annihilation, humans being mere toothpicks to Sebastian’s army.
He is a true trump card, but Aleric won’t use it unless the alternative is known death.
Still, he has many other connections that will allowhim to dismiss Varius’ alliance.
My brother stays staring out at the lake. “I will tell you later. Right now, I need you focused on resting so you’re at full power. We take out the Death Hunt in two weeks.”
The dismissal is silent but brokers no argument. I pat his shoulder as I pass him, trusting he will tell me when I need to know. Inside the house, Mother greets me at the door, her eyes scanning me for wounds. “We are all fine,” I tell her, but the worry doesn’t leave her face.
“Where’s Varius?” she asks.
I point towards the lake, and she heads out while I head up to my bedroom on the second floor. The pain from my missing kidney is starting to come back, the numbing agent from Leno’s tea fading with time. It’s going to be a bitch to regrow.
Opening my door, then kicking it shut, I strip off my clothes and crawl into bed. Although it’s only a few hours past midday, I have plans to be up all night.
