Stakes Have Sword Envy

by Holly Ryan

“Belle...”

  I answered him with a trail of kisses up his back, my fingers guiding his into the same rhythm before he’d stopped. My hips rolled forward into the backs of his, pushing him along into climax. With the hand that had been spread on the tile wall, he reached behind him and palmed my ass, shoving me forward into him so that my pussy rubbed up against the back of his thigh. Already swollen with need, I rubbed it even harder against him, my body completely snapping from my control.

  Then, with a wild growl, Sawyer turned and spun me about until my back was pressed up against the shower wall. He consumed my mouth with his, his tongue seeking and licking at the same tempo as his hips thrusting against mine. His hard length pressed against my opening, but he seemed too out of control at the moment to care that he wasn’t yet inside me. He palmed my breast and squeezed my nipple almost to the point of pain.

  He pulled his mouth away from mine and then growled into my neck. “I want to fuck you so hard I’m afraid I’ll break you.”

  I grinned against his jaw. “You won’t.”

  “I want you, Belle. All the damn time.”

  “Then take me.”

  With his eyes aimed directly on mine, he sank deep inside me with one thrust, our bodies slick from the shower. I threw my head back against the tile wall with a gasp. He was so big, so... And then I lost all train of thought. He drilled into me at the same speed he’d been jacking himself off, his muscled arms pinning my hips to the wall. He drank my body in with his gaze, watching my breasts bounce up to touch him, watching my nipples tighten to aching points.

  Usually with him, sex was slow and sensual and never disappointing, but this was hot, dirty, as if I’d peeled back a sexual layer of Sawyer he usually kept hidden. Maybe there were other layers too.

  I moaned at the coming storm within me, gathering along all my nerves and coiling them inside my pussy. With a groan, his eyes changed from golden to red, and his fangs extended, making him look exactly like a terrifying vampire warrior. Good thing he was mine.

  His hips slowed slightly, enough to hit everything just right. I came hard around him with a loud cry, the orgasm trembling down my limbs and back up again. It squeezed his cock inside me even farther, and then he came, too, with a great roar. He sank his fangs into my neck, which extended my orgasm even more, and then before he’d licked the wound totally clean, he pulled me down into the tub, and down on top of his face, for round two.

  Note to self: interrupt Sawyer’s showers more often.

  Afterward, when we were both finally spent, I asked him about Detective Blake Friday.

  “He’s clean,” he said while sitting down next to me at the kitchen table. “Not a fleck of dirt on him according to Google.”

  “The books agree, I’m afraid,” Eddie said from in front of the refrigerator. “Nothing to indicate his involvement in the Necron Brotherhood, though of course most of them were written hundreds of years ago.”

  Sawyer rested his hand on my thigh and squeezed. “I’ll go ask Ronick about any tattoos as soon as it’s a little darker outside.”

  I nodded. “See if he knows what day it is, too.”

  THE REST OF THE WEEK went...normally? Or as normal as life could get for me. I patrolled with no more interference from Paul, the mausoleum seemed to crouch in on itself as if it were sucking itself into a black hole, I was no closer to figuring out who the other Necron Brotherhood member was, and I hissed “don’t touch” if anyone got close enough to pluck stray hairs off my clothes for another make-the-slayer-useless spell.

  So yeah, normal.

  Until Friday came.

  That night, after my patrol, I went to go see Ronick again, as I had every other night, with a mug of blood and Night’s Fall. Other than a couple scratches on his stomach, Sawyer hadn’t seen any markings or tattoos on him. But every time I’d visited, he looked a thousand times worse than the night before.

  Tonight, he looked near death. Bloody tears dripped down his paper-white cheeks. His veins poked from underneath his skin as if something had shrink-wrapped his head much too tight.

  I swallowed hard. “Ronick—”

  “We don’t have much time,” he rasped.

  I stared at him for a long moment, searching for any hidden meaning behind his use of the word ‘we.’ Instead of any meaning, I found a whole lot of strobing alarms. “What’s wrong with you? What’s so special about today?”

  He groaned, pained and guttural, and his bloody tears fell harder. His hands twisted together in front of him and held to his gut behind his long leather coat. “It started out as just day.”

  “You’re not making any sense. What’s wrong with you?” I demanded.

  “Day. The rest came a few hours ago,” he rasped, then tore open his coat and shoved up his black shirt.

  The sight underneath ripped me back toward the door so fast I spilled half the mug of blood down my shirt. Carved into his skin was the word Friday, with bloody, gory emphasis on ‘day.’ But it didn’t look like it had been carved from the front. No, it came from inside him.

  Panic rang inside my head even though I still didn’t know what was happening.

  “Ronick,” I said sharply. “Talk to me.”

  “That night...that night in the graveyard, someone must’ve overheard me talk about Night’s Fall to you.” He looked at me with desperate, blood-soaked eyes. “The one thing that would draw you far away from the graveyard if you had its power.”

  My next breath hung in my chest. He was right. If I had Night’s Fall’s power, my very next blink would be from inside the Slayer Senate, where I could research the other slayers and Paul. Not anywhere near the cemetery, where I might just be in the way of Paul and the trapdoor he was so desperate to open. Night’s Fall was a more certain bet than the witch’s ladder, which hadn’t kept me away at all. Not since Sawyer had gone to the mausoleum and untied it. Also because I was a stubborn bitch when it came to my patrol.

  Ronick clutched at his gut and groaned.

  “Tell me what happens now,” I said. “If you give me Night’s Fall, it still won’t keep me away from the cemetery. Paul likes the night, so I’ll go to the Slayer Senate during the day—”

  “No. You can’t.”

  “The fuck I can’t—”

  “I’m dying. The sword’s magic is tied to me, so you’ll only have about an hour until the sword’s symbols fade and the magic goes dangerously haywire. Trust me, I know exactly how it happens because it happened when my brother gave me the sword.”

  “Night’s Fall was Roseff’s sword?”

  “He transferred it to me by letter, its contents only triggered by his death. I had an hour to do the necessary steps to make the sword mine.” He shook his head and grimaced. “You don’t have time for any of that. You have an hour to get what you need from the Slayer Senate before the symbols fade and the sword becomes too dangerous to use.”

  “What do I need? Where do I go?” A cold sweat gathered at the nape of my neck.

  “You need the book written about my brother. As a vampire, I wasn’t invited into the Senate building, but Night’s Fall showed me his book through the window to show me the name of my brother’s murderer. There are whole passages written about Roseff and Paul. He was close to finding out how to beat him.”

  “But your brother was a psycho.”

  “And yet, Paul didn’t kill him, did he?” Ronick’s bloody tears gushed faster, and he somehow went even paler. “S-so if you open the door, I’ll give you Night’s Fall’s power, but you have to hurry.”

  No. He’d try to run me down, take back his sword, and go kill Jacek. This was a trick. An elaborate trick to escape. I bit down on my teeth and squeezed the hilt until my fingers ached. But what if this didn’t feel like a trick?

  “If I leave here for the Slayer Senate, then Paul will open the trapdoor,” I said. “It will happen when I’m far away. That’s what the witch’s ladder was for—to keep me away.”

  “The plan was cut into my stoma
ch for a reason.” Ronick bowed his head and grimaced. “Whatever’s happening happens tonight. But if you don’t leave now, then you won’t find out how to stop him.”

  This sword was my only chance to find the Slayer Senate and find my only chance at survival. I had no idea what was in that trapdoor or what would happen when it opened. Instant death for me and no idea how to stop it? No, I needed knowledge. Knowledge was power, right? But what if by going to get that knowledge, I was walking straight into a trap?

  Gah, I had no idea what the right answer was, but one thing was for sure—Ronick wouldn’t escape if this was some elaborate hoax because I wouldn’t let him. I’d stake him before he did, Night’s Fall’s power or not. Either way, I didn’t really have a choice, and time was running out.

  Literally. A glance at my phone showed four minutes to midnight on Friday night. It was almost Saturday. What if I was already too late?

  “Try anything sketchy and see how that works out for you,” I said, slipping the stake free from my bun. With the sword in one hand and the stake in the other, I opened the door to his cell.

  “Come closer,” he rasped.

  I took one step forward.

  “Closer, damn it,” he growled.

  I took a deep breath. Tension chased across my shoulders as I stepped inside his cell with him, my senses alert for any kind of trouble.

  He reached out and touched Night’s Fall, just a simple touch on the tip of the hilt and whispered words I didn’t understand. His eyes met mine, streaming with bloodied tears, and my heart clenched.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked softly. “Why give me Night’s Fall at all?”

  A glow erupted around the sword’s black blade, and a light buzzing sawed up through my fingers on the hilt.

  “Because...” His desperate gaze dipped to my lips. “I was lying when I told the one with glasses that you smelled like gut rot.”

  I jerked back at his unexpected admission.

  “An hour. Remember to watch Night’s Fall’s symbol—”

  The cell exploded in a wash of red, spraying across my mouth, the walls, the ceiling. Drenching my entire body with sticky, wet blood.

  Ronick’s blood.

  He was gone. Dead.

  I stood there, staring at the spot where he’d been, completely immobile. His blood clung to me, an uncomfortable second skin holding me hostage right where I’d planted my feet. I tried to blink the shock from my eyes, but it kept pulsing, contracting like a living thing. Like a living thing swirling with black silk that had burst through the back of the woodshed and the fence behind it.

  This wasn’t shock or a hallucination. It was really there, right where Ronick had stood seconds ago.

  I lunged backward, slipping in the blood puddle on the floor in my hurry to get out. I went down hard in the doorway of the woodshed and scooted backward, dragging Night’s Fall after me. Black silk waved from the thing attached to the woodshed wall like wings. Underneath was a humongous...thing shaped like a slug with a body writhing with sharpened silver needles punctured through the black wings. Needles used for writing the day of the week through a person’s skin.

  It looked like a living, writhing witch’s ladder. Witchcraft. Good god, that was the only thing I could come up with. Scary as fuck witchcraft.

  I tore my eyes away from it to Night’s Fall and scrambled to get my legs underneath me. Time to go. I only had an hour to find Roseff’s book at the Slayer Senate. Less than that now. I glanced over the fence at the cemetery next door. Everything looked normal from here, but that was likely to change.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and sent a quick text to Detective Appelt: 911 at cemetery. Since it was his job to protect the trapdoor, he needed to be there.

  I was just about ready to text Sawyer to tell him much the same thing, when my phone chimed with a text from him.

  Why are you on Detective Appelt’s desk?

  I blinked. What? I had never been, nor would I ever be, on his desk. But then I saw the picture attached to the text, the one of Tattoo Guy, Detective Blake Friday, I took at the police station from behind Detective Appelt’s desk. I peered closer. Sawyer had zoomed in away from the hallway to a silver frame at the side of the photo, angled toward the wall on the desk, with a semi-blurry profile inside.

  But not so blurry that I couldn’t see it. That wasn’t a picture of me in a frame on the corner of Detective Appelt’s desk.

  It was my mom.

  Chapter Six

  A slimy cold sweat broke out over my body from head to toe as I stared at the picture of my mom through someone else’s eyes. Detective Appelt. Through his viewpoint, she was both a stranger and heartbreakingly familiar. Why was she there instead of locked up tight in my memories where I could let her out only when I had the mental strength to say goodbye again?

  A broken sob forced its way from my mouth. I couldn’t deal with this right now, and what it meant, if ever. Not when Mom’s death was still so raw and all thoughts of her brought me to a screeching halt. Not when I was dressed in vampire blood. Not when I needed to go.

  My hands shaking violently, I sent Sawyer a text: 911 at cemetery. I’m going to Senate.

  Then I turned off my phone so he couldn’t argue, stashed it in my pocket, and thrust Night’s Fall up into the night, just like I’d seen Ronick do.

  But nothing happened.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” I ground out. “Take me to the goddamn Slayer Senate, you fucking bird-sword!”

  I threw it up into the air, and two black wings sprouted from the hilt, a slight luminescent outline to its bird-like body and eyes. In an instant, the world faded to black. Night’s Fall flung me through blinding darkness. Nothingness pressed in on me, stinging tears from my eyes, threatening my sanity that this void was now my existence forever. A full-blown panic attack worked its way to the surface and stuck my lungs together. My breaths grew sharp, painful, yet completely silent.

  Wait. Stop. I’d done this before with Ronick when I’d escaped the police station to the cemetery with him, and it hadn’t lasted all that long. I could do this. I squeezed Night’s Fall’s hilt in a death grip and let it lead me instead of thinking I was all alone.

  Seconds later, I crashed to my feet on solid ground. It was so unexpected that I toppled completely over, feeling exactly how hard the ground was on every square inch of my body that made impact. Holy shit, that hurt.

  Once I caught my breath, made sure I hadn’t broken anything, I cracked open one eye. A light gray stone path stretched in front of me, up a wide set of stairs, to a wooden double door of a mansion. Over the top of the door stood a little rounded balcony with a sliding glass door behind it, and above that, the house kept climbing. Slate-gray stones covered the length of the house, with white shutters bordering the numerous windows. The mix between the outdoor lights and the fireflies winking from the neatly trimmed shrubbery edging the steps, paired with the warm glow within the house, created an ethereal feel about the place, like I was someplace truly unique and...other.

  And that I was. The Slayer Senate knew how to live it up.

  I peeled myself off the ground and stood with the help of Night’s Fall. A large fountain gurgled behind me, triggering my bladder to ache and my blood-soaked skin to itch for a shower. What would the Senate do when I waltzed in there looking like I’d just summoned my inner psycho? Answer my questions, no doubt, and then get the fuck out of my way. They hadn’t chosen me as the slayer because of my hygiene, or my extreme lack thereof.

  As I climbed the steps to the door, a sudden fury sparked in my gut. I was in this shitty predicament because of the people inside this house. Did they even care? Or were they already eyeballing the next slayer after my death, and the next and the next, like a factory conveyor belt spitting out fighters with a sanity-testing responsibility? I should totally tell them I was fucking three vampires just to watch their heads implode.

  I poked my finger at the doorbell at the side of the do
ors and held it there for a rage-ring. Chimes echoed from inside in a continuous loop, but apparently they didn’t stir up the level of annoyance I’d intended, even after several seconds. Then I tried the knob on the door, expecting it to be locked, but when it swung open on silent hinges, I paused, my hackles raised. Doors and I had a complicated relationship, and I didn’t trust any of them. Sketchy things, these doors. Maybe it wasn’t kept locked because there weren’t any neighboring houses, at least that I could see. This house appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. Still, I crept inside on tiptoe, all of my senses on alert.

  A candlelit chandelier hung above from a high ceiling, its crystals dripping with rainbow reflections and scattering them all over the white marble floor. Closed double doors led to the right and left, and standing guard at the side of them were two knight statues in full armor facing off with each other, their swords raised. Up ahead, a sweeping staircase curved gradually upward to a second floor. That floor stretched all the way around the entryway, separated by a banister. All of the doors up there, which interrupted the walls made of mirrors, were closed.

  Instrumental music drifted from somewhere, a haunting cello leading a beautiful melody, punctuated with the clatter of dishes and cutlery, as well as happy voices and laughter. Someone was having a dinner party.

  My fury burned brighter, and not just because I hadn’t been invited. Here I was fighting for my life, and the Senate thought it would be a good time to party it up? It sure sounded like it. If that was the case, time to burn it all down.

  I dropped my gaze from the second floor back to the entryway and then jumped. A large brown dog sat at the bottom of the steps when it hadn’t been there before. I swallowed, trying to remember if I was supposed to look dogs in the eye or if I wasn’t. It wasn’t baring its fangs or lunging or anything, but its keen, slightly droopy eyes watched me carefully.

  “Hey, doggie,” I whispered.

  It cocked its head as if to hear me better, its long, velvet-looking ears flopping slightly by its head.