Allegiance (Causal Enchantment #3)(40)

Terrified I’d see those spider veins again, I willingly followed Ivan out.

6. Threats—Sofie

No sooner had Evangeline left with Ivan than Caden appeared by my side, his hands digging into my biceps.

“Fix her!” He hissed through bared teeth.

I flung his hands off my arms. “I’m trying! Don’t you think I’m trying?” I was in no mood for another verbal assault. Evangeline’s had shredded me to rags.

“You’re not trying hard enough!” His roar reverberated off the vaulted ceiling. I noted Mage’s weight shift in my peripheral. I stayed her with a wave of my finger. There was no need for her intervention. Caden’s rage had already collapsed, his shoulders hunched inward, grief laying siege to his fiery spirit. “I almost killed her, Sofie …” Beautiful greenish-blue eyes begged me, shattering my heart.

I tentatively reached up to lay one hand on his broad shoulder, the other cupping his jaw. “I’ll fix this. I have to fix this.” I realized I was trying to convince myself more than anyone else.

“Forget the human!” Viggo cried out, his arms spread wide. “What are you going to do about Lilly? What’s your brilliant new plan?”

“She’ll come to her senses. Give her a day or two,” Mortimer answered for me, offering the briefest smile and head nod. Who would ever have thought that I would come to appreciate his company?

Viggo wouldn’t let up, though. “She’s a child nurturing a century-long grudge. She has no sense.”

“A grudge?” Mage’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You murdered her mother.”

“She wasn’t her real mother,” he retorted, but the fire in his voice was gone. He wasn’t an idiot. Whether he felt the tiniest bit of remorse, he knew this was all on him. I had only learned the reason of Lilly’s hatred for Viggo upon leaving the Tribe’s island, after I gave him the ultimatum of pledging allegiance to me or dying. Even then, I thought I’d have to tear off his toenails to get the truth out of him.

That’s when he finally admitted to killing Lilly’s mother, who was also the original vampire. Apparently she betrayed him, though my instincts told me there was another, more plausible side to that story. As if that weren’t enough to earn Lilly’s wrath, he stole the body, burned it, and hid the ashes away where Lilly could never find them. For what? Only the Fates knew …

“We will give Lilly a day or two to come to her senses, and then I will hunt her down if I must,” Mage answered calmly.

I sighed, as glad as ever to have Mage in my corner. “And while that’s happening, I’ll be busy trying to fix Evangeline and Julian. And Bishop.” Or I’ll die, trying …

7. Torture All Around—Evangeline

I trailed Ivan as he led me down the hall to a main floor bathroom. Without warning or asking permission, he slid his hands under my armpits and hoisted me onto the counter as if I were a child. I sat quietly, putting pressure on my wound as instructed, and watched him rifle through the cabinets below until he pulled out a sizeable rectangular white box with a red cross on the front. A first-aid kit—a strange thing to find in a palace of vampires, though perhaps not so strange with the ever-prepared Sofie.

Ivan unraveled the bindings around my arm in silence. Part of me wanted to keep the wound hidden, afraid of what I might see. The bleeding had stopped, thankfully. He tossed the soaked towels into the sink with one hand and reached for a giant syringe with the other. He gestured to my arm. Grimacing, I nodded my assent but had to turn away and grit my teeth against the sting as he pricked my arm in several places. Within minutes, my arm was completely numb.

Ivan continued rummaging through the box, pulling out various things—thread, gauze, ointments. He went to work, cleaning my wound and the skin around it with an antiseptic and cotton pads. With the blood cleaned up, it didn’t look as horrific. Still, the gash had to be a good four inches long, stretching from just below my elbow joint to halfway down my forearm.

I watched with fascination as my werewolf-nursemaid threaded a needle through my skin with the grace and delicacy of a plastic surgeon. In the eighteen years before I met Sofie, I hadn’t had one stitch. Since meeting her, my hand had been cut open, my neck punctured—twice—and now my forearm mangled.

“I’m going to look like Frankenstein’s monster by the time this is done,” I muttered to myself as I studied the long, thin pinkish scar across my palm.

Ivan looked up, his golden irises revealing nothing about whether he understood me, whether he even knew who Frankenstein was. “Scars build character. They make you human.”

He speaks English! I smiled, both at his gentleness and at his attempt to console me. “Well, that’s good. I thought they just made me ugly.”

One corner of his mouth twitched into a crooked smile as he went back to work on my arm. Within minutes, twenty precise, neat stitches closed up the gash Lilly had so stealthily granted me.

“Thanks … Ivan,”

He grunted, thrusting a small white pill and a glass into my hands. “For the pain.”

I accepted it with a nod, tossing it back and chasing it with the water. “So all this blood doesn’t bother you?”

He shook his head. “I can’t smell it.”

“At all? I thought werewolves would have a keen sense of smell.”