Bleeding Hearts

by Ry Herman

Genres: Vampires; Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

Is love stronger than death?

It's hard to hold down a functioning relationship at the best of times - but it's harder still when one half of the couple is on the wrong side of dead, and the other's just discovered they possess powers that are definitely not of natural origin.

To be together at all, Angela and Chloë have had to overcome almost impossible odds, but their final obstacle might be insurmountable.

In the last ten months, they've searched high and low for a cure to Angela's biting problem, and if they don't find one soon, the chances grow higher and higher that Chloë might die.

Is there a solution, or is the divide between the living and the dead too wide for them to cross?

Release date: June 10, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Cambridge Common, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1 November 2000

In the dead of night, a witch and a vampire creep towards the old graveyard.

‘Are you absolutely certain this is a good idea?’ Angela whispers as a lone taxi turns the corner and trundles down Garden Street, forcing them to crouch down behind a tree.

‘No, not at all,’ Chloë answers. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure this is really, really stupid.’

Angela smiles and tucks a loose strand of blonde hair back underneath her bandana. ‘Well. As long as we agree.’

Angela is still dressed as Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, mask and gloves and boots and all, although she left the plastic rapier behind. When they first set out, Chloë worried that Angela wasn’t taking this seriously enough. But now that they’re huddled up against a tree trunk, hiding from the traffic, she has to admit the outfit has practical benefits. It’s easy to move in and hides Angela’s face, and the bandana keeps her hair from glowing like a beacon in the passing headlights.

Besides, Chloë never minds seeing Angela in tight trousers.

Chloë changed out of her own costume as soon as the Halloween party was over. Dressing up as her pet cat might be many things, up to and including psychologically troubling, but ‘practical’ would not be at the top of the list. The tail got caught in a door twice when they were safely inside; God knows what would happen to it climbing a fence.

As soon as the taxi disappears around the bend, Chloë rises to her feet. After a quick check down the street in both directions, she starts stalking towards the cemetery again. Angela shrugs the strap of her giant duffle bag back up onto her shoulder and pads along silently behind.

Chloë wishes they hadn’t had to park so far away and walk so many blocks to get here. She feels exposed every minute they’re out doing this. If they’re caught, if they get thrown into a jail cell even for a few hours, it will be a death sentence for Angela. Chloë has a sudden nightmare vision of clutching Angela’s hand while the first rays of dawn peek through a barred window, nowhere to hide from it and no way to run. Of Angela catching fire, screaming, burning away to nothing while she watches.

At least there aren’t a lot of people out tonight, despite how close they are to Harvard Square. There’s a reason they’re doing this after 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. The bars closed over an hour ago, and the holiday revellers have long since departed. For once, the sidewalks here are emptier than the ones in the residential outskirts, where all-night parties will drip drunken X-Men onto the streets until dawn. But no matter how late the hour is, central Cambridge won’t stay vacant for very long. They have to keep an eye out for cars full of tired partygoers heading home on Mass Ave, and cleaning trucks, and police patrols. Especially police patrols.

Everything remains quiet and still as they emerge from Cambridge Common – everything except for the whistling drone of the wind and the rattle of the tree branches as it passes. It’s a clear night, only scattered wisps of cloud scudding rapidly across the sky. The smattering of stars that can be seen past the city lights gleam like pinpricks on a black screen. Angela would know what constellations they belong to. Chloë has no idea.

‘This may not be my greatest plan,’ Chloë says, resuming their earlier conversation, ‘but it’s the least terrible one I could think of. The book said it should be done at crossroads or a burial ground, the older the better. This is both, plus it’s about as old as you can get around here without trying to find something Native American.’

‘Why not use a Native American site? Shouldn’t we? I mean, they were here first.’

‘Yeah, they were. Which means I’d be an interloper.’ Chloë squints as they turn into the stiff breeze, and pulls her jacket around herself more tightly to ward off the chill. ‘It’s not my heritage or my tradition. That’d be pretty much the definition of cultural appropriation, wouldn’t it?’

‘I guess so.’

‘And think about this for a minute – you’ve literally just suggested that we go mess around with the occult on an Indian burial ground. Have you ever seen a horror movie?’ Chloë grins bright and wide to hide her nervousness. She suspects she’s only made herself look manic.

‘If this were a horror movie, we wouldn’t be the victims,’ Angela points out. ‘We’d be the monsters.’

‘That’s no reason to press our luck. It’s tempting fate. It’d be like making out in the abandoned cabin and then going skinny-dipping in Murder Lake.’

‘Sounds nice. I’m game if you are.’

Almost a year after they first met, and Angela can still make her blush. ‘Maybe when the weather gets warmer. One of us feels the cold, remember?’

With that, they’ve arrived at the Old Burial Ground, a grassy pentagon stretching between Christ Church and the Unitarian First Parish. It also bumps up against the back of a Starbucks at one corner; time marches on and Cambridge real estate values only allow for so much spare room. In the spirit of the holiday, someone has attached cotton cobwebs and plastic ghosts to the iron fence posts. The ghosts dance jerkily where they hang, buffeted by the cold gusts of blustery air.

Chloë peers through the gaps between the bars. The graveyard holds a haphazard assortment of thin, crumbling headstones. They poke out of the ground at odd angles, like a mouthful of smashed and jagged teeth. Which is probably less ominous than it sounds, Chloë reassures herself. Every ancient graveyard is going to look like that when you’re breaking into it at night. It’s not like she would have discovered a cheerful, cosy ancient graveyard if only she’d done more research.

There’s been a cemetery on this spot since at least 1635, according to a blue plaque affixed to the fence. Settlers and slaves are interred beneath the ground here, Harvard presidents and paupers, ministers and poets and heroes of the Revolutionary War. She hopes it’s enough dead bodies for the purpose.

‘Give me a boost?’ she asks.

Angela obligingly grabs her by the hips and swings her up, hefting her as easily as a sack of potatoes. Easier, really – it’s hard to hold a sack of potatoes at arm’s length, and Angela doesn’t strain against her weight at all. Chloë grabs the top of the fence and pulls herself the rest of the way over, stumbling a little when she lands on the other side. Angela follows, flexing her knees deeply and leaping without any need of a running start. She lands next to Chloë in a graceful crouch. It’s a much more efficient method. Inhumanly efficient.

Sometimes, dating a vampire can be unnerving.

The milestone doesn’t prove difficult to find. The half-shattered, boulder-sized marker rests in the northeast corner of the graveyard, not far from where they came in. Most of the inscription is legible in spite of the damage, although the part bearing the B in Boston broke off sometime long ago:

OSTON

8 MILES

1734

A.I.

The stone marks the meeting place of two eighteenth-century roads to the city, and in the present day it sits next to newer crossroads. Although, since that’s nothing more than Garden Street crossing from one lane of Mass Ave to another, it might only count as a T-junction instead of crossroads. Chloë isn’t sure. She does know there have been routes for travellers here since well before the stone was set in place, before any Europeans ever got here. Which, she belatedly realises, means that if she wanted to avoid anything Native American, she’s failed. Maybe there’s no way to avoid the messy tangle of history when meddling with forces this old and complex. She hopes if anything is actually listening when she casts the spell, it doesn’t mind too much.

Chloë worries her lower lip with her teeth. As usual when it comes to this sort of thing, she doesn’t have the best handle on what she’s doing. So much of magic seems to involve playing things by ear.

‘Shall we get this started?’ Angela drops her bag to the ground with a thump, startling Chloë out of her thoughts. She drags the pack behind a low brick wall inside the fence, and kneels down to fiddle with the zipper. The wall doesn’t look like it’ll do much to hide them from the road, but it’s better than nothing.

Chloë watches with growing amazement as Angela starts lifting out flat stones and laying them in two neat circles.

‘You didn’t just jump the fence, you jumped the fence carrying a sack full of rocks?’

‘Safety first. I didn’t want us to burn the whole graveyard down. It’s a historic site.’ She stands up again, flashlight in hand, and clicks it on. ‘Want me to read while you do the spell?’

Chloë nods, and takes the piece of paper with the instructions out of her jacket pocket. Angela unfolds it after Chloë passes it over, peering at the writing, holding the flashlight close.

‘ “Using a need-fire, light two . . . blinfries . . .” ’

‘Bonfires. That word is obviously supposed to be bonfires.’

‘Your handwriting is terrible. “Light two bonfires of sufficient size, one of fir and one of willow.” ’ Angela frowns. ‘How big is “sufficient size” supposed to be?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. My guess would be big enough that I can get around the place three times while they’re still lit.’ Chloë glances at the graveyard. It isn’t huge, as cemeteries go, but the area she needs to cover isn’t what she would call tiny, either. ‘I hope we brought enough wood.’

‘Gah. I hate the descriptions in these spells you dig up. “Add a measure of water”, “stir in a quantity of sheep’s blood”. It’s such obvious ass covering. If it doesn’t work and someone complains, whoever wrote it can just say, “Well, it’s not my fault, the quantity of your quantity was the wrong quantity.” Try getting away with that in a scientific paper. You’d never hear the end of it.’

Chloë waits patiently for the rant to finish. Angela has a tendency to grouse when she’s feeling stressed. ‘I think the amounts can change. Witches are supposed to have some kind of instinctive feel for how much to use each time.’

‘Magic needs a peer-review system.’ Angela returns her attention to the paper. ‘ “Toss the bones of the slaughtered heifers onto the fires. Don a garment of cow-hide, and pass between them.” ’

Chloë uncomfortably fingers the leather jacket she’s borrowed from Angela for the night. Her own tatty synthetic overcoat wasn’t going to do the job, but she doesn’t like how dead-cow focused this particular ritual is. Ever since a traumatising attempt at a spell involving animal sacrifice earlier in the year, she’s been leaning more and more towards vegetarianism. At least she only had to buy the bones for this one, not obtain them firsthand. She hopes the butcher who assured her they were heifer bones wasn’t lying.

‘ “Walk midway between the fires,” ’ Angela continues, ‘ “and circle the site three times, either widdershins, walking backwards, or forwards and deosil. Do not stop. Do not turn around.” You underlined “not” both times.’ She looks up. ‘Deosil?’

‘Sunwise. That means clockwise, at least in the northern hemisphere. It’s from Gaelic, I think.’

‘Gaelic? Is this a Celtic thing?’

‘Well, yeah. I mean, it’s a Samhain rite.’

Angela tilts her head, considering. ‘That’s not your heritage either, is it? Wouldn’t that be off-limits for you, too?’

‘I don’t think it has exactly the same issues,’ Chloë says hesitantly. ‘We’re not doing this on land that was stolen from the Celts. And I don’t think the Celts are being systemically oppressed in Boston, not anymore.’

Angela ponders that for a few moments, then nods. ‘OK. I suppose that makes sense.’

‘Look, I’m kind of grasping at straws, here. I’ve tried using the traditional Jewish stuff. I made that Kabbalah amulet, but we’ve got no idea whether it’s having any effect at all. It’s supposed to take years to master Kabbalah, God knows I still don’t understand most of it, and . . . and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m probably going to screw everything up . . .’ She chokes on the words, unable to continue.

Angela’s eyes widen at Chloë’s distress. She slips an arm around Chloë’s waist and murmurs in her ear. ‘Sweetie, it’ll be fine. I’m sure you’ll do fine.’

‘I’m the wrong person to be doing this, I—’

‘Better you than me. I’m an atheist, I’ve got to have offended every god from every culture there is. You’re going to look great in comparison.’

Chloë bites back a laugh, beginning to calm down. She always feels less panicked when Angela is holding her.

But it doesn’t keep her doubts completely at bay, not tonight. They’re running out of time. She needs to find a solution, something, anything, or she’s going to lose Angela. And she can’t lose Angela.

She can’t.

Old Burial Ground, Cambridge

1 November 2000

Angela lifts her chin and looks into her girlfriend’s eyes. Green, green eyes like two perfect slices of lime. Angela can see her own worries reflected there.

They’ve got two months left. The end of the year, that was the agreement. Then they break up and go their separate ways. Unless they can find something that will ward Chloë against the effects of Angela’s bites, some way to protect her from the potentially deadly risks involved. It’s terrifying how much the bites affect Chloë, leaving her shaky and pallid, clammy with sweat every time Angela drinks from her veins. Chloë’s symptoms seem far worse than what Angela remembers of her own reaction to it. Back in the days when a vampire was feeding on her, she was able to shrug it off most of the time.

They need to come up with a solution, and they need to do it soon. But time keeps passing, and not a single thing they’ve tried has worked.

Chloë’s unearthed spell after spell, poring over every source she could find, from medieval texts buried in university libraries to dog-eared New Age paperbacks she buys at used bookstores. None of her attempts at casting them have produced so much as a flash or a tingle. For all they know, every last one of the ‘spells’ have been nothing more than smoke and mirrors. As ineffective as waving their arms in the air and shouting ‘Abracadabra!’

And in the meanwhile Angela, for her part, has been experimenting on herself in every way she can think of, trying to discover exactly what her blood-drinking does, how it works, what mechanism allows human blood to give an unbreathing corpse the power to walk and talk as long as the sun is down. None of it has produced any useful results.

They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. If this graveyard ritual fails as well, they’ve got no back-up plan. They’re out of ideas.

Or almost out.

There is one person they know who might have more information, even if it’s someone Angela would rather not see ever again. But she’s been hesitant to bring up talking to Tess as a possibility. The dangers are greater than any potential benefits; Tess is far more likely to murder Chloë herself than tell them anything useful. She tried to do that once already.

Angela watches Chloë’s hair rise and twist in the wind, the curls writhing around her head like living creatures.

‘Come on,’ Angela says. ‘Let’s do this. Hey, I’m half Irish, right? If it’s something to worry about, then maybe having me around will be enough to keep things respectably Celtic.’

Chloë nods, looking hopeful. Angela turns back to the bag and digs out the fire-lighting equipment. Board, stake, bow drill, dry grass for tinder. It has to be started by hand in the traditional manner, no lighter allowed. She passes it all over to Chloë and starts readying the firewood, building neat pyramidal frames of fir and willow over the stones. Fallen branches, gathered by moonlight. That had taken a long night of picking up sticks.

Apparently, magic is hyper-specific about annoying things, like fire-starting and wood-gathering, but never about anything useful. ‘Sufficient size’ – what kind of nonsense is that? No wonder they haven’t been getting anywhere. One early attempt to make a protective sachet had them scouring the countryside looking for monkshood and wild garlic, trying to identify the plants using the pictures in a botany text – in the dark. Chloë collected a whole bag full of lily of the valley before Angela pointed out that garlic should probably smell like garlic.

It might not have been such a bad thing that they didn’t find any, though. The stench of garlic has been making Angela gag lately, much more than it did when she first became a vampire. She has no idea why it’s getting worse. One more mystery to investigate.

‘So,’ she says as she leans another branch against a woodpile, ‘what’s your strategy for this? Are you going to walk widdershins or deosil?’

Chloë pokes dry grass into the indentation in the board. ‘Definitely deosil. Widdershins is more to put stuff to rest.’ Using a block, she presses the stake into the tinder, and takes a moment to ready herself. ‘Here goes nothing.’

Angela gives her girlfriend’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. ‘You can do it. Starting a fire with friction is primitive technology. How hard could it be if a caveman can figure it out?’

‘Cavemen had mad skills. Can you make a hide-scraper out of a flint rock? I can’t. I couldn’t even tell the difference between a hide-scraper and an eye-gouger.’

‘You got it lit in the practice session.’

‘Sure. Once.’ Chloë draws in a deep breath, and begins spinning the stake with the bow drill as fast as she can. ‘Anyway. You go deosil if you want to bring energy up from the earth. It builds power. Ocean currents and winds move deosil. Hurricanes turn that way.’

‘That isn’t magic. That’s the Coriolis effect.’

‘Don’t you mock my mystic art. It’s all one. I am a witch, and therefore have a powerful and mysterious connection to nature. Crap!’ The stake pops out of the hole and somehow escapes the bow drill altogether. They watch it bounce away across the grass.

‘You should be careful with that thing,’ Angela says. ‘There’s a vulnerable vampire present.’

Chloë winces. ‘Oh, right. Sorry. I won’t let it happen again.’

‘Relax, I’m joking. If I can’t stab myself with a wooden stake on purpose, it’s not going to injure me accidentally.’ During the cautious experiments she’s conducted with Chloë’s help – and the single incautious attempt she made by herself, late last year – Angela hasn’t been able to get a stake through her mostly impenetrable skin. It’s touching that Chloë is still worried about it, though. Angela smiles affectionately at her girlfriend.

Chloë doesn’t return the smile, however; she’s turned a gloomy gaze on the unlit fires. ‘This is what I was afraid of,’ she says. ‘It’s a lot harder out here than it was inside. There wasn’t any wind indoors, for one thing.’

Angela sticks a final piece of crumpled newspaper in at the base of one of the woodpiles and picks up the stake. She twirls it thoughtfully in her gloved fingers. ‘Do you have to be the one doing this part?’

‘Maybe? It’s not entirely clear.’ Chloë taps her fingers against her thigh, frowning in thought. ‘There’s a Scottish tradition that says it has to be done by two chaste boys, and a German one that calls for eighty-one married men. I’m improvising a bit here, if you hadn’t noticed.’ She exhales a long breath, not quite a sigh. ‘My gut instinct says that isn’t one of the points that matters.’

‘Your gut instinct?’

‘It’s not like we’ve got anything better to go on, is it? So if you want to give it a shot, go ahead. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’

‘All right. It couldn’t hurt to—’

Chloë’s gaze jerks up over Angela’s head. ‘Car!’ She looks around wildly, her eyes darting to the piles of sticks, the duffle bag, all the evidence lying out practically in the open, hardly concealed at all by the small brick wall. Angela pulls Chloë down, ducking them out of sight as best she can just as she starts to hear the sound of the engine, a throaty growl growing steadily louder.

‘There’s no time to hide it any better,’ she whispers quickly. ‘We’ll just have to hope they don’t notice.’

‘It’s a cop car, shit, it’s a cop car,’ Chloë hisses back.

Whoever’s in the patrol car only has to turn and take a careful look to see everything needed to convict both of them for trespassing, lighting illegal fires, who knows what else. Definitely enough to keep them tangled up at a police station until dawn.

The car comes close enough for them to hear the squawk of a radio and an unintelligible mutter in reply. Angela doesn’t poke her head up to check whether they’ve been spotted. She waits, huddled tensely against Chloë in the moving shadow the headlights throw behind the wall. Both of them stay frozen in place as it takes what feels like an age for the car to pass. It must be crawling.

But there’s no sudden flash of red and blue lights, no wail of a siren. The cemetery returns to darkness and the engine noise fades with distance.

‘Do you think they’ll come back?’ Chloë asks.

‘Maybe. We should hurry.’

Angela takes a quick glance to the east. There are still no traces of pre-dawn light colouring the sky above Harvard Yard. The white half-moon is high overhead, a semi-circle so perfect that its outline might as well have been traced on the darkness with a compass and a ruler. They’ve got a couple of hours left before the sun comes up to chase it across the sky, but she never feels completely at ease if she’s outside when ‘last night’ starts to creep its way towards ‘this morning’.

She wraps the cord back around the stake and slots it into place, then shuttles the bow drill back and forth, faster and faster, picking up speed until her hand becomes a blur. There’s a quiet, constant whirring sound as wood grinds against wood. Smoke rises from the tinder.

There are benefits to being what she is. They don’t make up for the drawbacks, but they do come in handy sometimes.

‘Keep an eye out while I’m making the rounds, OK?’ Chloë leans in close, her lips pursed, ready to blow encouragingly on any nascent flame. ‘For the police. Don’t watch me, watch the road.’

Angela keeps her gaze locked on the smouldering grass. ‘All right. What do you think we should do if I see them while you’re out there?’

‘Run,’ Chloë says flatly. ‘Leave me behind. I can’t stop before it’s done. So get yourself out of here.’

Angela’s eyes shift towards Chloë, her brows drawn down in puzzlement. ‘Running makes more sense than trying to pretend the blinfries aren’t ours, sure.’ She’s very much aware of how great the danger is. Vulnerable vampire indeed. ‘But why can’t we run together?’

‘Oh. Well. I’m raising a lot of energy. If it doesn’t go into the spell, it still has to go somewhere.’

‘Like where?’ Angela frowns as she sees Chloë hesitate. ‘Into you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So this could, what, electrocute you?’

‘Something like that.’

The noise from the spinning stake stops abruptly as Angela’s hand goes still. ‘Chloë, what the hell? How dangerous is this?’

‘Agh, no, you almost had it! Look, it’ll only be a problem if this actually works—’

‘Which is the whole idea!’

‘—and if I give up in the middle, which I’m not going to do,’ Chloë continues without stopping. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

Angela stands and glares at Chloë, her hands balled into fists at her sides. ‘I think you should have brought it up a while ago. Not right before we start, with a casual, “Oh, by the way, I might get zapped if I do this wrong.” How bad could this be for you?’

‘I don’t know. But you’re making it sound more dangerous than it is.’

‘You just right now said that you don’t know how dangerous—’ Angela bites off the rest of the sentence. She has half a mind to pack up and leave. She has the bow drill clenched in her hand. If she tosses it back in the bag, the night’s over. ‘This isn’t even supposed to do what we need. It’s only asking for advice.’

‘I need the advice. We need the advice.’ A pleading note enters Chloë’s voice. ‘This is all I’ve got. I’ve tried every protection spell I could find that didn’t make me want to throw up. And I am not attempting dark magic again, I learned my lesson with the guinea pig.’

Angela scuffs the toe of her boot across the ground. The grass, wet with dew, squishes beneath her foot like a damp sponge. ‘That isn’t the point.’

‘I’ve got to find something that works. This might help.’

‘There has to be something else. You could use the cards. Or try talking to Esther again, if you can get a hold of her.’

Chloë snorts. ‘Because one of them might tell me something they didn’t the first ten times I asked?’

Angela doesn’t answer. It’s true that neither has been of much use. The ancient deck of piquet cards Chloë uses to read the future has proven worthless when it comes to the problem at hand, giving card combinations Chloë translated as either ‘seek out the dragon that guards the red path’ or ‘follow the vanishing tail’. Which probably means something, but Angela and Chloë have no idea what that meaning might be. And Chloë’s great-aunt Esther, the only other witch they know, has never been forthcoming with practical advice. They haven’t heard from her in months, anyway, not since she took herself off to Timbuktu. Which isn’t a metaphor – she went to the actual city in Africa, following some witchy urge. Their options right now, Angela has to admit, are limited.

‘Look,’ Chloë says, ‘we both agreed that this is worth a try, and tonight’s our only chance at it. Samhain only comes around once a year.’

And next year, as Angela well knows, will be too late. ‘When I said it was a good idea, I didn’t realise it could be hazardous to your health,’ she grumbles.

‘You didn’t have a problem with it when you thought you were the only one who might get in trouble. I could have hauled the wood here myself.’

‘I can outrun the police,’ Angela says obstinately.

‘And I can walk around a field. Seriously, that’s the only way it could possibly be an issue, if I fail to walk around a field. Can you trust me to do that much?’

Angela wants to say no. None of this seems fair. Not when Angela is the sole cause of the problem. In a just world, she would be the one taking on all the risk.

She kneels back down on the grass and turns her attention to the bow drill. The sound of wood scraping against wood fills the air once again. Chloë gives her a grateful look. Angela’s lips tighten. She doesn’t think Chloë should feel grateful. Not to her, not for this.

This time, Angela bears down harder and moves faster. It doesn’t take long before a small bright glow sparks in the tinder.

‘Get it to the kindling, get it to the kindling!’ Chloë shouts, then immediately lowers her voice to a hush. ‘Come on, let’s do this quick, before it goes out.’

After a bit more fumbling and a lot of coaxing, they manage to get the willow fire lit. The fir fire is easy after that, and soon both bonfires are big and blazing, the branches popping and crackling in the heat, showers of sparks cascading down onto the flat stones underneath. The light sends elongated shadows stretching across the graveyard, but they fade into the surrounding darkness well before they reach the other side.

Chloë throws the bones into the flames. The bits of gristle left on their ends quickly start to blacken. ‘All right, time to go,’ she begins, but before she can say anything more A. . .