by Anne Malcom
“I figured,” she replied, her voice flat, merging with the sound of her fingers tapping on the keyboard. “Either that or Scott ruined another pair of shoes.”
I scowled at the reminder of what he did to my brand-new Manolo mules. I really hoped his fingers hadn’t grown back yet. “No, I’d be shooting him if that was the case,” I sighed, gazing at the ceiling. If only I could shoot the person responsible for my mood. But I loved the prick, and I couldn’t seem to bring myself to tear through his beautiful flesh with a bullet.
The tap of Sophie’s fingers against the keyboard was rather peaceful, if not for the rancid taste of black magic saturating the air.
“We need to figure out a way to kill the witch,” I commented, shaking off the chill that came with the presence of her magic. I felt as if she was watching me even now, feeding on all my inner turmoil like a hillbilly at an Arby’s.
Sophie was still focused on her computer screen, but I saw the way her body stiffened out of the corner of my eye. “Well, you’ve established that bullets don’t work,” she said dryly. “But yes, we need to find a way to kill the witch.”
I stared at the ceiling, waiting for more. There was no more. No plans, no spells, no suggestions that we just shove a nuclear bomb on an abandoned island with Malena as the only resident.
“You don’t have leads?” I asked with impatience.
Sophie pursed her lips. “Some of the most powerful supernatural leaders couldn’t find a way for centuries, and you’re impatient that I haven’t done it in a handful of weeks?”
“Pretty much,” I agreed. “It would take such a load off not having to worry about whatever end of the world she’ll bring about if she Shawshanks her way out of here.”
“Well, now that you put it like that, I’ll put in extra effort,” Sophie snapped.
I flipped through a magazine that had been lying on the sofa. “Much obliged.”
More tapping and silence.
“The fight was about Jonathan,” Sophie said. Not a question. A statement.
I snapped my eyes to her. “Can you read minds now?”
She smiled slyly. “No, thankfully. I don’t think even I could handle a peek in your head.”
“No, it’s pretty fucked up in there,” I agreed, tapping my temple. “But how did you know what the fight was about if you weren’t molesting my thoughts?”
She quirked her brow. “You brought your new boyfriend home to meet the parents,” she commented. “Not only did your brothers and your mother try to kill him, but she tried to end you as well—not that that’s a change,” she commented. “But for Thorne, who is so very human—kind of, at least—and hasn’t experienced parents trying to kill their kin on the regular, I’m sure that was a slight shock.” She paused. “Then he found out that the husband you’ve been heartbroken about for the past five hundred years is alive and well, and looking to reclaim his wife and kill everyone in his path.” She shrugged. “It was bound to come up.”
I pouted, hating the way she was being so logical. That was not what I came to the witch for. If I wanted logic, I’d go to the king. Or I’d just shoot myself in the head. It would’ve made for a nice break from reality. Then again, in my newly weakened state, I couldn’t be sure that I’d recover from a bullet to the temple.
“He said Jonathan has something over me,” I told Sophie.
She didn’t gasp in shock or insult Thorne, as was expected. “He does,” she agreed.
It was my turn to gasp, a blatant disrespect of all the girlfriend rules: never agree with the asshole your girlfriends were shooting witches over. “No he fucking doesn’t,” I hissed.
Sophie moved her attention from the computer screen. “Isla, he has informed your behavior for half a millennium,” she said. “He was the first man you loved as a human, first sign of something that wasn’t the sadism your family treated you to. Then you saw your mother murder him and every single person from your human life, the trauma of which made you go seriously off the reservation for half a century.” She raised her brow. “You’ve carried a broken heart through the centuries, and what happened to him slowly chipped away at your sanity.” She winked. “Personally, I think it’s a vast improvement on who you were as a human—you sounded like a total snore—but nonetheless, it’s kind of heavy.”
Her eyes were soft and kind. I did not like that. Sophie and I didn’t do candy cane girlfriend heart-to-hearts with tears and kind words.
Usually to cheer each other up, we complimented how much like a high-class escort—me—or a Metallica groupie—Sophie—the other looked like. Then we went to kill things.
“So yeah, the dude has something over you,” she sighed. “He has control over that little dark part of you that tore apart Europe, killing without remorse for fifty years.” She held up a hand in order to stop me arguing.
Obviously a mere hand gesture was not going to work, but this particular one was coupled with a spell to snatch my voice from my throat. She did not take away my ability to return her gesture with four fewer fingers extended, however.
She ignored it. “You’re not going to admit it to me because you don’t like agreeing with people as a rule,” she continued. “And you’re not going to admit it to yourself because that means you have to face the fact that he’s controlled five hundred years of your life, in one way or another.” She narrowed her eyes. “But we will punish him for that, trust me, sister. His death will be slow. Painful.” She stood from the computer. “For now, he’s hiding like the coward he is, attacking through witches by proxy because we have his not-so-secret weapon.”
She yanked another gun out of her desk drawer, shoving it into her belt. She didn’t need the gun. She was all-powerful and scary. But I honestly think she put it there as an accessory to complete her outfit more than anything else. I totally approved.
“I still can’t find him because now that he’s partnered with Nora, she’s cloaking his locations.” Her eyes glittered, almost glowing with the power of her rage. Her betrayal. “And she’s calling upon some dark magic in order to do that.” She shook her head in disgust. “She’ll pay too. They all will.” Her last words held a slight echo, and a different kind of magic nipped at the edges of Malena’s dark presence. I eyed the black stone around her neck that seemed to pulsate.
Talk about deadly accessories.
Sophie blinked away the foreign glint in her eyes and grinned at me. “For now, I do have someone we can kill.”
I stood. “Excellent. Who’s the sucker?” I asked as I followed her out the door. I blew Malena a kiss as we exited.
“Ambrogio.”
I smiled, showing fang. Nothing like ending the original vampire to distract me from a fight with my slayer boyfriend who may or may not be connected to the aforementioned original vampire thanks to a nifty little prophecy.
“Oh, and I know exactly how we can kill him too,” I replied, falling into step with her, remembering Rick’s text that I’d glossed over on the way there. “Apparently the Sector feel like helping us out today.”
And so my witch and I walked into battle, maybe death.
It was a fuck of a lot less scary than facing Thorne, facing the truth.
“What is it with this dude deciding to live in hovels?” I moaned, kicking mud off my shoes as we trudged through the sewers—yes, sewers—below the Meatpacking District. “He’s YouTube famous now. He could totally afford at least a two-bedroom walk-up in Brooklyn,” I muttered, crunching a rat under my heel.
“Yeah, the evil ones really don’t seem to have nice abodes,” Sophie agreed, her boots slugging through the slop too, though they were more appropriate than mine.
Her hands let out a slight glow, preparing for anything, as we’d gotten closer to the location she’d discovered, but it was also handy since neither of us remembered a flashlight.
I clutched the copper dagger that Rick had given me. The man himself was slopping behind us, silent. I wondered if he was crying over the loss of his suit an
d loafers, which would be ruined beyond repair after this.
“I told you you didn’t have to come,” I called backward. “We girls actually have this handled.” And we did. For once, Sophie didn’t have her wolf with her, and I was thanking Hades for that small favor.
Though she had muttered that he would not be happy about her running off and killing the father of all vampires without him.
I reasoned Thorne might’ve been unhappy too. Especially since I had three missed calls from him—all of which I’d ignored. He’d be raging because of my weakened state, and because I hadn’t told him about the knife, and definitely about the fact that Rick was there.
But I was still pissed at him.
Pissed at him for making me pissed at myself.
Pissed at him because he was right.
Jonathan did have something over me. Something wrong and ugly and rancid. And the hold only became that much tighter the longer he lurked on this earth. The longer he did things to tease me with the control he thought he had over my world, over the lives—and deaths—of the people inside it.
I clenched the knife tighter.
“Of course I’m coming,” Rick snapped. “The two of you going alone is a recipe for disaster, and this is the creator of our race. Call me curious.”
I was going to call him a love-sick idiot because I had an inkling that he thought the human had been kidnapped and taken to Ambrogio for whatever means. I had that inkling because he’d come to Sophie demanding she scry for the human, then Ambrogio when it became apparent that Sophie couldn’t track her. Another little interesting tidbit.
The human was not there. Unless the Four Seasons had a seriously shitty new location. She had a good taste in hotels; my credit card thanked her.
But I was firm on not telling anyone, even Sophie, where she was. She needed silence, peace to fight with whatever very real demons were eating at her.
Normally I wouldn’t have cared about that, but I had similar demons and I couldn’t have peace. I was all about chaos.
“Thorne and Conall will not be happy about this,” Rick continued.
“Since when do you care about them?” Sophie whisper-yelled as we approached an area where the sewer widened, the ceiling stretching higher and the ground becoming drier.
The air become more rancid, full of something more than the filth of the sewers. Something much older than that.
“Party time,” I whispered, turning to wink at the king. “Try to keep up.”
And then the first hybrid attacked with wonderful timing. Sophie plain incinerated it before I got the chance to finish my great parting shot with the severing of a head.
“That was my moment,” I snapped at Sophie as more hybrids and a couple of demons came running through the small opening in the darkness.
She side-eyed me as she took down two at the same time. They were obviously being used to tire us out, and the demons would finish us off.
That was someone’s—most likely Jonathan’s—plan. But he was also planning on using the original vampire to enslave humanity, so here’s hoping we could fuck up some plans.
I snapped another head, dodging the fangs that came at me so they only just brushed my arm.
Sophie yanked the gun from her belt and started firing. She was a crack shot, hitting all the hybrids square in the head. “Copper bullets,” she said.
I ducked a punch. “Since when do you use bullets, witchy?”
She emptied her clip and loaded more into the gun. “Since it became super easy for the council to track me the more I used my magic,” she returned.
Sneaky little witch, sharing such a tidbit in the middle of the battle so I didn’t have time to get more information. “Fair enough” was all I managed to grunt in return.
Rick was holding his own against the hybrids, fangs wet with the blood of his enemies, eyes glowing with the thirst for more.
“You guys got this, right?” I yelled at them, looking ahead at a small corridor that snaked off from the main antechamber. Something told me to go for the less obvious.
I glanced back to Sophie and Rick. “Yeah, you got this,” I muttered. I killed one last hybrid for luck, then darted to the side, dodging the hybrids when I could.
A demon barred my entry to the small corridor, eyes lighting up with flames. “Not so fast, bitch,” he hissed.
I stopped. “Really? That’s your opening statement?” I shook my head. “So cliché.”
I was going to have to shoot Dante a text and ask him what the fuck his demon brotherhood was doing in the bowels of the city instead of the bowels of the earth. They were meant to answer to one master and one master only.
It was going to hurt, battling this guy, as the steam was rising off his skin, but at least he didn’t make an inferno like Dante could.
Silver lining.
“When am I going to learn to wear flame-retardant clothing when going into uncertain battles?” I muttered to myself, then said a prayer for my Gucci blouse.
But that prayer was not heard when a bullet brushed past my hair and embedded itself right in the center of the demon’s forehead, splattering black blood all over the blouse.
The demon fell backward, though it would only likely be incapacitated for a moment.
I scowled back at Sophie. “You owe me a new fucking blouse.”
“You’re welcome,” she shouted, discarding her gun, obviously out of bullets, as her hands started to glow. “Make it quick, will you?” She gritted out. “I don’t fancy battling the witches along with the OG vampire.”
I didn’t let her tell me twice. I darted forward, wondering if the tracking thing worked like the phone tracking in all those kidnapping movies where they had to keep the perp on the line for a certain amount of time.
The rest of the small tunnel within the sewer was abandoned. No more guards, no more hybrids, no more life at all.
“Ah, so you’ve come,” a voice called from the darkness.
I rounded the corner to a small inlet in the tunnel, barely big enough to fit a stone seat in, but whoever had put Ambrogio there had managed it.
“And you’re sitting in the damp filth, not doing a thing at all,” I observed. “You know, they say never meet your heroes, and now I totally know why.” I waved at the chalky vampire, etched and almost glowing out of the darkness. “This is just disappointing.” I stepped forward, gripping the knife. “As was your little fifteen minutes,” I added. “What did you even think would come of that? Because it sure as shit wasn’t a better crib.”
He moved slightly, and the movement in itself was jarring, like seeing some kind of ancient reptile, left over from the dinosaur period—one you’d become convinced was preserved in all its ugly splendor—crawl from its perch to attack.
“I thought it would come to this,” he said, his voice matching the damp and ancient air around us. “To you, coming here.” He nodded to the dagger in my hand. “With that.”
“Dude, you could’ve just texted me,” I replied, thinking how the way his gaze made my skin crawl, how being near him sickened me to the core. There was something wrong about this, about seeing something born from legends in the flesh.
I totally got why humans freaked out around vampires now.
“Ah, but there was no other way for you to procure the weapon than for me to expose myself to the world, for what I really am, was there not?” he asked, stretching his body upward. I imagined the creaking and protest of his bones, fossilized within him.
I put slightly more weight onto my back foot, out of instinct more than anything else before I realized what that little motion was a gateway to—running.
I leaned forward and tightened my grip on the knife. No, no running. My mind ran over his last words, the meaning.
“You knew the Sector had this.” I waved the knife. “You knew the only way I’d get it was for you to break the internet? How in the fuck did you know that?” My mind went to the witches who had aligned with Jonathan, but that just didn’t ji
ve someone.
“Child, I am long for this world,” Ambrogio replied, leaning slightly forward, the ages of the earth leaning with him, the suffering, the pain, the death.
If I could vomit, I would’ve done so right then, right on my already ruined shoes.
No one was meant to come into contact with that much suffering. That many memories. They were literally leaking from him.
“I know things,” he continued. “Too many things. I remember things.” His eyes bored into mine with the force of a thousand suns—if suns radiated the temperature of winter in the Arctic, of course.
“You wanted this,” I whispered. “All of this. You didn’t care about the rebellion, about humanity’s enslavement or survival, you just wanted an end.”
He was literally willing to damn the world so he could die, so he could escape the pain of his life, his entire existence. He totally trumped me on the selfish thing.
“Yes,” he said simply. “This world is wretched, and I along with it. I am done with it all. Quite done. You will all perish.” He eyed me. “Or perhaps you, unlike her, will not. I sense a strength in you that she did not have.” There was a long pause. “I sense you may need it.”
And then there were no more words. It wasn’t a pause. There were no poignant final words, final warnings. Those eyes just planted the seed, the need to sink the blade into his heart that I didn’t realize I’d actually done until I felt his ribs crunch and crumble around the metal.
I was close to him. Too close. His breath pushed onto my face as the knife pressed air from inside him onto me. I recoiled, but he gripped me with the last of his strength, yanking us both together.
Then, in a motion that I didn’t quite know how it had happened, my mouth was at his neck, filling with something so sweet, so rich that it set my veins on fire.
It was like drinking from the human full of Rick’s blood. But something so much more. It was the gods themselves.
It was pure Ichor.
A small taste. Enough to drive me mad for long moments.
Because then my lips weren’t at a cold neck. No, I was standing upright, holding a knife and watching a body crumble and turn to ash around it.