Siobhan began to back toward the door again, though she froze on the spot when Osamu observed, “Leaving so soon?” though his eyes, like bronzed over copper, never left his book.
“I wouldn’t want to disturb you,” Siobhan returned quietly, shooting a furtive glance at Harendra.
“You see, Harry?” Osamu murmured. “You try to kill them, and it makes them apprehensive.”
“Don’t call me that,” Harendra returned, his voice flat. “And I hardly even scuffed them up.”
“You scuffed us up a little,” Siobhan returned before she could think better of it. She was pretty sure her blood froze in her veins when Harendra slid her a frosty glance, his bronzed black eyes frigid.
Osamu clicked his tongue in admonishment. “Harry, behave,” he scolded lightly, his tone hardly even changing.
Siobhan swallowed. “I’ll, uh.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll just leave you to whatever you’re doing.” She couldn’t even remember what she had come into the library for, and she wasn’t particularly concerned with it as she backed out of the room again.
Osamu sounded amused as he called, “Be seeing you, then,” after her. She closed the door with a quiet click and let her forehead thump forward against it.
Could she say she was thrilled to be in the same manor as Harendra? No. No, she most definitely was not pleased with that arrangement. But considering how much Dask’iya had calmed, she supposed she was willing to believe that Harendra was not just actively murderous as a default, and if Osamu was willing to act as a leash on Harendra’s explosive temper, then that was even better.
She shuffled away, down the hall and into the kitchen. She needed lunch. And junk food. And coffee. There was cake in the fridge beside the AB+, and it and the blood were both calling to her suddenly. Comfort eating was still within the things she was able to do, and she did not intend to forsake it just because her diet had undergone a bit of a shift.
*
When she ran into Allambee, it was perhaps the strangest of the encounters, though it took several days for it to actually happen. The Lords seemed, by and large, content to keep to themselves and to each other. The manor was far more crowded than it usually was, so Siobhan supposed she didn’t blame them, but in any case, it was a bit startling to mosey into the kitchen midway through the afternoon and find him sitting on the counter and teaching Barton how to dance on his two back feet.
Suddenly, Siobhan was very glad she was now strong enough to hold him up when he inevitably tried to dance with her in the future.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Allambee offered, his words quietly pleasant. Dark, dark eyes, so dark that Siobhan couldn’t even notice the bronze, glanced in her direction for the barest moment before returning to the dog.
“Always been more of a dog person than a people person,” he added, though it was a bit needless; Siobhan could have guessed as much. She didn’t say as much, though.
“I don’t blame you,” she said instead. “People kind of suck most of the time.”
Allambee’s laugh was more just a quiet rumble, and Siobhan swore she felt it more than she heard it. “True enough,” he agreed easily. “He’s a clever boy,” he observed as Barton teetered carefully on two paws for a moment, until he lunged forward to catch the treat Allambee tossed for him.
“The best,” Siobhan agreed, thinking of each and every time he had acted as their early warning system along the way. He was her best friend, and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be dramatic to say that she or Jack would have died if he hadn’t been on hand.
There was silence for a moment as Barton swallowed his well-earned treat, before Allambee slid down from the counter, boots hitting the floor soundlessly. “I’ll let you have him back, then,” he stated, clapping her on the shoulder as he made his way out of the room.
Siobhan turned to stare after him over her shoulder as he left, wondering quietly to herself if she was ever going to get used to any of the Vampire Lords, or if she would just get used to finding them unsettling and faintly off-putting.
She supposed it wasn’t actually important. They were, after all, content to keep to themselves, and with only a handful of them in existence, she was pretty sure the odds of running into any in her day-to-day life would remain rather low, even if all of them remained awake after the angel issue was dealt with.
She was just…going to not think about it. There were too many other things for her to think about to waste time worrying about what the future would hold, and there were too many variables to try to keep track of.
She led Barton up to the old servants’ wing to play fetch with him down the long hallway.
*
When everything finally came to a head, Siobhan was pretty sure it was dumb luck alone that let it happen in the early evening. The sun hadn’t quite sunk below the horizon enough for any of them to be comfortable, but at least it wasn’t bright enough to be of any true concern.
Barton began barking out the backdoor of the kitchen, and slowly, the vampires began to trickle out the door to see what he was making such a fuss over, though inside, each and every one of them knew. They had been waiting for the confrontation for days.
It would have sounded impressive, perhaps, to say that there were more angels there than Siobhan had ever seen at once, but she had only ever seen one at a time before, so it would have been a slightly disingenuous observation. Even so, there was an archangel and what seemed like an entire swarm of principalities. And two seraphim.
They all hovered placidly over the manor and the land surrounding it at first, their wings shadowing the ground below and their eyes glowing dimly in the half-light of twilight. Siobhan knew that as the sky continued to darken, they would only get brighter.
One of the seraphim landed with enough force to rattle the manor’s foundation, and it was as if a spell was broken. The rest of the angels rapidly began their descent. Jack and Siobhan shared a look before they both zeroed in on the archangel. Siobhan surged toward her first, snagged a handful of feathers and tugged, and then bolted into the trees. They already knew that limited mobility worked to their advantage, and that angels were too arrogant to take such a thing into account when thoroughly hassled.
Siobhan glanced back to see Jack simply plow into the archangel’s shoulder first before he too bolted into the woods, the affronted archangel hot on his heels.
They kept running, leading the archangel deeper and deeper into the woods. She tried to fall back occasionally, but each time, Siobhan would make a grab for her silver wings or her jet black hair, Jack would shout overly creative insults over his shoulder at her (Siobhan’s favorite was, “Come on, you glowing turkey leg! Beat those drumsticks harder!”), or Barton would snap at her wings or her heels before dodging out of reach again.
In every direction, they could hear the sounds of vampires and angels clashing, and every so often, through gaps in the canopy of the trees, they could see flashes of Dask’iya’s fire in the air above.
On one rather noteworthy occasion, a vampire’s pale, severed arm was dropped through the trees, bringing Siobhan to an abrupt halt in her sprint. She ground to a stop so suddenly she nearly face planted right into the dirt, and a bolt of terror shot up her spine before she got herself under control again. She had fought angels already. She had even fought an archangel before. She could do it again.
Barton barked, and Siobhan turned just in time to block the archangel from attacking her face. Jack kicked the archangel in the back of one knee and hopped over a retaliatory sweeping kick. With a scoff, the archangel flared her wings as wide as she could, only to have to shake a few branches loose a moment later.
It was strange, in a way, to realize she was actually picking up on habits that the angels had developed. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she was used to noticing in the world around her. No, she was more accustomed to noticing the way moonlight gleamed off a puddle or the way a comet’s tail trailed across the sky.
The angels used their wi
ngs for intimidation as much as for any truly practical purpose. If they just stopped doing that, they would be getting rid of their primary weakness, as far as Siobhan could tell. Not that she was going to mention that. She rather planned on exploiting it as much as she could.
In fact…
“Hey!” She plucked an acorn off the ground and pitched it like the world’s tiniest fastball at the archangel’s head, before she jumped up to catch a low-hanging tree branch. She dragged herself upward until she was straddling the branch and then scrambled to her feet to follow the branch toward the bough, just before the archangel could grab her and drag her back down.
Instead, the archangel hopped up onto the same branch. Warily, Jack watched from the ground as Siobhan hopped to a different branch, and then another and another, leading the archangel on a brief chase, until at last they landed on a reasonably thick branch. Thick enough for Siobhan’s purposes, at any rate.
Turning around, Siobhan shimmied her hips at the archangel and patted her ass. “Come on, come and get me!” she cooed cheerfully.
Her face a mask of outrage, the archangel surged forward, only to come up short as the tangle of branch and bark her wings got stuck in. She broke through it easily enough, but it still brought her up short for a moment. Grinning, Siobhan kicked her square in the chest.
The archangel landed on her back on the branch. Jack didn’t need a signal or a cue, he simply hopped up the short distance to grab two of the four wings, pulling them taut as he landed on the ground again and balanced on his toes. The other two wings beat furiously at the air, to either dislodge Jack from where he held onto her or to give herself enough leverage to get off the branch.
Siobhan stepped forward, landing on the archangel’s chest and crouching. She reached out to both sides, fingers fisting around the beating wings and pulling them to a stop. Like a butterfly pinned to a table, the archangel was stuck between the vampires as both started pulling.
With the meaty crack of snapping bones and dislocating joints, and the soggy tearing of muscle and skin, the wings in Jack’s hold gave way first, and he narrowly leaped out of the way to avoid the deluge of shimmering blood that cascaded down from the archangel’s shoulders.
He stayed out of the way as Siobhan kept working at the other wings until first one ripped free, and then the other, though the archangel had stopped struggling after the first two wings disconnected, staring sightlessly up through the canopy from eyes that no longer glowed. Blood loss, it seemed, was even a celestial problem.
She stood up and hopped down to the ground, the angel’s body plummeting down after her, landing in the grass with a heavy thud. After that, rending the body to pieces almost felt routine. Maybe it was unnecessary. Maybe angels could resurrect. They didn’t know, and they didn’t want to find out. So, in the meantime, when there were so many in the area, it was better safe than sorry.
They stared down at their handiwork for a moment, and then Jack heaved a sigh, scrubbed one bloody hand off on his pants, and dragged his hand through his hair. “Well, that’s done. And nothing else is coming after us.”
“Should we head back?” Siobhan asked, craning her head back to look up through the leaves, just in case. There were no shadows of wings, no dropped carcasses, and no flashes of fire, though. The air above had turned eerily calm.
“Pretty sure that’s about all we can do,” Jack agreed. He curled a hand over Siobhan’s shoulder and gave it a tug, turning her back in the direction they had come from. In tense silence, they trekked back through the trees.
It was a gruesome sight as they made their way back toward the manor. The trees glistened with fallen feathers tangled in the leaves, stained with shimmering angelic blood. Every so often, they ran across a puddle of blood—sometimes red, sometimes transparent and glimmering—or an entire body part.
In those cases, it was a bit harder to tell which parts belonged to a vampire and which belonged to an angel. Either way, they knew that when they made it back to the manor, there would be fewer people there than when they had left.
They got to the edge of the woods, but they stepped no farther. It was almost entertaining, the way none of the remaining, garden variety vampires dared to step out of the trees, too busy watching the way the Vampire Lords swarmed over their current quarry.
They didn’t get to see the first seraph fall, unfortunately, but by the time they were toeing the line between the grass and the forest, all of the Lords were circled around the second one.
It took Siobhan a moment to realize he was the same seraph who had dropped her in the woods like an unwanted ragdoll. Suddenly, she found herself absolutely fascinated with the brewing fight.
Harendra was the first to break the stalemate, surging forward with one fist flying. The seraph blocked the strike with ease with a forearm across his face, though he couldn’t focus on Harendra for long, as Dask’iya set the ground around him ablaze. He beat his wings furiously, sparks and embers flying in all directions as he blew the flames out with the wind of his wings.
Regina crashed into his back, but only for a moment before he spread his wings wide, tossing her aside. She seemed unbothered, though, as she had made enough of a distraction for Osamu to kick the seraph in the throat, uninterrupted. The seraph gagged and staggered back before he turned in a sharp circle, two wings extended to knock the Lords back and the other four wings wrapped around himself like a shield.
Allambee ducked under one spread wing and darted into range, slamming his elbow into the seraph’s back between his shoulders. The seraph stumbled, caught himself, and beat his wings back, sending Allambee stumbling until the seraph turned and punched him in the chest. Allambee landed on his back in the grass and tumbled aside to dodge the stomp aimed at his ribs, and Osamu and Regina shot forward next, working in tandem.
While Regina landed rapid-fire blows against the seraph’s ribs, Osamu swept the seraph’s legs out from under him. As Osamu brought a knee into the seraph’s sternum, Regina tugged on the golden hair and feathers, until the seraph spread all six wings as wide as they could go, throwing them both aside like leaves flying on the wind.
“Should we do anything?” Siobhan murmured to Jack, though she made no motions to move from her spot in the oak’s shade.
Jack shook his head tightly. “No,” he replied, confirming Siobhan’s guess. “Either they can handle it themselves or they can’t, but we don’t need to offend them by trying to jump in too soon.”
Siobhan supposed it was to be expected, but as much as she didn’t want to get involved, just standing on the sidelines and watching still wasn’t a good feeling.
But she supposed, as she watched Regina squirm her way out of a sudden chokehold like some sort of weasel, that the Vampire Lords probably didn’t need any help that she could supply. They seemed to have everything well enough in hand.
With fingers grasping like greedy claws, the seraph reached for a handful of Regina’s hair to stop her slippery escape. She bit into the meat of the seraph’s palm and then squirmed away, dropping out of his grasp.
Osamu bolted forward as Regina tumbled out of the seraph’s hold, giving her time to roll out of the way and get back to her feet. His hands were quick, three rapid punches landing against the seraph’s side before Osamu had to duck under three wings.
The seraph wound up a kick that would likely send Osamu flying like a toy, and Siobhan found herself cringing reflexively as she waited for it to happen.
Harendra darted forward and caught the seraph’s leg before the kick could connect with Osamu’s side, and with a heave, he turned in a circle, pitching the seraph away. Wings spreading, the seraph caught himself in the air, landing safely on his feet once again. Harendra leaped forward, and while his first strike landed, his fist slamming into the seraph’s ribs, his second strike was blocked with one arm, and he was tossed aside with the other.
Allambee ducked under the seraph’s guard, but there was something sloppy in the motion, and the uppercut he aime
d at the seraph’s chin was too broad. Even Siobhan would have been able to see it coming from a mile away, and she barely had any fighting experience.
It was less like he was trying to land a real hit and more like he was trying to be the most visible, most bombastic distraction he could be. An unstated and yet still very loud ‘all eyes on me,’ as he came at the seraph with all the grace and subtlety of a bucking bronco.
The seraph kicked Allambee aside with a blow that Siobhan knew would have shattered her sternum, but Allambee hopped back to his feet, annoyed and slightly winded but otherwise fresh as a daisy. And throughout the scuffle, Dask’iya simply sidled closer to the seraph’s side, slow and unassuming. As if beside the seraph was exactly where she wanted to be.
Suddenly, watching with wide eyes, Siobhan had a very good feeling about the way things were going.
If the seraph realized that Dask’iya was too conveniently close at hand, then he evidently didn’t dwell on it. Instead, he simply lashed out, curling his hands around her throat before he spread his wings and took off. Her only protest was to wrap her hands around his wrists so not all of her weight was hanging from her neck.
The Vampire's Bond: A Vampire Romance For Adults (The Bonded Series Book 1) Page 16
