“You know why I am here, Dragon.” Devereux stepped toward him.
“Yes, I certainly do. The entire vampire universe has been talking about your search for my insane child.”
“Why have you imprisoned two of my people? Did you ask Olivia’s permission before you drank from her?”
“Permission? Moi? What a strange question, Devereux. I require no one’s permission for anything. Ever.”
“You know I must challenge this disrespect.”
Dracul pretended to yawn, tapping his open mouth with his palm. “Yes, I suppose so. But I did not keep your coven members out of disrespect.”
“No?”
“No.” Dracul folded his arms. “There was no disrespect intended. In fact, it is out of respect that I created my elaborate scheme to convince you to come to your senses. You are my biggest interference.”
Alan stood next to me, tensed to spring. I touched his arm, reminding him to wait.
Devereux looked over his shoulder at Alan. “Go and awaken your mother.”
Alan hesitated, probably afraid of what Dracul would do if he tried to rescue Olivia.
What Dracul did was flick his fingers, causing Alan to hit the floor, unconscious.
Poor Alan. Always losing control of his legs. I knelt down to feel his pulse, just to make sure he was still alive. He was.
“You do not give orders here, Devereux. If you do not join my cause, you will never give orders again, anywhere.”
Brother Luther’s “You’ll burn! You’ll burn!” screamed at ear-shattering volume as he marched in front of Michael drew my attention. I didn’t know which was more horrible: watching Michael’s nose and ears being tortured or trying to control my fear and confusion over what was brewing between Devereux and Dracul.
“I have waited patiently for this moment.” Dracul relaxed his arms and stared into Devereux’s eyes.
“What moment, Dragon?”
Devereux hadn’t mentioned a personal problem with Dracul, but I didn’t sense any surprise coming from him, either.
Dracul gave a leering glare. “I am providing you with an opportunity to alter your stance about the future of vampire-kind. Instead of simply destroying you, I decided to give you incentive to join me. I am going to hold onto your female for a while. Just until you cooperate.” He turned his gaze to me. “You know your woman drank the elders’ blood, which included mine. I now have a strong connection to her.”
Dracul stepped around Devereux and held his hand out to me. “Shall we, Doctor Knight?”
I could feel the compulsion he’d woven into his voice and his energy, so I began practicing the mental hum with a vengeance. What was I supposed to do? Of course I wasn’t about to go with him. I didn’t know how resilient my protections were, or whether I could withstand a vampire brain of his intensity. I probably wouldn’t last five minutes before I’d be tearing off my clothes and thinking it was a good idea. And Devereux needed to kill Lucifer before he escaped again and went back on the rampage.
Devereux peeled off his coat, threw it onto an antique dresser, and reclaimed the space in front of Dracul. “She is off-limits.”
“No one is off-limits to me.”
The two vampires approached each other slowly, eyes locked, barely repressed violence radiating from both of them.
“You are standing in the way of my plan for the world,” Dracul said. “You have grown too strong for your own good.”
“You have me at a disadvantage, Dracul. Please explain. I am holding the same position I have always held. Are you saying I am keeping you from fulfilling your agenda?”
Dracul laughed, his sharp fangs extending. “That is amusing. You are pretending not to be aware of how you are obstructing my desires, when we both know you have set yourself against me on purpose. You obviously see yourself as the humans’ savior.”
“As I have often said, I am not saving humans—I am protecting vampires. You have been stirring up the more bloodthirsty among us for decades, trying to convince them they will have more authentic existences if they go back to hunting mortals freely, that it is their right to feed instinctively.”
“Do you dispute the truth of that?”
“Yes. It is no longer necessary. This is not the Dark Ages. We need to evolve with the times. We are not animals.”
“Ha! What nonsense, Devereux. Vampires will always be primitive creatures, no matter how much you resist accepting that truth.”
“But why, Dracul? You have wealth, power, immortality—why would you pine for a life where you are pursued again by the hunters?”
“Because it was exciting. Invigorating. Now life is boring. Empty. Killing the hunters before they could destroy me gave my life panache.”
“If Mina had not died—”
Dracul’s face transformed into a mask of rage. “Do not speak her name!” He leaped on Devereux, snarling and growling, his long fangs flashing.
They slammed to the floor, slashing with their sharp fingernails and biting at each other. Blood spurted against the walls and pooled around them as they rolled across the rug. Their bodies, clothed only in tatters of their previous outfits, defied gravity as they soared up to the ceiling, smashing each other’s heads through the pressed-metal tiles before crash-diving to the floor in impacts that would have pulverized mere mortals.
Hurling what sounded like obscene epithets in many languages, they attempted to wrestle their fangs into each other’s necks, arms, and legs.
I tore my eyes away from the shocking war between Devereux and Dracul and caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. Alan had awakened from Dracul’s mental knock-down punch and, sliding on his belly, was inching himself out of the room, heading for the stairway.
Watching everything from the sidelines, I felt useless and frightened. My heart pounded and my brain spun as I tried to think of anything I could do. Even with whatever extra abilities the elders’ blood had provided, I was still a puny human. I called out to Devereux a few more times, knowing he couldn’t hear me. I’d just considered following Alan down the stairs—going for help—when suddenly the ranting stopped.
I turned to look at Brother Luther. He was moving toward me, silently.
Shit!
My entire body clenched in fear, and my heart tripped. Would this ordeal never end?
He lasered his gaze on me and screamed, “Jezebel! Whore!”
Then, like the eerie stillness before an impending storm, the energy in the room thickened, and it became difficult to breathe. The flames in the fireplace surged through the grating, singeing the thick rug under Michael’s chair.
Dracul and Devereux remained lost in their preternatural trance. I’d seen this kind of vampire madness before, and I knew they were no longer aware of anything about the outer world. Once the predatory urge to fight became engaged, the logical parts of their vampire brains simply shut down.
Brother Luther began transforming into the Lucifer personality before my eyes.
As I’d witnessed before, he grew in height and width. The coat that had hung loose on his bony frame only seconds earlier now stretched tight across his chest, shoulders, and upper arms. It flapped open to reveal an even more decomposed and festering body than when he’d frightened me at my house last Halloween. The horrible red erection had become even more forbidding and disgustingly hideous, if that was possible.
Michael bounced in the chair, making grunting noises, trying to loosen the duct tape securing his body. His eyes were wide. I was pretty sure he was trying to be supportive.
I shifted my gaze back to the vampiric standoff between Devereux and Dracul. Their faces had morphed into inhuman alien versions of their former appearances. Fear, stronger even than when Devereux had scared Alan back at Olivia’s apartment, flooded the room like toxic psychic quicksand.
“Devereux!”
The floor creaked behind me, and I spun around to find Lucifer within arm’s length. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand and backed away.
<
br /> Lucifer stepped toward me, his hands outstretched. “Come to me.”
Thanks to the elders’ blood and the sound magic, I no longer had the same reaction to his hypnotic voice as the last time he’d used it on me. Then the words had felt like insects invading my ears—they’d pulled me like auditory magnets. Now his voice had no effect on me at all.
I looked around frantically to see if there was any kind of weapon I could use—something to at least slow him down. The only thing I could see was an ornate letter opener on the desk a couple of feet away. Hoping it would be better than nothing, I lunged for it and held it behind my back.
“Come to me.”
I cringed at the sight and smell of the troll standing in front of me. He breathed his noxious odor into my face, and my eyes began to seriously tear. My stomach roiled.
“No!”
The sound of my voice must have roused Devereux from his trance, because he called my name. Looking back over my shoulder, I watched Dracul pull a velvet cord hanging near his collection of sex toys and yell, “Hold him!” as at least a dozen vampires materialized from nowhere. Most of them were abnormally large and dressed in full warrior gear, including armor plates over their chests.
“My servants will keep you secure while you watch your woman die. I had them stashed in the basement awaiting my signal. It appears my offspring has claimed the pleasure of draining her. Oh, well. The outcome will be the same, regardless. Clearly you do not intend to lend your support to my popular idea.”
Devereux gave a primal scream and began thrusting and kicking, combining what looked like various martial arts techniques with street fighting to dislodge the vampires holding him. As soon as he knocked down one, another took his place, and he became more and more enraged.
“Kismet!” he yelled, fear saturating his voice.
Dracul surveyed the bloody, torn-up room, an expression of disgust on his face. “I will never get my security deposit back now.”
Lucifer stepped so close his horrendous stink overwhelmed me, and I gagged. Had there been anything in my stomach, I would have vomited, which he probably wouldn’t have noticed. I held my breath and squinted. His face, almost totally rotted away, was an unidentifiable mass of twisted bone, festering, pus-dripping sores, maggots, and other crawling things. Chunks of decomposing flesh oozed down his chin and onto his chest.
I raised the letter opener in the inches between us. “Stop or I’ll stab you!”
He used his partially intact hands to push his coat off his shoulders and then shucked it onto the floor, exposing his entire putrefying, loathsome naked body. Pressing himself against me, his hell-fire red eyes stared into mine. “She must be punished.” His sharp yellow-and-black fangs jutted out at odd angles from his mouth, which was missing a portion of the bottom lip.
His touch thrust me into a state of hysteria. I knew the foulness of the thing that was pressed against me: the nightmare-come-to-life. My brain refused to grasp the horror of the moment—it was incomprehensible that I’d die in such a ghastly manner. I screamed again for Devereux, who was fighting to free himself from his captors. I could hear him calling my name.
I pushed against Lucifer, and my hand slid uselessly along the slime coating his skin. “No! Stop! Let go!” Trying again, I managed to startle him into leaning back just enough for me to stab him in the general area of his heart with my makeshift weapon. The blade sank all the way into his body, causing several pieces of tissue and bone to crumble onto my arm.
Ignoring my words and the letter opener buried in his chest, he lifted my head and angled his mouth to my neck. With a growl, he struck, piercing my vein with his filthy teeth. Devereux’s voice faded into the background.
Lucifer held me close as he fed. I could hear the loud sucking sounds and the moans he made as he drank from me. I struggled against him with every ounce of strength in my body, which had been increased due to the elders’ blood, but even with the extra muscle, I couldn’t budge him. As I fought, an idea kept circling my mind. Something about a song. I disregarded the idea, thinking it was just a reminder to practice the hum, which obviously wouldn’t do me any good now. A woman’s voice—whose voice?—said, “No, not the hum. A lullaby.”
What? My knees gave out, and I hung limply in the monster’s grasp.
The voice began singing bits of various lullabies in my head. “Lullaby and goodnight, hush-a-bye, go to sleep, don’t you cry, through the night, lay you down and rest, gentle light …”
Then I remembered: the lullaby CD at the blood-ritual, where I had chopped off Bryce’s head. The song made Lucifer transform into his child personality. Understanding the message of the mysterious voice, I started singing, very faintly at first, because I couldn’t get any breath. I kept repeating the same melody and random words over and over, and within seconds I felt Lucifer’s mouth release from my neck. Hoping that was a good sign, I tried to sing louder. “Close your eyes, sleepy tight, may your coffin be comfy …”
He lifted his head, stared at me with eyes that had gone dark, and collapsed us both onto the floor.
I kept singing, louder and louder, making up words and coughing as I gasped for deeper breaths now that my face was no longer pressed against the hideousness of what passed for his physical body.
He let go of me completely, curled into a fetal position with his head in my lap, and made bizarre, haunting sounds as he tried to sing along.
I didn’t know how long the reprieve would last. My body shook as the realization of how close I’d come to dying slammed into my brain, along with the fact that I’d probably have to keep on singing until Devereux could get away from Dracul’s thugs.
“Call me to you,” the same woman’s voice said.
I stopped singing. “What? Call who?”
“No, do not stop singing. Call me in your mind: Nettie.”
Nettie?
Picking up the song again, I thought, Nettie, come to me. What harm could it do? She’d saved me so far.
Coalescing in front of me was … me. Or a woman who looked very much like me, dressed in a long, full-skirted gray dress covered by an apron. She knelt down and said, “My Luke is not to blame. He was sick.” She pointed toward Dracul. “It was that devil who brought this about. I will take him now.”
“What do you mean? How can you take him? Aren’t you a ghost? Can ghosts do that?” Lucifer began to stir as soon as I stopped singing. Panicking, I quickly started up again.
Nettie gave a soft smile. It was weird, looking at my face on another body. “There are many levels of ghosts. You will learn in time. We must go now. I must free his soul.”
His soul? Do vampires really have souls?
“Wait! Why do we look so much alike?”
“I am your ancestor.”
What? Oh. My. God.
She stood and extended her hand toward Lucifer, who was still croaking out very unappealing sounds, and he gasped, then fell silent. A wispy outline of a nice-looking young male—body intact—floated up from the thing lying in my lap and offered his hand to Nettie. They vanished, and immediately, Lucifer’s body began to disintegrate.
Holy fuck. How the hell had that happened? Not that I was complaining.
I scrambled out from under the rotting corpse and glanced at Michael, who was sitting stunned in his chair, his eyes impossibly wide. Looking down at myself covered in slime and gore made my stomach churn. I took some deep breaths and thought for a few seconds about all the ways I could decontaminate myself before I noticed the room was silent. The fighting had stopped. Everyone was staring at me—even the behemoths holding Devereux.
Dracul moved with supernatural speed and stood over me. “What did you do?” Almost naked and dripping blood, he squatted down and studied my face. “How did you make him let go of you, and why did he die?” He poked at the bones and ash on the floor, then brought his narrowed eyes back to me. “He was a vampire. He could not die.”
Since nobody could see Nettie but me, and they probab
ly hadn’t heard me singing to Lucifer, the entire incident must have looked inexplicable and strange—strange even for vampires.
Snake-fast, Dracul dragged me up, pressed my back against his chest, and hooked his arm around my neck. “Looks like I will have the pleasure of draining your woman after all, Devereux. You will die next, of course. In any event, I believe it is even more important that she be eliminated now because she appears to be a powerful witch, and I have never trusted witches.”
Devereux redoubled his efforts to escape, and the vampires holding him had to struggle to keep him restrained. “Do not give up, Kismet. I will find a way.”
I didn’t see how he was going to do that, but I hadn’t expected to survive Lucifer’s feeding frenzy, so I was willing to hope for another miracle.
“It was never my servant Lucifer, you know, Devereux.” Dracul tightened his grip on me, causing me to have difficulty breathing. “He was merely doing as I commanded. He wasn’t smart enough to kill all those people or arrange to work with your offspring Bryce without my help. I enhanced both Bryce’s and Lucifer’s abilities the night they trapped you in the magical circle, and I borrowed some of your own sorcery abilities to use against you.” He laughed. “You know how good I am at borrowing skills. The fools thought their own combined powers overcame you. Instead, it was my clever plan to either enlist you to my cause or get rid of you.”
He lifted my arm and bit down.
I screamed from the pain.
After a few sucks, he dropped my arm. “Just a taste of things to come, my dear. Humans really have only one purpose.”
“Release her, Dracul. We can discuss your plan. Perhaps you can persuade me yet,” Devereux said.
With a wild whoop, Dracul threw me down to the floor and easily pinned me there. I barely had the energy left to fight.
“Excellent try, Devereux. I believe that ship, as they say, has sailed.”
Blood Therapy (Kismet Knight, Ph.D., Vampire Psychologist) Page 33
