The Prince of Cups (Villainess Book 2)

by Melos,Alana

  I stepped back in and closed the door behind me. A technician ran up to me, screaming about how the corporal had gone insane. He didn’t see my sword in his panic, and I jammed it into his gut, then twisted and tore it out.

  “Why?” he asked, grabbing at my trench coat.

  “You’re in the way,” I told him, annoyance surging at being asked that question for the hundredth time. Strength left his hand and he fell. I stepped over the dying man to survey the situation. Gerard had opted for his blades, wicked looking things which curved and fit in his hands as if he’d been born with them. A couple of the techs were cowering under whatever cover they could find, but most of the people in the room were already dead. Regulus grabbed the last one standing from behind, a screaming woman. He tipped her head back and slit her throat in an easy gesture, his thin handsome face grim, but I sensed the enjoyment in his thoughts.

  A little chaos, he sent to me, grinning wickedly as he let the body drop. Maybe you’re right. Just a little bit to get the blood pumping.

  The thoughts of a gun alerted both of us, and as one we turned. One of the cowering techs had pulled one from somewhere, and he fired at Regulus. The movement was too fast for him to dodge out of the way, and the guy stood too far away to cross the distance in a few steps. I raised a telekinetic shield over my partner. The bullets bounced harmlessly off the shield in front of him. Realizing he wasn’t being shot, Regulus gave him a wide, dark grin, and crossed the room under my protection. His twin blades flashed out, dual silver strikes, and his opponent fell.

  Two more were left, and I opened my mouth to say something about it, but Regulus turned and looked at them. “Kill him,” he said. The one on the left turned and attacked his fellow savagely. I looked at his threads, and horror dominated his thoughts...but I could see Regulus’ control clearly, a black ribbon tying the man’s mind, holding it hostage. His companion had no chance, none at all. The mind controlled scientist attacked viciously, jumping on top of his friend, grabbing his head, and beating it into a bloody pulp on the floor.

  I looked on with horror, for the first time in my life real horror, at Regulus. He enjoyed killing and wet work, but that was what he lived for: complete and utter domination of another person, to erase their mind and leave nothing but his poisoned thoughts behind. That was what he wanted to do to me. I shook my head mutely, the words to stop him locked in my throat. Being afraid for your life was one thing. That was natural. I’d felt it before, and would feel it again. Being afraid of a person was a different beast. In that moment, I feared Regulus, knowing it was only chance I wasn’t one of his puppets, with no free will of my own. And… being afraid for a person, as I was for this sobbing mess in front of me, different yet. I’d felt hints of sympathy here and there throughout my life, a slight sadness for a broken toy, or a recognition of someone feeling something I had once upon a time. This was not those pale wisps of empathy. I understood that bundle of threads I saw was a person, not an object or a thing, and that he was being used in the most vile way possible. Nothing in my experiences had prepared me for this volley of emotion. Trapped in horrific confusion, I froze.

  Once his friend was dead, the scientist on the floor openly wept as he crawled to Regulus, leaving bloody handprints on the floor as he cowered by his master’s feet. His mind was broken, but he retained enough sanity to know exactly what had happened to him. That was by Regulus’ design. The technician’s screams echoed in me. I’d known that touch before. Flashes ran through my mind, tendrils of memories which I grabbed after. They dissipated in my hands, leaving me only with a sick feeling, knowing the touch of madness, the yoke of control brushing against me second hand. The stasis which trapped me shattered.

  Tears lay unshed in my eyes, but I had no time for that. I crossed the floor and stabbed the broken man in the back of his neck. You are free, I told him.

  Thank you, he thought then died.

  “What’d you do that for?” Regulus asked, turning to face me. It couldn’t have been more perfect timing as my fist was already aiming for his face. It hit home, and I augmented it with as much power as I could. There was a satisfying crunch, and I actually saw one of his teeth fly through the air in slow motion like a movie.

  Regulus stumbled backwards under the force of my blow, and I held my sword between us, daring him to move at me. When he tried to look at my thoughts, I shut him out and he retreated. “No,” I snarled, my heart in my throat. “You have met me before. When I was a child. I recognized that.”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly, eyeing me warily now. “What do you remember?”

  “Darkness, fire, a skull,” I said softly. The sounds of battle raged below, but this was more important. I struggled against myself, trying to come to terms with this maelstrom in my head. “A mind, someone else, someone not me… it held me, it wouldn’t let me go.”

  He held up his knives and wiped them slowly, then put them away. I kept watching him, my hands shaking. I burned to stab him. I knew what a vile creature he was. I’d felt that mind control before, and it was against everything I stood for, if I stood for anything. Freedom, pure and true, wild and chaotic… that was for me. I would never be anyone’s slave. Knowing and truly understanding what he did, I didn’t want to let him live.

  “Whatever it was,” he said very slowly, his hands up, palms towards me, “it wasn’t me, Reece. I will swear on anything you want I never met you as a child. What you felt… it wasn’t me. I can’t do that to you, remember? I tried. I can’t. You remember that, right?”

  I blinked a few times, trying to clear my eyes. He was right. He had tried. And failed. It had to have been someone else, but seeing it like that, knowing what it was, understanding it down to the core of my being… it had jolted me. Made me small and scared. I was never scared. I only felt other people’s fear, never my own, but that had belonged to me, originated in me. My thoughts turned to my encounter with Nazferatu on the roof… my mother. It… it could have been that I was remembering. Too many feelings were becoming unburied, boiling up from the pit of my mind, making me cast doubt on everything. My breath heaving and my thoughts confused, I lowered my sword, hands still shaking as I did. It wasn’t him; that much I at least knew to be true.

  It might have been the only thing I knew was true.

  “Don’t do that around me again,” I said, my voice trembling with repressed rage and outright loathing. “If you do, I’ll kill you. I don’t care what you do when I’m not around… just not around me.”

  “Anything you want,” he said slowly, sliding his foot forward, testing the waters. “I promise.” He took another step, and another, then he was in front of me. When I looked down at him, his eyes looked concerned and soft, but searching. “I promise,” he said more firmly. “But we have a job. You going to be up for it?”

  “I am,” I said, rubbing at my eyes with the heel of my hand. It came away wet, and I looked at the tears which I had wiped away. I cleaned my hand off on my trousers and slid my sword away. I put the confusing emotions away in a corner of my mind at the same time as best I could. This was not the time to attempt to sort these foreign threads out. “Let’s move. We don’t have much time.”

  Once we got moving, the procedure actually didn’t take that much time. It was just complicated, and when people had to wait for other people, it took five times longer than it needed. With the two of us working in harmony, we cut down the time it took, but the portal still had to gather energy to warm up. When my tasks were finished, I moved to the door.

  “You stay here, flip the final switch when the time’s right,” I said. “I’m going down.”

  “Of course you are,” he muttered to himself, but smiled cheerily. “Good luck!”

  I unsheathed my sword and flew down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, chaos was around me. Muzzle flashes blinked on and off, and the floor was already slick from the blood spilled. As we’d predicted, the vehicles were locked in place, useless. It came down to using them as cover, and I put
up a telekinetic shield to protect myself from stray bullets as I floated on into the fray.

  It was easy to tell who was on my side. They were either pale as death or furry killing machines. Yet it wasn’t one sided either. I saw many fallen wolves, cut down by the hail of bullets coming their way as they surged towards the enemy. They were tough, but vulnerable to everything a person was… silver didn’t even come into the equation, which was a sad thing. If they had just that one vulnerability, then this would have been over and done. Who carries silver bullets? No one sane.

  I moved forward, and the soldiers ignored me, thinking I was on their side. As I slid forward I cut down any in my way went to the thick of the fray. I could sense Regulus watching the battle from above, and he gave me a bird’s eye view of it, so I could plan my path accordingly. Some people would have spun from the double senses, but I drew from my shield in my mind to partition my head, keeping part of my attention on his point of view to augment mine. Power rushed through me, but it would ebb the longer I fought. I cautioned myself for economy of movement, keeping things simple and not extending myself unless I had to.

  The thick of it… was chaos, beautiful and delightful. A wild dance, a bacchanal of blood and violence. The wolves were like the maenads, tearing their opponents apart in frenzied lust. In the middle of it all, a dark streak moved, and I stood there, watching the Nacht Sirene. She appeared behind a soldier, her hands whirling death. She didn’t just punch them, she punched through them, focusing her strikes with a loud exclamation. A soldier’s throat exploded, and she vanished into the darkness, only to reappear in front of his companion, her face grim and dark, her goggles streaked with blood. He swung at her. She planted her feet and leaned backwards neatly, avoiding the butt of his rifle. When he brought it up to fire, her hand came down on his wrist with a crunch of bone. As he screamed, she shouted and her hand darted out, striking him on the side of his jaw, going through the flesh. It shattered, sending a spray of blood and bone outwards in an arc. As he grabbed for his mouth, she disappeared.

  She was the perfect assassin: someone who couldn’t be mind controlled, ethereal death in a cloud of smoke and darkness, and one of the heaviest strikers I’d ever seen. It wasn’t just the shadowstep which they’d given to her from the experiment, but also the strength of a vampire… without the need to feed on people. The Siren danced from target to target, a black will-o’-the-wisp, leaving destruction in her wake.

  The Night Siren wasn’t the only streak of darkness in the battlefield. All around me, the vampires tore their victims to bloody shreds. Some of them moved with stealth, confounding their enemies, but the majority of them stood, bullets shredding their clothing and flesh as blood fell from a hundred wounds. They’d fed so much so their healing was on overdrive. They didn’t use guns, but their talons or knives, ripping open their victims so they could drink and replenish their stores. I would have been horrified had it not been so beautiful. A dozen killing machines intent on destruction whirled through the field of battle.

  Bullets bounced off my shield as I searched for Nazferatu. A black wolf turned and moved to my side. “You shouldn’t be here,” he growled. It was Rory. “You’ll get hurt.”

  I didn’t bother to level a gaze at him; we had no time. The invasion force was regrouping for a push, and I realized we had more than enough killing hands. We needed protection. “Stay with me,” I told him, then pointed with my sword. “We’re going up there.”

  He looked at where I was pointing, and grinned his wolfish grin. “Crazy,” he said.

  “I can help in a better way,” I replied.

  The vamps had finished clearing the path to the portal, and held it as it was the most important part of the plan. Without an exit, we would all eventually be killed. Switch it on, I told Regulus as Rory and I moved away from the portal, towards the heaviest part of the fight. Rory stayed by my side, bashing soldiers as I blocked the gunfire meant for the huge beast and myself. Regulus pulled away from the window as he finished the opening sequence, and returned as quickly as he could, lending me his sight once more to plan our path better.

  When we hit the front lines, bodies of wolves had piled up, actually giving cover between the jammed vehicles. Rory exclaimed, uttering a soft whine at the sight of his brethren, then a loud growl. He snapped his jaws shut, grimacing in hate. In the thick of it I found Nazferatu, his uniform no longer neat and tidy, but ripped and gouged. Part of his head on the side was missing, and blood drained from a thousand bullet holes, yet he never stopped fighting. He strode with purpose to the closest soldier as they riddled him with bullets, ripping apart his flesh as he grabbed one of them. With cold calculation, he held up the soldier as a shield as he fed from him, ripping his throat out and letting the blood wash over him, into his mouth and onto his body. I couldn’t see well from this vantage, but I knew the wounds were healing, and when the soldier stopped bleeding, he cast the body aside, knocking over a couple of soldiers as he reached for the next one. He was a slow but steady killer, but someone somewhere would remember what he was… and the sun was on the verge of coming up. The pre-dawn light grew by inches, and ticked time away for the seemingly impossible to stop vampires.

  “Up,” I told Rory, and I floated up so I could see the carnage more clearly. I didn’t go very far, just enough so that I made myself a target. Rory leapt onto a tank, and I shielded us both. Now that I could see the lines of the soldiers clearly from both myself and Regulus, I focused on them, trying to take in as much as I could with a glance. It wasn’t enough for what I wanted, but it would be enough to give the wolves a wedge.

  I drew deep on my mental resources and formed a massive shield with my telekinesis. Bullets which had been shredding our people stopped and dropped as they hit the invisible barrier. Seeing the lead pile up and drop from the air, the wolves moved forward as one, and I pushed the barrier back, forcing soldiers to their feet by accident as my mental shield swept over them. I grinned in victory, then grimaced as the first of my hunger pains wracked my body. Shielding one or two people from damage was much easier as I could more accurately judge where I needed it to be and was smaller, so required much less of me. Creating a shield on this massive scale drained me faster than I believed. My feet hit the top of the tank I was hovering over, and I stood next to Rory, wavering back and forth on my feet. It was too much. There was too many.

  “I can’t,” I gasped, and I dropped to my knees. I heard the sounds of combat resume, the ripping and shredding, and I had to let the shield go entirely after maybe five seconds, if I was being generous with myself. My face burned with humiliation as I admitted, “I can’t, it’s too big. There’s too many.”

  Rory stood over me as I regained myself. He urged me down beside the tank again, and I slid down after him using the vehicle as cover. I cursed my frailty and I cursed my mother again for cutting me off from the bulk of my power. Weak as a newborn kitten, I began to retreat, anger and shame taking turns as I reprimanded myself for my inadequacy. I had to keep reminding myself that it was her fault, not mine, but it didn’t soothe me one bit. If anything, the reminder made my rage intensify.

  The wolf watched my back. When a soldier turned around the edge of the tank, his rifle leveled at us, the werewolf surged forward, knocking me over in the process. The enemy got off a burst of shots and I saw them hit Rory, but it didn’t stop him. He ripped the machine gun out of the enemy’s hand with one swipe. The second took his arm off. White bone showed where the appendage once was, and blood spurted out wildly, drenching the wolf. The last swipe decapitated the enemy as Rory mauled him.

  “Mauled,” I laughed weakly and the wolf turned to me, blood seeping from the wounds. He reeled, being only human after all under all that fur and muscle. I wasn’t going to let him die, not when he’d saved me. Summoning up the last of my strength, I sealed his wounds shut, so he wouldn’t bleed out at least, and moved forward putting my arm under his. “Rest on me,” I said.

  “Heh,” he laughed. “Li
ttle girl, helping me.”

  “The mighty Mauler,” I said, grunting as he leaned on me. “Everyone needs help, sometime.” I blinked and repeated that in my head. Life lessons were learned at the oddest times, and I had to say, this was the oddest time of all… yet it was true. Even me... I needed help from time to time. Regulus, a name which terrified people in my world, had needed my help to erase his records. Rory, Nazferatu… everyone did, and it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. It didn’t matter how powerful you were. You had to have back up if you didn’t have the skills needed for the situation at hand… or if a dirty white hat got the drop on you.

  I looked behind us, and then a flash of light from before us filled the room. The portal was activated. Something in Regulus’ vision caught my eye. He noticed it the same time I did, and I mentally shouted an open warning, Rocket launcher!

  Everyone scattered. The guy aimed--he was going to destroy the portal! I couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t want to be trapped here, for who knew how long? He fired, and the missile streaked towards the portal, looking to be aimed at the base of it. I rallied, dropping the seals on Rory’s wounds, my connection with Regulus, everything… I focused on the missile with all that I had, and time slowed down to a crawl. It would be hard to hold it, and then try to hold the explosion if I failed to grab it gently enough. Instead I focused on a slide, a tube to redirect it. It sloped up gently, and curved around. The missile followed the path, going in a wide arc as it twisted gracefully in the air leaving a trail of fire and smoke behind. Sweat broke out on my brow as I maintained the tube. My body shook as the missile curved overhead, turning ever so slowly in the air. It wasn’t good enough to be pointed away from the portal; I wanted it to hit the enemy.