Flesh And Blood: House of Comarre: Book Two (House of Comarre 2) Read online

  Flesh and Blood

  A familiar shape walked among the boxcars. Long dark hair, backpack tucked over her shoulders, flashlight in hand. What little light there was passed through her translucent form.

  Numb recognition froze Doc.

  The circle of her flashlight beam pinpointed something. She walked toward it, stared at it for a moment, then nudged it with her foot.

  In a flash, a thin, dark shape lunged up and grabbed her. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. The flashlight tumbled from her hand and landed with the beam pointed at her. The shape was human, bones with a little skin stretched over them. It clung to her. Fangs, white in the flashlight’s beam, tore into her throat. Blood spattered, soaking the front of her sweatshirt. The creature gorged itself as the fight drained out of the girl’s body. Her fists stopped battering. Her feet ceased their kicking.

  The creature raised its face and turned its cloudy eyes into the light. A remnant of flesh hung from its scrawny jaw.

  The creature was Malkolm. The girl was Fiona.

  The image flickered and disappeared.

  BOOKS BY KRISTEN PAINTER

  House of Comarré:

  Blood Rights

  Flesh and Blood

  Bad Blood

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748121304

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Kristen Painter

  Copyright © 2009 by Tofa Borregaard

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Richie, my best friend,

  my biggest supporter,

  my loudest fan,

  my hero,

  my husband.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Flesh and Blood

  Books By Kristen Painter

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  About the Author

  Flesh and Blood

  Preview of Soulless by Gail Carriger

  About the time of the end, a body of men will be raised up, who will turn their attention to the prophecies, in the midst of much clamor and opposition.

  —SIR ISAAC NEWTON, FORMER GRAND MASTER OF THE KUBAI MATA

  Chapter One

  Paradise City, New Florida 2067

  Tatiana needed to die. The thought pushed Chrysabelle on until her shoulders burned and her arms shook. Sweat drenched her thin white T-shirt and dampened her hair, but no matter how many times she pounded her fists into the heavy bag, no matter how hard she punished her body, nothing changed. Her mother was still dead. Tatiana was still alive. And Chrysabelle still owed Mal for the promise she’d made to him.

  Over and over, she struck the bag, but the memory of her mother dying in her arms still haunted her. She hit harder, and her conscience punched back, heavy with the guilt of her unpaid debt.

  Mal had helped her when she needed him. And she’d done nothing to uphold her end of the deal. She’d barely spoken to him in the two weeks since they’d returned from Corvinestri and most of those words had been on the plane ride home. Her fist slammed the bag. Wasn’t his fault Maris was dead. It was Tatiana’s.

  The comarré life taught that revenge served no purpose. Chrysabelle was starting to think otherwise.

  She walloped the bag again, then spun and landed a kick with a loud, angry grunt. She dropped her hands and stared at the bag, not seeing it. Just the mess she still needed to deal with.

  She walked away from the bag, pushing hair off her face with her taped hands. She should be downstairs, reading through the journals Maris had left behind, trying to find some vampire weakness she could exploit to Tatiana’s detriment. Instead, she was hiding out in the gym. No, not hiding out. Training. For when she next met the vampiress who’d killed her mother. And with the covenant between humans and other-naturals gone, being fight-ready was going to matter.

  Just like Mal thought finding a way to remove his curse mattered. Which it did. She approached the bag again and punched her fist into it. Most comarré wouldn’t dream of creating such tension between them and their patron. Not that most comarré had a cursed vampire for a patron. If Mal even was her patron anymore. She sighed. Her life was an unqualified mess.

  ‘Argh!’ She whirled and kicked the bag, flinging sweat. Velimai, her mother’s former assistant and now hers, stood in the doorway, watching.

  Your mother loved beating up that bag, Velimai signed, her face wistful. Wyspers were mute, except for an ear-piercing scream capable of killing vampires.

  ‘It helps.’ Chrysabelle fought a wave of sadness to smile at the wysper fae. They both missed Maris. Her presence filled the house.

  Velimai nodded back, her fingers moving. Ready for dinner?

  ‘Steak?’ Chrysabelle asked hopefully. With no patron and no bite, steak seemed to keep her strength up and maintain her superhuman senses better than all the other foods she’d tried. No wonder it was served so often at most comarré houses.

  What else? Velimai signed, smiling.

  So long as Velimai didn’t sign too fast, Chrysabelle could understand most of what she said. ‘I’ll grab a shower and be down in five.’ She started ripping the tape off her hands with her teeth.

  Take ten, Velimai signed as she left.

  The hot shower felt good, but alone in the steam, Chrysabelle had too much time to think.

  She’d sent Mal blood, not just because it was the proper thing to do for one’s patron – however suspect his hold on her blood rights might be – but because she had to drain it from her system anyway. According to Doc, Mal’s sidekick of sorts, her efforts were futile. Mal had left the blood untouched in the galley refrigerator of the abandoned freighter he called home. Maybe he thought he’d have to kiss her again if he consumed it. She grimaced at that memory and added more cold water
to the spray falling over her. No, neither of them wanted to go there again. What he was doing for blood, she had no idea. She wanted to pretend she didn’t care, but that would be a lie. Caring about her patron was ingrained in her makeup. One hundred fifteen years of comarré indoctrination was a tough thing to ignore. The struggle between who she wanted to be and who she had been played out even in daily decisions. How many years would it be before she thought of herself not as a comarré but simply as a woman?

  She rinsed the soap from her body, letting the water beat against her skin. Her thoughts returned to Mal. Did he feel like she’d betrayed him? She hoped not, hoped he realized she was just waiting for the time to be right. Going back to Corvinestri could be very dangerous for both of them. Surely he understood that.

  She couldn’t imagine he was in any rush to face Tatiana again. Not after finding out she was the one responsible for his curse. He probably wanted to kill her as badly as Chrysabelle did.

  What must it feel like to have the person you’d married turn on you that way? It was bad enough the vampiress had killed Maris and destroyed the covenant, but for Mal to find out the woman who had been his mortal wife was the one responsible for his years of imprisonment and his curse …

  Maybe Chrysabelle wasn’t the only one whose life was a mess.

  She cranked the water off, grabbed a towel, and dried herself before wrapping her hair up. She threw on a robe and opened the door. The rich smell of steak made her stomach growl. She headed downstairs, ready to dig in.

  After dinner, she settled on the couch with one of Maris’s journals, but her mind kept returning to Mal. She needed a distraction.

  ‘Screen on.’ The wall across from her flickered to life, and the late-evening news projected into the room with holographic precision.

  ‘ … an ex-soldier in Little Havana who preaches outside the abandoned Catholic church. His message? Vampires need to be cleansed.’ The anchorman smiled like he didn’t expect his viewers to believe in vampires either. Idiot. Newsreel of the ex-soldier flashed on the screen and Chrysabelle peered closer. There was something familiar about his shaved head and the glint of his dog tags, but she couldn’t place them. What she did know was that the ex-soldier wasn’t human. He was fringe, a less-powerful class of vampire compared to the nobles but vampire nonetheless. Couldn’t the anchorman tell? Or had he, like a good portion of his audience, chosen not to believe?

  ‘A woman at a Coral Gables Publix reported the man behind her in the checkout line had horns.’ The woman’s face filled the inset screen hovering beside the anchorman’s head. ‘He had gray skin and a lot of silver earrings and horns. Horns!’ The woman made looping motions at the sides of her head. ‘And it’s not even Halloween yet!’

  A shadeux fae picking up eggs and milk was the least of that woman’s worries. What would the public do when Halloween had come and gone but the monsters still remained? The Samhain holiday was less than two weeks away.

  The camera switched its focus back to the anchorman. ‘More and more reports have been coming in from all over New Florida about strange sightings just like this one. If you’ve seen something unusual in your area, give our tip hotline a call at—’

  She changed the channel to another local news station. ‘In a press release today, Mayor Diaz-White announced she will be forming a task force to investigate what can only be described as the paranormal happenings taking place in the city, although the mayor claims every incident can be explained.’

  ‘Screen off.’ The holographic image vanished. Chrysabelle had seen enough. Paradise City was only beginning to wake up to the new reality the whole world now faced with the covenant gone. As the days ticked by, the inevitable clash between light and dark forces came nearer, escalating until there would be no denying what was happening. No matter what the mayor told the people.

  Which brought her thoughts back to Tatiana. Did a more evil, conniving, ambitious vampire exist? Chrysabelle doubted it. Tatiana had killed Maris as part of the ritual that tore the covenant away, but Chrysabelle had prevented Tatiana from keeping the ring of sorrows. How long before Tatiana made another attempt to claim the ring? It was safely tucked away, but Chrysabelle had considered destroying it several times in the past weeks. If only she could be sure enough of its power to determine that destroying it wouldn’t cause further damage to the world around them.

  The swirls of gold tattooed on her skin glittered softly as her thumb rubbed the band on her ring finger. One click released a tiny blade, sharp enough to pierce a vein and drain away the excess blood in her system. Those born into the comarré life, raised to fulfill the needs of the vampires who purchased their blood rights and heavily tattooed with the special gold signum that purified their blood, produced the substance in rich, pure, powerful abundance. Without a patron, the excess blood would sicken her, poisoning her system until she went mad. She’d been on the verge once and that was enough.

  She held her wrist up to the light. The veins pulsed thick and blue. The time to drain the excess was upon her. Maybe that was why Mal had been on her mind so much these last few days.

  Maris had told her that eventually her system would adjust, but Chrysabelle had twice drained her blood to feed Mal and twice he’d kissed her in return, giving her the infusion of vampire power that was her due. Those kisses had kept her body producing. Kept her thinking of him.

  She should drain the blood into the sink, wash it and her thoughts of Mal away. She sighed softly and wished he were that easy to forget. He wasn’t. Not even close. She stood and headed for the kitchen. What was one more container in the refrigerator among the others? Her blood was valuable. Whether Mal wanted it or not.

  *

  Corvinestri, Romania, 2067

  ‘This is going to hurt, my sweet. Are you sure you can withstand the pain?’

  ‘You’ve already told me it will hurt. And I’ve already told you I can withstand more pain than you can dream of.’ Tatiana glared at Zafir. ‘Do you think it was pleasant when that comarré whore sliced my hand off in the first place?’ If he knew what she’d endured while in the clutches of the Castus Sanguis, but of course, he had no idea.

  ‘Laa, my darling, of course not.’ His lush, black lashes fluttered over his olive cheeks. ‘I only wished to prepare you.’

  ‘Just do it. I will be fine.’ She lay back on Zafir’s lab table, her head propped on his folded coat, her remaining hand flat on her chest covering her locket where it lay beneath her blouse. Zafir and his brother, Nasir, were both exceptionally beautiful in a dark, Arabian kind of way, but according to Lord Ivan, who’d sent her here, Zafir was the most circumspect of the talented pair. And in this matter, discretion was of the utmost importance. Few knew her hand had been severed, and she intended to keep it that way. The servants who found out had been dispatched, save Octavian, the head of her household staff. She would not, under any circumstance, be made to appear incapable or disadvantaged. She intended to have Lord Ivan’s position of Dominus one day, and nothing, nothing would prevent that. Soon she would renew her standing in the eyes of the Castus. Show them she was worthy once again. Reclaim the ring of sorrows – and the power it held – that was rightfully hers.

  This new hand was the first step toward that goal.

  ‘Na’am, you will do very well, won’t you?’ Zafir laughed softly.

  She wanted to slap his face until that patronizing tone became a cry for mercy. He was no Mikkel, that much was certain. Mikkel’s talents in the black arts had been exceptional. Of course, those talents hadn’t kept her late paramour alive either. And if Zafir’s talents in alchemy were as powerful as he claimed, he might be better than Mikkel. If he failed to do as he’d promised, then perhaps she’d give the brother a chance. At the very least, Zafir was Mikkel’s equal in bed.

  Life had very quickly taught her that pleasure and power were the only real rewards for pain. Her sweet Sofia’s face flashed before her eyes, something that had been happening more and more since her confrontat
ion with Malkolm. Seeing him had stirred up the past. She tightened her grip on the locket, the silk of her blouse cool against her fingers. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Zafir moved the meticulously crafted platinum prosthetic into place at the end of her right wrist. The gleaming hand lay open, the lines and creases on the palm mirror images of those on her left because it had been modeled after that hand. The hot metal had been quenched in her blood to further seal the magic.

  He painted the stump of her wrist with a foul-smelling paste that burned slightly, then he adjusted the prosthetic so that her flesh touched metal. The metal was cool, but her body was warm because she’d fed from her comar before coming to give herself strength.

  Using a glass spoon, Zafir scooped pale silver-white dust from a squat glass jar and sprinkled the joined area with the powder.

  The pain struck in a searing wave.

  A cry ripped from Tatiana’s throat and she jerked away from the agony, but Zafir grabbed her forearm and kept it pressed against the metal.

  ‘You mustn’t move, my love.’

  Fire traveled the length of her arm and bit into her shoulder. Lava flowed through her joints, melting her bones with blinding pain. She clenched her jaw to keep from vomiting.

  She could endure this. She’d endured the Castus Sanguis’s punishing use of her mind and body, and would again if that’s what it took to regain their favor. All that mattered was the unholy power they wielded and that a portion of it become hers. Pain brings clarity.

  Flames licked her skin. Wisps of smoke wafted from the joint of flesh and metal. Blisters rose, filling with fluid. Her fangs pierced her lower lip, and the taste of copper washed her mouth.

  ‘Almost there,’ Zafir encouraged. ‘That’s my girl.’

  Killing him might ease the pain. She was no one’s gir—

  Daggers dug into the stump of her wrist, grinding through the muscle and burrowing into her bone. She cursed loudly. Then cursed again. And just as she was about to shove the fingers of her good hand into his chest and rip out his heart, the pain subsided to a dull throb.