Page 14 of Blood Sacrifice

I logged into our secure server of The Chimaera Foundation to track what was happening in the rest of our organisation. A war between vampires and lycans had raged for centuries, but there had been rumours about a tentative peace, and I knew it had something to do with Tasha. She had been a child when her mother Annalise brought her to me, terrified and needing to protect her baby. I had bound her powers as a temporary measure, but my gift of sight had shown me that she was an Elemental Sorceress who would find love with a lycan. The hellspawn who had been stalking her wouldn’t be able to find her with her powers hidden.

There were reports from my operatives in both the vampire and lycan world, and they had finally realised they should be fighting the hellspawn instead of each other. It was the curse of the gift of sight—you saw the future before it became solidified, and one wrong word could change that future. I had learned to say nothing, and watch as it played in real time, nudging it every so often when it veered off track.

I padded back to the bathroom with an ache in my neck, and my heart skipped a beat. There was a bruise on the side of my neck, the right size to correlate to a bite. My fingertips shook as they touched the area, and I was unable to explain where it came from.

My legs felt weak and shaky as I sat on the side of the bath.

“I shouldn’t have come back here,” I muttered, trailing my fingers through my hair in an attempt to tame it. Everything was becoming too real, and part of me wondered if someone was trying to influence me with a spell.

In the end, I crawled into the shower to shock my system with cold water. I tried to ignore the ache of my body, the craving to leave this place and follow my instincts to go to a building I could see in my head.

At six in the morning, I texted Maia.

Me:No idea what is happening here, but maybe I should come home.

My phone pinged about half an hour later.

Maia:What’s up?

Maia:You need me to send someone to you?

Maia:I’ll book tickets for the closest airport.

Maia:Text me your location.

Her panic calmed me down since it was a welcome normality.

Me:Still in Cusco. I just feel as if someone is watching me. The two lycans have disappeared and yet something seems to be stalking us.

My phone rang, and I answered as Maia had escalated from texting.

“I don’t like that you are there alone. I’m contacting our nearest people and sending them to your location.” She paused and I imagined her pacing back and forth. “I don’t like the idea of you breaking away from your group. If someone is watching you, that could be what they need to identify you.”

I sucked in a breath and released it slowly. Maia had been monitoring the situation, so was able to analyse it neutrally.

“Yeah, I agree. I just panicked.”

She tutted at me, her Scottish accent growing stronger as she became irritated. “I told you I should go with you, just twowomen on an adventure to a foreign country. We don’t even let our operatives on a mission alone.”

“This wasn’t supposed to be a mission, just a return home.” I sighed and sat on the bed. “Every time I visit, I hold my breath and expect someone from my past to walk up to me. Then I return to my life, and it takes me another hundred years to find the courage to come back.”

I heard water running in the background, and I knew she was making coffee. “Listen, I know what you’re going through. Every single person in this organisation has found themselves alone, and we give them a family. There is nothing wrong in wanting to connect with what you lost, but in the future you need to be more careful. You are one of the last links that will unlock what Balor wanted all those years ago.”

There had been times I felt like going to him and handing myself over. The expression on the face of mother priestess was the only force stopping me. No one ever had to tell me, I knew deep inside my heart that she had stayed that night and sacrificed herself to allow the rest of us to escape.

“Thanks, Maia,” I said. “I needed to talk to someone about this.”

“There are people on their way to you even as we’re speaking on the phone,” Maia informed me in a matter-of-fact tone. “They will extract you and accompany you back to headquarters.”

“So, what’s not on the briefing reports?” I asked, bringing the conversation away from me.

We spent the next hour or so chatting about what was happening in the vampire-lycan war. Maia had been there when I bound Tasha’s powers, so she had a vested interest in what was happening, and she was the ultimate romantic since she was a love deity. They weren’t tiny cherub creatures with bows and arrows, although she brewed a powerful love potion. Love deitieshad the ability to locate someone’s soulmate, or ignite a passion in someone’s heart. What she couldn’t do was make someone fall in love who belonged with someone else.

All was fair in love and war, but Fate was easily pissed off and tended to be grumpy when someone interfered in her plans.

According to Maia’s sources, Tasha had met a rather handsome lycan by the name of Levi, and he was changing lycan-vampire politics for them to build a life together. She was almost swooning as she filled me in on all the romantic details that appealed to her in the story, including how he managed to bilocate to reach Tasha in her coven castle.

“Are you sure you weren’t interfering?” I teased Maia.

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