The vampire’s high-pitched wail fused with an eruption of light from his open mouth and gaping wounds, which mushroomed into a shimmering vapor cloud that expanded around him in all directions before imploding, leaving nothing in its wake but the glass-strewn asphalt.
Then I spun around to mete out similar justice to the second vamp.
Once he was dead, my very next thought turned to Niko. During the chaos of the fight he’d been pulled away from me.
I whipped my head right and left in search of him in the dark street that had suddenly come alive with the sound of distant sirens and shouting humans. I couldn’t see Niko anywhere.
More and more lights began to punctuate the darkness within neighboring high-rise apartment buildings, as tenants approached their shattered window openings to peer across at one another, and then ultimately down to where I was standing in the middle of the street.
The sirens were getting closer, but I wasn’t going anywhere until I could find Niko. He was alive and close by. I could hear him calling to me inside my head—and he wasn’t alone.
That was when I spotted Dimitri and his sister clambering back up to their feet. Kassandra appeared to have suffered her own share of injuries from the shockwave I’d generated.
Regardless of the degree of pain she was experiencing, it didn’t keep her from trying to run her brother through with her fallen sword.
Dimitri blocked her attempt with his own sword and shouted over to me. “Go after Niko!”
I turned in the direction he’d indicated to find Jace dragging him away.
Another wave of fury detonated inside me. I didn’t give a damn that the sirens were mere blocks away now. That Cockney bastard was going to burn for hurting my lover.
No sooner did the thought form in my mind than Jace howled in agony and released Niko. He staggered toward me in the middle of the street, arms outstretched, his lean body engulfed in red and gold flames.
Several female screams echoed down from the adjacent buildings, and I was vaguely aware of the sound of multiple feet pounding the asphalt to my left, as I ran past Jace to get to Niko.
Despite my rush to ensure that he was unharmed, I couldn’t help but savor the vampire’s misery. Because what was pouring off of Jace wasn’t exactly flame. It was light; and it pushed and stretched away from his body as though something wanted out.
Then the vampire gave one final cry before the night swallowed him forever.
I reached Niko and fell to my knees, turning him over with care and praying that the gash across his cheek wasn’t as bad as it looked.
He opened his eyes and smiled up at me to the sound of more sirens and screeching car tires. Multiple doors opened and slammed shut and men were barking out orders in Greek. Then Niko’s smile vanished and his eyes grew wide with terror.
The cracking blow to the back of my head silenced the human chaos around us, as cool night air rushed in to fill my head.
CHAPTER 33
The cold dampness from the floor I was sprawled across had seeped into my aching muscles and bones. All I could see from my limited vantage of lying face down was an arched opening in a rock and mortar wall consisting of metal bars and incorporating a narrow iron door. An irregular glow came from a bare bulb dangling from a wire in the far corner, which did little to illuminate the darkness beyond the cell. I could also hear the faint sputtering of a generator.
Memory flashes of the ambush began filtering back to me: the fighting, the lethal shards of flying glass, vampires dying in bursts of vivid light, and the look of horror on Niko’s face just before everything went black.
Not only had I been captured again, both times due to my own infuriating stubbornness, but I’d failed in my promise to keep Niko safe.
I pushed off the floor with a groan and rested back on tender knees. Supernatural constitution aside, I was nursing a whopper of a headache.
The cell I’d been locked in couldn’t have been more than fifteen-by-twenty feet. The row of iron bars encased in the thick wall of stones above and below would effectively keep a human from escaping, but not a demon who could probably lift the front end of his car off the ground.
As for the prospect of guards, Bring’em on!
“Austin?”
I rushed the bars. “Niko, did they hurt you?”
“No! You must not—”
Pain exploded behind my eyes the instant I touched the metal. I pitched sideways, landing on all fours and quickly scrambled away from what was probably my sole means of escape. Taking in several deep breaths to push back the nausea, I waited for the jackhammer inside my head to relent. When I made another attempt to re-approach the exit that jackhammer turned into a wrecking ball.
“I can’t get close to the bars without getting sick.”
“I tried to warn you,” Niko said in a hoarse whisper. “They used witchcraft to bespell them when they brought us down here.”
Great. Where’s a powerful witch to undo a spell when you need her? Oh right, back in the safety of her vampire lover’s island sanctuary that we never should have left in the first place.
Except that Dimitri had been in Athens and fought to save us. That he’d failed…
“Buddy?”
This new voice elicited more than a crack of emotion in my own. “Mark!”
I rushed the bars again and paid the price. Stumbling backwards, I attempted to focus on the spot from which his voice had emanated and, once my non-spinning vision returned, made out two shadowy forms in the cell opposite my own.
“Christie?”
A third, indistinct shape joined the others. “Please tell me you have a plan to get us all out of here?” Her voice was weak and unsteady.
Thank God! My friends were still alive—for now.
“What the hell are they?” Mark demanded.
“You know what they are,” Christie said. “That police detective told you. It’s what they want from us that terrifies me.”
A cold chuckle issued from the shadows. “Are you so eager to find out?”
The monster hiding in the darkness emerged and approached my cell. He peered in at me with black, soulless eyes, his porcelain face all sharp angles and aquiline nose. He regarded me as though I were nothing more than a curious zoo creature.
I willed my thundering heartbeat to slow, while Haemon worked to insinuate himself into my mind, the way he had in Prague, testing the psychic shields I’d brought down around myself.
His gaze hardened. “Did Dimitri teach you that little trick?”
“Dimitri taught me a lot of things,” I lied.
Haemon smirked and unlocked the cell door. “I’ve a few tricks to show you myself.”
He stepped inside, leaving the door wide open behind him. He was that confident I couldn’t escape. “Raping me in Prague wasn’t enough for you?”
I heard a gasp from the other cell just as Haemon descended on me, shoving me so hard into the wall behind me that some of the stones cracked from the impact. The gash in my scalp reopened and a bead of blood trickled into my right eye.
“Get the fuck off him!” Mark shouted.
Haemon ignored the outburst. “Supplex pro mihi!”
My shields collapsed and I fell to my knees, immobile and unable to speak.
How had he done this? Dimitri didn’t possess this kind of power, and he sure as hell hadn’t warned me that another vampire might.
Haemon crouched beside me. “I imagine there is a great deal that our Dimitri has not shared with you.” He cast an amused glance over his shoulder into the gloom and a light flickered on in the other cell, revealing the appalling condition of the three people I cared about most. “With this,” he whispered, extracting an ancient-looking medallion from the neckline of his tailored shirt which he twirled in his pale fingertips so that the green stone at its center winked back at me, “I can make you do whatever I choose. Even kill one of them…if it pleases me.”
Horrified, I struggled to move, but couldn’t.
Haemon stood up to leave, turning at the cell door to offer me a chilling smile before securing it behind him. He then unlocked the door to the neighboring cell and stepped inside.
Mark barricaded the others with his body and shot me a conflicted glance, but I was powerless to stop whatever the fiend had in store for them.
That was when my best friend did something equally fearless and reckless. He rushed the vampire.
Haemon retaliated with lightning swiftness, seizing Mark in a chokehold. It didn’t matter that Haemon was shorter by nearly half a foot, the vampire easily bent Mark backwards at a painful angle, his tattered and filthy T-shirt lifting to expose the bruised and abraded skin of his lean stomach, over which the vampire ran an excited hand.
“Perhaps the stallion would enjoy what I did to you at Alcatraz.”
Niko held Christie, who’d covered her eyes and begun to sob.
Screw the damned amulet! My friends need me! Summoning every ounce of incubus power in me, I was rewarded by what felt like a thousand red-hot knives stabbing into me all at once.
Haemon laughed at this and twisted Mark around to face him. “Yes, I shall give this one what he has only dared fantasize about.”
Mark hawked a wad of spit at him.
The vampire thrust my friend’s face so hard against the iron bars that I heard what had to be bones cracking, and yet all I could do was kneel there on the cold, stone floor, incapable of making the monster stop hurting him.
In all the years we’d known each other, I’d never seen Mark truly frightened—until now.
“If not you,” Haemon said, shaking Mark violently, “perhaps the pretty woman?”
Mark’s pain and fear transformed to desperate fury. He shoved away from the bars, twisting in his captor’s grip and locking on to his face as though he would tear it from him.
Niko barely got Christie out of the way in time before Haemon jettisoned Mark’s body into him and the two men fell in a tangle of arms and legs and out of view.
Haemon lunged for Christie.
Shock must have caused her to go rigid, because she did nothing to free herself, except shift terrified eyes from the monster clutching her to me. It was only when he smiled at her that Christie’s paralysis shattered and she began to wail in terror, kicking and clawing to break free of his inhuman hold on her.
Mark scrambled to his feet again, but Haemon kicked him back down.
The vampire jerked Christie’s head back to expose her throat. “The incubus wishes you dead,” he told her in a confidential tone, delicately pushing errant strands of blonde hair out of her eyes. “Tragically, he longs to reclaim what you took from him so long ago. His mind whispers this to me even now.”
She went slack in his grip and let her head fall to the side to stare entreatingly back at me, a single tear coursing down her cheek. “Austin?”
I could feel my face darkening with rage, yet couldn’t shout to her this was an unconscionable lie.
“You see,” he whispered, leering over at me. “He cannot refute it.”
I fought to reclaim my voice, my neck corded with strained muscles, but failed. Couldn’t Christie see it in my eyes. Couldn’t she tell that Haemon was lying?
She offered me a quivering smile, and then her face went blank when she turned to face the monster holding her once more. “Burn in hell!”
Haemon raised his free hand above his head and held it in the air for an instant. “You first.”
He brought his long fingernails down across her throat to the thick, ripping sound of parting flesh. A scarlet torrent sprayed his face and clothing, as Christie’s body thrashed and jerked in his arms, and then grew slack, the look of shock only now beginning to fade from her eyes.
Mark wailed from the cell floor, his hand reaching up frantically to grab at his wife’s, but her blood-saturated limb made her flesh too slick to take hold of.
The vampire let Christie’s body drop like an uninteresting doll and turned to me, his alabaster face a crimson horror show. “This,” he said above Mark’s piteous sobs, “is only the beginning.”
CHAPTER 34
One minute I was at the mercy of a sadistic, murderous vampire. In the next, I found myself adrift in a womb-like bubble at the center of some twilight world.
I shifted within the pliant, crystalline membrane and glimpsed a brilliant spark on the horizon, which began to speed toward me now, swallowing the indigo dusk in its path and leaving in its wake a golden firmament that stretched as far as the eye could see.
The longer I stared into this light the more the horror of Christie’s death began to relinquish its debilitating grip on me. I could feel something else (anything!) other than soul-numbing grief. Even my rage at Haemon’s savagery was receding, along with the echoes of Mark’s sobs and my dread over what would befall him and Niko.
All the pain and uncertainty that had plagued my life over the past year was being lifted from me. In its place, an unexpected sense of calm settled over me.
In the midst of this extraordinary experience, a shimmering vortex materialized in the near distance. I watched its particles swirl and drift in my direction, swelling in number until, little by little, they coalesced to form the shape of a woman. The very same tall, regal, white-haired woman who’d visited me in dreams.
There was no visible delineation between sky and ground. Nevertheless she stood not ten feet away, barefoot and self-possessed, her long gossamer gown billowing out hypnotically behind her like a ghostly sail.
Taking a few steps closer, she paused, never once shifting her focus from my ethereal bubble bobbing and dipping on the ether.
That was when I felt a tiny shudder ripple beneath me and which soon expanded to encompass the entire sphere. She was testing the protective shell’s framework, its physical limits.
I wasn’t sure whether or not to be grateful to her. Given the way my life had been going as of late, maybe it was better to remain safely inside my protective bubble.
The woman’s expression hardened. “It is not I you should fear, but that which comes for you, my boy.”
I gave a bitter laugh. “Lady, you’re a couple of dead bodies too late to be reading me a warning label. The Big Bad already found me.”
Joy Ebersole and Christie Gold were irrefutable proof of that, and Mark and Niko were probably next. Yet here I was, floating around on my ass in some bizarre dreamland talking to a cryptic fairy godmother I had no reason to trust. What I really should be doing was figuring out a way back to the only two people I had left in the world, if they were even alive to go back to.
“Loyalty to humans should be of no concern to you.”
“Well it is,” I hit back. “Those people are everything to me.”
The woman rushed my cocoon, fixing on me from the other side of it, her conviction radiating physical heat in her violet gaze. “And your undoing.” Her words dripped with contempt. “You cannot possibly conceive of the evil that still comes for you.”
My once serene bubble began to vibrate again, only this time it emitted a dissonant buzzing that assaulted my eardrums. The strident sound appeared to be having a similar effect on the white-haired woman, as well.
She bit down on the pain and pressed her palms against the outer membrane surrounding me. “We haven’t much time left.”
I watched her eyes close, at which point she tilted her head skyward and began to recite what I took to be a silent prayer.
I mimicked the placement of her hands from my side of the crystalline shell, simply because my own body willed me to do so. She wasn’t controlling my actions, but rather I was reacting to something that the muscles in my body (not my brain) understood better than I did.
The instant I positioned my palms beneath hers, an intense jolt of energy leapt between us. It struck the membrane and penetrated its malleable crust, shooting, hot and electric, into my hands and down into my forearms. The white-haired woman above me was undergoing a similar phenomenon, but the resolve in her expres
sion did not mirror the panic I could feel beginning to take root in my own. The bluish-white glow in my hands was beginning to burn like hell. Try as I might, I could not prize them away from the transparent casing.
Whatever she’d set into motion, it secured me to the wall of my ethereal cocoon and was beginning to cook me from the inside out! It was Dimitri’s yacht all over again!
Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the membrane between our palms gave way and the intense burning was replaced by the cooler contact of skin against skin.
The glowing light and intense pain vanished the moment we interlocked fingers and gave the other’s hand a reassuring squeeze. The whining buzz that had intensified to the roar of jet engines had also been silenced, as a series of extraordinary images flashed behind my eyes.
In them, I witnessed a monumental palace of gold, silver, and ivory marble etched by a jagged mountain range. Twelve beautiful females of diverse ethnicities, dressed in flowing white gowns and sharing the same long, platinum hair, stood holding hands in a semi-circle before an admiring throng of radiant men and women. Behind them sat a massive stone altar draped in crimson velvet. On a raised dais above this was a double throne of precious metal and gemstones. A broad-shouldered man with raven hair who looked astonishingly like me perched on the edge of the smaller throne, his gaze alight with keen anticipation as he regarded the regal woman standing in front of the altar. The very same woman standing over me now.
“You see?” She gave a furtive glance over her shoulder and, returning her focus on me once more, intensified her grip on my hand. “You belong with us, my boy, with your own kind.”
“Who are you?” A swell of excitement rippled through me as I awaited her response.
She offered me a melancholy smile. “You already know the answer.”
From the night I’d first discovered adoption papers at the bottom of Laura’s jewelry case, struggled for months afterwards to uncover the smallest breadcrumb regarding who and what I really was, only to be met with failure and frustration at every turn, I’d dreamed and prayed this day would come. Here she was at long last, my birth mother, standing before me.
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