Chapter Forty-Three: Mortal Desperation

Evan

The moon was beginning to descend, and that meant that soon the sun would rise. Too soon for my liking as I followed Frank through the cemetery.

“The Knights really had a cache here?” My brow arched in doubt, but he didn’t so much as look back as he blazed on ahead. “In a public cemetery?”

“A mausoleum,” he specified. “Knights coming and going would’ve just seemed like family members of the departed, and no one but those with authorization would have access. Seemed pretty perfect at the time.”

He gestured ahead, and sure enough there was an old mausoleum, overgrown with vines and half covered in moss.

“So why do you think they abandoned it, if it was so perfect?” I watched him warily as he pulled a key from the chain around his neck and used it to unlock the tomb.

It seemed . . . convenient, and I had to wonder if it was really abandoned, or if the Knights of Testament had their suspicions that Frank was hiding nearby, and they hoped they could draw him out.

They had apparently thought he was competent at one point if they trusted him with a piece of wood from Christ’s cross, but if he was the type to lose his nerve and raise the infant anti-christ instead of killing her, it seemed to me that there should’ve been signs.

Unless there was a reason the knights abandoned this area.

With their reputation for brutality only tempered by their efficiency, the idea of a force strong enough to push them back made me uneasy.

But maybe there was something special about Primrose and the area around it, whether Frank knew it when he settled there or not.

“Beats me,” he grunted, trying in vain to open the heavy wrought iron door. “Give me a hand with this, would you? The damn thing’s been left to rot for so long it won’t budge.”

Hovering my hands above the bars, I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is it blessed?”

“Of course it’s blessed, but the blessing has had to have mostly worn off by now.” He shrugged, not giving a damn if I was going to get hurt or not. “It might sting a little.”

Gritting my teeth, I grabbed the bars. The lingering consecration burned against my flesh as I forced the door open with an ugly scrape of metal on stone, but just as Frank said, it wasn’t too bad.

Like leaning on a car that’d been in the sun for too long.

Funny that I still remembered how that felt with how long it’d been since I’d been able to feel the sun’s rays for myself.

Frank shouldered past me, and I watched without entering as he popped open old coffins and caskets, rummaging through different devices and supplies.

When he came out, he had a strange compass and an old bottle in his hands.

He shook the bottle at me with a toothy grin. “Blood of Christ. Want a sip?”

He knew as well as I did that I couldn’t drink that if I wanted to, but I snatched it out of his hand anyway. “The sun’ll be up soon. This is staying in the back of the el camino with me until nightfall so I know you’re not getting sloshed behind the wheel.”

But he was hardly even listening to me, his face screwing up into a grimace as he smacked the compass. “Fuck!”

“What’s wrong, is it not working?”

“It needs the blood of the creature we want to track to actually work,” he spat. “No wonder the K-o-T abandoned the damn thing.”

He pulled his hand back like he was going to spike the compass into the ground, but I caught his wrist, eyeing him intently. “I can help with that.”

His lips tugged into a sneer as he pulled his wrist back. “You’ve been drinking her blood, haven’t you, you sick freak?”

“Given willingly,” I spat back, pulling a knife out of my boot, my stomach churning at the thought of what I was about to do. “Just like I’m giving it willingly now.”

“You’re really going to cut into your own stomach?” He eyed me skeptically, almost like he was studying me rather than looking at me.

“We don’t have a better option.” I gestured toward his hands with the knife. “I’ll heal faster if I have a little blood though, and like you already said, you can’t do this without me.”

His brow furrowed as he took a defensive step back. “I’m not letting you bite me.”

“I’m not asking you to. Just a cut,” I asked, my eyes never leaving his. “I don’t need much.”

He seemed to think about it for a moment before shaking his head and cussing under his breath. “Fine, but keep your fangs to yourself.”

“Glad that’s settled.”

At that, his face softened as he watched me pull up my shirt and hold it between my teeth to keep it out of the way—and hopefully muffle any screaming I might want to do when the knife goes in.

“You really care about her, don’t you?”

My eyes snapped up to him, but I didn’t bother saying anything. I didn’t need to, not when I was cutting open my own stomach to find her.

I groaned through my clenched teeth and the fabric of my shirt as I pushed the knife in, the pain so intense that if I were human I’d have thrown up, passed out, or both.

But my undead body wasn’t capable of vomiting, not under any normal circumstances anyway. A knife in the stomach was a hell of a lot better than a near-death experience.

Still sucked though.

As soon as the blood started flowing, he was ready with the compass, filling it with the red slurry.

“Fuck,” I spat, out of pain and realization. “There’s some slayer blood in there too. We got attacked on the way to Primrose.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he assured me, sealing off the compass once it was full. “Helaine’s is the only supernatural blood, so that’s all the device will pick up on.”

“Good,” I huffed, clamping my hand down against the deep wound in my stomach, shoving my organs back in place as I doubled over onto my knees. “Now, it’s time to hold up your end of the bargain.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he drawled, pulling a knife out of his own pocket and holding it to his wrist. “You had better fucking heal this for me.”

My eyes widened as he dragged the knife across his wrist, the red blood bubbling to the surface.

When the first warm drops splattered against the ground I opened my mouth wide, catching the blood on my tongue as I inhaled a shuddering breath.

“Fucking disgusting,” Frank spat as I gulped down the stream of blood, but I didn’t give a damn what he thought.

I was disgusting. No one knew that better than me.

But when the flesh of my stomach and abdomen knitted back together, I grabbed him by the arm, licking the wound to seal it with my saliva.

He shoved me away, and I smirked at him, wiping the excess blood off of my face as he stalked toward the driver’s seat. “Never thought you’d willingly feed a bloodsucker, huh?”

“Fuck off,” he grunted. “You’d better take cover before the sun comes up, or else all of that was for nothing.”

Without another word, I did just that, grimacing as I slotted myself in between the instruments. It was anything but comfortable, but the memories were worse.

But I couldn’t fixate on that now. There was nothing I could do for my band—they were long dead and gone, but Helaine was still alive.

I had to save her.

When I closed my eyes in attempt to rest, however, I felt the wicked spider-crawl of Valek’s influence on my mind, clouding my vision until I was seeing through her eyes.

My heart felt constricted in my chest when I saw Helaine, naked in a hot spring with a set of blood-caked angel wings protruding from her back.

No wonder she’d been in so much pain before.

“Valek, if you hurt her—”

“You’ll do what, exactly?” Her voice echoed through my skull as she interrupted my threat, and I watched her fingers work to clean the damp feathers of Helaine’s wings. “You couldn’t stop me from taking her in the first place.”

It hurt, seeing Helaine like this. It was good to know she was alive, but a gentle gesture from Valek was about as trustworthy as a safety net made from cotton candy.

“Relax,” she purred, dunking Helaine’s wings into the water, giving me a glimpse of the sheer exhaustion on her face. “I won’t hurt the hell daughter.”

“I’m going to find her,” I swore, but Valek only laughed.

“I know. She chose her champion well.”

And just like that, all I could see was black, the spiders having released their hold on my mind.

But as glad as I was to see Helaine alive, all I could think about was Frank, and what he was going to do when he saw her transformation.

There was no going back now.