Bloodbound Read online

  Bloodbound

  Ramy Vance

  S. W. Clarke

  Contents

  Bonus Content

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Bonus Content

  Fatebound Series © Copyright > Ramy Vance

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

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  Chapter 1

  Las Vegas—the heart of fantasyland. The city was at once more lively and more terrifying than any place I’d been. And after five hundred years of immortality and a recent escape from a secret underground army facility, that was saying a lot.

  But at least we were free. For now.

  I shielded my eyes from the kaleidoscope of colors outside the car’s backseat window. “How can anyone live here?”

  “It’s the strip, Isa,” Justin said beside me. “People love it.”

  I stared at my boyfriend. “Love this?”

  “I love this!” Hercules boomed out the other backseat window, slapping one hand on the side of the car. He had rolled it down and leaned his head fully out. His brown curls whipped so gently he might have been in a photoshoot.

  “Did you see that?” Cupid pointed out the window of the Corolla. “A guy in a Make Earth Ours Again hat. The bigotry is spreading.”

  “Make Earth Ours Again?” I repeated. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  The little demigod spun to me, his blue eyes twinkling beneath his blond hair. “MEOA, for short. They’re the vilest of the vile, and they hate Others. They think the Earth belongs to humans … and only humans. They have a point.”

  I looked at Cupid in shock. “You agree with them? I mean, you’re an Other.”

  Cupid shrugged. “This was their world first. We kind of were forced on them. I get why they’re frustrated. I don’t agree with them and hope that one day we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but I get it.”

  “No blind hatred, huh?” I winked at him. “You’re all love.”

  “Love is understanding the other. The better I understand them, the better I can show them who I am and the faster we can all get to kumbayaing.”

  “Huh.” I was impressed by the little cherub.

  Hercules ducked his head back inside. “I’ve noticed a preponderance of men in red hats in this city. What does it signify?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. It wasn’t that the demigod listened selectively so much as he seemed overwhelmed by all the newness of the modern world. He had only been in it for a few months, after all.

  Cupid groaned. “Herc buddy, if you pass one on the street, give them a good wallop for me.”

  “I’d be careful about that,” Justin whispered to him. “He’s—”

  Hercules had already leaned back out the window as we passed another group of hat-wearers. “STEP TOO CLOSE AND I’LL WALLOP YOU!”

  “No violence, please,” I called out. “They haven’t done anything to us.”

  Hercules slapped the side of the car again. “I did not need to understand the hydra to know its evil, just like I also need not understand these mongrels to know they’re evil.”

  “Please stop hitting my car,” said Sara, the human who’d given us a lift from the gas station in the middle of nowhere. She’d been giving us increasingly dubious looks in the rearview mirror the longer we’d ridden in the car. I didn’t blame her; Hercules and Cupid together could be a bit … overwhelming.

  Justin yanked Hercules back inside. “There’s a bunch of them walking around. Is there some sort of rally going on?”

  “Yep,” Sara said. “Biggest rally of the year is happening this week in Vegas.”

  “This week?” Justin, Cupid and I said in unison.

  Hercules growled out the window at another group of MEOA supporters. They stopped and stared after us as we slowed and Sara put on her turn signal.

  “We’re here,” she said with what sounded like relief. No doubt she regretted agreeing to give us a lift to Vegas, especially after Hercules and Cupid arm wrestled on the center console a half-hour in. “This place is fancy.”

  “Holy Hera!” Cupid said as we rolled up to the hotel.

  “Do not speak that name,” Hercules growled. He really, really hated the goddess Hera. Which made sense, considering she had tried about a hundred times to kill him back in antiquity.

  Cupid lowered his eyes with regret before looking out the window again. “Sorry, big guy.” He pointed at the hotel. “We’re staying here?”

  I swallowed, staring at the hotel through the window as Sara pulled us into the driveway. “We’ll see about that.”

  Five minutes later, we stepped onto the sidewalk, all our faces angling up, up, up. I had to squint against the lights, swivel my head left and right to take in the expanse of it.

  The Bellagio.

  This was where the resistance had sent us?

  I had promised Sara that we would put her up here for the night in exchange for bringing us to Vegas, but I didn’t even know if we could cover half a night.

  Hell, looking at the four of us—fresh from a fight with a giant and a World Army assassin in the middle of the Nevada desert—I didn’t even know if they’d let us into the lobby. We looked like we’d been to Burning Man and then spent forty days and forty nights wandering through the desert.

  But we had nowhere else to go.

  According to the note the head of the NYC resistance had left me on the train, I needed to find my sister, Ananda, who worked here. She was our only and best hope. Of course, we’d also had a … fraught relationship. But maybe four years of mortality had changed that. Maybe.

  Justin stepped up to my side. “Just walk in
like you own the place.”

  My eyes met his, and I wondered how he so often sensed exactly what I was feeling. He was my boyfriend, but at some point he had also become the one person who never left my side. My friend. Ordinarily I didn’t mix lust and friendship—we encantado believed in a separation of the two, to avoid dullness and familiarity with our lovers—but with Justin, that seemed impossible not to do.

  We had been on the run together for six months. And despite everything that had happened between me, him and Hercules, that bonded two people. Bonded us.

  A smile touched my lips. “That I can do.”

  “Ooo, time for a little encantado glamor,” Cupid whispered to Hercules.

  “She’s never without glamor,” Hercules murmured as we started through the doors into the Bellagio’s lobby.

  My heart squeezed, and I straightened; GoneGodDamn Hercules, always with the right words on his tongue. It was almost like he was a demigod. It was almost like he had charmed a thousand women.

  Justin and I passed inside, Hercules and Cupid and Sara following behind. We came in to a chorus of chains dragging across the tile—Hercules’s manacles, still enclosing his wrists from when he’d been held captive at the World Army’s facility that morning.

  And the army was still coming for us. In six months they hadn’t stopped coming for us, which meant we needed to find Ananda sooner rather than later. After my face had appeared on TV as a suspected arsonist back in New York, I didn’t even like being in public places anymore.

  We stood beneath an enormous ceiling sculpture, which sent a hundred different wisps of colors beaming down on us. It was gorgeous, and befitting a hotel this fancy. Except no one was looking at the ceiling. I pretended every concierge and guest in the lobby wasn’t staring at our group, that we weren’t the biggest spectacle in this lobby.

  Or, at least, not one worthy of being escorted out by security.

  We approached a receptionist who looked overwhelmed, her eyes flitting between all of us. Every time she looked up at Hercules, her eyes rolled halfway into her head to see his face. She cleared her throat. “May I help you?”

  I put my hands on the counter, leaned forward. “I’m looking for Ananda.”

  She blinked. “Ananda?”

  “A female.” How to describe my sister? She could look like anyone. I leaned closer. “A young woman who works here, maybe?”

  The receptionist’s expression still maintained its professionalism, but I saw the dubious droop of her mouth. “We have many women who work here. I’m sorry, I don’t know an Ananda.”

  A flutter of worry started in my chest. “Is there anyone whose name starts with the letter A?”

  “We have many employees whose names start with the letter A.” I sensed the receptionist was being purposefully obtuse, maybe trying to get us to turn back around and drag our chains and dust back the way we’d come. Every guest in the lobby was gawking at us, after all. We were kind of an eyesore.

  “All right,” I said slowly, “I think you’re not telling me the truth. I think there is an Ananda working here, and you know who I’m talking about.”

  The receptionist’s eyes hardened at once, and I realized I wasn’t accomplishing much. “Listen, lady,” I began. When her eyes hardened even more, I knew I was digging myself farther in.

  Hercules set a hand on my back and leaned in to whisper, “Is your womanly cycle blooming forth?”

  I flared on the demigod. “I don’t get PMS,” I growled with as much control as I was capable of, “because I don’t get GoneGodDamn periods.”

  But I might be pregnant, I thought, resisting setting one hand over my belly. It seemed like the most absurd thing in the world, but Serena Russo’s words hadn’t stopped running through my mind all day. “Soon we shall share the burden of motherhood.”

  Serena Russo was an evil bitch, but she wasn’t a liar.

  “For someone not blessed with the mortal burden of womanhood,” Hercules remarked to Cupid, “you’d think she’d be more chipper.”

  I sighed. I had promised Sara I would put her up here for the night. I had to not get us kicked out of here. “I’m sorry, I’m just tired,” I said to the receptionist. “How much is your cheapest room for tonight?”

  I sensed the receptionist’s relief as we crossed back into the realm of what was normal, what she had been trained for. “Let me look that up for you.” Her pretty pink fingernail tapped the mouse button. “We do have a room with two double beds available on the second floor.”

  “How much?”

  “$1,498.”

  Nausea rose in me. “Any others?”

  She clicked again. “We have a penthouse suite.”

  Cupid flitted up by my side. “How much?”

  “$2,998.”

  “Do you always knock two bucks off the top?” I said before I could stop myself. It wasn’t just the prices—it was that we were alone. Completely alone. Even Roger, the head of the resistance in NYC who’d given me the tip about Ananda and the Bellagio, was dead. Another casualty of the World Army.

  Hercules stepped forward, and Justin and I parted for him like a wave. It wasn’t even conscious—he was just that kind of demigod. “Good evening,” he said. His dimples appeared, and even though he was dragging GoneGodDamn chains behind him and he was matted with sweat and a little blood, I knew that receptionist was done for.

  I saw it in the blush rising up the length of her neck.

  Hercules leaned forward. “What’s your name?”

  “Oh boy,” Cupid groaned.

  ↔

  Five minutes later, we had a room. But we weren’t even the ones staying in it. Sara was.

  “Thank you for getting us here,” I said to Sara as we stood in the middle of the lobby. “It means more than you know.”

  “Oh, you bet.” Her eyes had gone all glittery and wide ever since we’d entered the city. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one.

  “We are in your debt,” Hercules declared, lifting her hand and setting a kiss to the back of it.

  I eyed Hercules. “I think we’ve paid most of that debt off.”

  Sara’s eyes flicked to what I held in my hand. “Can I uh …”

  “Oh!” I extended the $1,098 room key out to her. “Of course.” Hercules had gotten $400 knocked off the bill, which still made it the most expensive single purchase I’d made in my entire lifetime—after my college education.

  She took hold of the other end of the key, and the tiniest little tug-of-war took place in the lobby before I acquiesced.

  “Thanks,” she said quickly.

  As she disappeared toward the elevator bay, Hercules started after her.

  Cupid flew in front of him and pushed Hercules back. Well, I should say he tried to—it was more like he put his hands on Hercules’s bare chest and floated backward as the demigod strode forward. “Hold up there, big guy.”

  “Hercules,” Justin said, “we need to stay together.”

  Hercules stopped, a sigh echoing through the lobby. His entire body seemed to wither. He blew a kiss to Sara, who looked disappointed as she stepped into the elevator. When he walked back to us, his great arms folded together. “Why was I brought back to this world, if not to partake in the spice of life?”

  “To complete your undone labors?” I offered. As an encantado, I wasn’t even jealous if he wanted to have an evening of fun. But Justin was right: we needed to stay together. “You know, avenging a great wrong and all that.”

  He waved a hand through the air. “What good is avenging great wrongs if you don’t also bring about great rights?”

  Justin and I exchanged a confused glance.

  “And what rights are those?” I asked.

  “The rights of ultimate pleasure.”

  “He’s talking about making whoopee,” Cupid chimed in. “And implying that he’s excellent at it.”

  “Legendary, actually,” Herc said.

  I groaned. “Thanks for the clarification.” Retrea
ting to one of the plush couches, my hand slid over my belly. Was that what Serena had seen when she’d walked through the portal in the garden and seen into the future? Me, pregnant? But such a thing wasn’t even possible—Others were infertile, all of us. We had the parts, they just didn’t do anything since the gods had left.

  Heck, I didn’t even have one of the necessary components to an actual pregnancy—sperm. Those little guys still had to …

  My thoughts trailed into silence. That night when I’d been shot with Cupid’s arrow, I had slept with someone. Maybe it was Justin, maybe it was Hercules. Maybe it was both. The point was, I had slept with someone.

  Maybe I did have all the components inside me.

  But what would have made them work? After four years of nothing, why would I, an Other, become pregnant?

  The bottom line was: I needed to find a pregnancy test, stat. But the little shop in the lobby was closed, we were car-less, and I still hadn’t found my sister.

  When I sat and set my face in my hands, I felt the cushion depress next to me. I knew exactly who it was. “Are you all right?” Justin asked.

  My hand slipped quickly off my belly. “Not in any sense of the word, no.”

  “What about in the we’re-not-dead sense of the word?”

  He was right. But right now I resented his rightness. “Oh, don’t start making me grateful for things. I just spent $1,000 on a room with two double beds, and I don’t even get to sleep in one.”

  Hercules and Cupid sat on the couch facing ours. Cupid picked up a book on garden topiaries and opened it on his lap. He looked like a toddler reading a picture book.