“Did you bring me food, Sahara? A peace offering?”
“No — ” she began, but Harold cut her off.
“Back off, bloodsucker,” he said. “I’m not for dinner.”
John stopped abruptly. The smile wiped away from his face. Old Harold would’ve shrunk away, laughed off the joke maybe, but he was no longer the old Harold. If that Vampire got too close, he didn’t doubt he would’ve swung at the damn thing, or announced how he was a Protector and threatened him with a sword that was no longer part of him.
Sahara placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezed subtly.
“He’s my partner, John — a Protector, too.”
John’s grimace vanished, and for a second Harold thought the man might’ve looked a bit anxious, uncomfortable. His large hand rubbed the back of his neck and the fiery stare broke from Harold’s eyes to the dirt road. “Geez, man, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know. You just — you just don’t look like much of a Protector. No offense.”
Harold stifled a chuckle. The fact that he could make a Vampire uncomfortable by saying a few words amazed him.
“You look more like a Demon,” John said. “More like something from Hell.”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Harold said.
“Enough chit-chat,” Sahara interrupted. “Roman’s dead.”
And just like that John’s eyes went slack, his hands fell to his side, and his big, lumbering frame nearly toppled over before he caught himself on the hood of the Audi with a metallic clunk.
“D-dead?” he said.
“It was the Shadow Eaters, John. They’re back.”
But Harold couldn’t let Sahara lie. It wasn’t the Shadow Eaters; it was him, and the old Harold would’ve been perfectly fine with having someone else take the blame.
“No, Sahara, it’s alright,” he said, waving a hand and turning to John. “Roman died sacrificing his life for me.”
The Vampire stood up straighter, looked to Sahara, who had come around the other side of the car, dried tears in her eyes, and placed a hand on the Vampire’s tree trunk-sized forearm.
“Is this true, Sahara?” John demanded.
The two stared at each other until Sahara’s gaze fell to her feet.
“Yeah, it’s true,” Harold said, and stood a little taller as he said it.
He’d own up to the things that had happened to him, to the things he’d done. Besides, it wasn’t his fault that Roman took it upon himself to sacrifice his life for Harold’s. It still didn’t make much sense, but it happened. Sure he felt guilty and he hated himself ever since waking back up in the terminal, thinking he’d gotten into Heaven, and he didn’t doubt he’d hate himself for a long time to come. But like his mom always used to say: There’s no use in crying over spilt milk. And things happen for a reason. So there must’ve been a pretty damn good reason why Harold was still alive and the Vampire wasn’t.
“What makes you so special?” John said, advancing on Harold.
Harold didn’t shrink away; he stood his ground.
The rage shook John’s voice. “Roman was my brother, and you killed him?”
“John — no,” Sahara said, but it was too late. A brick-sized fist sliced through the air. Knuckles connected with the left side of Harold’s gaunt and toasted face. The dark forest grew darker. Something split open on his cheek. A bursted blister? Or a just the thin skin? He didn’t know. The metal of the car buckled under his back. An elbow ripped the sideview mirror down with him as he bounced off of the packed dirt road.
Sahara’s scream sounded distant. So did her voice as she yelled for John to stop.
“My brother — ” the Vampire spoke between punches.
Harold saw the fists rain down on him like a violent storm. And it hurt. So bad. His ribs popped with each forceful plow. Head thumped against the metal.
“Where’s your blade, huh?” the Vampire spat. “Draw your fucking blade, man. Go on, do it! You’re in Vampire country now.”
“John, enough!” Sahara shouted.
“Shut up!” he yelled back at her.
The little jabs picked up speed, more force, then the Vampire locked both hands together, brought them high above his head. And all Harold could see was the large figure’s dark outline, but he could sense the fear, the danger. Without a key in his flesh, he was doomed to die, and there was no doubt that the Vampire could kill him with his fists alone.
“You’re going to kill him!” Sahara shouted.
Metal screeched as her blade emerged, though John hadn’t taken notice.
“You can’t kill him! You kill him then you kill everyone,” she said, voice fading more and more.
A faint howl echoed inside of Harold.
I am the Alpha. I am the Alpha. I am the Alpha.
Though he thought it to be just in his head. Phantom voices that matched the phantom pains.
Harold raised his arms up.
“Anyone can die if you hit them hard enough,” John said.
The Vampire brought down both fists with enough force to shatter concrete.
Harold caught his hands, gripped with unbelievable force, then twisted, popping the bones and the knuckles until they felt loose and rubbery underneath his skin. “C-can’t kill me,” Harold said. “I am the Alpha.”
John shrieked. His body fell down like a broken Slinky.
Harold still clutched the man’s hands, still twisted, meant to rip the large arms straight from their sockets. But Sahara, finally seeing a perfect time to intervene — much easier stopping Harold, a friend, than trying to subdue a three hundred pound Vampire — set her Deathblade on Harold’s shoulder.
He let go, looked closely at the blade, noticed how worn and dilapidated it looked, like it’d have trouble cutting through wood, and no shot cutting through Man, Demon, or Vampire. She had been pumped full of the venom in Hell. Harold had saved her in the short term, but how much longer did she have before it consumed her like Charlie said it would consume him?
“Y-you can’t kill him,” Sahara said to the broken Vampire at her feet. “Because he is Electus.”
Despite all the pain written on the Vampire’s face, his eyes lit up and he smiled. “Electus?” he asked. “No — that can’t be.”
The Chosen One.
Something faint squealed inside of Harold’s mind, something like one of the Wolves tearing at a throat, tongues lapping at the flowing blood.
Faint, but real, so, so real.
CHAPTER 3
The glowing eyes brought Harold’s thoughts back to earth. At least ten pairs of them poked out from the darkness beyond the trees.
Sahara helped him up, ran a hand over the rough, broken skin of his face. He winced as she did it. John had gotten a few clean hits in, the type of punches that would’ve won him the world heavyweight title. And Harold’s face was the clear loser — always had been. But how much worse could it have gotten, really? The lumps and blood were another addition to the mess. He didn’t care.
All he cared about were the eyes. Glowing yellow eyes, bobbing up and down, advancing on him. Sure, he’d disarmed one hulking Vampire— almost literally — but could he do it to ten or twenty more?
Hell, no.
Sahara’s blade retracted. She threw her hands up and despite all the pain radiating from Harold’s face, he threw his up too.
Three more Vampires emerged from the forest. Each one damn near perfect in their own way. A tall and slender blonde with skin as white as fresh snow; a man with a razor sharp jawline; and a girl, maybe about seventeen, but who knew how old in Vamp years, that looked all too familiar.
Then it struck Harold, how he knew that face. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her in the blood bank because her father, Roman, had ushered her out, fearing for what would happen with two Protectors enforcing Felix’s treaty. But the resemblance was almost uncanny. She had the same shade of dark eyes, same shape of nose — long and coming to a point sharper than her cheekbones.
She was Roman’s spawn,
alright, and the way her attractive features melted off of her face when she saw the wrapped body in the trunk of the Audi hurt to look upon. He was not a father — might’ve been in a previous life — but he knew the love Roman had for Cinder was real, was strong.
She took a few shaky breaths, edging closer to the taillights, but Sahara put a hand on the girl’s shoulder before she could reach the body. Luckily, Cinder wasn’t as hostile as John had been. Even if she was, Harold didn’t think he could harm the girl because that’s all she was after all — a girl. He didn’t see her as a Vampire or a Bloodsucker or an enemy at all. Just a girl who had lost her father. And Harold knew what it was like to be without a father.
“I’m sorry,” Sahara said.
“Sorry?” Cinder answered, a hint of sarcasm in her tone. “Sorry isn’t going to bring my father back from the dead, is it?”
Sahara shook her head softly, avoiding eye contact.
Then Cinder turned to Harold. “Is it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“This was your father’s choice,” Sahara said.
“Oh shut up, whore. Why should I believe you? You’ve been making my father’s choices for years. For all I know you killed him just like you killed Nik.”
“Uh, no, that one is on me,” Harold said. He sounded confident, but one look at the Vampires’ burning stares told him he should’ve kept his mouth shut. “Geez, I was just doing my job.”
Sahara put a hand up, blinked slowly. “Nik violated the treaty. He worked for the Shadow Eaters, too. Death was never our plan, but he acted maliciously, and Harold had every right to defend himself. So before you start pointing fingers, chew on that. Besides, If I do recall correctly, you happened to be at the scene as well. Wouldn’t that make you an accomplice?”
“Shove that motherly bullshit right up your ass,” Cinder hissed.
A couple of them chuckled, and the group seemed to ease up after that. Maybe the tension was over, maybe Vampire and Realm Protector could live amongst each other after all. Then Cinder began to cry, shattering that idea. Three teardrops made their way down her cheeks. And she pushed through Sahara, towards the open trunk. The sheet rustled, and Cinder drew a sharp breath before falling to her knees, her elbows hitting the metal bumper with audible clunk.
Harold’s legs lurched. Part of him wanted to console the poor girl, but another part of him wanted to smack her upside her head. Even teenaged Vampires, in the face of great tragedy, suffered from a bitchy attitude.
Sahara’s arm shot out, brushed against Harold’s shoulder, telling him not to bother. She needed to grieve on her own, though Harold thought she might’ve faked the tears, if that were even possible for a Vamp.
“Follow me,” Sahara said. Then, turned to the crowd of Vampires watching Cinder sob on her knees over her father’s dead, sheet-covered body, and said: “We are going to see the King, I expect no more resistance throughout my passage, understood?”
Her blade came out in a flash, and Harold as well as the three picture-perfect Vampires coiled away in disgust. The blade looked melted, like an infected and sticky wound. Sharp edges had turned to serrated and flimsy metal. And the smell — like rotting corpses covered with a pine-scented air freshener — made him gag.
“That doesn’t look so good,” he said.
The Vampire with the sharp jawline made a show of taking a few steps away and plugging his nose, even his fangs bared in his grimace. Seeing those pointed teeth caused Harold’s gut to clench — flashes of Nik with his jaw stretched open, closing in on Harold’s neck came to him in a rush.
His whole body seemed to go numb.
The faint howling came back.
He jammed his eyes closed, edged away from the group until he bumped into the Audi. Shoulders began to curl downward, he clutched at his head, felt his lips moving. But he couldn’t hear what words came out, if any words came out at all. Because a bell tolled inside of his mind with utter, earth-shattering intensity. The roar of the Demons; Charlie’s knowing smile; Beth cackling; Nik’s dark eyes, all hitting him like a sledgehammer to the brain.
Then he felt the ground rush up to meet him, must’ve fallen hard too because his breath whooshed out of him as if someone sucker punched him straight through the lungs.
The words came to him now, shattering the tolling bell. “Embrace the Shadows. Embrace…”
Sahara hovered above him, blocking out the canopy of knotted branches against the backdrop of a gray sky. She shook him. “Storm, Storm! Snap out of it!”
He gripped her arm, so tight that she withdrew her Deathblade and tried to pry his fingers away.
“We need to get you to the King, now,” she said.
He came back gasping. Like he’d been held under water for an hour. Sahara stood in front of him, working her way at his locked fingers. And when he saw her there in all her radiant beauty — the red hair, almond-colored eyes, he felt normal again.
His fingers released, and a smile muscled its way onto his face.
“Get up,” Sahara said with harshness. And she practically ripped him right up like a rag doll. They made their way into the dark forest, but before they were too far away from the Vampires, he heard one of them say — John, he thought — “If those are the ones charged with protecting this Realm, then my friends, we are all royally fucked.”
CHAPTER 4
Frank King hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours, not since Priscilla’s phone call. He had always had trouble sleeping, that was nothing new. But the nightmares were.
They had happened on that very night, as Frank lay tossing and turning in a bed with no sheets on it — mattress totally bare except for an uncased pillow and a thin blanket too small to cover his entire frame. The night was darker than normal, or so it seemed, because it spilled in like some kind of evil oil.
Frank lived in a small cabin in the woods; the only town was about three miles away, but that’s how he wanted it. Away from all those curious, wandering eyes. Away from the empty condolences from strangers. Life out in the woods seemed much simpler to Frank, much less stressful.
But now, staring out of the black window, he wished for someone — anyone — to talk to him, keep him company, get his mind off of the horrible images forever burned into his brain.
That towering forest with its branches stretching up into the heavens like corpses’ hands and the black clouds looming above, the fires burning bright under the layers and layers of darkness. Shrieks of pain.
How he stood there with a face like leather. Shoulders were slouched, neck craned. And those eyes. Those lifeless black eyes. A blade hung from his arm, dark too, but every now and then the flames would catch and dance off of the black metal. Frank and him stood facing each other, neither vying to make the first move. He could feel the tension knotting in his shoulders, feel how heavy his lungs were. Death was in the air.
Horrible dreams were in his head, stuck on repeat like a horrible, but catchy song.
He leaned over to his nightstand, searching around the rough cedar and cold glass of the table lamp for his cup of water. When his hands touched the plastic, the anger of not being asleep at that ungodly, black hour and the sadness of being alone had already done enough to tick him off, and the force was too much. He heard a cup clang off of the hardwood, bouncing, spinning, echoing in the sheer quiet like twenty rounds of gunshots. Beads of water splashed with a heavy smack, some spraying his face like an ocean mist.
He swiped the back of his hand at the drops.
Not water.
His hand stuck to whatever liquid was in the cup as if it were syrup. He brought his pointer finger up and touched a spot on his upper lip, brought it up in front of his eyes and massaged his thumb against his finger pad. Whatever the substance might’ve been, it was certainly not water.
Lack of sleep could’ve been the cause, but it had seemed so real. His free hand found the ball cord of the lamp and he tugged it, bathing the room with too-bright yellow light, nearly blinding him, like
a Vampire exposed to the sun for the first time.
He blinked once, twice, three times; each open and close harder than the last, then he stared down at the sticky, red liquid splattered on the floor, dotted on the wall like a man had just blown his brains out. Frank brought his finger closer to his gaze, and shrugged.
Blood. So what? he thought. Never seen a little bit of blood before. You’ve slain the most wicked creatures in all of existence and you’re gonna let a bit of blood spook you? Get real, Franky.
He knew it wasn’t real. Just a product of a scarred past and lack of a full night’s rest. He’d shrug it off, go back to sleep — or at least try to — and dream his horrible dreams of a dead son and monstrous trees. Not a big deal, right?
Despite the small voice in his head telling him: No, not a big deal at all, his hand visibly shook as he reached out for the cord to the lamp. There was a fine line between dreams and hallucinations, and deep down in Frank’s gut he knew the mess on the floor, pattered on his wrinkled brow and the black rings around his eyes, were neither.
The light cut off with a deep click. And soon the darkness enveloped him. The rough material of the blanket found his face as he tried to wipe away the blood. Tried to forget it ever happened and let sleep take him.
It would come, he knew.
And as his eyes began to get heavy, one foot stuck in that dreamworld with the trees and the man who’d killed his son, he’d welcomed it.
Those eyes. Those dark eyes; eyes of malice and evil, loomed over him. He breathed heavy, choked on saliva pooling in the back of his throat.
Soon he was up, coughing, feeling the tight hands of death strangling him. But the room was no longer shrouded in darkness. And a figure stood at the end of the bed, emanating black energy. Electrical clouds wafted off of the figure in waves of smoke. And Frank had to hit himself, first lightly, then the next, much harder, bringing the blood boiling up to his skin.
When the last slap registered and he realized the figure was not in his head and really stood at the end of his bed looking like a pissed-off Shadowy ghost, he scrambled up towards the headboard, kicking his blanket and pillow to the floor, revealing that bare, sweat-stained mattress.
Shadowbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 2) Page 2
