by Tricia Barr
He was beautiful, an angel of death if she ever saw one. His devilishly handsome face was bespeckled by a five-o’clock shadow that she wanted to run her fingers over, his dark hair shiny and silky, swept back in a style that looked both pristine and effortless, like a model in a fashion magazine, perfectly captured for all time.
“Draven, this girl claims she has a spell for daywalkers.”
Draven cocked a brow at Kenzie, stepping closer. “Ah, a selkie. I’ve only heard of one other selkie with such a spell.”
Kenzie blinked at Draven. Did he know where the grimoire came from? Would he know her relation to Leif?
“Well? I’d like proof of this spell.”
“Um, it’s in my bag,” Kenzie said, looking around the room. She didn’t see her suitcase, or Todd. But Adam was staring at her, his brows drawn. Kenzie looked back to Draven quickly. “And I hid it with magic, which I’ll need to use to reveal it.”
“And how do I know you’re not here to use your magic to try to destroy us? Selkies aren’t known for looking out for anyone but themselves.”
“I hate the shifters,” Kenzie said, channeling that feeling of disappointment that she’d tapped into just moments before. “They wouldn’t let me in their school.”
Draven laughed. “So you come to a vampire school instead? And what do you hope to accomplish?”
“Revenge.”
Draven smiled, wagging a finger at Kenzie. “I have a feeling I’m going to like you. But I’m going to need you to prove yourself, first.”
Kenzie’s brow shot up. “I thought I just did.”
Draven shook his head. “Words, my dear. Those were just words. I want to see action. I want to see that hate light your eyes.”
Kenzie took a deep breath to try to steady her racing pulse. “Of course. Whatever you need.”
Draven narrowed his eyes at her. “I recognize your face. You know my daughter, Myreen, don’t you?”
Kenzie’s eyes widened. “Myreen’s your daughter?”
Draven laughed again. “Don’t look so surprised. I should’ve known her friends would come for her.”
“I came to join her.”
“We’ll see.”
“Wait a minute,” Adam said, recognition lighting his eyes.
The tower shook, and there was a rumble. Some shouts came from outside, only discernible once the clamor from the lobby died down.
Draven’s eyes widened. “There’s an attack? On my towers?” His gaze shot to the Initiates. “How many did you leave patrolling?”
Adam stepped forward. “There were still four when we came in.”
“Six! It takes at least six to cover all angles of these towers. And the middle of the day, too.” Draven scowled. “Cowards. Initiates, take up the front lines. The shifters will be less likely to kill humans. Vampires, let’s take care of any who come through their ranks, shall we?”
The angelic woman threw a glance at Kenzie. “What should we do with her?”
Draven looked at Kenzie thoughtfully. “Take her with you, Beatrice. If she’s true to her word, she’ll help us in this fight. If not...?” Draven let the words hang in the air as he dashed up the stairs.
“Come,” Beatrice said, clamping a hand around Kenzie’s shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”
The pair headed for the stairs, and Kenzie inwardly groaned. Of course there were more stairs.
She peered at the ceiling as they ascended, cringing at the sounds of yelling coming from above. She wondered how Myreen was doing. Hopefully she hadn’t been injured in the attack. Maybe they’d rescued her already. That would make Kenzie’s job a lot easier.
Kenzie gulped as she considered having to defend the vampires. Maybe the shifters could do a better job than she could, but she wasn’t going to give up now. She’d come too far. She just hoped she wouldn’t regret this decision.
Chapter 15: Kol
The sun neared the top of the sky. It was the perfect time for vampires to die.
Kol was grateful for the weight on his back. It forced his lungs and wings to work twice as hard—effectively pushing the fire and adrenaline throughout his body. Finally, they were going to rescue Myreen.
Kol barely felt the hands of Private Gibson. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t holding on at all. He just hoped Gibson could keep his bear inside long enough to get him to the tower. Ursas could be unpredictable, even the trained ones, and Kol would hate to lose a wing before the actual fight.
He glanced at Char beside him. Specialist Torisei gripped the edges of the blue scales at her neck with white knuckles. His eyes were closed tightly, and he looked like a ten-year-old riding his first rollercoaster. It was almost comical, except he also looked as if he might vomit the second Char dropped him off—if he could hold it that long.
The black looming spires grew in size as they drew closer. When Char and Corporal Modder scouted the location the day before, they had to stay hidden and keep below the tree line to avoid detection. With Kol’s invisibility skill, Char merely had to position herself above and behind Kol as they approached, adjusting slightly as they flew closer. She was directly above him when they arrived in position, above one of the roofs where the vamps had laid tinted glass.
Kol assumed it was a sort of torture area—darkened skylights in a vampire tower—for disobedient vamps, rather than a strange masochistic fetish.
Private Gibson was up first. He leapt from Kol’s back and onto the glass, shifting mid-air and growing three times his already-hulking size seconds before crashing onto the reinforced glass. Of course, the glass never thought a full-grown, monster-sized bear would ever attack it from the sky, and it shattered almost instantly.
Kol didn’t stick around to spectate what happened next, because their next target was an obscure shadowed area lower down for Specialist Torisei. Kol and Char were to create chaotic distractions—as if a giant ursa wasn’t distraction enough. They would then help plant more of Specialist Torisei’s devices.
Kol didn’t know the exact details of the devices, mainly because he specifically asked not to know, but they were made to change the material on the outer walls from their solid state to either a liquid or gas state without burning. In other words, melting and evaporating the very walls that protected the vampires from the sun.
Kol suspected it had something to do with changing the molecular structure. Normally he would’ve insisted on learning every single detail, but his focus was on Myreen and only Myreen. He couldn’t allow his own hunger for further knowledge to distract him from the goal. He could study the tech later.
When Specialist Torisei leapt lithely from Char’s back onto his target area—and to his credit did not vomit—Kol immediately shifted his invisible scales to match Char’s perfectly and split from her. He went to the right, she went to the left. The two of them only had one device each, Sergeant Char’s orders, so they had to plant their devices where they could make it count. If Kol had any idea where Draven imprisoned Myreen, he would race to her wall and pluck her out before the device evaporated more than a square meter. After all, the sun’s rays wouldn’t harm a mer. They could be safely back at the Dome by dinner.
But he didn’t know where they were holding her, and the place was enormous with its twelve towers, so there was no guessing either.
Kol found a place in the center of one of the larger towers that looked like it might do the most damage. He used his hind claws to grip the wall, but slipped. It was made of some sort of smooth stone, like obsidian. Not some high-tech metal as he’d assumed.
Could obsidian melt? he wondered, but didn’t let that line of thinking get far and pumped his wings to steady himself. He’d have to plant the device while hovering. It was only a small setback, and he figured it didn’t need to be bullseyed in any one spot. He just made sure to stick it firmly, like the characters did with C-4 in heist movies. Instead of a small explosion, Kol was instantly gratified with the once-solid rock looking very much like black molasses—the ginger
bread house protecting the blood suckers melting right before his eyes.
Kol pushed hard against the walls to jettison himself away from the tower, but it was to give him the space and momentum to hurl himself through the now-open wall and into the room. His brilliant blue form filled almost the entire area.
A large vampire huddled in the corner of the room. His face and arms were a scorched, angry red. But he was alive.
Kol felt a hint of disappointment at that. He’d hoped the sun’s effect on a vampire would be instantaneous. As he slowly shifted, he watched the clearly weakened and suddenly non-threatening immortal creature. He waited for it to lunge at him, but since Kol shifted in full sunlight and the hole in the wall grew ever larger, he was safe.
Kol stalked from the room as the entire east-facing wall was completely melted, leaving no corner in shadow. Satisfied that the vampire was certainly a goner now, he didn’t even bother to look back to make sure.
The hallway was a different story. Except for the sunlight streaming from the open door, it still had the protective darkness, albeit illuminated from artificial lighting. So he’d need to be careful. He silently cursed himself for not picking a wall with a grand hall or conference type room full of vampires, but how could Kol know the wall he chose was just individual vampire quarters?
Fortunately, the screams in the adjacent rooms both on the same floor, the floor above, and the floor below, told him that the device was creating an ever-increasing hole.
Concentrating hard, trying to remember how he had succeeded before, Kol wished himself to be unseen. To be invisible to the eyes of those who resided in these walls as he searched for the girl he loved. Finding her still seemed an impossible task, but being unseen would allow him to look longer without detection.
And it worked. Kol looked at his arms as he held them out and saw nothing but the wall in front of him and the floor below.
It made him feel better about disobeying orders. He and Char were to plant the device only, then create a distraction by encircling the towers as if planting more devices to create panic inside while Private Gibson destroyed and killed as many vampires as he could and Specialist Torisei figured out how to get the devices to evaporate and melt more than they were capable of. Kol changed his scales to blue to match Char’s, but his instructions were to shift between several different colors to give the illusion of more dragons attacking to give Gibson and Torisei time.
But there were no damned windows except those on top! How could that plan possibly work if Draven’s minions couldn’t even see them? And besides that, no one was tasked in finding Myreen.
So Kol improvised.
He walked down several floors without detection, hoping to overhear or find some clue about where they were holding Myreen. But the entire tower was in utter chaos, and the hallways soon became crowded with vampires at various stages of burned to death, staggering and slumped against the shadowed walls. Both the dead and the dying. He decided to make his way back up. Maybe one of those towers held Myreen?
“What was that?” one tiny girl asked, her tone filled with venom and her hair a mess of pink curls. She looked mostly unscathed.
Kol swore under his breath. In his desperate need to hurry and the ever-thickening crowd, he’d jabbed her shoulder with his elbow by accident. He backed against the wall as if it would help, but his own panic and growing discouragement—that his search would not only be endless, but near impossible even with his new-found skill... he suddenly felt exposed.
And then he was.
Five pairs of narrowed eyes shot to his location, including the small girl who looked years younger than Kol. The other four were clearly weakened or dying, but the girl was barely hurt.
But he was exposed. His invisibility no longer worked, and he was in a hallway full of vampires.
He did the only thing he could think of and explosion-shifted, breaking walls and furniture, and crushing a few bodies underfoot. The girl let out a shrill shriek when he clamped his teeth into her forearm, but she returned in kind with a kick to his front claw with enough force that he heard the bones cracking before they bent at a ninety-degree angle.
Kol released the girl’s arm, letting out his own pained shriek, and fled—as best as he could—down the hallway, up the stairs, and away from her. But swift footsteps unimpeded by a too-big-for-the-hallway size, gave her the upper hand, and she soon caught up to him.
He shifted back, clutching his broken arm with his good one, and staggered toward the next door he could find, cotton-candy girl-doll on his heels. If she caught up to him, dragon or not, he’d be finished. So he put all his weight into his good shoulder, crashing through the door and into the safety of the blood-red plush carpet and streaming sunlight.
It wasn’t planned, but the timing was perfect. She thought she had the upper hand and was on his heels seconds before he busted the door open, seconds before she sank her teeth into his neck as she leapt forward. But the leaping forward and Kol’s collapsing to the floor gave the sunlight a straight shot. A full-frontal attack.
She screamed and clawed at her eyes—a bit dramatic in Kol’s opinion—but she was dying. He supposed it was her party. But in the burning, she managed to get behind a piece of furniture, an armoire of sorts that was partly shadowed. Then she slumped to the floor.
Kol stood, his chest heaving as he watched her. There was an open wall behind him. He could escape into the sky right now and away from the murderous vampires. But he still didn’t have Myreen, nor did he have any idea where they housed her.
The vamp’s breaths were labored, but she was still alive, so Kol took the opportunity to ask her. Maybe a dying vamp would be open to spilling the secrets of their leader?
“Where’s the siren girl?” Kol asked, his voice low and slightly trembling.
She spat in his direction right as a voice crackled in his ear.
“Where. Are. You. Private Dracul?” It was Char. They’d gone radio silent when the citadel came into view—was it only a handful of minutes ago?—and Kol had forgotten he still had the earpiece in his ear.
“You mean Draven’s little trophy from the fishbowl?” the vampire asked, seemingly not bothered by the burns on every inch of her skin, which were beginning to look like a red version of the melted tower walls.
Kol averted his eyes, resisting the urge to gag.
“Her name is Myreen,” he said. “Where is he keeping her? One of the towers? Is there a dungeon?”
“Private?” Char hissed. “Private?” Her voice cracked on the second one. She was concerned for his safety.
Covertly, he reached up to respond, clicking the mic on and off in a Morse code response to tell her that he was all right, as well as his location.
“Why would I tell you?” the melted girl asked.
“Because you’re probably going to die soon?” Kol said, feeling a little triumphant. “Because my sergeant will be here soon and we plan to finish you off anyway before continuing our destruction?”
Since Kol had been studiously keeping his gaze away from the ruined face of the cotton candy girl, he nearly missed her eyes dart over his shoulder before a stifled sob sounded behind him.
Kol whipped around and saw Myreen huddled on the far side of the large bed—he should have thought it strange that this one had a bed, since the rest didn’t because vampires didn’t need them.
“Myreen?” he whispered, his heart suddenly stamping out an irregular beat. He felt lightheaded seeing the top of her dark, silky hair. And suddenly he felt the pain radiating from his broken arm with acuity.
He was so close to victory. All he had to do was shift, grab Myreen, and fly right out of the room. They’d done it. They’d rescued Myreen. In the split second where he considered waiting for Char or leaving now, she flew in and shifted before landing next to Kol.
“C’mon,” she said. “Torisei and Gibson are out, let’s find this girl and go.”
With a smug smile Kol motioned with his eyes that Myreen was
only a few meters away.
She smiled back. “Then let’s go!”
But when Kol took one hurried step toward the beautiful girl still crouched and hidden, the forgotten vampire let out a hideous laugh that seemed to echo along the entire length of the tower.
Instinct told Kol to shift and get out before she could call for help. But suddenly he felt like he was nine years old again. Something that was normally effortless and easy for him was all of a sudden impossible.
He couldn’t shift.
He tried again, focusing on his skin, urging it to turn into invisible scales, willing his shoulder blades to shoot out with his wings. But nothing. He remained human.
The look on Char’s face told him that she couldn’t shift either.
Melted-cotton-candy-girl’s laughter died down a bit, but she still chuckled to herself as a figure gave her a wide berth and entered the room.
A redhead, with suddenly shorter curls, who was definitely Kenzie, slowly stepped forward, muttering some sort of spell under her breath. Her arms reached out as she chanted.
“Kenzie?” Kol whispered.
“Kenzie!” Myreen shouted louder. Kol witnessed Myreen finally stand in his peripheral.
Kenzie gave a half-smile to them both, but didn’t stop her chanting.
“What are you doing?” Kol asked, hearing the betrayal in his voice.
Char remained silent at his side, but she reached out for his hand. He wanted to jerk away so Myreen wouldn’t see, but he couldn’t deny his friend that tiny bit of comfort. Char guessed before he did exactly what was happening.
“Instruct them to come this way,” Draven’s voice called from the shadows of the hallway.
They’d been caught. And Kenzie was helping.
Why was she helping?
Kenzie motioned with her fingers for them to follow, but Kol and Char remained where they stood. Kol because of stubbornness, but he suspected Char was frozen because of fear. Her fingers trembled in his.
“Instruct them to come this way, now, or the blonde one doesn’t get to live.”