by S. W. Clarke
“Oh, I did.” He smiled, white teeth gleaming in the floodlights. “You’ve asked me to let the descendants go. And I will.”
I glanced toward the crosses, stepping forward. “So do it.”
“I’m afraid that cannot happen quite yet.” He let out something close to a lovelorn sigh as he approached. “You are more beautiful than I remembered. Forgive me, snowdrop—mortality does things to the mind.”
Snowdrop.
That flower again.
He and I had come to within five feet of one another—striking range. But something held my hand. I observed him; he was still taller than me by most of a foot, but he wasn’t so pretty and evergreen as he had been that night five years ago.
He was older. Five years older. White had snuck its way onto his temples.
Behind him, the chanting went on. It had grown in volume and intensity. Swaying had commenced, and whatever lay on the ground had grown brighter.
“What are you doing to these people?” I breathed.
His good eye was practically incandescent. “I am returning our immortality to us.”
“Us?”
“Yes, snowdrop.” He stepped to within four feet. “To me, and to you.”
A strange, invisible brew swirled around him. He wasn’t a vampire anymore, but he had some odd power over me as he had that night.
Of course, that night hadn’t followed five years of cultivated rage.
I swung the whip out as my chest filled with heat. “Numquam obliviscar. Numquam propitius eris.”
He would never become immortal; not if I killed him first.
Chapter 22
He sidestepped as I swung the whip at him. It lashed through the air, and he smiled.
“It has been so very long since I’ve heard Latin. You speak it beautifully.”
I bit back a curse. I made to swing overhead and take out his other eye, but an enormous hand snaked out from the darkness and gripped my arm.
One of his lackeys—a troll some eight feet tall—had materialized from nowhere. He looked like an uglier, slightly smaller version of a giant, his dark hair wild in the wind.
And he had a good hold on me. I couldn’t move in his grip.
I leaned back, aimed a kick at the troll’s shin as I’d done with Erik. But when my boot connected, it bounced right off his leg. And he didn’t even wince.
I reached to my belt for Thelma, but a second hand gripped my other arm. Behind me, another lackey—this one just a regular old ex-vampire—solidified his hold on my arm.
I tried to lean in with a headbutt, but the troll’s grip held firm. I only managed a strange huffing, my head meeting nothing but air.
GoneGodDamn it, where was my backup?
Valdis stepped close, examining me. “Strange. I remember you being more strategic than this.”
I scoffed. “You don’t know a damned thing about me.”
This amused him. “I know more than you realize, and less than I’d like to.” He glanced to the lackeys. “Keep her snug and safe until it’s done.”
Valdis turned back toward the ritual. Because that was what it clearly was—a ritual. Satanic, probably, and one which meant nothing good for the folks hung on those crosses.
The two lackeys lifted me bodily off the ground, carrying me between them toward the proceedings. I struggled, kicking the air and raising noise to the sky. I yelled every nasty thing that came to mind, peppered with calls for a certain houri.
No dice.
Where in the Empty Hell—
But then I heard it.
A growl in the sky.
It wasn’t loud—not with all the wind and the noise coming from the ex-vampires in front of me. But it was a noise I’d recognize anywhere, because I loved that sound.
It was the sound of my dragon.
My eyes rose, and I caught a glimpse of a shadow across the moon. In the next second, a crack sounded over the wind, and the whole roof vibrated as he landed on the raised edge.
Beyond, the constellation of New York City lights branded the horizon. But I only had eyes for him. Percy perched in shadow, but I could still see the flames burning in his open mouth.
He wasn’t supposed to attack anyone. But then, you never could predict a dragon.
The fire poured out of him, turning darkness to light. If the Scarred nearest him hadn’t backed away, they would have gotten crisped.
But that wasn’t the part that made me happiest.
It was the ululation that cut through everything else like a knife through butter. Off my dragon’s back leapt a seven-foot-tall warrior, landing in a crouch with her hair hanging around her face.
In the semidarkness, her red nails shone with the promise of blood.
“I am Seleema Nourra, Bint Al-Uzza, Arousa-Franklin,” she said in a low voice, “and I have come to relieve you of your evil desires.”
She rose as Percy took to the air, crossed her hands in front of her chest and began a slow approach. By now, all chanting had died away—everyone’s attention was on Seleema.
Bless her pretty houri heart. With a yell, I leaned into the distracted troll and brought both feet up for a kick into my other captor’s sciatic nerve. I must have hit the right spot, because his leg crumpled beneath him.
As he fell, I yanked my left arm free, reached behind me for Thelma. I yanked her free, swept her around and cracked the troll right across the bridge of his nose.
This troll might be tough, but I’d modded Thelma with a spiked tip. Only dragon hide could stand up against her bite.
The troll roared, blood streaking across his face, and just like that, I tugged free.
I knelt and grabbed Louise in my right hand. Now it was on.
The troll threw a backhand at me, but I skipped out of his range. I swung Louise over my head, struck the troll in the sensitive center of his left ear. She snuck out like an angry adder, sank her fangs in and drew back.
My other captor had gotten back up, but I was ready for him. He lunged on unsteady feet, and I only had to sidestep and send Thelma after him, spanking him hard on the ass.
That one would smart for weeks.
Another ululation sounded behind me.
Seleema. She might need me.
I spun, found the houri fighting two ex-vampires at the same time. Or, I should say, she had landed atop one and slammed the palm of one hand onto his chest. And from that chest arose the specter of that man, almost iridescent and open-mouthed under the floodlights. He sailed into Seleema’s own chest, which expanded, her eyes fluttering a moment.
And the man himself? He might have been dead. He certainly wasn’t moving.
Her eyes opened, and she stood, pitched forward toward her next attacker. Just before they met, she spun in place, leg rising high into the air. Her boot met his face, and his face met the cement.
Yeah, no—she didn’t need me.
The glint of light caught my eye. The chanting hadn’t resumed, but whatever ritual had been taking place hadn’t ever stopped. Valdis was now approaching the glowing spot on the ground, kneeling. Behind him, those elite Scarred who had stood around the crosses now joined hands.
And something bad was happening to Annabelle and the others. Real bad. How did I know?
Well, they’d all started screaming.
↔
From his kneel on the ground, Valdis murmured something. I couldn’t make out all the words, but as he picked up the glowing object with both hands, I did catch a few of them.
“Hear him, my descendants.”
Hear who? And how? They were all stone deaf.
Well, I didn’t suppose it mattered. Because either way, I was going in. With a whistle to Seleema, I started forward. I was going to Red Rover my way right through that group of ex-vamps around Valdis, and I didn’t expect it would be a challenge—they were all thin and pasty, and they weren’t looking my way, anyway.
On my left, Seleema glanced up, a man’s head and neck in the grip of her arm. She surged to
her feet, following my lead.
As I got closer, Valdis lifted the object high over his head, its gleaming whiteness almost too bright to look at directly. He lowered it, affixing a chain around his neck, until the object settled at his breastbone.
An amulet. Another GoneGodDamn amulet.
The wind had kicked up a few notches beyond what it had been all night. It carried Annabelle’s hair around her face like a dervish, pulling toward Valdis.
But the strange part was, the wind was pulling my hair in the opposite direction. And the jackets of the people standing around him were all blowing toward the crosses.
The only commonality? Everything was pulling toward him.
He was the center of it all. He was a vortex.
Valdis was no longer speaking English. It sounded like … Hindu? As he did, he raised his face, palms falling away as though he were about to receive some divine benediction. But nothing about this night was divine.
“Tara,” Seleema called out. She pointed up into the sky.
I’d expected to see Percy, but it most certainly wasn’t my dragon.
There was, however, something floating in the sky above the roof—a shadow so dark it made the night sky look blue.
It was descending straight over us.
The shadow wasn’t terribly large—not even as big as Percy. But it was the darkest thing I’d ever laid eyes on. It was what I’d imagine Seleema would see if she were to look into the soul of the vilest, most wretched person who ever lived.
And it was coming—slowly, but inexorably—down.
I broke from a jog into a sprint. The brightness swelled around Valdis, and the screaming intensified into a miasma of light and sound.
And, for one shutter-stop moment, I stood somewhere else. Some time else. Was it a vision? A peek into his soul? I didn’t know.
But I knew I was looking at him as a vampire. He stood in a small bedroom with a baby in his arms, and he wept. “What if she’s not immortal?” he said, staring down at the child. She was a perfect, beautiful baby. “I could not bear such a thing. How would I live with her death?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off.
His eyes lifted to mine, full of fire and intention. “She must live forever. Just as I will. Just as—”
I didn’t hear the rest. My own scream surged through the moment, just as I broke through the joined hands of the Scarred surrounding their master.
I knew now what Valdis was doing.
Elvarish Drow had given me all the pieces to the puzzle. Everything had been there, in his papers. I only needed to read closely, to apply what came before to what I was seeing now.
Almost a thousand years ago, Valdis’s wife, Mariana, had died. He’d spent hundreds of years trying to bring her soul back from Heaven, because he could not bear the loss of her.
He could not bear her death—that his wife should not live on.
She must live forever. Just as I will.
Valdis would not live forever. Not any longer. Not after the gods left.
It wasn’t just about rebirth for Mariana. He wasn’t trying to bring her soul back into the world any longer—he had already accomplished that, according to Drow.
Now? He was finally regaining his own immortality. His vampirism.
And those people on the crosses—the “descendants”—were the inheritors of his rare gene. The same gene that had allowed him to become the first vampire.
That was why he’d taken Annabelle. That was why she had been brought here.
He needed her life force to allow the demon to rejoin with his body.
So I would do what I needed to do. I would save Annabelle. And then I would kill that man while he could still bleed.
I rushed into the blinding light, my whips racing out ahead of me. On my left, Seleema went for the circle of hand-holding Scarred. And above us, that thing cast its dark and portentous shadow over all of us. It was close now—too close.
But before I could get to Valdis, something rocketed in out of the darkness. It sounded like one of those screaming firecrackers, and it crashed right there in front of me.
No, I thought as the light rippled, that wasn’t supposed to happen.
That wasn’t part of Valdis’s plan. It wasn’t part of mine, either.
This was outside interference.
Erik.
Outside the elevator, he’d told me the World Army’s second priority: “Manage the illegal use of magic and magical items. Especially if they threaten the safety of a human being.”
I’d scoffed. “You memorized that?”
He’d tapped the side of his head. “Don’t pretend like it’s a bad thing to have a good memory.”
GoneGodDamn World Army. GoneGodDamn Norwegian.
I should never have let him get involved.
What happened next happened faster than I could process.
A wave of force pushed back against me, and I was thrown high into the air. The roof’s edge wasn’t more than six feet from where I stood, and I was so close to the center of the blast that I sailed right up and over it like one of those high divers.
Except I wasn’t jumping fifty feet into a pool. I was fifty-seven stories into the sky.
And let me tell you, falling from that high up, you’ll never appreciate the moon and stars so well. Because it’s probably your last sight, I thought as the roof disappeared.
And then, like that, I was freefalling.
Chapter 23
The first time I fell from a trapeze, I was four. And I was terrified in the way only a four-year-old can be.
Mortally so.
I’d believed, in the moment I lost my grip on the bar, I was falling to my death. And even when I hit the end of the rope attached to the safety harness, it tugged my gut in toward my spine so hard I thought I would lose my lunch.
And I’d cried. Oh, how I’d cried.
If it had been up to my mother, I would have been done for the day. But it wasn’t up to her—it was my father watching over me.
And my father did things differently.
He reeled me onto the opposite platform, where we stood together. “Go again.” His voice lay somewhere between the realms of fatherly kindness and severity.
I’d clutched my body with both arms wrapped tight. “No, Daddy. I can’t.”
“Go again.” This time, he was closer to severity.
I stood in place on the platform, refusing and refusing again.
He knelt down, wiped my hair from my face and stared at me through my blurred vision. “Are you afraid of the trapeze?”
I nodded, hiccuping through my sobs.
“Then you need to go again. Today.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a chance—a good one—that if you stop right here, your only memory of this day will be the time you fell from the trapeze and thought you would die.” He paused, setting both hands on my cheeks. “And you will always carry that fear in you, as small as it might be. But if you go again, you may very well remember this as the day you felt that fear and faced it.”
In fact, he had been wrong.
I’d gone again. I had felt that fear, and I had faced it. I went on to swing on the trapeze—fearlessly, in the end—thousands of times. But I hadn’t remembered it in either of those ways—not the fear of death, or the conquering of it.
I remembered it as the day my father took my face in both his hands and taught me the first lesson I could remember learning. It was still the most important lesson of my life.
Don’t fear death. Face it.
Later, I would come to understand why it was important not to fear death. Fear, as the saying goes, is the mind-killer. The small death.
It’s in facing death we master it. We can retain our humanity.
We can reach for the GoneGodDamn whistle around our neck.
As I fell, my braid whipping up past my face in a straight golden line, something else sailed out from under my shirt and twinkled in the moon
light as it struggled against the end of the chain on my neck.
The metal whistle. Percy’s whistle.
The building raced by, lights winking in and out of my peripheral vision as I grabbed the whistle and set it to my lips. With all the air rushing past my ears and compacting my back, I couldn’t even tell if I was blowing into it.
Apparently I was.
Because a second later, a crack sounded in the sky. Above me, a form sailed over the edge of the roof, wings tucking hard to its sides as it arrowed straight down toward me.
I swallowed, gritting my teeth for the inevitable.
It was never fun looking down.
He blew past me, and as he did, I rolled my body over in the air. Below me, the city rose like a promise, lights and movement growing almost faster than my eyes could process.
As much as I could, I flatted myself against the forces of gravity, spreading my body wide to slow my descent.
Percy continued some thirty feet before his wings tented, snapping wide and catching the wind like magic. He rose up—or, I should say, I kept falling at the same pace as he slowed down—and …
I missed him.
“Shit!” I yelled as I sailed right past.
He swooped down, foreclaws extended. I grabbed at one of his legs with both hands, missing every time.
I could tell we were getting close to the street, because I could hear engines. Mufflers. Honking.
I kept grabbing for him until finally—finally!—I got a hand around his right leg. My other hand followed until I was dangling with a two-handed grip.
He pulled up, testing all my upper-body strength as he slowed our descent and we came to a stop in midair.
I glanced down; we were about thirty feet over the street.
“I was coming before you blew the whistle,” Percy said as I climbed up his leg and onto his back. “I just wanted you to know that.”
Ferris’s new saddle greeted me with smooth leather, and I secured the straps around my thighs. My breathing was taking longer than usual to slow down. “I know you were.”