Now, I was not only physically stronger than my former self, I knew by the minutiae of sights, sounds, tastes, and smells surrounding me that I was stronger than the Damned charging us, as confident as I might be in my former life if pitted against an ant. The Damned was large and fierce, and I was frightened of it because of previous experiences, but with my newly enhanced eyes, I could plainly see that as the Damned charged me, it was tensed to raise its right claw and slash at my front, swipe my body forward with its left, and tear out my throat with its teeth.
I smiled grudgingly, realizing what Dominic had already realized: as a night blood, I’d been woefully inept to bump back against the creatures of the night; as a Day Reaper, I didn’t just have the strength and ability to bump back—I was the creature who bumped.
I stepped in front of Dominic and dodged under the Damned’s claw as it swiped at us, like I’d known it would, and I countered its attack with a swipe of my own, letting the Damned impale itself on my talons with power and speed of its own momentum. I plunged my claws deep into its neck and pulled down with a smooth slice of my arm, gutting the creature from chest to groin. A pile of its intestines and internal organs gushed from the wound, spattering me as it stumbled, its legs still running as if they were a separate entity and not privy to the fact that it was already dead.
I blocked its sluggish counter-swipe easily, and it collapsed face-first at Dominic’s feet.
Dominic glanced at the creature, gurgling in its death throes, and then raised his eyebrows at me.
I crossed my arms, annoyed. “What?” And then realized I’d smeared gore across the side of my shirt. “Oh, ugh,” I groaned.
Dominic’s grin channeled the devil himself. “I want to hear you say the words.”
I looked away from my ruined shirt to glare at him. “I want lots of things, but it doesn’t mean that I get them.”
He made a circular gesture with his hand.
I rolled my eyes. “How was I supposed to know I could compete with that?” I asked, gesturing to the behemoth on the floor at our feet. “We’re lucky that more haven’t come for us.”
The walkie-talkie crackled to life. “I’ve secured Bex, and I’m about to climb from the Underneath. Am I clear? Over.”
I opened my mouth to give Walker the go-ahead, but Dominic touched my forearm. “Do you hear that?”
I strained my senses, listening to the depths of the Underneath with more than just my ears, with my entire being, and there it was again where it hadn’t been before, a subtle shift in the air: the sound of Jillian’s relief and regret. More Damned were coming.
“What the hell?” I snapped. “How does she know this one didn’t finish the job?” I asked, pointing my thumb at the Damned behind us.
Dominic wasn’t looking at me or the Damned anymore. He was looking at the walkie-talkie. His expression hardened. “Because she heard otherwise. How does this damn thing function without cellular service?”
I shook my head, staring dumbly at the walkie-talkie in my hands. “I don’t know the particulars. It uses sound waves and air frequencies to relay what we’re saying.”
Dominic’s eyes blazed. “Are you telling me that the words we are saying are traveling through the air at a specific frequency?”
“Yeah, frequency four, to be exact,” I said, pointing to the frequency knob, “but I don’t know about our exact words. Cell phones use electrical signals. I don’t know exactly how walkie-talkies work. I didn’t invent them,” I snapped.
Dominic swore under his breath. “Do not answer Walker on this thing. And stay here; I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you—”
Dominic turned, giving me his back as he walked to the crevice of the Underneath, effectively cutting me off mid-question. He peered over the crevice and made a come-hither curl of his hand at Walker.
The walkie-talkie crackled. “Walker to DiRocco, do you copy? What’s going on up there? Over.”
The subtle shift on the air paused.
Dominic gave Walker a thumbs-up before returning to my side.
I frowned. “Is he coming up?”
“Yes, but now Jillian thinks we’re dead, or at the very least incapacitated, since we didn’t respond with the walkie-talkie.”
“Walker did.” I frowned. “Tell me this isn’t your backhanded way of getting rid of him.”
“If I thought getting rid of Walker was the best course of action, he’d already be dead,” Dominic said, incinerating me with the heat of his glare. “When have you known me to backhandedly do anything?”
I snorted. “I noticed you didn’t say that you didn’t want to get rid of him.”
Dominic raised an eyebrow. “I noticed you didn’t produce any examples of me being backhanded.”
“Then what is your intention?”
“My intention is for Jillian to think the Damned killed us, and after Walker rises from the Underneath, we will make her think the Damned killed him as well.” Dominic crossed his arms. “And then we leave, all of us, very much alive. Does that work for you?”
“Anything that involves walking away alive damn well works for me,” I answered, as if his question hadn’t been soaked in sarcasm.
Dominic shook his head and opened his mouth to retort, but before the words could leave his mouth, Walker popped his head out from the Underneath.
“A little help here?” Walker asked, his voice strained.
He was holding Bex in his arms, but I’d never seen her look like this, even at her worst. Bex typically wielded beauty like I did anger and Dominic did stoic intelligence, to hide weakness and pain, but she didn’t have her beauty to hide behind now. Her body was cringingly emaciated, her charred, blistered skin shrink-wrapped to her bones. Her hair, formerly thick, long, and luxurious, rivaled the brittle thinness of Ronnie’s straggles. Her one remaining eye, however, was still intact and glaring at us from over the silver muzzle that Walker had locked around her head.
He’d also bound her arms and legs in silver cuffs; her skin was steaming where the silver touched the skin at her ankles, wrists, and mouth, and her struggles against those bonds, coupled with the acrobatics of balancing them midair over the crevice, was proving difficult, even for Walker. In another moment, Walker would lose his balance and strength, and I could tell by the set of his jaw that he wasn’t letting both of them fall—and he wouldn’t be the one falling.
I darted forward, took Bex’s meager weight from Walker, and pulled her over the lip of the crevice.
She flinched as I laid her on the ground, but really, I couldn’t avoid hurting her when what little was left of her skin was oozing blisters. I patted her shoulder, hoping she could feel some comfort through the pain.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “We’ll remove the bindings as soon as we’re out of the coven.”
Her glare sharpened on my elongated, silver talons on her shoulder, and her struggles stilled. She met my gaze, staring deep into my reflective, otherworldly eyes, and the knowing in her one, green, human-like eye was terrifying.
I curled my talons into a fist and pulled back my hand.
“Holy shit. Is it dead?”
I jerked around at the panic in Walker’s voice, bracing for another attack, but when I followed his gaze to the object of his fear, I relaxed. He was just now noticing the Damned lying eviscerated on the tunnel floor.
“Even creatures as indestructible as the Damned find it difficult to continuing living without their internal organs.” Dominic offered this hand to help Walker over the lip of the crevice.
“Nice work,” Walker said, ignoring Dominic’s proffered hand. He finished the climb on his own.
“Thanks,” I murmured.
Walker’s head whipped up in my direction, then glanced at Dominic as if in confirmation, but Dominic wasn’t interested in explaining who had done what. He was more
concerned, as was I, on what needed to be done next.
“Question our absence into the walkie-talkie and then scream like your heart is being ripped from your chest,” Dominic instructed, pointing at Walker’s radio, “so Jillian thinks she has successfully killed you and stops sending Damned to kill us.”
Walker frowned. “Why would she think that?”
“She can hear us over the walkie-talkies,” I explained.
“Impossible,” Walker scoffed. “All the times I infiltrated this coven, and you never—”
Dominic’s expression yawned wide with realization. “That’s why your voice would sound different. I knew when you entered my coven by your scent, but I never knew why your voice always sounded so strangely mechanical. I thought maybe it was the vibrations and echo of your voice in the tunnels. All this time it was the walkie-talkie,” Dominic said, studying said device. “Interesting.”
Walker wasn’t looking at the walkie-talkie. He was staring at Dominic, gaping at first and then grinding his teeth with the hard flex of his jaw when he finally closed his mouth.
Dominic, ignoring Walker’s expression, pointed at the walkie-talkie. “You must pretend to die before we leave.”
Bex grumbled, but gagged as she was by the muzzle, I couldn’t understand her words. If her eyes were anything to go by, however, the sentiment was cutting.
Walker narrowed his eyes at all of us. “Jillian is a Master now, imbued with all the omniscient powers you once had,” he said. I’m surprised he didn’t choke on the sarcasm in his tone. “If she knows we’re here, playing pretend won’t fool her into thinking we’re dead. Again.”
“That’s not entirely true. Had Jillian adopted the full Master’s power, I wouldn’t even suggest it, but she didn’t. I retained the majority of my strength and heightened senses. I think we may very well be able to play pretend, and she might just be confident enough in what she thinks are her full powers to believe us. It’s—how would you put it, Cassidy?—it’s a long shot, but worth the risk.”
Walker didn’t say anything for a long moment. In fact, he didn’t move at all except for the rhythmic tightening and release of his jaw muscles.
Finally, without breaking eye contact, Walker squeezed the talk button. “I’m nearly to the top, over.” He waited a second. “Do you copy? Over.” Another few seconds, and he drew a handgun from his side holster. “Where the hell are—holy fu—” Walker pointed his gun down the opposite end of the tunnel and squeezed off several rounds. He released the talk button and raised an eyebrow. “Good enough?”
“You didn’t scream like your heart was being ripped out,” I commented.
“I wouldn’t scream; I would shoot,” Walker said. “My version was more realistic.”
Dominic’s smile was all fangs. “I dare say, Ian Walker, that you missed your calling.”
Bex grumbled under her muzzle, something along the lines of “always an excellent actor.”
I sensed another shift in the air—not like before, when Jillian was ordering her flock of Damned to massacre us—but not like she was content, either.
“Excellent actor or not, we need to move. Now,” I said, reaching for Bex.
Dominic brushed me aside. “I will carry her. If they come for us, you will need your hands free.”
I stepped aside, allowing Dominic to squeeze past me to reach Bex, and my gaze wandered back to the Damned I had killed. Never mind that it had been in self-defense, the thought that I was physically capable of ending the life of a massive, twelve-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound rabid creature with little more than a swipe of my wrist was mind-boggling. I lifted my hand and stared at the length of silver talons that probably wouldn’t contract back to fingernails until I’d fed. The Damned’s blood was crusted under my nail beds. If we met with any further resistance on our way out, it wouldn’t be the only one whose blood would stain my hands.
My claws, I amended. I could regret the creature I’d become. I certainly wasn’t comfortable with it; but I was the only one capable of defending us against them. I could rage at my cravings and hind-hinged legs and deadly claws, but human hands wouldn’t have saved us from the creatures trying to kill us.
“Lead the way,” Dominic said. His hands were full, carrying Bex, so he jerked his head sideways in the relative direction of the passageway. Walker had already packed away his rappelling equipment. He stared at me with the same expression I remembered from that fate-filled night in the middle of the woods in upstate New York. He’d just killed Rene and shot Dominic with his crossbow, and Jillian had fled the scene, leaving me on the ground, dying from my metaphysical bond to Dominic’s wound. Walker had watched me struggle to breathe with the same look he had on his face now—an unyielding, uncompromising, terrible expression I’d only ever seen him direct at vampires—right before he’d turned his back on me and left me for dead.
And I had a thought. It was an ugly thought, and the fact that it came from me—not from Cassidy the Day Reaper or Cassidy the Master vampire’s lover, just from Cassidy DiRocco—somehow made it even uglier: We’d needed Walker to find the hidden entry into the Underneath, but we didn’t need him to find our way out.
Bex grumbled something indecipherable under her breath. The stink coming from the silver bonds melting her flesh snapped me back to reality. I turned my back on Walker’s expression and did the only thing I could do. I led the way.
“Ever since we were children, she was determined to outshine me. I got my nose pierced while she got a scholarship to Berkeley. I became a high-school track star, and she became a Pulitzer contender. I earned my EMT certification while she took a bullet, earning the respect of NYPD’s finest. It was only just a matter of time that she transformed into a Day Reaper after I transformed into the Damned. Stealing the show is as programmed into her DNA as being a vampire.”
—Nathan DiRocco
Chapter 10
Two hours later, we had nearly completely escaped from the labyrinth of the coven’s Underneath, but dawn was only a short fifteen minutes away. Dominic said that he could feel the heat of its rise on his skin, and he wasn’t even in direct sunlight. Of the four of us, he was the only one who would burst into flames should we not make it back to his underground bunker in time, but his danger was my danger; I could feel my fear for him like the shock and shrivel of ice against my skin. I’d witnessed him burst into flames once—the inferno of his body blasting my face and frying my eyebrows and lashes, his skin peeling to charcoal, my own hesitant, frantic helplessness, and the piercing pitch of his screams—and that had been quite enough. I’d never before heard Dominic scream, and I’d planned to never hear those screams again.
“If we don’t make it out of here in the next fifteen minutes…” I began.
“We will,” Dominic assured me, his tone and conviction unflappable.
I didn’t share his confidence. “But if we don’t—”
“We have to,” Bex interrupted. Dominic had removed her muzzle after only a few minutes into our escape, reasoning that if she was incapacitated by the silver around her wrists and ankles, the muzzle was cruel and redundant. I agreed, but in such close proximity to Walker, I’d admittedly felt more assured with her muzzled. Neither had said a word to the other, either in sarcasm nor hostility. And since Dominic had taken the burden of carrying her, they hadn’t looked at or touched one another, either.
The tension between them was somehow thicker for having remained unspoken.
“But if we don’t,” I insisted, “can we reach your bunker without leaving the tunnels?”
“No,” Dominic said curtly.
“But maybe we could—”
“I deliberately chose the location of my bunker precisely for its complete separation from the coven’s tunnels to prevent Jillian from finding me during the Leveling,” Dominic explained. “If we do not escape the tunnels before the sun crests the horizo
n, I will be physically unable to leave the tunnels until sunset tonight.”
I turned back to Walker. “How far are we from the entrance?”
“Another hundred yards or so,” Walker said, sounding vaguely disappointed at the prospect of us escaping in time. “Really, the grate is just around the next bend. You’ll probably make it back to the bunker with a whole minute to spare.” And as he finished speaking, the disgust in his voice wasn’t vague at all.
“Try to contain your relief,” I said drily.
“I’m expending all my energy trying to restrain my trigger finger,” he snapped.
“Why start now?” asked Bex—the first words she’d spoken directly to Walker.
Walker grinned. “Go ahead, give me a reason to stake you.”
“As if you needed a reason to stake anyone before,” Bex said, laughing darkly.
“Removing the muzzle was a mistake,” I muttered. I could see frustration tightening Dominic’s expression as he nodded in agreement.
“You attacked Ronnie,” Walker said. “I staked Rene. We’re even.”
“You watched Nathan rip out my heart,” Bex accused. “We’re nowhere near even.”
“You invaded my home and slaughtered my friends!”
“They’re still alive, you idiot,” said Bex. “You choose to shun them. You killed Rene!”
“You let Julia-Marie die!”
“I didn’t want her to die!” Bex shrieked, struggling in Dominic’s arms.
“You did,” Walker insisted. “She was the only thing standing between you and me.”
I closed my eyes to keep Walker from seeing them roll.
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