by Misty Evans
This round, there was no sense of pain, no jolt of electrical shock. In fact, I felt nothing at all. The entire thing was absorbed by the Hello Kitty pendant lying at the base of my neck.
I fell through the sky in a repeat performance of parachuting sans parachute. I hit the sanctuary floor flat on my back, arms and legs splayed as if I’d been crucified along with my friends. But again, there was no pain. Just the opposite, actually. As I stared up at the white light above me, I felt at peace. My demon was at peace.
Shouts and voices echoed around me, but they seemed distant and inconsequential. Maria’s invasion of magic had probably damaged my hearing. The portal’s magic enveloped me, soothing my body, mind and spirit. I felt the brush of wings on my face, the tug of something in my chest wanting to let go and float into the light. There were no regrets, no guilt, no struggle. Only tranquility.
A few seconds of that shit and I’d had enough. I told whatever it was inside my chest trying to break free to buckle itself back in. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Kali?” A strong, deep voice that had rocked my world since the first time I’d heard it, brought me back to the church and reality.
Blinking away the heavenly blinders, I stared up at Rad’s face. His head was backlit with the iridescent light of the portal. An angel, I thought.
I laughed, an edge of hysteria making it sound harsh even to my damaged ears. My throat was raw, the sound emerging from its depths, guttural.
And very, very angry.
The sconces that had tremored earlier at the energy pouring off my body, exploded, sending glass shards flying. I pushed my aching body into a sitting position and looked the Chaos demon in the eyes. Maria’s spell had been broken and the wounds on his chest were already healing.
He grinned at me. “Nice job, babe.”
Babe? I raised my hand and smacked him square across his angelic double-crossing face.
Chapter Fifty
Rad went flying from my simple slap, hit the edge of a bench with his back and ricocheted to the floor.
Raising a hand to his wounded cheek, he blinked. “Hey! What was that for?”
I hadn’t meant to hit him that hard, but the anger cruising my system lessened, so maybe it was a good thing. Working my way to a standing position, I tugged on my ringing ears and blinked my eyes to clear away the haze hanging in my peripheral vision.
Cole, Kirill and Yasmin had now joined our party, Kirill tending to the witch who lay unmoving on the ground, and Yasmin hanging on Damon as if he’d been hurt. Which he hadn’t. Bri had released everyone from the crosses, and she and Di were tending to JR who had passed out. Poor kid.
Maddy stepped in front of me, facing Rad. Her long hair was tangled and matted with blood. “Don’t even pretend you don’t know, pretty boy.”
I laid a hand on her shoulder as Rad rose from the floor. His gaze searched mine. “I tried to kill Maria myself, but she was too strong.”
He thought I was pissed because he hadn’t played the shining knight? Truth be told, it would have been nice if he’d at least kept Maria from hurting my friends, but I’d handled it with Damon and Salmad’s help. Neve and Di had jumped in too. Friends who were always there for me, even if I was doing my damnedest to imitate an island.
Maddy set a hand on her hip. “Cut the crap, you back-stabbing two-timing son-of-a…”
“Not here,” I murmured. “Not in front of everyone.”
Rad looked even more confused and Maddy, big surprise, wasn’t listening. She started in again, and Rad said, “What are you talking about?”
“Parker Burkett.” Maddy jeered. “Ring any bells?”
Rad’s face blanched. His hand fell to his side. “Kali, it’s not what the papers and ezines are saying. I never asked her to marry me.”
“I don’t want to discuss this now.”
He started to take another step toward me, but Di joined Maddy in running interference. “Maybe you should go.”
“Yes,” Dru stepped to Maddy’s side, Bri to Di’s. “Kali said she doesn’t want to discuss it right now.”
Rad stepped up and punched Dru squarely in the nose. “Don’t you act like you have a right to her, bloodsucker.”
Dru fell backwards, blood gushing from yet another spot on his body. There were gasps, but I only shook my head. Two guys fighting over me…when had that ever happened?
“Alright, alright.” Cole lodged himself between the Master vamp and the Chaos demon before Dru could retaliate. “Take it outside.”
Cole turned to me. “Can we get out of here? This place gives me the creeps.”
That made two of us. I trudged for the wooden doors, passing Salmad who was staring at the side of my neck. He pointed to his own, sending me some kind of silent message. Damon saw the action and grabbed hold of my hand, spinning me around. “Your neck. Is that a bruise?”
Most of the candles had blown out when their sconces exploded. Damon drew me toward one that was still lit. I tried to remove his grasp and avoid the light, knowing he’d pull the scarf from my neck and see the matching holes Dru’s fangs had left behind. His grip on my arm was too strong and I was weak. Tripping over my own feet, I nearly fell into the soft glow of candlelight coming from the stone wall and pooling on the floor. I could only hope the bite marks had healed quicker than the rest of my body.
Neve, Maddy, Di, and everyone except Kirill and the witch fell into a loose conga line behind Damon as he removed the scarf and stared dumbfounded at my neck.
“What is it?” Neve asked, her brown eyes so dark, they looked black.
“Cool.” Maddy stared with teenage wonder. “You didn’t tell me you got a tattoo.”
My fingers instinctively went to my neck, palpating the spot they were staring at. I remembered the feel of Dru’s fangs sinking into my carotid artery. The brief pain followed by the driving pleasure. I raised my gaze to meet his and felt something fall into place. A key locking into place. “I didn’t get a tattoo.”
He shook his head, his focus on my neck like everyone else’s. Even Rad, standing a few feet away, stared openly, a deep crease pinched into his forehead.
“Let’s get you back to the Institute,” Damon said, keeping me at arm’s length as he hustled me toward the door. “You’ve been through a difficult trauma. You need a complete health evaluation.”
“What about the witch?” I asked Kirill. “Will she live?”
His head was bowed and I saw him reach for the witch’s eyes that stared vacantly at the ceiling. He slid his large hand over her face, shutting those eyes forever. “She did not survive.”
Guilt bloomed in my diaphragm, hollowing me out. I shouldn’t have jerked the poker back out. Shouldn’t have stuck it in her in the first place. She’d been strong—Maria would never have been attracted to anyone weak—but she’d still been human.
I didn’t argue as Damon led me out of the sanctuary and took me back to the Institute.
Chapter Fifty-one
Being an archdemon’s guinea pig has its advantages. Kirill put me through every medical test known to man and a few they don’t know about. For every test he ran, I demanded information in return for my cooperation. Information with a side of bacon. Kirill complied without making a fuss, probably because he liked bacon as much as I did. We shared large plates of the stuff while gossiping about Institute employees and discussing my Frankenstein status.
There had actually been a vampire-demon hybrid or two according to his record books. None of them had been made from a direct descendant of Vlad the Impaler and a demon such as myself, so his best guess about the scrolling silver tendrils decorating the side of my neck and trailing over my shoulder was that they were, in fact, a type of bruise from Dru tapping directly into my carotid artery. How long they would last, he didn’t know, but after they hadn’t faded in over a week, I had the feeling they never would.
Along with Kirill’s in-depth exam, he spilled facts about Damon and Yasmin I had only guessed. Yasmin was doing h
er best to gain girlfriend status with Damon and lock onto Damon’s power, but Damon wasn’t interested. He doubted her motives, and from the energy that sloughed off Kirill when we discussed them, Damon and Kirill were both considering ways to send her back to London and the Bridge Institute there.
The few times Damon entered my room in the medical ward, I was hit by a wall of extreme stress and another wall of repressed sexual frustration. Both problems involved me.
I didn’t tap into his thoughts—doing so seemed rude and I honestly didn’t have the desire to go digging around inside his head. My own head was such a mess, I wasn’t sleeping, and when I did sleep, I’d wake up somewhere else. Sleepwalking, Kirill assured me, was normal after what I’d been through.
Maria’s voice was constantly in my head. I played back the memories of her appearance and disappearance over and over. It bothered me that I had let go of her when I was in the portal, but I hadn’t actually seen her go anywhere. One minute, she was there. The next, she’d disappeared into the light.
Hearing her voice combined with the sleepwalking unnerved me. One day, I woke up in the training center, a butterfly katana in my hands and one of the boxing dummies cut to shreds at my feet. I swear I heard Maria laughing when I realized where I was and what I had done. Another time, I woke up in the center’s swimming pool, eight feet of chlorinated water above me, as if I had tried to drowned myself. Maria’s ghostly face floated in the water above me.
Kirill had taken to locking my door round the clock, but it did no good. No matter what mundane locks or magical wards he placed on the doors, I escaped when sleepwalking. I walked in and out of Damon’s bedroom one night, leading him, he claimed, to the solitary confinement prison cell where Vicky was held. Apparently, I asked him to lock me inside with her. I had no memory of the event, and when I questioned Kirill if it were possible I was schizophrenic, he confirmed it was a possibility Maria had scrambled my brain. He prescribed antipsychotics, but I refused them, afraid they’d intensify the hallucinations and sleepwalking rather than control them.
Bottles of my blood were sent to Chloe’s for Arman and Rad. My friends came and went, all of them except the Chaos demon. Damon even allowed Neve into the Institute to bring me her homemade soup and sourdough bread. We sat for several hours talking and laughing, and for the first time in nearly two weeks, I thought I might be on the mend.
Fifteen minutes after she left, I asked Kirill if I could go to Damon’s office and talk to him and Kirill agreed. I put on fresh clothes and brushed my hair, determined to look and act normal, but when I reached the landing outside my boss’s office, I overheard him and Neve talking. She told him I wasn’t myself yet, and while he assured her I was fine and Kirill was taking excellent care of me, she argued. “Something’s terribly wrong with her, any fool could see that. Are you sure Maria’s spirit didn’t latch onto her soul?”
Regardless of the fact I didn’t own a soul, I slunk away, Neve’s statement confirming my suspicions. I ended up in the training center, confronting Cole. “Find a piece of iron and drive it through me.”
A few vampire recruits were working out with Cole’s soldiers. Since Dru was back as acting Master and the European brothers had slunk off to their kingdoms, the treaty between the Undead and the Institute was still in place. The recruits threw suspicious looks my way, having heard all about the psycho vengeance demon who was also their queen. Cole drew me aside, searching my face. “Why would I do that?”
“I think Maria’s possessing me again.”
He blew out a tired sigh. “Damon said Maria went into the portal. She’s gone, Kali.”
“Then why am I so screwed up? Why am I acting so weird? I don’t even feel like staking any of these vamps.” I waved a hand at the Undead recruits. They all took several steps back. “That’s just wrong, Cole, and you know it.”
“Have you talked to Guitar Boy?”
Unbelievable. “You think this has something to do with my love life?”
He stared at me, his eyes hard but concerned. “Look, I’m not cerebral like Damon, nor am I a pseudo-doctor like Kirill, but you need to clear the air with Beaumont and then you need to kick the shit out of Dru. You’ve pent up so many emotions in the past month and a half, you’ve made yourself crazy. It’s not Maria doing this to you, it’s you doing it.”
Emotions. I’d always wanted to be human so I could feel the way they felt. Now I had too many feelings and sentiments. To compensate, I’d shut down everything inside me.
Maybe being human with all its confusing, overwhelming passions would be too hard for me. Hell, I could barely handle anger, and that was as much a part of my makeup as my demon.
“I need to work out,” I said. “You up for a round?”
Cole grinned. “Throw in a steak dinner, and I’ll go two.”
“You’re too easy. I would have thrown in an expensive whiskey as well for two rounds.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon sparring with Cole. It felt good to let loose of everything. The anger, fear and worry driving me crazy. The deep disappointment. I fed my demon with physical activity and shut off my mind.
After we finished, I was exhausted, but in a good way. I stopped in Damon’s office. “Why haven’t you reprimanded me yet for injecting Dru with my blood?”
He didn’t lift his attention from the enormous book in front of him. The pages were a dull cream parchment, looking as if they were as old as the archdemon himself. He jotted a sentence down on a notebook. “What is there to say at this point?”
“You should fire me.”
“I should.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“What is it you want, Kali?”
Was this a trick question? What didn’t I want? “I want to go home. Back to my place. Maddy said your contractor is done making the repairs to the roof and I’m sick of the scans and tests and the inactivity. If I’m crazy, I’d rather be crazy at home.”
Ignoring the pleading tone of my voice, his gaze met mine with a serious lack of empathy. “You took a vow when you joined the Bridge organization to protect and defend humans from supernaturals who would do them harm. Yet, you defy our rules, refuse my guidance. Your latest escapade created a monster.”
I’d been lingering in the doorway, but now I stepped inside the office. “You created a monster when you let Dru inject me with his blood. How is that different than what I did?”
“I’m keeping you under observation until the Council has sufficient evidence to make a decision concerning your threat level.”
“My threat level?”
“At the moment, you appear to be a threat only to yourself. We’ll continue monitoring you to see if that escalates to include others.”
“And if it does?”
He tossed the pen he’d been using to make notes on the desk, sat back in his leather chair and steepled his hands. The answer was in his eyes. He wasn’t going to fire me.
He was going to kill me.
Fat chance I’d let that happen, unless I really was a threat to humans.
“What about Dru?”
“He is your mess to clean up.”
The flatness in Damon’s eyes told me what his version of clean up entailed. “You want me to kill him and then you’ll kill me if necessary.”
“Consequences are a bitch.”
Tough talk from his royal pain-in-the-ass. “Has Dru done anything so far to deserve such consequences?”
“Not yet, but I have no doubt he will.”
“Someone mention my name?” Dru said over my shoulder.
I jumped. What was the Master vamp doing there? Why hadn’t I felt him sneak up behind me?
My magic reached out instinctively for his and his responded without missing a beat, curling fingers of support around mine. Our combined blood pumped hard and fast in my veins.
Damon looked unsurprised at the vamp’s sudden appearance. He motioned a hand at one of the chairs across from his desk. “Thank you for coming, Al
exandru. Come in and take a seat.”
“Don’t do it,” I said, holding Dru back. My instincts were on high alert, and for the second time that day, I felt like my old self. “This is a trap.”
Damon rose from his chair. “I’m afraid Kali is still unwell. You’ll have to ignore her delusions and paranoia.”
I’d show him a delusion. I started to jump forward and get in his face when Dru rested a hand on my neck in the very spot where he’d taken my blood and left me with my new tattoo. “I’ll be fine,” he whispered in my ear. “There’s someone downstairs who very much wishes to speak to you. Give him five minutes while I discuss my situation with Damon.”
No way. I yanked Dru out of the room and shuffled him down the hall and out of Damon’s hearing range. “I’m done being queen and I don’t know how to handle my need for your blood, but what I do know is that Damon and the Council will kill you without blinking an eye because of what I did to you. You shouldn’t be here and if you walk into that office, your ashes will be coming out in a box.”
“Damon and the Council are right to be concerned. I’m here to offer them my complete cooperation. Meantime—” he pressed a kiss against my forehead, “—I apologize for my behavior after you resurrected me. My body was acting on pure instinct, nothing more. I needed blood and you were there.”
“And you threw in being an asshole on top of it just for grins and giggles?”
He sighed. “I’m sorry for that, too. I was…”
“An asshole.”
“Yes. I was.” He held out a hand. “Friends?”
His blood in my veins was going crazy. I needed to protect him. I wanted to do more than that, even if he had been an asshole to me. Stupid blood. “Please don’t go in that office.”
Something flashed in his eyes. His pupils enlarged. “You’re cute when you’re worried about me.”
I smacked his arm. “Stop it. I’m serious.”
“My father’s death created an opening in the Undead world, and as you know, there’s been a lot of posturing for that position. You’re looking at the new Liege of the entire Undead Nation. Believe me when I tell you, no harm will come to me here at the Institute. Damon wants to keep our covenant as much as I do.”
