A Glamour of Blood
by L.E. Sterling
Copyright © 2023 by L.E. Sterling. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Prologue
Dominion City, 2142 A.D.
The man who’s been hunting us has finally run us to ground.
Beside me, Carl Chiba growls low in his throat and tugs me deeper into the alley we’d been sheltering in. “See you on the other side, Ser. I’ll be the one in the furry orange pajamas. Let’s give him hell.”
It’s our little thing, what Carl and I say to each other when we’re in a hairy situation and we’re not sure one or both of us will make it out alive.
“I’ll be checking everyone out. See you there.” All puns intended, because in our versions of heaven and hell, I have my former vision restored. I turn, pulling on my game face. If I’m going to meet my death, I’ll do it head-on.
A beat later, a man strides out of the dark like a swarm of stars, overwhelming in his brilliance, pulling me forward as he erases the distance between us. Two orbs of light, bright and hypnotic, emerge in place of his eyes. It’s as shocking as the punch I felt the first time I saw him.
“Do you think you can run?” Carl says quietly. My wise-cracking best friend, the other half of our two-person operation, would do anything to protect me. Half man, half cat, all True Born, Carl doesn’t like rain, and he generally doesn’t like people—except me. If I run, he’ll die protecting me. That’s the bond between me and my familiar. But today, I need to protect him.
I shake my head. “We’re not running.”
Not from this man. We’d never make it, anyway. The man in question moves with the grace of a predator, his shoulders full and rounded, thighs bunched and corded with muscles. All that strength pales in comparison to his ridiculously beautiful face. Snaking chimeras of power pull across his chiseled jaw, setting off cheekbones sharp as knives. His silver-and-blue eyes light with an intensity that could snap me.
This is Nolan Storm, leader of the True Borns—quite possibly the most powerful man in the world. I thought we’d been friends once upon a time. Now, we face each other as enemies.
Storm halts a mere foot away from me, close enough to reach out and snap my neck. Too close. I throw out my arms in a gesture that screams, Here I am. Come get me.
His low-pitched voice cuts through the darkness like a blade. “It’s over, Serena.”
“I don’t think I like your tone, Storm,” I snark.
Storm throws Carl a withering glance before he tips his chin toward me. Above his head spreads a spectral tangle of light. No one sees the talismans curving up from Storm’s head into antler-like branches like I do. For most, Storm’s crown of light is more a suggestion that occasionally threads into existence as gleaming, solid bone—mostly when he’s livid. Like right now, for instance, as those antlers thicken and shower sparks in the air between us. He crosses his arms. Strands of light weave together across his chest like knotted pearls.
Nolan Storm shakes his head in disgust. “Before I go and end this thing, I want you to tell me to my face. Why did you turn on us?”
After all we did for him, helping Storm advance the True Borns’ cause, how could it be so easy for him to believe we would go and betray him?
Carl shows a nice, shiny row of pointy teeth. “Now wait just a damned minute.”
I lay a hand on Carl’s arm and throw a glare of my own. “You didn’t wait a nanosecond to get our side of the story, did you? We were trying to help.”
Carl and I worked for Storm not so long ago. For months, we gathered intelligence for him. We fought for him, bled for him. And when it was needed, I let myself be captured for him. Over a distinctly unpleasant stretch of days, Dominion City’s finest interrogated me, beat the hell out of me, and starved me. Then, when they thought they’d won, I gave those soldiers what they wanted to know: the location of Nolan Storm.
But not for the reasons Storm believes.
“I was there, Serena. You gave me up.”
“Do you really think I’m so weak? Did it never occur to you that Carl and I planned the whole thing?”
Storm growls, murder in his eyes. “That’s exactly what I believe. So I’ll ask again. Why?”
He should know exactly why. The Plague has been ravaging the population for years. And while the naturally Plague-immune True Borns are doing just fine, thank you, the human population is looking iffy. A few months back, we’d started hearing rumors that a Plague cure was in the works, something that could save lives the world over. Word on the street was that cure was about to be hijacked—only it wasn’t clear who was pulling the strings. All we knew was that it was someone at the very top of Dominion’s food chain…and that the brains behind the operation wanted Nolan Storm’s head on a platter.
I give Storm my best duh expression. “How else do you think we were going to get the bad guys to come out from the shadows?”
I was the bait. And it had worked.
But then, instead of asking me what happened, or maybe thanking me, Storm let Dominion’s soldiers know where to come looking for us. Carl and I have been hunted like dogs ever since—by the soldiers, and then by him. Who betrayed who, exactly?
“You’re a traitor to your kind.” The way Storm says it makes my legs shake.
“My kind?” I scoff. “You don’t know the first thing about my ‘kind,’ Nolan Storm.”
I’m telling the truth. He really doesn’t know about my ‘kind.’ I’m a Salvager—the only one alive, as far as I know. I’m unable to see anything except True Born DNA, known as True Born talismans. Save for a few exceptions, those talismans are only found in True Borns like Carl and Storm, whose bodies express the ancient DNA of a time long past when beasts and humans were one, threaded together through powerful magic. To my eyes, True Borns are lit from within by the special genetic material that makes them unique. Dominion City and its human inhabitants—the rich citizens of the Upper Circle, and the poor class known as Lasters—aren’t visible to me at all.
Still, Storm’s barb hits deep, shredding my sense of certainty that I’ve done the right thing, that things have turned out—if not all right in the end, then at least better than they might have.
“This isn’t a game, Serena. People’s lives are at stake.”
I let out a wild bark of a laugh. Carl tightens a claw on the flesh of my forearm, an angry purr rising from his throat. I pat his hand, a signal to stand down.
“I thought you were better than this, Storm. Now I see you’re just as bad as the rest of them. All those corrupt men in power who hear and see exactly what they want.”
And what Nolan Storm wants is my death. It’s me he blames for our so-called betrayal. Of our two-person crew, Storm knows that Carl is the muscle and I’m the brains.
The True Born leader stops to listen to something being relayed in his communications implant. “In two minutes, all hell is going to break loose. I just need to know if I should kill you where you stand or whether you’re going to try to make amends and work with us when this is over. Let me tell you, I’m really leaning toward killing you right now.”
A rumble shakes the street.
“What in tuna heaven is that?” Carl mumbles.
Storm lets his eyes blaze over Carl’s distinctive fur. “Tanks. The end game is playing out.”
I’m swept by a sudden bout of dizziness. Before I go and end this thing, he’d said earlier. When this is over. “You’re going to fight them. Aren’t you?”
Storm has the entire Dominion City army after him. But instead of running away like a sensible person, he’s gunning for them. As if in answer, the sound of a plane’s engine splutters nearby and then gallops to life. Shots ring out.
Carl presses my arm. “We really need to go, Ser.”
I nod but don’t dare take my eyes off the man before me. “Storm, whatever you think of me now, whatever team you decide I’m playing on tomorrow, I hope you will remember one thing. Everything I’ve ever done is to try to save Dominion.”
“Nothing in these last few weeks has shown me that’s true.” Storm leans forward, his body moving like smoke before my eyes. I read anger in those light-rimmed eyes, coming at me like crushing black holes. “But I believe in second chances. I’ll give you two weeks from tonight to prove it to me.”
Two weeks? That isn’t enough time.
“Prove it,” I echo woodenly. Storm inches closer, close enough that I can feel the hot tug of his breath. Electrified, either by fear or something else I dare not name, my body trembles. “And then what?”
“Then you’ll be brought to account for your actions.”
“You’ll be my judge, jury, and executioner, then?”
“No, Serena Rogue. I’ll be much, much more.”
Hair rises on the back of my neck. His words are a promise, and one that won’t end well for me.
Gunfire stutters in the distance, followed by the uncanny pop of an explosion. Storm steps back, and the air arranges itself around him anew, like water parting and folding. A moment later, the True Born stalks off toward the heavy clattering of tanks and guns. Carl and I stare after Storm’s tarry afterglow until he turns a corner, and it winks out. I feel suddenly parched for his light.
Carl whistles under his breath. “That wasn’t tense or anything.”
“Uhhhhm.” I sink against the nearest wall, relief washing through me that I’m still breathing and I have all my limbs.
“Uh. Not sure we’re out of the woods, Ser.” Carl puts a finger to his lips.
Then I hear it. The scrape of many feet on broken pavement. All at once I know what Carl is looking at. I can feel the bodies as they pass—silent wraiths, thin and broken and hungry. I smell illness. Lasters. Hundreds of the poor and ill citizens of Dominion, from the sounds, moving through the city streets. Following Nolan Storm to some unknown fate.
It was unthinkable not that long ago. In Dominion, the divisions between human and True Born run deep. The lower-class Lasters generally tolerate True Borns, fear them, but don’t interact. They certainly don’t fight alongside True Borns—or so I thought.
Carl and I use the crowd as cover, slipping away from them when the sounds of violence rise. We don’t stop until we hit the long bridge to the east of the city’s core. I lean against one of its iron pillars, feeling their solid weight behind me. I’m alive. We’re still alive.
“He’s going to kill us if we stay, Ser.” Carl’s furry cat face swarms into view.
“I know.”
A drop of rain hits my face, then another. Carl wipes my face and yowls. “What the hell is this? Are you bleeding?”
I look up. And then I see it. Where I shouldn’t see anything at all, I see rain. Each drop is a streaking comet, purplish white, light drenched, and wonderful.
“N-no. Carl,” I stammer, not sure whether to laugh or cry. “I’m not bleeding.” And then I do laugh, sinking to my knees. Because what’s raining from the sky isn’t water. It’s True Born talismans. Which I can see.
Which also means, from this second on, everything—everything—in Dominion City will change.
Chapter One
Dominion City. Six months later.
I pounce. With a rubbery squeak, the little rat—okay, fine, the large, disgusting rat—that had been skulking around my bedroom jumps for a hole in the wall. I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that our little hideaway is infested with giant rats—which, for the past several months, I’ve been able to see, thank you very much—or the fact that Carl, who has extraordinary vision, has always seen them but has never tried to catch a single one.
Some cat man he is.
“Carl! Damn it, Carl!” I pick up a shoe from the floor and hurl it at the crack in the wall. Nothing. Just the twitter of genetically enhanced rats laughing their asses off at me.
Despite the rats, leaving Dominion City had never been a serious option for Carl and me. Nolan Storm’s two-week grace period had come and gone months ago, and all that changed for us was that we suspended our trade of finding people and things for money in favor of living under bridges and dumpster diving for scraps of food.
After another month of living rough, with no further sign of Nolan Storm’s lieutenants bent on hurrying us to the afterlife, we started to rethink our strategy and rented this hidey hole. Which doesn’t stop me from waking up at night with a very real terror that when he finds me, Storm is going to rip my spinal cord from my body.
I bang my fist like a drum on the paper-thin wall. “Carl!” No response. He’s either gone out for food or was eaten by the rats. I pound some more, and this time I’m echoed by a bang from below.
I head to the door. The peeper on our hidey hole’s main entrance is actually two openings. A sliding gun mount rides just below the eye hole. Waiting for me in a side cubby is a gun, which I insert into the mount before I bother to squint into the eye hole.
I can make out a thin figure backing up into the stomach of several other figures, giving me a good shot at them all. Short. Shiny.
I sigh and pull the gun back before pressing the intercom button. “What do you want?”
Our hidey hole is in the port-side quarter of the city known as the Fifth. It’s famous for broken, rubble-strewn streets that are choc-a-block with drug dealers, war lords, and black-market Splicers who want to fly under the radar. They make Carl and me, whose business often involves very bad people, feel quite at home. Also, having a criminal network at our disposal is pretty handy for gathering intel…until we get made by a bunch of vicious, starving children, that is.
Those vicious, starving children standing at my door now look around, wondering how I sound so clear from the other side of a door. Well, technology will do that for you, darlings, I think smugly, suddenly glad we invested the two thousand Dominion dollars needed to gear up our hidey hole for exactly this kind of drama.
The voice that comes back at me is thin and reedy and cracks at a high note. Can’t be more than fourteen. “Looking for Sky Lady?”
I pause. Sky Lady was a nickname the street kids started to call me a couple years back because my eyes were the same white-white as Dominion’s skies.
“Who sent you?”
“Jasper.”
I sigh again and start pulling back the four bolts on the door, knowing with every fiber of my being that I’m going to regret this, and raise my gun.
“Only one. The message keeper.”
The tall, gangly one nods reluctantly while the others step back, arms raised in surrender. I don’t know what Jasper told them, but they weren’t expecting this. To their mind, I used to be one of their own, and one of their own would never turn a gun on them. Right?
Their intel can’t be that good, then.
I keep the gun trained at the kid’s chest while I wave him in.
“Sky Lady,” he wheezes. He looks like he’s going to pass out.
“Kid.” I motion with the gun for him to close and lock the door. Children are vicious in packs, and there’s no reason to give them any invitations.
He eyes me warily. I wait until the silence deepens. He licks his lips. I can practically see unease coiling through his skinny body.
“Sky Lady.”
“Kid.”
“Sky Lady.”
“Kid.” I tip my head to one side.
“Jasper wants to talk to you.” Formalities are over, then.
“So?” I lean back against the door, watching the boy’s veins shake a new genetic cocktail through his limbs. He’ll turn True Born before his voice finishes breaking. “How’d you find us, anyway? I thought we were pretty well hidden.”
The boy looks up at me and shrugs. “Not hard to track a five-foot cat man.”
“He’ll kill you if you say he’s anything less than five-four. How long?”
The boy gulps with discomfort. “Maybe…three moons?”
They’ve known where we are for three months? We should have pulled stakes and gotten the hell out of here ages ago. What were we thinking? I mean, other than semi-hot showers and a cookstove.
“Hmm. But you’ve decided to darken our door today. Why now?”
“Now is the time. Jasper say it.”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Thigo.”
I sidle up to the lad and lean in with the gun’s muzzle. “Thigo, why does Jasper say now is the time?”
He inches back until he hits the door. Fear steams off his skinny body in waves. “They eat each other in Dominion now.” Thigo makes a crunching sound as his jaw moves up and down. “Mwua, mwua. Everybody munching on each. Splicers, ’specially.”
I can only hope that Thigo is being metaphorical about the eating part. Splicers are folks from the Upper Circle who come down with Plague, but instead of dying like the poor Lasters, they pay good Dominion dollars to cut out their rotting genes. Splicing is an expensive procedure and often has to be performed more than once, which is why only Dominion’s elite can afford the treatments, which are offered in the city’s handful of Splicer clinics.
“Why does Jasper care?”
“They be eating kids, Sky Lady.” The boy closes his eyes. His body ripples with a shudder of horror. “Kids gone missing. Lots of kids.”
And…that would do it. I lower my gun. For these kids, there’s nothing more terrifying than the gang not being enough to protect you. I should know. Still, it’s several long moments before I find it in my heart to answer.
“Tell him I’ll be there before the week is out.”
“But Sky Lady—”
“My final word, Thigo. Take or leave, it’s all one and the same to me.”
I owe Jasper nothing. But the kids? Do I owe them? My heart skips a beat, unsure.
