Canticle to the Midnight Moon Read online

  “You expect me to sit in the back seat?” said Viggo.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Viggo huffed.

  I opened the door.

  Landon opened his door.

  “I could compel you to let me drive, you know,” said Viggo.

  “You could,” I said. “But if you have to compel us, then there’s not much point in having us along at all, is there? Compelled people only think and do whatever it is you tell them to do. I thought you were sick of yes men.”

  “Oh, blood and fangs,” said Viggo, yanking open the back seat of the car. He got inside, looking very annoyed.

  Landon and I got in.

  We drove.

  We arrived outside Adeline about twenty minutes later. I parked the car and we all got out.

  Then we walked through the woods for the next three hours, looking for any signs of this home base that Viggo had spoken of. We didn’t find anything.

  Eventually, we took a break and sat down on some old stumps in a small clearing. The moon shone down on us from above. It wasn’t full, but it would be within a week. I hoped we’d have made some progress before then.

  “Listen,” Landon said, “there’s no reason to think that the dark figure is here. Maybe the dark figure is on the other side of the trail, and that’s where the home base is.”

  “The other side of the trail is the city,” said Viggo.

  “So?” said Landon. “Why wouldn’t the dark figure be from the city?”

  “It’s not possible,” said Viggo. “We always kept witches and other magic users out of the city. Witches have too much power over vampires.”

  “But you’re not running the city anymore,” said Landon. “So all bets are off.”

  “If Desta’s being held in the city somewhere, we’ll never find her,” I said, feeling panicked.

  “We have only been looking for a short time,” said Viggo. “We mustn’t give up yet.”

  “Oh, this is a short time, huh?” said Landon.

  “Yes,” said Viggo. “When you’ve been alive as long as I have, this is but a blink of an eye.”

  “He’s right, Landon. We can’t give up yet.”

  Landon threw his head back and looked up at the stars. “We can’t? Seriously?”

  “Come on,” I said. “I thought you wanted to rescue Sinead. And besides, you know what it would do to me if anything happened to Desta.”

  Landon turned his gaze on me. “You’re right. I’m sorry, babe.” He patted my knee.

  Viggo raised his eyebrows.

  I pointed at him. “Whatever you were going to say, don’t.”

  Viggo chuckled softly.

  Landon shrugged at him. “I don’t know why you’re so self-satisfied. You’re obsessed with a woman who hates your guts.”

  “She does not,” said Viggo. “She’s simply the kind of woman who needs to be wooed, that’s all. She can’t be won over easily, unlike some women.” He eyed me. “Some women will fall for anything, even bloodhounds.”

  “She thinks the fur is sexy,” said Landon.

  “Landon!” I said.

  He turned to me. “What? You’re embarrassed that you find the fur sexy?”

  “No, it’s just some things I say to you, I don’t want you to repeat.”

  “What do you care what Viggo thinks?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So, why are you even saying it in the first place?” I said. “You don’t need to prove anything to him.”

  Viggo cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could get back to looking? I think we have more ground to cover tonight.”

  “We’re not going to find anything,” said Landon.

  “Likely not, no,” said Viggo. “Wherever the dark figure is, she has probably used a spell to hide her home base from prying eyes. It’s unlikely we’ll find her simply by searching.”

  Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, but he was definitely right. “So, then why are we even bothering with this?” I said.

  “To rule it out,” said Viggo. “Our next step will be to try to unearth the spell and break it.”

  “Why don’t we do that first?” I said.

  “Because if there is no spell,” said Viggo, “then we won’t find anything that way. First, we must be sure we can’t find the place with a typical search. Then we move on.”

  * * *

  We searched for the rest of the night. As dawn split the sky, Viggo was visibly weakened. Admittedly, he was much better off than most vampires would be. He was ancient and strong. Still, he suggested we should rest and find somewhere to spend the day until we could get started again later that night.

  I almost said we could just drive back to the village. It was close enough. But there was no way that I was inviting Viggo within the protective spell of my village. No way at all.

  So, when Viggo suggested we stay at a motel in Adeline, I went with it. To get into Adeline, we had to climb the fence that surrounded the town. Then we walked together down the streets until we found somewhere.

  Inside, the man at the desk told us, “You can’t check in until 1:00 in the afternoon.”

  Viggo leaned across the desk and gazed into the man’s eyes. “We can check in now. You’ll give us two rooms for free. You’ll tell the maids not to disturb us. You’ll check on us yourself and after we leave, you’ll forget we were ever here.”

  The man nodded, a blank look on his face. “Sure thing.”

  And so, we were soon checked into our rooms.

  Landon and I peered at the queen-sized bed in the room.

  “He couldn’t have compelled us another room?” said Landon. “Or specified separate beds?”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m exhausted. All I want to do is sleep. Neither of us is even thinking about… you know… anything.”

  “Right,” said Landon tightly. “Not even thinking about it.”

  “It’ll be like when we had to stay in the bed at Ondine’s in Pattos,” I said.

  He nodded, swallowing.

  We went to sleep on opposite sides of the bed, but when we woke up later, to screams, we had somehow both migrated into the middle of the bed, and he had his arms around me and I had my head burrowed on his shoulder and our legs were intertwined.

  It might have been a problem, but thankfully, the screaming was a distraction.

  Landon and I rushed out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

  Viggo was there, holding a maid by the shoulders and speaking to her in a quiet, calm voice. “I’m not the vampire king. You didn’t see me. And I most certainly wasn’t feeding on anyone in the bedroom.”

  There was another maid at the end of the hallway, running. She was the one who was screaming.

  Viggo looked up at Landon and me, irritated. “Could one of you do something useful and catch her?”

  “What?” said Landon, smirking. “We’ve got to help you clean up your messes too?”

  I was horrified. “You didn’t kill someone, did you?”

  “No,” said Viggo. “But even if I did—”

  The screaming cut off.

  We all turned to see that the maid had shut herself inside the stairwell.

  “Oh, fang it all,” said Viggo. “She’s getting away.” And he took after her at top speed. He reached the end of the hallway and threw open the door. Then he ran inside. The door clattered shut after him.

  “I don’t know if I trust him,” I said. “Maybe someone’s dead in his room. We should check.”

  “I don’t see why he has to bite people at all,” said Landon.

  “I know, right?” I said. I started across the hall to Viggo’s room.

  But at that moment, the door to the stairwell burst open. Viggo was running towards us, and right on his heels were ten bloodhounds, rushing toward us, their eyes yellow with rage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Come on,” Viggo snarled at us, streaking past us into our room.

  We ran after him int
o the room.

  The first of the bloods knocked the door down, and wood splinters went everywhere. The others climbed on top of him to get in.

  Viggo picked up a chair next to a desk and hurled it at the window in the room.

  The sound of shattering glass.

  The bloods were snarling, coming for us.

  “Shift,” Viggo ordered me.

  I pulled off my shirt and let the shift flow over me.

  Viggo vaulted out of the hotel window.

  I looked at Landon questioningly.

  He nodded.

  I jumped out the window too. Landon came behind me.

  And right behind us came all the bloodhounds.

  Viggo streaked through the streets. It was all I could do to keep up with him. Vampires are a bit faster than wolves. But Landon could have gone faster. He was a bloodhound, but he was holding back for my sake.

  And the bloods that were chasing us were gaining on us.

  Soon, we reached the fence.

  It slowed us down to scale it and jump over, and then the bloods just powered through the thing, tearing the chain links apart like paper chains.

  One of the bloods leaped into the air and landed on top of me.

  I yelped, my body slammed into the forest floor.

  The bloodhound raked its claws down my back.

  I tried to buck it off.

  Landon dove into the thing, and the two bloods tumbled away from me, snarling and scratching and biting, a whirlwind of fighting.

  I was wounded, but I could fight. I turned on the remaining bloods and growled.

  “No, Camber, run!” came Landon’s voice, strained from the effort of fighting the other bloodhound.

  Two of them were coming for me.

  I jumped up to meet them, jaws wide. I sank my teeth into the midsection of one.

  It made a strangled sound of pain and then sunk its claws into my throat.

  I gargled, unable to make any noise, the pain washing through me.

  The bloodhound pulled its claws out and the other blood’s teeth closed around my front leg.

  I tried to fight them off, but the throat wound was bad. I was going to need to shift, and soon. But in human form, I would be vulnerable to the bloods and—

  Viggo was there, plucking the bloodhound on me up by the scruff of its neck. He wrapped an arm around its chest and then he yanked the bloodhound’s head off, as though it was nothing. The bloodhound was dead.

  Viggo seized the next, did the same thing.

  In moments, it was over. Viggo had killed them.

  He was incredibly strong. Most vampires couldn’t just do that. But Viggo had done it without even seeming to strain himself. I guessed there was a reason that he had become the vampire king. I also got the impression that if he had wanted to remain the king, he would have. No one could have stopped this man.

  He stood in the middle of the bloods’ corpses, his face and clothes spattered with blood. He was smiling, and it was a terrible smile. He looked completely insane.

  I limped off into the woods to shift.

  * * *

  “Well, how am I supposed to eat?” Viggo was saying. He was sitting on the forest floor in his bloody clothes, looking like a sulking six-year-old.

  I was wearing Landon’s shirt because I’d had to leave my clothes in the hotel. I was going to suggest that I go back and get them. I was the least likely to look as though I didn’t belong. But I was still trying to recover from the scuffle with the bloods.

  Viggo squared his shoulders. “So, they’ve got orders to kill me, marvelous. But I need blood. If I don’t get it, I’ll starve to death. Well, not to death, but it’ll be miserable. I’m hungry.” He picked up a small, flat rock and surveyed it. “I can’t very well give up eating because of the threat of being attacked by bloods, now can I? I have to eat.”

  “Do you?” said Landon in a low, dry voice.

  Viggo pointed at him. “You’d be dead if it weren’t for me. Both of you. I saved your lives.”

  “Yes, and got us in danger in the first place,” said Landon.

  “He’s not wrong,” I said. “I can’t help but wonder if we wouldn’t be better off looking for Desta on our own. People are going to recognize you, and they’re going to alert the authorities, and they’re going to sick bloods on us.”

  “We’ll stay in the woods, then,” said Viggo. “No more going into the human towns to sleep in hotels.”

  “And that means you’ll be out in the open in the sunlight,” I said.

  “There have to be motels for werewolves, don’t there?” said Viggo.

  “No,” I said.

  “There are those whorehouses,” said Landon.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” said Landon. “The werewolf prostitutes? They have houses all up and down the edges of the fences.”

  “Oh, you know where they are, huh?” I said, eyeing him.

  “I do,” said Landon. “I was part of a bloodhound pack, you know? I was taken there.”

  I swallowed. When bloods went to those places, they might try to be intimate with the werewolf women there, but that always triggered their rage mode, and they would kill them in the process of doing whatever it was that they did with them. Had Landon done that? Did I want to know if he had? We were mated now. There was no going back on it.

  And maybe I couldn’t judge him, not if it had only happened once. Maybe he hadn’t known it would happen. Maybe he had been horrified to see that it had happened and—

  And maybe I was making excuses for him.

  I licked my lips. “Look, going to a place like that—”

  “Sounds perfect,” said Viggo, getting up. “We can rest there during the day, and I can feed on the whores. Wonderful. Lead the way, Landon.”

  Landon turned to me. “Are you okay with this?”

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

  “I’m sure Viggo will compel us some rooms without anyone in them, won’t he?” said Landon. “Separate this time, as I’m sure you can understand that it’s not safe for me to be bunking down with—”

  “No, we can have a room together,” I said. “If that’s where we’re going, I want us in the same room.”

  Now Landon was the one with his mouth open, as though he was going to speak, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  “Done,” said Viggo. “Let’s go. I’m still hungry.”

  * * *

  Viggo was sitting at the head of a table in a large great room. It had a long, wooden table and an iron chandelier hanging over it, lit with real candles. The walls were covered in a patterned scarlet wallpaper, and the room was a sort of mix of rustic werewolf decor and a Valentine’s Day party.

  There was a werewolf in human form sitting on Viggo’s lap. He had already bitten her, and she was in a giving mood, because bitten humans tend to form crushes on the vampires who bite them. I’d experienced it myself. It was awful. Viggo didn’t have to do that to his victims. He was strong enough to stop it. He’d bitten me, and I’d never developed any feelings toward him. But in this case, I think it amused him to have the woman infatuated with him, so he hadn’t stopped it.

  Landon and I were sitting on the other side of the table. I hadn’t been able to go back for clothes, so Viggo had compelled one of the werewolves to give me something to wear. I had been afraid it would be something trashy, but it turned out to simply be jeans and a t-shirt, which was perfect. We were eating food which Viggo had compelled the werewolves to make for us. It was macaroni and cheese with bits of ham in it. It was pretty good.

  “As I was saying,” Viggo said, “at the time, this whole part of the world was ruled by kings across the sea, and the humans weren’t the least bit pleased about it. They were also frightened of the werewolves, who were native to the land. Many of the humans had intermarried with them, but many more were frightened of the offspring of such unions. So, the entire land was chaos, and the distant kings had no
way to keep order to keep the humans safe either.”

  “This is riveting,” said Landon. “Really, it is. But I don’t remember asking you for a history lesson on how you became king of the vampires.”

  “King of everything,” said Viggo. “I conquered it all, even those countries across the seas. If you go there now, it is my emissaries who hold the top positions in those governments.”

  “Well, they’re not really yours anymore, are they?” I said.

  “Of course they are,” said Viggo. “Ondine can take over the government, but she cannot take what is mine.”

  Landon gave me a look. “Let’s just tune him out, huh?”

  “Viggo, maybe we could talk about how we’re going to look for magical spells that are hiding where Desta is being held captive?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Viggo. “That’s quite important. But first, let me just explain a bit about how it all worked, because it wasn’t easy, you know. The werewolves nearly did us in. They would attack in swarms and bite every single vampire. I was forced to the point of surrender nearly four times.”

  “Pity you didn’t surrender,” I muttered.

  “Well, truly, how would you have it?” said Viggo. “The humans afraid of the vampires and the werewolves? Making weapons to destroy us? No, no, this way is much better. I know you think that you wolves are oppressed, but you are mostly left alone in the woods.”

  “Except when we’re attacked by bloodhounds,” I said.

  Viggo shrugged. He lifted the hand of the woman on his lap, bit it, and poured her blood into a glass. “Well, the humans have to believe I’m trying to do something about the werewolf problem. And yet, it can never be solved, because the fear of the wolves keeps them in line.”

  “That’s despicable,” I said.

  “I suppose.” Viggo took a long drink of blood. “Truthfully, I am glad it’s all over. Being king had grown frightfully dull.”

  “So you say,” I said.

  “You know what I think has grown dull?” said Landon. “Listening to Viggo talk.”

  “Viggo, the magic?” I said. “We need to find Desta tonight.”

  “Yes,” said Viggo. “We’ll look again. We can use blood magic.”