All Chapters of The 200 Year Blood Swap: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

(Maxine)Every other bride in the hall looked like she was being walked to her own execution. I looked like I'd won a raffle, which, as far as three hundred of the most important supernatural families in the world were concerned, I had.I made no effort to correct them.The Supernatural Council's Pentagon rose out of its private island like something built to intimidate the ocean — five wings for five species, fifty miles of cold water between us and anyone who might have talked us out of this. They'd flown us in that morning, past the checkpoints and the wards and the very serious men with very serious guns, and funneled the five of us into a hall the size of a cathedral so the two-hundred-year cycle could begin again on schedule.Peace through marriage. Trade a daughter into another kingdom, keep the union alive ten years, buy yourself a hundred and ninety years of nobody setting anyone on fire. It had worked, more or less, for eight centuries. That most of the couples spent the dec

(Morrison)She was still on the floor, laughing at me. Not out loud. It lived in the corners of her mouth and in how comfortable she'd made herself in a froth of white silk, six feet from where my magic had thrown her. My blood was dark on her lower lip.I'd married her ten minutes earlier. I didn't know her middle name. And she'd opened one of my veins with her teeth on our first post-wedding meeting like it was a party trick she'd been saving."You bit me," I said."I did.""Vampires can't drink witch or mage blood. It's poison to your kind. It should be burning a hole through you where you sit.""Someone should tell my body." She dragged her thumb across her lip, checked it, and her mouth turned down when the bleeding had already closed. "It disagrees."Every working I've ever cast comes home. Magic leaves the body, does the job, settles under the skin where I keep it, and I've trained since I was six to know how much I hold and where all of it sits, down to the last thread. I coul

(Maxine)Barely a day married and my new in-laws already had me under house arrest.Honestly, on brand for a family that decorated with murder wards.They'd given me the prettiest cell I'd ever seen. Silk on the bed, fresh flowers, a bathroom bigger than my first apartment, and a door that would not open for me no matter how sweetly I asked. Marwick warding. I'd run my hands over the frame twice hunting for a seam and gotten nothing but a low buzz against my palms that said, very politely, no.Three hours of pacing the perimeter like a rescue dog nobody came for. Vampires don't do boxes. We get itchy. We start counting exits and finding exactly one, and then we start doing math about how many guards stand between us and it, and whether chewing through them would technically void the peace treaty.The treaty. Right. The thing I was supposed to keep front of mind. I'd married Prince Morrison Marwick III to stop two kingdoms slaughtering each other for another two centuries, and also for

(Morrison)She laid the back of her hand to Maxine's cheek. Maxine flinched from the cold of it. The fever had climbed high and fast."This is withdrawal, near enough. She's starving for the one thing I've just forbidden her.""Then unforbid it.""I can't. You heard the reason yourself. Feed it twice and it deepens." Ferren straightened, and for the first time in my life I watched her run clean out of answers in front of me. "Deepen the bond and we don't know what she becomes. Starve it and the magic keeps hunting until it burns through something she can't spare. I can buy her hours. A night, if she's stubborn, and she strikes me as stubborn. After that I'd be guessing, and I don't guess with lives."Hours. She didn’t shield that horrific thought, and it went down in me like a stone dropped down a well. Maxine can’t die. It will be seen as an act of aggression, a blight against Marinescu, the Vampire Kingdom.Then a fresh wave of it took her, and it took me too, a hot wire drawn strai

(Maxine)Not dark. Elsewhere.We were standing in a stone hall that stank of iron and old smoke, the two of us, together, which should have been impossible and somehow wasn't. In the middle of the floor a woman knelt inside a ring cut into the stone. A vampire. I knew it the way you know your own reflection: pale, dark-eyed, snarling through a gag of woven silver that stopped her doing anything about the men pinning her down. Across the ring, a man fought four others to reach her. A mage, robed, blood pouring from his nose with the effort of whatever he was hurling at them, screaming a name I couldn't hear. Between them, someone had painted a working on the floor in two scents of blood, hers and his, and it was doing something to the air that made the marks on my wrist burn—Except… I didn't have marks on my wrist.The woman turned her head. Past the men, past the spell, straight at us. Straight at me. Her eyes were older than the hall, older than the treaty, older than anything that