Blood Song

  Blood Song

  Carmine Court Book 2

  Kara Sharpe

  Contents

  1. ELIJAH

  2. ELIJAH

  3. FINN

  4. ELIJAH

  5. FINN

  6. ELIJAH

  7. FINN

  8. ELIJAH

  9. FINN

  10. ELIJAH

  11. FINN

  12. ELIJAH

  13. FINN

  14. ELIJAH

  15. FINN

  16. ELIJAH

  17. FINN

  18. ELIJAH

  19. FINN

  20. ELIJAH

  21. FINN

  22. ELIJAH

  23. FINN

  24. ELIJAH

  25. FINN

  26. ELIJAH

  27. FINN

  28. ELIJAH

  29. FINN

  30. ELIJAH

  1

  ELIJAH

  The man in the YouTube thumbnail was arrestingly beautiful, all sharp cheekbones and black hair and dark intensity, and as the video began to play he seemed almost too bright and charismatic for the screen to contain him.

  His jawline sharp and dusted with stubble, and his eyes were a bewitching hazel, brows and lashes both as dramatically dark as the shade of his hair.

  “You’re pretty infamous for sharing wild details of your tour hook ups,” the interviewer said somewhere offscreen, the camera staying trained on the man’s face as if hypnotized. “Any new salacious gossip to share with us?”

  He offered a cocky grin. “Hmm, let’s see… I banged a vampire last night. That was pretty incredible.”

  The unseen interviewer made a bemused noise, clearly willing to go along with the joke and equally clearly having no idea what the rock star was playing at. “A vampire, huh? Vampires are fans of Crystal Pulse, then?”

  “How could they be anything but, when we’ve got a name like that? Actually, to be honest, I don’t know if he’s a fan of the band. We didn’t do a lot of talking.” A lewd wink.

  He had the kind of slim, muscled physique that tended to wiriness after middle age, but that day was still a long way off for this glittering star.

  Finn Oliver, guitarist for Crystal Pulse.

  Emelie closed the laptop with a snap, cutting off the YouTube video between one frame and the next, and glared at Elijah.

  “What?” he asked, giving her the most innocent look he could manage. “Why do you assume I had anything to do with this? And even if I did, which I’m not saying is the case, then what’s the harm? Also, did I mention that I had nothing to do with this?”

  “Well, first of all, I know he’s talking about you because I know your type,” she said coolly. “And this guy couldn’t be more an example of your type if he’d been specially grown in a lab for you.

  “And I also know because that interview’s from a week ago. It’s just the first one. He’s escalated ever since, and by yesterday he was talking about the vampire who bit him as ‘this tall dude in a cool leather jacket who was just the hottest guy you’ve ever seen; Gary Oldman and Robert Pattinson have nothing on him in the hot vampire stakes, his name’s Elijah and he’s incredible.’”

  “Still doesn’t sound all that conclusive to me,” Elijah replied, deadpan.

  Emelie didn’t blink as she stared at him, waiting for him to crack. It was kind of unnerving, which Elijah was sure was the whole point. Emelie was very good at giving people enough rope to hang themselves.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Elijah went on, the silence getting too much for him. She’d won again, of course. He felt mildly exasperated at himself for letting her get to him, but she always did sooner or later. That was why she was the Queen of the city’s vampires and he was the misbehaving brother who got scolded for sleeping with mouthy rock stars.

  Not that Elijah could bring himself to regret it. Finn was an incredible guitarist and an excellent lover, and it had been a great night all around. If the price for that kind of wild time was that he got a slap on the wrist for it now, that was a price he was willing to pay.

  “Rock stars say outlandish things in interviews all the time,” Elijah insisted, pressing on despite Emelie’s decidedly unconvinced expression. “This is forgettable and tame compared to most of it. Nobody’s going to notice.”

  She stayed quiet for a beat, and when she spoke her voice was surprisingly gentle. “You know you’ve gotta fix it, Eli. If you don’t, I’ll have to step in.”

  Sitting there beside him on her sofa, she looked unassuming, to the point where someone who didn’t know better might even say harmless. But Elijah did know better, and knew that she only had her guard down because the two of them knew each other so well.

  Emelie’s public face was far more formidable than this private side. Out there she was the cold and immaculately just ruler of the city, whose compassion could not be manipulated and whose passions were a strength more than a weakness.

  But simply because she trusted Elijah to see this less formal side of her didn’t mean he had any leeway when it came to following the edicts she handed down.

  “I arranged it so they’re in town for a last-minute show tonight,” she told him. “Fix this.”

  Elijah felt flattered that Finn had noticed his jacket; it was his favorite item of clothing, and one he almost always wore when he went to watch bands perform. He’d favored similar clothes ever since he’d been alive, centuries ago now — he’d enjoyed hunting in those human days, more than he liked the hunting necessary to being a vampire, and leathers made for good hunting garb.

  Hunting when he was human had been a necessity, to protect his family from the wild animals that roamed their lands. He’d never been a petted lord who’d played at pheasant shooting; his hunts had been to keep the wolves at bay in winter forests.

  Then his brothers had grown old enough to take over the work and Elijah had journeyed to the city to get an education, devouring books with a voracity he’d never gained a knack for when it came to blood.

  In so many ways, the things he’d loved as a human should have made him a much better vampire than he was. Perhaps that was the trouble: he was so naturally inclined towards being a clever, talented predator that he deliberately held himself back from indulging these easy talents.

  Still, regardless of his failings, the fact remained that Elijah had liked leather jackets ever since his days as a hunter. He liked the sleek armor they provided against the world. Tonight he was wearing his current favorite over a white t-shirt, with dark wash jeans and converse sneakers completing the look.

  He could scrub up as nicely as Emelie when he wanted to… or, well, close to as nicely; he didn’t really have the regal bearing to pull it off quite as formidably as she could. But he felt less and less inclined to bother as time went on.

  He knew that worried Emelie somewhat; vampire ennui ran the risk of becoming a fatal condition if the one afflicted by it decided that eternity was too daunting to face. But Elijah wasn’t really interested in self-destruction or anything as dramatic as that. He was just a little stuck in the doldrums, that was all.

  If anything, that apathy put him firmly in line with the mood of the modern world: everyone was a little tired and a little sad these days. Drumming up enthusiasm about anything seemed like too much effort.

  Already dressed appropriately for his errand, Elijah stepped out of Emelie’s apartment building and ordered a rideshare car on his phone.

  He’d had cars of his own at various times, but had always preferred to avoid driving where he could. He’d never quite gotten the knack of it, which was slightly embarrassing to admit but remained the truth, regardless of how silly it might sound.

  These days he didn’t even bother keeping a car of his own, using apps or taxis
when he was on his own and being whisked back and forth by Emelie’s extensive network of town cars and limousines when he went places with her.

  It was a respectably large venue for being a last-minute booking, which showed just how popular Crystal Pulse was. They could sell out a concert hall this big with barely any notice.

  Or, at least, sell out enough of it that Emelie’s meddling wasn’t obvious, which pretty much amounted to the same thing.

  He bought a ticket to the show and wandered towards the backstage door, approaching the fans hanging around in a happy gaggle. The mood before band performances was something Elijah loved deeply about the modern world — the electricity, the sense of something alive.

  It was a little bit like drinking blood felt, but Elijah liked it even more. Unlike most other vampires, he didn’t let himself fall into the primal, overwhelming pleasure-feeling when he fed, preferring to do it as a perfunctory aside to sex or to other kinds of physical intimacy. Oftentimes he avoided a living source completely, and opted for blood bags instead.

  He knew Emelie pitied him and worried about him. That she thought he was missing out on a fundamental part of what made their existence worthwhile. But he was fine. He liked his life. Music gave him everything he needed.

  As Elijah had hoped, the fans hadn’t just convened around the backstage door in the hopes of seeing a member of the band. Two of the musicians were there among them, signing autographs and taking photos.

  One was the drummer, whose name Elijah was pretty sure was Damien, and the other one was Emelie’s current number one headache, guitarist Finn.

  Elijah moved closer, wondering just how to go about this. There was a little while before the show was scheduled to begin, probably long enough that he could get Finn alone and explain to him the need to be a little more circumspect in the things he said to the press…

  Elijah’s thoughts were abruptly interrupted when Finn launched himself through the crowd straight at him, planting a sloppy kiss on his cheek.

  “Look, everyone!” Finn said delightedly, slinging an arm across Elijah’s shoulders. “It’s my vampire!”

  2

  ELIJAH

  Dragging Finn into the narrow backstage hallway, Elijah was torn between amusement at the man’s careless idiocy and furious concern over, well, his careless idiocy.

  “What the hell are you thinking, saying stuff like that?” he asked, resisting the impulse to shove Finn against the wall as an intimidation tactic. Elijah had never been a very intimidating kind of predator, and so suspected the gesture would come off as more sexual than threatening.

  Finn gave him a delighted grin. “I wanted to get you to come back, obviously. And it worked!”

  Elijah was momentarily dumbfounded. “You…You shouldn’t have done all that just to get my attention.”

  The backstage world around them was a familiar kind of chaos to Elijah; he’d been in similar surroundings dozens of times before for other bands, albeit in less dramatic circumstances.

  This example was all very typical: once-bare concrete and drywall, now plastered with thick layers of photocopied fliers and sharpied stickers; the hum of activity as people carried heavy equipment from place to place; cables and drinks and tour management schedules in a pleasant mess atop most flat surfaces. It was a world Elijah loved being in, and he felt a hum of pleasure at it now even with Finn’s incomprehensible behavior to deal with.

  “You’ve risked the anger of some powerful people with all that shit,” Elijah went on, hoping Finn understood the subtext of what he was saying.

  “Again, kind of my plan,” Finn admitted cheerfully. “I wanted exactly this, that they’d send you back to clean up the mess. I wanted to be seen as a danger, so you’d come back and have to kill me.”

  Elijah stared at him.

  Finn’s grin widened. He patted Elijah on the shoulder and stepped away from him, moving further into the backstage labyrinth. “Hang around, enjoy the show! We’ll talk after, okay?” he said brightly, like Elijah was an old friend and they’d been catching up.

  Elijah continued to stare after him, lost for words. When Finn was out of sight, Elijah shook himself and headed back outside, going around to the front entrance and using his ticket to get in like the rest of the fans were doing. He knew if he stayed backstage mulling over Finn’s ludicrous words he’d just feel like he was losing his mind, so it made sense to spend the time enjoying the show instead.

  Elijah had gotten himself into this whole mess because he liked watching Crystal Pulse perform, after all.

  The first song from the band that had generated much attention online had been a cover of Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana. Luckily for Crystal Pulse, it had set the tone fairly accurately for the rest of their sound and vibe generally because their original stuff, like the cover, was indebted to an earlier era of raw, wounded rage. The band was very good at channeling the memory of a time when music had been a conduit for pain and self destruction in equal measure.

  Elijah had adored that lo-fi cover mp3 from the first listen. He’d liked Nirvana well enough in their day, despite finding riot grrrl and queercore more to his taste than grunge in general. It had been impossible to discount Kurt Cobain’s obvious fractured charisma.

  Even though the members of Crystal Pulse were all too young to have been conscious of Nirvana when the band had still existed (in fact, the odds were good that none of them had even been born yet, which made Elijah feel old in a way almost nothing did after centuries of ageless unlife) their cover recording of Frances Farmer was the first time that Elijah felt transported by nostalgia for those earlier days.

  They’d captured the lost spirit of the age perfectly. Resurrected its vanished heart. Elijah had been their avowed fan from that moment on.

  The trouble had really started, though, when he’d finally gotten around to seeing them play. Crystal Pulse were a sight to behold onstage, and Elijah had been caught up in the kinetic energy of the show, the beautiful messy aliveness of it all.

  At the show a week earlier, Finn had looked pretty much the same as he did tonight, a gorgeous vision in black skinny jeans and an old sleeveless t-shirt that was almost more holes than it was fabric, well-shaped muscles tense under the gleaming skin of his arms as he wrestled notes from his guitar.

  His hair hung in a sweaty black veil around his face, making him look even wilder than he already did. Finn had incredible stage presence, clearly giving his all to the wild, unfettered extremes of his performance.

  There was something jagged and beautiful about him as he played, a dangerous ability to give all of himself without holding anything back. Elijah knew it wasn’t unhealthy for artists to do that, to keep nothing for themselves alone, but it was so compelling to watch: like a whole book of matches being struck into life in a single flare of flame.

  And so Elijah had given in to the hunger he felt for Finn, and hooked up with him that night. The bite had been good, the sex even better, the repercussions he was now facing extremely unexpected. Finn was far from the first musician that Elijah had dallied with, but things had never gone like this before.

  There had to be some kind of perfectly reasonable explanation for Finn’s words, and an easy resolution to the situation. Elijah would convince him to stop talking about vampires in interviews, to move on to something else outlandish like aliens or angels or the like, and that would be the end of it.

  Finn couldn’t mean what he’d said about wanting Elijah to kill him, could he? It must be more flirting with danger, a failure to understand just how serious the situation had become. Rock stars like Finn didn’t have a very realistic understanding of the world, so it was a stretch to expect them to understand secret and complex codes of behavior such as vampire conduct.

  Elijah shoved his thoughts to the side before they started giving him a headache. He wasn’t especially good at being serious himself, which was one of the reasons he’d been drawn to the world of rock concerts in the first
place. Getting worried over the kind of minutiae that people like Emelie worried about had never been Elijah’s style.

  He forced his attention back to the concert, ignoring the concerns and worries that had led him here and would make themselves known again once the show was over. They could wait their turn.

  On the spot-lit stage, Crystal Pulse’s lead singer Jessica looked like a beautiful doll… a beautiful doll with the misfortune to be owned by an angry, careless child, that is.

  Her features were small and fine-boned, offset by a pout of black cherry lipstick and a haircut that had all the finesse of a little girl exacting revenge against a plaything for some imagined slight, with tufts shorn down almost to the scalp alongside sleeker, neater locks that had escaped the carnage.

  Tattoos adorned her slim arms like the wrath of marker pens, her lacy dress and t-bar shoes smudged with grime as if she’d been left carelessly in a playground overnight.

  The bassist and the drummer, Curtis and Damien, had less palpable charisma than Finn and Jessica, but it would have been hard for anyone to match the intensity put forward by those two.

  As a unit, the band was intoxicating, and Elijah drank it in.

  After the show Finn came out and found Elijah waiting near the bar. He held up a finger, signaling that he wanted one beer, then turned to Elijah. “I assume you don’t drink… beer.”

  “Cute.”

  “I have my moments,” Finn agreed, tipping his head back as he swallowed down a long draught. It put his neck on full display, which had probably been the point of getting the drink in the first place.