Blood from Stone, chapter 13

Chapter 13

After breakfast and much needed showers, Liliana and the Winterbournes met up in the library. The aroma of thousands of books surrounding them hit Lily like a ton of bricks, soothing in an indescribable way that wouldn’t diminish over time. The group congregated in a side meeting room with a large oval table, and several overstuffed chairs covered in maroon velvet.

Draven was perched in one of the chairs, long legs crossed with his laptop settled across his thighs. He glanced up from his screen to give her a quick wink, his fingers rapidly clicking across keys as he searched for information not stored in the volumes of books that filled the shelves.

Orion and Oberon sat beside each other, one of them scanning down the left page while the other soaked in the information on the right. Without needing to ask, she knew they were mentally relaying the contents back and forth to each other.

Aubrey and Leon brought in stacks of books, setting them none too gently in the center of the large table. Jaxon sorted them, spacing out the piles into similar sorts of books. Maverick walked past her with a few books under one arm, giving her shoulder a soft squeeze.

Leon dropped a pile of empty spiral notebooks into the center of the table. Beside them he deposited a large mug filled with pens and pencils. It said, “Knot before coffee”. Since Leon was a professor, she thought the misspelling seemed off. Curious, she stood and leaned forward, rotating the mug to see if there was more to the design she was missing. Much to her chagrin, the other side of the mug featured a female silhouette with her arms behind her back, a series of intricate knots made from red rope fixing her arms in place and winding down her backside and legs.

Liliana’s cheeks burned at the implications, and she jumped when someone behind her cleared their throat. Glancing over her shoulder, her eyes locked with Leon’s. He held a cup of coffee in one hand, lifting it to his lips without breaking his gaze. He lifted a large tome in the other, speaking after he finished his sip. “I have an assignment that would be best suited to you, but only if you’re comfortable with it.”

She turned around to face him, leaning her hips back against the table, fingers gripping the bottom edge of it. “What is it?”

“I know you haven’t been with us very long, but now that you’ve seen some of the differences between the reality of modern vampires and the information from the old European grimoires, I’d like you to look through one of them with fresh eyes. Maybe there’s something hidden in there that’s meant to be symbolic that we may have missed. I know a lot of… groups take these books to be gospel, but we know that’s not the case.”

“Groups,” Jax murmured. “Cults, you mean. Let’s call a spade a spade, Leon.”

Leon shrugged. “Since you’re the one who’s practically lived these books for the last twenty years, I think you’d get results from it quicker than any of us would. If you’re comfortable with it, that is.”

Liliana drummed her fingertips against the table as she thought it over. Finally, she nodded. “If you can get me a cup of coffee that’s not in a shibari mug, consider it done.”

He handed her the large, green covered tome and bowed his head lightly. “I’ll get you that coffee, bloddukke.”

“Jesus, Liliana. For someone who was so concerned about your purity, dear old Dad didn’t do a very good job of cloistering you from the naughty things in the world.” Jax said without looking up from the book he was paging through.

She sat down in the heavy wooden chair, running her fingertips over the words on the cover of the dusty old volume. “He did for a while. But we had a few new people join us when I was about fourteen. They brought the internet with them, and all things naughty and not safe for work were laid bare before me.” She smirked. “Hell, you should see some of the fanfiction people have written about you lot. You are public figures, after all. Some people fawn over you like you’re rock stars. But you knew that, already.”

Grabbing a pen and a notebook, she sank back in the chair, a grin on her face as the room momentarily exploded with chaotic voices. She hushed them all after a minute or two of pandemonium. “You all have access to the internet. A simple search will bring up everything you could possibly NOT want to bear witness to.”

Leon sat beside her, shaking his head in disapproval. He set the coffee she’d requested in front of her, the liquid in the mug sweetened so heavily that it was almost white. “I should have gotten you a worse mug than the shibari one, if I knew you were going to be causing an uproar like this, Liliana.”

She grabbed the coffee without looking, taking a long swallow of the warm liquid. “If I don’t manage to find something useful in here today, feel free to punish me accordingly.”

“You’re just diving headfirst into the shallow end of the pool, juice box.” Maverick said with a shake of his head.

“You underestimate my research abilities. I wouldn’t just throw out an offer like that, without knowing I’d be able to deliver.”

“Fair enough,” Leon replied.

The afternoon melted away with quiet mutterings, the scratching of pens on paper, and the turning of pages interspersed with the clicking of computer keys.

“Ho-ly shit,” Liliana said softly, her eyes focused on a page halfway through the tome. The thick paper had become comfortable in her hands, and a small subscript beside an illustration had drawn her attention.

“Did you find something?” Draven glanced up from his laptop, intrigued.

“Check this out.” Beside a sketch of a man and woman was a small paragraph, written in the same looping script as everything else on the page. “If a dining vessel is born of a non-human and a human, their reaction to venom is unpredictable. They should be culled at birth to… avoid complications.”

She turned to Leon, eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “So… does that mean I’m something other than human? I know I was adopted, but I don’t know jack about my birth parents. Could one of them have been a vampire?”

He gestured with his hands for her to pass the book over and she complied, sliding it to him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one finger, reading over the bite of information that could potentially change everything for them.

“Definitely not vampire. If one of your parents is a vampire, you’re a vampire. There’s no such thing as a half-breed. Vampire genetics overwhelm and destroy the human ones once puberty is finished. But there are plenty of other things in the world that aren’t human.” He leaned closer to the book, peering at the corner of the illustration and tapping it with his fingertip. “There’s a number here. It doesn’t match up with the page it’s on, so maybe it’s a page near the end of the book.”

Leon flipped the pages to the one that matched the number from the picture. There were several blocks of text on it, and two lists side by side that Liliana could only describe as a chart. “How in the hell did we manage to miss this?” he murmured in disbelief.

Everyone had stopped and gathered around the table, anxiously waiting to hear the news. “Well? What is it?” Aubrey snapped.

“This is a list of non-human bloddukke species and known ways to counter the effects of vampire venom for them,” Leon replied with a small frown.

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Liliana said, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in the chair.

“However, without knowing more about your birth parents, that means the only way for us to figure out if your genetic origins are even on this list is to treat you like a lab rat.”

“You mean we’d have to hurt her and see if any of this bullshit helps.” Aubrey chimed in.

Leon took off his glasses, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Some of the solutions are preventative, some of them are to be applied after the fact. Going by these symbols and the annotations, some of the solutions are not only preventative, but permanent.”

“Which still boils down to us inflicting unwanted pain on her, and possibly still not having a cure. After all the shit she went through before she even came to us? Absolutely fucking not.” Maverick put a voice to what they were all thinking.

“Guys,” Liliana tried to interject, but they continued like she wasn’t even in the room.

“Seriously, there’s got to be some other way.” Draven put in.

“Aside from trial and error, we could also consult Daniel to see if he can find more information. Since she’s his patient now and he has all her previous medical records, we should probably talk it over with him before attempting anything.”

Liliana cleared her throat loudly and seven sets of eyes flicked to her. “Do I get a say, here?” She had an eyebrow raised and her tone was anything but pleased. Leon nodded and she continued. “I’m glad you’re all looking out for me, firstly. I appreciate that. But good lord, give a girl a little credit, would you? I’ve been physically, emotionally, and mentally abused my entire life. Almost like my father knew this was coming, like he was preparing me in his own twisted little way. I’d like to mitigate continuing that abuse as much as possible, but if Daniel and his network of people don’t find another way…” She looked down at her hands in her lap, fingers intertwined, and her palms squeezed together so hard that her knuckles were turning white. “I want to get this figured out as soon as possible.”

Leon’s hand settled on top of hers, his touch warm and reassuring. “We’ll figure it out. This information puts us on a clearer path than we had. We’ll talk with Daniel and go from there. If you think it’s taking too long and want to move forward, we’ll leave that decision up to you. But Liliana…” His fingers tightened around hers and she lifted her eyes to meet his caramel hued gaze. “Just because you’re accustomed to physical pain doesn’t mean you have to continue to put yourself through it. Especially not for our sakes.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, tears in the corners of her eyes that she refused to let fall. “For letting me decide.”