by T. S. Joyce
“What? I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to, Nicole. Run out into that sunlight so I can’t get to you and neither can he. Not until sundown. You can’t go back to the house.”
“I don’t even know where we are,” she whispered in horror. She couldn’t leave him burned. She couldn’t.
He winced, and a long hiss sounded from his lungs. “Nicole, you have to go! Now!”
“I can’t!”
“I can’t take your life! Do you understand? He’s going to make me take your life!”
“Then turn me!”
“Fuck…fuck…” His face was twisted up in pain. “Nicole, there isn’t enough time, and it won’t solve anything. He’ll stake you. Run to town. Hide somewhere he can’t get in.”
“But—”
“Please live.” There was such pleading on his face. Such desperation. “You have an hour.” He suddenly lurched forward and roared at her, his expression terrifying.
With a scream, she fell backward into the sunlight. He stopped, pacing the edge of the shadows, black eyes trained on her, an empty smile on his lips.
Evan wasn’t here anymore.
She watched the hollowness of his hungry gaze as her lungs burned for breath. This couldn’t be happening. He’d brought her here to set her free into the daylight, to trap himself into the shadows.
One hour.
She had one hour to find a safe place from not only Vlaric, but from the Winterset Coven under his control. She had to find a safe place from Evan.
That part broke her heart.
He’d become her safe place.
A sob clawed its way up her throat. She scrambled up and bolted from the barn. She hunched in fear when Evan’s roar echoed through the woods surrounding the barn.
There was a road so she followed it. She needed to find her way to town. One glance at the horizon, and she was horrified to find the sun had sunk so low in the sky. Too low. Time was so short. Think, think.
She veered into the tree line and searched frantically on the ground for a limb. It needed to be dry and stiff and easily fashioned into a stake.
Over there.
She bolted for a stick that had splintered into a sharp end and clutched it tightly in her hand. She jogged back to the overgrown dirt road, which was basically two tire tracks through knee-high grass, and that told her this place didn’t see humans often. As she jogged, she stripped the small branches off the limb and made it as smooth as possible. And holding it in her hand, she ran faster. God…dang! She should’ve paid more attention to her gym membership because her legs and lungs were already burning.
It hadn’t been one hour. She obsessed with thinking of the minutes that had passed since she had looked at the microwave in the Coven house for the time. It already felt like so long ago. God, what she wouldn’t give for her phone right now.
“Go into the woods.” The voice that whispered across her mind was so soothing, so convincing, she veered off from the tire track a few steps and stopped.
Nicole shook her head hard and ran back to the road. “Fuck you,” she said out loud.
Well, now she knew what he wanted. The monster wanted her in the woods.
That vamp was holed up somewhere, not asleep, playing puppet master with the minds of her friends. And now he was trying with her.
She’d never hated anything before, but seething fury roiled through her veins at the thought of that asshole. She could sink this stake deep into his heart, and she wouldn’t lose an ounce of sleep over killing a man.
“Go into the woods.”
She gasped and spun, crouched, ready, her stake poised to slash. “Where are you?” she called. The voice had been real. She knew it was real. She’d heard it.
No answer.
With a sob, she turned and started running again, determined to ignore anything else but getting to town.
“If you run into the woods, it’ll all be easy. You’ve been so fun, Nicole. My greatest hunt. You did so perfectly. You went to a coven for protection. A coven with shifters, and you gained their fealty. It was beautiful. Now I don’t have to hunt you. I get to hunt vampires and shifters. So perfect. You’ll be hard to top.”
She swallowed bile and fought the urge to retch into the dry grass.
The road wound this way and that through the trees. God, where was she? There weren’t any outbuildings or markers. Where had Evan brought her? Far enough away from the coven house that Sadey and Dawn’s snow leopards couldn’t track her down, but close enough that Evan didn’t burn completely.
Evan. Another sob escaped her, and twin tears made warm tracks down her cheeks. She was so scared, and he wasn’t here.
Run to town. That’s what he’d told her and that’s all she had to hold onto, so she sprinted, stake in hand, arms pumping with every stride. The sun was halfway down the horizon. How long had she been running? Ten minutes? Twenty?
Her legs were on fire.
“Then stop. Stop where you are and go into the woods. Everything will be okay. You’ll see.”
Yes. She should just rest for a few minutes against a tree.
No! She squeezed her eyes closed against the building headache and ran faster.
“Brave girl, running for your life. Running for your coven’s life. When you get tired, you know it’ll feel so good to have all this be over with. You and your coven can rest in peace. It’ll feel so good, Nicole Leanne.”
“Screw you for using my name, Vlaric Prickface Gofuckyourself,” she growled.
A crack of pain blasted through her head. She skidded to a stop and doubled over.
“I don’t like when you talk to me like that. I’m the one who is going to free you from your hollow life. Is that how you talk to your savior?”
Inhaling deep, she forced her legs forward, but it was like running in a dream in slow motion. Her legs felt so heavy; like her bones were made of concrete.
Evan!
“Go into the woods, Nicole Leanne. Just go and rest for a few minutes. You have plenty of time before nightfall. Plenty of time.”
Plenty of time.
Her arms grew too heavy to lift, and the stake fell from her hand as she stood there. Her body weighed too much, and she was too tired.
“Evan,” she cried, tears streaming down her face.
“Evan will be fine. He’s been waiting for this. For his final end for so long. We’re going to give him what he wants. Go into the woods, Nicole Leanne.”
Shoulders shaking with her sobbing, she focused all her energy into moving, but her body betrayed her. She was no longer in control of anything.
“Please,” she pleaded. “I just found Evan. I haven’t had enough time with him.”
“Please, please, please,” Vlaric’s wrenched-up voice echoed all around her. “Don’t go to pieces now. You actually had fire in you. Don’t disappoint me with your weakness.”
A blinding headache blasted through her mind, and she bit back a whimper at the pain. She didn’t want to go weak. Not for Vlaric’s game.
Her feet were moving on their own, and she watched in horror as her bare feet strode from the road and toward the tree line.
On and on she walked, trying and failing to fight every step, until she reached a lumbering, dying, spooky tree. The sun was disappearing on the horizon.
The glisten of metal caught her eye, and she bit her lip hard against a scream.
Sitting under the tree was a huge trap with sharp teeth, just waiting.
It was a trap like the one Evan had described from the night he was Turned.
“Yessssssss,” the monster hissed inside of her mind. “You’ve got it now. Evan has such vivid memories. I can pick through them all when he’s asleep. He loves you. Loves you deeply. I don’t know what love is, but I felt it through him. Uncomfortable for a man like me, I assure you.”
“You’re not a man,” she whispered breathlessly. “You’re a monster.”
“Good girl.”
Nicole looked down i
n horror as her feet began to move again on their own. There was no use in begging. She could feel Vlaric’s glee in her mind. There was no turning back, no getting out of the betrayal her mind and body were about to do to her.
The best she could hope for was to be strong in the end.
“Evan, I’m sorry,” she whispered as she stepped over the teeth of the trap and pressed the heel of her foot onto the trigger.
Chapter Eleven
Damn the cloudy night as she looked up and searched for Evan’s stars.
Warmth ran out of her broken leg as she panted in agony at what the bear trap was doing to her.
“Why is she holding her leg up like that?” a man’s voice asked softly.
“Because that vamp is fucking with her mind,” another voice answered.
Above her, a white snowy owl flew to the branches of the death tree and settled there. He flapped his massive wings a few times, languidly, as he caught his balance on the branch.
A snowy owl. Those shouldn’t exist here. Maybe this was what happened at the end. She was cold from her bones out, and the sky was dark now. Vlaric was coming for her.
She wished she could see the stars.
“Nicole?” the voice asked.
Where was it coming from? She couldn’t see anything but dark woods and the snowy owl staring down at her.
“This is going to hurt,” the voice told her.
Okay. It was time. She wanted to go well and not scream. Not give the satisfaction to Vlaric.
“Okay, but Weston, what if she wants to be a vamp?” the other voice asked. “Evan won’t be able to Turn her if we do this.”
“Look, Wyatt, I told them to stay near the house, and she didn’t. That’s where my dad’s vision has her surviving, but she ended up way the hell out here. In my vision, she dies human out in the woods. In his, she lives as a bear. Bite her and stop giving me shit. Vlaric will be here soon.”
“Evan?” she asked, confused. Her head was swimming, and she didn’t understand anything but the pain in her broken leg.
Nicole gasped at the roar of a monstrous animal that rattled the woods, but the motion yanked on her leg caught in the trap. She yelped in pain and turned her head to the side. There was a man with dark hair and bright green eyes, crouching down near her, and behind him, lumbering from the woods, was a massive grizzly bear.
“B-b-b….” she stammered, fear shooting more adrenaline into her shaken system. “Bear.”
The enormous predator picked up speed. He was going to get the dark-headed man, Weston. But no, Weston stepped easily out of the way, and the bear came for her.
Riddled with terror, Nicole screamed as the bear opened its enormous jaws and aimed for her. He ripped into her shoulder and shook her hard enough to rattle the metal trap that held her tethered to the earth. And then he released her and backed away, the fire in his eyes dying like the cooling embers of a campfire.
And that man…Weston…he came and knelt beside her and cradled her head. “You’re one of us now. Your Coven has been compromised, but you have the protection of the Bloodrunner Crew. My father says you’re important. I think you’re important, too.”
She didn’t understand. Didn’t understand any of this. All she understood was the unrelenting pain. “My leg,” she whispered in agony. “Can you open the trap?”
Weston looked at her leg and back to her face. “There’s no trap. You’re okay. That’s just what he wanted you to believe.”
What? No. There was a trap. She had stepped into the metal contraption and felt the teeth going into her skin and snapping her shin bone. She’d felt it. Felt it. Nicole looked down at her leg, and there it was, mangled and bloody, a horrific sight to see.
“There’s nothing there,” Weston said softly with such honesty in his eyes. “You’re going to be okay.”
The pain in her leg started fading away, only to be replaced by a burning in her shoulder. “There’s fire,” she whispered.
Weston scooped her up and carried her through the woods, and no trap or chain stopped her. “See?” he asked. “No trap.”
“No,” she murmured, holding her bloody shoulder. “I mean, there’s fire in my arm.”
Weston sat her on the ground again and looked back at the bear who was pacing between two trees, his eyes on her. “Well, that part is about to get worse.”
“What have you done?” she whispered.
The man smiled, and his eyes turned black. “We gave you a weapon.” He stood smoothly, and as he reached the peak of his stance, his clothes fell into a pile and a massive crow flew up into the trees.
I’m here, something whispered through her. And indeed, something was growing. Warmth was streaming out of her shoulder as she arched her back against the leaf-riddled forest floor. She screamed out at the pain, but her scream changed. It started human but then morphed into something different. Into something other. It turned into the roar of an animal.
The bear in the woods answered her roar and stood on two legs. God, he was so big. So big.
Something was growing inside of her fast. With a grunt, she rolled over and got up onto her hands and knees, and then the popping of her breaking bones filled her head. Nicole gritted her teeth against the agony, but in a few blinding seconds, it was over. Stunned, she sat there frozen on the dry leaves. Chugging breath, she locked eyes with the bear. He was pacing in the woods but then gave her his back, charged away into the shadows.
Every instinct in her told her to follow. Not because some monster vampire was controlling her mind, but because she wanted to. That bear was safety.
She bolted after him, but stumbled hard and hit the earth. Stunned, she righted and looked down at herself. Where her hands should’ve been gripping tufts of grass, only massive paws with long, curved black claws existed.
What the fuck? Nicole backed away, but the paws followed.
This was her. This was her! This was her body!
Filled with shock, she looked back to the woods where the bear had gone.
We gave you a weapon.
If she could smile in this form, she would’ve. She was the weapon now.
Above her, bats filled the air.
Bring it, motherfucker. I’m going to rip your limbs off one by one.
Nicole stood and ran a few steps. When she stayed upright, she ran a few more, faster. Still upright. Okay, body, let’s see what you can do.
She roared again and bolted for the shadows where the bear—Wyatt, Weston had called him—had disappeared. Faster and faster she ran, ducking and dodging trees easily, her night vision allowing her to see every single leaf and limb that reached for her.
Movement above her dragged her attention upward, but it was only a raven and snowy owl coasting the air currents, keeping pace with her.
“What the fuck have you done?” Vlaric’s voice bellowed in her head.
It should not have struck her as funny, but his anger settled the last of Nicole’s fear. “Ha ha, dipshit. I ruined your game.”
A deafening roar sounded through the woods. “I’m going to kill you, bitch.”
“Gotta catch me first.”
Nicole pushed her legs harder because she could see Wyatt up ahead. He was leading her back toward the coven house. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. Her entire sense of direction was different in this body. Weston wanted her near the house. She didn’t know why, but her instincts said to trust the raven shifter. If he wanted her dead, he could’ve killed her instead of ordering Wyatt to change her.
Vlaric had the minds of the coven under his control, but he didn’t control the Bloodrunners. Not yet at least, and that told her something important. His power had limits.
A tight ball of bats gathered above her and swooped down to earth toward her. Here we go.
She could see him! She could see him in this body. Could see his monster outline, his wings, his slimy, smooth skin. He was diving at her, but instead of running faster, she bunched her muscles and leapt up into the air a
t him, wrapped her arms around him, and slammed them both down to earth. She sank her teeth into his arm as his fangs hit her neck. She twisted and slammed him sideways into a tree.
Weston and the owl were divebombing him on the ground, so she took off after the bear again. She was supposed to go to the coven house. Whatever Weston’s vision had been, it had scared him, and if he was trying to change her fate? She was in.
This wasn’t just a fight for her life. It was a fight to spend a life with Evan.
That thought made her push her legs harder. The crow and the snowy owl were flying beside her, sailing low, dodging foliage through the trees.
Up ahead, the bear roared, and Nicole could see it. Vlaric was latched onto Wyatt’s back, his claws and teeth sunken deep into his hide.
Fury possessed her, consumed her, lit her on fire, and she didn’t think or slow. She pushed herself and leapt through the air, hit that battle hard, and ripped the vampire off him. She pushed him into the dirt and pinned him down with one claw, and then she ripped one of his disgusting, tattered wings off his shoulder blade with her teeth.
Fueled with vengeance, she spit the twitching thing out and reveled in the creature’s screaming. He disappeared into a cloud of purple smoke, but she was done. She didn’t care about dragging this war out or making sure Weston’s vision came to fruition. She was in charge of her own fate.
With a snarl, she ran after the purple smoke and screaming bats, and above her, the sky moved.
That’s all she could think to describe it. The clouds gave way to a swarm of bats.
Her coven was here.
Evan was here.
She could feel him.
Vlaric couldn’t fly. He was injured, and his smoke twitched this way and that but didn’t gain altitude. He stayed in reach, and something dark inside of Nicole smiled.
A screech sounded from the monster, like nails on a chalkboard, and just as she reached him, just as she opened her jaws to latch onto him and destroy him, he disappeared.
And then…she could feel him behind her, but it was too late for her to turn and defend her neck. Shit!