Blood so red, p.1
Blood So Red, page 1
BLOOD SO RED
Urban Magick & Folklore. Book 2
C. GOCKEL
ABOUT THE BOOK
FAIRY TALES OFTEN HAVE GRISLY ENDINGS …
Fairy tales don’t always go by the book either. Cherie, the Charming Princess, rescued Jack, her sleeping prince, but she didn’t receive her happily ever after.
Jack is distant, the city is in turmoil, and Cherie’s made new friends, but new enemies, too.
And all the while, the Evil Queen is watching, scheming, and waiting for her chance to strike.
A retelling of Snow White with Urban Magick, plenty of folklore, and a Princess Charming. Perfect for fans of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver.
Copyright © 2022 C. Gockel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, subject “Attention: Permissions,” at the email address below:
cgockel@cgockelwrites.com
* * *
Print ISBN: 9798839905504
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
Get sneak peeks and exclusive content
Also by C. Gockel
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Contact Information
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ALSO BY C. GOCKEL
URBAN MAGICK & FOLKLORE
Snow So White
Blood So Red
Grendel & Beowulf
I BRING THE FIRE (A LOKI SERIES)
Wolves: I Bring the Fire Part I (free ebook!)
Monsters: I Bring the Fire Part II
Chaos: I Bring the Fire Part III
In the Balance: I Bring the Fire Part 3.5
Fates: I Bring the Fire Part IV
The Slip: A Short Story (mostly) from Sleipnir’s Point of Smell
Warriors: I Bring the Fire Part V
Ragnarok: I Bring the Fire Part VI
The Fire Bringers: An I Bring the Fire Short Story
Atomic: A Short Story
Magic After Midnight: A Short Story
Rush: A Short Story
Take My Monsters: A Short Story
Soul Marked: I Bring the Fire Part VII
Magic After Midnight I Bring the Fire Part VIII
Last Wish: A Short Story
THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT
Archangel Down (free ebook!)
Noa's Ark
Heretic
Carl Sagan's Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe: A Short Story
Starship Waking
Darkness Rising
The Defiant
Android General 1
Admiral Wolf
Supernova
Mech
OTHER WORKS
Murphy’s Star: A Sci-fi Short Story
Friendly Fire: A Sci-fi Short Story
Let There Be Light: A Sci-fi Short Story
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Knives get sharper and more polished against a whetstone. My books become better with the feedback of my beta readers. Blood So Red was sharpened and polished with the feedback of Kay McSpadden, Sarah Easterly, and Amy Eberhedt. All of them read my digital pages before they’d been grammar edited, enduring massive eye twitches when I managed to spell names that I created wrong … multiple ways, over and over again. They caught plot problems, hats that came off more than once, point of view shifts, and helped me keep my characters in character.
Erin Zarro did the first pass for grammar, cleaning up the detritus of my dyslexic mind and suffered mightily for it. Louis Maconi ran through the book correcting the grammar and spelling faux pas I committed while fixing the problems discovered by Erin, and then my team of faithful ARC readers did a final pass—thank you Genevieve! This book wouldn’t be possible without this team, and I owe them more than I can say.
Writing can be a lonely business, but writing this book wasn’t thanks to the Morning Sprinters group. Thanks to all the regulars there for keeping me on task: Christine, Yasmine, Lilith, Margaret, Kelley, and many drop-in guests. Special thanks must go to Kate Danley, our instigator, hostess, and whip cracker.
My family had a role in this book, too. My husband was the one who convinced me to publish. He doesn’t bat an eye between releases when earnings become thin. Also, he puts up with my daydreaming writer’s brain, as do my children (though they have less of a choice in the matter).
This book also wouldn’t have come to pass without you, my readers. Thank you for reading, thank you for buying (and borrowing!). Thank you for reviewing and all your kind emails and posts on Facebook. I’ll try to keep writing as long as you keep reading and listening.
Lastly, special mention must be given to Naomi Novik. If she had continued the series of splendid fairy tale retellings she began with Uprooted and Spinning Silver I might never have felt the need to write Snow So White, Blood So Red, or the upcoming novels in Urban Magick and Folklore.
CHAPTER 1
She’d been buried alive.
A gnawing, hollow feeling in her gut woke her before the chilling realization set in. Her eyes opened to darkness unbroken by the barest thread of light. Panicking, she threw up her hands and encountered a slab of metal, cold and hard, too heavy to lift. With frenzied fingers, she searched around her, finding crumbling stone walls to the sides and thin bedding beneath. That’s when she knew she was entombed. Her heart jumped to her throat. Think. That was how she got out of this.
She screamed instead, with such fear that it felt like her soul was ripping out of her chest, leaving her lighter, untethered. Her arms flew up, and this time, the slab lifted and tumbled away as easily as if it were a leaf. Panting, she burst through the opening into the familiar gloom of her basement. She’d been buried in her own home. Why? By whom?
Frantically scanning the room, she spied a rat. Rearing back on its hind legs, it appeared to be frozen in fear. She took a step toward it, her body oddly weightless. She took another step. It didn’t react. She licked her lips, snatched it up, and bit its neck.
Her soul suddenly condensed and collided with her body with jarring force. She had weight again. The rat squeaked and struggled as blood flowed over her tongue. She gulped down the warm, faintly salty fluid, the sound of its heartbeat fading.
Realization hit heavy and hard. Grendel, you idiot, you’re a Vampire. You buried yourself this morning. Must you do this to yourself every night?
A few minutes later, Grendel headed to the dumpster in her alley, the rat wrapped in a piece of bed sheet and stuffed in a plastic bag.
A neighbor taking out his trash glanced up at her curiously. She hoped the clothes she wore didn’t look like she’d slept in them and self-consciously pushed her glasses up her nose. The glasses were Magickal and a gift from Ashwin, a helpful, handsome, delicious young man. She didn’t know the last from experience, but she couldn’t help extrapolating from how wonderful he smelled—the solid, strong thump of his heart, and whoosh of the blood in his veins. She licked her lips.
The neighbor, an older gentleman with a bit of a paunch and jowls shaded by gray stubble, tossed his trash into a bin. He doffed his cap at her. “Evening.”
He smelled flowery sweet, like cancer, and the blood that flowed through his veins sputtered in the area of his heart. Still, he was delicious, too, and her fangs nicked the insides of her lips.
“Evening,” she said, smiling with her lips closed, which had the advantage of looking sweet and grandmotherly and also hid her fangs. That seemed to satisfy him. He didn’t stare at her or call to her; he merely went about his business. The cancer wasn’t advanced; he wasn’t close enough to death to recognize her for what she was or in pain enough to crave her presence, to hold her in his arms as his blood spilled over her tongue ...
Grendel swallowed the lump in her throat. She should mention to Cherie he was sick; Cherie could convince him to get treatment. Grendel sighed. That would mean she’d have longer to wait before he did call for her.
“Do the right thing, Grendel,” she whispered. “Do you want to be a monster?”
Yes. Maybe. Sometimes.
“Not now,” she whispered to herself. People needed to not be afraid of her. “There’s too much at stake for me to wind up at the sharp end of one.” Grendel surveyed her alley. Potholed pavement revealed
That it looked so much like before Ember had swept across the world, before electricity had failed, before Vampires had risen, and Magick had awakened, testified to the scene’s wrongness. Nothing living stayed frozen in amber the way her neighborhood had. Nothing natural.
Sometime after becoming a Vampire, Grendel had fallen asleep, far from her city. According to Cherie, her adopted granddaughter—who wasn’t a Vampire but knew much more about vampirism than Grendel did—Vampires slept for long periods of time occasionally.
While Grendel had been asleep, her city had been cursed by a faraway Queen who sent a flock of millions of sluagh, crimson-eyed black birds, to devour its inhabitants’ souls. At the last minute, Chicago had been saved by Mizuki DeWitt, an enchantress—or, as these modern folks called her, “a Magickal.” Mizuki had cast a spell that put every living thing—human, animal, and plant—to sleep. In sleep, their souls had been suspended, unreachable by the sluagh. The birds had waited above the slumbering bodies for nearly two centuries, until Cherie, with Grendel’s help, had awoken the one Magickal strong enough to destroy the infestation.
The Queen still lived and could not be happy. The Magickals of the city said the Queen wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—send sluagh again. A curse that strong had to have been a once-in-a-lifetime spell. But the Queen would react somehow, sooner or later, and Grendel needed to be alive, or at least not a pile of ash, when it happened.
She approached her dumpster and lifted the lid. A flash of grey in the periphery of her vision made her pause. Sliding her gaze left, she caught the gleam of amber eyes too large for a cat, their owner too stealthy to be a dog. A coyote stood a few paces away, its nose up, perhaps catching the scent of her dead rat. Coyotes had been tolerated in the city since before the Change—they ate rats.
Salivating, she slowly turned her head. At her motion, it backed up a few steps and ducked. Grendel could hear its rapidly beating heart and the rush of blood in its veins. The creature took another step backward but didn’t run away. She noted the roundness of its belly—it was pregnant and hungry.
Sighing, Grendel set the garbage can lid down. The coyote scampered back a few more paces. “Relax, I'm not going to eat you,” Grendel grumbled. “More’s the pity.” The coyote, unlike the rat, would be more than an appetizer. Grendel was “allowed” to drink coyotes, but Cherie was uncomfortable with that. “Coyote is a Native American Trickster God,” Cherie had explained. “In some tribes, he’s given credit for creating mankind and the world itself. It seems … undiplomatic … to drink from His totem animal.”
“The things we do for our children,” Grendel muttered, not sure if she was referring to herself ignoring her appetite because of Cherie’s unease, or the pregnant coyote, desperate for food and facing down a Vampire despite obvious fear. Unwrapping the rat, Grendel tossed it behind the dumpster.
“Enjoy,” Grendel said to the coyote, turning away. She heard the soft pad of paws behind her.
Cherie wasn’t home.
Grendel knew it as soon as she entered the third-story flat. Cherie used lights after sunset: Ember powered lights that Jack had installed. He’d come over to supervise their installation himself, to make sure it was “done right.” Grendel might have suspected it was an excuse to spend more time with Cherie, but that was the only time he’d spent with Cherie since the sluagh had been eradicated. Grendel had thought Jack was in love with Cherie; however, men in love tended to be underfoot, and Jack was not. Cherie’s feelings toward Jack were uncertain, and Grendel did not know if she was sad or relieved of Jack’s inattention.
Hoping that she was wrong, that Cherie was taking a nap or reading a book in a window nook, Grendel prowled through the abode. Entering the bathroom, she froze at the sight of her white-haired, wrinkled visage in the medicine cabinet’s mirror. Vampires did have reflections when they were not out-of-time, moving faster than photons could track. That wasn’t the reason for her shock. Draping a towel over the cabinet, she scolded the absent Cherie, “Granddaughter, you left it uncovered.” Backing away, she assured herself the towel covered the mirror completely. She’d destroyed every other mirror in the house, but Cherie had insisted that she needed at least one mirror to check her appearance. Grendel narrowed her eyes and scolded the absent Cherie again. “The evil Queen sees through mirrors, Granddaughter. I’m going to rip it off its hinges if you forget again.”
Leaving the bathroom and continuing her search, Grendel walked by the figurative ghosts of her family: photos, covered and leaning against the walls and in albums on shelves. She didn’t know her family’s fate in the last two hundred years. They’d already left Chicago before she’d died. She wanted to seek them out but was afraid to do so. Her children and grandchildren were most likely dead. She was probably only a memory now, a half-forgotten story of a great-something grandmother who’d vanished mysteriously after a wedding. She felt like she should look for them. It was a mother’s job to watch after her children.
“You have a child here,” she told herself. “And they probably don’t want to see a Vampire relative …” She tilted her head and glanced at a shrouded photo. “Unless they are Vampires.” Her nails bit her palms. “In which case they are dead, Grendel.” There had been a war between Vampires and Magickals, and all the undead that hadn’t slept through it had been destroyed. She wasn’t sure if she was sad about that. Other Vampires might try to eat Cherie. She continued down the hall to the kitchen, talking to herself. “You probably wouldn’t like other Vampires. You were never particularly fond of humans.” She found her hands gesturing in the air as she spoke and hissed at herself in frustration. Talking to herself was a habit she’d picked up before she met Cherie. She hadn’t been asleep the whole time since she’d turned. But she couldn’t tell Cherie that. She didn’t want to remember the darkness, pain, and blood …
Shaking herself, Grendel muttered, “That’s why Cherie should be here. To help me forget.” She wrung her hands.
Grendel went over to the calendar on the wall, though she’d memorized Cherie’s plans already. Cherie and Jack were attempting to meet with the Old Magickals that Cherie and Grendel had encountered when they’d entered the city: the Fae, a Feilong—a Chinese dragon—and the Greco-Romans. Gates to the worlds of these Old Magickals and others dotted the city. Humans were hoping to form alliances with them before the Queen struck. Or, at the very least, hoping they could come to an agreement whereby the Old Magickals did not intervene in the coming conflict, by, say, sending the city’s defenders on a merry chase through the Greco-Roman Elysia, the land of Fairy, or Chinese Hell.
Under today’s date Cherie had scribbled Elysia. The portal to that world lay between Chicago’s Little Italy and Greektown, where a Magickal forest had sprung up. Dryads, fauns, centaurs, and Cerberus, the three-headed canine guardian of Hades and the Best Doggy Ever, liked to frolic there. Cherie had duly noted, “Halstead and Harrison 1 PM,” and “Meeting with Spiros and Timoleon.”
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