by Jessica Gunn
I backed up a few paces. “Stop this, Will.”
Will’s face hardened, like he’d built up some mental resolve he hadn’t had before, and he charged me again. I didn’t move quick enough this time. He caught me by the elbow and yanked down hard. I teetered, about to fall onto my face, when he picked me back up again by the back of my shirt, only to throw me headfirst into a nearby table.
I threw my hands out to stop myself, then turned fast to face him. Will was still feet away, but behind him, Veynix had turned to monitor something on a security feed. He wasn’t even facing us anymore, like it didn’t matter that his back was turned.
Now. I withdrew the dagger from the sheath at my back and threw it with everything I had straight at Veynix’s head. He turned at the last moment, taking the impact to his shoulder instead.
Dammit. But—
Veynix peered over his shoulder at the dagger sunk into him with a hiss. But when he yanked it out, he did so casually, like it was just another day at work. He glanced over at me, grinning. “Did you really think I didn’t develop an immunity to that which I created?” Veynix threw the dagger to the ground. “You really are a fool.”
Shit.
Something solid slammed into me, sending me flying sideways, breathless, a few feet into a table. The metal surface skidded on its legs, taking me and an enraged Will with it. I pushed Will off me the moment we stopped, then moved to kick him away. Weaponless, Will grabbed for my legs, pulling my feet out from under me.
I fell to the ground, my shoulders jarring on impact. Gasping, I rolled onto my front to collect myself. Everything hurt. My movements were slow, awkward. Painful. A screaming, throbbing fire raced across my shoulder blades.
“Did you really think you could kill me?” Veynix asked. “That you could come here alone and come out the victor?” The wound on his shoulder was already healing fast, like demon wounds did. It’d be nothing but a nasty scratch by morning.
Will’s smooth hands collected around my throat, pulling me up to my feet. I choked, trying to sputter words, but nothing came out and then—
The pressure of his hands was gone. A warm, reassuring presence arrived behind me.
“Krystin?” I asked, spinning, only to find Kian standing between me and Will.
“Get Veynix!” Kian shouted over his shoulder. “I’ll take care of Will.”
“Don’t you dare kill him, Kian,” I said to him. How had he recovered so quickly?
Kian turned to me for a moment. His eyes were still glowing red-orange. Kian was only half here. “I’ll do what I can, but I’m not dying tonight.”
I looked between Will and Veynix. Kian was fighting to survive. And while I knew he’d protect Will as much as possible, I also knew that Kian, poisoned or not, would kill Will if it meant his own survival. My best friend and my only ally were going to fight while I faced the demon of my nightmares, and there was nothing I could do to ensure the outcome I wanted.
There might be little I could do to ensure that I’d survive my own battle.
“Go!” Kian shouted as he launched a set of attacks at Will. In a break in attacks, he pulled out a dagger and tossed it to me. I caught it, staring at Kian.
My heart broke for my best friend and for all the hurt he’d feel in the morning. But if we stopped Veynix and got both Will and Kian to a hospital, maybe Will would at least be alive to feel that hurt.
I righted the dagger in my hand, feeling the reassuring weight of the handle, and used teleportante to bring me across the room, right into Veynix’s space.
I got a kick in before he realized what had happened, but then he met each of my dagger swipes and punches from my free fist with a block of his own. His white-blond hair spilled into his face as we fought, but he didn’t slow down. His Talon armor absorbed most of my hits, but one good swipe with my blade across his arm shed bright red blood.
Veynix hissed and threw up his hand. An invisible force collided with my sternum and ribcage, sending me flying to the far wall. My back hit hard, pain bursting across my mindscape with the force of Veynix’s telekinetic attack. The cement and concrete behind me splintered, sending me straight through the wall, past the rebar supports, and into the next room.
Blackness swirled around my vision when I finally stopped moving. Every millimeter of my body screamed in anguish. I groaned and pulled myself up off the floor. Pain was good. Pain meant nothing irreparable had happened. My fingers moved and so did my feet. If I could move, I could fight. And that had to be good enough for now.
Slowly, I took a breath. Doing so hurt, but relief flooded me as fresh oxygen entered my lungs and fresh blood pumped through my body.
Veynix stepped through the hole he’d created with his power and my body, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said. “Not today.”
I groaned profanities at him. Too much pain had worked its way through each of my limbs to form a more coherent response.
“You see,” Veynix continued, “I do enjoy this game we’re playing very much. And to see it continue, I’m willing to make you a deal, Christine.”
“My name… is Ava,” I ground out through clenched teeth.
I was standing now, but my body shook with pain and rage and guilt. Will was in the next room, probably getting beaten to hell by Kian, who shouldn’t have even been here. But if he hadn’t been, I might have died at Will’s hand. And Veynix was bastard enough to let Will live after that so he’d have to deal with killing me for the rest of his life.
And Krystin and the others. If we’d waited and come with everyone, how many of us would have been poisoned with the gas that’d temporarily taken out Kian? What kind of bloodbath would have happened in that tunnel?
All of it because I couldn’t kill Veynix six months ago.
“Well then, Ava,” Veynix continued. “Here is my offer: You forfeit Kian to me and I return Will to you. I allow you a three-day period to heal and once more turn coward and hide yourself from me. Then we begin again. Deal?”
My mind twisted around his words, trying to make sense of them. “What good is Kian to you?” Kian had stolen and sold Demon’s Blood. I was sure that was some sort of awful offense to Talon. But in the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t see how my life and that of Will’s equaled Kian’s involvement with Demon’s Blood.
“He is strong,” Veynix said. “So is your friend Will, for the record. I’ll need all three of you for what is to come. If I get Kian now, I can begin the process.”
My brow furrowed. “Process?”
Veynix cocked an eyebrow. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” He glanced over his shoulder, through the hole in the wall, where Kian and Will were locked in their fight. “Oh, my precious Ava. You have so much left to learn.”
“You can go fuck yourself,” I said, lashing out while his back was turned.
He spun fast, grabbing my hand before it’d even gotten close to him. “You have no weapons. Nothing left to fight with or for. What do you hope to accomplish by doing battle with me?”
“Your death, asshole,” I said and spat in his eye. I kicked with all I had into his groin.
He dropped my hand the second the impact connected, wincing and backing away a step. I threw a punch at his head at the same time, knocking him down further. But even that hurt, the hit rocking my already-abused body.
I went to kick him again, this time in the side while he was down, but he tossed up one of his palms and sent me flying backward into a storage cabinet.
This time something did snap inside me—a rib, maybe two. I cried out, tears brimming behind my eyes as a fresh wave of agony stripped me clean.
This is how it ends.
Finally.
Something coppery filled my mouth. I spat on the floor. Crimson. I must have bit my tongue at some point because blood had flooded my mouth. My stomach churned as I spat out the rest of it.
Veynix laughed again as he stood, righting himself, as though I’d never
fought dirty at all. “Do you know what is most entertaining about this fight, Ava?”
“Fuck you,” I said, staggering to my feet. I wrapped an arm around my middle.
“You aren’t using your full repertoire tonight.”
My eyes narrowed. “Not all of us carry weapons and poisons, Veynix.” And with my body hurting like this, I’d have been lucky if I could hold and swing a weapon at all now.
His expression changed from victorious to curious in a matter of seconds. “You don’t know, do you?” he asked. “How close your team was to getting away that night. How close I’d come to failing my mission.”
The tears building in my eyes fell as the faces of my teammates flashed through my mind. Strong Jeremy, our leader. Em and Liz, who were like sisters to me. And Brian, my first love. He’d been so innocent and kind.
Now they were all dead because of this bastard.
“You could have saved them,” Veynix said as he stepped closer to me.
His demonic presence, the weight of the aura I could only feel and not see, swathed me in dark power. His deep burgundy eyes held me in place, as though I were frozen in place by a snake, unable to move.
I stood there, letting tears stream down my cheeks.
Veynix’s lips curled, like he was going to say something but decided to reword it. He tilted his head. “Why didn’t you save them like you saved yourself? Why did you run?”
“I ran because they were dead,” I shouted. “Because you killed them! You rammed the car and sent us flying off the damn ravine!”
I reeled back and punched at him again, quicker this time. But he still dodged it.
Veynix’s face brightened and he shook his head, like he couldn’t believe the ridiculousness that was me anymore.
I didn’t blame him. I stood before him crying, broken, unable to even fight him because of his power and all the other advantages demons had. And yet instead of just killing me, he wanted to talk. To bargain. To haunt me.
Veynix’s laugh split the air in the room. “My dear pristine venom, you didn’t survive because you ran. That was your cowardly choice alone to make.”
As if I hadn’t heard that from others and myself for the past six months. “Screw you, Veynix. Just kill me already.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be a fair fight,” he said. He grabbed my hand and lifted it, palm up, into the air.
I braced myself for the pain of him breaking it, steeled myself for the wave of excruciating hurt—but none came. Instead, he lifted the fingertips of my hand to his forehead. To the scar that ran jagged down his entire face.
My hands shook at the feel his skin, the ridge of his scar, the closeness of his body to mine. The body of the man who’d taken everything from me.
“Why would I fight you when you’re not using your full potential? What honor is there in that?” he asked. “Ava, you didn’t survive because you ran. You lived because you had magik.”
Chapter 25
I ripped my hand out of Veynix’s grip. He let me go without much effort. I stared at him in disbelief. “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t have magik, you idiotic, sadistic, bastard.”
While he was letting me, I staggered backward until my back hit something cool and solid.
Veynix grinned cruelly. “You do, Ava. And what’s what makes you special. My special venom. Because while everyone thinks that you made some sort of deal with me, the truth is that you were selfish in saving only yourself all on your own. I had nothing to do with it. But now that you survived, you could be so much more to me. To Talon. To our war.”
No. Veynix was wrong. My memory of that night was fuzzy after a certain point, but I was sure I would remember something as drastic as magik being used. No one on my team had magik, least of all me. And in most cases, from what I understood, magik showed its ugly face early in life, so we all would have known.
There was no way Veynix was telling the truth.
Unless…
The police had said the car had been in terrible shape. Our bodies should have been more mangled. I shouldn’t have walked away with minimal injuries.
But I had.
It was a mystery even to me, and in that mystery grew the false rumor that I’d made a deal to survive. Some sort of demonic pact that should have been enough to land me in Ether Circle Prison for colluding with a demon.
Had Dacher or Ben guessed this all along?
“Now you see,” Veynix said as he paced toward me. “It took me some time to figure it out. You’re not the only person who blacked out that night.” He lifted a hand to the scar on his face. “I wasn’t sure what cut me until a run-in with a witch who could manipulate memories accidentally unlocked that specific set.”
My eyes narrowed. If I had magik, I would have known by now. My powers would have shown themselves, manifested somehow in my everyday life. Especially as a Hunter. Most magik was emotionally-driven; at least that’s what we were taught during our training period as Hunters.
I wracked my brain for any knowledge I had of magik, but it was sparse. Non-magik-users didn’t get the same level of training as magik-users in the Hunter Circles, a tradition that hadn’t changed since the Circles’ inception.
“You’re an earth-elemental, Ava,” Veynix said. “One strong enough to withstand my venom. Not many magik-users can say that. My purpose here, in returning, is to see if you’d survive the Ember poison too.”
He grabbed at the air, and that invisible force of his magik wrapped around my throat, pulling me to him.
“You’re the start of all of this,” he said, gesturing to the operation around us at large. “You’re the poison that created our new mission. The inspiration for it all. And tonight, I was hoping to test this operation in full. You’re so special, Ava, and you don’t even know it.”
I gripped the invisible force holding me up in the air. My feet dangled, desperate for solid ground, as if that would help me regain my breath. I was not the reason for this. Whatever Talon was planning, it was not my fault.
“Fight me!” he screamed in my face. “Use your magik.”
I kicked up at Veynix, but the blows didn’t connect. I was weak, my vision fading yet again. Whatever fight he was hoping for wasn’t coming. And neither was back-up.
This was dumb. So dumb.
Why won’t he just let me die already?
He pulled me closer until we were eye-to-eye, inches apart. “Fight me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut—useless, since my vision was already darkening anyway—and I wished for a weapon. Anything that’d break his concentration and hold on me. Something big enough to do damage despite him probably being able to catch it with his telekinesis.
I just need a weapon. A distraction.
A way out.
A loud snap sounded, sending a metallic echo somewhere behind Veynix’s head. I opened my eyes and watched as a large piece of rebar, long enough to hold, broke off and rose in the air, hovering for only a second before it flew, lengthwise, toward Veynix’s head.
My eyes widened as it soared across the air and thwacked Veynix in the back of his skull. His hold on me dropped with his loss of concentration. I fell to my knees, gasping, as a piece of rebar the length of a baseball bat fell to the floor next to me.
Veynix cursed, holding his head as he stood. “There you go.”
I wasted zero time, swinging the pipe at his closed eyes. He caught the swing, but I used his hold of my weapon to jump up and kick him in the chest, twisting the metal along with his arms. I ignored the pain screaming across my body with every movement. Veynix cried out as his muscles strained, and he spun unnaturally.
My body throbbed, each breath and movement a chore, but I kept fighting. Kept throwing attacks at him. Kept moving. Because if I stopped, if I gave him even a millisecond of leeway, it’d be over. He’d get his telekinesis under control and smack me with it again.
I wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened, but I’d take the free weapon—thank you very m
uch.
I spun and struck Veynix in the face, drawing a new line down the clean side to match his older scar. Blood poured from the wound immediately. He wiped it away as I swung to hit him again, but he got a hand in the air long enough to push me backward.
I caught myself this time, though I dropped the rebar. It skittered across the floor with a loud clang. My hand wiped at the blood dripping from my mouth from when I’d bitten my tongue, now swollen and aching.
As my hand moved across my mouth, the rebar slid along the floor. I gasped, watching it with confused eyes. I swiped my hand across the air the opposite way. The rebar followed!
Holy shit.
Veynix was right.
A flashback to the night of the accident skewered my mind. It was a rainy night, the day after Thanksgiving, not long after Ben had told us not to worry too much about upsetting Talon. After Dacher had all but waved off what we’d discovered.
The rain had come pouring down, slicking the roads that had grown dangerously cold and slippery in the incoming winter weather. We’d been attacked at the house, more poison bombs that had given Emily hallucinations. Jeremy had gotten everyone into the car and started to drive like a maniac to anywhere, anywhere that was safe.
We had been only a minute into the drive when we’d realized we were being followed. Another couple minutes before we had caught Veynix’s face in our rearview mirror.
He had rounded the side of our vehicle with his and pushed the front of our car into a spin. Then he had rammed us with enough force to send us flying off the edge of the road, down into a ravine, spinning and turning and flipping over and over and over again.
My lungs wheezed with the memory, the stomach-churning rolls our car took. The look on Brian’s face saying this was the end. Liz’s scream. Jeremy’s cursing. The slam of the final impact as our car’s nose hit the hard forest floor below. The twisting scream of metal as I wrapped part of the car’s frame around my body instinctually, protecting myself from the brunt of the impact.
Saving myself, but not the others.
