Alexis Tomar's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Alexis had a life to spend, but she did not know how to spend it. A binding rite needed tools. Which tools, she had never learned. She knew the target. She knew the cost. She did not know the ritual. A wrong step and the minister's death would buy nothing. Tyler would stay welted and broken. So she went to the one vampire in Walachia who could learn a secret without seeming to want it. She found Carmilla on the steps of the rune-carved tower, its glass domes glowing above them. Carmilla stood with a pale, silver-haired lord, the two of them a matched blade of black and gold. She dismissed him with a glance. Alexis had let this woman close over many nights. That was the danger. Carmilla read hunger the way Alexis read men. "You need something," Carmilla said. "You never climb these steps for me." "I need to know how a binding rite is prepared. The tools. The order." Carmilla's eyes moved once, top to bottom. "For your brother." Not a question. "The Mother teaches only in her vault. You won't go to her." "No." "Then you want me to steal it." Carmilla stepped down one stair. "I know the witches who keep the old rites. Death-work isn't written now. It's folded into moon-charged stone. Whoever holds the stone holds the rite." Alexis had not known that. The knowledge chilled her. "Then get me the stone." "I get you nothing for free." Carmilla's nails brushed Alexis's jaw, light as a moth. "When I raise my clan in Styria, I will want a spy who owes me. You. This is the debt." Alexis weighed it. A debt to Carmilla was a leash. But a wrong rite was a grave, and Tyler's with it. "Done," she said. They walked the cobbled street together, past a knot of four court vampires trading gossip in leather and lace. Carmilla nodded, unhurried, a countess out for air. She led Alexis to a shuttered rowhouse and knocked twice. A stooped witch opened, saw Carmilla's face, and could not shut the door. Whatever Carmilla poured into her voice, the woman softened under it and turned inside. Carmilla came out with a smooth gray stone in her palm. She pressed it into Alexis's hand. "The rite lives in this. Bowl of iron. Salt in a broken ring. The minister's blood drawn while his heart still beats, not after. Speak nothing until the stone goes dark. Miss the order and the life burns off for nothing." Alexis closed her fist around the stone. She had the rite. She had the tools. The last thing between her and Tyler's freedom was the killing itself. "You're mine now," Carmilla said. "Remember that." Alexis walked away with the stone warm against her skin and a new master waiting on the other side of the man she was about to murder.