by Elena Lawson
“Ethan!” I called, blocking a blow from the vamp and feinting to the left as he went right. I jumped to my feet and nailed a good, hard kick to his abdomen. “Blake!”
Someone needed to help Frost. He wouldn’t be able to take three at once.
I was distracted and unable to keep focus as the vampire cursed and retaliated with a kick of his own. The air whooshed from my lungs and I strained to get it back, hunched over and sputtering.
A knee came up and before I could block, it slammed into my face. A throbbing pressure built behind my eyes and dark stars danced in my vision. A gush of blood rushed from my nose and I choked on the hot, metallic taste, coughing as I struggled to shake off the stun.
The vampire had his hand reeled back to strike, his long fangs bared and brown eyes wild. This time, I was faster, I ducked and rolled, coming up on all fours a few feet away before I lunged for his throat. I dragged my sharp nails over his jugular, effectively tearing out his throat. My fingers slipped over the polished metal stake as I drew it from its holster—my last available weapon before I would need to start getting really fucking creative.
As the poor bastard clawed at his ragged neck, I rammed it into his chest. I didn’t wait to make sure he was dead, I withdrew the bit of metal and whirled, ready to go to Frost’s aid, my muscle burning with the urge to run.
Instead I was face to face with another vampire. This one tall and broad. I shivered as that otherworldly feeling clawed up my spine and made my insides tremble. With the flames to his back, his face was cast in shadow, but I recognized that long hair, pulled back in the style he always wore it. I saw the flicker of firelight cross his brown eye, turning it blazing amber before it lit his blue one with flecks of gold.
“That’s quite enough, I think,” he said and there was a note of something in his voice I hadn’t heard before.
“Azrael—” I began, but the vampire tsked me and I craned my neck back to get a better look at him, my stomach dropping to my toes.
Raphael shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
I tore my eyes from his and without missing a beat, I struck out, trying and failing to catch him by surprise.
He caught my arm mid-strike, jarring me to a rough stop before he crushed the bones in my arm, forcing me to drop the stake. I cried out as splintering agony scattered through my nerve-endings like buckshot. My stomach roiled and I clenched my jaw to keep my head.
When he let go, I clutched my arm to my chest, breaths sawing in and out through the tiny gaps in my clenched teeth. A high pitched sound assaulted my ears and it took me a moment to realize the sound was coming from me.
Raphael grinned down at me, his fangs flashing in the orange glow. “A valiant effort, Miss. Ward, but I’m afraid your skills are of no use here.”
I backed away a step, then another. He advanced slowly, enjoying himself. Taking his time.
This kind of monster liked to play with his food, I realized. If I could just keep him talking, maybe I could…
“It’s no use,” he chuckled, the sound throaty, with a bass-like tempo that I could feel reverberating in my chest.
Fuck, I forgot he could read my thoughts. Damn.
I was even more fucked than I thought.
Raphael nodded as though agreeing with me, still advancing as I backed towards the fire truck still fifteen feet away. If I could…
I stopped the thought, trying to conceal it from him.
“Why don’t you just give up now and save us both some time. Save yourself some hurt pride, hmmm?” he crooned.
What?
As I backed towards the fire truck and away from the scorching heat of the burning building in front of me, I saw Blake atop the roof. He was just as bad off as Frost was. There were two attacking him. One landed a hard hit to his ribs and I saw him buckle from it. A third blood sucker was scaling the wall at the opposite end of the street, going to join the fight.
Frost was barely hanging on. His ankle was bent at an odd angle and he limped as he fought—keeping the three still attacking him back, but not without what looked to be a huge amount of effort and strain. He’d clearly already sustained several injuries. He wouldn’t last much longer.
My throat closed and a hard ball formed in my chest, crushing my lungs and gripping my heart. No.
No. This wasn’t happening. I was shaking my head, over and over as I moved, my arm throbbing now. Head pounding.
Not my guys.
Not here. Not now. I couldn’t watch this.
I should have known there were more than six. That more would come.
I shouldn’t have been so cocky. I should have been more careful.
When Blake said Raphael himself could be here, I should have believed him. I shouldn’t have dismissed it.
He already took my mother from me. He couldn’t take my guys, too. He…
I…I…
A powerful sob racked my body and my eyes stung.
It’s my fault.
My fault.
“I can make it stop,” Raphael said, his eyes slitted. His words might as well have been a siren’s lure. I froze, my heart in my throat. The vampire held out his hand. A hand that looked so like his brother’s. He looked at me with eyes that could have been Azrael’s too, if it weren’t for the malevolent gleam that made them seem brighter. Sharper.
Like he was imagining a million ways to break me and enjoying the horror picture show his mind concocted.
Crazed, my mind supplied. He looked like a fucking psychopath.
Raphael frowned, and his heavily lidded eyes deepened in shadow.
Oh shit. He didn’t like that…
“Kill me then,” I bit out, abandoning my goal of making it to the truck and my weapons that were safely tucked from view beneath the rear. “Call off your dogs and let them go and I’ll surrender.”
Raphael’s shoulders vibrated with silent laughter. “Kill you?” he said, pausing to catch his breath before laughing audibly. “Oh, you stupid girl…”
He must’ve seen the question in my stare because he stopped laughing as suddenly as he started and halted in his advance. Stopping a mere two feet away. Close enough that he could reach out and grab me and I wouldn’t be able to see it coming. I gulped. “Killing you wouldn’t be any fun,” he taunted. “I have much more…interesting plans for you, my Black Rose.”
Raphael reached out a hand toward my face and I recoiled. He surged forward and grabbed my face. His sharp nails bit into my cheeks and I saw a flash of wild eyes before his lips closed over mine, stealing a rough kiss. The smell of expensive cologne clogged my nose, laced with something putrid. Rotting. Like overripe apples left out in the sun. His tongue skimmed my lower lip and I tasted blood.
I almost barfed into his mouth and managed to break free with a perfectly placed knee to his groin. But though it made him tear his lips from mine, he didn’t budge. Anger, fevered and unrestrained, boiled in his haughty stare.
White spots burst in my vision as my head snapped back. My mouth filled with blood and I fell, landing in a heap on the pavement, the jarring movement jostling my broken arm in a way that made me hiss in pain.
I blinked into focus to find him staring down on me with disgust. “On second thought,” he said, wiping the blood from his knuckles with a kerchief. “I think I will kill them all. I’m not very fond of loose ends.”
I noticed one of the vampires taking turns attacking Frost was glancing back toward Raphael.
Rafe nodded and I pushed myself up, trying to find my voice—to scream. To warn him. To warn them all.
The fucker was toying with them. His lackeys didn’t have orders to kill yet. Just to distract. My guys could hold their own, but who was I kidding? They couldn’t stand up against three vamps each. Three vamps older and stronger than they were.
It just wasn’t possible.
“Frost,” I croaked, unable to see more than vague shapes after Raphael’s hit. My vision was blurred and stained with pockets of light and dark t
hat I couldn’t blink away.
“Come now,” Raphael said with a saccharine tenderness, making me shiver. “It’s time to go.”
His hand closed around my upper arm and I suddenly found my voice. The shooting pains demanding a vocal release. I screamed.
A white blond head turned.
A blow was stuck.
Frost fell.
Shadowed shapes fell upon him in a wave of black.
I blinked as Raphael lifted me, my vision clearing to find Ethan speeding out of the trees. He’d been searching for the source of the scream, his head snapping back and forth. But he saw Frost instead, and I watched as he tore one of the vampires off his friend, then another. Throwing them as though they were rag dolls, into the trees of the park.
“Run,” I tried, but my voice was hoarse and brittle. The scream had done something to my vocal cords, and I could do little more than wheeze and squawk. “Get…away…”
A loud bellow sounded over the roaring of fire and I looked up in time to see the shape of a body falling from the building. It was Blake.
I knew it. I could feel it.
Had he jumped? Or was he…?
I couldn’t finish the thought. I just wanted this all to be over. I wanted the hurt to stop. The fury was fading, unable to keep up with the building emotions of heartbreak and despair vying for dominion over my soul.
I knew right then that whatever Raphael planned to do to me, it couldn’t possibly hurt me more than this. Nothing could ever compare to the helplessness I felt right now. At the knowledge that I alone had led my guys to their deaths.
That without me, they would be alive and whole somewhere. Living their lives unaware of the evil lurking in the shadows.
I wished…
Another sob bloomed in my chest.
I wished they’d never met me.
Raphael stiffened and his hand that was holding tight to me like an iron manacle, loosened. I slipped from his grasp and yelped as I fell back onto the ground, landing on my injured arm.
“Brother,” the deep voice filtered through the cacophony of sound and I struggled to squint into the haze down the street to see him. Azrael’s thick-soled boots crunched over broken glass and debris. His wide frame blotted out the light as he neared.
“It’s been a while,” was Raphael’s response. He was trying for nonchalance, but even I could hear the note of surprise in his tone. He hadn’t anticipated this.
I sure as fuck didn’t, either. My mind raced to make sense of it.
As the two oldest vampires in the world had their fucking moment. The stare down of all stare downs, I searched for Ethan and Frost, having a feeling in my gut…
Ethan knelt next to a hunched form that could only be Frost. His back was to me, but by the relief on Ethan’s face, I knew he was still alive, if barely.
I found something else in his face, too, as he, too, turned his attention to Azrael’s approach. He wasn’t surprised. Another wave of relief flooded his gaze and the pieces clicked into place. I’d sent him back to leave the vial with Azrael’s driver. The phone had been ringing.
He…he’d told Azrael where we were going.
Ballsy fucking move.
I didn’t know whether to kiss Ethan or smack him. If we all survived this, though, I was hoping to get to do both. Definitely more of the former.
Without warning, Raphael vanished from my side. I thought for an instant that he fled, but a clap of thunder shook the ground and I realized he was attacking. And the sound of their bodies colliding was like a hammer hitting stone.
Ethan found me amid the carnage and moved to stand, his face paling. I shook my head and pointed with my uninjured hand. “Blake,” I managed, my voice sounding like I’d been gargling rocks. I pointed to the edge of the building, where the other vampires were jumping down, presumably to finish him off, if he wasn’t dead already.
Ethan hesitated and I ground my teeth, making sure it was conveyed in my stare that if he came to me over helping Blake that I wouldn’t forgive him.
He let loose an uncharacteristic growl and bolted for the building and Blake.
Relief flooded my senses and I pulled my aching form towards the fire truck. I had to be ready in case Azrael didn’t win the fight. I had to…
My mind was growing foggy, and when I blinked, the black spots grew, taking longer to disperse than they had been a moment before. My right eye was throbbing, and a red substance was stinging it, making it more difficult to see.
I sagged only five feet away from the glint of steel just behind the rear tire of the fire engine, leaning my head against my bicep to catch my breath. With unfocused eyes, I was powerless to move as I watched the dance of immortal kings in the streets of Baton Rouge.
Maybe wrong place, wrong time, but I couldn’t help thinking how many people were going to have to be compelled after this monumental fuck-up.
Azrael and Raphael were nothing more than dark shapes blinking into and out of focus. The sounds of their epic fight so loud they physically hurt my ear drums.
I winced at each booming hit.
Please, I thought to myself, sending up a silent plea. Please let the guys get out of here. No matter what. They have to live.
Please let them all live.
And then the darker part whispered and let Azrael tear that motherfucker’s black heart from his rotted chest.
I squinted past the fight, finding movement further away in the haze. The silhouettes of seven—no nine—bodies grew in size as they neared. I thought they were humans and attempted to move again, needing to get up and help them. Tell them to stay back. I managed to crawl on my belly to the tire of the truck and reach a shaking hand beneath, trying without success to reach the hilt of my Katana.
But it wasn’t humans.
That tickle of otherness slunk down my spine and filled my gut with dread. They were vampires.
Raphael noticed them, too. He landed an earth-shattering kick into Azrael’s chest, sending his brother spiraling through the air to land among the oncoming crowd of vamps.
No…
As Azrael stood, I half expected the vampires to jump him. It would be a damned bloodbath. Surely even Azrael would have a hell of time fending off nine vampires at once. My fingertips brushed the smooth black grip, but I couldn’t quite get my hand around the hilt. Grunting, I pressed my face against the hot rubber of the tire to get a better angle, reaching across sharp bits of glass and debris.
My hand closed over the hilt just as a hand closed over my ankle, viciously dragging me over the debris. My skin scraped raw over the rubble. I lashed out, swinging the blade blindly. A sickening thud preceded an animal hiss and the blade was torn from my grasp.
Raphael was clutching a bloodied stump to his chest, staring down at his severed appendage in horror.
“Leave,” the word was a brutal snarl torn from the chest of Azrael as he approached once more, this time flanked by nine vampires.
They’re with him.
I could have laughed.
I wanted to sing.
Oh, hell yes. Kill the fucker.
“Go back to the hole you crawled out of and stay there,” Azrael barked, the challenge in his tone plain as his eyes bore into his brothers. “If I ever see your face again, brother, I will end you.”
Wait…he wasn’t going to kill him?
“Fucking kill him,” I tried to say, but the words came out slurred and not making any logical sense as I intended them. My vision blurred again, and my head was suddenly too heavy to hold up anymore.
Raphael’s blow to my temple must’ve really fucked some shit up in there. My right eye still throbbed and my vision in it was narrowing to a pinprick.
My good hand clawed at the pavement, trying to drag myself to where Raphael had discarded my Katana.
Fine, I thought, if Azrael wouldn’t kill him, I would.
“Rose,” his soft voice brushed over my face. His fingers lightly touched a tender spot on my temple.
My head lolled back, and I found Azrael staring down at me. After the initial flinch of fear that it could be Raphael, I realized it was actually quite simple to tell the difference.
They were both fucking nuts, but Azrael didn’t have so much of that untethered insanity in his eyes as his brother. And his hair was longer, I thought.
I searched immediately for Raphael, confused as to why I was staring into the eyes of Azrael when his psychotic twin was just there a second ago. I craned my neck to survey the entire street but came up empty-handed. He was…gone.
Fury sizzled back into my chest and I growled. “Why…why let fuck away get…”
I knew I wasn’t making sense, but I couldn’t seem to connect what my mind was thinking and what my mouth was trying to say.
I cried out as Azrael lifted me from the ground, cradling me against his bare chest and what was left of the shirt he’d been wearing, shredded to scraps from the fight. But there wasn’t a mark on him. He’d already healed any injuries he may have had. Beneath the torn fabric was smooth, unblemished muscle. Warm and hard.
I tucked my shattered arm carefully into my chest and tried to fight his hold, but it was no use. I was utterly spent, and whatever was wrong with my head was making it unfairly hard to do anything.
“Clean up this mess,” Azrael barked at the group of vampires still standing protectively around him. “Leave no evidence.”
They vanished to carry out his orders. He stopped one of them with a look and added, as what I assumed was an afterthought. “There are three vampires with us. They aren’t to be harmed. See that they’re tended to and then bring them to me.”
My heart beat out a discordant rhythm. They were alright? Was he certain?
His gaze lowered to rest on my battered face, looking at me with incredulity. As though he was only just seeing me for the very first time. His brows lowered as he studied me, seemingly perplexed. “I can hear their thoughts,” he said in a low whisper, his chest rumbling against my side in a way that somehow soothed me almost as much as those five beautiful words.
My body sagged against him and I was able to draw a full breath, my chin quivering as the reality of what almost happened settled into my core.