by Laken Cane
And she was not going to second guess herself.
She called Ellis. “If I don’t contact you with news of Llodra’s death by dusk, don’t delay. Get back into the room.”
“I will.” He was subdued, but that wasn’t surprising. The man he loved was in the hands of a sadistic enemy. He was forced to hide from the dark to be sure the mad master wouldn’t take revenge and turn him.
He was going through shit. Being subdued was understandable.
It didn’t stop her from trying to coax him out of it, though. “It’ll be okay, Ellie. We’ll find Llodra, and we’ll find Levi.”
“Just please don’t die on me, Rune,” he said. “Don’t leave me here alone.”
“Oh, baby. No. I would never.”
“Promise me,” he said, insistently. “Give me your word right now. It’ll mean more if you ever…when you’re in the dark place and want to go.”
“I swear. I will never leave you. God, Ellie. Especially not on purpose.” She was a little ashamed she had the balls for such a boldfaced lie. Because she had wanted to die. Had wanted it badly.
“You mean it until you’re there,” he murmured. Then he hung up.
And there’d been absolutely no belief in his voice.
She sighed and looked at her crew. “Ready?”
They all nodded, except for Owen. His gaze lingered on the scratch that marred the berserker’s face, and on the puncture marks revealed when Strad clubbed his hair back in a careless ponytail.
The berserker didn’t care that the marks were visible.
“Then let’s go. We need to find him today.”
“If he’s in Rock County,” Raze said, “we’ll find him.” Raze wanted to find Llodra as badly and as quickly as Rune did. Little else was as important to him as saving Lex.
But of them all, Ellis was the innocent. He was the one who’d been forced into a dark, silver wrapped cave while his tormentor walked free.
Without the crew killing Llodra, he hadn’t a chance. Lex and the twins, they had a chance.
She opened her car door, but as she started to climb in, her cell rang. “This is Rune.”
“I’m a friend of Gunnar’s,” a soft voice said. “He said to tell you it is of the utmost importance that you come to see him immediately.”
“Tell him I’ll see him as soon as I get a free minute. I can’t right now.”
Before she could hang up, Gunnar’s friend spoke again. And this time, she sounded furtive. Afraid. “He said to tell you he knows where the mad master is, and that you are to come to him. Now.” Then there was only silence.
“Shit,” Rune said. “Gunnar says he knows where Llodra is. Let’s head to Wormwood and check it out.” Gunnar had never let her down before.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, then got into her car. Please. Please.
Still, a sinister voice inside her mind asked quietly, “Can you kill him? Can you kill your own father?”
“Shut up,” she muttered, and drove too fast through town. There were no zombies, at least not that she could see, but she could feel them. They were there, somewhere.
People who were out dashed from cars into buildings as fast as they could, throwing fearful glances over their shoulders as they went.
River County was not safe for the humans.
It wasn’t safe for the Others, either.
“Not yet,” she whispered. But it would be, once she killed Llodra and ran COS the fuck out of town.
And she would do both those things. She would.
But just in case she faltered…
“Make sure he’s dead,” she told the crew, once they gathered at the gates of Wormwood. “If I can’t end the bastard, one of you do it. No matter what I say.”
Strad frowned. “He slaughtered RISC and threatened Ellis. We will end him. Why would you say otherwise?”
Because he’s my father.
When he’d given her the excuse not to kill him, when he’d blatantly forced her to make the choice between his death and Ellie’s life, hadn’t there been a spark of relief? If she was being honest, hadn’t there?
She shook her head and looked away. “I don’t know.”
But no one believed her. They understood she was keeping something from them. None of them would have guessed what that secret was, though. Hell, they might not have believed her had she told them.
Uncomfortable beneath Owen’s considering regard, she pushed through the gates of the graveyard, behind which Gunnar the Ghoul waited.
“Your Horror,” he said, bowing slightly.
“The mad master,” she said, fingers lightly touching her shivs. “Where is he?”
He motioned her closer. “He is here. I discovered he cannot leave Wormwood once he stole his maker’s power from you.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“Yes,” he said, nodding solemnly. “The master did not foresee every possibility.” He leaned over her, his fuzzy hair drifting in a wind she couldn’t feel. “He cannot be permitted to take over Wormwood. We wish him out.”
“And we wish to take him out,” she said. He was there. Right there.
“Then make haste,” he said, and pointed to his left. “The vampires are sleeping in the ground behind the old caretaker’s cottage.”
“In the ground? How can we find—”
“I have placed a marker. The master lies with the black blade at his head. Find his heart with it.”
She shivered, remembering the black blade he’d staked her with. Gunnar had found that same knife. The daughter would now return the favor and stake the father.
She hoped.
“Take us there.”
But he stepped farther back, shaking his head. “I cannot.”
“Why can’t you?” She frowned. Gunnar wasn’t one to shrink from danger. He’d fought Llodra to protect her.
“When he is dead, the power might release. I do not want it to find a home inside me.”
“Gunnar, you offered to take it when I held it.”
“For you, Your Loveliness. For you, I would absorb the power.”
That was too fucking sweet. She pursed her lips, unsure of what to say. Finally, she nodded. “Stay away, then, baby.”
And with the crew at her side, she ran toward the cottage, where the mad master, the vampire, the father, lay sleeping.
The time of Nicolas Llodra would soon be over.
Chapter Forty-Five
They found Llodra’s resting place—his hiding place—with no trouble.
She knelt beside the black obsidian blade and closed her eyes. She could feel them there, the vampires. She felt them much the same way she felt the zombies. With empathy, and familiarity and fucking tenderness.
No.
Opening her eyes, she stared up at her men. They’d gathered around her in a semicircle of concern.
She grasped the blade and pulled, and it came out of the earth with a sucking sound, as though the ground were hesitant to let it go.
Because it knew what she would do with it, perhaps. Maybe the ground did not want Nicolas Llodra, either.
She swallowed past the tight thickness in her throat, willing herself not to cry. It was just…
She’d killed too many parents.
“Rune,” Raze urged, gently. “Do it.”
The blade lay in her palm, innocuous and plain, patient and deadly. Once she shoved that blade into his heart, it was over.
Maybe he would have told her the story of her past. But she couldn’t have trusted his words. Nicolas Llodra was created from lies and madness.
As was she.
But maybe he had loved her, as much as a vampire could love. He might have taken her into his coven and make her his favorite. She could have ruled by his side, once the zombies—
“Fuck,” she said, then groaned. “Fuck.”
She put her palm on the ground and traced it slowly toward where his chest would be. His heart.
How deep in the ground was he? I
t didn’t matter. The blade would find him.
She would find him.
The end of Llodra.
God, how fucking sad that was.
The end.
She felt him there. A line connected them, like a bloody, black umbilical cord. She followed that cord, raised the blade high, and plunged it into the ground.
Into his heart.
He screamed, screamed as the power of Damascus made him more, made him stronger.
She lifted her face to the sun and screamed with him.
He thrashed and the ground churned in response, opening enough to show her his face, his eyes.
The pain they held was almost too much for her.
He caught her stare with his and she couldn’t look away. Didn’t really want to. She was killing her father, and it didn’t matter that he was an almost unmatched evil.
He was hers.
The least she could do was watch him as he died. She’d give him that small comforting touch.
He would not die alone.
She pressed harder on the blade, willing him to die, to just die.
To die before she gave in to the useless need to ask him who she was. What she was. How she was.
The sun burned away his skin, searing and blackening his flesh as she shoved the blade more deeply into his heart, begging him silently to stop struggling and find peace.
And finally, after an eternity, he stopped screaming.
Blood leaked from the corners of his ruined mouth. It covered her hands as she held the knife in his heart.
“Not yet,” he begged. “Not yet, my sweet child.”
“Find your peace.” Then, she whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She was always sorry.
She was never sure.
“God,” she cried. “I’m sorry.”
But she did not remove the blade.
At last, Strad pulled her from the ground, pried her frozen, bloody fingers one by one from the handle, and forced her to let the blade go.
She might have held it forever.
“Why, Rune?” Owen asked, peering into her face. “Why was it so hard?”
Did she not owe them that much?
Did she not, maybe, owe herself that much?
“He was my father,” she murmured.
And then, it was real.
She sobbed, staring at them beseechingly, as though somehow, they could make it okay.
They didn’t move for a long moment, disbelief in their eyes.
Then, finally, Strad groaned, and lifted her into his arms. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, sweetheart.”
But there was more work to be done. She would leave none of the vampires alive.
Ellie couldn’t be protected from all vampires for all time, but she could protect him from these.
And after killing Llodra, the others would not be so hard.
She squeezed the berserker’s neck, then nodded for him to let her down. “Don’t tell Ellie,” she said.
“Never,” someone promised. She wasn’t sure who.
She wiped her eyes, smearing blood across her face, then took a deep breath. Whatever the fuck she was, wherever the fuck she’d come from, that information had died with Llodra.
And she would go on.
“Let’s put the rest of them down,” she said, her spine stiff. “So we can do the same to COS.”
Something inside her had hardened with Llodra’s death. With her killing of him.
She was different, and the world was different.
And she would go on.
A small part of her didn’t really believe it was over. The new zombies, the mad master…
They couldn’t be over, not just like that.
But COS was still to come, and she knew defeating them would not be easy. It was a fight that would never end, because COS did not end.
So maybe with Llodra, fate was just giving her a fucking break.
It hadn’t been easy—but it could have been worse.
They made short work of the other vampires, who never stirred when they were staked. Nor did they struggle when they were burned by an unforgiving sun, or when they finally, silently, dissolved into sad little piles of dust.
Chapter Forty-Six
Rice called her as she drove back to town.
“You killed Llodra,” he said.
“How’d you know?”
“The new zombies are gone. All over the county, they lay back down. Some of it was caught on film.”
“Awesome,” she replied, her voice dull.
He paused. “Are you okay?”
“Will you tell Ellie he doesn’t have to go back into the room?”
“Gladly.”
“And also…”
“Yes?”
“Tell him we’re on our way to get Levi and the others.”
“I’ll tell him.” He made no attempt to caution her to watch herself—COS had covered their tracks. Rune could be the one to end up in legal trouble.
She clicked off and tossed her phone into the passenger seat. The sadness—the sadness of Amy and Llodra and the COS abductions and Z, oh God, Z—all that was cementing into a hard, black ball of rage.
Rage she could handle. She needed rage to destroy the fucking slayers. To free Lex and the twins.
To make everything okay if just for one fucking minute.
Her cell rang again. “Did you find the location?” she asked Strad.
“I did. They’re in the Moor.”
“Because in the Moor, no one cares.”
“Yes.”
He gave her the address and she headed to the Moor, the bad place at the edge of the city where desperate humans seemed to congregate in large numbers.
The place in which she would soon be living.
She’d fit right in.
Even though they parked a couple of streets away from the address, Rune wasn’t sure COS and their greasy ringleader, Bach Horner, weren’t already aware of their presence.
They hadn’t even taken much trouble to conceal themselves. Either they were that arrogant, or they had a plan.
She was betting on the plan.
It was the middle of the morning. Somehow it didn’t seem right. Battling COS was a nighttime kind of act.
She put her cell in the glove box and left her car as the men parked behind her.
Across the street a half-lit bar sign flashed. A man lurked in the bar’s doorway, watching them. Two doors down a thin woman in a black coat and a knit hat stood poised to go inside a decrepit sex shop. She spit in their direction and then disappeared into the dark depths of the store.
“Welcome to the Moor,” Rune muttered, and pulled her guns.
When they reached the house inside which COS had planted themselves, Rune, Owen, and Jack went to the front, while Raze and Strad covered the back.
It was a white, two-story house, not in bad shape comparatively speaking. In the Moor, most of the houses were ramshackle and the buildings were crumbling.
Except for her new house. It was like a diamond sparkling amidst the ruins. Probably not for long, but so far it hadn’t been burned or otherwise destroyed.
“We knocking?” Jack asked.
She shook her head. “We’re kicking. Take the fucking door out, Jack, and let’s go in blazing. I want Lex and the twins.”
She stood at the side with her guns ready as Jack kicked in the door. In seconds, they were inside.
But no one else was.
“What the fuck?” she said. “Strad was told they were here.”
“Somebody lied,” Owen answered.
They looked up when Strad and Raze walked into the living room.
“I’ll check the basement,” Strad said.
She hugged her arms against a sudden chill, pacing the floor. “Something isn’t right.”
Jack nodded. “Even I feel it. And you all know I’m not the most sensitive of individuals.”
The landline inside the house began ringing. Rune lunged toward
it, nearly ripping it from the wall in her hurry to answer. “This is Rune.”
“And this is Bach Horner,” he said.
“Black Horror,” she murmured, forced to lean close to the phone. The phone was an old one, and the curly cord connecting the earpiece to the base was short.
“Pardon?”
She cleared her throat and wished her heart wasn’t beating quite so hard. After the staking, that was a little painful. “Nothing. Where is my crew?”
“I’ve talked with our leaders,” he said, not answering her question. “And we’ve come to a decision.”
“Why don’t you tell me this decision, asshole?” She didn’t want to antagonize him, she really didn’t. But she was so angry. So afraid.
“That’s uncalled for. I’ve been nothing but courteous to you.”
“You took Lex and the twins. God knows what you’ve been doing to them. In my book, that’s not being courteous. That’s being a piece of shit and will get you killed.”
He sighed. “I’m being nice, Ms. Alexander, by bothering to explain to you that the three we’ve taken are back where they belong. You will have to stop.”
For a second she couldn’t speak. Strad had come back up from the basement and stood staring at her. Waiting.
“I will never stop,” she said, finally.
“Lex and the twins are COS—a fact you should have accepted by now. Why, Lex doesn’t even want to leave.”
It was a trap. A fucking trap in the Moor, and she’d walked right into it.
She swayed on her feet as spots began to dance before her eyes. Get out, she mouthed to Strad. Out. Now.
“She would rather die than be in the church,” she said, hoping her voice was calm.
The men headed quietly for the front door.
No doubt it was a bomb—COS loved blowing shit up. She darted her gaze frantically around the room.
What would trigger it?
Hanging up the phone? Walking across a certain spot?
What?
The crew eased out the door, and once they were outside, Rune breathed a little easier. “So what have you planned for me? You rigged this house with explosives?”
“I knew you were sharp.” He paused. “Did you warn your men? I’d rather have taken you all out, but you’ll do, Ms. Alexander. You’ll do.”
“Why?”
