Sun Cursed (Shades of Blood Book 1) Read online

  SUN CURSED

  Shades of Blood Book One

  Megan Blackwood

  Copyright © 2019 Megan Blackwood

  All rights reserved.

  www.meganblackwood.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder except for brief passages quoted by reviewers or in connection with critical analysis.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover art by Book Covers and Designs by Juan

  Also By Megan Blackwood

  Shades of Blood Series

  Sun Cursed

  Night Blessed

  Shadow Redeemed

  Table of Contents

  She Begins

  One: Duty Calls

  Two: Clouded Garnets

  Three: A Dance of Blood and Shadow

  Four: Bullets and Bloodstains

  Five: Crests Unbroken

  Six: Mortal Law

  Seven: Lifting the Veil

  Eight: Sweet Light

  Nine: Ghost Words

  Ten: The Road Ahead

  Eleven: One More Crypt

  Twelve: Not Close Enough

  Thirteen: Screams in the Dark

  Fourteen: No Love Lost

  Fifteen: Silver and Gold

  Sixteen: Trapped in Metal

  Seventeen: Cast the Second Stone

  Eighteen: Moonlight

  Nineteen: Memories in Snow and Ink

  Twenty: Mist in the Trees

  Twenty-One: Fell Shadows

  Twenty-Two: Friendly Flames

  Twenty-Three: Iron Horse

  Twenty-Four: The Stink of Magic

  Twenty-Five: Strange Light

  Twenty-Six: Power Forgotten

  Twenty-Seven: Night Screams

  Twenty-Eight: The Cottage Witch

  Twenty-Nine: The First Ripples

  Thirty: Black Clouds Rising

  Thirty-One: A Rising Tide

  Thirty-Two: Encore

  Thirty-Three: Her Body

  Thirty-Four: Tyranny of Doors

  Thirty-Five: Broken Skies

  Thirty-Six: The Big Guns

  Thirty-Seven: Smoke

  Thirty-Eight: Cold Promises

  Thirty-Nine: Two Monsters

  Forty: Silence and Scones

  Forty-One: Death From Above

  Forty-Two: The Jar

  Forty-Three: Hooked

  Forty-Four: Oubliette, Broken

  Forty-Five: A Thread to Pull

  Forty-Six: Trigger Discipline

  Forty-Seven: Time's Up

  A Spear of Silver

  She Begins

  When this world finally burns, my hand will be the one to put it out of its misery.

  My kind were forged in the womb of the world during the merging of the planes which birthed all life. We are one half of an eternal dichotomy: light and shadow, sun and moon. We walk the days eternal, drinking the essence of humanity to sustain ourselves throughout the eons. We do not kill. We do not take.

  Our kin are another matter.

  Born of shade as we were of light, they stalk the darkest alleys, the blackest hearts. They delight not in asking, but in persuading. Forcing, if it pleases them. They are the weight hanging from our wings. They anchor us to Earth. We raise them out of hell.

  Angel, demon. Vampire. These terms are mortal inventions. They do not describe us, not completely. As the ages tick by we, too, have lost the ability to describe the truth of ourselves. We know only that we live, chasing one another across the turning world. A ceaseless war on a never-ending pivot. We balance ourselves. We balance each other.

  I no longer remember the time of my making. To sleep, for us, is not to awaken into a new day, the time of unconsciousness a brief lapse between moments. No. For our kind, sleep is a quantum of atonement. Of penance. We sleep to forget.

  Sometimes, if we are very lucky, we sleep long enough that we do not remember why we went to sleep at all.

  For my crimes, I was meant to sleep longer than this. But the balance of the world is shifting. I can feel it, deep in my barrow. The night is rising. My kin are dying. And that will not stand.

  My name is Magdalene Shelley.

  And I am waking.

  One: Duty Calls

  I crawled out of a sewer into an alien world. This was my London. I knew it to be so, for the city that rebirthed me into the realm of the living dead is as familiar to me as my blood. Its soil smells like no other, its streets thump with a stuttered beat that mirrors my own long-dead heart. London is mine, and I am hers, though my mortal body was not born here.

  But I do not recognize her like this.

  False lights dot wide streets, burning with illumination but not flame. I cannot sense power in them; their source is something beyond my ken.

  I was born in 1750. I understand the way time can craft a place, speeding it towards a new face, a new ethos. But these centuries—for they must be centuries, even though I know I have awoken before my designated time—have accelerated the world in new and wonderful ways.

  The shadows aren't my friends—they're the purview of my nightwalker cousins—but I hid in them all the same, ignoring the burgeoning pressure in my chest. The grave dirt dripped from my fingertips. Though the oath of the sunstrider compelled me onward, I watched the people of London stream by my hiding spot. Despite my ancient leathers and moth-eaten silks, I wasn't the strangest creature on the streets.

  Mortal throngs pulsed up and down the sidewalks. They blinded me with their joy, their carefree nature. Women bared legs and throats and chests, fearing nothing but the cold. Men strode this way and that in the tightest trousers I'd ever seen.

  Some quarreled, yes. Humans were inconstant creatures, and occasional scuffles broke out in front of buildings swathed in flashing lights that stank of various ferments. Each and every mortal, no matter how base or fractious, shone through the night with a coal-ember of possibility. Their changeable nature, their quick whims and violent passions, drove the fulcrum of the world. Pushed beauty and hate and hope forward through the centuries.

  I drank in the sight of them, the sounds of them, their smells. I absorbed their words and their nuances, adjusted my mind to the way of these modern mortals. This was one of my many strengths as a sunstrider. Whatever time or place I awakened within, new phrases and customs came easily to me. My adjustment would take time to complete, but it would be swift enough not to raise too many eyebrows.

  A new ache, and not an unpleasant one, overwhelmed the lure of my oath. The changes to mortal customs had not overwhelmed the core of what they were. These brilliant, idiotic, stumbling, swaying, madcap beings made the snuffing of my mortal coil worth eternity. Their passions were why I had sworn my soul and my blood to humanity's defense.

  That oath demanded my obedience. Somewhere in the mess of humanity, darkness spread. Eroded the spark of light each mortal nurtured in their veins. Why I had awoken early was irrelevant. Though centuries in the oubliette fogged my mind, my body knew what it must do. What it had been re-forged to do. I was here, my sibling sunstriders were not. I knew what I was, what I had chosen to be. I was a weapon, humanity's sword. I was not meant to wait in the shadows while the world ticked by.

  And, after a century or so of dreamless sleep, I craved action.

  I shifted my blade—a mortuary sword—to my back, hiding the scabbard under the tight fabric of my leather stays, and stepped from my hiding place. The blade, though no trouble for my strength, was bas
ket-hilted and meant to be a cavalry sword. My moth-eaten clothes did a poor job of concealment. A few glances fluttered to me, but I ignored them as I pushed through the stream of foot traffic, down the road in the direction my inner compass tugged me.

  Ahead, a brick-faced building pulsed with heavy, loud beats. A glowing sign declared the place Club Garnet, and blood-red curtains draped the open double-doors. Crimson light splashed across the sidewalk in front of the building. I tensed, suspecting sorcery, but the lights of Garnet were just as mundane as the false lights lining the streets.

  A new trick of modernity. I adjusted my expectations for lights, wondering what other advances awaited me in this new London. Certainly the wardrobe was more interesting than during my time.

  Mortals choked the sidewalk, corralled in place by golden, velvet ropes. From the stink of nightwalker ghouls emanating from within, I suspected they had been hypnotized, and were starry-eyed cattle penned for slaughter, but they showed no obvious signs of enchantment. Whatever was happening in this place was mundane. These humans wanted to be here, all on their own.

  They whispered among themselves about getting 'into the club' with religious reverence. I didn't know how to handle that—human psychology had evaded me even when I shared their species—but I knew how to handle the stink of nightwalker beyond those doors.

  At the front of the line a man with a shaved head checked small paper cards the mortals handed him and waved them through the door. He had the lean build of a warrior that'd been too long on the march, stacked muscle revealed by little body fat. Heavy combat boots laced halfway up his calves, tight blue material encased his legs, and a simple black tunic had been tugged over his torso to keep those impressive arms bare. Jeans, muscle shirt, I connected the words I'd skimmed from the streets to the items he wore.

  Under other circumstances I would have found him attractive, but the faint whiff of nightwalker clouded him. He was a ghoul, or well on his way to becoming one.

  There wasn't a bicep in the world that could lure me to the nightwalkers, but he didn't know that. And I needed in that club.

  I let my gaze linger, knowing its drawing power, and sure enough he cocked his head, then swiveled to me like an arrow to a bull's eye. He gave me a double-take as I tipped my head down, letting a few loose strands of hair obscure the calling card of my molten gold eyes. His gaze swept me, cataloging me as I had him, and lingered awhile on the too-short hem of what was left of my chemise. That'd have to do.

  Hair covering one eye, I strode across the short distance between us, drawing a few derisive tuts from the women at the front of the line. Sir Handsome didn't care about them anymore, though. He'd caught a whiff of me, my ancient blood, and though confusion wrinkled his forehead, he cleared a hitch from his throat.

  "Haven't seen you around here before," he said.

  "I've been busy." I smiled, distending my fangs just enough so that he could see the flash of their tips. He twisted the paper he held between his fingers, staring hard at my exposed, golden-iris eye. I tensed my fingers, shifting a foot back to brace myself if I needed to draw my blade, but there was no recognition in his gaze. He hadn't seen anything like me before. Where were my kin? No nightwalker toy should be unable to recognize a sunstrider when one was staring them in the face.

  "Please," he said, and unhooked the velvet rope between me and the door. "Enjoy yourself."

  "I always do." I pinched his arm as I passed. Not just to flirt, but to check the flavor of the blood pumping through his veins. Quick with adrenaline and a hint of lust. A normal, human reaction. Nightwalker blood wasn't yet slowing down the thump of his heart. Sir Handsome could live to see another day.

  I wasn't so sure about the rest of Club Garnet's clientele.

  Two: Clouded Garnets

  The sensory overload of the club almost knocked me on my ass. The music I'd heard from the street bore into my skull, thrummed through the ground so intensely that it vibrated the soles of my feet. I pushed my hearing back, tuning out the heady thump, but not completely. The steady background rhythm was a useful baseline to measure any unusual sounds against.

  Lights speared through air tinged with smoke pumped from somewhere in the rafters, the source lost behind a sea of twisting red and grey glass teardrops. Bodies pulsed to the music, a throbbing mass of humanity streaked through with the reek of nightwalker. Much, much more nightwalker blood than human moved through this place. At the edge of my smudged memories, something familiar stirred. Something warm—a hay-like scent, decidedly mortal. Decidedly familiar. I lost the thread.

  My oath sang to me to set right the balance. Anticipation raced up my spine. I pushed that down. The sheer percentage of nightwalker ghouls in this room was unusual enough to warrant an investigation.

  I skirted the edge of the dance floor to a roped-off area of red leather couches surrounding low, black glass tables. Wary gazes tracked my every move as I strolled along their line, searching for the most important-looking ghoul to ply with questions.

  Raised above the others—typical princeling bullshit—a man with a lighter pallor than the rest reclined against a couch, surveying the dance floor as he sipped a glass of red wine. A blonde woman, very much human, curled against one side of him while another mortal sat to his left, her stake-like heeled shoes kicked up on the table. Two overly muscled men flanked him behind the couch.

  Ignoring the startled glances of the other table-loungers, I stepped over the rope and approached the man who-would-be-king's couch. He caught my eye and cocked his head, a faint motion of his fingers indicating to his guards that they should hold. At least he had some honor, to face me one-on-one.

  "Who are you?" I demanded.

  He chuckled, almost choking on a sip of wine, and looked me over once more, lingering on my unusual golden eyes. The woman curled against him sneered, but the other, the one with the staking shoes, tensed.

  "Brian Garnet," he said smoothly, composure regained as he swirled the wine glass between his fingers. "And this is, you may have noticed, my club. Who might you be?"

  "Who is your Master?"

  "I have none," he snapped.

  "Get rid of this freak, baby," the curled woman said, sliding her hand between the buttons of his shirt. "She looks like she crawled out of a dumpster." He swatted her away and set the glass on the table.

  "Does she really?" the other woman mused. I wondered if she was one of our mortal attachments, the Sun Guard. It would explain the shoes.

  "You're being awfully pushy," Brian said, "for a woman who hasn't introduced herself."

  I tossed my head to clear the hair from my eyes, revealing the full force of their flame-and-golden light. Brian frowned, leaning forward intently. There was no fear in him, only morbid curiosity.

  "My name is Magdalene Shelley," I said. The woman with the shoes paled.

  Brian smirked. "A bit old-fashioned."

  "Not when it was given to me."

  I let the tips of my fangs be seen, and he gasped—not in terror, but in admiration. The oath roared within me, demanding Brian Garnet's destruction. I should not be chatting with this petulant rat. I should spear him now, put him out of his misery and end his long spiral into darkness. He'd taken so much nightwalker blood that he was practically fully turned. But I had to know what was going on here to better fulfill my oath. I snapped my mouth shut, coiling my fingers into fists to keep them from sprouting claws.

  "You're one of them. A vampire." He was on his feet in an instant, the curled woman shoved aside. "Nobody warned me you would come by the club tonight. If I had known..." He trailed off, a strange mixture of fascination, horror, and lust swirling through the scents that his still very-human hormone system put out.

  Vampire. My thoughts tangled over the word. I knew it, of course. It was one of the many that dogged the heels of my people since our beginning, but in my time it had grown out of fashion. We sunstriders had made the difference between ourselves and the nightwalkers very, very clear.

&
nbsp; Nightwalkers were the thing of human nightmares.

  Sunstriders were the thing of nightwalker nightmares.

  And yet, here in this strange new London, my kind, it seemed, had been forgotten.

  Brian Garnet licked his lips and extended a hand to me. "Would you dance with me, Magdalene?"

  "Brian..." The woman's voice held a warning, but I had already taken his hand. Its heat pulsed through me, the proximity of even ghoul-tainted blood a tempting thing in my recently revived state. I would have to feed, and soon. But first... First I had a balance to set to rights.

  "I'd love to," I said, and pulled him away before his allies could protest.

  Three: A Dance of Blood and Shadow

  If you asked me to tell you who I was before I was turned, what mortal role and name Magdalene Shelley held, I would tell you such things did not matter. That a mere twenty years of moving beneath the sun as a mortal were irrelevant when measured against the centuries of my undeath.

  This is true, and it is also not. What we once were will always inform what we become. I, like all sunstriders, do not remember the specifics of my life before being turned. But my body remembers what it is to dance. That was why it had been so easy for me to pick up a blade.

  The music shifted to something slow and heavy, luring me toward the center of the dance floor so that I could be better nested in the press. Garnet followed without question, without hesitation, marking himself a greater fool than I had imagined. So close to the dancing throng, I did not need to touch them to confirm my suspicions. The stink of nightwalker swirled like smoke all around me, a heady perfume begging me to draw my blade and remind the world of what I was.

  But one does not survive centuries by giving in to impatience.

  He leaned close to me as I swayed to the strange music, letting the beat awaken my senses and warm my tired, stiff muscles. Nightwalker taint was not the only scent on the air. Human sweat, hints of herbs and spices and other things I couldn't name—fresh and floral, sharp and sugary. A woman spun past me, auburn hair tickling my arms, and with her traveled a waft of citrus sweetness laced in her own musk. I marked her; her tall, yellow boots and long, slender legs. The sheen of sweat upon her skin, and a redness to her lips that had nothing at all to do with blood.