Blood Legacy Page 4

  The comm chimed with an incoming voice message.

  Victor slammed his fist against the desk with such force it made me jump. “What is it, Heron?” he hissed. “I’m very busy today.”

  I tensed my walls, as if I thought for a minute that I could pull his erection into me. Stupid Raven. The gooseflesh on my exposed rump didn’t feel quite so pleasurable now with its pain; it just felt like a cruel taunt.

  “Oh, nothing,” Heron’s simpering voice replied. “But you’ve asked me to warn you whenever Violetta Stregazzi arrives at Bressov Industries.”

  Chapter Three

  I excused myself to the restroom as quickly as I could—I don’t even remember what I said to Victor, if anything. I only knew I had to get out of there, and fast. I nearly tripped over my underwear, forgetting that it was currently tangled around my ankles, but Victor reached down and snatched it away before I could even attempt to pull it back up.

  Ugh. Just as well. No use traipsing around in that wet mess for the rest of the miserable day ahead.

  Though no one so much as looked up from their frantic typing as I left Victor’s office, my skin crawled as if a thousand eyeballs were roving over it, and finding me wanting. It wasn’t bad enough that I was a human, turned on by a Vampyr, of all things. That I’d practically tripped and fallen onto my boss’s dick on my very first day of work was even more embarrassing. No, the most humiliating, terrifying part was that I was starting to believe Victor’s crazy conviction that I was an agonie.

  The heavy restroom door groaned shut behind me, sealing me away from the administrative team’s gaze (and, of course, the approaching Violetta Stregazzi). I leaned against the cool marble countertop. My hair had pulled from of my chignon in places, and stood out like a frantic black halo of wisps around my face. The worst damage, though, was surely to my butt, and I wasn’t about to lift up my dress to check it out in the mirror. I could feel the bruises festering just fine.

  Deep breaths, Raven. I stared myself down in the mirror. So what if Victor Bressov spanked you a little bit and gave you an (admittedly pretty phenomenal) orgasm? You have a job to do here, and I’m not talking about financials. You found that shady file. If you have to cut your losses and flee this madhouse right now, then you can at least take that file with you.

  I washed myself off as best as I could in the executive bathroom sink; hopefully I didn’t stink of scotch and sex anymore. I tugged my hair free from the chignon, smoothed it out with my fingers, and twisted it back into place. I could do this. I could grab that file and get away from Victor Bressov, and still be a hero in the resistance’s eyes.

  The bathroom door groaned open. My eyes flicked toward it in the mirror, but from the mirror’s perspective, there was no one there. Heels rang against the slate tiles and the door eased shut again. That meant only one person was likely to be behind me—a Vampyr.

  I turned around, as calmly as I could.

  Violetta Stregazzi’s burgundy curls were piled high atop her head; a black metal corset cut into her milky skin before ending in a velvet skirt that billowed out nearly as wide as the doorframe. I dropped into a hasty bow and brushed past her. “Excuse me, my lady.” I grabbed the brass handle, having to lean around her close enough that I could smell her sharp metallic perfume with its undercurrent of dying roses.

  She grabbed me by the wrist—what is it with Vampyrs and wrists? I thought grumpily—and leaned forward. “Who are you?” she asked. And then her nostrils flared as she sniffed at me like some ferocious bloodhound. If I hadn’t heard all the terrifying stories of dreadful fates her many, short-lived Donors had met, as well as rumors of even darker and more depraved dealings, I might have laughed.

  “Raven.” I looked away. “Part of the administrative team, my lady.”

  She hmmed, tight-lipped, then leaned toward my ear. I froze in place. “What an unusual scent you have. There’s something very familiar in it.”

  Oh, god. Victor. She could smell Victor all over me. I was about to get eaten by a psychotic black-widow Vampyr. In an executive bathroom, no less. Could this day get any less illustrious?

  “It’s delightful.” She leaned back, an eerie smile parting her blood-red lips. “Well, I won’t keep you. In any case, I’m sure we’ll be meeting very soon.”

  “Maybe.” I ripped the door open and got out of there even faster than I’d escaped from Victor’s office. But hopefully not, I thought.

  The next few hours were torture—and no, not the pleasurable, agonie kind. Violetta strutted into Victor’s office, and those thick black glass doors whose sound-proofing qualities I’d been so grateful for this morning now vexed me to no end. Was Violetta undergoing a spanking session of her own? Or maybe it was Victor’s turn to get paddled. No, I couldn’t afford to let my thoughts wander down that road. I had no claim to Victor Bressov—nor did I want to.

  Despite what my hormones were saying to the contrary.

  If Heron suspected anything, she didn’t show it, but then, Bressov Industries kept all of us loaded down with endless tasks. At the end of the day, Administratives were really no different from Laborers—we punched our timecards, we churned our way through the assembly line of whatever tedious task kept society lovely for our Vampyr betters, then we descended into Undertown and collapsed into bed (after a quick stop at the Donation stations, if our numbers were up).

  Still, I waited until Heron left for the restroom to dive into the hidden archive again. The file sat there, taunting me, covered with Violetta’s digital fingerprints. It was encrypted, of course, but that only furthered my certainty that something juicy must be locked away inside. I took a deep breath and copied it over to a private drive, along with several other nearby archives, just so it didn’t look like a deliberate copying. Then I passed the archive through several hop points along the Stream. Once I left the Bressov Industries building, I’d give it a final send-off on my personal equipment to one of Finch’s secret accounts. His Resistance tech heads could get their rocks off trying to decrypt it.

  The Administrative hall started emptying out after six. When Heron stood up and shut off her machine, I realized that Victor’s office doors were ajar, the interior dark. When had he and Violetta left? I’d been so swamped with my tasks (and espionage) that I hadn’t even noticed.

  I glanced at my task order. Twenty more items to get through before I could leave. I slumped forward until my forehead rested against the cool glass of my mainframe’s screen. If I’d just been able to prop myself up with caffeine . . .

  The screen vibrated with the chirp of an incoming urgent text comm. My eyes followed the screen down to the notification box. BRESSOV, VICTOR.

  Shit. What did he want now? Another spanking session, or twelve more spreadsheets processed by morning? At this point, I couldn’t decide which was the more painful fate.

  SUBJ: This Evening

  Raven –

  Your presence is required at the Bressov Towers in Uptown at ten o’clock tonight. As this is a formal event, appropriate attire will be sent to your registered compartment address in Undertown. You will be excused from tomorrow morning’s work duties. If you are still working, you may place your current tasks on hold so that you may rest before tonight’s festivities.

  Do not be tardy.

  – Victor

  My presence was “required”? If this was how he asked a girl on a date, it’s no wonder his relationship with Violetta was the stuff of Stream tabloid legend. But, if it excused me from the rest of these tasks . . .

  I logged out of the mainframe, tucked the rod of my tablet into my purse, and all but ran out of the Bressov Industries spire onto the smudgy gray streets below.

  Before I could comm Finch to let him know about the archive, I had to check in at the Donation center. How I hated those white-tiled facilities, the only clean whiteness to be found in Undertown, rife with the stench of bleach and metal syringes and the vile fake juice and crackers they gave you after your Donation to try to keep you from
passing out.

  The bored-looking Administrative manning the check-in desk keyed in my questionnaire answers with zero suspicion: nope, no caffeine in the last five hours, no alcohol in the last twelve. A blatant lie on that last, but if our Vampyr betters were going to insist on drinking my blood every month, they deserved to get that sour scotch taste. I didn’t have any dings on my record yet, so if they did a spot check analysis of my blood, I could take the hit. Besides, I thought with sultry grin, Victor Bressov certainly had no complaints as far as the smell of it.

  The machine bit into the soft inside of my elbow, sucked out the pint of blood, and retracted, over and done with in a minute. Somewhere in the device’s bowels, a silicon bladder was filling with my blood, and then would be distributed to a Donor-less Vampyr at random or, less likely, to fill the feeding schedule of a Donor-blessed Vampyr while his or her Donor (or Donors) had to recuperate. Quick, efficient, and about as painless as it could be. The perfect system of oppression obscures everything absurd about it.

  But that little bite of the needle was why I’d given my life to the resistance.

  I stood up, legs rubbery beneath me, and staggered through the doorway of my Donation stall. My nose and ears and face felt numb. For the first time all day, I couldn’t feel the welts along my ass where Victor Bressov had laid into me with his paddle. A Donation administrative rushed toward me with a tray of those vile crackers but I waved her off, arm swinging wide with that drunken, uncontrollable motion of acute blood loss. I pushed past the line of other humans, waiting to make their Donations, but their faces swirled together into a buzzing mess. Just as well. I didn’t want to look at them, either. I was a rebel against the Vampyrs and a traitor to the rebels’ cause, all at the same time.

  The cold, wet air of Undertown slapped me in the face as I stepped outside. The sky was deep indigo far overhead, and everything was lit in tight circles of artificial yellowy light. The Donation station was only one tier down from street level, so I could still see the peaks of New Sanguinus’s skyscrapers soaring overhead to pierce the starry sky, but the mag train tracks and roaring limo capsules of Downtown whooshed by above me frequently enough to remind me I was more or less underground. I stumbled down the slope to the mag lift station and hopped in the first capsule to ride it down, deep into the earth, my ears popping and my vision tangling up the harsh geometric metal capsule walls.

  The vines and triangles of the panel seemed to unlock, reaching out for me, pulling me into their fantasy world. Oh, no. I threw out a hand to steady myself but only succeeded in whacking a fellow passenger. Not this again. The capsule seemed to melt away around me as the vision took hold.

  I was in a darkened chamber, candles crackling and guttering around me. I’d been here before, in other woozy visions brought on by rapid blood loss. Hallucinations were a common side effect of Donations, the posters at the station read, but I’m not sure they meant anything quite like this. A candle flame danced, slanting to one side as a figure rushed past me, then another. All of them wore dark robes with deep, billowing hoods. They were just blobs of blackness, really, in the dark chamber.

  “The blood shall not run cold.”

  “We shall rise, and rise again.”

  A call and response, tangling around me, like a spider’s web knotting me up. I was on a platform of some sort—my ankles and wrists bound to an iron X I couldn’t see.

  “This is purity. This is our charge.”

  And then the knife—nicking into that soft patch of my elbow, just like the Donation machine. Hot blood welled and ran down my forearm, flooding my nostrils with a tangy metal scent. The cold stones beneath my bare feet and the cold iron against my bare skin warmed as I felt the blood warm me . . .

  “Child, you don’t look so good.” An old Laborer woman’s face bubbled through the vision, her wrinkled skin thrown in sharp relief from the harsh capsule lighting. “You skipped the crackers, didn’t you?”

  I blinked furiously, part of me wanting to sink back into the vision—despite the major creepiness of the setting, there was something comforting in it. It . . . called to me; I could think of no other way to describe it. But the woman was right. It was just a hallucination.

  “Guess I did.” I smiled, and leaned against the cold metal panel, waiting for the fuzziness throughout my body to ebb away as my blood started to replenish itself.

  Finch was waiting for me outside my compartment complex, thirty stories deep into Undertown. He leaned against the railing, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and tugging at one of his thick dark dreadlocks. His deep brown skin looked blue and sickly in the fake Undertown light; he melted into the shadows so easily that only the intense whites of his eyes and his cigarette’s cherry gave him away at first.

  I gave him a sharp scowl and turned away from him to punch in my compartment’s code, shielding the code pad with my hand while I did so. “You shouldn’t come to my place.”

  “Sorry, girlie. I didn’t think this could wait.”

  I arched one eyebrow and held the door open, just a hair, so he could follow me inside.

  Compartment was about as accurate a term for my prison cell as they came. I’m told that even at the height of human civilization, when cities were home to tens of millions of festering human bodies, most people had a couple rooms they could call their own. But here, it was one room, everything stacked and jumbled together so I could lie in the bed that stretched across my kitchenette, loft-like, and reach almost everything else.

  I checked the package chute; as promised, a large box sat waiting for me. Glossy black cardboard, with a black velvet ribbon tied around it. I scooped it up in a hurry and carried it over to my wardrobe. Finch reached over to the wall panel and turned it on with a jab of his thumb, popping on the default Stream media feed.

  Noise, constant bleeping and digital trilling and spiraling noise. I shot him a look and spun the volume down as low as I thought I could get away with while still hoping to conceal our conversation.

  “So,” he said. He propped against my kitchenette counter. “The archive you nabbed.”

  As I rooted through my wardrobe, I caught a glimpse of his sculpted behind in the mirror, perfectly squared off beneath his warm orange carpenter pants. There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like—when I would’ve given anything to see just how sculpted it was. But it wasn’t quite the thrill I’d been hoping for. Finch was my first, but I was just another in a long string of girls looking for direction and maybe a father figure, and if he had to whore himself out a little to get them to do their share for the Resistance, then that was what he’d do.

  Of course, I’d thought it was true love. A hollow ached in my chest at the thought of it, just beneath my breastbone. But I was over it. I had no choice but to be.

  “Pretty vicious encryption on it. High-level stuff. Coven-level. Not the sort of easy, half-assed shit my boys are used to getting their hands on. They’ve only been able to crack a few of the files in the archive so far, and even then, only part of the way. But this looks pretty . . . serious.”

  “Serious, how?” I asked. I tugged at the black ribbon on the cardboard box, keeping my body positioned in the opening of the wardrobe so Finch couldn’t see inside.

  And let out a sharp gasp. The dress inside was exquisite—soft chiffon and tulle in shades of peacock blue and royal purple, with a metallic waist piece that curved up one breast and shoulder. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it looked like the segmented metal belled out at the hips, nipped in the waist, then cupped the one breast before crowning in a cap sleeve, while the other shoulder and breast were exposed to the ethereal tulle and its shifting hues.

  This wasn’t your typical Vampyr extravagant fashion statement dress. This was better.

  “It’s all transaction records so far, but it’s incredibly vague as to what they’re recording. They’re old records, too—the oldest is twenty-five years ago, but then it all stops abruptly at the twenty-year mark. Then, two months ago, it starts u
p again.”

  “Weird,” I agreed, but I was barely listening. I started to close the wardrobe door behind me so I could change, but then remembered the interesting morning I’d had, and decided a shower was in order. I glanced back at Finch, a scowl on my face. I’d long gotten over any sense of propriety around him—once I’d gotten over the initial sting of being dumped for the next bright young Resistance fighter in need of persuasion—but letting him see the bruises that were no doubt sprouting on my bottom was another matter entirely. I shimmied out of my dress and threw a towel around my body before I emerged from the wardrobe, and then quickly darted into the adjacent shower stall.

  Finch arched one eyebrow. “Is everything okay, Raven?”

  “Yeah—just fine. I’m getting ready to go back out, is all.” I debated telling him about Victor’s invitation, but quickly decided I wanted to keep that knowledge to myself for now. Whatever Bressov had in mind for me, I wanted to find it out on my terms this once—not as an operative for the Resistance.

  Doing something for myself, for a change? Who did I think I was, anyway, a bloody Vampyr?

  Finch rolled his eyes. “This is important, kiddo.” Great. He was pissed—I could always tell his mood by how condescending of a tone he was taking with me. “Think about it. What happened twenty years ago or so?”

  The water turned on in one frantic blast, peeling away Victor Bressov’s scent from my skin with all the zeal of caustic chemicals. That was one thing they didn’t skimp on in the human slums—anything relating to washing away our stinky humanness. “Um. Twenty plus years ago—the Phantom Coup?”

  “Right. When a Vampyr or Vampyrs unknown overthrew the Onyx Queen and her entire Coven, leaving the Republic ripe for the taking.”