by Ana Calin
I turn my eyes to the ring. With highly focused eyes, Tristan waits for the alligator to make the first move.
The alligator dances around him, looking for the right moment to strike, waiting for a change in Tristan’s stance so that he can attack. But nothing changes for minutes, Tristan standing like an ice statue in the middle of the ring, serpents all around him.
“Do it already,” Mark bursts. The bastard is angry. When his feelings boil over, it’s not his face that shows it, but his reddish hair that turns even redder. Right now, it seems on fire.
Prompted by his master, the alligator throws himself at Tristan, but Tristan whirls around in an instant and claws his throat. The alligator falls to the ground, bleeding heavily from his jugular.
The serpents hiss, and Mark curses, throwing his fists in the air and urging the alligator to get up. He tries, and Tristan even lets him do it.
But as the beast stands in front of him again, preparing to attack, Tristan’s eyes flash and his tongue runs over his fangs. Next thing I know, he’s jumped the alligator, and sunk his teeth deep into the beast’s carotid.
Serpents hiss and writhe, ready to intervene, but Lord Dracula blocks their way in a second.
“These weren’t the terms,” he says evenly, Tristan feasting on the alligator behind him. I can see the creature’s limbs convulsing, his tail slashing the air, but Tristan keeps his fangs in him like a predator in its prey. I shudder at the sight.
“Tell him to stop, now,” Mark demands, but all Lord Dracula does is laugh, his big chest moving up and down. He’s enjoying the serpent’s distress.
“But the alligator is your best man, isn’t he? He should be able to fend for himself, wouldn’t you think?”
A roar comes from behind Lord Dracula. Tristan rises to his feet, and I freeze on the inside. This is a sight like I’ve never seen before in my life, not even in Bran, Dracula’s legendary village that is full of supernaturals.
Red veins crisscross Tristan’s athletic body under his skin, crawling up his neck. His bones protrude harder, thicker, his white-blond hair glowing like the sun. An aura of power radiates around him, and serpents shrink back.
“Attack him,” Mark calls in a hysterical voice, pointing his long, slimy finger at Tristan. There’s rage in his eyes, determination not to respect the deal if bad comes to worse.
I’m scared to death, watching the serpents slither towards Tristan. They’re unwilling and uncertain because his aura of power is so laden with energy that it’s visible. Its heat reaches as far as to where I stand. The alligator’s supernatural blood was a true feast for the vampire prince, it makes him so strong nobody here dares to take him on. With Lord Dracula by his side, he exudes invincibility.
“Now, take him down,” Mark calls again. But just as his serpents muster their guts to go through with his command, a shockwave ripples through everybody in the cave, except for me and the Old Priest, who uses the opportunity to slink away.
Serpents hiss, forked tongues shooting out of their tongues, and soon they writhe on the floor as if stabbed. My eyes find Rux, whose demoness black eyes are deep, intense, the grin on her face defying. She’s using her powers on them.
“Now that we got those meddling forces out of the way,” she says, her round shoulders squaring like a queen’s. “Why don’t we go on with your proposition, Mark? What was it again? Oh, that my husband should give you his blood, and the Old Priest would perform incantations in order to make you invincible. Then the two of you would fight each other to the death. Then let’s get the Old Priest.” She cranes her neck in my direction. The cave is shaped a little like an amphitheater, and I’m on the top level. Rux pouts theatrically as she sees the empty spot at my side, which the Old Priest occupied until a few minutes ago.
“Oh,” she says mockingly. “Seems he left. Dang. I guess no incantations to make you invincible after all.”
Gratitude fills me as I look at her, small but perfect with her hourglass shape. From up here it’s all too clear her breasts and wide hips may be too generous for a woman her size, her wasp-like waist making it look like she’s wearing a corset, but it makes her sexy as hell. Lord Dracula is drooling over her even now.
It makes me want to laugh, that Lord Dracula is more concerned with the desire for his wife than with Mark’s growing rage.
“I will pull out the pain from your serpents if you step into the ring and do what you said you would from the beginning—fight Tristan, now that he defeated your second in command.”
Mark’s jaw locks, his slitted eyes burning. Soraya is worried, distress obvious in her face as she grips Mark’s arm.
“Keeping him back isn’t gonna help, dear girl,” Rux says, and Lord Dracula drives his fangs into his lip. Seeing her in action makes him want her, badly, and he’s not hiding it.
“All right,” Mark says, and a pang of fear goes through me. Knowing him, I’m afraid he might have a deadly ace in his sleeve.
He slides out of his floral robe, and Rux pulls the pain from of his men. They hiss and grunt as they come back up to their feet or their serpent tails, as if they don’t know what hit them. But one thing’s clear—they’re exhausted from the pain.
A minute later, Tristan and Mark are facing each other in the ring. My heart rate goes wild—I know all too well only one of them will come out of this alive.
CHAPTER XII – A Fight to the Death
Tristan
MARK SERPAINT SHIFTS. His serpent tail rolls under him, pushing his slimy torso up into the air. His lips turn black, like leeches, and his red hair turns wiry. He could use it to stab his opponents if he wanted to.
“Fuck, you’re even uglier like this,” I say through my teeth, provoking him. I’m glaring at him from under my eyebrows.
“I once fucked her in this form,” he provokes back. The anger that I’d managed to calm in order to focus is back, striking with a vengeance.
“Wait for him to strike first,” Lord Dracula whispers in Romanian. It’s common knowledge the serpent doesn’t know the language, his arrogance prevented him from learning even a little bit in the year he spent here.
“I’ll make this painful, Mark,” I hiss. “When this is over, you’ll be proud of me.” My body tenses, all the power I accumulated from the alligator running through me like the rush of heroin.
The alligator’s essence turned to fuel in my veins, enhancing my own powers. His now half-human half-shifted body lies behind me, some of his tattooed skin shed, spread like wrinkled paper on the ground.
Mark slides his thick reptile tail through the air just above the ground in an attempt to throw me off. I slink out of his way as quickly as a viper, now fueled with reptile skills form the alligator, and let him try again and again.
He soon hisses and attacks with his claws that look a lot like the claws of a dragon. They’re strong, and when they rake my shoulder they go bone-deep, drawing blood.
I can hear Isolde yelp in the distance, and it’s a struggle not to look at her, but one second of lost focus in the fight with my former executioner could cost me my life.
The bite of his lashes returns to my memory, the pain of his claws now throbbing in my shoulder. With a war cry, I decide to make him feel exactly like I felt when he whipped me. The helplessness, the despair, the throbbing pain.
I’ve been relieved of my blades, but my claws become my daggers. My arms flexing, I swing my claws through the air. He makes a good job of gliding out of my way, his huge serpent tail rustling loudly on the ground as he slithers back and forth in the makeshift ring.
But soon he grows tired, while I’ve taken strength from his alligator. I grin—funny, that his plan started out with him weakening me, and it turned out the other way around.
My claws finally slash through his lower back, right where his kidneys are. He arches back, growling, blood swelling out of the four gashes in his slimy flesh.
And then something unexpected happens. Something I wouldn’t have thought possible in a
million years.
I planned to take my time and claw at him until his flesh comes off his bones, just like his lash did to me in the past. But the scent of his now exposed blood fills my nostrils, making me roll my eyes and forget myself. The last coherent thought that I have is, I’ll be damned, my executioner is my fucking Grail.
That’s why he always smelled so good to me. But I could never tell that he was truly my source of infinite power, because his blood was coated in the body of a serpent, a vampire’s natural enemy.
The need to take his blood now controls my brain completely. The scent of him drives me wild. I become pure instinct, like a predator. I want to feed on him, that’s all I know.
He turns to face me, but I’m no longer a slave to my anger. I realize anger made me slower than usual, which must be why my masters insisted so much on keeping all emotion at bay. But that’s all gone now. Emotion doesn’t control me anymore. Pure instinctual bloodlust does.
Mark opens his serpent jaw at me, his forked tongue dashing out to spew poison, but he doesn’t get to. I’m faster than him as I slit his throat with my claw. He whirls around from the force, but with my vampire speed I flash around, and swing my claws at his throat again.
The flesh falls off his throat bones, and he falls to the ground, tearing gasps from all the serpents.
But that’s not enough. I have a very clear script in my head about how I want Isolde’s tormentor to die, and how I want to take his blood. I look around for the proper item, and grab the first shifted serpent in my way. I take him between my hands as if he’s a feather, and swing him around my head like a lasso, sending him like a whip to coil around Mark’s huge serpent tail.
When the two of them are properly knotted together, I rip the serpent’s throat open, and tear into his throat bones with my fangs to ensure he’s dead. Soraya screams, the serpents hissing in dread at the brutality of the scene. Anticipation bubbles up in me—they’ve seen nothing yet.
I jump from one rock to the other toward the cave’s ceiling, and knot the dead serpent around a pointed rock sticking out of the cave wall, well overhead.
In a few seconds, I have Mark hanging upside down from the rock. He swings his tail desperately. He would have been able to free himself, which is why I knotted him with the other serpent. The dead can’t struggle.
I’m standing up on the rock like a king, Mark hanging under my feet, wheezing and twisting. I look out at the serpents that stare open-mouthed all around the cave, taking in their awe. I ignore the terror on Soraya’s face, and point my bloody claw at the beauty with chocolate hair and sparkling blue eyes looking up at me like I’m a god.
“This is for you.”
With that, I jump off the rock, pirouette in the air, and drive my claws through Mark’s body from his cock to his throat, splitting him open on my way to the ground. I land on my feet with a thud, bits of rock rising from the ground from the impact.
Silence fills the cave while I straighten up, raising my eyes to my masterpiece. A single sound rips through the silence—Soraya, screaming and falling to her knees, terror filled eyes staring up at Serpaint’s mutilated, bleeding body. She tries to run over, but Lord Dracula catches her by the shoulders and pulls her back.
“You don’t have to watch,” he tells her, granting her some mercy.
My chest swells as I watch the executioner who took pleasure in whipping me and leaving me for the ravens to pick at my wounds. He’s now dying a cruel death at my hands. He’s still alive, but not for long. He chokes on his own blood as our gazes lock. I take it in, seeing the recognition in his eyes, the pain—he’s going through hell.
“I told you by the time this was over you’d be proud of me.”
I step right under him and close my eyes, letting his blood flow on my face. I open my mouth and drink it in, letting it slide its way through my veins, filling me with power to the point of bursting. When it’s too much to contain, my eyes blast open, and light shoots out of them, my aura of strength pulsing around my body.
Compelled by this might, the serpents bend to the floor, crawling their way to my feet. Soon, they’ve filled the arena, lying at my feet like rays of sun. There’s only one exception—Soraya.
I meet her eyes when I turn around, and she shrinks under the power that oozes from me. There’s hatred mixed with the desire to be my chosen one in her eyes, I can see it clearly. How I’ll love displaying my love for Isolde to her.
I look above her head at Lord Dracula’s face, who’s looking at me like a proud parent. If I didn’t know better, I’d say those are tears in his eyes.
Then I turn to the only person who can make my heart jump—Isolde. She has her hands at her mouth, her eyes big and shocked. She’s alone up on the highest stone row of the amphitheater in her gray dress, the image of an avenged angel. Ah, the liberation knowing we’re free to be together!
I flash over to her, and pull her in my arms. She blinks as if she doesn’t know what hit her. Closing my eyes, I take in her scent.
“That’s why your scent was so appealing to me the entire time,” I whisper. “He was my Grail, and you were his mate.” I open my eyes, her face glowing in the bluish light from my irises. “And now that I’ve taken his blood, you are my mate.”
I can feel that knowledge, that bond, spreading to every cell of my body, and by the smile that lights up her face, she has started to feel it, too. I take her heart-shaped, angel-like face between my hands, looking deeply into her sapphire eyes.
“Mine,” I whisper, and bend to claim her lips in a kiss. She leans away, and I realize her abusive husband’s blood is still all over me. I look down at her to realize I’ve stained her dress with it, and move to put distance between us and apologize for being such a complete idiot. This must be disturbing to her, a real trauma.
But Isolde stops me, flinging her arms around my neck. She rises on the tips of her toes, and I bend to let her press her sweet lips to mine. She wasn’t shrinking away from me, she simply wanted to take the lead, and be the one who takes charge and claims me.
The sky roars above the mountain, the forces of nature blessing our union. I am her true mate, and there’s nothing anyone can ever do to take her away from me. My arms go around her lean body, pressing her to me, my hard body crushing her soft round breasts.
Mine.
The Wicked
THE WICKED RUNS THROUGH the forest, heavy rain soaking his cloak. He pushes leaves and hanging boughs out of his way. He glances behind, relieved to see the mountain far behind him. The clouds are heaviest above the mountaintop, lightning striking, thunder ripping through the sky.
Something big must have happened, something heavy. Either the serpent has gained boundless power, or the vampire has assimilated the serpent’s. With a pang of disappointment, he suspects it is the latter.
He can’t waste another minute. A new plan has already started to form in his head, but just as he pushes his way forward through a thicket into a clearing, he bumps into someone.
Lighting strikes, illuminating the soaked figure of the Mistress of Pain. She stares at him out of demonic black eyes, her hair plastered to the sides of her face and her neck. She just stands there in the storm, doing nothing, but The Wicked knows her presence alone is a death sentence.
He sidesteps her, and she does nothing to stop him. He runs heavily, his feet catching in the mud as he turns to look at her. She still stands there, with her back at him, but then he bumps into another obstacle.
Looking up at the person standing in his way, The Wicked screams, stumbling and falling on his back. Above him are the black eyes of the Mistress of Pain.
“Tell me,” she says in the eerie voice that she takes when she’s in this form. “The secret to human immortality. Is it real?”
“Of course it is,” he mutters. “I’ll give it to you if you swear to let me go.”
“Oh, yes. You will give it to me. In exchange for the afterlife.”
An unnatural grin stretches on that im
possibly white face with the strikingly back eyes. Her dark dress sticks to her large breasts and wide hips, soaked as it is, and The Wicked can’t help thinking she must also have the power of a sex demon.
A ball of warmth begins coiling in his lower belly, a sensation that worries him. With good reason. The sensation intensifies and spreads, burning to the rest of his body, soon having him screaming and wriggling in the mud as his body burns from the inside out. It’s hell.
“Please, I beg of you, just kill me.”
“Give me the secret, and I’ll end your suffering,” Lady Ruxandra says calmly.
She has grown stronger, much stronger than he remembered. Now, in the last moment of his life, The Wicked sees the flaw in his plan—he never foresaw the kind of weapon that Lady Ruxandra could become. He underestimated her. Back in the cave he told Isolde Jochs that God or the devil would have to personally step in to save her lover. Well, the devil did intervene, in the form of the Mistress of Pain.
Desperate for the relief of death, The Wicked surrenders his best-kept secret. A moment later, the searing heat fades from his body, and all the lights go out.
EPILOGUE – Happily Ever After
Isolde
ALL OF BRAN CHEERS as Tristan and I emerge from the church. Such joy swells in my chest as I look out to the crowd, that I think I’ll burst. A full moon hangs low in the sky over the mountains with thick forests that hide a myriad of mysteries.
So many mysteries, a whole Hidden World waiting for me to explore it, side by side with the man of my life. If everything I lived until a month ago was anticipated payment for this blissful life with Tristan, every second of it was worth it.
The wedding had to take place at night, so that all vampires could take part in it. Some couldn’t step inside the church, because the sins of their pasts are too heavy, and they stayed outside, but they’re still enjoying themselves.
Still, there’s something that has me on edge. This is the night when I will be turned into a vampire myself. Tristan has a hunch that he is my Grail, since we are now mated, and that he can make me immune to silver and sunlight with his own blood. He preferred to wait until the wedding because he thinks it will sanctify our union in a special way.