Made By Design (Blood Bound Series Book 2) (34 page)

As I stared at Mr. Aquinas a glint of knowledge sparkled from his ancient eyes. “You know what the unidentified substance is.”

He nodded. “I do. But I was under instruction to keep any mention of them from public knowledge.”

“But since you all already know they exist,” Vanessa interrupted. “There’s no reason to keep it from you.”

A shiver ran down my body, chilling past my bones and solidifying the marrow inside. At any moment I expected to crack into a million pieces. I knew what the third ingredient was. “I was infected with damned blood.”

~

A little later Mr. Aquinas retired upstairs with Ty’s assistance. When Ty reemerged he rubbed his hands together. “Now for the reason we came here.”

Vanessa smiled and strolled to the far right wall. Considering the other walls all housed hanging ancient and rusting weapons, this one appeared empty. She pressed her finger onto a silver button in the wall. With a click then clatter of rattling chains and cogs, an eight-foot-long section of the wall spun from the middle. “Think yourselves lucky. Not many have seen the extent of our hand crafted stock.”

My mouth hung open at the hidden room inside the wall, fitted with floor-to-ceiling hanging weapons. But these weren’t just any old weapons. These were shimmering and deadly weapons of all sorts. Like Ty’s training room, these weapons were sharp, made to kill. Every piece was edged with silver, if not coated in the metal. There were guns too, automatics, semi-automatics, handguns, rifles, and shotguns. Dark metal glistened from guns of all shapes and sizes. So this was where Ty’s stock had come from.

Kendrick’s jaw hung open in shock, mirroring Dorian’s. They hadn’t expected this any more than I had.

Vanessa went to a stainless steel counter and slid open the top drawer. She rifled through with a clink and a clatter before both hands reversed, now filled with gleaming silver stakes. She handed me one first. “Ty tells me you’re immune to silver.”

Ty’s and my encounters on the cruise and at
Pulse
when I’d used one of his silver stakes had proved that. Not to mention the silver amulet he’d given me that had belonged to his mother. My fingers toyed with the amulet nestled against my almost cleavage. I couldn’t help thinking about the red, hungry eyes of the damned vampires we’d encountered. Their color was same as this hefty stone. And some of their vile blood was inside me, poisoning me.

Feeling ill and wondering what other side effects Caius’s drugging would have, I nodded and took the stake. “Yeah, I guess I have Caius to thank for that. Kendrick won’t be immune though, will he?”

“No, I’m not,” Kendrick said out loud. But through the bond his words were more personal, picking up on my rising insecurities.
And being infected with their blood doesn’t make you like them. Please believe that.

“If that’s the case…” Dorian held out his hand and Vanessa handed over another stake.

Without warning there was a sizzling followed by a shout of pain. Dorian dropped the stake like it was a hot coal. It bounced with a clank against the concrete at his shoes. The stink of burned flesh invaded the frigid basement air.

Dorian rubbed at his blistered and bleeding hand. “What the hell?”

Vanessa caught and inspected his hand, which was already smoothing over. A moment later only remnants of his spilled blood was left. “You’re not immune.”

I rubbed at my temples. The first thing I saw was Marcus, a silver-faced Rolex on his wrist.
Marcus is immune,
I passed my words and memory through the bond. Then I conjured up details of what we’d found under the cabin ruins in Alaska. The explanation hit me like a sonic boom. “Caius used two solutions in his experiments. Both had silver nitrate and Pure Blood, but one had ingredient X.”

“Damned blood,” Ty said.

I nodded. “Yeah, and the other had X2.”

“The X probably means it’s damned blood, too.” Vanessa walked back to her workstation and flicked through a tattered notebook. “But my guess is that it was altered in some other way. Before being mixed with the other ingredients.”

“It could also have something to do with the infected before and after birth stuff,” Kendrick mused.

Dorian took all this information in his stride. Yet all I could think was that this was another thing that separated me from everyone else. Another thing that made me different. An outsider.

“So what’s the alternative?” Dorian asked, sliding a finger along a mean-looking handgun. “I’m guessing your guns aren’t made of silver.”

“No, they’re not,” Vanessa said. “But our bullets are. Not great for killing unless you’re a perfect shot and can fire off enough rounds to pretty much shred the heart. But seeing as the damned are so fast, they’ll rip your neck out before you get the chance.”

I heard Dorian mutter
“buzz kill”
under his breath which made Kendrick snicker.

“There are silver-coated machetes and swords.” Ty pointed to the ones hung from the wall. “But with their size they’re difficult to conceal. In the end a stake is the best weapon.”

“But we can’t touch them,” Kendrick said, his tone screaming
dumbass
.

“No.” Ty laughed. “Not those ones. But these…” He let the word hang in the air as he pulled two objects from the cabinet’s second drawer. Each was a stake, but they were different from the others. These ones were silver, but their hilts were coated with a thick layer of rubber.

“Never thought I’d be giving those out.” Vanessa sighed, resigned to the idea. After hearing about her parents’ tragic murder at the hands of rogues, it was no wonder. Still, I wondered if her shift to help was more to do with something else. Something more than assisting the greater good. Like my charismatically charming brother who kept sliding her sexy eyes.

“If you don’t stick yourself with the pointy end,” Ty said with a smile, “and carry the stake in a holster or pocket, you won’t get burned.”

“Good to know.” Dorian grabbed one by the rubber casing, testing what Ty said by sliding it into the back pocket of his jeans.

Kendrick muttered “
smart ass
” but did the same.

With each of us armed and enough bombshells to clog up my brain, I let my focus drop to the silver stake in my hands. It was unsurprisingly heavy and now the third I’d held. During our attack on the cruise, I’d grasped the one from Ty’s backpack in a desperate effort to save his life. Though back then I had taken little notice of the weapon itself. I rolled the piece across my palm. A scrawling inscription was etched into the length. The flowing words weren’t in English.

“What does the inscription mean?” I asked Vanessa who was still nose-deep in her dusty book.

She went to answer, but Kendrick replied before she had a chance to. “It’s…” The next words he spoke were in a language I didn’t understand. Maybe Greek or Latin.

“That’s Greek, isn’t it?” Dorian asked, surprising me. He shrugged. “What? It’s my language elective at school.”

“And it translates to mean,” Ty added. “
Deliver back unto hell
.”

My body convulsed at Ty’s words, ice undulating my muscles. Then the world around me faded. The stake fell from my hand, rattling to the ground. I swayed, knees giving way as I fell.

In a flash of confusing light, I saw a man standing at the edge of a cliff backing a forest. Covering his body were tattered clothes that appeared centuries old. His hands were outstretched, reaching for the raging electrical storm above. I tried to scream, to tell him to move. But I wasn’t there. I was merely a spectator, eyes without a body. And then it was too late. A bolt of light split from the roiling clouds, plummeting at the man in the blink of an eye. The lightning connected with his hands, sizzling through his entire body as he crumpled to the grass.

“No!”

My body jerked back and forth and my lids flew open. My vision was hazy as a familiar voice registered in my ears. “Amelia. It’s me. It’s Ty.”

Ty was cradling my shaking body in his arms. Dorian and Kendrick were kneeling around us. Vanessa stood behind them, her face showing the most shock I’d ever seen in her.

“I’m okay,” I said. Ty tried to pull me up and I pushed him away. I struggled to stand on my own and fell back on my butt. “I can smell blood.” With blurry vision I scanned everyone in the room. “Everyone’s blood.”

As I blinked, lifting my lids, Vanessa gasped. Through Kendrick’s sight I saw my red-tinted, bloodshot eyes. A sight Vanessa hadn’t witnessed, having been absent during my other visions.

“Another vision,” Kendrick guessed. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a bottle of blood. “Don’t ever say I’m not prepared.” At my hesitation he said, “And no, it’s not mine.”

Even though his preparedness came from not wanting to see me sink my fangs into Ty’s neck, I accepted the bottle. A few seconds later it was empty.

As the blood sank in, taking the edge off, I shook my head. I needed to piece together what had happened, what it all meant. This vision had been different from the last. There’d been no death. No violence. And no bloodshed. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t been confronting. The images of this stranger being struck by lightning were hitting a little too close to home. Yet I had sensed his decision. He had wanted the lightning to strike him.
Who would purposely walk into that?

For once Kendrick didn’t have an answer to my unasked question. But there was something else different about the vision. It hadn’t been an urgent warning of something terrible to come. It had been an insight into a past event.

“So what did you see?” Dorian, standing close to Vanessa, looked worried.

“It was a past event,” I offered, sending
this stays between us
silently to Kendrick. “Not related to the damned or anything posing an imminent threat to us or anyone we know. Just some guy in old clothes in the forest.”

I skidded to a halt as the forest opened up into a winter wonderland. Kendrick and Dorian stalled beside me. “This’ll be fun,” Kendrick said dryly.

Dorian clapped. “Head to head with Troy. I’m psyched. Been wanting to knock that dick around since our last fight.”

I groaned. Today we were training against the wolves. One on one while wielding stakes. How Ty saw this going well was beyond me.

I glanced around our usual secret training space. All the lush greens of white cedar and hemlock pine trees were lost to powdery white snow. The once dewy forest floor was a blanket of white just waiting to be torn up.

It was the following morning—Saturday, so we didn’t have to wait for school to finish—and the wolves were already waiting. Ty was having words with Troy across the clearing, jabbing a finger into the guy’s chest and flashing canines. Although indignant with his own canines peeking out, Troy nodded. Glued to his side, Marika sneered at Kendrick and me while ignoring Dorian’s very existence. For once she was dressed in black, with most of her body covered.

Vanessa waved us over and tension fled Ty’s warning expression. “As you all know, the most efficient way to kill a damned—”

“Or vampire,” Troy barked.

Ty glared but continued. “Is to stake them in the heart.”

I had experienced the effectiveness of Ty’s silver stake on the damned, which Kendrick had witnessed through my mind’s eye. But Dorian had relied on his brute strength, speed, and a lot of luck to kill his and Kendrick’s attacker.

I palmed the stake in my hoodie’s pocket. The entirely silver stake that I, a vampire, could touch. An unexpected questioned rolled off my tongue. “What happens when you stake a living vampire?” The words tasted like acid in my mouth. But we needed to know. If it came to it, in the end we might have to kill Caius, a living vampire. All I knew so far was that we didn’t disintegrate like the damned.

“They die a painful death as a result of the silver burning the heart and preventing repair,” Vanessa answered sounding clinical. “If the heart doesn’t stop from the damage, the blood loss will eventually have the same effect.”

I swallowed, knowing that Ty had actual experience in this. The times he’d assisted his father in killing rogue vampires. Even more daunting than that was the memory of the night he had almost killed me, too. I would have been his first.

With an uneasy smile I nodded to Ty. “Let’s get started then.”

We walked into the center of the clearing, leaving sunken boot and shoe prints in the snow. Light pattering rain began to fall.

Ty nodded to Troy. “First, you need to know where to hit.” He motioned towards Troy who at Marika’s curled lip removed his shirt to expose his buff torso. Ty took a stake from the back pocket of his jeans and directed the tip at his chest. “You need to hit here, before the base of the pectoral, between the 4th and 5th rib.” His gaze narrowed. “If you misjudge even half an inch, you’ll strike a rib, or worse, the sternum.”

“Neither of which will kill or really harm your opponent,” Vanessa chimed in. “But will more likely just piss them off.”

Under Ty’s direction Dorian was set against Troy and Ty took on Kendrick. “Now this is training. Not battle. Hits are fine.” He leveled flashing eyes at his pack. “But if any skin is burnt by silver you’ll be answering to me.”

With Vanessa separating Marika from me, we watched from the sidelines atop a fallen tree. The log was sheltered by a few oaks and almost clear of snow. First the wolves, still in human form, were armed, showing us in one-on-one combat how to hit our mark. Ty was all business, but you could tell Troy loved every time his stake hit the kill point on my brother. Kendrick was behaving too, for now.

Vanessa barked out tips throughout the sparring, not missing a single mistake by Kendrick or Dorian. I kept my focus on the guys, picking up weaknesses and strengths. What moves worked and which came up short. Beside Vanessa, Marika mirrored my intent observation.

After round one, the tables turned and my best friend and brother were the ones armed. Following an hour of that, their bodies dripped sweat and mud from the ground they’d shredded up. Kendrick’s frustration every time he missed the mark on Ty was met with a curse. Though to his credit he got in a few wins. Troy reacted to every correct hit from Dorian with a roar of rage. Each time the outburst got louder, teetering closer to an unstoppable edge. As Troy was about to blow his top and actually take my brother down, Ty called a stop.