Scorched Ice

by Erica Stevens

  Julian followed Chris as he led the way. The smoke cleared, and the heat of the flames lessened as they moved further away from the fire until they reached a set of stairs. Quinn climbed unsteadily beside him with her head bowed. He didn’t miss the tears that slid down her cheeks as her trembling increased.

  His hand fisted as he fought the urge to drive it into something. As soon as they were out of this place, he would make sure she took something from him. He wouldn’t allow her to remain in such pain.

  The stairs entered into the first room they had passed off the main hallway. He’d seen no door in the back wall when he’d first looked into the room. However, The Commission also loved their secret entrances, something else Chris, Melissa, and Lou seemed to have remembered about them if they’d discovered this door.

  Julian led Quinn swiftly outside as the heat of the spreading fire beat against his back. She shivered when the cool air brushed over her brutalized skin and a distressed sound escaped her. Her legs wobbled even more as they threatened to give out on her.

  “You must take from me,” he told her.

  “I need too much. I won’t be able to stop… Could kill you… I have to… have to… heal on my own,” she stammered between her chattering teeth.

  “What if you take from all of us?” Prue asked.

  “I can’t… won’t… ask that of you,” Quinn replied.

  She didn’t have a choice in the matter as far as Julian was concerned. Stepping closer to her, he rested his other hand tenderly against her cheek. Her skin was so hot he swore it burned the healing skin on his palm. Instinctively, she turned into his touch, wincing when the deeper contact abraded her raw flesh.

  “Grab hold of me,” he commanded Prue.

  “No,” Quinn whispered.

  “Yes,” he insisted.

  “We can take it, little one,” Vern said and rested his hand on Julian’s arm.

  Prue placed her hand on his right shoulder, and Chris grasped the other one. All around him, the vampires took hold of each other until all of them were connected together. Quinn’s eyes burned into his as tears streaked down her cheeks, but he knew this time they were not tears of pain. He carefully wiped one away with the pad of his thumb.

  “All of us are willing to do this for you. You cannot drain us all to the point of death,” he said to her.

  “You don’t know that. If I lose control—”

  “Yes, I do,” he interrupted. She gulped and her gaze flickered over the group surrounding them before coming back to him. “Trust yourself. Trust me.”

  “I do,” she whispered.

  Her eyes remained locked on his as the tendrils of her power spiraled into him. Her ability moved sinuously through his body and onward into those standing beyond him. He felt the interconnected pathways binding them as her power slipped further out to the other vampires and she drew the life from them. Her eyes closed as she swayed toward him.

  The swell of power increased within him as she funneled from all of those around her. She’d given most of their life back to them before, but he knew she was too badly injured for that to happen now. The vampires had to know that too, yet they all willingly remained standing with him. There should be enough of them that the small loss of a piece of their life wouldn’t create a lasting effect in any of them.

  He lifted his head to take in those around him, and for the first time in all his years, he saw a unity among his kind that he’d never seen before or ever would have believed possible. And it was because of Quinn. He’d loathed that prophecy since the second he’d heard it, but he realized now she’d brought them all together, and she would be the key to keeping them united.

  They would follow her to Hell and back.

  Quinn’s cheek turned further into his hand, drawing his attention back to her. As he watched, what remained of the white foam on her skin flaked away from her charred and blistered flesh. The harsh redness and the crispy black of her surface peeled away. The countless blisters were replaced by smooth, flawless skin. Skin so flawless that the scars on her face and the one on her sternum were no longer visible. Her ears and lips pieced themselves back together as new flesh replaced that which had burnt away.

  Her eyelids fluttered open to meet his again, and a small smile curved her lush mouth.

  “Dewdrop,” he breathed as her tendrils released him and the others. “Chris, give me your shirt.”

  Chris tugged his shirt over his head and wisely kept his gaze averted from Quinn as he held it out to him. Julian took it from him and slipped it over Quinn’s naked form as the others all released him and took a step away. The hem of it settled around her thighs.

  “For you, Boss.” A hand thrust forward, and he took the pair of jeans dangling from them.

  “Thank you,” Julian said to the male vamp standing in his boxers, who had offered them to him. He hadn’t even realized he was naked until then.

  Quinn rubbed a hand over her bare head as he pulled the jeans on. “Still bald,” she murmured.

  “You can’t perform all miracles,” he replied.

  “I’m alive,” she said with a shudder.

  “Yes.”

  “My hair will grow back.”

  “It will, and you make a beautiful baldy.”

  He pulled her closer and kissed the top of her smooth head. Her hair could never grow back, and he wouldn’t care—she was here with him. She hadn’t been destroyed by the flames.

  “You are a powerful woman,” he murmured against her ear.

  She lifted her head to look at him and then turned to take in the vampires grouped around them. “I didn’t expect this.”

  “No one did.”

  “Look!” a woman shouted. She pointed to where a figure was emerging from the ground on the other side of the fence, nearly half a mile away.

  “Another exit,” Julian murmured before turning to face the crowd gathered around them. “I don’t care who goes after them, but leave one of them alive so I can try to learn if we’ve destroyed them all, or where any of the others might be. Kill the rest.”

  The vampires nodded to each other before a dozen of them took off for the fence line. Screams resonated through the air as those who had emerged from beneath the earth fled for the woods.

  “So much for our ‘Kumbaya’ moment,” Chris muttered.

  Julian bent and swung Quinn up into his arms. She draped her arms around his neck. “I can walk,” she said.

  “I know, but I much prefer to hold you right now.”

  She didn’t protest further as she rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder and nestled closer. “Where are we going?”

  “Away from this place,” he replied as a loud crack reverberated through the air, and the hot wash of flames rushed up against his back.

  The remaining vampires stepped out of his way as he carried her down the pathway they’d cleared across the minefield. Chris, Lou, and Melissa stayed by his side while the vampires followed him across the field. Once safely on the other side of the fence, he turned to watch as the flames consumed what remained of the building.

  Something within the building exploded with a reverberating bang that echoed throughout the mountains and forest. The vampires around him took a step back, and Quinn jerked in his arms. Like lava erupting from a volcano, flames burst straight upward. They surged into the night in an inferno that illuminated the midnight sky and lit the trees around them.

  Across the way, flames burst from the exit that some members of The Commission had just emerged from. A metal door shot high from the exit and into the air before crashing into the forest. Flames ate away at the skeletal branches of the trees surrounding the exit and spread across their barren tops.

  On his left up in the mountains, another burst of fire erupted into the air.

  “Luther, Dani,” Melissa whispered and took a step toward the woods.

  “If they somehow managed to get inside, Luther would have gotten out by now,” Julian said. “The minute the fire started,
he would have evacuated everyone from within, but I doubt they were ever able to gain entrance.”

  Melissa’s onyx eyes shimmered with tears when they met his. “You can’t know that.”

  “No, I can’t,” he said. “But Luther isn’t stupid, and look at what it took for us to get inside that building.”

  It was true, Luther was one of the smartest men he’d ever met, and they most likely never would have gotten inside, but Julian couldn’t take his eyes away from the area where he knew Luther and the others had gone. He searched for some sign they were still alive up there, but there was no way for them to know, not from here.

  Chris wrapped his arm around Melissa’s shoulders and pulled her close as a single tear spilled down her cheek. About a mile straight across from them, another fire erupted into the trees.

  “What did they have in there?” Chris inquired.

  “They most likely rigged something to destroy the place if they felt it was going to fall into enemy hands. They would seek to destroy all evidence of whatever they were doing here,” Julian replied.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw figures coming toward them and turned to watch as the vampires neared. One of them had his hand around a woman’s neck. He carried the squirming woman relentlessly across the ground, ignoring her frantic movements.

  “The only survivor from the ones who fled,” he said and dropped the woman.

  She released a small umph when she landed on her ass before Julian. Her eyes rolled in her head as she gazed at all of them. There had been a time when he would have delighted in her terror; now he simply wanted this over with. Reluctantly, he lowered Quinn to the ground and set her on her feet. The woman scurried backward across the ground as he approached, but she came to an abrupt halt against the legs of the vampires standing behind her.

  Kneeling before her, Julian rested the tips of his fingers on the earth.

  “Don’t kill me,” she pleaded as tears streaked down her face.

  “That’s not an option for you.” With lightning speed, he seized hold of her wrist and pulled it toward him. Unlike objects, which sometimes only revealed a secret or two, touching a human could sometimes be an influx of memories and knowledge. He often felt like he was trudging through mud when he tried to sort through everything in order to uncover what it was he wanted from another.

  The woman tried to jerk away, but there was no escaping his hold or retaining her secrets. Screams resonated in his head, not her screams but those of the countless victims she’d tortured and experimented on over the years. She hadn’t done her experiments with the ruthless glee that many of The Commission had. She’d done them with a scientific, analytical mind that allowed her to distance herself from her victims. She’d been fascinated by her subject’s many bodily reactions to what was done to them.

  He recalled encountering a few like her when he’d been held by The Commission. Despite the fact their faces had remained impassive while they’d tortured him and they’d seemed to take no pleasure in the act, they had unnerved him more than the ones who smiled while they sliced him open. He could understand taking joy in the torture, he certainly had over the years, but he couldn’t understand people such as her.

  They were far more dangerous to him. The others would keep him alive to get off on what they did with him; she would gladly end it all to see what would happen and not be disappointed that she’d lost her toy when it was done. There would always be other toys for her, after all.

  And this woman had played with many many toys over the years. Not all of them had been vampires; some had been Hunters and others human. Age had never been a factor to her. She was as curious about a five-year-old’s reaction to her methods as she was to a fifty-five-year-old’s.

  Julian pulled his hand away from her, unwilling to see anymore. “And you call us monsters,” he murmured.

  The woman frowned at him, not because she didn’t like what he’d said, but because she saw nothing wrong with anything she’d done over the years. Julian rose to his feet and wiped his hands on his jeans. No matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to wipe off the filth of her memories, but he wanted to rid himself of the clammy feel of her skin.

  He almost jerked his hand away from Quinn when she took hold of it. He didn’t want her to have any kind of connection to this woman, no matter how remote it was. Her fingers clenched around his, refusing to relinquish him.

  “All the remaining members of The Commission and their followers are here, secure in their belief we’d never be able to get to them. Now it’s a matter of making sure none of them escape here as she split off from two others while inside,” Julian informed the group. “Take her into the woods and kill her.”

  “Wait!” the woman cried. “I can tell you what we discovered! I can let you know our findings!”

  “We don’t care about any of that,” Julian replied. “If we did, I would continue to pull your memories from you. Take her.”

  “No! Wait! Wait!” the woman screamed as two vampires slid their hands under her armpits and dragged her into the woods.

  Julian stared at where they’d gone until her screams abruptly silenced and the scent of blood permeated the air. His gaze drifted back to the building. The eruption of flames blasting out the top of it had died down to a normal fire again. In the woods across the way, the flames were spreading rapidly through the trees.

  “We need to find the other two who were with her, and we have to find Luther,” he said to everyone. “We’ll split up and search throughout the woods until the sun is starting to rise, or until someone arrives to put out the fires. Stay safe and alert for any danger.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Relief flooded Quinn when they found Luther making his way back down the hill with Dani at his side and the vampires trailing behind. They all did a double take when they spotted her new hairless look.

  “What happened?” Dani blurted.

  Quinn found herself unable to reveal what she’d endured. The trauma of it was still too much for her. She could feel their stares on her as Julian told them what had occurred, but she kept her gaze focused on what she could see of the fire spreading through the woods. Fanned by the wind, the flames were whipping down from the mountains toward them. The first tendrils of smoke wafted by her while they stood there.

  “Her ability fed her life even as she was dying,” Luther said, unable to keep the awe from his voice. “An immortal immortal.”

  Quinn ran her hands up and down her arms when his words caused an icy chill to run over her skin. Many may have found such a possibility reassuring, but the prospect of such a thing scared her.

  I can’t come back to life if there isn’t life to fuel me, she told herself. She wasn’t in a rush to die, but the possibility of never being able to die was more than a little overwhelming. She wasn’t indestructible, just a little more difficult to kill than other vampires.

  So are my loved ones, she reminded herself. If I’m close enough to bring them back to life, I can.

  Melissa stepped forward and embraced Luther. He hugged her back, lifting her off the ground as he squeezed her. “Good to see you too,” he murmured before setting her down. “How many of them are left?” he asked Julian.

  “We’ve killed all but two of them. According to the memories of the woman we captured, those two are the last of them.”

  “Then they’re all dead,” Dani said. “We took out two who were trying to get away before the whole place went sky high.”

  “So that’s it, no more Commission?” Chris asked.

  Quinn looked to Julian as he gazed over the mountainside to the remains of the building below. The flames danced in his icy-blue eyes and highlighted the chiseled planes of his face. Standing only in the borrowed jeans, he still somehow managed to look more lethal than all of the vampires gathered around them.

  His gaze came to her, and he placed his hand against her cheek. “No more Commission,” he murmured and kissed her with a tenderness that curled her bare to
es into the earth.

  She rested her hand against his stubble-roughened cheek, savoring the feel of him. They’d destroyed the cause of many of her nightmares with Earl, and now Julian’s nightmares had been burnt away in the mountains of Pennsylvania. He broke the kiss off and dragged her against his chest.

  “It’s an entirely different world, Dewdrop,” he murmured in her ear.

  “It has been since the first night you walked into Clint’s bar.”

  He chuckled before kissing her ear and bending to swing her into his arms again. “Let’s get out of here before the sun comes up.”

  “Yes please,” she said. “I’ve had enough being on fire for one day.”

  His long legs ate away the ground as he carried her back down the hill. They stopped at the bottom. Shifting his hold on her, Julian held his hand out to Chris when he stopped beside them, panting slightly.

  “Phone?” Julian asked.

  Chris dug into his pocket, pulled out one of the burner phones and handed it to Julian. Julian hit a button on the phone before lifting it to his ear.

  “It’s been taking care of,” Julian said through the phone, most likely to Vern. “Send someone to gather the group of vampires who went to find the back road and meet us at the vehicles.”

  Julian tossed the phone into the woods before he started walking toward where they’d left the vehicles. He kept her in his arms when they made it back to the RV and didn’t let her go while the other vampires gathered around them.

  “Put me down,” she whispered to him. “I can’t appear weak in front of them.”

  “They just watched you crawl out of an inferno, on fire. I don’t think weak is a term they will ever associate with you.”

  “I’d still prefer to be on my feet while you speak with them.”

  “As you wish.” He set her down but kept his arm around her waist as they waited for everyone to arrive.

  The vampires milled about the clearing, going through some of the vehicles as they prepared to leave here as soon as possible. When the last of the vampires joined them, Julian stepped forward, drawing everyone’s attention to him.