Atonement: Immortal Soulless, #3

By Tanith Frost

Among the dregs of vampire society, there's no safety in numbers.

It's been a year since the vampires of Maelstrom threw Aviva to the wolves. When her next assignment arrives, it's clear that her elders haven't forgiven her past sins. She's to take a position watching over the clan's weakest members: the old vampires who can't be trusted to keep the supernatural world's secrets. Locked away in a crumbling home by the ocean, they exist in isolation, nearly forgotten by the world. It's a boring job, an assignment more insulting than her placement with the werewolves, and a terrifying warning of where she could end up if she doesn't change her ways.

Aviva is determined to keep her head down, prove herself, and atone for her mistakes. But when a group of vampire hunters calling themselves the Blood Defenders attacks the home, Aviva has no choice but to step into her role as guardian and hit the road with a group of misfit vampires who are as much a danger to the world as they are to themselves.

When the Blood Defenders shatter the heart of Maelstrom's power and leave them with nowhere to run, Aviva and her band of monsters have no choice but to stand and fight to save a world that despises them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sparrowcat Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781775169130

Book preview

1

The wolf thinks she’s disappeared.

It’s the same trick she’s used a dozen times over the past year. Racing ahead of me, hugging the shadows, freezing in the shelter of the underbrush, relying on her silence to hide her.

I touch my tongue to the tip of one of my fangs, tasting my poison. I have no desire for blood tonight—not after the meal I enjoyed just a few hours ago. The gesture is simply a reminder of what I am.

I am a vampire. The night is my element, and my power is strong.

But the past and the future keep creeping into my thoughts, distracting me from the present. If I want to catch her, I have to let go of everything else.

Ignoring my physical senses, I open myself to a deeper place, drawing on the void—the dark, mysterious power that sustains and animates me.

The world around me comes into sharper focus. The scents of moss and fallen October leaves fill my nostrils, deeper and heavier than I ever could have perceived when I was alive. And underneath them the scent of fear, cloaked in clean canine fur and the hot air from the breaths she’s trying to suppress.

It’s not enough.

A sense far deeper than what my body offers catches the energies that flow through my prey. Her life calls to me. I have no interest in feeding on an animal’s blood, but my power, cold as the grave and leagues deeper, responds to it nonetheless. I am a creature without a soul. A monster who feeds on life. A ruthless hunter with a hunger that can never truly be satisfied.

Life can’t hide from death. It never has. And never will.

I’ve almost located her when another power flares to life inside of me, burning bright against my darkness, strange and overpoweringly wrong.

I grit my teeth and shove it downward, willing the deep waters of the void to douse the flame. It’s a battle I’ve fought for over a year now, one I can’t seem to win. This is not life. This power—this fire, as I’ve named it—isn’t mine. It’s an invader, an unwanted guest that infected me after I fucked, fed on, and fought alongside an alpha werewolf. His death connected us on a level I didn’t understand. I still don’t.

Silas’ life washed through me as he died. Then it disappeared, as life is always destined to do after I’ve taken it into myself. But his other power, this supernatural gift possessed only by werewolves, has remained.

I lose my focus as my dark power tries to drown Silas’ flame, and a wave of nausea crashes over me. It’s always like this. Vampire and werewolf powers are age-old enemies, dissonant and repulsive to each other. Every time the fire rises in me, the void fights back, protecting me. And the battle sickens me, distracts me, leaves me feeling like I’m being torn in half.

Feeling like I need to scream and howl and climb out of my body so I can escape the warring energies.

I give my head a hard shake and imagine a dark fist of power crushing the golden flame. My visualizations are amateurish at best, but this one helps. My focus sharpens again, and I creep toward the life that’s hiding in the bushes on the other side of the clearing.

I move silently over the dead leaves on the forest floor, but the moon is too bright for me to hide my approach. A silvery grey form breaks from the shadows and bolts away from me, crashing through the bushes.

I can’t help the grin that exposes my fangs as I race after her between the trees, banking off the boulders that litter the forest floor like a giant’s discarded playthings, leaping over a fallen tree that would have given me pause a year ago.

There was a time when the wolves knew how to lose me, but these are my woods now. It’s been fourteen months since the vampires of Maelstrom abandoned me here.

My mind wants to turn to thoughts of my clan, but I force it back to the present.

These moments on the hunt are the only times I’m not haunted by my mistakes and my worries. I’ll be damned if I’ll throw my perfect clarity away for the sake of those who have rejected me.

Her breaths are coming hard and fast, her heart is pounding. I sense it all as much as I hear it, and I smile as I anticipate my victory. My legs might be sore tomorrow, but my heart remains still, and I’m not wasting my energy on anything as unnecessary as breathing. Everything in me is focused on my quarry as I draw closer.

She stumbles, and I leap.

It’s still a close thing. I wrap my arms around the thick barrel of her chest and shoulders, landing as heavily as I can on her back. My small frame should put me at a disadvantage, but her exhaustion works in my favour. She twists, snapping at my face with savage yellow teeth, snarling. I jerk my head back and release her just long enough to wrap my hands around her muzzle, forcing her jaws closed and pressing her nose toward her chest.

She struggles for a few more moments, then goes limp.

I release her. This is all I needed.

Violet climbs to her feet and shakes the leaves out of her shaggy coat, then sits and scratches behind the ruined remains of her ear—the one that took a silver bullet from a vampire’s gun last summer.

I sink to the ground and lie on my back, and she does the same. The forest is silent save for the wind in the trees and the soft squeak of a passing bat.

My win, I say. Just so we’re clear. Fair and square.

She snorts and turns her head toward me, letting her tongue hang out one side of her mouth.

I glare back at her. Fuck you, you did not let me win.

She shrugs, an oddly human gesture that doesn’t suit her wolf’s body. I’ve become adept at understanding Violet when she’s in wolf form, but there are definite limits to the nuances I can interpret. I know she tries to accommodate my ignorance. Sometimes I think I could do better if I opened myself more, but the fire rises in me when I try.

I want to try now. But I won’t, and not only because of the power.

Since the September night when the last of the other vampires left me here to supervise the werewolves’ transition to independence, Violet and Irene, her pack leader, have been far kinder to me than any vampire deserves. Certainly far kinder than my own clan. Though the vampires left me with a camper to live in and ongoing access to stock in the nearby town of Bloody Bight, and though my requests for supplies have been answered without question, they’ve otherwise ignored me completely. My punishment, I suppose, for helping the werewolves save their species—a species most vampires would just as soon see exterminated. It’s been lonely, and I’ve often questioned my place in the clan, even as I’ve worked to keep up with the training I’ll need when they take me back.

As a result, the kindness of this pair of werewolves has become a temptation. They offer me a taste of what it might be like to belong to a community. To have friends.

My stomach knots. I can’t give in to that temptation. The idea that I could belong here is an illusion—a fact I’m reminded of at least once a month when the pack gathers and shifts. My only future lies with the vampires, with their rules and laws and the cold comforts of their society. With blood, death, the void, and all the things werewolves will never understand.

I look up at the stars in the endless night sky, willing them to absorb me entirely and pull me away from myself, but nothing hears my prayers these days. Without the hunt to occupy me, I’m at the mercy of my memories.

My mistakes.

My sins.

And every fear and doubt that’s wormed its way into my heart since last summer.

Violet and Irene were the first of the wolves to remind me of what I had been missing out on since my death. Though vampires exist as part of a community these days, we remain solitary creatures at heart. We’re loyal to our clans, but it’s as much out of self-interest as anything. We form alliances as it suits us, and God knows we enjoy our physical pleasures. But true affection, selfless loyalty, and love are forbidden. They are aspects of the light that abandoned us when we died. They are weaknesses, chinks in our armour, and opportunities for enemies to break us. We survive or perish on the basis of our own glorious, individual strength.

Werewolves live in true community within their packs, loving and fighting and forgiving, supporting each other through pain and tragedy. Violet took a risk when she reached out to me and tried to help me understand what it means to belong in a pack.

And Silas—dear, cocky, foolish Silas—drove the point home when he died to save me.

My throat closes at the thought of him, but I don’t have any tears left to shed. I didn’t love him. We weren’t some kind of supernatural Romeo and Juliet, as he once joked, though we did find our tragedy in the end. But he was an ally who chose to fight beside me when no one else would. He was a warm and extremely satisfying body when I needed pleasure to ease my pain. And he was, in the end, a friend who treated me like a pack member.

He made me feel like I belonged.

I didn’t realize how dangerous that was until after his death broke my heart and Irene invited me to stay with her and Violet during these quiet months here at the sanctuary. I accepted to preserve my sanity, but I’ve kept my distance.

Because no matter how we try to set aside the instinctive hatred between our species, no matter how I try to ignore the power that’s invaded me and changed me in subtle and infuriating ways, this is not where I belong. I’ve accepted that, and most of the time I don’t feel sorry for myself. Mad at the elders and everyone who’s forgotten me, sure. But this melancholy that’s crept up on me tonight is rare.

I fucked up. I’m paying for it. It is what it is, it won’t last forever, and I’m lucky to not be alone here.

But something’s got to give.

Violet nudges my cheek with her cold nose, bringing me back to the present. A pale, filmy cloud has drifted in front of the moon, diffusing its light and turning it to an indistinct almost-circle.

I’m fine, I tell her, and she snorts again.

She sits up and stretches, then looks down at me.

You want to go back?

She shakes her head and nods toward the shadows of the forest.

You want privacy?

She nods.

You don’t have to do that. I’m really okay.

She rests a paw on my chest and tugs at the red plaid blanket scarf that’s tucked into my leather jacket.

There’s no point arguing. Irene’s second-in-command doesn’t tend to take no for an answer. I stand and drop the jacket and scarf onto the forest floor, then walk far enough away that I won’t hear it if she moans in pain as she performs her transformation. Violet is generous in offering to shift so she can help me keep up with my training, never complaining about the inconvenience of it all for her. That doesn’t mean she wants me to witness her pain or pity her for it.

She joins me a few minutes later, wearing my scarf as a skirt and straining to close my jacket over her larger chest. She’s barefoot, but she never seems to mind that, even on a night as cold as this one. As for me, my bare arms are covered in goosebumps, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m not about to die of hypothermia.

You’ve lost your fangs, Aviva, she says. I’m hardly bruised.

Maybe I just need something more challenging to sharpen them on. I give her a sly grin. Do try to be graceful about your defeat.

She smirks, then turns to lead the way through the woods. I expect her to head straight back to the cabins before the heat of her change leaves her and she catches a chill, but instead she leads me to the nearby hillside where we can look down at the village of Bloody Bight.

It’s another world, one that neither of us belongs to, though Violet could visit in human form if she wished. She never does. She says she feels safer among werewolves than among humans, a sentiment I understand well. I feed on humans. I’ve even had tea with a woman from the village a few times. But I don’t belong there.

I smile at the thought of Susannah and brush my fingers over the blue stone of the necklace she gave me. She claimed the Labradorite would open me to the powers of this place.

Susannah is big on powers. She’s also big on oils and crystals and various theories about the spirit world. I suspect that ninety-five percent of her beliefs are bullshit, but she’s right about this. There are some weird energies in this place, even beyond the ones that now occupy me.

I wonder whether Violet feels them.

I risk relaxing my habitual hold on Silas’ fire, just for a moment, and fight back the nausea as my power responds. But though I watch Violet carefully, there’s no sign she notices the change in me. Her eyes are closed, and a faint smile touches her lips as a breeze off the river blows her thick hair back from her face. Even when she turns her strange golden eyes on me, there’s no indication that anything is wrong.

I haven’t told her or Irene about the fire in me. There’s a part of me that’s always wanted to tell them about the illness it brings when it wakes up, about how I dream now when no vampire should, about how I discovered that this power—their power—sustained me and kept me clearheaded when I wasn’t able to feed after we got snowed in this past winter. I felt like shit the whole time, and the craving was as bad as it’s ever been, but I survived.

It feels wrong to talk about it, though, as though confessing out loud that there’s something in me that’s essentially Not Vampire would somehow be a betrayal of my true nature. Or maybe it’s just that sharing a secret this huge—one that I would never dare share with my own kind—would be a step too far toward opening myself.

I might disagree with vampires about a lot of things, but they’re right about secrets. It’s best to keep them hidden. You can’t really trust anyone not to use them against you.

Or to not walk away when the secrets get to be too much to handle.

What? Violet asks, and for a second I think she’s sensed it in me. Then I realize it’s just that I’m staring so intently at her.

Nothing. I squeeze the fire back down to embers, burying it in the depths of my darkness. It’s a relief to put it away. To keep my secret.

You going to be okay next week? she asks, and we turn to walk back to the cabins.

Always am, I say, and want to kick myself for the hint of self-pity that comes out in my voice. That’s not who I am now, and I refuse to let it consume me. I force a wry smile. I mean, you’re okay and all, but I need a vacation.

She’s not buying it. We’ve entered the darkest part of the woods, but her golden eyes still shine bright against her dark skin as she frowns at me.

She doesn’t say anything, though. She can’t. So much has changed for us, but the deep truth of our clashing powers never will. The other werewolves look at me and see only an enemy, so this is our compromise. Most of the pack avoids the sanctuary for three weeks out of the month, returning only for the full moon and their week of roaming the woods as wolves. Meanwhile, I return to my little camper next to the burned-out compound and accept the solitary not-quite-confinement that I’d be suffering every damn day if things had turned out as my superiors expected.

As they wanted, no doubt.

Fucking vampires, I mutter.

If Violet is surprised by the apparent non sequitur, she doesn’t show it. Fucking vampires, she agrees without hesitation. Heard anything from them?

I grit my teeth. Not a thing.

No word from Miranda, the high elder who claims she’s keeping a close eye on me, waiting to see whether I’m capable of atoning for the sins I committed with Silas. Nor from the Department of Unnatural Resources, which is supposed to be overseeing the werewolves’ transition to freedom.

Worst of all, there’s been nothing from Daniel. Things ended badly between us, to say the least, when he left me here at the sanctuary. But before that, it seemed like there was something between us that went beyond his status as the vampire who made me, the trainer who helped me find my strange gifts, and the lover whose cold, dead body lit a fire in me that had nothing to do with werewolf power. He said he wanted me, almost confessed to desiring things that are forbidden to us.

Almost.

And yet I haven’t heard a word from him since everything came crashing down here. My chest tightens as I think of him, of the hard look he used to get in his eyes when I disappointed him during training. I can only imagine how he’d look at me now if he knew what I’d done.

I fed on a werewolf, an act that is strictly and clearly forbidden. I defiled my body with an enemy species. I stood against vampires to defend his kind and preserve a power that seems to be the antithesis of ours.

Unforgivable sins, even among a species that hardly believes in right and wrong.

Still, imagining Daniel is angry because Miranda has shared my secrets with him is better than the alternative. On my lowest days, when I haven’t had blood for too long and my thoughts turn dark, I imagine far worse things.

We’re not mortal creatures, but we’re not invincible, either. It’s hard to believe Daniel wouldn’t have at least called to end things with me if he’d finally decided I wasn’t worth the trouble he’s been dealing with since the night he first laid eyes on me.

Maybe he can’t call. Daniel does dangerous work for Maelstrom. He’s a legend in our clan, the best rogue hunter we’ve got, ruthless and strong.

But no one is perfect. I wonder whether anyone would bother to tell me if he’d fallen in pursuit of an enemy.

I wrestle my thoughts away from that and try to focus again on the now. On the night air. The forest. The creature walking beside me who’s almost a friend.

She catches me looking and wrinkles her nose. I’m being weird tonight. I know it. But it never seems to bother her.

I guess walking through the woods at night with a corpse isn’t exactly normal behaviour for her, either. If the other werewolves knew she was hanging out with a vampire as often as she has, if they knew my presence at the cabin went beyond letting the resident vampire keep an eye on things, they’d think she was nuts.

I wrinkle my nose right back at her and look away, though not before I catch her bemused smile.

Maybe it was wrong of me to make werewolves my allies and stand against vampires. Maybe my screwed-up powers are part of the price I’m paying for disrupting the supernatural balance between us, and maybe there’s nothing I can do to pay for my sins.

But I can’t say I regret what I did.

Violet shoves her hands into the pockets of my jacket. She’s got to be freezing by now. She’d have been fine if she’d stayed in wolf form until we got back to the cabins, but I think she knew I needed her voice to break the silence and interrupt my thoughts.

Damn werewolves. They can’t help what they are. But being around them, being reminded of the fact that I don’t truly belong with them any more than I do with my own kind, is a weird sort of torture. I’ve spent the last year neither here nor there, ignored by my clan and rejected by most werewolves, strengthening myself and searching for peace in the space between while I wait for something—anything—to happen.

Welcome to Limbo. Population: Me.

Everyone should be asleep when we get back, but a dim light is glowing in Irene’s private quarters. Violet’s golden eyes narrow and her shoulders hunch under my jacket. I tense, too, as we creep toward the little cabin.

It’s not the light that bothers us so much, but the scent of automobile exhaust lingering in the air. Not one member of the pack likes to come or go this late at night, and even if they did, they’d park in plain sight.

We’ve got company.

I peer in the window and spot Irene seated at the little wooden table in her kitchenette, sipping from a steaming mug. She’s listening to whoever’s sitting across the table from her—someone I can’t see, no matter how I twist my neck.

She seems fine, I tell Violet. You go get dressed. I’ll take a look.

She darts off toward her room in the big cabin.

I stretch my neck from side to side and roll my shoulders forward and back.

I don’t anticipate a fight, but I need to be ready. Only a vampire would brave the forest roads this late at night.

I harden myself. Whatever comes next, I’ll handle it. If I’m lucky it will be Chester, the perpetually flustered head of the Department of Unnatural Resources. He’s a pencil pusher, no threat to me. My void power is flowing through me like the cool water of an underground river, wakening my senses and priming muscles that are strong from my self-imposed training schedule. If it’s not Chester—if it’s Miranda, God forbid, or one of the elders I haven’t met—I’m as ready as I can be.

Of course, there’s still the small matter of the other power that flows through my own. Violet and Irene don’t sense it in me, but that doesn’t mean vampires won’t. For all I know I’m walking in there with what amounts to a scarlet letter on my breast, announcing my crimes to all.

No point worrying about it now, though, or even thinking about it. Denial is a far safer place for me to hide. Whoever it is, they’ll sense my agitation and question it. Or exploit it. I need to project strength now, and nothing else.

I arrange my features into a neutral mask and knock softly at the door. If it were Violet’s room, I’d just barge in—much as I’ve tried to keep my distance, we don’t have many secrets at this point. But Irene is another sort of creature. She’s kind to me, and welcoming. She seems to trust me. But there’s something about the alpha of this pack that commands a respectful distance.

A chair scrapes across the unfinished boards of the floor inside, and I step back as Irene opens the door.

She’s the same woman I met when her life was under vampire control, and yet she’s not. Governing a larger pack in a freer environment has taken a toll on her, but it’s also made her stronger. She stands taller, and in spite of her slight, middle-aged human appearance, she commands control of any space she occupies. Her greying hair seems more mane-like now than ever. True leadership suits her.

Aviva, she says, and offers me a tight smile. Please, come in.

She seems calm, though she’s not hiding the faint tension around her eyes. Maybe this isn’t about me. Maybe the time has finally come, and Maelstrom has given her permission to leave this place behind and move her pack to Labrador. It’s been her plan since she negotiated freedom for her kind.

Or maybe it’s bad news. Maybe—

The thought isn’t fully formed before it dies, drowned in the faint hint of well-concealed power that sends a hard shiver up my spine.

I stop in my tracks before I’ve made it through the door. My chest tightens into a hard knot that sinks into my stomach, and I struggle to hold my composure as I take in the source of that familiar energy. The quick burst of relief that warms me for a moment is quickly snuffed by anger.

Son of a fuck.

I step into the cabin, and he sets his mug down on the table.

I cross my arms over my chest and give him the coldest glare I can muster. Hello, Daniel.

2

Wherever Daniel has been, he’s none the worse for wear. His clothes are clean and his button-down shirt is pressed, even if he hasn’t dressed up for the occasion. His thick brown hair is in its usual state of appealing disarray.

His expression gives nothing away. Not pleasure at seeing me, though his gaze flicks quickly up and down my body before resting on my face. Not relief that I don’t appear to have gone completely insane since he left. His hazel eyes are as cold as I remember, the same ones I’ve been seeing in my dreams.

I thought you were dead, I tell him, my voice tight but even. No tremble, as there once might have been. Daniel is as intimidating as ever, in spite of his casual posture at the table and the faint smile on his lips, but I won’t cower. I’m not the reluctant vampire he plucked from the recovery facility or the angry young woman whose murder he witnessed before he turned me.

I don’t know what I am now, but I’m stronger than all of that. I can’t let myself step back into old weakness.

He rises, and I fight the urge to retreat.

Technically you weren’t wrong, he says. I’m as dead as I was the day I met you.

You know what I mean. Where the hell have you been?

We’ll have to discuss that later. He sets his battered leather messenger bag on the table and motions for me to take the seat across from him.

Tea, Aviva? Irene asks. I nod, though she’s already pouring from the teapot. She doesn’t need to ask. That little wedge of uncertainty is for Daniel’s sake, I’m sure. One more little thing that I owe her for.

She sets the steaming mug of Earl Grey on the table.

Thank you. I take the chair, sitting straight-backed and stiff.