“Shit.” Sam tried dialing Alex back, but a polite recording informed her that the number she was calling was temporarily out of service.
Although Sam didn’t know what Alex had meant by mind control, the possibility that their blood supplies had been tainted made sense. To please her, Lucan usually abstained from feeding on humans and depended mainly on the supply of bagged blood the jardin had stockpiled. Because the blood was kept out of sight in a refrigerated room belowground, and was available for any Kyn to use, no one had ever bothered to put a lock on the entry or otherwise secure it.
If someone had spiked their supplies with even a small amount of animal blood, it would definitely affect any Kyn who drank it. At first it would only make them sick, but if they’d continued using the tainted blood, it would gradually begin to change them.
Drinking animal blood for long periods of time caused the Kyn to undergo bizarre physical mutations. After being forced for decades to live exclusively on cat blood, the high lord had become a part-human, part-feline hybrid known as a changeling. Sam and Lucan had also battled a snakelike Kyn who had lost most of his humanity by living on the blood of reptiles.
Remembering Faryl Paviere and his grotesque appearance didn’t bother her as much as recalling the ferocious and violent behavior he’d displayed. Sam had personally witnessed him using his jaws to rip the head off the body of a Kyn warrior as easily as a human might pop a grape from a stem.
“No, it can’t be the blood.” She and many of the men among the garrison also made use of it, and none of them had fallen ill or shown any drastic changes in behavior. Unless someone tainted B positive blood, she thought. Ever the connoisseur, Lucan preferred the taste of that particular type over all the others. She and the rest of the Kyn were aware of this, which was why they usually set it aside for his use. . . .
Sam left her suitcase on the stair and trotted down to the first-floor landing, where she inputted the code to access the secondary stairwell leading down to the tunnels.
At the blood-stocks room she found the captain of the guard supervising a group of tresori wearing protective shrouds and working in bucket-brigade fashion as they removed bloodstained white bags.
“What the hell happened here?” Sam asked Aldan.
“Nothing good, Lady Samantha.” He sketched a quick bow. “Someone deliberately destroyed our stocks. They used a blade to pierce the bags, let them empty out, and strewed coin on the shelves and flooring.”
Samantha peered inside the room again and saw the hundreds of pennies that had been scattered everywhere. “Why throw coins in the blood?”
Aldan looked uncomfortable. “’Tis like a thing that was done in the old days, during the jardin wars. A traitor would come into a stronghold and poison the blood stocks by dropping coppers into the kegs.”
“You kept kegs of blood?”
“During the winter season, when humans remained indoors and were harder to hunt, the cold kept it sound.” He saw her expression and quickly added, “’Twas not taken by force, my lady. We collected the blood bled from the sick by leeches hoping to heal them. Our tresori would also give what they could to help sustain us.”
“The only thing we have in kegs now is beer, right?” When the captain nodded, she looked back in at the mess. “I don’t get it. This isn’t the Dark Ages. We can buy all the blood we want and have it here in a few hours. So destroying it was a waste of time and perfectly good pennies.”
“Often such a thing is done to provoke, my lady.” Aldan gestured for her to follow him, and led her out of earshot of the mortals. “It is not the act but the doing of it that harms. Lord Alenfar is as feared as he is respected. For an enemy to successfully elude detection and the guards to infiltrate his household and make worthless that which sustains it . . .”
She stared at him. “You’re saying they did this to make Lucan look bad?”
“Not bad. Weak,” Aldan said. “Or perhaps unworthy of rule.”
This on the same night Lucan had driven off the only son of another, highly dangerous Kyn lord, leered over a girl he’d always treated with affection, and nearly pushed Sam, his life companion, into shooting him. “You may be right, Captain. What is the general procedure when something like this happens?”
“We must make it known to the garrison,” he said. “They are the first line of defense. Our mortal allies should also be advised. For that, I would call on Mr. Burke.”
“All right. I’ll head upstairs and talk to him. If you would, call Lady Jayr and ask if she can spare some of her blood stores. Send one of the men to Orlando to pick it up.”