by P. N. Elrod
The chanting resumed, but somewhat raggedly. When I was about five feet from Gage he conjured a ball of magic in his hand. I expected him to throw it at me, but instead he held it over Michael.
“Come no closer,” he warned.
With a flick of my wrist, I snuffed the dark orb as easily as a candle. Gage roared in frustration and rushed me. I sent the knife flying into his shoulder with such force that it knocked him back against the altar. I was on him with my hand around his throat before he knew what had hit him.
“Please,” he begged.
“I told you that you’d die begging for my mercy,” I said, and squeezed just a bit harder.
“Cin,” Michael whispered. “Don’t. He’s human.”
I looked at my consort. I knew that look. I had once asked him to spare a life that he wanted to take. Now he was asking the same of me. Perhaps I could break the spells that held them without Gage’s death. I relaxed my grip on Gage’s throat . . . and felt a searing pain in my chest.
I looked down. Gage had taken his moment, pulled the knife from his shoulder and driven it into my heart. It wasn’t a wooden stake so it wouldn’t kill me, but by the gods it hurt.
“Do you feel it?” Gage asked.
I released Gage and stumbled back a few steps.
“Cin, what is it?” Michael asked. “What’s wrong?”
I looked down at the knife hilt sticking out of my chest. Gage’s blood had been on the knife. It was now inside me. I could feel it, the darkness in it. I felt it latch on to my own magic and spread through me like a wildfire.
I pulled the knife from my chest, dropping it to the floor.
I turned my gaze to Gage.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he asked again.
“I really will kill you for this,” I whispered.
“No, you won’t. This is what I’ve been offering you, but you were too stubborn, too full of your precious morals to take it. How does it feel now, vampire?”
“It feels like evil spreading through my blood.”
“Exactly,” he said in triumph.
“Cin!” Michael shouted. “Fight it! Darling, please, fight it!”
“Silence,” Gage snapped, passing his hand once again over Michael’s face.
Michael tried to speak, but no sound came out. His eyes though, those beautiful blue eyes, were panic-stricken. I closed my eyes. I tried to fight it, but I could feel the darkness blossoming in my chest and radiating through my body. It was like the slow burn of a good whiskey, multiplied by a thousand.
“That’s right,” Gage said as he struggled to stand and walk to me. “Do you feel the darkness inside you now, taking you over bit by bit? It feels decadent, doesn’t it, to have all that power and not be limited by morals or conscience?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and opened my eyes. “But unfortunately for you my conscience and morals were the only things stopping me from doing this—” I said, and drove my fist into his chest.
I felt skin tear and bones break, not all of them his, but I didn’t stop until I ripped the still-beating heart from his chest. I looked down at it and then I threw my head back and laughed.
As Gage’s lifeless body sank to the ground, I turned toward the coven. They’d abruptly stopped chanting, staring at the thing in my hand. I smiled at them and they bolted.
I willed the one door to close and lock. At first they pounded and pulled, and then they tried magic to open it. Finally, they turned back to me. I stood ready for them, soaked in Gage’s blood with his heart still in my hand. The smell of their fear filled the room, mingling with the sweet scent of blood and the pungent odor of sulfur. Under the fear, though, was anger and hatred. They couldn’t flee, so they would fight.
The steel-haired woman stepped forward and drew a stake from somewhere inside her robe. “She killed the master,” she screamed. “She must die! Kill her! Kill her!”
The others followed her lead, and they swarmed across the floor as if someone had kicked over a nest of ants. I dropped Gage’s heart to the ground.
Let them come, I thought, I’m so very hungry.
THEY FELL ON me in a blur of black-robed bodies, and I welcomed them. A black cloud enveloped me, pushing down everything I was until it alone was in control of my body. Gage’s magic rode me—and it wanted blood. It wanted me to feel just how powerful I could be. My ears rang with the coven’s screams of anger, and of pain.
Dimly, as though from some great distance, I heard Devlin’s booming voice. “Stop her! Stop her or she’ll kill them all!”
Arms like steel bands grabbed me from behind, but I would not be stopped. The magic gave me the strength to tear myself free of his grasp and I hit him with a blast so powerful that it threw him across the room. The darkness inside me reveled in the fact that I could toss a man who was nearly six and a half feet of solid muscle as though he were nothing more than a rag doll. It didn’t recognize that this was Devlin, my friend, and as the black magic consumed me I couldn’t bring myself to care. No matter how many of them fell by the wayside, Gage’s coven seemed to keep coming at me and nothing, not Justine’s pleading screams or the hands that tried to hold me back, would stop me. Gage’s power had to be satisfied and the only way to accomplish that was with blood and death. Suddenly there was a face in my line of vision, blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, sensual mouth.
Michael, some part of me screamed softly in the darkness, please make it stop.
I held my hand out. As he took a tentative step toward me, a dark-robed figure rose up from the floor behind him. It was the steel-haired woman. With grim determination she raised her stake high and Michael’s eyes widened in fear as I sprang toward him. I shoved him out of the way before her weapon could hit its mark. She staggered forward and the last thing she saw in this life was the fury in my eyes as I snapped her neck.
It was over.
With that final death, Gage’s magic settled inside me like a nest of vipers coiled in my belly—well-fed, smug, and content. For now. I looked around. Devlin was standing a few feet away with Justine in his arms, a cloak wrapped around her that had been taken off of one of Gage’s followers. Some part of me didn’t understand why my friends were looking at me with something akin to horror and pity on their faces. I blinked and looked around me again.
It was carnage.
The floor was littered with bodies, twelve of them, to be exact. Throats had been ripped out, necks twisted at odd angles. I took a step back, and my foot hit something. Turning, I looked down into Gage’s slack face and blank, staring eyes. It was then I noticed that I was covered in blood. The once-white shirt was soaked with it. I raised my hands, and they too were caked with blood.
“Michael,” I said softly, my hands shaking. “What have I done?”
“Mo ghraidh,” he said and reached for me.
I stumbled backward. “Don’t touch me! Oh gods, Michael, don’t touch me! How can I have done this? For the love of the Goddess, why didn’t you stop me?”
“We tried,” he said. “Nothing short of killing you would stop you from slaughtering them all.”
Michael stepped toward me again, but I kept backing up, afraid that if he touched me, the evil would taint him somehow. Panic welled within me, and I started crying uncontrollably. I had killed them, all of them. And it had felt good.
A hand touched my shoulder, and I spun around. Morrigan stood before me again. I looked at her with the horror of what I’d done gripping me.
“Morrigan,” I said and raised my hands to her, palms up, as if to say Look what I’ve done.
“I know, child,” she said. “I shouldn’t have left you to find your way alone. This is my fault, and I’ll make it right.”
“What have you done to her?” Michael demanded.
I almost smiled. Only my Michael would speak to a goddess in that tone.
“I have forced her to embrace her destiny,” Morrigan replied.
“This is her destiny?” Michael snapped, gesturing to the bodies
scattered across the floor.
“Of course not,” Morrigan chided. “Her power is her destiny. This was simply . . . unfortunate.”
“Oh, is that all?” I asked in a small voice.
“It was the dark power riding you,” she said.
“And it will do so again,” I said. “It’s still there, inside me. I can feel it.”
“Is there nothing you can do?” Michael pleaded with Morrigan.
She nodded and turned to me. “I will make you as you were meant to be.”
She reached out and put her hand over my heart. At first I felt nothing, and then what I did feel took me screaming to my knees. It was the dark magic. I had ripped it from Gage when I had taken his heart. It was like a living, evil thing that had taken over my body.
And it wanted me. It did not want to leave, but it was no match for a goddess.
Morrigan’s power flowed through me, cleansing me, pushing all the blackness from my body. If light could be black, then that’s what came out of me, a flood of bright, shining black light. And it felt as though it was trying to rip me apart as it went.
When it was over Michael was there, his arms around me, helping me to my feet.
“There’s my whiskey-eyed girl again,” he muttered, and pushed my hair back from my face.
The rustle of feathers made me turn in his arms. Morrigan reached out and took his wrist in her hand, the hand that was still covered in blood from the wound in my chest. I heard Michael suck in his breath, and I glanced down at my own skin. The wound from Gage’s knife was gone, healed in whatever Morrigan had done to purge the black magic from my body. She pulled her hand from Michael’s wrist, and the gash Gage had made there was gone as well. Morrigan held her hand out to me, her fist closed. It took a moment to understand what she wanted. I held my hand out and she dropped a large uncut ruby into it.
“Made from your blood, and his,” she explained.
“Thank you,” I said, and closed my fist around the stone, holding it up to my heart.
“Goddess,” Devlin spoke up from behind us, “what do we do? She’s killed twelve humans.”
Morrigan turned to him. “They were evil and they would have killed you. Their altar is stained with the blood of innocents and there would be more where that came from, had they lived. Do their lives truly mean so much to you?”
Devlin’s face hardened. “It is not for us to decide the fate of humans.”
“No,” Morrigan said. “It is not.”
In that moment, I realized that she had known. When she’d shown me what my magic could do, that I could stand against Edmund Gage and win, she had known what would happen.
“Why?” I asked.
Michael and my friends cast confused looks in my direction, but Morrigan understood my question.
“Because what happened here was necessary to help you become what you were created to be,” she replied.
“Gage infecting me with his power, all these deaths, that was necessary to teach me how to control my magic?” I asked incredulously.
“You may not understand it now,” she replied, “but one day you will.”
“I pray that whatever you hoped to gain from this was worth their deaths and the nightmares that will haunt me,” I said softly.
“If the lives of a dozen evil humans will make you into the warrior who will save millions of innocents then, yes, it is well worth it.”
It seemed an easy thing for her to say. She didn’t have to live with the nightmares of what I’d done here tonight. Then again, I thought as I regarded her cloaked in her own darkness, a war goddess must carry the burden of far worse things.
“There will be rumors,” Devlin interjected. “If the High King were to find out—”
“If he takes issue with anything that’s happened here,” she said, “I will deal with him.”
Devlin just nodded, and pulled Justine closer to him.
Morrigan turned back to me. “Dawn is approaching, and you must go. Rest today, but if I were you I’d put Venice behind me come sunset. Sara likely will not be too pleased to find her father dead, evil bastard though he was.”
I nodded.
“Go with my blessing, my children,” she said, and then she was just . . . gone.
I sighed and laid my head on Michael’s shoulder, suddenly weary to the very marrow of my bones. All I wanted was a bath and the comfort of my lover’s arms around me.
“Let’s get you home, love,” he said, and kissed my forehead.
“Home,” I sighed. “Can we go back to England?”
“Of course,” Michael replied softly.
“Sounds bloody marvelous to me,” Devlin grumbled. “I’ve grown weary of this city.”
Justine arranged her borrowed cloak more securely around her. “Oui,” she said, “I liked Venice much better when the most interesting thing about it was keeping up with what Lord Byron was doing.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” I murmured as Michael swept me into his arms and carried me to the door.
Jenna Maclaine is the author of the Cin Craven series. When she isn’t writing, she spends her time caring for the eighty-plus animals that share her family farm in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
You can find out more about her at www.jennamaclaine.com.
