by CC MacKenzie
Eleanor ignored the jibe, ignored the threat, and cocked her head around his torso to take a peek at Charlotte.
Charlotte’s little vampyre’s threatening hiss of response made him proud.
But he knew it had about as much affect on Eleanor’s vampyre and her magic as spitting in the face of a hurricane.
Now those sinister eyes returned to him and narrowed in satisfaction.
"Time's a wasting, prince. You either come quietly or I’ll kill your pathetic excuse of a wife."
The announcement was all it took for James to launch himself at Eleanor.
He was fast.
Very fast.
And he was at the top of his strength, at the top of his game.
But James found himself face down chewing on carpet fibres as Eleanor’s spiky heeled boot pressed down hard on the base of his spine.
He was paralysed, unable to move a single muscle.
Unable to even blink.
Terror for Charlotte gripped his heart and twisted.
Charlotte didn't know what to do, how to help him.
She shifted to kneel on the bed hugging a pillow to hide her nakedness.
The vision that stood before her was an Eleanor Pattullo she found hard to believe existed. The woman who’d befriended her had been kind and understanding. And had then drawn her out and betrayed her, she reminded herself.
The Eleanor who stood before her now had vicious eyes, crimson and merciless, staring down into hers and Charlotte’s vampyre rose to take over, as did something else. Her magic seemed to expand in Eleanor’s presence. She felt it like a living, breathing entity.
What was it Ezekiel had said, something about nature needing balance in all things, including the elements?
But Charlotte was under no illusions about her fledgling magical abilities and didn’t lie to herself that she could win a fight with this warrior.
A warrior who, it appeared, would stop at nothing.
A warrior who wanted her husband.
Not a chance, sister.
But then something else materialized in the portal.
A creature so horrific in appearance that Charlotte’s mind refused to believe it was real.
The being stepped into the room. He stood over seven feet tall with a bald head that looked too big for his vast body. His skin was parchment white and pulled too tight across the sharp bones of his face.
Her heart was doing a crazy dance as it battered relentlessly against her ribs. The room spun as black eyes, pitiless, devoid of any emotion stared into hers. And she knew she was looking into the face of Death itself.
Eleanor’s triumphant smile froze the blood pounding through Charlotte’s veins.
"Take her," she instructed the creature in a silky voice.
The earth rumbled and roared as the being simply opened its too large mouth wider until it was a gaping maw and it shrieked a sound that came from the bowels of hell itself.
She heard her vampyre scream as it clung onto the essence of life. But nothing could stop the agony as her soul was torn from her body. And out of the corner of horror filled eyes, Charlotte saw James’s body float up from the carpet.
Eleanor moved to the portal and Charlotte's husband, the love of her life, drifted behind her.
“No!”
Charlotte’s mind screamed and her magic rose to save her from certain destruction.
Eleanor was through the portal now and stood back to watch James move towards her.
“No!”
This time Charlotte’s hands reached out to her husband. And everything she felt for him, a love so overwhelming it emptied itself into the blue flame that shot out of her fingertips to surround James with enough power to release him.
As Charlotte sank to her knees, utterly spent, James tackled the beast from behind and she heard Eleanor’s scream of utter fury.
But then, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, Ezekiel burst through the door clutching what appeared to be a Samurai sword.
At the same moment, three Centuri warriors smashed through the French doors to the balcony.
The Centuri were blown backward by Eleanor’s fisted bolt of magic flame.
A distraction that gave Ezekiel a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Using two hands he swung the huge sword and Charlotte’s mind snapped out like a light being turned off.
Chapter Twenty One
The whistle of Ezekiel’s blade was all James heard as the witch decapitated the soul-eater.
James himself still had a death grip on those massive thighs when the heavy head bounced once before rolling towards the portal. The sound and the sight of it turned his stomach, but it was the stench of it that threatened to tip him over the edge. His lungs burned.
The way Charlotte crumpled to the floor, like a puppet with the strings cut, had sobbing breaths catch in his throat as he crawled through filth towards her.
With his heart breaking in his chest, he held her on his knees, supporting her boneless neck.
"Speak to me, baby. Please..." he whispered brokenly.
He was beyond prayer now, he was begging God to save her and didn’t give a damn.
Shaking her lifeless body, he kept shouting for her to wake-up.
Although his focus was on his wife, a part of him was aware of the tremors rocking the building. And James realized the portal was shrinking upon itself and gradually dissipating.
Ezekiel cried out a warning and moved fast but the remains of the soul-eater were whipped into the portal followed by a frantic-eyed Eleanor’s screech of wild defiance, "You are mine, James, forever mine."
Raging nutter.
The portal snapped closed, sucking oxygen from the room in a way that made his ears pop.
All around him could be heard the groans of Centuri and an acrid smell, like spent fireworks, filled the room. But James's eyes were glued to his wife's face.
"Please, baby. Wake up!"
Charlotte’s pallor was deathly pale.
James shook her again then held his ear to her mouth to listen for any small evidence of life and he almost wept when he felt a faint whisper of breath.
Ezekiel took a shuddering inhale, perspiration beaded his brow as he held up his sword.
"We have a soul-eater's blood to analyse. At least it’s a start."
Then he jolted, stared at a point just above Charlotte’s head and dropped the sword.
"Do not move,” he ordered the Centuri who'd advanced towards them to give assistance to Charlotte and James. "Her soul is in great distress and attached to her body by the merest thread."
His face eerily pale, Ezekiel's hands rose, palms up as he chanted words in a tongue so ancient James couldn’t decipher their meaning. And magic tingled in the air, tiny pinpricks causing gooseflesh to rise. All he could do was close his eyes and pray.
If James hadn’t been so in tune with how she felt in his arms, he might have missed her lightning shudder.
Clutching his belly Ezekiel fell to his knees.
"It is done," he gasped.
And like a huge tree being felled in the forest, his body hit the floor.
Saira Pattullo and four Centuri medics of her clan raced through the bedroom door to skid to a halt as she took in the scene.
Dark eyes filled with utter dismay as they slid over the witch lying flat on his face on the floor and her mouth went hard as her eyes went tight.
"If he’s bust open his stitches I’ll..."
But then she spotted James rocking Charlotte like a baby.
In an agile flex of strong thighs she balanced on her toes and crouched beside them.
"You seem to spend all your time naked with Charlotte unconscious. What have you done to her now?"
James lifted his head and what she saw in his eyes made her fall back on the lethal heels of her boots.
"Your sister happened to her, again. Christ, Saira, Eleanor has seriously lost the fucking plot."
***
The Maker sat behin
d his stone desk and watched events on Earth unfold upon a wall of flickering screens.
There were times when human technology was better than pure magic, and this was one of those times. All that was needed was a miniscule rip in a portal for the electronic signal to beam the information he required into his screens. Honestly, the vampyres on Earth were so complacent they hadn't once scanned their environment for electronic listening devices. Of course, he knew his luck wouldn't last. It was only a matter of time before they realized they were bugged. Even now the vampyres of Gillespie, Pattullo and Hindmarch were making plans to investigate his confinement. And he'd be ready and waiting for whoever they sent. In the meantime, he must ensure the seeds of dissent and mistrust were carefully sown and tended. Eleanor was working hard to bring his dream to fruition. He sighed, the girl was becoming a handicap and a hindrance to his overall plans. She meant well, but she was overly concerned and preoccupied by her obsession with James Gillespie. Obsession wasn't necessarily a bad thing, if one harnessed the compulsion and controlled it instead of permitting fixation with a cause or with a person to rule one. And now one of his soul-eaters was almost fatally wounded. He sighed lustily. After a beheading those bastards took months to heal.
However, on the plus side, he'd seen much that had intrigued him. His flu-Ebola virus was performing well above expectation. Of course, it wouldn't in and of itself be enough to tip humanity over the edge. What he needed was a few extreme weather events coupled with perhaps insect plagues as well as disease, famine and floods. Maybe a global conflict. Still, there was no rush. He was in it for the long game.
Then something else he'd seen made his eyes narrow on a screen on the wall, the picture a still of James Gillespie holding his wife in his arms.
Who could have conceived a human woman, of all things, should defeat his instrument of death? Charlotte Gillespie had used white magic to break Eleanor's dark power. Who'd have thought it? More importantly, what did this development mean for the future?
The creature known to vampyres as The Maker sat back in his chair as his thoughts whirled with a wide variety of strategies. In the meantime, in the distance, he heard a woman weep. Her cries were filled with an impotent fury and utter despair.
Poor Eleanor.
She'd failed him again.
Perhaps the time had come to put her out of her misery?
Then again, perhaps not.
When he thought of how he could use her to bring disgrace to the vampyre house of Pattullo, his lips curved. Ah, Cristophe, so cunning, so clever, so two-faced. Payback, for everything the Italian prince had done to him, the being who ruled all universes, who decided who lived or died, was going to be a bitch. Yes, he would derive the ultimate pleasure from destroying all the vampyre princes and their progeny. They'd made him suffer the worst of all tortures, aloneness, with only his own thoughts for company for six hundred years.
But first thing’s first.
He must never take his eye from the ultimate goal, to bring his brand of magic back to Earth.
His eyes, the color of a blood sun were malevolent, deceitful and deranged.
Chapter Twenty Two
The relentless tick, tick, tick, of the wall clock in the hospital wing had James eyeballing the fucker with a distinct feeling of déjà vu.
His life, he decided, was in fucking shambles.
What had been his happy home was nothing but a pile of rock and rubble.
He was in no fit state to work, which meant he was letting his family and the business down.
The extra workload was piling the pressure onto his brothers.
And everything, everything that happened to him and to the woman he loved, was all his own damn fault.
He couldn't sleep.
He couldn't feed.
He couldn't think.
"Sitting here with you, in this place," Marcus drawled as he sat next to him, "is becoming a very bad habit."
He handed his brother a black coffee and made himself as comfortable as possible on the skinny plastic chair, permitting their knees to touch in a demonstration of sibling support.
The physical connection had a hot ball of emotion grip his throat and James heard a loud buzzing in his ears.
"She was prepared to sacrifice herself to save me," he whispered and shivered in reaction.
Marcus took a deep inhale, exhale. "She loves you."
Now James's voice went hoarse with self-loathing.
"Yeah. But I’d just taken her to the edge. To test her, to see how far I could go before her magic rose. And all the while she thought she’d lost me. You should have seen her, Marcus. She fought to suppress magic like a fucking warrior." His voice broke and he didn't give a hot damn.
Marcus heaved another heavy sigh, leaned back and rested his head on the wall.
"Alchemy is an integral part of who she is, James. Anais has a spooky side, too. As well as her vampyre she’s an empath, but neither has changed who or what she is. Not really. Charlotte is still the woman you fell in love with."
James spoke his deepest fear,
"I know it. But when we made love something changed within me, too. When I took her vein my hands glowed." He lifted hands that looked perfectly normal now and turned to look at his brother. "What the fuck is all that about? And you know if the Order get even a whiff that she's somehow spread her magic to me, they'll take both of us and there'll be nothing, nothing we can do about it."
A sick kind of terror crept from his gut into his lungs to fist there making it hard to take a breath. He refused to let anything happen to her. He'd take her away. Run. But to where?
Marcus shrugged wide shoulders, shook his head.
"Try not to worry until we have something to worry about. Since sorcery is his speciality perhaps Ezekiel has an answer. It sounds to me that when you consume her blood, you ingest her powers, too. But then what the hell do I know about it?"
In a world gone mad, for some reason, Marcus's explanation made perfect sense to James.
But now he groaned,
"I blamed her for hexing me in some way. God, I’m a fool."
"You’re scared shitless for her and you’re freaking out about your relationship. Nothing wrong with that but don’t let fear of the unknown drive you apart."
His brother was right.
But James shuddered at how close he’d come to losing her, again.
He was her husband, for God's sake. He was supposed to protect her, to take care of her.
Instead, he was continually placing her in danger.
"If Ezekiel hadn’t severed the head of that thing, I’d have lost her. You should have seen it."
James couldn't help the shudder that rocked him right down to his bones.
Marcus turned to him.
"I did see it. I saw a soul-eater when I entered Anais's mind to bring her back. And it’s a sight I’ll never forget. At least we know the creature can be killed," he said in an optimistic voice.
James supposed that was something, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get up close and personal with a soul-eater again any time soon.
His gaze rose to the clock on the wall again, that tick, tick, tick slowly driving him out of his tiny mind. He didn't want to think of what the medics were doing to his wife. Was she in pain? Was she asking for him? Would this set her back psychologically? Would she ever, ever, forgive him for what he'd done to her?
"How long are they going to be?" he asked a Marcus who didn't have the answer.
The sound of heels clipping along the corridor had both vampyres turn to look towards the door.
Saira entered with Anais.
The fact both women had been crying shot them to their feet.
James had known Saira Pattullo for over two hundred years. He'd seen her through some pretty bad times and not once had he ever seen her cry. Well, she was crying now.
Instinctively, he braced himself.
Marcus moved to hold Anais close, stroking her shiny hair as she took a convulsive b
reath.
The pressure on his chest became too tight as James stared at Saira and the way her eyes slid from his made it difficult for him to breathe.
If she couldn't meet his eye, this was so not good.
Not good at all.
"Come with me,” she said and held out her hand to him.
James hesitated.
Saira Pattullo was not a touchy-feely sort of woman.
More like a kick-your-ass ball breaker.
This was bad.
Very bad.
But he took her hand and followed her down an endless corridor.
The polished floors squeaked under the rubber soles of his shit-kickers.
When she linked her fingers with his it took everything James had, not to howl like a baby.
She paused outside a door and took a deep breath.
Her eyes still didn’t meet his.
"Ezekiel is with her," she whispered as if to prepare him for... something.
She opened the door and they stepped through.
James had no idea what to expect.
Perhaps his beloved wife had a machine breathing for her or perhaps she was in a coma?
But as soon as he saw her, his jaw dropped.
Charlotte sat up in bed looking absolutely fabulous.
And perched on the edge of the bed Ezekiel held his wife’s hand in his and smiled into her eyes as if he had a fucking right to touch her.
His vampyre growled a warning, but everyone in the room ignored it.
Charlotte's curls had definitely turned a glossy black.
Her fine skin could only be called glowing, but her eyes now shone like beacons of undiluted... joy. Until she set those eyes on him and then that light was dimmed, replaced by a caution and wariness that broke his heart.
With difficulty, Ezekiel got to his feet and gave Saira a warning glare when she pushed a wheelchair near him.
"Sit," she demanded in a voice that dared him to refuse.
Ezekiel sat.
Those dark eyes, raptor sharp, found and held his.
Bemused, James couldn’t read the expression.
"We will leave you alone for a moment," said the witch to Charlotte, his deep voice rumbling in his vast chest. He turned dark and very hard eyes on James. "If you upset her again, vampyre, I shall be seriously displeased."
