Anderson stared at her. “Money. Words. Sacrifice is blood and bone, Mrs. Waring. Maybe once you understand that, you’ll be glad to give your son to the cause. Bring him. Waring and the vampire. If she objects, send her down with the vampire in the well.”
WARING GAGGEDand choked as Anderson poured a cup of blood down his throat. Black crusted the sides of his mouth and around his nostrils. He’d retched once already and Anderson had held his mouth shut until he swallowed the bile back down again.
“Dhampir blood is free of the curse,” Anderson said as he dipped the cup back into the bucket at his feet. He drank from it himself this time. “We’re damned for the sin of our birth, but we cannot share that with others.”
Strung up over a galvanized tub, his arms slashed open from wrist to armpit, Madoc choked on a laugh at how badly wrong Anderson had that. Dhampir blood wasn’t as addictive as a draft of vampire ichor, but the curse would still undermine the will of a human who drank it. They just rotted on the inside instead of the outside.
“All you need to do is hide this place again,” Anderson said as he pinched Waring’s chin in his fingers. “Annabelle told us you were the sorcerer. We know what you did. Now do it again. Hide us from VINE and everyone else that wants to find us.”
Waring gaped at him, half drunk on old blood and dizzy with it. He couldn’t explain to Anderson how that wouldn’t work.
“Tell him,” Madoc said. He craned his neck to catch Waring’s eye. “Tell him what a fool he is. Just like you told Took.”
Waring shuddered and closed his eyes.
“How did he get Annabelle to talk, do you think?” Madoc asked.
Waring opened his eyes and stared into Anderson’s. His mouth twisted in a grim smile as he spat out, “I can’t.”
Magic bent him like a bow as it arced out of him. Each time he broke his pact, it was worse, the smell of scorched marrow sickly meaty in the air, but Madoc didn’t have time for sympathy. As Anderson sprung back from the sting of magic and his deputy ran to his side, Madoc twisted up to grab the rope they’d strung him from. A hook was caught through his heels, slippery with blood, and rather than waste time, Madoc just tore it free.
He screamed at the raw flash of pain and dropped in a tangle of limbs into the tepid bath of his own blood. It sloshed over him, stuck to his clothes and hair as he struggled up onto his knees.
“No!” Anderson yelled in frustration as he snapped his gun up. “You can’t stop me!”
He pulled the trigger at the same time that Madoc reached out and pulled himself through the shadows—all of himself, even the quarts not currently in his body. His blood, handed up like nonaddictive sacrament to the guards, yanked them all through into the cold, gray other.
Waring, glutted on Madoc as he was, tripped across for a second. He looked oddly bright in the shadows, as though someone had outlined him in silver, and almost relieved. Then his magic snapped him back to the punishment he’d bargained for.
Anderson stumbled as the blood in his veins—his own long-stolen heritage and Madoc’s fresh injection—pulled at him. He grabbed at a wall to steady himself and fell through it. His people staggered and blustered as they yelled at him for an explanation.
The clamor made something move in the forest, with a clatter of dry-wood limbs and the sketchy outline of something darker than the shadows under the trees. Nearby, a giant, its warped bones naked expect for tendons and its bony, antlered skull studded with a hundred different eyes, turned slowly, weightlessly toward them.
“Watch me,” Madoc told him coldly as he braced himself against the tug toward the sea. “I told you not to cross me, Sheriff.”
Anderson staggered to his feet and lurched toward Madoc, his hand extended desperately. The cross on his arm blistered and warped as something took exception to the ink.
“I know things,” he blurted out as he groped at Madoc’s arm with his fingertips. “Secrets. Like your toy, the blond wetmouth. I know who took him. I know why. We all talk, you see, us alchemists. We tell each other things.”
He managed to get hold of Madoc’s wrist to anchor himself. A laugh twisted his mouth as he thought that was a win.
“He’s more of a monster than me,” Anderson rasped. “They shouldn’t have turned him. They shouldn’t have been able to turn him. It’s—”
Madoc snapped Anderson’s neck in a single sharp motion. The plan had been to leave him here to suffer, but Madoc wasn’t the only one who passed through this space. Since he didn’t want to leave the job half done, he twisted again until the skin ripped and he could lob the head, the face still set in an expression of surprise, toward the forest.
The deputy seemed to realize the gravity of her situation as she started to scream—a ragged, endless howl that clawed out of her. The antlered beast in the sky answered her.
Madoc left them there.
He let his bones and the meat of him drag him back into the world. Took caught him as he fell and pulled him close, his mouth soft as he pressed a frantic kiss to Madoc’s temple and made promises he probably didn’t mean. Madoc let himself slump into Took’s embrace. He doubted this was how he’d die, but it wouldn’t be the worst way to go.
Epilogue
THE ANAKIMcouple cooed over Augusta Aron as she clumsily offered her hand. There had been offers from across the country to foster the rescued children, many desperate enough that they’d had to make sure the children had guards. A few of the older children had balked at the idea, but they needed to find out what it was to be Anakim and to get their strength back. Some of them wanted to find out if their parents back home had ever wanted to find them again.
Until Nora woke up or died, she stayed in VINE custody with Took’s cat tucked under her chin as it took five breaths for every one she inhaled. Annabelle, though, was the only one who’d outright refused. As a stopgap compromise, she’d moved in with Lawrence, who’d grown up more Anakim than human. Now Annabelle hovered next to Took behind the glass as she watched the two men offer Augusta Aron their dog’s lead to hold.
“They havepets?”she muttered under her breath.
