Page 20 of Bloodgrove

His pulse quickened with the rush of magic, which lay over the hall like static and raised the fine hairs on his arms. Elodie looked breathtaking, removed from this world by faerie light and candle flame. Only now did he notice the devices surrounding the altar—pumps, vessels, and tubes stained with dried blood.

Chains rattled, and from one corner of the hall, Elodie’s silent maid emerged with a hunched figure on a short leash. The person wore nothing but a loincloth and was forced roughly to the ground beside the duchess. The spectators’ chanting swelled, and Will crept closer to the gap in the door. He forgot himself, forgot fear and decency as fascination took hold of him. How close could he come to the stories told by governesses in the Capitol? To the horrors they described without ever having witnessed them, now unfolding before his eyes?

Elodie raised a dagger and cut into her palm, where the wound from the night before had barely begun to heal. The chained vampire snapped at her, hissing and straining against his restraints. Blood dripped onto the shadowed body lying across the altar, which Will noticed only now. In the dim light, between the swaying bodies, he could make out little more.

The maid seized the vampire by his hair and dragged him toward her mistress. He looked like nothing more than a ragged man, but his eyes bulged from their sockets and shone with madness. His fingers clawed at the body on the altar.

Elodie seized one of his arms and forced it straight. “By blood! Accept my offering!”

The chanting rose to a crescendo. The dagger flashed. Elodie drew it across the soft underside of the vampire’s arm, and blood welled from the cut, spilling thickly over the creature on the altar.

Barbaric. The word described the scene perfectly, and still Will edged closer, putting his cheek to the wood of the door.

“Serve the one who gives you life!” the duchess cried. She let the dagger fall, dipped one finger into the blood now pouring from the wound, and began to write in the air. Glowing red, it remained suspended before her. Words and symbols formed, pulsing with a heartbeat of their own.

Will sank to his knees as though a hand had settled on him and guided him down. His heart beat in time with Elodie’s, and he knew that every other heart in the room had fallen into the same rhythm. The hard marble bit into his knees, but he no longer felt it.

The duchess cut herself with a second dagger and fed her own blood into the invocation. Then she closed the circle of symbols.

The faerie lights flickered and went dark.

Only the golden glow of the candles remained.

The duchess licked the blood from her fingers. A sigh escaped her red lips, and she released the vampire. He crumpled to the floor like all the others, hypnotized by the song of magic. Only the duchess remained standing, strong, her arms raised.

“Awaken!”

The creature on the altar shuddered and twisted with a bone-rattling scream. Arms so long that they hung far over the sides—arms Will had mistaken for cloth—folded inward. It drew up its legs and tried to rise, tearing free of the tubes that connected it to the apparatus.

The monster found its feet and rose to its full, immense height. It stood more than two meters tall, with long arms, matted fur, and skin stretched taut over its ribs and shoulders. Half man, half wolf.

Will should have been horrified, but the song of magic held him captive.

All of a sudden the vampire tore himself free and threw himself at the duchess. Before she could react, his fingers clawed into her collar and ripped it open, and at once he sank his teeth into the exposed skin.

Her control over the monster shattered. It lunged at the nearest person in the circle, who reacted too slowly in their trance. Accompanied by the others’ chanting, it tore the summoner’s head from his body.

Within seconds, the room dissolved into chaos. The floor beneath Will’s knees suddenly felt icy as he watched helplessly. The spell was too strong. Magic held him down, and his body swayed gently with the melody. But then something began to pound inside his chest. A second heartbeat—one that did not match the rhythm of the invocation.

The magic faltered. As though wading through a swamp, Will curled his hand into a fist and tore himself free of the ritual’s puppet strings. He shook the haze from his thoughts and dragged himself back to his feet.

A cold storm gathered inside his chest as he threw open the door.

“Enough!” His voice thundered through the room, and everything stopped. The air froze. Ice crystals glittered in the candlelight. He had no idea what he was doing; the words shaped themselves on his lips. Something more natural than his heartbeat spoke through him.

The room fell deathly silent, and every pair of eyes turned toward him: the entranced guests with their milky glow, the vampire with his mad gleam, the monster’s pain-filled black pearls, and at last the storm in Elodie’s silver eyes.

She recovered first. She seized the vampire, tore him away from her, and hurled him onto the altar.

“Feed, my child,” she said, pressing one hand to the wound in her neck.

The monster obeyed. It released the summoner and turned back toward the altar. Its enormous jaws opened, and with one brutal bite, it ripped out the vampire’s throat.

Still trapped in their trance, the guests began to hum and sway once more. They held the mutilated body of their friend as though nothing had happened.

But Elodie did not look away from Will as he slowly approached her. Two hearts hammered in his chest, finding a rhythm of their own. Amid all the chaos, she was a quiet fire drawing him closer, stronger than any spell. He circled the altar, and she followed his movement until her back struck the stone. Her hands clung to its edge, and blood glittered where the vampire had bitten her, soaking the trim of white lace.

Will no longer felt like himself as he stepped closer, until Elodie’s skirts brushed his legs. His body was only a small fragment of what he was, no more than a ship, while his soul was the sea. Every part of that vast consciousness fixed on the red at her throat, the red on her lips, the red on the fingers gripping the stone slab of the altar.