by Tanith Frost
“Gift,” Lachlan snarls, and draws a gun from behind his back. “The power was the same. The life was the same. The death should have sealed it.”
“No. You took by force what was freely given to me.” I shake my head slowly. “You’ve gained so much power through intimidation and fear. They can buy you loyalty, even respect, but they’re as fragile as the void is in your clan. Impressive, even terrifying when untested. But you can’t force what Silas gave me.” My fire rises again, strengthened by the recent proximity of so many werewolves—creatures who instinctively understand that their strength comes from unity.
“Perhaps not,” Lachlan says thoughtfully. “I suppose I was wrong about you. You weren’t destined for greatness. You failed your way into it. You were a mistake.” He raises the gun. “One I’ll happily remedy.”
Of course he will, and would even if there wasn’t already so much bad blood between us. If he can’t have what I have, he’ll destroy me so no one will.
I roll to my left, away from the water, as the gun goes off. He anticipated it, if not the speed with which I’d move. The bullet grazes my leg, sending a fresh shot of pain through my body, searing my skin as silver passes through, dimming my connection to the void for a moment. If he gets another shot and the bullet lodges in my body, he’ll have the advantage.
For now, it might still be mine.
My roll continues and carries me to my feet. I push off, slipping a little on the slimy rock, and throw myself at him, letting my fire burn bright in the hopes that it will weaken him. He swings an arm, catching me in the chest, tossing me into the freezing water of the ocean. It’s shallow enough that I can stand, but too deep for me to run effectively. He takes aim again as I scramble away, and it’s only by stopping short and darting backward that I avoid taking a shot to the head.
The gun clicks softly as he pulls the trigger again, and he tosses it into the waves.
“Garbage,” he mutters as he pulls a knife with a curved blade from his boot. “Relying on anyone else’s power is always a mistake. I suppose that goes for technology, as well.” He steps closer, grinning, as I clamber onto the rocks. “And what good is your power now that I’m accustomed to fire, Aviva? When I’ve taken life, as is my nature and my right as a hunter, while you’ve been fed feeble scraps by a mistress too weak and uncertain to take it all for herself?” He lashes out, his blade cutting deep into my arm as I throw myself out of his reach.
He is faster. Stronger. And fire can do nothing for me now.
I once had to make a choice between strengthening Miranda and attempting to undermine her enemy. I believed then—and still believe—that affirming what I wanted was better than tearing down what I hated. But I’m out of options now, standing alone against an enemy who would laugh in my face if he knew I’d consider letting ideas like right and wrong stand in my way.
We are vampires, he’d have told me when we were on better terms. We claim our power. We take what is ours by whatever means necessary.
He stalks toward me, fangs bared, radiating malice and his desire to see me suffer.
Fuck morality. I want to see him suffer, too, and I still have one weapon at my disposal. I focus on the magic I still feel faintly around us, trying to call it to me as I did the night I broke into Viktor’s house, but I can’t catch hold of it. It slips from my grasp and fades away.
Imogen’s curse is protecting me from the ill-effects, but it’s cut off this part of the connection, too. I can’t have it both ways.
My stomach turns as I consider my options. Even with Imogen’s symbol, I felt terror pressing around me at the new rift. Without it, I might have lost my mind entirely. But that power is there, waiting. It weakened our enemies. We’re so close, and Lachlan has no defence against it.
All I have to do is find the connection.
I raise my knife, which looks pitifully inadequate compared to his. Lachlan chuckles. “Good luck, Aviva.”
“I don’t need luck.” I roll my sleeve up, both hands trembling. I’m here because a werewolf sacrificed himself for me. I won’t offer less than that back to his kind, or to my own, or to the humans and creatures and powers that will suffer if Lachlan wins tonight. “I failed my way to greatness.”
I brace myself and cut deep into my flesh, carving away skin and ink, slicing away Imogen’s symbol, exposing myself to the pain I once inflicted on an enemy in order to break the power of her magical protections. It worked then.
It works now.
I let out a scream as I slash and carve at my skin, using the pain to keep me focused enough to get the job done, relishing the clarity it brings before blood and skin fall to the ground, leaving me exposed. Apprehension rises, followed by fear, but they’re bearable.
… Until I call to it, opening myself to magic, willing it to come nearer just as the humans in a nearby church opened themselves and unknowingly called light to them. But this is far more difficult. They would have felt comfort, joy, acceptance, every warm thing that comes with the connection I lost when I died. Mine brings terror that echoes its screams through my mind, drowning everything else out. Magic floods the beach, tossing my mind in its current until I’m drowning in it. All I want to do is swim for the surface, but I can’t.
Lachlan can’t feel the magic, but he feels the effects. “No!” he screams, and lashes out at me. I stumble away, only managing the dodge because he’s slowed so drastically.
The void in him is so strong, so pure… and so fragile when faced with an unfamiliar threat.
The screams continue. Bright lights flash at the edges of my vision, leaving ghostly images behind—the men I beat up in an alley, the first one I killed, all gaping at me with terror-filled eyes. Helena Slade, wandering closer with a stake through her heart. The humans I fed from more recently, one willingly, one whose suffering and emotional pain made him a meal I can’t help remembering fondly even as he reaches for my throat.
They’re illusions, hallucinations brought on by my own terror, but they seem terribly real.
The rocks seem to shift under my feet, and I stumble again. The stars swirl overhead.
I don’t know how much longer I can hold on, but there’s no sign of the others yet. Lachlan’s weakness will mean nothing if someone doesn’t finish him now.
I can’t think. Can’t make a decision. Lachlan’s face morphs into that of a green-skinned monster, its skin falling from its skull in chunks, its mouth full of knife-like fangs. I’m losing my grip.
But somewhere below rational thought lies instinct—that thing I’ve learned to rely on when reason fails me. Instinct and training. I let go of my iron-tight hold on my body’s responses and allow it to move, responding to Lachlan’s attacks, blocking and countering. My muscles remember battles I’ve fought before, whether through training under an unforgiving instructor or from scrapes I’ve gotten myself out of no matter how narrow my escape. I feel my body ducking, darting, weaving, throwing kicks and punches that Lachlan’s too slow to see coming. The ground beneath my feet changes—we’re moving away from the water.
The monster’s eyes glow red, and his hatred reaches out for me, visible as tentacles that spring from his back, wrapping around my arms and my chest.
Hatred. But not power. I can’t feel that in him at all over the magical energy that moves around us, carried from the rift, fresh from another world.
Over the sounds of the terror in my mind, I hear other screams—not those of a rational being in the throes of battle, but of a wounded and frightened animal.
It takes me a second to understand that they’re coming from me.
The monster—Lachlan—falls, and I drop on top of him, bring the handle of my knife down against his temple, and daze him for a moment. Seemingly without direction from me, my hands tug at the front of his armour, hauling up and releasing the velcro straps beneath. I look around, fighting to see past the lights and afterimages, until I spot what I’m looking for.
Driftwood, smoothed and worn into a long
stick.
Lachlan bucks beneath me as I reach for it. I scream again and bring it down, still without conscious planning, against his head, snapping it in half, leaving two jagged, pointed ends.
He’s not a monster now. Not in appearance, anyway. His own handsome, broken face has been restored, though the rocks behind him swirl red and molten as the stench of brimstone fills the air.
“I thought you believed in mercy,” he whispers, eyes wide.
“I do,” I gasp back, fighting for every word. “But you don’t. I’d hate to disappoint you.”
He tries to twist away, and I call on magic again to keep him weak as I drive the wood through a heart that hasn’t beaten in centuries. His screams join my own, but quickly fade. His black eyes pale to chocolate, then chestnut, then the milky brown of weak tea. His skin wrinkles, his hair whitens.
I roll off of him and crawl away, willing the magic to leave. I should be able to do it as a human can reject the light. It’s a connection, not a part of me. I can turn it away.
But the magic doesn’t leave.
I crawl toward the ocean, then collapse on my stomach, unable to keep moving on limbs that are shaking too hard to hold me up. I squeeze my eyes closed and press my hands to my ears, but the images and sounds won’t stop—red lights now, then green and blue, clanging as if I’m trapped in the massive bell of an old church tower.
And the screams continue.
I can’t close it off. Can’t fight it. When I open my eyes, there’s nothing but darkness.
I pull myself into a tight ball as footsteps clatter across the loose stones. Strong hands grip my shoulders, trying to force me onto my back. More monsters—drooling, snapping, all fangs and claws and ragged wings.
I scream and lash out, making stabbing motions though I think I’ve lost my knife. Someone grips my injured arm tight.
“Get her farther from the rift!”
A familiar voice. A girl.
I try to stop fighting. I can’t. Any control I had over my body is gone. It knows only this infinite and bottomless chasm of terror I’ve thrown myself into.
“Hold on.” Another familiar voice. I want to know this one. I think it’s a good one. But I’m still falling. Losing my hold on that, too.
Bright pain erupts in the exposed muscle of my forearm. Then my face. Something is tearing at me. A monster.
“Stop her!”
Too many voices. Too much pain.
“Restrain her—come on, carry her. Move, now!”
The pain stops. Everything stops. I can’t feel my body. Can’t feel the void.
The chasm isn’t bottomless. This is what lies at the bottom. Nothingness. Oblivion.
I never thought I’d welcome it, but I do.
There are worse things than the end.
34
First, there is nothing.
Then, suddenly, there is everything: a rush of air into lungs I’d swear didn’t exist before this. Heavy eyelids opening, the grey canvas of a peaked roof, the soft glow of a lantern I feel I’ve seen before, though there is no before.
Is there?
Wetness on my temples, tears leaking from my eyes. Another breath—not one that I need, but one that I want. This movement assures me that though I am not alive, I am. And that’s enough.
Cold. I’m cold. But blankets cocoon me, and the lantern’s light is warm on my face.
My next breath comes out as a sob.
Movement—a rustling noise. Feathers. A shadow passes between me and the light. I turn my head slowly, testing muscles that seem as new as everything else. Wings, black as midnight, folded neatly.
Gideon.
I open my mouth, and pain radiates from my jaw through my head. Now that I’ve felt that, other pains return—my leg, my ribs, a pounding ache in my left forearm. Memories creep back with the pain.
“Gideon,” I whisper. He crouches beside me. “You… you saved me? Again?”
“Looks like it.”
My arm is impossibly heavy as I free it from the blankets and reach up clumsily to touch the scar on my torso, but there’s no fresh pain there. “How? You said you couldn’t…”
His finely shaped lips curve into a hint of a smile.
Another shadow comes closer. Gideon leans back to let me see Daniel, who sits on the ground next to me and rolls up his sleeve to reveal a greyish symbol on his skin—not the tight, temporary dots of Imogen’s curses, nothing that was placed by human hands.
It’s the same pattern that marks me beneath my ribs.
My chest tightens in a hard spasm.
“You owed me more than you’ll ever be able to pay off,” Gideon says softly, though entirely without remorse. “Even if you had been able to negotiate, even if I’d wanted to, I had no way of offering you more.”
“So he accepted my offer, instead,” Daniel says. He smooths my hair back from my face and lets his fingers rest against my cheek.
I look more closely at the mark. It’s blessedly faint—lighter than mine was even after my first deal with Gideon.
“If we might have a moment?” Gideon says.
“Of course.” Daniel rolls his sleeve down. “I should tell the others she’s awake.”
Gideon settles himself on the floor next to the lamp as Daniel slips out of the tent. I want to ask about the others—who survived, who I’ll have to mourn—but I don’t have the energy.
“You didn’t charge him much,” I say, instead. “It can’t have been easy for you to bring me back from… wherever I went.”
“You were gone,” he says gently. “Not in body, but your mind was—well. Your body would have followed in short order even if they’d managed to keep you from clawing yourself apart, which seemed to be your intention.” A frown creases his brow, then disappears. “You did a foolish thing.”
“One more to add to the list.” I arch my body to shift my weight against the hard ground beneath me, wincing as spasms tighten the already stiff muscles of my back. Void flows through me, strengthened by fire. “I guess Daniel really is a good negotiator.”
Gideon chuckles. “He is, and perhaps more determined than you were to keep his existence separate from mine. I was disappointed by how faint the mark turned out, but I suppose my own desires factored into that. A shame, but I’ll use him well while I’ve got him.”
“I have no doubt. I’m sure it was hard for him no matter how little he owes you.”
“You might be surprised how easy it was in the end.”
I want to ask more, but the tent flap flies open, letting in faint, near-sunrise light that turns my stomach and sends me dangerously close to sleep. Gideon vanishes without another word.
It doesn’t matter. I have no doubt I’ll see him again soon enough.
Taggryn flops down beside me and pulls the blanket over himself, smoothing it out to cover us both.
“Welcome back,” he mutters. His breathing slows and deepens.
Imogen follows a second later. “You’re okay with him here?”
It takes a few seconds for me to understand what she’s asking. “Yeah,” I say only now thinking to be surprised by it. I feel Taggryn’s magic, but it’s like it used to be—distant, a thing outside of myself. I sense it more clearly when I focus on it, but it doesn’t grow stronger. “Did you do another symbol or something?”
“No.” She sits next to Taggryn. “He—the fellow who brought you back—said something about your connection to magic being shattered. Is that… it’s okay, right?”
“It’s fine,” I say though I’m surprised to find I feel a little disappointed. Maybe a part of me hoped it would be like fire—a curse until I truly accepted it, at which point pain would be followed by unimagined benefit. But maybe this is better. Lachlan was right about one thing—I didn’t earn my fire. My connection to magic showed that greater things may be possible for me, but I’m not ready for that kind of power.
Not yet. But I will learn and grow stronger. I will become worthy of these gifts, someday.
“Is he okay?” I ask Imogen.
She smiles down at Taggryn. “He’s fine. Opening the rift took a lot out of him. He said he wanted to recover before he went home, but I think he really just wanted to stick around to make sure you were going to make it.”
Taggryn heaves a sigh and rolls over, throwing a bandaged arm over me, and begins to snore softly.
“Odette would have done it better,” Imogen says. “More efficiently, anyway.”
“She’d be proud of you.” The words don’t feel like a lie, but Imogen wrinkles her nose.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m proud of myself, and I’m going to keep working at all of this stuff. She gave me a good start on it. Someday I’ll really do her proud.”
“I have no doubt.”
The tent flap opens again, and Daniel enters. “Can the vampires have a turn?”
Imogen shakes Taggryn awake. He growls and burrows deeper under the blankets.
“Come on, Taggryn,” she says. “Morning’s coming, and we still have a car. Have I ever told you about breakfast sandwiches?”
Taggryn rises, still grumbling, and follows her out.
Imogen holds the flap open as she leaves, and Hannabelle enters on crutches, her prosthetic leg gone. I wait, but there’s no one else.
I push myself up on my elbows in spite of the fresh pain it brings. “Please tell me there are more of you left. Not that I’m not overjoyed to see you both, but—”
Hannabelle smiles gently and eases herself to the ground with a hand from Daniel. “Don’t worry. We had some casualties, but it’s nothing like as bad as it could have been. The others have gone ahead to the city to liberate the captives. Miranda insisted that Daniel and I stay until you woke, but we’ll follow tonight.”
“Do they think the prisoners are all right?”
“We hope so,” Daniel says. He looks as though he’d like to be there with them, but I’m glad Miranda made him stay.
“Edwin?” I ask.
“He’s fine. And Jia.” Hannabelle looks down at her hands, which she’s folded in her lap. “I suppose you wouldn’t know most of those we lost. Crawley’s gone, though. And Clark.” She swallows hard. “No one even saw what happened to him. One minute he was there, protecting Miranda’s back, and then…”