God, I had a thousand-and-one questions for her, but I also wanted to bask in this incredible moment, to savor every second of it.
“Come!” she said with greater urgency.
I looked up at her and shook my head, our hands still clasped together. “How?” The hole we’d made in the skin of the cocoon was in no way big enough for me to escape through.
“You must do the rest, my boy. Use your mind, it is all you need to—”
A bolt of lightning crackled overhead, sending tiny pinpoints of light to swirl around the outer edges of my vision. The intense, chromium flash had also charged the air around us, leaving behind an acrid odor and also caused the fine hairs on my body to stand on end.
“Do it now!” she commanded, but then jerked her hand away from mine and turned abruptly to search some remote spot on the horizon.
Another blinding flash of lightning rent the sky. The thunderous boom that followed shook our environs and the once vibrant horizon sped toward us at dizzying speed, devouring all the light in its path.
I stood up within my cocoon and didn’t need to be told what was coming. I knew the thing driving that terrible darkness.
In my mind, I saw myself standing once more at the precipice of that ancient gash in the earth. It was calling to me, wooing me to take that last step and plunge into eternal darkness.
The white-haired woman brought fists down onto the energy field still encasing me in a desperate attempt to breach it, but failed. Her violet eyes searched mine, her hands still balled tightly above me. “Spurn her, my son, for she will bring only death and destruction.”
She?
The cocoon tightened around me, suffocating me. I was gasping for air that was simply no longer there. Despite the rising panic taking hold of me, I forced myself to do exactly what the woman had instructed me to do and used my mind to envision the shield collapsing. I held onto that thought with literally my last breath, until I felt the shell begin to hum again, then fracture, before shattering with such violence that the white-haired woman was knocked backwards into the air and hurled several yards away, where she crumpled to the ground, unmoving.
Why I was unharmed I didn’t know or care. All that mattered in that moment was whether or not she was alive or dead. She was my mother, the key to unlocking the mystery of who and what I really was. I couldn’t lose her now.
“And yet there is so much you do not comprehend,” a dark voice boomed.
An insidious shudder ricocheted through me, insinuating its icy touch into every muscle and bone, every artery and vein in my body, as I whipped around in a futile attempt to search out the owner of that terrifying voice from with the increasing darkness.
“Austin?” the white-haired woman moaned.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and sprinted to her aide. Halfway there, her body started to twitch, then rose sharply into the air.
She hung suspended by some invisible force, her mouth slack with stunned disbelief, her violet eyes glassy and unfocused as she tried to choke out something through quivering lips.
In horror, I watched her stiffen in agony as a fist exploded through her chest in a shower of crimson gore and fractured bone. She blinked down at the blood-drenched fist protruding between her breasts, at me with a mixture of shock and regret, and then opened her mouth to scream, but a cyclone of obsidian air descended on her to swallow the sound.
I rushed forward to grasp the hand she held out to me, but instead of being sucked up into the emergent twister, I was blown backwards and away from it in time to see her garments shredded by the black, crystalline particles of spiraling air.
Helpless to stop what was happening, I lay sprawled on the ground while her gown disintegrated around her, followed by the rest of her form. My mother was lost to me forever.
As the windstorm subsided, the temperature plummeted. With it arose the cloying scent of rotting citrus. I remembered that smell. Knew what it heralded.
The Queen of the Damned.
An amorphous shape materialized in the exact spot where my mother had been consumed. I shivered in the freezing air, my legs crooked, my hands and arms bracing me from behind and ready to push me up to a standing position at the least provocation, as the evil form glided ever-closer toward me from within a dense mist. Through it, similar to that long ago night in my bedroom, I caught fleeting glimpses of an ivory arm, a bare shoulder, or hint of leg.
“Mourn not Shayla’s loss, my child,” the very same dark, glittering female voice said, “for you have but one true mother, and I am she…”
CHAPTER 35
I shot to my feet, ready to fight the insidious creature lurking within the cold, roiling mist.
Instead, I found myself face-to-face with an exotic beauty whose olive complexion and glossy dark hair, swept up and away from her face to fall in gentle waves over her shoulders, only added to her captivating good looks. The woman’s ivory silk blouse, tapered slacks and high heel boots were right off a Paris runway. She was female beauty personified.
That is, until I recognized who she was.
“Expecting someone else?” No amount of artfully applied makeup or designer clothing could disguise the hatred burning behind her cold, amber gaze. “My brother, perhaps?”
Dimitri…
Once again, I was forced to relive the final moments of the battle in Athens, right before everything went black. Dimitri had shouted to me to save Niko, while he fought of Kassandra with her own sword. That she was standing here and he wasn’t—
“I’m afraid your brave knight is no more, tesoro.”
My gut tightened. Dimitri Ravello was not dead. He couldn’t be.
Then a fragment of conversation aboard the yacht drifted back to me. He’d warned me about her. “Lies fall from my sister’s lips as truths. She will use this against you.”
Yes, Kassandra was a liar; and she had just lied to me now. In spite of my precarious position, I knew this on some intrinsic level. Which begged a more troubling question.
If Dimitri had survived the skirmish in Athens, why did he allow his sister to capture and escape with Niko and I? Why didn’t he stop her? There weren’t any henchmen left alive in the plaza to assist her, at least none that I had seen.
The vampire drew closer still. “I asked, who were you expecting?”
Kassandra was doing her damndest to intimidate me. Her smug and hateful aggression elicited an uncontrollable urge in me to take a swing at her. I’d never hit a woman in my life. I’d never even considered it. But this bitch wasn’t a woman. She was a soulless monster.
“Your boyfriend, actually,” I replied in the same arrogant tone. I was thankful to have regained the use of my voice, as well as my mobility. The last memory I had of this dungeon cell was Haemon and the amulet robbing me of both. No, the last memory I had of this place was—
“And why is that?” she asked with mock interest.
“Because whenever he pops round for a visit, I always get a hello kiss first.”
Kassandra’s lips lengthened into a voluptuous smile and she leaned in so close that I could see the yellowish-brown flecks of her irises illuminated by the dim light source behind me. “Tell me, incubus, how do my kisses compare?”
White-hot pain exploded behind my eyes from the head butt she’d delivered with the momentum of a charging rhino. What was it with this immortal harpy and her hard-on for splitting people’s skulls?
I staggered backwards, my vision blurred, but she grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, spun me around, and jostled me toward the open doorway. I braced myself for the agonizing pain getting anywhere near those iron bars would cause me.
“Tollite maledicto!”
Reeling from her attack, I wasn’t so incoherent that I’d missed her lifting of the spell on the exit, which I passed through now without incident. Not so for the second cell.
No amount of disorientation or physical discomfort could numb the brutal reality of seeing Christie Gold’s life
less body staring up at me on the cold stone pavers. Her eyes, leaden with a milky grayness that only true death carried, confirmed what I already knew: I alone was to blame for her death.
Kassandra sprang backward just in time to avoid the stream of projectile vomit erupting from my open mouth. “Ma che cazzo fai!”
Only once she was satisfied that the contents of my stomach had been thoroughly emptied did she clutch me by the neck again and force me to confront yet another horror: Niko and Mark were no longer in the cell.
An image of Shayla being rent to pieces by that sinister, black twister flashed in my mind. Everyone around me was dying. And if I couldn’t pull my shit together and think of a way out of this nightmare, I was going to be next.
Kassandra twisted my head back at a sharp angle, her cool, ruby lips pressed to my ear. “Would it please you to know that the pretty Greek boy still lives?”
I couldn’t help it. I heaved a sigh of relief.
My relief was short-lived.
Niko may have survived, if what she said was true. But was this her twisted way of letting me know that Mark hadn’t?
I didn’t get to ask, because the vampire sank fangs deep into me above the collarbone, restraining me with razor-sharp fingernails while she gorged herself on my blood. Playing her personal chew toy was about as pleasurable as Haemon’s raping me. What I wouldn’t give to be able to summon my incubus power and fry this bitch good and proper. Unfortunately, she was wearing the protective amulet.
Kassandra pulled back from me with a loud smacking sound. “Niente male. I’d forgotten how your kind caresses the tongue.” Her words came in the slurred staccato of a junkie who’d just gotten the fix of her life.
Poised to tell her that I hoped she’d choked on it, two bad guys stepped from a shadowy alcove. The men bore strong Slavic features; dark hair, pale skin and deeply set, elongated eyes. They were probably brothers. They were most definitely vampires.
The tallest of the duo regarded me with budding interest. The second vampire seemed all around pissed off and took up the rear.
“He’s ready,” Mr. Curious announced, unable to take his eyes off me.
Kassandra shot him an icy look.
To me she said, “Time to move, incubus.”
How badly I wanted to rip that amulet from her neck and show her, show all of them, of what this incubus was truly capable.
“Do it,” she said, having plucked the thought from my mind. Our bodyguard escorts weren’t quite as cavalier and took a collective step closer. Kassandra stopped them with a raised hand. “Take it from me, incubus, I dare you.”
About to say something that would undoubtedly get me knocked on my ass (or worse), the emerald at the center of the amulet captured a refracted beam of light from a wall torch. It produced a tiny green spark at its center which coincided with a familiar quickening inside me.
Faint laughter echoed from the deeper shadows of the dungeon and I swore I’d detected the slightest hint of rotting citrus in the air. Or was food and water deprivation, coupled with murder and mayhem, to blame for my hallucinations? No one else here gave any indication that they’d heard or smelled anything.
And yet, the renewed surge of power vibrating throughout my body was no phantasm.
Kassandra rested hands on her shapely hips. “Signori, I give to you the last of the Great Incubi. No wonder we slaughtered your kind so effortlessly.”
This time the other bloodsuckers did laugh.
I should have kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t take their arrogance any longer.
“You sure about that?” The two guards glanced from one to the other, then down at me. Kassandra leveled a cool amber gaze at me. “It never crossed your minds that, if I exist, surely there must be others like me somewhere out there?”
Kassandra offered a dismissive snort in reply. “We would have sensed their presence in the world,” she said. “You, little incubus, are nothing but a freak of nature.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “And you’re a few clowns shy of a circus.”
She was on me in an instant. “If you wish to keep what makes you male,” her grip on my balls tightened, “I suggest you learn to curb your tongue.”
When the vampire released me I crumpled to my knees, taking in several shallow, gasping breaths and trying to focus on something (anything!) other than crippling pain.
It was then that I glimpsed another spark at the center of the emerald. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. There was no direct light source at this angle for the stone to reflect. And with this realization, I forced myself to swallow back the pain, heed gut instinct, and summon whatever strength and speed the earlier quickening had restored in me to do exactly what Kassandra had dared me to do. Make a play for the amulet.
The reward for my effort was a furnace-like blast of heat across the back of my hand.
Certain the flesh had been burned away to raw meat and bone, I sat huddled and shaken at the feet of Mr. Curious, cradling my tender hand to my chest. Amazingly, it bore no outward signs of injury. The same could not be said of my continual displays of weakness.
No matter what happened next, I had to be stronger. I had to make them perceive me as a formidable force.
Not an easy feat when your nuts were screaming in agony and you were crouched and humiliated at the feet of your captors.
Another flash of Shayla intruded upon my mind. Only this time it wasn’t her awful demise that revisited me but a vital remnant of what she’d told me in that other world.
On a rational level, I could have written off my experience there to trauma; a form of mental escape brought on by witnessing Christie Gold’s savage murder. I’d gone into shock, my mind forced to conjure a safe haven for itself. And yet, how quickly that refuge had unraveled into its own nightmare realm of carnage and terror.
No. Whatever that dream/vision/other dimension place was, I decided, it had been real. As had Shayla’s instruction for me to use my mind to destroy the ethereal bubble that imprisoned me there. Once I had, once I’d channeled all thought and energy into being free of it, the bubble shattered. The same thing happened in Athens. I’d unwittingly used thought to incinerate the vamps who’d attacked us.
Clearly the amulet around Kassandra’s neck possessed its own unique power, but was that power exclusive to its wearer?
Haemon had effectively used mind control to make me see and feel things well in advance of my ever having been brought to this stronghold. Was that what happened earlier in my cell? Was it really the amulet that had held me back or had he simply convinced me that it rendered me powerless? If so, might that be what Dimitri’s sister was doing to me right now? Turning my own mind against me? Since I didn’t have a lot of options, time to put the theory to the test.
“Who is Shayla?” Kassandra demanded, momentarily breaking my train of thought. My silence provoked her to ask me again, only this time with the tip of her boot into my ribs.
The emerald at the center of the amulet gave one last shimmer before growing dark. As it faded, I felt a familiar veil descend over my thoughts, followed by an electrical pulse shooting into my extremities.
Oh yes, more and more incubus power was returning to me. I could feel it rushing to heal the damage to my groin and neck wounds.
Pushing up to my feet, I made certain Super Bitch couldn’t get anywhere near my ballsack. “You’re the mind-reader, Kassandra. You tell me.”
Her ruby lips lengthened. “Amore. There are countless ways I can torture you and keep you alive, for months at a time, if it pleases me.”
“Lucky for me your boys here have other orders. Haemon doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d take kindly to your killing his prisoner without permission.”
“If only you knew what he has in store for you…”
From the bowels of the fortress we climbed several narrow stairwells, continuously working our way single-file along close, dank corridors. The uneven stone pavers were cold and slick against my bare
feet and I could hear the distinct squeaking and scampering feet of rats scurrying to get out of our way. I’d also calculated that we’d ascended six floors.
Eventually, we emerged into a spacious, torch-lit foyer. Its tall, stone walls held a hanging threadbare tapestry and not much else. Sparse and austere pretty much summed up the space.
More importantly, a dozen vampire guards had been strategically positioned around the vestibule to foil any attempt at escape. Three were stationed before a large wooden and iron door that had to be the main entrance (and exit) to the castle.
Much as I wanted to use the return of my incubus power to storm the door, kill the baddies, and escape into the night, I had Mark and Niko to rescue first. Instinct told me they were still both very much alive and somewhere within the castle.
I tried not to dwell on the notion that Dimitri Ravello may have let us be captured.
The dungeon crew wasn’t about to give me more time to weigh my limited options, either. They were already forcing me up a grand staircase to the second level of the castle proper.
When we stopped before a large, intricately-carved pair of doors, Kassandra dismissed the two bodyguards. No sooner did Mr. Curious and his brother depart than the tall set of doors parted with a groan, revealing a bedroom that could only be described as grotesque opulence.
The master of the castle wasn’t just a sadistic murderer, he was also a drama queen.
Flames crackled in the mammoth fireplace, casting a deceptively warm glow onto the polished wooden floor. Centuries-old portraits lined the paneled, windowless walls, along with a few tapestries and other ornate furnishings. At the room’s extreme end sat a colossal bed, its four posters stretching toward the coffered ceiling. In the middle of this, a grinning Haemon reclined on one arm, his leg crooked, as though receiving a lover instead of a condemned prisoner.
Incubus Moon Page 24
