Read Online Blood of the Wicked by Karina Cooper - Free Book Online Page B

she couldn’t see it. Her eyes had been the first to go.
    But she had been beautiful, and the charming gold promise ring at her right hand said someone else had once thought so, too.
    He checked his watch. It was nearly noon, not that the lack of light down here would ever have told him that.
    “I—” The word gurgled deep in her chest.
    He knelt in the small circle of light. What little carpet remained after the degradation of time squelched. Blood oozed into the fabric over his knees, sticky and cold.
    Silk whispered, butterfly soft. Even its infinitesimal weight was too much for her shattered arms to move. “I wish—” She choked, coughed. Droplets sprayed from her cracked lips, and he turned his head as they splattered like warm rain against his cheek.
    “Shhh,” he whispered gently, and touched her cheek with his bare fingers. They came away wet, tingling. “Easy, Delia. It’s almost over.”
    The ruined shape of her face twisted, and as she wheezed, he realized she was trying to laugh. He caught her cheeks between both hands and held her still.
    Blood gathered like a well inside her open mouth, a pool of bloody words. She hacked out a foaming cough, sucked in a breath, and choked again instead.
    He leaned over, released her wrists from the restraints that held her, and brought her hands to his chest. Her fingers splayed, seeking. He didn’t cringe beneath the patterns of blood she left behind on his gray shirt.
    “Promise me,” she whispered, so faint that he had to concentrate to make out her words. “Promise me.”
    His grip tightened. He knew what she asked. He knew what he’d already promised. Because it cost him nothing, because it had cost him nothing to promise a dying prostitute even before she’d undergone the ritual, he said it again. “I promise.”
    For a brief, silent moment, as the tortured holes where her eyes had been turned upward to the ruined ceiling, she rested peacefully.
    Then her body spasmed. Her fingers curved like talons into his chest. He seized her wrists, but it wasn’t to push her away. He held her, hung on to the delicate bones of each hand, kept her close, as he said he would.
    Kept her close, and squeezed every last drop of latent power from the dying shell of her body.
    Another spasm seized her muscles, another searching, desperate grasp. Pain burned a line into his neck. One cord snapped, the beads of one of a handful of his charms clattered to the thinned carpet in a singing rain of metal, but it was she he watched as the last breath rattled thickly in her lungs.
    He whispered in her ear, even as the life seeped from her skin like water from a ragged sack.
    Latent magic. Unfulfilled potential. It would never be as sweet, as strong, as true power, but heart’s blood was something else entirely. He claimed it. Gathered it. Pulled it from her body with a last, whisper-soft brush of his lips against her ruined mouth.
    When she was truly dead, he tipped his bloody face to gauge his watch once more. Three hours fifty-three minutes. He was late. Not enough to send out a search party, but enough to garner curiosity. He was never late.
    Now he’d skewed the pattern.
    Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. He stretched the joints that ached from staying still for so long, rolled the kinks from his neck and shoulders.
    She lay in the center of a dark, gelatinous stain. In his visual memory, it was red, but the hours had aged it to brown and black. He turned, snapped closed the glow rod case, and pocketed the rechargeable device.
    “Rest in peace, Delia,” he murmured. “Finally.”
    Each step squelched, gummy and clinging. The wreckage of the shattered apartment was the only tomb she’d get. But each breath of foul, stale air thrummed through his charged body, a crackling whip of stolen energy.
    He pulled the door shut behind him, wedged it tightly. Let no one seek shelter in this damned, cursed place. Let no one find her, twisted and rotting. Especially the sister who