Bloodtraitor

  BOOKS BY AMELIA ATWATER-RHODES

  DEN OF SHADOWS

  In the Forests of the Night

  Demon in My View

  Shattered Mirror

  Midnight Predator

  Persistence of Memory

  Token of Darkness

  All Just Glass

  Poison Tree

  Promises to Keep

  THE KIESHA’RA

  Hawksong

  Snakecharm

  Falcondance

  Wolfcry

  Wyvernhail

  THE MAEVE’RA TRILOGY

  Bloodwitch

  Bloodkin

  Bloodtraitor

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Cover art copyright © 2016 by Sammy Yuen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Atwater-Rhodes, Amelia.

  Title: Bloodtraitor / Amelia Atwater-Rhodes.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2016] | Series: The Maeve’ra ; volume 3 | Summary: “When a mercenary from the vampires’ inner circle proposes a daring plan to bring down the empire of Midnight, Malachi must feign support for his unstable sister so his prophecy can be fulfilled. He must do it for his family, for his people—and for their freedom”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015023325| ISBN 978-0-385-74307-5 (hardback) | ISBN 978-0-307-98077-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Fantasy. | Shapeshifting—Fiction. | Vampires—Fiction. | Prophecies—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic. | JUVENILE FICTION / Legends, Myths, Fables / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.A8925 Bk 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  eBook ISBN 9780307980779

  Cover design and interior design by Jinna Shin

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Bloodtraitor is dedicated to Brittany Maresh, a dear friend of mine whose writing, perseverance, dedication, and brilliance are a constant inspiration to me. I couldn’t have made it through Maeve’ra without you.

  This has been a year of major changes—some wonderful, some horrific, and some still to be decided. I’ve lost people I never thought I could do without, rediscovered friends I thought gone forever, and learned the incredible love a mother feels for her newborn child. For that reason, Bloodtraitor is also dedicated to all the people who come and go in our lives:

  To the stranger we speak with for a few minutes on the train, and never see again. To brothers and sisters who stand by us no matter what. To college friends we cherish for a semester and then drift from when the summer comes. To lifelong friends who are as dear to us as family. To Internet buddies and neighborhood pals.

  To the people we can’t stand, who irritate us, challenge us, frustrate us, and drive us to compete. To the people we admire, who inspire us, encourage us, and push us to achieve. To the cute barista we smile at without asking his or her name, the adolescent crush who broke our heart, and the love of our life. To our teachers—good, bad, and indifferent—and our students. To our bosses, employees, customers, and clients.

  Maeve’ra is dedicated to all of you.

  MACHIAVELLI BELIEVED THAT the ends justify the means.

  He had many opinions, mostly about what it means to be a leader, and how to maintain peace—and, more importantly, control. He says that it is best for a prince to be both feared and loved, but that if you cannot manage both, it is better to be feared than loved.

  A ruler should not be overly generous, except when he can spend that which belongs to others. He should always keep his word, or at least always seem to. He must control his own army through cruelty, because that is the only way to keep his troops’ respect, but he should never abuse his subjects so much that they revile him.

  I know for a fact that Jeshickah has a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince on a shelf in her room. I have read it dozens of times, and I see much of the Italian’s philosophy reflected in the vampires’ empire.

  Midnight’s laws are inviolate. The vampires are held to them as strongly as the shapeshifters and witches Midnight rules. A verbal agreement with one of Midnight’s leaders or mercenaries is as strong as one etched in stone.

  Midnight’s conquered lands are allowed to keep their monarchs, their religion, and their culture, but all of those leaders are forced to adhere to Midnight’s laws. These puppet kings and queens cannot guarantee their people safety or freedom without Jeshickah’s blessing. Only she is powerful and generous enough to give them sovereignty over their own flesh and spirit.

  Midnight’s laws offer all loyal subjects the coveted title of freeblood. A freeblood man or woman cannot be claimed as a slave, nor can any of his property be seized by the vampires. A shapeshifter can only lose his freeblood status if he violates Midnight’s laws, or if he is sold into Midnight by one of his own kind. In that case, it is not by the vampires’ will that he loses his freedom, but through the cruelty of his own.

  This is a simple way to weaken the loyalty shapeshifters have to their own kind, while avoiding the kind of contempt that Machiavelli warned would give rise to conspirators and the end of a kingdom.

  In addition to this generous gift of freedom, Midnight offers beautiful things, which the Diente of the serpiente or the Tuuli Thea of the avians could never hope to match. It provides luxurious markets and maintains trade roads, supporting a global economy in exchange for “reasonable” taxes…and the complete reliance on the vampires’ continued goodwill.

  What of those who refuse to bend to Midnight’s law? Those who stand up against it, and cry out, We do not need you! Those who would spit in the face of any king who claimed to “protect” us by allowing the vampires to maintain their sovereignty?

  We are branded exiles and traitors, forced to live outside the lines of easy answers and simple definitions of right and wrong.

  Diente Julian Cobriana, king of the serpiente, sold my sister and brother into slavery to pay his taxes. I accepted a devil’s deal and was able to rescue one of them. Just one.

  I left my brother, Shkei, to die in a trainer’s cell, not realizing that it was already too late to save anyone. Th
e woman who returned to us looked like my sister, Misha, but she was riddled with madness, and every step she has taken since her return has led us further down a path so dark it is hard to imagine any escape.

  Perhaps I have no right to complain about anyone else’s clarity of mind, or lack thereof. My falcon blood has kept me teetering on the edge between sanity and utter lunacy all my life. It has infected my days and nights with visions, usually of the darkest moments in my own and others’ lives, and made it a daily struggle to remain in the real world with those I still call kin. That weakness almost cost me my life, since Jeshickah saw no use for me.

  A serpiente outlaw named Farrell saved my life, and taught me how to survive and—more importantly—how to love. Now he is gone, just like my brother, just like my sister might as well be, and in the end I cannot help believing that it is my fault.

  Malachi Obsidian

  June 1804

  WAS IT FEAR that continually brought him back to this place? Loneliness? Desperation?

  Malachi paused in the middle of scrubbing the smooth marble cell floor. The copper tang of blood mingled with the acidic tang of vinegar in his nose, caustic but soothingly familiar. These were the first scents he recalled from his childhood, a combination of abuse and antiseptic, but it wasn’t nostalgia that brought him back to Midnight again and again.

  Guilt, his mind whispered to him. That’s what brings you here. You know that, no matter what you say or do, this is where you were made and this is where you belong.

  He shook himself, trying to clear the nagging, gnawing thoughts. The watered-down blood on the white marble swirled in his vision, becoming the red bands of a midsummer sunset.

  He flattened his wet hands on the smooth stone, trying to force his magic back and keep his awareness in the here and now, but then he clearly heard Farrell’s voice saying, “Guards. Too many to fight. Run!”

  Malachi’s head whipped toward a vision of the man who was the closest thing he had ever had to a father. Farrell had just put himself between a serpiente soldier and Shkei, Malachi’s younger brother. Nearby, Aika was standing against two palace guards, wearing a feral grin as she spun the blade-tipped stave she favored as a weapon. Shkei managed to extricate himself, and then they all turned to run.

  If Malachi were there, he could have called on his power to help hide his kin as they fled, but even by flight he was hours away. He could only watch.

  “You’re in the way, Malachi.” The vision wavered as strong hands casually pushed him aside. He fell, and the odor of blood overwhelmed him. Was it only here, or was it in his vision, too? Who was hurt?

  He shoved himself up on hands and knees and scrambled out of the cell. He needed to get back—

  —

  “Malachi!” Frantic, desperate pleas whispered my name. Where was I? When? “The guards are gone,” the same voice said.

  Guards. In the woods. But I was in Midnight—

  No, I could smell the forest. Had I made it back to camp?

  I opened my eyes, and the face leaning over mine slowly became recognizable: slender Vance, the quetzal with emerald- and ruby-colored feathers beneath the chestnut hair that fell around his russet-dark face. His second form was a small, brightly colored bird better suited to its native tropical lands than it was to this cold, rainy place. Seeing him helped me snap back to the present, because that vision was of something that had happened a year ago, and I hadn’t known Vance yet then.

  Like me, Vance had been born in the heart of the empire known as Midnight. Mindful of the fact that a quetzal cannot survive in captivity, the lords of that realm had kept him in a beautiful greenhouse filled with every luxury, in the hope that he would never realize he was a slave.

  After he had escaped that box, they had put him in a larger one. They had showed him the human slaves and the shapeshifter traitors, and had told him, This is the way the world works. They had offered him power. I was the one who had shown him the truth…as well as I could, anyway. My understanding was obviously flawed, but the terrible day when my siblings had been taken by serpiente guards had taught me one lesson well: there was nothing good to be gained inside Midnight’s walls, and too much that could be lost.

  Fear of what he could become had driven Vance to the Obsidian guild. To me. To death, probably.

  I looked around, trying to get my bearings quickly enough that Vance wouldn’t realize how lost I had been in a different time and place. I was a victim of my own power less often these days than I had been when I was a child, but stress, fear, and exhaustion could still combine to overwhelm me.

  We were lying on bare earth in the middle of a grove of white birch trees. Two more of our guild huddled with us. Kadee, gentle Kadee with romantic notions and a love of books she could not read and history she could hardly remember, had her knees curled against her chest and was shivering as she tried to keep warm despite the spring chill and pervasive dampness, hanks of sandy-brown hair dripping lankly around her face. Nearest to the edge of the grove was Aika. Scarred and lean and blank-faced, she grasped a weathered, beaten stave with a glistening steel blade at the tip. She must have washed the mud and blood away before I woke.

  The guards are gone.

  The events of the previous night returned to me like a crashing wave, and I had to bite back an involuntary cry of pain. I remembered the guards streaming into our camp. The ones who had descended upon my guild nearly a year ago had been simple soldiers intent on capturing our people alive. The ones who had assaulted us the night before had been elite royal guards with orders to kill.

  Farrell. I remembered seeing him fall. Farrell Obsidian had been our guiding star, the man who had founded our guild. More importantly, he was the one who had rescued me from Midnight when I was seven years old and would have been put down as a worthless failure. He had given me back the voice my volatile magic had stolen from me. Now he was dead.

  My fault.

  “The guards are gone,” Vance repeated, as if I might not have heard him the first time.

  I nodded this time, finally acknowledging him, and once more looked around, only to realize that the others were all looking at me, waiting for my next words. The Obsidian guild had no king, no true leader, but these three were allowing me to guide them because Farrell had always trusted me.

  Years ago, I had spoken a prophecy: Someday, my sister, you will be queen. When you and your king rule, you will bow to no one. And this place, this Midnight, will burn to ash. Farrell Obsidian had known a falcon’s gift for prophecy, and so he heeded my statement even though I was just a child. He had bought my freedom, and that of my unborn sister, Misha, and my white-viper mother.

  Farrell’s mate, Melissa, had never forgiven him for rescuing me, a mostly mad, mute, half-falcon slave from Midnight. She knew that falcons and white vipers both possessed dark magic; she didn’t trust me, and had been convinced that my presence would only bring trouble. She had left Farrell, and their son, Aaron, had ended up being raised by the serpiente king.

  “Do we have…any kind of plan?” Kadee prompted me, when my silence had stretched too long. Though she was only fifteen, Kadee always had a mature quality about her, as if she gave more thought to what she said than most people did. Maybe it came from her human upbringing, or from the way she had been so isolated through the months of terror and pain associated with coming of age as a human-born serpent.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked toward where the serpiente guards had camped the night before, remembering how close we had all come to being killed. My magic had hidden the four of us. I didn’t know how many others had survived the night.

  Before the guards had chased us apart, our guild had been fighting among ourselves. My sister, Misha, had unveiled her plan to ascend to the serpiente throne after selling the current heir, Hara Cobriana, into slavery in Midnight. I had objected, but many of my kin had agreed. I hoped now that most of them had run in the opposite direction, following Misha instead of me. Her intentions disgusted me,
but I would rather know that my kin had chosen to follow a path I disapproved of than that they had all been slaughtered.

  “We need to warn Hara.” Vance grimaced, as if not liking his own words. “Carefully. I don’t imagine she will welcome us gratefully if we go speak to her, even if we are trying to protect her.” Our guild had been hunted outlaws, wanted for treason, for longer than Vance or Kadee had been alive.

  “We need to stop Misha,” I said, though the words threatened to choke me. I had done so much to save my sister, but in the end it had been for nothing. No, worse than nothing. Her madness endangered us all now.

  “Do we?” Aika asked thoughtfully. “I don’t approve of her methods, but she is the one who is supposed to—”

  “I’m sick of prophecy,” Kadee snapped. She addressed the words not to Aika, but to me, as the Obsidian guild’s prophet. “I’m sorry, but I am. I’m sick of us following what some vision says. We sold the avian princess to Midnight to buy Misha. Vance and I just helped the Shantel sell the sakkri to Midnight—”

  “You didn’t have a choice,” Aika interrupted. “Midnight would have—”

  “I don’t care what Midnight would have done. I know what we did,” Kadee spat, “and what we did was give the Shantel’s most sacred, revered witch to the vampires. I have nightmares about the feel of her blood on my hands. Now Misha and Aaron are working to sell Hara Cobriana to Midnight. If we continue this way, pretty soon every royal house of the shapeshifters will be owned by the vampires.”

  I flinched as Kadee listed the atrocities in which we had participated, all in less than a year. Slave-trading, even when it was wrapped in the most noble of excuses, left a dark mark on the soul.