A Tithe of Blood and Ashes

  They descended on us just as they had the night before and the night before that. Nicholas was a pale, sharp blade, cutting through the infestation. Even weakened by his blood loss, he was fierce. I had stakes on my belt and in by boots and up my sleeve, and a miniature crossbow. I could only hope it would be enough.

  While we fought the feral undead, Rosa approached the fire and the stone, carefully carrying her own hollowed egg in her hand. We couldn’t do anything to stop her, there were just too many Hel-Blar between us. Nicholas and I were back to back, circling like a spinning top.

  “Rosa, stop!” Samuel came out of nowhere, staking a Hel-Blar even as he slid to a stop next to her. I stared at them.

  “He’s your brother?” I asked, momentarily distracted.

  “I didn’t know she’d do this when I brought you home to meet her,” he said apologetically. “I tried to call and warn you.”

  “And we figured I could get here quicker to do the spell,” Nicholas added with a roundhouse kick to a Hel-Blar. “Which might have worked if you weren’t so dammed efficient,” he added drily.

  “And she’d have staked you when she got here and you’d be dead,” I pointed out.

  “Lucy, on your left!” Samuel interjected.

  I spun, stake ejecting from under my sleeve. The Hel-Blar crumbled as it reached for me, hissing. “I’m kicking both your asses later.”

  “You’re welcome,” Samuel muttered.

  Finally, finally, the Hel-Blar we’re gone. Even the blood dripping from the trees wouldn’t entice them past the stink of the dead ash scattered over the snow. It was a new moon, as required by the spell, so the sky was full of stars and ice but no moonlight. Still, I’d done my research. The new moon technically set at sundown. There wasn’t any time to waste. We might already be too late.

  Nicholas prowled towards Rosa, looking just as deadly as he had when facing down half a dozen feral vampires. When he reached the fire, it shot up into a column, the sudden light searing the mountain side, the standing stone, his fangs. Rosa threw water from a canteen. When it landed, it formed into icicles, spearing up out of the ground. Nicholas dodged out of the way, the ice glittering and sharp as stakes.

  “Don’t,” Rosa said. “I might not know how to fight, but I know magic.” The icicles shone brighter, like sunlight. Nicholas raised a hand to protect his eyes. His cheekbones were angry and raw with the burn. “Holy water,” Rosa explained. “The kind that works against vampires.”

  I froze. “Rosa, just take the shield. I don’t care. Leave him be.”

  “Hell no,” Nicholas hissed, pushing against the pain. The icicles tilted at him like jousting lances.

  Samuel skirted the ice, confident his sister wouldn’t hurt him. Fury simmered in his voice. “Rosa, enough.”

  “Samuel, go home,” she said. “I need to keep you safe. It’s my job.”

  “For God’s sake, I’m eighteen years old and I can kill monsters four different ways with one hand tied behind my back alone.”

  “That’s exactly why!” she insisted.

  “I’m not letting you shield me by killing someone else.”

  “I’m not going to kill her. Not if she stays out of my way.”

  “But not having the shield might,” he said quietly. “You don’t know her.”

  “Hey,” I felt obliged to say, even though, technically he might just possibly be a little bit right. Maybe.

  Samuel , never much for talking, finally made the decision for her. He slapped her arm so that the egg flew out of her palm. He caught it, crushing it in his fist.

  But Rosa had smashed Nicholas’s egg as well, and now mine was broken in my pocket. There definitely wasn’t enough time to drive the half hour back to my house to get another one.

  Not to mention that if I didn’t find a way to work the shield spell, the Hel-Blar would keep coming after me, night after night. I could only survive that for so long. And eventually, they’d kill someone I love just for being near me. Like my pacifist parents who were ill-equipped to deal with my hobbies, especially when they came in the form of Hel-Blar.

  Nicholas and I stared at each other, the spell falling apart before it had even begun.

  “Wait!” I yelled suddenly. He only blinked, accustomed to my outbursts, as I tackled my knapsack. “I brought all the chocolate in the house!” I explained, rummaging frantically through stakes, a glue gun, a novel, and left over candy canes. “As a sacrifice,” I continued. Nicholas was the only one who didn’t look surprised.

  “You offer what you treasure most,” he said, understanding my logic.

  “Exactly. But she’s not getting you, so next best thing,”

  I pulled out a bag of all the organic dark chocolate, and raw cacao nibs, I’d found in the kitchen pantry, and more importantly, proper sugar-filled cheap-chocolate I hid in my dorm room. I pulled out a foil-wrapped oval, grinning. “Easter chocolate always goes on sale really early,” I said, tearing the foil off with my teeth to reveal a chocolate egg the size of my fist.

  “You’re kinda awesome,” Nicholas grinned back.

  I carefully pulled the chocolate egg in half and used a page out of a school notebook to scrawl my name on. Rolled into a tiny scroll, it fit inside perfectly. I placed it between the crystal clusters, shaped like the inside of a spiky stone egg. The smoke turned sweet and sugary. A stone egg sheltering a fragile egg, that was the metaphor of the spell. The meteorite was already tucked between the two crystals, calling to the Cailleach.

  I stepped back, Nicholas beside me. I glanced around so wildly my eyeballs started to hurt.

  “Did it work?” I wondered when nothing much happened. The cold stayed cold, the mountain crouched all mountain-like. I stomped my feet to keep my toes from freezing so thoroughly they fell off altogether.

  “She’s coming,” Nicholas finally whispered, his pale icy pupils widening.

  “She’s here,” a voice like the wind off the mountain corrected him.

  The smoke curling off the dying fire wreathed an old woman who was both as tall as the standing stone and as tall as the mountain. She wore a thin veil that could have been made of starlight and moonlight. It did nothing to conceal her blue-ish pallor and the knife-glint of her eyes. Her cloak was stone-grey and there was a heavy black iron hammer tucked into her belt. I could easily imagine it crushing unsuspecting skulls.

  Black Annis.

  I leapt in front of Nicholas. There were vampire ashes everywhere and he’d already offered his blood, but what if she wanted more? “You can’t have him.”

  The earth trembled faintly beneath us. Snow and rocks shivered down the mountain, threatening an avalanche.

  That’s me. Ordering goddesses around. I’m smart like that.

  “Please?” I added.

  “Lucy,” she said. “My little Lucy.”

  I’d faced down Lady Natasha and Viola, Solange’s possessing spirit, but this old woman with her hunched shoulders made me shiver right down to my spine. “You remember me?” I croaked.

  She smiled. It wasn’t comforting.

  “You are one of my children,” she said.

  I bit my tongue hard, before I could ask her if I was one of the children she planned on eating.

  “I’m here to Tithe.” I elbowed Nicholas in the sternum as hard as I could when he opened his mouth. “To renew the shield spell.”

  She sighed and snow fell off the pines trees as the boughs drooped. “Another tithe of blood and ashes,” she said. “That one already offered his blood,” she motioned to Nicholas. “And your recent blood moon battles have stained my cloak. ” She twitched it, looking displeased. There were Hel-Blar ashes at her feet.

  “My parents gave you the possibility of future children,” I said quietly, holding Nicholas’s hand so tightly that if he’d been human I might have cracked his knucklebones. “What do you want from me, if not blood and chocolate?”

  “I have ever been the Cailleach, but you would have the Black Annis, who eats childr
en and sucks their bones dry. I didn’t take your parents’ future children,” she added. “They were given to me, without my consultation. The spell was cast before I was summoned.”

  I didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

  “They assumed, but you at least, have asked directly. You are fierce and brave enough to be my daughter.”

  I swallowed thickly, waiting for her to continue. What if she asked for something I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give? How did you tell a goddess ‘thanks but no thanks’? I hadn’t exactly thought that far ahead.

  “I prefer whiskey,” she cackled.

  I blinked, wondering if I’d heard wrong. Could old lady goddesses go senile? “Um, that’s it? Whiskey?” I’d anticipated something more. Something gross, to be honest.

  “On every new moon, poured over a grey stone. For as long as you expect the shield to hold, for as long as you call these mountains home.”

  “Deal,” I said, quickly before she changed her mind.

  “Deal,” Nicholas agreed. “You’ll have twice the whiskey.”

  The Cailleach began to fade, turning to snow and wind and ice.

  “Wait,” Rosa said frantically, shoving closer. “Wait, we need another shield.”

  “You can summon Black Annis,” the old woman smiled, her teeth suddenly smeared with blood. They were the last to vanish. “If you dare.”

  And then the Hel-Blar were back.

  This time they were drawn to the blood Rosa had tossed everywhere, not to me.

  I didn’t know that at first. Adrenaline sparked through me, bright as fire.

  Nicholas paused. “Um, Lucy?”

  I blinked away the tiny blue fireflies floating in front of my eyes. Adrenaline had never done that to me before “Yeah?”

  “You’re kinda going invisible.”

  The lights exploded into fireworks when I looked down.

  “I can sort of see your silhouette,” he said. “But only if I focus really hard,” he continued. He turned away to stake a Hel-Blar.

  Another wave of adrenaline crashed against my bones and breath. The fireworks intensified. “Is this the shield spell?” I murmured. “I go invisible when I’m scared now.”

  The stars were bright and curious as cat eyes overhead, but they had no answers. Neither did the standing stone or the mountain. The Winter Hag didn’t show her blue face to offer any convenient explanations. As the anxiety faded, so did the flicker of tiny lights. I was sharply delineated against the snow once again. I was a little lightheaded.

  I didn’t just go invisible.

  I drooped like a wilting tulip. My eyes were open, tracking the fight, the ashes, the grinding of fangs. I could see it all, even as it loomed over me, but I couldn’t react. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could only lie there invisible, purportedly safe, but more vulnerable than I’d ever been in my life. Someone’s boot slammed into the snow right by my face. They couldn’t see me either. It wasn’t just the Hel-Blar. I fought against it until a scream built in my lungs, but even it wasn’t released.

  I wanted to fight but I could only lie there.

  When the last Hel-Blar was finally dispatched, I felt myself shimmer back into view. I choked on the scream and my own breath.

  It was just like I’d told my parents.

  Magic always has a price.

  ***

  It had been a full month since the night of the shield spell.

  I hadn’t seen Hel-Blar except on patrol when I actively sought them out. It was the new moon again and even though I could have poured the promised whiskey on a stone in our garden, which my parents were doing right now, it seemed more appropriate to return to the standing stone.

  I wasn’t surprised to find Nicholas by a little fire he’d started for me. He didn’t need it, of course, even with the frigid crunch of ice falling from the bare branches all around us. I was wearing every sweater I owned.

  “Are you ready?” He asked, handing me a bottle. “Bruno sent this. He said it’s the best whiskey in Scotland.”

  “It’s weird to have a problem that isn’t caused by vampires,” I teased him.

  “Give us time,” he smiled back. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”

  “You always do,” I agreed.

  A crack of a branch sent adrenaline soaring through me. I reached for a stake. Maybe the shield hadn’t worked as well as we thought. Maybe the Hel-Blar had just been waiting to descend as an army. Blue lights shimmered and sparked around me.

  “It’s only my brothers,” Nicholas said softly.

  I took a deep breath, willing the adrenaline to peter out. Mom had finally got her wish: I had to take up meditation. If I got scared, I went invisible, slipping into that fugue state that was far more terrifying than any vampire attack.

  “Did you just disappear?” Logan asked, crossing out of the woods.

  “Only a little.”

  “Get bitten by a radioactive spider lately, kid?” Duncan asked.

  “That’s Spiderman,” Connor said.

  “I’m Invisible Girl,” I added. “Ms. Shield? I’ll work on it.” Hunter and I could roam the streets like sister superheroes.

  “I’ll get you a cape,” Logan hugged me with a grin.

  “And a theme song,” I said, concentrating on my breathing. “I totally need my own theme song.” I stared at my hand, hoping it wouldn’t vanish. It stayed just an ordinary hand. It took a lot to scare me when I was with all seven Drake brothers.

  “You’re all here,” I said, more touched than I’d like to admit when I realized there were seven ridiculously handsome brothers circled around me. “It’s like I have my very own vampire army,” I said. Quinn winked at me. “Or my own vampire boy band,” I amended.

  Duncan snorted. “If you ever want your car to run you will never say that again.”

  I grinned. He was the only one who was able to coax life out of my car’s pathetic engine. “Don’t worry, you’d be the rebel.”

  “Just pour, Invisible Girl.”

  I tipped the whiskey bottle over the standing stone. The whip of alcohol burned my nose.

  Nicholas, Logan, Quinn, Connor, Duncan, Marcus, and Sebastian all followed suit. I coughed. “Magic smells like a frat house.”

  “You’re thinking of beer,” Quinn corrected me.

  “Hanging out at frat houses, are you?”

  “I’ve been to a sorority house or two,” he said primly.

  “In Violet Hill?”

  “They’re the real secret society of the Violet Hill. Other towns have conspiracy nuts and we have cheerleaders.” He kissed my forehead. “Don’t tell Hunter.”

  I pulled his hair, knowing he was kidding. “Like she doesn’t already know.”

  “Speaking of whom, I have a date. See ya.”

  The brothers all drifted away until it was just me and Nicholas and the fire and the stars. His arms slid around me, tugging me closer. “Don’t disappear on me.”

  “On you? Never.”

  His lips were cool, like the best ice cream on the hottest summer day. The kiss was long and dark and deep. It consumed us until I was tingling all over and wishing I could lose a few of my confining sweaters. Snow fell lightly, melting into prisms on my eyelashes. Nicholas kept kissing me, dragging his mouth across my throat until my skin hummed. My tongue darted out to slide along his in the most fun kind of revenge.

  We finally pulled apart when the wind blew the fire into coals.

  There was a strange sound in the darkness, reminding us that this was Violet Hill.

  Nicholas’s nostrils flared. “I don’t think that’s a Hel-Blar,” he said tightly. “But it’s definitely unfriendly.”

  Blue fireflies danced around me as my edges blurred out like I was being erased. I made my breaths even and slow until they faded. The cure was worse than the medicine. I’d rather fight exposed, than not at all.

  I grinned at Nicholas, a stake in each hand. “Here we go again.”

  About the Author


  Alyxandra Harvey lives in a stone Victorian house in Ontario, Canada with a few resident ghosts who are allowed to stay as long as they keep company manners. She loves medieval dresses, used to be able to recite all of The Lady of Shalott by Tennyson, and has been accused, more than once, of being born in the wrong century. She believes this to be mostly true except for the fact that she really likes running water, women’s rights, and ice cream.

  Aside from the ghosts, she also lives with husband and their dogs. She likes vanilla tea, tattoos and books.

  Alyxandra can be found on the web at www.alyxandraharvey.com

  Fun Facts

  - Favorite food - Gingerbread! I especially like Gingerbread People so I can bite their heads off!

  - Favorite movies: Pride and Prejudice, The Mummy, Lost in Austen, Harry Potters...

  - Favorite time to write - Lately I’ve been writing longhand in a notebook at night. There's something about the quiet and the sleepy dogs all around.

  - Hearts at Stake was nominated and won the award for the Ontario Library Association's White Pine Award, and Haunting Violet was the Honourary Book for the OLA Red Pine Award.

  - Favorite book of all time -The Wood Wife by Terri Windling. I’ve read half a dozen times! I also adore Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

  Also by Alyxandra Harvey:

  The Drake Chronicles:

  Hearts at Stake (Book 1)

  Blood Feud (Book 2)

  Out for Blood (Book 3)

  Bleeding Hearts (Book 4)

  Blood Moon (Book 5)

  Blood Prophecy (Book 6)

  A Killer First Date, Corsets and Crossbows (novella)

  Haunting Violet

  Stolen Away

  A Breath of Frost (Lovegrove Legacy #1)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.