Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) Read online

  Quick as a blink, he had another knife, this one short and stubby as a pit bull, a knife built for punching holes that never closed again. As we circled each other, I drank in the joy of a fight about to happen, as if the world was holding its breath to see who would emerge the victor. Just to be kind, I let him lunge first. Dancing back from the knife’s swipe, I ripped off my gloves and admired the curl of my white claws, much finer weapons than anything a man could make over a forge.

  “Psh. Shoulda known. Bloody Bludmen,” he said, spitting in the dirt at my feet.

  “That’s the idea.”

  I launched myself at him, claws outstretched, mouth open, knocking his long, shiny knife into the dirt. He landed hard on his back and tried to stab me with the squat knife, but I pinned that hand down and beat it against a rock until it opened like a flower. Now it was just us, me and my assailant, and my mouth was a thing of smiles and teeth and laughter as I struck for his neck, bit down hard, and yanked.

  Only one feeling I know comes close to the ecstasy of the enemy’s blood, and I finally understood why Criminy was such a good lover.

  I drank and drank, gulping down hot blood as fast as his body could pump it up through his arteries, and he danced beneath me, bucking and blubbering and blowing bubbles of snot and spit. I had never been so thirsty, and I could almost feel the life flowing from him into me, making me stronger and tougher and infinitely more mad, powering the beast that purred on a dying throne of grubby clothes and hot flesh. The jolt of glancing merged with this river, and I was gratified to see that his life had been a long, unbroken streak of taking from others and giving them only pain and death in return. This? This was a creature who needed to die, and I had fulfilled my duty to the world, destroying a bad seed so that others could live and flourish.

  His arms and legs stopped shaking and fighting, and his face went still and white, and I lapped frantically for every last bit of blood I could take in, and then it was all gone and I stood up and threw back my head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  I had never felt so powerful, and now I understood why this act was forbidden. Why the humans dressed as they did, why they built their walls and sifted us out in the dark and carried their weapons. Gazelles who dreamed lion dreams could only shit themselves and die of heart attacks. Bludmen were terrifying and in every way superior, and if I killed a bad guy every day, nothing in the world could stop me from my ambitions.

  But.

  Slowly, I came back to myself. At first, it was the itch of drying blood on my chin, urging me to reach for my handkerchief. Then it was the way his eyes were open and empty and going dry. Then it was the strangeness of standing alone in a barren wasteland outside a thriving, filthy metropolis, alone with a corpse. It was almost like being peeled apart into two people and left with the more boring, confused one.

  That . . . was no good.

  “Bother. Now I see why we don’t do this,” I said to no one in particular.

  Putting on my gloves and grabbing my assailant under his armpits, I realized that he was bigger than I had assumed when my beast was in charge. It had been six years since I’d had to handle senseless bodies, turning over coma patients to clean and bathe them or helping rehab patients support themselves. But I had never done this with a dead body, never tried to pick one up and move it. And he was all floppy as hell and had no good handles, and I couldn’t help thinking that if there were video cameras in Sang, the whole rigmarole would have ended up on YouTube set to Benny Hill music.

  I finally got him stashed between some gray boulders and dropped fallen stones and brick chunks and bits of greenery on him until he was mostly camouflaged. I felt as if I needed to say something, because human beings are trained to say things when they stand over dead bodies, but no one had ever trained me for being an almost-vampire who rightly killed her almost-killer.

  “You shouldn’t put knives to people’s throats,” I finally said. Before I walked away, I swiped a finger over the blood on his shredded neck.

  When I reached the right boulder, I smeared his blood into the pitted stone.

  It disappeared, revealing a deep, dark chasm into nowhere.

  I did not like deep, dark chasms.

  I did not like walking into my enemy’s lair without backup, without my deadly and delightful husband by my side, squeezing my trembling fingers with his strong ones, flashing that dashing smile framed in fangs.

  But I was going to do it anyway.

  It was a tunnel meant for walking . . . and also meant to scare people away. Ever so gently sloping downward, it was dry and hewn from solid rock, smelling of dust and age and long-ago rotting. And of all the potions and weapons I had brought, I’d forgotten the one thing I needed most underground: a damn lantern. The boulder behind me reappeared, and I found myself in total and complete darkness that gave me vertigo.

  Living with the greatest magician in the country, however, had its perks. For six years, I’d watched him pinch his powders and slur his spells, and that sort of thing starts to sink in after a while. In the world of Sang, magic began with the daimons and skipped over humans entirely, but Bludmen could learn it if they had the knack. And I had no idea if I had that knack, but I had a fantastic memory and a desperate need.

  Taking a deep breath, I focused my mind and heart on the fingertips of my right hand. Mimicking Criminy’s accent and tone exactly, I muttered a few words of Sanguine and snapped my fingers.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried it several more times, my desperation building to a frenzy as the cave closed in around me, and I imagined I heard claws on stone and wet, white cave monsters and heavy breathing, somewhere farther down the tunnel.

  There had to be some other secret, something I hadn’t noticed in Criminy’s spell casting. Or maybe I just didn’t have the knack. Maybe my glancing was my only magic.

  I put my hands over my eyes and tried not to cry . . . and remembered I was wearing gloves.

  Of course.

  My hands shook as I took off my right glove, almost as if I were going to glance on someone in the caravan. I stilled, focused, closed my eyes, said the words, and snapped.

  A flame flickered from my fingers, bathing the stone walls in cool blue.

  I looked up, laughing.

  Right into the face of the witch herself.

  16

  The witch cackled, just like the fairy tales said she would.

  “Where’s your Hansel, Gretel?” Hepzibah trilled, her overly smooth face more beautiful and youthful than when I’d last seen her. I had been human then and frightened of her.

  Now I was a Bludman, and I was godalmighty pissed off.

  “Where’s my grandmother?” I asked, my flame-tipped fingers curling into a fist between us.

  She shook her head and grinned like a fanged pumpkin. Her eyes were lined in black, with swooping corners, her lips matte red. During our last encounter, her hair had been in red and black dreadlocks, but now it was dark and disturbingly glossy, set in pin curls. I couldn’t imagine how many hundreds of years she must have stolen from innocent people to look this young. And if the situation had been different, I would have clawed for her eyes and pulled her hair and gotten into a horrible fight.

  But the stakes were too high. She had my grandmother.

  And I still had a grudge that couldn’t be settled with a resounding bitch slap.

  “Ruby’s in my parlor with her boy toy,” Hepzibah said, and it struck me as utterly bizarre that she was from Earth, like Demi and Casper and me, but had somehow ended up a wicked vampire witch. People from Sang did not say things like “boy toy,” especially not about the most well-muscled strong man on the entire island.

  “Can I have her back?”

  In response, she threw back her head and laughed the wild, unselfconscious laugh that firmly differentiated a Bludman from a human.

  “For a price,” she said, amused. “But you might want to talk to her first.”

  With a flip of her hair,
my archenemy, the evil vampire witch, spun around and stalked down the pitch-dark corridor, her skirts dragging on the stones. I had no choice but to follow her, holding my blue light in front of me as she ducked down side tunnels and disappeared around columns. The fear was replaced with suspicion, with doubt, with anger.

  She could have killed me in the dark. But she hadn’t. She seemed amused.

  Which meant she was up to something, and history had proven that such situations went badly for me.

  As I hurried, I realized that we were in catacombs much like the ones Demi had used in Paris and had incorporated into Sang’s first production of The Phantasm of the Theatre. But she had described the Paris catacombs as morbidly beautiful, with intricate designs constructed of skulls punctuated by delicate finger bones and fine mosaics of glittering stones that could only be seen by lantern light. These catacombs sleeping under London were heavier, thicker, more utilitarian. At least it didn’t smell much like dead people and dripped only when we passed under thick pipes. I concentrated on following Hepzibah’s skirts, lest I remember that the enormous, towering, hermit-crab-like sprawl of London was above me and might shudder and implode and crash at any moment, squashing me like a bug.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked to pass the time.

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Duh. But why do you need my grandmother?”

  Her cackle echoed down the tunnel. “I don’t need her. She came to me.”

  “She came to you to kill you.”

  Another cackle. “Not quite.”

  I turned a corner and saw the witch silhouetted in orange light. There were voices echoing beyond her—familiar ones. I recognized my grandmother’s laugh, albeit much younger and more carefree than I’d ever heard it on Earth. The rumbling voice that answered her had to be Torno, then. And they didn’t sound as if they were being imprisoned and tortured by an evil witch. My heart and feet sped up as I hurried to make sense of it all.

  “She’s here,” Hepzibah said.

  With a dramatic flounce, she sprawled onto a settee in front of a grand fireplace. I could only stand in the doorway and gape, because it wasn’t often one saw a doppelgänger of the Beast’s library in the catacombs under London. Bookshelves went up at least two stories, complete with rolling ladders and a gold chandelier, although I did note that in addition to books, scrolls, and grimoires the shelves held urns, bones, and candy jars full of fluid and subtly writhing flesh like what I’d seen and crushed at Mr. Sweeting’s shop. Furniture and rugs were placed just so near the fire, and I was gratified to see a black cauldron bubbling over the flames. I couldn’t help wondering if it was really part of her witchcrafting or just an affectation from someone who’d seen Disney movies and assumed that any decent witch ought to have a bubbling cauldron full of toil and trouble.

  The other side of the picturesque room, however, was a combination dungeon and mad scientist’s laboratory. Iron bars were set into the stone, and behind them were my grandmother and Torno the strong man.

  And then my grandmother did the strangest thing I could imagine.

  She opened the door to the cell and walked out, laughing.

  “Nana?” I said, and she held her arms open and laughed a Bludman’s laugh.

  “You always were the damnedest child,” she said in her new voice, which was notable for its lack of a dying person’s puckered, toothless wheeze. She sounded sharp and amused. And somehow . . . wrong.

  I stepped into her embrace with the strangest feeling running up my spine, as if I were about to hug the monster under my bed. “Nana?” I said again, unsure as hell.

  Firm fingers dug into my shoulders as she held me away, inspecting me. She must have liked what she saw, as she grinned and winked a kohl-lined eye.

  “I told you, sugar. My name is Ruby. And you weren’t supposed to come here. This is between me and Elizabeth.”

  “Hepzibah?”

  My Nana—Ruby—snorted and pulled me back into a hug of sharp edges and no comfort. Quick as a blink, she whispered in my ear, “Stay out of my way,” before pushing me back.

  I stumbled over the cave scree and stared at her beautiful smile, trying to see my Nana’s kind face and sweet eyes in this hard, mysterious Valkyrie. She pulled a slim cigarette case out of her trouser pocket, lit the end of a cigarette, and blew a smoke ring at me, arms crossed.

  “She told you her name was Hepzibah? What a crock. Her name’s Elizabeth. Elizabeth Merrywell. And she’s my mother’s sister. Which makes her your . . .” Nana looked up at the ceiling. “Great-great-aunt?”

  “Once removed,” the witch said from her settee, twirling a bored hand as one booted foot dangled over the edge.

  “Okay, so if we’re all one big, happy family, why is this so weird?” I asked.

  Torno stepped forward, a hand the size of a grizzly paw heavy but gentle on my shoulder. “She needs to know, cara mia,” he said, kind eyes flicking back to Ruby.

  “Come on, then.” Ruby sighed and strode to the witch’s carefully placed sitting room, taking up the other sofa and curling into the corner, leaving room for Torno. When he sat, she snuggled back against him, content as a cat in a sunbeam.

  What the hell was happening?

  The witch didn’t sit up or move, and Nana inclined her head toward the lone wingback chair. When I didn’t immediately sit, she jabbed her cigarette to shoo me. As if in a dream, I joined them.

  “Well?” I said, feeling very much like a prim and confused Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

  The witch finally sat up, looking very bored in every way except for the overbright way her eyes glinted. “If we must,” she said. When she clapped her hands and shouted, “Tea!” a clockwork lemur emerged from the darkness, pushing, of all things, a laden tea cart. Its long tail, striped copper and silver, curled overhead, holding a steaming teapot.

  “You’re the youngest. You serve,” the witch said, inclining her head to me, and I knew exactly how Alice must have felt at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  I stood stiffly and took the first cup and saucer from the cart, holding it dumbly.

  “Two lumps and a splash of milk,” Hepzibah said, and I used the tongs to place two heart-shaped lumps of sugar in the cup with an echoing plink. The milk was pale pink, and when I went to take the teapot from the lemur, the thing somehow managed to look affronted and poured the hot blood for me with a superior air.

  I added a dainty spoon to the cup, turned to the witch, and threw the cup’s contents right into her too-smooth face.

  Hepzibah screamed and scrabbled at her eyes. My grandmother laughed, and Torno made the sort of tsk, tsk noise old men make when young women do silly, thoughtless things. The clockwork lemur let out a tinny sigh and hurried into the darkness, returning seconds later with a pile of neatly folded tea towels.

  “Shouldn’t have done that,” Ruby said, trying to hold in her laughter and smoke. “You’re only making it worse.” A few beats later, the laugh escaped her, and she rode it like a wild horse until she was gasping for breath and coughing. “Not that I blame you.”

  “Sorry, Auntie Elizabeth,” I said, obviously not sorry at all.

  “I should’ve killed you when I—”

  My grandmother threw a towel in the witch’s face. “Shut up, Aunt Lizzie. Haven’t you learned yet that you can’t order people around?” Sitting back down, Ruby looked at me, and something cold in her eyes struck me to the core. “One lump for me, no milk. And if you throw it at me, you’ll be sorry.” She took a long drag and smiled an icy smile.

  My fingers twitched in defiance, but I fixed her tea and placed the saucer gently in her smooth, clawed hands. “You want me to mash up some Ambien and put it in your blood pudding? You need a suppository? Anything else I can do for you, my poor, dying grandmother?”

  She turned her face as if I’d slapped her. “Probably deserved that.” She sipped her tea and nodded approval of the grand gesture of a sugar cube. “I didn’t enjoy dying slowly any m
ore than you enjoyed watching me do it.”

  “Yeah, well, you stopped saying thanks a while back, didn’t you?” It felt stupid and movie-foolish, standing there by the fire, so I held out a trembling cup to the lemur. It poured with elegant tidiness, and I gulped down the lava-hot blood without adding any sort of civility to the gesture. I held it out again, the lemur poured, I drank, I thanked it for some strange reason, and I hurled the dainty cup into the fire, finally strengthened enough to say what I had to say. “Look, you wanted to be young and healthy, and you are. You wanted to be free of me and my lovely little caravan, and you are. You want to hang out with our aunt, the bitchy witch who almost ruined my life here and made every day full of worry and self-loathing? Great. But I’d like to get back to my life without you, if you don’t mind. Maybe Criminy has a spell that can help me forget I brought you over.”

  Hepzibah laughed and tossed the bloody towel onto the ground. Her face was burn-pink, lit lurid orange by the fire, but she seemed too amused with the overall proceedings to focus her anger on me. Without standing, she snatched another cup. The lemur hurried to fill it, and she plunked in her own damn sugar and sat back watching Ruby and me as if we were a riveting but ridiculous soap opera.

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to go,” Ruby said.

  “Such fire,” Torno said, sounding almost awestruck. “It must run in your family.”

  And that’s when I realized what to do, how to stop this purgatory of confusion and me being the only one who had no control, the only one who didn’t know the next step, the glancer whose glance had been stolen. I grabbed Hepzibah’s arm with both hands, jerked her up from the sofa, and threw her into her fire.

  17

  My grandmother dropped her cigarette and jumped up, looking genuinely shocked. “What on earth?”