Click.
Click.
Click.
The automatic was empty, leaving John with no weapons other than his fists and wits. He retreated until he was backed against the chain-link fence.
“We defeated you once before,” he threatened.
“They will abandon you again,” she tormented him. “The vampire is using you. The angel is no better.”
The loneliness of his lost years drained his hope. All that friendless time due to Lance’s cowardice. Valerie’s careless past that put them in this situation. Despair flooded him, weakened his knees, washed away the strength of his arms.
He lay huddled on the dirt, helpless against honeysuckle woman’s relentless voice. Her football-sized mouth closed in on his face.
“It won’t hurt this time, I promise,” she breathed seductively in his ear.
“Lucifer’s hairy testicles, John, she’s a liar!” Valerie shouted.
Valerie’s voice laid a soothing barrier between the trap of despair and John’s true self. A sense of being wrapped in rosemary and cloves loosened his muscles, allowing him to think freely.
The dirt beneath him was covered in a soft, cold moss. Tiny white starlike flowers spangled the tender green. His sweat decorated the flowers with a watery shine. Despite the trampling it had received, the moss’s tendrils slowly sprang back into shape.
The joy of life was as persistent and unrelenting as the pain.
John thanked the plant. He snapped back from his reverie in time to slap his enemy’s teeth away from his face. The plant woman fell to the ground. The moss shrieked when her chaos came into contact with its orderly energy. John felt the moss’s anger at her intrusion. Decades ago, flowers had run together to form the woman that had nearly destroyed him. Today, the moss poured over that corrupt body, wrapping her in the relentless, unstoppable waterfall of life’s creativity. Mere seconds passed, and his tormentor was a squirming, huddled lump under an unbreakable layer of vegetation.
He placed his hand on the mound. “Hush now. Ride the Wheel. Be at peace.”
If there was anything that John Janté knew better than anyone else, it was that the Powers Above believed in redemption, creation, and love.
“I am not salvageable.” Her voice came thick and labored from under the moss.
“Lucifer always did know how to sell a lie,” he answered.
Lucifer, the Father of Lies. The first Fallen found the one thing a being could not disprove, the one thing a person felt to be the utter truth of their inner life, and rammed that false story so deep into their consciousness that they could not help but believe it for all time. This was what John had been made to do—tell the truth to those who could not believe in themselves anymore.
The woman heaved a sigh under her green shroud. “What do I do?”
“Think of who you truly are. Let go of any lies you have been told about yourself.”
He could see the slow disintegration of her body, the crumbling of her physical form to ash, just like every other paranormal creature. She had chosen to ride the Wheel.
John listened to his own advice. Who was he truly?
The blood of those who fought for justice ran in his veins. He carried a mission to help the broken. And he was the mate of both a full angel and a vampire. That was not too shabby at all.
Airstream fog trailing from his wing tips, Lance took to the air. The German landscape spiraled away as he took Maxwell high in the sky.
“Let me die,” the Fallen moaned in the not-yet vacuum of the high atmosphere. “This has been too much.”
“Not until I can get you out of her mind control. Anyone who can spread compassion in Hell deserves to go home.”
Gritting his teeth, Maxwell wrapped his legs around Lance’s body and punched him in the face.
It was a terrible punch, glancing off his cheekbone with a soft thock sound. Lance spun, but Maxwell reached for the sheath of the obsidian sword.
“I was doing it for myself, asshole. Let me go. I’ll kill you,” the Second Revolutionary screamed. “I’m done.”
Lance twisted, trying to keep the other from his dangerous blade. “Stop that. I am not going to let you destroy yourself.”
They wrestled in the dark, until the sheath tumbled off the sword. Maxwell grabbed for the hilt, but instead sliced his fingers on the edge of the blade. His illusions and self-deceits fell away from his body like two-ton weights.
With a scream, he clutched his hand to himself and dropped like hail toward Earth. Lance folded his wings in tight and flung himself after the other man. Only to find Maxwell hovering, thirty miles above Earth, frantically clutching at a now-white garment, flapping enormous hot pink wings with purple tip feathers.
The other angel bounced into the sky.
“What have you done?” Maxwell shrieked like a teenager meeting his favorite sex object.
“You were lost. I have found you.”
At Lance’s words, the Host descended and took Maxwell into His arms.
Valerie led Mina on a blind chase through the rows of cars. Finally, she took cover behind a wrecked blue BMW. Robotlike, Mina advanced, not even pausing as Valerie’s bullets slammed first into one shoulder, then the other.
Valerie kicked Mina with all her strength. Her thick boot heel connected with her former wife’s gun hand. Her wrist broke and hung strangely at the end of her thin arm. The gun skittered behind the blue BMW.
They traded blows. Mina’s good fist threw Valerie against a beige Lexus’ windshield. It shattered beneath her.
Valerie grunted and kicked Mina in the kidney. At the moment, the vampire was faster, but she was slowing. She was hungry, tired, pregnant, and this innocent car had been wrecked.
“Cut it out with the nonlethal hits,” the baby snarled, sounding way too much like her grandfather for Valerie’s peace of mind.
Valerie leaned her back against the Lexus. “I can’t,” she answered. “I can’t kill her again.”
“Oh, but I can kill you, dear husband.” With that, Mina rounded the back of the car and kicked Valerie in the temple. “You liar! You deceived me for centuries, you bastard.”
Valerie’s head rocked against the blow, but she refused to fall. “Yes. I did. I can only say that I loved you too much to endanger you,” she answered. She would not deflect blame to Radu. He would have to answer for his own actions, if he still lived.
“Look at what you have wrought.”
Valerie unflinchingly met Mina’s maddened gaze. In those lost eyes, she saw Ilona’s despair at knowing that her husband lied to her every day. Her fear and revulsion toward Radu who had torn her humanity from her. Her helplessness at being a pawn between the two siblings.
And the hollow knowledge that she would be forever trapped in this shell, never able to die, never able to ride the Wheel to a new oblivion.
Mina grasped the neck of Valerie’s black and gold jacket. Valerie did not resist. With the unleashed strength of the possessed, Mina flung Valerie into the air.
The madwoman watched as the vampiress’s body soared high into the sky, and landed on the ground next to the Shelby with a terrible crunch.
CHAPTER 33
“MOM!” The baby screamed in Valerie’s inner ear and kicked her in her cracked ribs. “Wake up!”
“What?” Valerie groaned.
“She’s eating them alive out there”, the baby said.
Valerie cracked open one swollen eye. The men had attacked Mina. They were fighting as though their world had fallen apart, but were still true to themselves. They were not out to kill.
Mina on the other hand, was insane, powerful, and wanted to kill everything she saw.
They didn’t know one small, insignificant thing.
Valerie wasn’t dead yet.
Her right arm was broken in five places and completely useless until she fed. Her left shoulder, though, was merely dislocated. A few more seconds and it would pop back….
“Fuck.” And there it went. W
hy was it people thought that just because a vampire would heal, it wouldn’t hurt?
She dragged her broken leg behind her, grinding the gravel into the already-shredded flesh, until she reached the Shelby’s driver’s side door.
Using her good left arm, Valerie pulled her body across the seats to reach the keys in the glove box. Leaning her battered self on the transmission hump, her swollen fingers shook with the strain of lifting the key ring.
Finally, finally, the key slid into the ignition. A painful twist, and her car rumbled to life.
“I’m sorry, girl,” she whispered to her car, her beloved Ilona’s memorial. “I never wanted us to end. Not like this.” With that last benediction, Valerie’s left hand shifted gears and floored the last reminder of her wife. Using the white Le Mans stripes as a rifle sight, she aimed her automotive weapon at the incarnation of her former wife.
Two and a half seconds later, the Shelby slammed into Mina Harker’s torso. The other woman screamed as the speeding car broke her spine and splayed her halfway across the hood. She lay perfectly centered between the two stripes, Valerie dimly noticed.
Valerie didn’t stop until she crashed into the concrete wall of the impound lot’s main building, pinning the already-cooling corpse against the crumbling cement. As the engine ground to its final stop, the baby kicked her in the liver.
A band of pain tightened her lower back, dwarfing the pain in her arm and leg. Water splashed down her legs and across the already-ruined leather seats. She sighed as her body tumbled out of the car and landed on her back on the ground. She was so tired.
“All right, kid,” Valerie whispered. “I can do this thing, but then you’re on your own. You’ll do great, trust me. We Draculs are tough.”
CHAPTER 34
Labor was the right word. This shit was hard work. Even though her arms could barely move, Valerie gripped Ilona’s door frame. Her response to the contractions shook the entire wreckage. The ends of her barely healed bones shifted and rattled under her skin. Every muscle and tendon in her body twisted in unnatural ways in the effort of birth. The metal that used to hold the window together ripped with the earsplitting screech as she shook under another contraction
“Fuck, kid!” she screamed. “My liver is not supposed to move that way.” If this kept up, Valerie would be begging for the mercy of silver poisoning. Nothing before had ever hurt like this: not the tortures of her youth, the way her brother crucified her, not when Lance’s blood had penetrated her very cells and changed her from the inside out.
“It ain’t a picnic on this end, either!” The baby kicked and punched its way toward Valerie’s cervix.
Lance zapped out of nowhere and knelt in the broken glass. His wings nudged the wrecked hull of the Shelby away from the mother and insistent child. Once his two girls were safe, he spoke.
“You can’t come out now, little one.” He rested his hand on Valerie’s belly, attempting to soothe his daughter. His other hand slid under his woman’s neck, removing the pressure on her too-slowly healing arms.
“My minion is suffering, you fool! I must save her.”
John skidded onto his knees, digging grooves in the gravel. “We do this together, bébé. You are not alone. All for one.”
“Then get moving!” Valerie shouted. Her face grew whiter and whiter with the strain.
The two men exchanged an exasperated glance. Like mother, like daughter, their gazes said. Valerie bared her fangs in response to their silent communication, but a cramp in her back took her voice.
Lance gathered light in his hand and sent a soothing, healing glow into her body. Valerie’s pain eased enough that she could suck oxygen into her lungs. The intoxicant spread a sense of calm throughout her wracked uterus.
“You need more than air.” John jammed his hand into Lance’s pants pocket and pulled out his friend’s Gerber knife. With the sharp point, he sliced a line across the veins in his elbow.
“Drink.”
John was forever saving her when she was in pain. His blood had mended her when she had been laced with silver, and now he gave even more for her well-being. Valerie opened her jaws and dug her teeth into his arm. The painful torn muscles and broken bones smoothed as John poured his love into her system.
Another contraction. She sighed into the thin skin of his elbow. This one was no worse than a single silver nail through her hand. Definitely manageable.
“Kid,” she muttered. “Really, you aren’t supposed to be born for another three months. I looked it up. Humans gestate for three trimesters.”
Her child humphed. “Mom. We’re not human. We make our own rules.”
John wiped his blood away from his already-healed arm. “You are next. Vampires don’t have endorphins. Angel blood will do it.”
As Lance took his place at Valerie’s lips, John placed his hands on Valerie’s churning belly. “Let us care for your mother, darling. You stay in there. It is not safe for you yet.”
“Kid? Come on. Let’s do things the easy way.” Lance’s voice charmed his daughter into a pause.
“We don’t ever do anything nice and easy,” the child replied.
“She’s got a point,” Lance responded. Valerie shot him a glare as she licked her nourishment from her wet chin.
“Easy would be nice for once,” Valerie snapped.
John hid his laugh with a cough. “I don’t think we have a choice in the matter, chou. She’s coming anyway.”
The three adults clasped hands, at peace for another moment. They breathed together. “Then let’s do this thing,” Valerie declared, her lips pressing hard against each other. “All right kid. Go for it.”
The next few moments were the most revolting Valerie had ever experienced. Her body swam in an ocean of blood. She groaned and heaved against her men’s strong hands, the smell of birth disgusting her more than any festering abdominal wound. The birth fluids soaked into the gravel parking lot and froze, slicking every surface.
Night fell, cold and deadly, but Lance’s wings sheltered them, warmed them, and protected them from human eyes and ears. Valerie gave thanks. At least no one would be forced to witness this.
Besides, who knew what her child would be like? Would it be a normal infant helpless and squalling, but with all its fingers and toes? Would it emerge with wings? Fangs? Fangs and wings? She gave a weird, exhausted laugh.
“She’s getting loopy,” John said. “Feed her again.”
Lance’s blood flashed through her veins, mitigating the last pain from her injuries and labor. One giant tidal wave of a contraction started at the back of her neck.
“This is it!” she cried through Lance’s muffling arm.
“Ready or not, here I come, ’rents!”
As the wave lifted, crested, and broke, the infant escaped Valerie’s birth canal and slithered into John’s waiting hands.
“She’s a girl,” John crowed, wrapping the tiny, wet being in clothing salvaged from the Shelby’s wrecked trunk. “And she has your eyes, Lance.”
“I’m not giving them back, either,” their new daughter replied indignantly.
Lance stifled a laugh against Valerie’s shoulder. “C’mere, kid. Let’s meet everyone.” He took the newborn from John’s hands and settled their small package against Valerie’s chest.
Valerie tucked the wrapping of her former favorite sweatshirt away from her baby’s face. “Hi there, angel,” she whispered, tracing her fingertips across the wisps of black hair. Arctic blue eyes squinted up against still-wet eyelids.
“I have all my fingers and all my toes, too,” the baby bragged.
“Wings and fangs?” Valerie crinkled her nose at the child.
“We’ll just have to find out.”
The baby wrapped her fist around her mother’s finger. Valerie smiled. The newest Dracul’s grip was strong, well suited to weapons training. A strong pulse throbbed in the tiny veins on her head. A powerful will shone in the direct gaze of those ridiculously small eyes.
&
nbsp; “Who are we going to name her for?” Lance asked.
John took the baby away from Valerie’s arms. The Guide and the infant nodded, each perfectly content with the deal. “I would call you Josephine after another great woman warrior.”
“I suggest we name her after a similarly improbable pregnancy.” Valerie rolled to her knees, wiping her hands on her ruined shirt. “I name her Minerva.”
John rocked back on his heels, but continued to smile at the child.
Lance extended his hands. “Hand her over.” As the child settled into the cradle of his chest and arms, he said, “I would name her after my mom, Victoria.”
“How about we get under shelter before I decide what my name will be?” Minerva/Josephine/Victoria pointed out. “Besides, I’m hungry.”
John supported Valerie as she pushed to her feet. “I’m not driving,” she announced. Her most prized possession, the exquisite car that encapsulated her in guilt over the past, was wrecked beyond all fixing. All reminders and remainders of Ilona were dead now.
She looked behind her at her Guide, her angel, and her mysterious daughter.
Fuck it. What happened to Ilona’s spirit now was absolutely none of Valerie’s business anymore.
“Take us home, sunshine,” she told Lance. “We got a kid, so make it smooth.”
Lance gently transferred the baby to Valerie’s ready arms. As he gathered the little improbable family together, Valerie touched her forehead to her child’s. “You have a good eye for tactics, kid.”
The baby’s arms flopped about in evident pride. “What can I say? It runs in the blood.”
CHAPTER 35
DRACULA’S HONEYMOON
“We are going to Monaco for our honeymoon,” John Wannounced to Valerie and a hungry Minerva one bright Saturday morning.
The vampire mother looked up from feeding the baby from one bleeding fingertip. “When did that get decided?” she asked, her tone decidedly grumpy.
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