Back for another fix?
VAELA DENARR (SHE/THEY) & MICAH IANNANDREA (THEY/THEM)
The Gift of Blood (Crimson Tears: Book One)
The Gift of Blood Book Cover by Lexa @rocket_bird
Author’s Note
CW: This book contains gore, brief mentions of self-harm, and brief mentions of homophobia.
Chapter 2
She couldn’t keep relying on dumb luck to save her ass. A weapon would be a good start. Ryann raised a hand before her face and tried to focus on the little claws that remained on her fingers, looking like the best manicured fingernails she’d ever had. She tried to make them grow.
Nothing happened.
Oh, come on…
She focused harder. She didn’t want to fight Batman, but he had already abducted one person. Ryann didn’t want to be next. Even if he had been more interested in a grave last time, he’d still shown a vested interest in eating her before.
Still, despite Ryann’s best attempts her fingernails remained pointy but short. “Dammit,” she muttered. She tried flexing her fingers. Still no sign of vampire claws. “Okay, fuck you too then,” she muttered. “Punching it is.”
“You sure you’re good?” Rowan asked from the radio. “You’ve been quiet.”
Ryann rolled her eyes. She pressed the button. “Almost like I’m sneaking through a monster-infested cemetery to find a guy that’s almost certainly dead.” She could smell the blood in the air. Jacob’s chances weren’t great already, and there was no telling where the trail might end. “Maybe I should call this off,” she muttered. She didn’t think Rowan could hear her. She wasn’t serious in the first place. She was just still very much pissed.
But Rowan quickly replied, “We can’t do that! He might still be alive! We have to help him!”
“Yes, of course, Jesus,” Ryann said back, annoyed. “I wasn’t serious.” She tested the air with her sense of smell. Was it her imagination, or had the blood scent become thicker? She pulled the mask down. She could almost taste the traces of blood on the wind, and sniffed the air like a bloodhound until she uncovered the source.
It came from an octagonal stone pavilion with iron fences filling the gaps between the pillars. It was the only place with any light around. In that light Ryann saw Jacob slumped against the inner wall. She rushed to the door quickly, and inside, stepping into a thick, red trail by accident.
Memories flashed before her eyes. The smell, the shape of the place, and the light… they brought back things she tried to push down.
She was in the ring. The smell of her own blood was in her nose, and something sharp and strange. Like the smell of something that had gone off. Lights glared overhead. The crowd was so deafening she barely heard it. He was there. Her opponent. There was not a drop of sweat on him, and his skin looked pale and dry.
Everything was moving in slow motion. Ryann saw the ripple of her muscles as she tried to block the strike, and only then felt the sharp jolt of her pain through her shoulder, cutting through the adrenaline. Her head snapped back as his knuckles collided with her jaw, she spat blood. Another strike hit her head, way too hard, making her vision black at the edges, then another, another.
She came back up, driving her fist into his jaw, and saw him grit his teeth as his head snapped aside. Teeth that were too long and sharp. They gnashed angrily.
They were in the same weight class. Ryann could have kicked his ass easily. She’d taken on opponents bigger and heavier than herself in less legal matches. But nothing worked on this guy. She could practically see the red marks of her strikes vanishing from his gut.
Ryann stepped in and blocked his kick with her own shin. The hit felt like it was designed to break bones. She ducked under his swing and drove her fist into his stomach again.
Even through the knuckle guards, it felt like punching a wall. There was not enough muscle there to not give. What she was fighting didn’t feel human.
It occurred to Ryann that she’d been fighting a vampire. The thought came suddenly and with a bit of a numb shock. It felt odd, like it should have been a greater revelation.
Well… Still choked him out like anyone else, she thought as she pushed the thought down. They’d told her to lose that fight. She’d told them to fuck off.
They’d waited for her outside the venue and had ambushed her.
After that, all she remembered was the hospital, the smell of disinfectant, the doctor telling her she’d been in an accident and a coma, and London crying at her bedside.
Ryann clenched her hand in anger. She gripped the pillar next to her to steady herself. Her claws scratched over the stone hard and left little marks.
The smell of blood ripped her from those thoughts. She took a deep breath and tried to fight the anger down. She’d deal with those bastards later. Maybe give them an accident of their own, let them see what it’s like. They were probably all vampires, right? They certainly all had looked pale enough, so they’d probably be fine with a few broken bones.
Her teeth ached again. She really wanted to dig them into something. Not to drink blood. Just to tear something apart.
The radio in her hand cracked precariously with her grip. The blood scent in her nose made her growl deeply. You don’t have time for this, she tried to tell herself. Her lungs burned as if the blood had entered into them as a thick, red mist. She staggered forward, through the blood smell, and to the man slumped on the inside of the pavilion.
She crouched down next to Jacob. He was pale and still. Dark circles under his eyes were overshadowed by his sweaty blond hair. A large puddle had already formed beneath him on his other side, and the smell intensified the closer Ryann got. “Found him,” she said a little hoarsely into the radio. Her throat stung with the words.
“Is he alive?”
Ryann already had her fingers to Jacob’s neck. No pulse. His body was still warm, but it would take between six and twelve hours to grow cold anyway. A little trivia from her time at med school.
She tried not to think about how many classes she’d missed in her four-month coma. Maybe they’d give her extra credit for that?
God, that’s fucking sad… She sighed at the thought and shook her head.
She lifted the radio back to her lips. “He’s gone,” Ryann said softly. “I’m sorry. Looks like he just about managed to crawl to safety.” She could see the huge claw marks under Jacob’s torn shirt. Even if his heart had just stopped, there would be no way to get him to a paramedic in time, not to mention him losing more and more blood.
The radio was quiet for a long, long moment. Then it crackled once. Rowan’s voice came over the line breathy and quiet. “Does he have a bag on him?”
Ryann frowned at the question. He was indeed wearing a bag, small, like the kind you’d put a planner or notebook in, or maybe a water bottle and some snacks. On closer inspection, it strained to hold its contents, bulging a little. “Yeah, he had one,” Ryann said into the radio. “What about it?” she followed up. Something didn’t feel right.
“I need you to tell me what’s inside.”
She frowned a little deeper at that. The bag was covered in Jacob’s blood. He seemed to have clung to it with his last breaths.
For a moment, Ryann felt herself transported to a different place. A darker place with no lights, the cold floor of an alley beneath her, and a different body at her feet. Someone else she’d failed to save.
She pushed the thought aside and busied herself with the bag. The smell of blood has lost its allure after that memory.
Her fingers brushed against leather, and she pulled it free.
It was a book, old, with yellowed pages that were stained darkly, and entirely leatherbound. She tried not to touch it too much. The binding felt old and badly cared for, and where she came in contact with the paper, it felt oily.
Emblazoned on the cover was the title, along with scratches that marked the leather, like someone or something had clawed at it. The Stalwart Hunter’s Almanac. She relayed this to Rowan.
Her friend from the Institute seemed to think for a bit. “You can see the lights in the middle of the cemetery, yeah?” she asked. “Make your way over to that. It’s safe there.”
“No offence,” Ryann said and narrowed her eyes at the white structure next to the decapitated angel statue, “but it doesn’t look like a huge monster bat would have any troubles with that.” She could only make it out in detail because her vision had sharpened so much over the last days.
“We have measures in place against that,” Rowan told her. “Get over here, you’ll be safe. And don’t forget the book!”
The smell of blood and grave dirt faded into the background at the emphasis Rowan put on that. A soft growl rose up in Ryann’s throat. Rowan wanted the book bad, and that didn’t sit right with her. Something was off.
“Why?” she asked. “I’d move quicker without it.”
“Jacob stole it. I need it back.”
Ryann stood up and leaned back against one of the pillars, crossing her arms. Her tongue played over her fangs as she brought the radio to her lips. “The blood smell could attract Batman. I should leave it here until it’s safe.”
“It could come back to get Jacob’s body!”
“So? What would it want with a book? Animals are smart enough to not eat books.”
“Kate!” Rowan strained and failed to stay calm. “I need that book! Or else you going after Jacob will have been for nothing!”
Ryann left the radio off for a bit. Rowan called her name. Then once more, getting more and more agitated. Ryann clicked the button again, cutting her off. “No bullshit this time…” she said in a low tone. “Did you even send me after this guy to get him back?”
“Of course…”
“Yeah?” Ryann asked darkly. “I said no bullshit. And I’m smelling bullshit.” She didn’t question her intuition. She didn’t always understand how she knew, but generally people lying to her left a bad feeling. “So if I bury this book in a fucking grave, you won’t really care?”
“No! I mean…” Rowan floundered. Ryann growled even louder now.
“Did you even think we’d find him alive?” she all but yelled into the radio. “Fess up, or your book gets spread around the entire cemetery, one page at a time!”
Rowan hesitated for a long moment. “To be honest…” she said then in a nervous stammer, “I assumed he was dead the moment you mentioned the blood…”
“Motherfucker!” She wanted to throw the radio to the ground and shatter it. It creaked precariously in her grip.
“I had to get the book back!” Rowan implored her almost desperately. Ryann had trouble hearing her over the agitated, clicking growl from her throat. “It’s an encyclopedia of monsters!”
Ryann ducked further into cover when she heard a scraping sound in the night. “Do you maybe want another souvenir?” she hissed into the radio. “A finger maybe? Or an eyeball?”
“I don’t— Kate, listen to me, I know you’re angry…”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Ryann interrupted harshly. “You sent me after some guy you thought was dead, all for some shitty old book!”
“I never sent you—”
“You let me go after him even though you — and I quote — ‘already thought he was dead ten seconds after I picked up his shitty fucking radio’! And at the mere suggestion of turning back, you told me to keep going anyway!” The radio cracked hard in her hand as she gripped it harder in her anger. “So what the actual fuck, dude??”
“I… I’m sorry,” Rowan said after a moment of silence. “I planned to reward you for bringing it back, of course. This book is so valuable that people are constantly looking for it. Especially vampires. We thought we would find it here. Jacob made it vanish before anyone else got a hold of it.”
Ryann stood there completely baffled. She’d been used. Manipulated. She had been through enough emotional abuse at the various orphanages to recognize an after the fact apology meant to get back into her good graces.
After a moment, she clicked the radio button again. “Don’t fucking talk to me right now,” she said. She kept her voice level to not let on how upset she was. Then she sat down opposite to Jacob’s dead, slack-jawed corpse, and tossed the radio out of reach. She buried her face in her hands.
This was utterly fucked. How was this her life?
Fucking Rowan, she thought with an angry clench of her fist. Stupid fucking Institute, goddamn fucking vampires and bat monsters. It felt like the entire world had gone insane overnight. Or at least the people Ryann had been forced to spend her time with.
Her eyes stung. Her nose felt blocked, which thankfully kept the blood smell away. She sniffed and rubbed her face. You got this. You’re fine. You can handle this, she told herself as tears of frustration collected in her eyes. It’s just one shitty person in a world full of shitty people. And yet the feeling of being used persisted. She’d thought she was past that.
She had trusted Rowan. Not implicitly, but she had believed they were on the same page, trying to save a life. Turns out that was a lie. I guess you just can’t trust people. She hated that it affected her so much. It shouldn’t. But she was just so stressed.
Being beaten into a coma had hurt.
Waking up weak and disoriented had scared her.
London leaving her had destroyed her.
And then she had actually been killed. Arms sliced open, a knife through her chest. Apparently even killing her hadn’t been enough. After the week she’d had, she was just so utterly done with everything. And still, shit just kept piling on from all sides.
Well, I’m not gonna take it lying down. Ryann swallowed against the lump in her throat. She wiped her eyes and dried them with her sleeve. Okay, she thought with a grim, angry determination. Fuck Rowan. Fuck her stupid institute. She had been lied to. She had absolutely no reason to care anymore.
I’m gonna get what I came here for. Maybe a little extra. And Rowan can fuck right off. She took a deep breath and centered herself.
She took Jacob’s thin, fancy gloves and wiped her fingerprints off the radio. Ryann had no intention of leaving any more traces than necessary, just in case Rowan recognized her as a vampire. Her skin wasn’t as pale or cold, but you never know.