Chapter 28
Eric. Eric Northman. I could smell him on my skin. Taste him on my tongue. In every part of my world, he had begun to seep in.
And for the first time, I wasn't afraid.
"Little girl~"
I rolled, my insides jolting uncomfortably at the nipping air along my bare skin, the scent of mountain air and pine rolling along the wind. I hated it here.
My lips curled away from my teeth, something savage bursting up inside of me as I crouched, the tall grass almost obscuring my view of the clearing, the great tree, and the lone mare standing ramrod straight at its base. She was ethereal, bathed in light that danced along her ebony skin, a gold crown shimmering in her curls. Milky white eyes cut across the clearing, striking at me like a lance as bursts of indigo and sapphire swirled around her pupils.
I knew this one. I had met her before.
"You," I sneered, remembering her last warning, the pain that she had inflicted.
Her teeth flashed white and straight. "I'm honored that you remember me."
My shoulders hunched, the grass curving in around me, tree trunks gouging at the dirt, scarring the earth to either side of me. In the weedy depths, I saw the skitter of pale, scrawny bodies - the pin-pricks of famished eyes all focused on me. I had noticed it before briefly but now it was a weight - something that made a cold spike of fear clench my stomach. There were others in the great tree behind her - and I didn't think that they were as in control as she was.
"What do you want?" I snapped, my voice gravely - from fear or anger, I didn't entirely know.
Either way, the mare didn't like it, her pale eyes crinkling at the tone. "Is that any way to talk to your sister?"
"You left me for dead," I spat, remembering the half-dreams of that night - when I had been ripped open with no one to save me. I gulped something warm lodging in my throat. Nothing but Eric between me and death. My shoulder's hunched, my legs tensing with the urge to sprint in the opposite direction. Would they kill me? My eyes narrowed as the woman danced a bit closer, her movements graceful as the tall grass seemed to rub lovingly along her thighs. "It's been five months since you last contacted me. Five months without having to worry about your idiocy-"
A few low tsks escaped her full lips, her eyes flashing a stunning gold as she settled herself onto the upturned face of a root. "Now, now, let's not say things that we might regret."
A low, humorless laugh left me as I twisted to keep her fully in my view. "I regret everything that's led me to have to deal with you people."
She didn't think that was as funny as I did and in the back of my head, I could almost feel Eric's sharp gaze, his thoughts on my current recklessness all too apparent. My skin itched. I needed to get out of here.
"You fucked the Viking," the mare said plainly, her face deceptively void of everything but general distaste. A low hissing burst from the foliage of the great tree, the sound of a swarm of bees gathering. It made my whole body roll with unease.
I forced my voice to be as emotionless as possible. "I thought that after you left me for dead all bets were off."
She rolled her eyes daintily. "Oh please. What could we have done? You were laying out on a bench like a slab of meat ready for the butcher. What did you want us to do? Catch the quickest plane to that bum-fuck town you call home so that we could all drink cocoa in the sitting room and pray for your well-being?"
"You know for someone who preaches unity, you're really giving me mixed signals." I wet my chapped lips, my eyes flicking uneasily to the dense foliage of the branches. Flashes of pale, coppery flesh skittered across my vision. Jesus. "Odd but when I was lying out on that table, half-mad with poison and blood-loss, I thought - and correct me if I'm wrong - but I thought I might have heard some interesting chatter. Something that sounded a lot like you knew what had attacked me."
Bingo. Her face tightened, closing off in an instant. When they hadn't been bothering me, I hadn't bothered thinking about it. Why when I could handle things on my own? Her lips tightened. "I-"
"Don't lie to me...sister," I hissed, purple energy crackling along my knuckles, lighting the grass around me. An electric charge burst from my fingertips, skittering across the ground in a chaotic wave.
Her eyes widened for a fraction of a second, a momentary break in her usual cool demeaner but enough that I thought… Why did she look so surprised? And more interesting than that, why did she look so scared?
"You…" Her eyes darted to the great tree, something odd darkening her expression before she was whipping back to me. Like she had been concentrating on something… "...Perhaps we weren't as clear about our knowledge before."
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. How convenient. I bit down on the almost overwhelming urge to snark back at her.
Silence stretched between us, long and tense as she seemed to deliberate. Finally, her chin tipped back, a flash of silver lighting her pupils before they dimmed once more to a milky white. "We've been hunted for a while now."
My heart leaped. "Excuse me?"
That little bit of info should probably be something in the orientation class - brief bullet point on mare 101.
A long-suffering sigh slipped from her like it was becoming a real pain to have to give the briefing. "It started a few years before. We were thriving. World war two was a feeding frenzy for us-"
My brows furrowed. That was more than a couple of years. She looked like she was pretty into the retelling though, so I let the massive gap in time pass.
Her face softened, going slack with hunger and lust as she gazed off into the distance. "Then the cold war hit and all those little humans were scrambling around like crazy trying to find some semblance of world order and…" Her lips parted, a low grown slipping out before her tongue was running across her bottom lip in reverence. She was kind of freaking me out. "We hadn't known that much power for a while. All those little worms just crawling over themselves in panic and paranoia… absolutely breathtaking." Her voice wandered off, tipping into a long pensive silence that eventually overrode whatever sick reverie that was playing in her head. Her face darkened ominously. "That's when the maenads came to us."
I blinked, my head spinning around the word. School had never really been my thing. I was more of a street smarts kind of girl. Education - well, that had always been where Sookie thrived. I had always been too emotional. Most days it had been a struggle to force myself into those classrooms, my powers barely leashed, constantly on the verge of tipping everyone into their worst nightmares.
"I don't speak fairytale," I said, my voice snapping the mare's gaze to me in the span of a second. "You're going to need to explain properly if you want to mend this familial bond."
For a moment, I thought that she might cut the lesson short in favor of trying to kill me. A long, slow breath burst from her nose, her face tight with distaste. She seemed to permanently look at me like that. But more interesting than her annoyance was her lack of action. Last time she had reveled at the ability to cause me pain but tonight… Her gaze flicked briefly to the ground around me once more before she shook off whatever was running through her mind.
"Female followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility… and madness." Something about the way that she was looking at me made me shiver. No longer stained with distaste, her face had taken on the sheen of someone who had seen too much. Someone who wasn't scared exactly but maybe tired. Tired of whatever disasters these creatures had caused. And that made a small pit of panic start to grow and solidify in my stomach. Her voice was quieter as she continued. "When we were first created, we formed a sort of alliance. We liked the bloodshed, the panic, the chaos. But when technology and ingenuity started to blossom, the maenad's ways withered while ours solidified. Their type of religious fervor and ritual frenzy - it was sloppy. Too unkempt for a world that was becoming more and more untethered from ancient practices."
"You dropped them," I supplied, imagining the rash of cults that had sprouted just short of the 80s. Could that have been from the sudden unmoored maenads? No. But they had all been so consolidated from Shoko Asahara to Jim Jones… "Right after the cold war there were all of those cults…"
Her eyes cut to me, apathetic before she turned her head away to stare up at the moon. "We have no recollection of what occurred after the maenads were cut from our wing. All we know is that they flourished for a bit and then died a swift death."
"If they're dead then why are you telling me about them?" I whispered.
"A few were smarter than the rest," she stated with a tiny shrug. "They didn't throw their lot in with systems that were self-destructive."
My stomach turned at the insinuation. But worse was our own lack of action. My face twisted with disgust, my lips curling back. "And what? You've just let them slaughter your own kind because it would be too much of a hassle to stop them?"
Her beautiful face shuddered, her lips thinning. "We're solitary creatures, Runa Stackhouse. We hunt alone. Which makes us incredibly susceptible to creatures who are deformed half-wits with claws for fingers." her gaze flicked down to her nails, examining them with false disinterest. "Besides, they're unfortunately unsusceptible to our gift for nightmares."
A sharp laugh burst from my lips, the sound joyless. "So you're saying that they can kill us but we have no way of killing them."
A flash of sharp teeth showed her annoyance. "The best of us are adept fighters-"
"The problem is she's not going after your old," I snapped, my legs starting to burn from this crouched. She seemed immensely unhappy that I had made that jump. "She's finding your young."
"Our young," she hissed and something about the way that she said it made my matter how much I hated it, I was one of them. This was a group that knew every struggle, fear, and ache that I had gone through. We were made of the same bones, the same flesh. A long pause darkened the air around us before she looked away once more. "You're the first one to survive her attack."
"Lucky me," I muttered, highly annoyed at the implied honor that that was. And also vaguely horrified that she had ripped through so many of my own kind.
"She knows what you are," she whispered, her voice oddly soft as her pupils burst with chilly blue light. "She'll be back for you once more."
"And let me guess," I snapped, already hating the direction of this conversation. "You won't be aiding me?"
"Not at all," she murmured, to my surprise. "I'll be sending another mare to assist you in capturing and bringing this maenad to us."
That wasn't what I wanted to hear.
My teeth bared in rage. "I'm not a pet to be kept."
Her eyes flicked over my hidden form and for some reason, I got the feeling that she could see every mark that was left on my bad from Eric. Every place that his lips and fangs had touched. It was altogether nauseating.
Her eyes swirled a series of colors. "I highly doubt that."
"So what?" I hissed, anger roaring through me, sending sparks skittering across the ground and roots around me. Once again the mare's body stiffened with the action, her gaze following the wayward energy with awe and another sharper emotion - one that looked a lot like hunger. My fingers burned with the next current of power, making the area around me burst into full light. Distantly, I heard the shrieks and gasps of the creatures crawling through the branch of the great tree. "You'll use me and then burn me at the stake for not keeping myself untamed?"
I spat the last word. Somehow saying it made it sound even more absurd. My mind flashed to that leatherbound book that had been left in little yellow, sudden rage burning through me. And what had that been? Some type of ludicrous scare tactic of a weak gaggle of creatures barely surviving.
Her shoulders rose in a slow, agonized breath, her eyes lighting with reddish light. The next words were tight, sharp little things. "We'd be willing… to give you anything you wanted in return. One favor for another."
That got my attention. Anything I wanted. Sudden hope blazed within me, making me feverish. I could cut all ties with them. I could tell them to forget about my very existence.
Be smart, little mare, Eric's voice chided me and I could almost feel his fingers curling in my hair, tugging in gentle reprimand. Your kind are wily, shifty creatures.
I drew in an unsteady breath. "How do I know that you won't fuck me over?"
The look of offense was enough of a gauge on her feelings about my question. Her teeth bared, her pupils flashing a vivid scarlet. "Besides the fact that I'm well over five hundred years old and I've never broken a promise to another mare?" Her eyes burned into me as I shrugged, unwilling to even give her the satisfaction of seeing my shock at her ages. Her shoulders rolled, obviously agitated. "I'm a keeper of the viloplats." Her head bobbed in the direction of the great tree, a low humming starting at the word. A dozen eyes glowed from the depths of the branches, an answer to her voice. "My word is bound to this place. I, Randi, will uphold and honor your sacrifice. With my name, I pledge myself to you on these sacred grounds, returning your bloodshed with my own. Bring the maenad to viloplats and we shall honor any request that you have."
The ground shook beneath me, my eyes following the lithe form of Randi as she stood, her hands going up to the small, gold crown in her hair. A low hissing filled the air like a nest of snakes waking, those eyes burning through the darkness.
She suddenly seemed much larger than I was, her ebony skin glimmering with the droplets of moonlight from above. Her eyes were wide, milky voids as she leaned over me, the weight of that little crown seeming almost crushing as she gently placed it into the wild mess of my hair. Her eyes bore into mine, swirling with distorted colors as she leaned a little closer, her breath hot against my cheek.
"This is my token, Runa Nótt Elska." I shivered, sudden weight making my muscles quiver in fatigue. "You will wear it until we meet next."
Slowly, she leaned back, her gave assessing as I tried to grab ahold of my surroundings. Everything seemed to be shifting, turning as if my whole world had found a new axis point. Blinking, I tried to push down the rush of panic.
"A word to the wise, little one," she suddenly murmured and I winced, trying to focus on her even as the edges of my vision went fuzzy. "The maenads have been known to play mind games. Don't let her get inside your head. If you lead her back to this place, I'll have to kill you."
Please review. I got a lot of engagement last chapter (even if it was open hatred of my Godric/OC addition lol) and I would really like to see that for something positive in this chapter.
