by D. N. Hoxa
My cheeks felt flushed, a million tiny fireworks exploding inside my veins as I made my way deeper into the fight. You’d think I’d have felt a bit dizzy by how fast I got from one end of the street to the other or because of the many smells that hit my nostrils every time my chest rose and fell. I wasn’t trying to breathe, it was just a habit, but the smell of blood overran everything else. I felt full—I’d drunk two bodies dry already, but the thirst was still there. It was part of me, just like the monster in my chest, and I didn’t question it. There was no time for that. I had people to kill.
And I did. I passed Moira, John, Emanuel’s wolf as I went, and I killed three Uprising soldiers before I reached a wolf with pitch-black fur and some patches of white around the tail. Carter. He was fighting Faron. All my stars had aligned.
“Hey, fellas,” I said, not bothering to shout, even though the noise from the fight was deafening. They could hear me just fine. Carter looked up at me for a second and growled, and Faron smiled.
“Your time has come, thief,” the fae spit, his voice hard and ice-cold, like he was talking to the lowest creature he’d ever laid eyes on. I would totally be that for him. I’d be anything so long as I got to kill him now.
Carter’s wolf moved to the side, stepping over the chest of a decapitated man as he went to Faron’s side. Faron kept his eyes on me, but I could tell that he was focused on Carter, too. Both his swords were raised, one of the blades chipped on the side, and he blew strings of hair from his face, then smiled. I returned the favor.
Then I jumped him. He must have seen me coming because he moved to the side and the blade of his sword ran over my gut, making a clean cut. I expected the pain to be intense, just like everything else about vampirism, but it wasn’t. It barely stung, and I actually heard my skin knitting back together, the blood in my veins its fuel. It hadn’t been that deep a cut, but I was going to have to watch myself now. I turned around with my arms outstretched, trying to grab him by the hair as he came back up. Time seemed to move slower for me now, or maybe I was just really fast. Either way, I grabbed a handful of hair, but Faron still moved away. A chunk of blonde hair tangled around my fingers. That must have hurt like a bitch, but the fae was good at keeping the pain on the inside. He came at me with his sword raised, and he was fast, too. I had to jump back three times before I saw an opening. I ducked and jumped with my legs in the air, and hit him on the side so hard, he fell to the ground. I landed on my feet, my body light like I barely weighed ten pounds.
Faron stood, too, wiping dirt off the side of his face. The pull was instant. His magic had a strange scent, something like lilies with a bit of spices added to it, and it spread incredibly fast all around me, slipping into my pores like it had done a thousand times before. My thoughts came to a sudden halt as the magic wrapped itself around my brain, and whispered to it to shut down. I had been on the receiving end of Faron’s magic before. It made you fall asleep, lose consciousness like someone turned the switch off, but it had never been this fast. Guess he wasn’t holding back on me now.
I took a step forward and my legs wobbled. I could still see perfectly, but I couldn’t control my body as well as I did just seconds ago. Shit. I should have tried harder to kill him while I had the chance. Another step forward and it felt like my legs were stuck in quicksand. Something heavy fell on my shoulders, and it was pushing me down as Faron kept his distance and his eyes on me, letting out an insane amount of magic all over me.
But he was distracted, and that was all that mattered.
He’d completely forgotten about Carter’s wolf who had been circling us and was now right behind him.
Snap. Jaws locked on Faron’s left shoulder and he was pulled back. His magic lifted from my body like the sky was sucking it up. Faron was on the ground, trying to get Carter off him, but the wolf had gotten a good grip on the shoulder. Blood everywhere on the fae. For the three seconds it took for me to gain back control of my body, his whole side was soaking wet with it—and it smelled magnificent.
I walked up to him and grabbed his hand before he could cut into Carter’s back with his sword once more. Carter shook his head, trying to tear the flesh he’d bitten, but so far it hadn’t worked. Prying Faron’s fingers from the handle of his sword was easy. I broke two fingers in the process, but it’s not like he was going to need them again, anyway. He screamed. I bit the other side of his neck.
Fae blood tasted a bit different from the guy I’d drank dry before. It was a bit on the sweet side, which wasn’t to say that it was bad—it wasn’t. It was just as heavenly, but it did leave a taste in my mouth.
Plus I didn’t get to drink every last drop of it because something stabbed me in the back.
A sword. A very long sword, the blade extra wide. I was still crouching over Faron, and I hadn’t heard a thing. Now that I looked down, I could see the blade coming out of my chest, red with the blood I’d stolen. Whoever was behind me pulled the sword out of me again, and the relief was instant. I stood up and turned around just as the tip of it touched my chest—right over my heart. I grabbed the blade with one hand, barely feeling the sting of the cut, and I looked at the ghoul carrying it. He wasn’t a very big guy, but by God, he smelled worse than any hellbeast head I’d ever cut off. It was worse than rot and piss together, and it was all over him. Before he could even try to pry his sword from my hand, I was in front of him and fisted him in the face with all my strength. My knuckles broke, and this time I felt the pain all the way to my brain. It froze me for a split second, but it got worse when my bones instantly put themselves back together again.
The good thing was, the ghoul fell back and hit the ground on his ass. I’d always thought ghoul fists were the worst, but vampire fists apparently kicked ass. Since I would rather claw my eyes out than drink his blood, I didn’t bother with biting his neck. I did the thing Carter had done once with one of the maneaters he’d killed—I twisted his head to the side, then jumped on his shoulders and pulled, my fingers secured under his jaw.
The head didn’t come off all the way like that maneater’s had, but bone broke, thick, dark blood slipped out. When I jumped off him, his head was hanging on only by a thin piece of skin.
I heard Kit’s screeching cries behind me and I turned to look at where he was. All around me, the battle raged. Just how many people had the Uprising brought? Because there were so many of them, almost as many standing as there were bodies on the ground. The fight was brutal, body parts flying, swords clashing, bones breaking.
This needed to stop now.
I searched around me for one last time, hoping to see Malin or Jamie somewhere, but they weren’t in sight, which could only mean that they were hiding somewhere. Somewhere on the left side of the street because Uprising soldiers who fought the werewolves and the Bane were freezing in place every few seconds, or falling to the ground, shaking, writhing in pain. Witch magic. Malin’s magic.
My eyes found Kit on the ground, looking up at the man standing in front of him—Alexander Adams. He was a little less than six feet tall, but his shoulders rivaled those of Chris Conti. His dark hair was cut close to his head and matted with blood. He wasn’t old by any means but his eyes gleamed with cold intelligence—definitely the eyes of a madman.
A ward was wrapped around him so tightly, even Kit couldn’t get through. And Damian was moving all around him, fast, because though he had a ward around him, somehow Adams managed to throw his spells outside it.
Easy, I thought. I could break that ward easily. I’d done it before with more powerful wards.
Except…now I was a vampire. I didn’t have any magic to use. I wasn’t going to be a sorceress for another…how many minutes? I could keep a Prime’s magic for thirteen and a half minutes, but I had no idea how long it had been. I didn’t feel any different, but it could all be over soon. I’d best get this over with.
I’d seen Damian do it before, the first time I’d met him. We’d been in a wizard’s house, looking for the amulet, and th
e wizard had had a ward wrapped around him, too. Damian had broken it by literally slamming into it with his body. I did the same. My shoulder slammed onto the magic that was pretending to be a really thick brick wall. The pain shot up and down my body, paralyzing me for an instant, before it let me go. It was incredible how fast I healed, how fast the pain came and went, but that didn’t mean I liked it. It was still pain, and it came back, over and over while I slammed my shoulders onto Adams’s ward and it didn’t even budge.
The first five times, Adams had been focused on Damian, who was trying to break the ward with his sword instead. I didn’t even notice him turning his hands toward me, but I did notice when the magic hit me. It was like a bucket of ice over my head. It wiped my brain clean and froze my body, then picked me up and threw me back like a rag doll. I don’t know how fast or how far I flew, only that I landed with my face on something sharp, and it hurt like hell.
Glass. Pieces of broken glass all around me, shards inside my face, one of them going through my cheek, the tip touching my tongue. As if the fangs weren’t enough already. I put my hands against the ground as the magic of the spell left me, and more shards sank into my palms. Kit was in front of me, his red eyes wide, his mouth full of sharp teeth, and he was crying out as if I couldn’t already see what the hell was happening.
“Dagger,” I told him, which was harder to do than you’d think, both with a set of fangs and glass coming out my cheek. “Stolen dagger.”
Kit understood. He jumped on top of my head and ran down my back while I made it on all fours and finally stood up. My body was a mess. I picked the shard from my cheek first and pulled it out. Fire. It was like bathing in a tub full of magma—but as soon as the piece of glass was out of me, the pain stopped instantly. And then more glass fell to the ground. My body was expelling it, coating me in a new wave of flames as it pushed every foreign object from my body and the wounds began to close.
Dizzy.
Did vampires get dizzy? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think so.
Which only meant one thing: I was starting to turn back to myself.
I turned around, shocked at first to find my chest completely silent. The feelings that went through me would have normally made my heartbeat soar, but not now. It lay perfectly still in there. There was time. I still had time.
I ran back to the ward as Damian slammed his sword on it, moving from one side to the other while Adams tried to spell him. Our eyes met for a split second and I could tell that Damian wasn’t relaxed anymore. He was beginning to panic.
Something touched my foot, and when I looked down, I found Dalia with my stolen dagger in her thin arms. Her scream made me flinch. I leaned down to grab my dagger.
“Thanks.” When I looked up, Damian was no longer trying to break the ward. He was slammed against the wall on the other side of the street instead.
Adams turned to me. He wasn’t smiling. There was no expression on his face whatsoever. He was completely focused on the chanting, his lips moving so incredibly fast they almost turned to a blur. This was the second time I’d seen this—once with the redheaded witch who had escaped from prison to try to grow the plant of immortality. She’d chanted just as fast as Adams—and I was going to learn how to do the same, too.
If I survived this first.
I pulled the stolen dagger up over my head, grabbed the handle tightly with both hands, and I slammed the tip of the blade onto Adams’s ward. If his spell hit me, so be it, but that ward needed to be broken.
The spell hit me. It was bad—I spun in the air and fell, then kept going, the skin of my face getting eaten by the asphalt underneath. I didn’t know where the pain ended and the burning began, but I sucked it up and stood up as soon as I stopped sliding. My face felt completely ruined. Thank God I didn’t have a mirror. I turned around, feeling more pissed off by the second, especially since I could feel that my skin wasn’t healing as fast as it did minutes ago. I could still feel the remains of the pain, lingering on my muscles, on my skin, and that was a very bad thing.
But there was a good thing, too. I don’t know what had done it—Damian’s sword or my dagger—but Adams was no longer wrapped up in his ward. Instead, he was fighting with Damian, and they were face-to-face. Damian could reach him now, and so could Kit and his family. They were on him, scratching, clawing at his face, and the fucker pretended not to notice as he moved away from Damian’s sword, too fast for a normal wizard. My dagger was still in my hand and I ran to him—not as fast as I had gotten used to doing in the past few minutes. That was the reason why the wolf who leaped in the air from my side reached him before I did. It was Carter.
He was as black as the night as he literally flew, and his large paws slammed onto Adams’s chest. They both fell back, rolling on the ground for a second, before Carter flew once more, off him and onto the ground on his side with a cry, in between Damian and me. Damian was already onto Adams, but when he aimed for his throat with his sword, it met resistance.
Another ward. How the hell could he chant so fast?
Damian turned to me when Carter jumped to his feet, bared his teeth and growled. I couldn’t hear him as well as I did moments ago, either. I was definitely turning back to myself.
“The dagger,” Damian said and stepped to the side, as if to make way for me to go to Adams.
I looked at the stolen dagger in my hand. It was an ugly thing, but it seemed to do the trick every time. It only took half a second to reach Adams, and the heat of the magic of his ward warmed my face. It still didn’t feel healed, but I didn’t dare touch it.
This time, Adams wasn’t chanting. He wasn’t completely focused on words—he was focused on me. I smiled. It felt good to have his attention again, especially now that I had the upper hand, with Damian and Carter at my sides, just waiting to tear him apart.
I raised my dagger. One last strike and I could turn back to a sorceress, when…
“Wait,” Adams said, his lips barely moving. He had his hands raised toward me, but he knew that even if he hit me, there was nowhere he could go. His precious Amina and Faron were no longer there, and Boyle was probably dead, too. There were no more maneaters left standing. His own people were retreating, even though some were still fighting the Bane and the werewolves. They would be dead in the next few minutes, too.
“You’re making a mistake,” Adams continued when I refused to say anything. “You think you’ve won, but you haven’t. You’ve lost, Montero, and you know it.” He raised a brow as if to test me. I knew exactly what he meant. After all of this, there was no way I could escape the Guild.
“You’re right—I’ve lost. But so have you.” The rest, I would figure out as I went. I raised the dagger higher.
“Wait!” he shouted a second time. “I can give you everything you’ve ever wanted. Think about it, Montero—I can give you the world!”
That caught me a bit off guard, I’ll admit. “The world, huh?” I thought about it for a second. “Wow. But what about the moon, you know?” I pointed at the sky. “What about the entire fucking solar system—who’s gonna give me those?” Because that’s exactly what I wanted—planets. Lots and lots of planets.
Adams looked at me like I’d lost my mind. He could be onto something there—I didn’t exactly feel like myself ever since I’d turned to a vampire. The shift had done something to my mind, too, not just my body. I saw his lips moving as the tip of my dagger slammed onto his ward, but I didn’t think he’d actually be able to finish the spell in time.
He did.
The ward broke. I heard it cracking like a piece of glass under my dagger the same second magic hit me in the chest and threw me back. I really hated being thrown off my feet like this, but it would be over soon. This time, at least, I hit the ground on my back.
No, not the ground—the wall of a building. My ribs were broken. Vampire or not, broken ribs hurt like hell. It felt like a four-hundred-pound hellbeast was sitting on my chest and its ass was full of spikes, jamming into me.
That wasn’t even the worst part. When my body began to heal, that’s when things got real. It hurt so much I wanted to pass out, disappear, cease to exist altogether. I could actually hear the bones moving, could feel them as they rearranged themselves and snapped back into place. I wanted to scream so badly, but no voice came out of me. My skin was on fire, my insides already burned, and it lasted for what felt like hours.
And when the pain began to fade, my heart jumped in my chest—a single beat. My eyes opened and the world came into focus again. I hadn’t even seen anything before I tried to stand up, terrified that Adams was coming for me. If he caught me down, I was never getting up again.
A wolf growl. I reached out in its direction and my fingers sank into wet fur. I grabbed it anyway and pulled myself up with all the strength I had left. My ribs were no longer broken, but the pain lingered. It was there, a bitter reminder that I never wanted to have broken ribs again. Another growl and I finally looked at the wolf next to me, only to find that it was Chris Conti. He stayed in front of me, his head turned toward Adams. I let go of his fur, wet with blood, and I forced myself to focus.
Adams was still standing, Damian on his left, and Carter on his right. He was throwing his magic like he didn’t even need words for it at all—but not for much longer. I took a step forward determined to finish this once and for all, but my whole body convulsed. I gritted my teeth and took another, just as Damian flew back from Adams’s invisible magic.
Carter’s teeth sank into Adams’s arm. He turned to Carter’s wolf and tried to push him off, but it was no use. Once Carter bit into something, he didn’t let go. But he didn’t even have to.
I didn’t even see Damian—only the blade of his sword, coated in blood, as it sank into the side of Adams’s neck.
It was already over.