Bloodsong Ch. 01

Valerie shook her head, raised a hand to her heart and reevaluated what she knew.

First, thank the gods that she hadn't kept the phone at her ear. A head bursting open like an overripe tomato was more than her healing factor could handle. Second, she now had an answer to the question she had hitherto been too preoccupied to ponder: how had Westmont been overtaken what looked like days ago with no one being the wiser?

The odds of no one posting on Twitter as it all went down were nil, but judging by the sad fate of her phone, it seemed depressingly likely that someone had attempted it and hashtag died trying.

She wondered what kind of magic could —

The hum of another blood song, this time an achingly familiar one, one she recognized without pausing to think, overlaid Valerie's musings. She jumped to her feet, too quickly, too much like she'd been spooked. Then, having sucked in a shaky breath, she forced herself to rotate and faced the figure standing at the far end of the roof.

He hadn't been there a moment ago. She wouldn't have missed him.

He had his hands in his pockets and his head tilted, a hint of a smile playing on the sharp, mocking line of his lips as he came closer, making his tune fill her head as though it meant to make itself at home there. Even after so many years — going on twenty five now, so wasn't it an aberration that the wound still felt fresh? — Valerie had to wrestle herself to quell the urge to let it in. Those same notes had reverberated through her skull so many times before, to say 'here is your best friend, your family, here is someone who means the world to you, here is safety, here is home'.

Funny. The melody hadn't changed one note. She could sing along if she felt inclined. Yet nowadays, whenever Jack Aramis' blood song welled up inside her, it said such different things.

"How in darkness did you find me this fast?" She kept her voice flat. Emotion was wasted on him. Him. Jack. Once someone she had cherished, now everything loathsome under the sun packed in a handsome man with too many strings attached.

She hadn't laid eyes on him since Morozovsk, two years, one month, nine days ago. It had been a quick encounter. Mostly she'd fought his goons — well, Marabeth's goons. Jack had shown up after she'd given her pilot leave to take off. He'd lassoed the helicopter, whereupon she had shot him in the head. Short and sweet. Would that she could keep all their interactions that way.

This one wouldn't go like that, she could already tell.

"Hello to you too, Val. How have you been?" His stance was relaxed. He didn't appearto have climbed up looking to start a fight, but the trench coat made her twitch. A well-worn, charcoal gray piece, too heavy for the July weather — then again, Jack was forever complaining about Earth being cold — and so long that it could hide anything in terms of weapons. Did it? "See, this is how you start a conversation. You're welcome."

"Don't you have humans you should be hunting down?" The white hot knots in her throat unwound, allowing spite to seep into her words. "I see that things have been busy around here. What happened? It isn't Her Horridness' style to shit on her own doorstep."

And truly, it wasn't. The fact hadn't occurred to her before, but staging a full-scale takeover of a populated earthen area was out of character for the hell-hag in question. Especially it being Westmont. For a town that served as the primary base of one of the most notorious slave export businesses active on Earth, there were few reports of people vanishing within its limits. Valerie had long suspected that Marabeth enjoyed the irony of having the only humans with nothing to fear from her be the ones living atop her lair.

Jack made a face like he'd swallowed something sour.

"Aunt Marabeth is dead."

". . . come again?"

"Dead. Deceased."

"You're joking."

"No." He did sound serious, and now that she looked properly, he appeared worn, wan, imbued with a sense of heaviness that would make sense if he were indeed grieving. But it couldn't be true. Marabeth Aramis was the enemy. If they were in a play, she'd be the wicked witch meant to be defeated in the third act. It felt . . . wrong, somehow, to hear that she'd died off-screen. "Aunt Briseis hit her in the back with a rocket launcher and dropped a church on her. There was barely enough left to cremate."

"Mrs. Drakma finally got her?" Valerie blurted out. Jack's mouth twisted into an ugly scowl. There'd been a time when she would have apologized for being insensitive. Presently, his harrowed expression was a cue to double down. "I suppose it would be in terrible taste if I started singing Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead?"

"Don't." The bitterness — no, the pain — in his voice almost moved her. Almost. Because, like the ass he was, Jack had to squash any burgeoning sympathy by adding: "Aunt Briseis will die for this. Even if she weren't a traitor, a blood crime is a blood crime, and you know how easy the Council doesn't go on those. The only reason I haven't sent her to Barashi yet is that I needed her to get you to come here."

There it was. The last bit of the puzzle that, what with one reveal after another derailing her, Valerie had not yet placed. The phone call. It had been a trap. And Mrs. Drakma would never have agreed to lure her to Westmont of her own volition, which meant . . . 

Any elation brought by the news of Marabeth's demise fled like air from a deflating balloon. The possibility that Sykes hadn't lied loomed bloodcurdling and frighteningly plausible. Marabeth had been a steaming pit of rot shaped like a humorless middle-aged woman. Nevertheless, there'd been lines that she wouldn't cross when it came to family, and Mrs. Drakma was her sister. True, a sister with whom she had a millennia old feud, who had attempted to destroy her countless times and now at last succeeded, but still her sister.

Jack, in contrast, had despised his renegade aunt for the entire length of his adult life. Marabeth had been his mother in all senses save for having birthed him. Given a chance, he'd have tossed Mrs. Drakma to Sykes out of pettiness alone. Factoring in revenge, plus a need to ensure cooperation that wouldn't otherwise be forthcoming . . . 

Gods, let him not notice that she stood on the verge of shaking.

"What. Did. You. Do."

Jack shrugged, unperturbed.

"Nothing. I didn't have to. She was surprisingly biddable."

"That's a lie. Sykes claimed that he—" She couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't get her tongue to wrap around it. Her face spelled out what went unsaid.

Jack had the gall to laugh, and in that moment, Valerie hated his guts. It remained jarring to have that emotion burst forth in relation to him. Although with how hard he worked to get it to emerge, it really, really ought to have become normal by now.

"Val, please. I wouldn't foist Billy's dick on her. There wouldn't be enough bleach to get the mental image out of my head." A pause, while he waited for her nonverbal admittance that yes, fine, that much was plausible, even believable. "Besides, you care about that walking train wreck, so I have been . . . restrained. Though I won't say I might not have hinted that refusing to call you would result in—"

"Shut up. Don't talk. Not a word." The corners of his eyes crinkled, and all Valerie could think about was how historically, Jack had shown no qualms about unleashing Sykes on so many girls who had become corpses. Then again, those had been human. She shouldn't expect him to factor cattle into the equation. "You will not kill her."

"Of course not. Weren't you listening? I'm turning her over to the High Council."

"To answer for a blood crime, for which the sentence is death."

"Not always. Although, yes, in this situation her head rolling is a foregone conclusion."

She felt ill. She felt like breaking all of his teeth and pushing him off the roof. She took a shuddering breath she didn't bother to soften, thoughts full of snapshots of a head flying down a dais in a shower of crimson.

"Then in what way is that different from killing her yourself?"

"It's plenty different." His smile was blinding and insufferable. "They can't charge me for a blood crime if I dispose of that bleating harpy by letting the proper legal channels handle her, for one. Which is convenient, as I'm not willing to go through that again just for the fleeting satisfaction of wringing her neck myself."

"Regardless. You won't be handing her over to anyone. The nearest gate to Barashi is in Canada, and if you think for one hot second that I won't employ every resource at my disposal to ensure that you never get there—"

"You have no resources. And the nearest gate to Barashi is currently located at the Mayfly, in what used to be the staff kitchen."

"The-what?"

"We have a world gate in the staff kitchen," Jack repeated, as if genuinely believing that she hadn't heard him. "It was meant to open in a corner of the packaging facility, but Aunt Marabeth got her calculations wrong. Strange that you didn't know about it yet. How long have you been in town for again?"

"Less than an hour, but long enough to loathe my stay," Valerie bit out. He gaped at her, but she ignored him. There was a tight feeling in her chest that she identified as the cusp of a panic attack.

The secrets of gatemanship, of world binding, were supposedly lost to time. Some gates remained functional, relics of an age when her species still flourished on Old Tsikala, when the Four Great Isles had yet to rise from the Barashi seabed. They were few and exhaustively monitored, especially in unconquered worlds such as Earth.

If Marabeth had cracked gatemanship, if that knowledge hadn't become ash along with her, if wild gates started cropping up, there'd be chaos. If the lords of the High Council got hold of the secrets and turned gates into tools to aid in their quest for expansion . . . 

It would mean war. For Earth, if not immediately, then surely eventually. Worlds like Cynihe, which had shaken five hundred years of Tsikalayan oppression by destroying the gates connecting them to Barashi, would be helpless against the tide of invaders. So would many others. Kaldiciperia had been moving towards rebellion like Cynihe had, but now it might be best if they never made it that far.

It was a disaster waiting in the wings, and Jack had been moving his mouth at her for closing in on a minute, and she hadn't heard a word, catching only the tail end.

She groaned. It was, of all things, a lecture on the utter rudeness of her being late to his trap.

" . . . necessary when planes exist! I, here thinking you'd smelled a rat, but no, you decided to drive across half the country for whatever reason—"

"Try boarding a plane with enough unlicensed weapons to start your own banana republic, see how well that works." Even as she snarled at him, realizing her idiocy stung; Mrs. Drakma had dissuaded her from hitching a ride with the Front's magic users. Valerie had interpreted it as her presence not being required instantly, and so she'd taken her time, made a stop in Omaha to help Roarke et al handle an Ennead turf war, and all the while . . . "What about the rest of the Westmont Front section? The—"

"No, that's enough of all of that." Jack waved an impatient hand, shaking his head and stepping forward. Valerie tensed, ready to spring away at the first sudden move, which appeared to amuse him more than it concerned him. "I didn't bring you here to talk shop. I'd like to talk about us."

Gods above, she mouthed in the privacy of her thoughts. Not this shit again.

"There is no 'us'." One would expect that two and a half decades would be time enough to learn to look him in the eye and feel as dispassionate as she looked whilst saying those words. "I have nothing more to say to you on that subject, and there is nothing you can tell me that I haven't heard a hundred times, and why do you even still try?"

"I have to."

"You really, truly don't."

"It looks to me like this will be a conversation best had over coffee. Come. My treat."

Valerie took a deep, steadying breath and begged the gods for serenity and patience.

"Jack," she began, dragging every letter. "No. Can you hear yourself? Do you see where we are standing in relation to one another? No. I will not entertain you and have yet another long, pointless conversation about the mess that is our past. Furthermore, everyone you could buy me coffee from has been killed or enslaved, something which you are directly responsible for."

"Keep in mind that it was Aunt Marabeth who —"

"Even ifthe takeover was her doing, you have been in charge at least since you made Mrs. Drakma call me. Now, how many people did you ship to Barashi since then?" She sucked in a breath. 'Calm, reasoned, steady,' went her inner mantra, but it was hard, so hard, when her rage left her ready to spit. "I'm not going to sit down and drink coffee with you. You can call yourself lucky if I let you live when this is over."

"If you're afraid I'll hurt you, you don't need to be."

"That's not — look, sincerely, fuck off!"

There was a pause, a suspended quietness while Jack blithely deleted the fact that she'd sworn at him from his own personal reality.

Valerie sometimes wondered what their . . . relationshiplooked like, from his perspective. Jack didn't hate her. He liked her, and not in the normal-for-his-type sense of appreciating her attitude, or her spirit, or her pluck, or whatever having a shred of personality was called in the circles he frequented.

He liked her in the sense of wanting to quote schmaltzy poetry at her, treat her to dinner and keep her for eternity.

Twenty five years ago, she had lost a friendship spanning more than half a century to the revelation that the boy she'd grown up with had followed in the footsteps of the wrong aunt, becoming an embodiment of everything she'd spent almost four fifths of her life fighting to obliterate. Incidentally, at the time it had also come to light that Jack wanted to be much more than friends, having been in love with her since forever.

To preserve her threadbare sanity, Valerie refused to engage with that information.

"What do youwant, then?" he asked, following a protracted silence which he'd spent scrutinizing her face as though the lines creasing her forehead might hide a cheat code to turn her pleasant. That was his one want: that she act towards him as she once had, so that everything would return to what once had been. She'd deny him, always. Sweet payback for the lies he'd spent decades feeding her. "What can I do to make you agree to talk?"

"We are talking. As for what I'd want, it shocks me that you even have to ask."

Jack closed his eyes, tch-ing softly. The cold, analytical part of Valerie informed her that here was a golden opportunity to get a hit in before he could react, but curiosity held her back. It was a novel approach. Bargaining, rather than attempting to plead his case again. Or issuing apologies that he clearly badly wanted to be sincere, yet fell flat for how they made clear that his understanding of what he'd done wrong was tenuous at best.

Part of her wanted to know where this would lead.

"You want me to free your humans."

She cringed, outwards and inwardly. Well. There was the answer to her question about the fate of the Westmont section. At least she didn't have to wonder anymore.

"I want you to free my colleagues from the Liberation Front, as well as any other humans that you decided toappropriate, get rid of the gate, get rid of whatever that bitch cooked up that is making phones explode, and leave." Valerie watched his face, alert to every twitch of expression. She hoped, despite not wanting to, despite knowing that she was setting herself up for disappointment. With Marabeth dead and Jack no longer under her thumb, maybe he'd . . . "And I want you to let Mrs. Drakma go."

Jack made no attempt to subdue his reaction, coming just short of hissing.

Valerie nodded, more to herself than him, and resumed plotting where she'd left off before she'd allowed wishful thinking to sidetrack her.

It was maddening; too many variables, too many issues to tackle with meager information to go on, too much magic thrown in the mix. And Jack. With Marabeth's death, it was a safe assumption that he'd inherit her company. The woman had other relatives, but insofar as Valerie knew her nephew was the only one she'd tolerated.

Meaning that Jack Aramis was now the problem-in-chief. She hadn't quite digested the shift. She wasn't certain she could.

"You don't do anything for cheap, do you?" He'd overcome his temper flareup, and now studied her through half-lidded eyes, no doubt also plotting. "It's a lot to ask for in exchange for a conversation."

"Jack." She forced her voice to cool instead of rise, having gotten this far without shouting. He always stopped listening when she shouted. "This is your chance, the only one you'll get, to convince me that Marabeth was the problem and that without her toxic influence, you are salvageable. Don't ruin it by being—"

"I'd appreciate it if you refrained from speaking ill of the dead."

"And I'd appreciate it if you refrained from—" She waved her hand, encompassing all of him. "— that, but one learns to moderate one's expectations. You can shoulder the loss of capital. Greed is about the only character flaw you don't have. This is the lowest bar you need to clear for me to stop considering you a blight upon the land, why are you even arguing?"

He sighed and massaged his forehead, and again she could have used the chance to . . . but no. She'd wait a moment, just in case, just on the off chance that the moment she was wasting was the moment he needed to see the light.

Jack raked his fingers through his hair as though torn about how to proceed.

"If I have to," he said, at length, "if that's what it takes, then very well. I'll give up on this town and leave. I want you to come with me, however."

Valerie grimaced. She had expected that much.

"In what capacity?"

The bewildered look she got in response might even be genuine.

"What do you mean, in what capacity?"

"If I go with you, what will I be? Your prisoner? Slave? Pet? Will you brainwash me into submission, put me in chains and tell me to heel?" Jack's feet slid forward, but he might not be aware that they'd done so. There was a disquieting glint in his eyes. Valerie didn't know what she'd do with herself — or do to him — were he to reply 'All of the above'.

"You'll be mine."

"Well, that clarifies an awful lot."

"I won't hurt you."

"You said. The fact that you feel the need to repeat yourself? Suspicious." Even so, she gave the prospect thought. It might not be a palatable route, but it would be clean. Temporary, too. Even if by some fluke she failed to escape after she'd assured the town's freedom, Jack wouldn't be able to keep her. Once word that he had her reached the High Council, they would demand that he turn her in to be executed. He'd have to comply, defy them and risk incurring his own share of legal troubles, or free her.

Faced with such choices, Valerie had little doubt about what he'd pick.

"You know that I—" Jack sucked in a breath. She knew at once what he'd say, and — screw it. If he was allowed to negate her swearing, she was entitled to pretend that the words he was about to speak were nothing beyond moving air. "I love you, Valeriana, and if—"

"Don't call me that."

"— if you come with me, I'll take care of you. Protect you. Make sure you want for nothing. You won't be brainwashed." There he went again, making assurances left reeking of deception for how much emphasis he placed on them. Her failure to be impressed was obvious, as Jack took one look at her face and heaved another sigh. "You don't trust me."