Savior (Starlight Book 4)

by D. N. Hoxa

  “Really?” Nope, I had no idea, but whatever Tytania had given him had to have been worth it. A fairy, Kyahen or no Kyahen, simply didn’t do things for the greater good. Not that the Seelie Court was any better than the Unseelie. “How strong would a demon have to be to kidnap thirty female vampires and disappear into thin air?”

  Very, was my gut feeling. He could have used portals. Used a possessed fairy. Possess the vampires to go willingly. The options were limitless.

  “Can you even hear me? That was Kyahen of—”

  “Yes, yes, of the Seelie Court. Heard you the first time. Let’s just focus on the new information.”

  My stomach turned at thought of calling Aaron. He was a demon, too. He probably knew his own kind better than most. Would he know of demons strong enough to pull off something like this? The only way to find out would be to call him, and I still hadn’t forgotten the footage Kyle had shown me of the hallway outside my room. I hadn’t forgotten how Aaron said he hadn’t been at my room last night, either. And those reminders almost made it hard for me to breathe.

  “How the hell did you just summon him with a call?”

  This time, I turned to look at Frosty. He had an extremely confused look on his face, and I just didn’t get why he was so caught up on Kyahen.

  “We made a deal. Trust me, it was no fun, and it isn’t going to be fun when he comes back to collect the favor. Wanna let it go and focus on your vampires?”

  “I just—”

  Frosty didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, in less than half a second, his eyes turned silver, his fangs grew out of his lip, and he hissed like he was going to charge me. It took me a second to realize why.

  The sun. A single ray of sunshine had fallen right on the sidewalk.

  “Oh, shit,” I breathed as I watched him step back fast, and I turned to the two vampires still lying on the ground. The first one farthest away from me had already caught fire, but the other still hadn’t burned. Like a mad person, I grabbed her ankle, and I took off running for cover as if the sun would burn me any second now. What a huge mistake. I should’ve never left the bodies out there in the open like that, knowing that it was daylight. The door next to the bar was already open, and with all the strength I had, I threw the body I’d grabbed by the ankle inside just as the sun covered my body completely.

  The door slammed right in front of my face. I sighed as I looked back at the other body, which was now only ashes on the sidewalk. I felt terrible for not being able to save her, and I knew exactly who was going to get yelled at for it.

  I pushed the door open with all my strength and walked inside the restaurant. Vampires and humans stood around the body of the vampire I’d dragged by the ankle as Frosty pushed his wrist to her mouth. I was going to explode with a thousand curse words at him, but his people were all around us. I didn’t want to make him look bad in front of them. He was their leader after all. And it had been my fault, too.

  “She’ll be all right,” I said, more to myself than to the others. The woman was a vampire. She was paralyzed because she was drained completely of blood. Enough of it running in her veins and she would be brand new again.

  “Take her upstairs,” Frosty said to no one in particular as he licked the blood from his wrist and stood up. “Feed her until she wakes up.”

  Two vampires immediately grabbed the other by her arms and legs and made their way to the stairs. Frosty finally turned to me again, looking his normal human self. “Thank you,” he whispered with a curt nod.

  Oh, I thought. Well, thank yous were certainly nice. “Don’t thank me yet. Get her to wake up as soon as you possibly can. Hopefully she’ll be able to tell us where she was or what was done to her.”

  Frosty pressed his lips together before he spoke. “Kirsten was one of the last ones that were taken. So was Addy.” He looked out the tinted windows with longing.

  “Let’s just keep bloodsuckers inside from now on, okay?” We didn’t need any more dead bodies.

  “Let me pour you a drink until Kirsten wakes up,” said Frosty and waved at the bar. By the time we sat down on a couple of stools, almost everyone inside had disappeared out the door and up the stairs. I was more comfortable that way, anyway.

  “Did you talk to the people who saw them first? Did they see anyone?”

  “I did. Humans. They claim the sidewalk was empty one second, and Addy and Kirsten were just there the next.”

  “Figures. If this really is the work of a demon…” But then again, Samayan wasn’t really known for being tight with demons. What had changed? Except the war, of course.

  “I think it is. Otherwise, Kyahen wouldn’t have said so.”

  He sure seemed to trust the fairy an awful lot. The bottle of whiskey that he put in front of us together with two glasses looked really old. I bet it smelled delicious, too. Maybe it was too early in the day for it, but I really needed a sip.

  “No, he wouldn’t have.” Unfortunately, I didn’t think he had lied either. “Now it’s a matter of finding out who is strong enough to possess like this and get Kirsten to wake up so she can tell us where she was.”

  “And how are we going to do that?” Frosty asked.

  When he finally sipped his whiskey, I dared to do the same. I was right. The taste was exquisite, and it burned through me like lava. In a second I felt a lot more awake.

  “I need to make a phone call,” I said, flinching. Calling Aaron was inevitable. The sooner I got it over with, the better I’d feel. And by this time the next day, I was sure I’d laugh at all of this stupid suspicion and feeling of discomfort.

  I had just gotten my phone out as I took another small sip of the whisky when my phone began to vibrate in my hands. I almost spit the drink out. Definitely wasn’t expecting it. When I saw Aaron’s name on the screen, I almost smiled. Maybe we were more linked than I’d realized.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said to Frosty, and I made my way out of the building before I picked up.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, but I was just about to—” I started, but Aaron cut me off.

  “She’s gone.” The panic and tension in his voice shook me to my bones. He never sounded like that.

  “Who’s gone?”

  “We can’t find her anywhere, Star. I’ve searched the whole Base. Ella’s just…gone.”

  The weak sunlight streaming from the dark clouds lost its shine altogether. “I don’t follow.” What did he mean, gone?

  “Kyle couldn’t find her in her room or in the kitchen. He was freaked out so I searched around the Base with him and a few guards. She’s nowhere. Her room is untouched. She wasn’t seen in the kitchen or the hallways by anyone. Kyle checked the cameras, but there’s no sign of her ever leaving her room.”

  Every word he spoke seemed to lose meaning as soon as it left his lips, then turn to terror before it reached my mind and wrecked havoc in my head. Ella was gone. It sounded like a really bad joke. Or a nightmare. Anything at all, except reality.

  “Star?” Aaron called, but my body was frozen. I couldn’t produce any sound. I couldn’t even move. My eyes landed on the pile of ash that had once been Addy lying completely empty on the sidewalk. She’d been a vampire. Super strong, super fast, super everything, and the sun had wiped her away for good, just like that. The sun that was still shining in the sky. And if Ella was outside…

  “Do you think this has to do with Frosty’s missing vampires?”

  The sound of Aaron’s voice brought me back to the present. Frosty’s missing vampires. I looked around me like I just realized where I was. My mind tried to find a link fast. If Aaron was right, and I was sure he was, Ella had disappeared the same way Frosty’s vampires had—without leaving anything behind. Which meant Samayan, or Samayan’s hired demon, had taken her.

  But Ella had a sire. Jack was still alive and well. I hadn’t wanted to know the details because the wounds were still too fresh, but they had to be connected. Ella wasn’t masterless. So what would Samayan want with he
r on top of so many independents?

  To get to you, of course, the ugly voice in my head whispered.

  “Aaron, I need you to tell me everything you know about demon possession in its purest form. I need you to find out which demons have the powers to perform such possession, right now.” My voice sounded strong. Foreign, as if it were coming from someone else’s lips.

  “Demon possession? What does that have to do with this?” He sounded a lot worse than I did.

  “Frosty’s vampires were taken by demons. They were possessed, too, until there was literally nothing left of them. I need to find out who is strong enough to do this. Please…if they have Ella, I need to get there in time.” Seeing my sister completely spent the way Addy and Kirsten had been…it just moved something deep inside of me. Something that was going to make me a million times worse a monster than Samayan’s potion ever could.

  “Of course. I’ll get to it right now,” Aaron said. “I’m so sorry, Star. I don’t know how this happened, but we’re going to find her, okay? We’ll find her.”

  I wanted to believe him, I really did. But people had broken into our Base and they’d stolen Illyon right off my neck. He’d been in my room the night before and said he hadn’t. There was just something about the entire situation that made me sick to my stomach, and I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to allow myself to even think about whether things were going to be okay. Things were just going to be how I made them. I was a lot more comfortable with that mind-set, though who knew how it would serve me?

  “Call me back as soon as you have something, okay?”

  “I will.” The line went dead the next second, but I couldn’t even put the phone down for a short while.

  “I love you,” I said to myself. I loved him with everything in me. And if Aaron had really betrayed me, I hoped to God that I never found out.

  ***

  Kyle was completely freaked out, and unlike me, he didn’t even try to hide it. She’s gone, he said, more than a dozen times when I called him, and I would’ve slapped the hell out of him if he had been in front of me. Ella was not gone. She was just missing. And I was going to find her, no matter what.

  I gave him the updates about the demons and asked him to look into it, give Aaron a hand. He’d already spoken to Sam, too, who was also on board with all of this. It felt good to know I had backup.

  “She’s up,” Frosty said from behind the blue door. I was still outside, watching the clouds that had completely taken over the New York sky again, giving myself some sort of a pep talk before I made my way inside.

  Frosty let the way up the stairs and to the first floor above the restaurant. When he opened the door and showed me the surviving vampire—Kirsten, I realized she looked a lot worse than she had while in the vampire version of unconsciousness. I realized vampires couldn’t cry—their tear ducts didn’t exactly work, but tears would have made her look a thousand times better. Her eyes were wide, pupils completely dilated and she looked at everything as if it was going to kill her right that second, even her own hands. Her mouth was open, no fangs in sight. She was so scared that her own body had forgotten her very nature. Vampires transformed to hunting mode, silver eyes and wide fangs, when scared. This one looked as fragile as a human.

  She sat on a bed while two other vampires stood by the draped windows, looking at her like they couldn’t decide what to think. Couldn’t blame them. We were on the same page.

  When Frosty closed the door behind us, Kirsten’s eyes finally moved our way, and she actually jumped to the edge of the bed.

  “Kirsten, it’s okay. Star here is a friend,” Frosty said, reaching out both his hands to her. But Kirsten would only shake her head while her chin quivered. “We’re here to help you. I know you just woke up, but we need you to tell us everything you can about who took you and where you were so that we can get to the others in time.”

  A cry escaped the woman’s lips. “You can’t,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “You can’t save them.”

  Blood rushed to my cheeks. Saying something like that was not allowed. I walked over to the bed and I sat down at the very edge, trying to give her her space but also be on her eye level.

  “Yes, we can. We will. We just need your help to do it faster. Kirsten, I know that you went through a lot—”

  That much was obvious, but she didn’t let me finish.

  “No, you don’t. If you did, neither of you would try to make me talk about it!” Finally, some silver sprinkled her eyes. That didn’t stop her body from shaking, though.

  “Don’t you think those other women they took deserve to be home safe, too?”

  If I could just get her in a place to start, she would definitely not stop. I realized this sucked for her. Some things you just didn’t want to talk about, ever. But you needed to. Every single time. And talking about it, as weird as it sounds coming from me, could help a lot.

  Or maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better for making her go back to what was obviously her worst nightmare to date.

  “Safe? You think we’ll ever be safe?” Kirsten said, her eyes even more silver now. That was good. She was coming back to life with anger. I’d take it. “Nobody is safe. Not from those…those…”

  A second ticked by. It was a wonder how her chin was still attached to the rest of her from how badly is shook.

  “Those what?” I pushed, my heart pounding in my chest. “Who took you, Kirsten?”

  Her eyes moved slowly from her lap and up to my face. “Darkness.”

  “Kirsten, we really need to—” My raised hand stopped Frosty mid-sentence.

  I held Kirsten’s eyes. “It enveloped you from head to toe, didn’t it?” I asked her, my voice as low as I could make it be. She didn’t need shouts. She needed calm. And she slowly, but surely, nodded. “It started as nothing but black smoke.” The image I’d seen of Azazel at the Cathedral in Santa Fe was right in front of my eyes. “It looked harmless. Until it began to swallow everything it touched.”

  Kirsten’s shaking hand covered her mouth as she once again nodded. “It started with my feet,” she whimpered.

  “And it went up all the way.”

  I’d never seen a demon possess. I’d read about it in Simmons’s class in Lyndor, only the few texts that existed about it, but having witnessed Azazel once, I could put the image of a possession together. If I’d had any doubt that Kyahen had told me the truth, it was gone now. This vampire was definitely possessed.

  “I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear anything but screams,” Kirsten said, both her hands around her neck now, as if she were trying to protect herself.

  “The place you were in was dark, too,” I stated. The guessing game could backfire terribly, but I had a feeling that asking her straight questions would take her over the edge. I couldn’t risk that.

  “Dark and wet. Cold,” Kirsten whispered.

  “And the sounds you heard coming from outside…”

  But she shook her head. “There was no sound outside. We were in tombs,” she said. Damn it. They’d probably taken them underground.

  “And the people around you were scary.”

  Kirsten closed her eyes and sighed. “He was nice at first,” she cried. “But then he started. And…and…and…” she seemed to want to choke on her own words. I don’t know what came over me, but I dragged myself closer to her on the bed and grabbed both her hands. They were cold. Not vampire cold, but dead body cold, no matter that blood was coursing in her veins now. It didn’t look like it was going to warm her any time soon.

  “It hurt. A lot,” I whispered. God, I felt filthy for sending her wherever she had been again, but what she could tell me could save a lot of other vampires. It could save Ella.

  “We no longer screamed. It was no use,” Kirsten said. “He just took and took and took and left us with nothing.”

  “He was a demon. You recognized him as a demon.” It had obviously been one guy that had done this to the v
ampires. That narrowed our search down, I hoped. And I didn’t think it was Samayan.

  “No.” Kirsten pulled her hands away from mine. “He was not a demon. He was death.”

  “Kirsten, did you recognize him? Did you recognize the place? Anything at all could help,” Frosty said, his voice now as calm as mine. Only then did I realize that the three of us were alone.

  “Away,” Kirsten said, her chin quivering violently again. “We were taken away from here.” She looked up at Frosty, her dark eyes begging. “Please…”

  And we both knew we needed to stop before she lost whatever sanity she had left.

  15

  ——————————

  I found myself back in Mauve’s room. Frosty leaned against the doorframe and watched me try and figure out whatever my gut was telling me when it insisted I go back there. There literally was nothing out of the ordinary about the room. So what was it?

  “Why would anyone want to possess so many independent vampire females?” he asked for maybe the tenth time. “Myth says we grow stronger when we sire our own, true, but some of the vampires they took had never sired in their lives.”

  My answer remained the same.

  “Magic is infinite. You never know what could be gained from what,” was my wise reply. I pulled the drapes of the windows aside after I made sure there was no sun outside. Wouldn’t want Frosty going up in flames, too. Outside, people walked up and down the sidewalk without any idea of what was hidden right in front of their eyes just across the street. Magic was a strange thing, indeed.

  “But Kyahen said it wasn’t magic. It was possession,” Frosty said, but to me, it was the same thing. If we could just find out how the vampires were taken in the first place…anything at all, really, that would take my mind off the fact that Ella wasn’t in the Base. She wasn’t safe. She was probably…stop. I needed to stop.

  “Do you know of any demons in the city?” Someone we could maybe go visit, instead of sitting around, doing nothing. The reflection in Mauve’s mirror as I passed by it showed me a ghost. I didn’t even look like a person, or perhaps it was just my imagination. My skin was paler than usual, my eyes as dark as if the sky was suddenly left without the moon and stars. I looked deader than a vampire. I almost grabbed Mauve’s makeup to put some on my face.